Nova Festival Memorial Site Honors Victims of Oct. 7 Hamas Attacks With Portraits of Vibrant Lives Cut Short

The dull, distant thud of munitions falling in Gaza is the only sound you hear in the parking lot in Re’im in southern Israel. It’s a world away from the thumping, joyous EDM beats that filled this same site more than two years ago as 3,000 ravers gathered under the stars for an all-night Nova Music Festival.

The site is now a memorial to the 364 people killed by Hamas militants on Oct 7, 2023, eerily silent on a recent mid-May morning as friends, family and visitors quietly wandered among the hundreds of tributes to the slain attendees of the music festival. In addition to the scores killed and assaulted that day, 44 others were taken hostage in what became the deadliest attack in modern Israeli history.

The joyous rave kicked off the night before the shocking early morning raid by the al-Qassam Brigades that resulted in the killing of nearly 1,200 Israelis and foreign nationals and kidnapping of more than 250. What was meant to be a celebration of the Jewish holiday of Shemini Atzeret — a time to stop and reflect, pray for rain and gather with friends and family — is now a heart-wrenching shrine to vibrant lives cut short.

“Daniel Goffman, 24 years old when he passed away. A child with a huge heart, endless generosity, and optimism, always willing to help and sacrifice himself for a friend,” reads one tribute featuring the image of a smiling young man giving a thumbs up. “He went to the Nova music festival with his partner, Daniela Petrenko, may she rest in peace, to celebrate the start of a new life, but they never returned.”

Among those attending the festival was Israel’s 2025 Eurovision Song Contest runner-up Yuval Raphael, who still bears shrapnel in her body from the attack. She has recalled hiding in a bomb shelter packed with 50 other people as Hamas gunmen repeatedly shot into the shelter and lobbed grenades. She survived after making a panicked call to her father, who counseled her to play dead and be quiet, a tactic that allowed her to be among the 11 people in the shelter who survived the onslaught.

In the middle of the sea of stories of lives cut short featuring tokens of memorial ranging from a charred DJ deck to a ghostly white statue mirrored on the ground by a hollow dirt reflection, is a massive star made up vibrant reproductions of the nation’s official flower, the red anemone (Kalanit). The flowers bloom at the festival site every February and the deeply symbolic gesture is a nod to the spilled blood of the victims, as well as a sign of resilience and hope. The official memorial funded by the non-profit Jewish National Fund has quickly become the JNF’s most-visited site, attracting nearly 7,000 visitors a day.

Visiting family for a wedding in Tel Aviv, I admittedly was not able to get a perspective on the dire situation in the Gaza Strip as Israel’s government continues to hammer the area with daily assaults in a conflict that has killed more than 53,000 people in the territory to date, according to Palestinian health authorities.

But what I did observe that day was a sea of moving tributes to dance music fans who gathered in the desert for an all-night celebration of renewal that turned into an early morning nightmare of automatic weapons fire and brutal assaults by Hamas militants who crashed through the border during the shocking surprise attack.

Just down the road was a kind of car graveyard, framed by five-story piles of charred, rusted vehicles attendees attempted to flee in that were destroyed in the attack. Scattered among the trashed cars with memorials to the victims were shot-up trucks driven by the marauders, some with large gun mounts in the bed.

Like the Nova memorial, the eerie site full of crushed and burnt cars and piles of mangled motorcycles features placards with QR codes that lead to the fuller stories of the victims. At the center is a destroyed car spilling over with a long trail of the red anemone sculptures. Atop the vehicle is a metal sculpture with the Hebrew word “V Ahavat,” which translates into “and love,” a common expression of affection.

The entire nation is laser-focused on returning the remaining hostages in Gaza — believed to number 58 men and women, half of whom are believed to be alive — with the two Nova memorials similarly plastered with stickers and banners honoring the captured and demanding their return. From the Ben Gurion airport arrival area to restaurant walls and roadside memorials, the stickers and posters bearing the faces of the captives are inescapable in the country now, along with massive banners reading “Bring Them Home.”

Just like the Nova site, the stickers and banners are daily testimonies to a grievous wound that feels impossible to ever heal from. But they are also a reminder of the vibrant stories of the lives that were lost and, hopefully, of those hostages who may yet return.

Check out a gallery of photos from the Nova site below.