Bearing Witness [E05]-"Hiding Amidst The Massacre At The Re'im Music Festival"

Millet Ben Haim Bears Witness Of What Happened To Her & How She Was Saved From Massacre at the SuperNova Music Festival near the Re’im Kibbutz on October 7th, 2023

Jan 22, 2024

Memorial For Those Massacre At The Music Festival

Bearing Witness: The Profiles In Horror & Courage Series is a witness-by-witness rendition of what happened on October 7 and afterward.

I will be releasing these, one at a time, mixed in with the other posts from The View From Israel Newsletter.

Why?

Many have forgotten or chosen to ignore what occurred on October 7 and afterward. And history demands these be recorded and put in the annals of the war. Additionally, many do not have the patience to go through YouTube videos and listen to the inane advertisements every 5 minutes. Or we turn our brains off. Perhaps, in writing, it will help.

These are the rules for what you will read in the series:

The English is far from perfect. Remember, these are people who, for the most part, are not native English speakers.
In editing the transcripts, there is a limit to how much one wants to remove from the person’s original voice. It is a balance that takes time. So you will notice that though some sentences and paragraphs could read much better, the wording was left as is, with some minor corrections so that the reader will feel the original voice, horror, and fear.
There is no natural order to which witness I place first, second, and so on.
I have eyeballed the text and run it through Grammarly to catch the blatant mistakes and problems.
The paragraph structure may be off as well. It is difficult to put a transcription into an entirely correct English structure. Dividing paragraphs correctly is nearly impossible, even with Grammarly AI and other tools.
I have, in no way, shape, manner, or form, add any comments or remarks to these testimonies. In a place where a Hebrew word is used, you will see: (ex. by the editor: “and here will be the explanation”) or [explanation in the brackets]. That is the extent of any remarks.
I left some spoken delays, such as “um” and “uh” in. This is to show that the document is a transcript of someone speaking and bearing witness.
You will catch misspellings, wrong sentences and word usage, no capitalization, run-on sentences, misplaced periods, etc. This is not meant to be an edited piece for the NYT or a Newsletter. It is raw. It is as real as life gets. It is bearing witness.
There is usually an interviewer as well who sometimes asks questions. I have tried to put those questions into separate paragraphs to the best of my ability.
I have also included the accompanying Video of the person bearing witness at the bottom of the piece.
None of this is made up. None of this is AI. You decide.
One final point. We all put the share, comment, and subscribe buttons in our Newsletter. In this case, I am, without shame and with “chutzpah,” asking you to at least share the posts from this series on all your social networks, with all your friends, and anywhere you think it may be read. And please hit that heart at the bottom of this email to “like” it. Sharing & Likes are extremely important, and they help a great deal.

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Millet Ben Haim went to the SuperNova Music Festival to enjoy music and nature on October 7th. Instead, she found herself hiding from terrorists and bullets while a massacre was taking place around her, and she knew she was next.

Since being saved, Millet Ben Haim has been an outspoken proponent of bearing witness worldwide about what happened to her.

Background:

The Supernova Music Festival near the Re’im Kibbutz

As part of the Hamas-led attack, 364 civilians were killed and many more wounded at the Supernova Sukkot Gathering, an open-air music festival celebrating the Jewish holiday of Sukkot near kibbutz Re’im. At least 40 hostages were also taken. This mass killing had the most significant number of casualties out of several massacres targeting Israeli civilians in settlements adjacent to Gaza that were part of the 7 October invasion, alongside those at the settlements of Netiv HaAsara, Be’eri, Kfar Aza, Nir Oz, and Holit.

At 6:30 am, around sunrise, rockets were noticed in the sky. Around 6:50 am, a siren warned of an incoming rocket attack, prompting festival-goers to flee. Subsequently, approximately 50 Hamas gunmen, dressed in military attire and using motorcycles, trucks, and powered paragliders, surrounded the festival grounds and indiscriminately fired on people attempting to escape. Attendees seeking refuge nearby, in bomb shelters, bushes, and orchards, were killed while in hiding. Those who reached the road and parking lot were trapped in a traffic jam as militants fired at vehicles. The militants executed wounded people at point-blank range as they crouched on the ground.

As festival attendees fled in panic, jeeps filled with gunmen began firing at the escaping cars. Gunmen also blockaded roads. The open terrain left few places to hide. Many attendees who hid in the trees were murdered as militants methodically shot them. Others who hid in bushes and orchards managed to survive. Independently verified drone footage of the site showed dozens of scorched, burnt cars and skid marks. Footage of the attack, posted on a Telegram channel, included graphic depictions of murder and hostage-taking.

During the massacre, according to survivor and emergency responder testimony, Hamas militants raped women attendees. According to survivor testimony released by Lahav 433, a young woman was gang raped by Hamas militants before being murdered. The testimony was published in Hebrew- and English-language Israel news outlets. According to Haaretz, police reporter Josh Breiner, ZAKA emergency response personnel found naked women with injuries and their genitals mutilated, with others found bound and naked below their waists.

The details of the hostages’ whereabouts and conditions are not publicly known. The massacre at the festival was the largest terror attack in Israel’s history and the worst Israeli civilian massacre ever.

So... My name is Millet Ben Haim.
I'm 27 years old. And I was at the party in Re’im. I really wanted to go there.
I knew I would be there before it was even a few months ago. I already bought the tickets once they started selling them. It was huge for people who like to party, dance, and trance music, so it's a big thing.
And so, on October 6th, we went to this festival. It was me and one really good friend, and then I met a group of friends I didn't know. They were like friends of hers. And we just started putting down mattresses and tents and getting to know everybody. Just hang out.
I remember it was the thing about those kinds of parties. It's really, really safe, like a safe zone. It's very welcoming and very loving. And you can feel at home from the very first moment. You can go there without knowing anyone. You know, everybody loves everybody.
We had places to do art and places to chill on two different stages with many excellent DJs. In my previous life, I was a DJ as well, so... we just went back and forth from dancing to chilling with friends and knowing more and more people. I barely think about it, but when I do, I remember how many people I met that night because I became friends with everybody at this event.
And then, when the sunrise began, we went to the mushroom stage. It is the smaller one. The sunrise was breathtaking. I remember it was a really happy moment. It was a very joyful pea, peaceful, and free moment.
And then the music stopped.
At the beginning, we thought it was, like, maybe the electricity went off. But I was in the front because I like to dance next to the DJ. So, I asked the DJ, Why are you stopping? He said, like, Turn around, there are rockets. So I did.
And from that moment, everything was very. I didn't know how to access my emotions at that moment; it was like my heart was sealed. But I remember people started running wherever. Nobody knew what to do. The protocol is to lie on the ground; we had no shelters there. It is an open field. So, some people lay down or sat down, and others were trying to run.
And we do have this kind of, like, the mentality of being in Israel, of like, okay, We are near to Gaza, like, it's the South of Israel. Sometimes we have rockets. It's not a new thing for us. And I remember I thought, maybe we will go back and dance. Like I knew it was, like, a festival of two days. We still have so much more time to party, to have fun.
But after a few minutes of the Rockets being massive, brutal, and not stopping. It's like I knew in my gut that I had to go. Security guards were there trying to open the fence surrounding the party just for us to leave.
But nobody knew what to do. Many people wanted to stay there because they thought it would be best. And we asked them, like, what should we do? What is the better option? If they know if there is anything they can tell us, they tell us that they think we should go. That is the order, but they don't know and think we should do what we feel we should do. Like, they can’t take responsibility for it.
And I realized that we need to do this on our own. Nobody knows. It's pointless to keep asking and searching for people. I knew we had to leave. People don't understand that at that moment it's people in a, like, in a party in nature, so everybody is on any drug you can imagine. People usually take it right before the sunrise. That is the moment to do it, because you want to experience the sunrise like that.
So everybody is on acid, or Cocaine, or MD, or whatever. And so, we are very much helpless. Some people don't understand what's going on. Some people are shocked. Many people realize that we need to go, but they don't know how they will get behind the wheel. Like, you can't drive like that.
Luckily, I was sober at that point. And so I asked the friend I came with if I could drive his car. We all got in the car. [A noise goes off in the background.] Sorry. Noises are a trigger for me. We got into the car and started driving. There were a lot of cars there. The road was bumpy. And everybody was panicking. But I remember how civilized it was. We didn't cut each other lines. Everybody tried to find their way quickly but was nice, helpful, kind, and patient. I remember thinking that I wanted to get out as fast as possible. But I don’t want to do it if it means that other people will stay. We should all get out, so I don’t want to. I don't deserve more than others to survive.
We got it [the car] quickly, and I managed to drive from the side for a long time. We got out, made the right turn, and had a police officer tell us the other way was closed. So we went to the right, but after about a minute of driving, I saw a car of Israelis where the people were going out of the window to try to explain to us what was going on. They did this with their hand [making a hand stop sign], and they shouted. Like, I opened the window to hear what they were screaming. They said that a terrorist was waiting for the cars over there, and they were shooting everybody. So, I made a swift U-turn. We were going in the other direction that we already knew was supposedly closed, and we didn't know why, but we could figure it out.
But on that end, there was definitely terrorist shooting at us. So, we tried the other way. After, also, like, I don't know, two minutes of driving, we saw many cars stopping. We realized that we had to stop as well. Once we got out of the car, we could hear the shooting. Being Israeli also means that you know weird stuff, like recognizing who is shooting at you, because Israeli soldiers don't shoot in automatic mode. Because it is not Humanitarian if I can say so.
So when we heard this, I don't know how many hundreds of shootings at the same time. We knew that it was terrorists and not our forces. We waited to hear a single shot. Like, we kept thinking, okay, so there are terrorists here, but how many? 10? 20? 30? Like, that sounded crazy to us. It's a matter of minutes, and the soldiers will come. But we realized we had to ditch the car and started running towards the field because they were shooting and coming closer.
And at that point, there were, like, hundreds of people coming out of different places on the road from their cars and running together. I remember one person shouting at the people who ran. Like, don’t make us nervous. Why are you running just like that? You don't know what, like. There is nothing. We were just panicking, And they're like, No, there are terrorists behind us. Like, Run.
People didn't want to believe that this was what was happening. We couldn't wrap our heads around it, like you can't understand, at this moment. But I did start writing to my family and friends. Just the closest one that I loved them that I loved them. I didn't want to panic anyone, so I didn’t say anything in addition, just that. And we and we ran like crazy. At this point, you try to go one way, and people are screaming at you that there are terrorists over there. So, you run the other way. And it just goes on and on and on.
I remember this one point of seeing a group of 20 people coming towards us, And I thought, maybe they're soldiers. But then I realized that they had an RPG. It was like a massive weapon. I knew that Israeli soldiers don't go with RPGs on their backs, so we realized We had to run really fast in the other direction that we had already been shooting at.
You choose where to go from there, but there is no safe zone. You choose whether you run away from a gun to an RPG. It's like that. And I remember thinking – thinking is not even a good word because I felt like I was about to pass out from being so scared. But there is this moment in a nightmare when you know you can't run fast enough and can feel it in your body. You can feel on your back how people are about to grab you. You can feel that. But you can't go faster.
And that was the experience. Like, I knew that they were behind me, and I knew that most of the people that were surrounding me were running faster than me, and they could kidnap me, or murder me, or whatever. And that is a nightmare. Like, that moment is, I think, I don’t know how we even stayed alive just from not getting a heart attack at this point. I can't really pass it with words; it’s just too…
But I do know that from that moment, I had a battle in my mind between the part of me that just wanted to pass out, to cry for help, to have someone saving me. And the other part of me that knew that no one was coming. And that there was no point in me thinking about how slow I was or what was going to happen because the situation was that that was what was happening back then, and that was that.
So, the only thing I could do was to run as fast as I could. And hope for the best. People started to fall around me. I tried to believe that they just...I don't know. They fell because they hit something; that was the case for most of them. And still, people were so kind and stopped to shake someone who was too anxious or shocked, and people were giving water to each other.
I grabbed some chocolate so I could give it to people. I started telling them we didn't know the next time. Drink or eat, and We need the energy. People need to wake up like people were on many, many drugs. Just the situation could make you shocked regardless of whatever you consumed.
And everybody was so nice in those In those crazy circumstances. We realized we had to hide because we were moving targets, and they were closing on to us from everywhere. And honestly, I didn't have power in my body anymore. It was like over two hours of running. Although it felt like 10 minutes, I know from it, after I searched, that message I sent to my family and the pictures I took at the beginning and hour I called the police, so I know it was something like that.
And I told the friends that were with me. We found this hiding place between a tree and a bush. We ran. In the beginning, hundreds of people, and then we became like a group of 20 people. Maybe even less. And then We hid, three other girls and me. At that point, We ran for a very long time, so we saw that most of it was an open field, and sometimes you had some trees; we thought about where we should hide and go, but no place seemed good enough.
But when I saw that point, that seemed somewhat safer or That We had better odds to hide and not be found. In combination with us, realizing that we didn't have power in us and that they were surrounding us, and we didn't have any place to go. So, yeah, we got there, and we covered ourselves with leaves. I tried to call the police. They didn't answer for a very long time. When they did, they told us that they were going to do their best, but that there are villages that have been taken over by terrorists and people are being kidnapped, and they can't really. They don't have anyone to send right now. Like they told us, hang in there. We'll do what we can. But you're on your own.
And I remember I understood it. I wasn't mad or anything. We realized that there was something massive. Knowing how many people were being kidnapped, we didn't know exactly, but we knew that it was starting to happen and realized that there were villages that were now taken over. It was just so scary to understand that, and it's important to say that it's not like we found a quiet place in the bush and stayed. It was A fire zone.
The Rockets were above us all the time. The screaming that we can hear sometimes. It is Israeli that we know that they were probably murdered or kidnapped or both. And sometimes, it's in Arabic. And we can hear the whistle. They're shooting at us, and we can hear those whistles above us. And that way, we know it's here. It's also around us, but it's like it’s right here. It's above us. That was when I realized I had to contact people from outside; I didn't want to panic anyone, but I knew that was our only chance to survive, so I sent my family to a location.
We have a group chat. And I told them I needed them to help us, three other girls and me. We are there. We need rescue. They didn't understand at the beginning. They tried to... Nobody understood just how crazy it was. How horrifying it is.
Israel... It's like... The media started to understand what was happening. They broadcast that, but not on the scale that it was happening. That only was revealed hours into this crazy attack. And my family and friends. I also posted on my story on Instagram that we need help without giving many details. And I told them they would not contact me but my family because I needed the battery. Also, I needed my phone to be quiet because we were staying silent to the point where I tried not to breathe...
Like it's, now and then, we wanted to start crying because you can’t. You can't cry right now. You can't panic right now. You have to stay silent. You have to stay still. And they started finding ways to... Or searching ways to rescue us. My family wanted to come to pick me up. I tried to tell them not to because we did not need more people to come to this Fire Zone; we needed to get people out.
After a few hours, I'm saying a few hours, but I don’t know if... People can't understand, but it's every minute; we don't know if it will be our last. Now, I can tell exactly how much time was there. I am saying it from here, knowing that we survived, but The situation is that you lay there. You look up because you can't look any other way, and you hear them getting closer and closer. And you pray that they will not see you. But you don't know that. And you know that you are at a huge risk every minute you are there. And you don't know if they’re going to find you.
First of all, I was very much okay with dying. We just made our peace with the fact that we were going to die then. I told my family that I was happy with the life that I had and that I loved them. I said goodbye. Like, I knew I was saying goodbye right now.
And I remember there were tons of shooting all the time. Still, there were breaks of three seconds now and then, and I could hear the birds in those seconds and see a lot of grey in the sky, but the other part was really blue. And I had butterflies above me. And I mean nature like I was lying down in nature. And I just thought that it was lovely. Like, I'm going to die here, but the world will keep on going. Like, the nature is stronger than the brutality that humans have.
And so, after a few hours, we could contact this Angel Rami Davidian. He saved over 700 lives. He's 50-something years old from Pettish. He's just A person who volunteered to do that. He was not called for it. It wasn't necessarily his job. He just decided he wanted to rescue people, so he did. Knowing what it meant, he entered this Fire Zone with his car. And rescue Tons of people from that party. But he couldn't find us. We got his number after four hours of lying there, and for something like two hours, he couldn't find us.
The other girls were swift. They ran out of battery because they texted people like crazy, which I can understand. They just wanted to feel safer, say goodbye, or whatever. I tried to keep my battery. To save it for... I didn't know how long it was going to take. But it was also about to run out, and suddenly, I realized that the location was probably not okay. If he can't find us, even though we're sending the location, he's so nearby. We tried to describe as much as possible, but we can't really... There was nothing to say, and we were so desperate...
I found myself saying, "Okay, there is one tall tree, and then another low one, and then two that are close... and I was hoping he would... I don't know. Like, I didn't even know what it was. You don't have what to do. But I realized our location was wrong, so I asked him to send us his location. And every communication was a risk. You need to be silent. And so, you just... You are weighing your options.
So he did, and I tried to stick out my phone because the reception was not very good, but you couldn't get up. I realized that if I took it up, it would load something. We didn't have the whole map.
And so... I could see his and our dots on the screen. Nothing more than that. And it was looking up to the sky, trying to see where the sun was, where it used to be. Like, I tried to talk with a girl to understand the directions. Where we were, we didn't even know. For example, we ran in so many directions that you can't say how long you had been running in one direction. Like, you don't know anything. But I could explain to him like go east, South, whatever, like... And so I had 3% of my battery left. I told him I would hang up the phone right now and turn it off. And I begged him not to... Not to give up on us and to find us. I told them we Were not going to move.
We thought we should, like... They wanted to move a lot of the time to escape. The debate that we had... It was usually just silent, and we were not talking. We were terrified and trying to listen, to understand what was happening around us. And occasionally, when it felt a bit quieter, we debated, like, some girls were saying, we have to go. They're getting closer and closer, and they're going to find us.
And I thought that we had to stay. I told them that there was no safer place for us. That was the safest place for us. And there is, for the very least and the best option, 20 minutes of us trying to go somewhere. We didn't even know where to go. They surrounded us. And it was a terrible position to be in because, you now, you're taking responsibility for other girls, as well. And they were begging me to leave.
I told them, Look, you can. If you want to leave, then leave. I'm staying here, and I think you should, too. And we tried to, at a certain point, to crawl to a kind of a road so that Rami could find us. It was, like, I'm already trying to step out of our hiding place to crawl outside and navigate our way there.
And I know that they were counting on me to do that. It was a lot of responsibility, and it would take at least two hours for us to do that. My phone was going to die before. And they were fighting with me about what to tell Rami. And I realized that that was what we were going to do. I was sure I had a family I needed to return to and wanted them to survive. I didn’t know why, but I knew, in my gut, that this was the right decision.
So I told Rami that I was going to hang out on the phone and we were going to stay right there because I went back to lie down with the girls. They begged me to, like, send him a message saying that we were going to die if he didn't come.
I told them we're saving that battery. Let's just lay down. There is nothing else to do at this point. There were no more phones. That was our only hope. That was our only chance, and we were lying there praying and accepting death.
Before Rami hung up, he told us he would honk the horn in his car, so if we could hear it, we would know it was Rami. So we lay there, and after about half an hour, we suddenly heard Rami's car. And so I turned on my phone. And luckily, I still had 2% of battery left. I called him. I was like, Rami, is that you? He said yes. We tried to understand how to access it as closely as possible because there was always shooting.
I knew I had to leave our hiding spot, so I crawled outside to find him. He said he had a white Toyota, which was very scary because that was the same card the terrorists had. So, I was lying on the ground, and I could see a car, but I thought it wasn't his car. For some reason, I wasn't terrified. I felt like it was an Israeli car, but I didn't know that at the last second, I could see something like a sticker in Hebrew on that car. So I went a bit... He could see me. And I went back down because there was shooting.
And it was Leon Bar's car. Another angel hero who decided to come just because he wanted to save people. He was there with his son. They went back for us, they took us, we got into their car. He was so brave and calm. We asked him to search the trees around us because we heard screams. So, we wanted to see if there were Israelis there. They couldn't find anyone. I think they were kidnapped, probably.
The next day, Leon Bar was murdered by terrorists. He kept for two days trying and rescuing people and eventually was attacked. We owe him our lives. And he was working with Rami. So, after we tried to escape this Fire Zone now in a car, we felt much better. They passed us to Rami's car, then took us to Patish, a nearby village. There were still rockets and terrorists, and so, we were hiding then in a shelter for, like, four hours, knowing that people were shooting outside. But it was different. We felt like we were rescued when we got into Leon's car.
In the evening, they managed to get us out of the South. A small group of people at a time. And that's that.
Do you have any questions?
[Interviewer]
How are you today?
[Millet Ben Haim]
How am I today? The beginning was chaotic... Like, the second I would open my eyes, I would start crying. I had many panic attacks. And you keep hearing about more and more people who are now dead or in Gaza being held hostages. And you understand that it is still so scary. And from day to day, you understand more and more what you went through. And also what you could have gone through and didn’t...
And there is a lot of guilt and a lot of... We know it's not our fault; it's the terrorist’s fault. But you still know that people were tortured and raped and murdered and kidnapped. People that danced with you a few hours before.
I can't believe that it happened. And to know, at the end of the day, I know
that the reason that I'm here is partly because they were busy hurting other people.
[Interviewer]
So this is the guilt?
[Millet Ben Haim]
Yeah. So, you feel guilty because, like, why... Why did we return? Other people didn't. Why... There are no good answers to those questions. These are not good questions. Those thoughts very much haunt us, and after a while of unbearable pain that our heart is going through... I think, now, mostly numb. My heart is very much closed. I still haven't... I don't see my friends from before at all. I don't talk to them. I can barely be with my family. I don't feel like I Love, if that makes sense.
I do have a lot of love in me. Because there is so, so much love right now in our country. So many people are trying to help. And we have these healing spaces that we go to, and it's unbelievable. After witnessing this kind of evil, To see all this light and all these people with such good intentions in their hearts is incredible. And so, I do have a lot of gratitude and love. And I do believe that is the solution to spread love and to... You can't fight evil with evil. You can beat the darkness without light. That is the solution and...
At the same time, I woke up in the morning, and it was too much. I'm so scared, and I have so many friends and family who are soldiers that are now at risk. And I can't stop thinking about the hostages. It is selfish to say that I was lucky enough to be here. But I feel like I'm dead. I feel like I have been murdered, and I can't recognize myself. I don't even look in the mirror because it's hard for me. Like, I don't know that person. I'm sad for that person. Like, I mourn my old self. Because she's not... She's gone. And my new self. It's like I don’t know who I am. I'm so sorry.
[Interviewer]
Do you have a message or something for everyone?
[Millet Ben Haim]
The message is that for us to believe that it happened, we need to accept that there is this kind of brutality among us. It's something that actually can happen, which is unbearable. I experienced that I had such a hard time believing that it happened. But ignoring it or denying it is not going to help. We need to understand that it happened, and we need to do everything that is in our power to make sure that it will never happen again.