Nova survivor reports brutal rape by Ham

Warning: The article contains graphic depictions of rape and sexual violence

D., a former tennis coach, recounted the horrific experiences he went through on the day of the massacre and described how he felt “dirty with shame” afterward. “My friend and I arrived at the Nova Festival around midnight on Friday night, which was a really special party,” he recalled.

“When all the chaos of gunfire and everything else started at 6:30 a.m., we initially thought it was just sirens,” D. recalls. “We were sure it was rocket attacks that we could relocate to the shelter. At some point we realized that it was actually a terrorist infiltration.”

When he realized that terrorists had also infiltrated the party, D. suffered a panic attack. “It’s as if all the demons break out at that moment. You become very tense and suddenly switch to survival mode.”

Shortly after he started running, D. was caught by Nukhba terrorists. “They attacked me out of nowhere. I mean, not out of nowhere – you know it’s going to happen, but until that moment it seemed very far away. When it happened and you got hit, you get a very, very big shock, and because I was in such a state of shock, I could hardly defend myself,” he said.

Within seconds, he was surrounded by terrorists in military uniforms. “One of them was their commander, I think he was their leader. They addressed him according to his headscarf,” he recalled.

D. demonstrated to the Daily Mail reporter how the terrorists pushed his body and head to the ground. “At that moment you feel a kind of separation from your body. At first you try to resist, but after a while you eventually surrender to the situation. You get into an incredibly difficult mental state within yourself.”

“They choked me very hard, pushed my head to the ground and then forcibly took off my clothes. And they laughed about the situation. It sounds crazy. But if you look around, you can see that they enjoyed the situation,” he added.

He recounted how he asked them to stop, but “you have no one to talk to, they don’t listen to you.” He added: “From then on, I’m like a doll to them. At that moment, I’m their Jewish doll. That’s what they want me to do with them, to do whatever they want with me.”

According to him, five Nukhba terrorists were present. “Two were directly involved in holding me down during the attack. There was spitting, shouting, laughing – impossible things. At that moment you feel torn between wanting to shout and maintaining a kind of silence.”

After the rape, D. said he saw people being taken away in cars. “Their commander was there and I was supposed to stay with someone in the same place. He left for some reason and I didn’t dare move because of everything that had happened. But at some point he disappeared. They were called by different people and things were discussed.” D. said he hid in the festival’s stage area, exhausted, until rescue workers arrived.

“When people came to rescue us, at first I didn’t know there were other people there, but when I saw them coming out of the area, I realized there were people living there, people who spoke Hebrew. I don’t remember exactly what they said in Hebrew, but there are things you understand when an Israeli speaks, by the way they speak, and that’s funny because that calmed me down in that moment and gave me the confidence to go with them,” he said.

D. recalled running to a patrol car when officers arrived. He managed to get his jeans back, but those were the only items of clothing he had left until officers gave him a jacket from their vehicle.

“At first you freeze because of all the trauma of this situation,” he described his feelings during the horrific experience. “You feel terrible because you have no control over what is happening and I asked God for help so I said the (Jewish prayer) ‘Shema Israel’ and we want it to be the end.”

He added that the horrors he witnessed during his escape will haunt him forever. “We saw a lot of people die. They cut their legs, they dismembered them, amputated people. There were a lot of bodies on the ground with a lot of blood.” He described the return journey as “a fog of absolute fear” and said it took him a long time to process what he had seen.

D. shared that he is still struggling with what happened to him. “There are times when you feel it very, very strongly, when you feel disconnected, and there are times when it comes up. These days I often take many showers to wash away the energy of everything that happened.”

He added that he did not want to share what had happened to him with anyone and thought he would never talk about the rape. “Even today I am ashamed of it, but in that moment I felt such shame, as if something inside me had been damaged in that moment.”

After the attack, he retreated to a hotel room and didn’t go out much. “I’m a tennis coach. I was ranked number 1 in Israel. But after Nova, I was about 20 kilograms heavier because of the situation,” he said – and said he finally told a close friend what had happened to him. “I couldn’t believe I was telling him, but when I did, it was the right thing to do. He said, ‘You can’t undo what happened, but you have to talk about it.'”

Although D. began to describe his experiences, October 7 still haunts him. “I still have terrible nightmares. I don’t sleep. I need a lot of time to shower. Because I feel dirty.”