in Tel Aviv, relatives of the victims of the Nova festival pay their respects

On the eve of October 7, the families of the victims of the Nova festival gathered this Sunday evening in the north of Tel Aviv, the capital of Israel, for a first tribute ceremony. Relatives of the victims hug each other, in an atmosphere filled with sadness.

Annie’s eyes are red, she lost her daughter on the morning of October 7, 2023. She hesitated for a long time to come this Sunday evening, for fear that her sadness would take over. “It’s quite hard to find ourselves again, to fall back into this period where people are sad, where there are all the commemorations. It takes us back a year,” she confides to Europe 1, explaining that she paid tears.

“We live in a nightmare”

“It’s not easy to see the photos,” Annie continues. She refers to the photos of her daughter and the other victims which have been scrolling on a giant screen since the beginning of the evening. Another resident looks at that of her son Barack. She needed to gather with those she describes as her new family. “They are the only ones who can understand what I am going through, and I understand the mourning of all these families, their pain,” she emphasizes.

“We live in a nightmare, we still can’t realize that something like this could have happened. I miss my son so much, I dream of him coming back,” she adds, moved. On Monday, she and her husband will go to the Nova festival site where a morning of commemoration is planned. It will take place at the same time when Hamas terrorists fired on the crowd. Sunday evening, relatives of the victims took the floor to share their pain and remember together the 410 people killed at the festival.