Rami Davidian, who rescued over 700 people from the Nova Music Festival during the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on southern Israel by militant group Hamas, shared his experience with members of the Duke community at a Monday event.
The event, hosted by Chabad at Duke and the Provost’s Initiative on the Middle East, also featured remarks from Millet Ben Haim, who was saved by Davidian at the festival. Davidian and Ben Haim shared their stories to a full lecture hall with Duke students and members of the Durham Jewish community in attendance.
The event was co-sponsored by Students Supporting Israel, Jewish Life at Duke, Duke Center for Jewish Studies, Duke Friends of Israel, Fleishman House and Duke Israel Public Affairs Committee. Davidian delivered his remarks in Hebrew, while Ben Haim translated for him.
For Davidian Oct. 7, 2023, marked the 46th anniversary of his father’s passing. While getting ready to go to the synagogue for his father’s memorial, he said he received several phone calls from a friend asking him to rescue a young man named Ben. That’s when Davidian said his 48-hour rescue mission began.
He got in his car and left his home in Patish, a Moshav — or agricultural, communal village — in southern Israel. He wore slippers and assured his wife that he would only be gone briefly.
But as he neared the site of the Nova Music Festival, Davidian said he immediately recognized that something was wrong when he saw “bicycles thrown to the side and some cut fingers.” He then saw a burned pickup truck and, upon approach, found four dead bodies.
He shared how he witnessed “hundreds” of young people running and screaming for help, which prompted him to call his sons-in-law, nephews and friends for more help. He continued his search for Ben, who he found hiding in a bush with 14 others. He fit all 15 people in his car, and when he got them to safety, one of them asked to share Davidian’s contact with someone else who needed rescuing.
“He agreed immediately, but [within minutes], he received thousands and thousands of messages from worried parents [and] from people inside that area wanting to get help,” Ben Haim said, translating for Davidian.
Over the next two days, Davidian said he did not eat any food and only drank water from abandoned bottles he found along the way.
At one point, he said he was searching for a young woman named Amit. When he finally found her, he recounted that she was being “actively kidnapped by five [or] six terrorists.” Davidian rescued her by pretending to be a member of Hamas. After bringing her safely to his own home, he continued his mission.
That’s when he began the search for Millet Ben Haim, who told the story of Oct. 7 from her perspective.
Ben Haim showed a video from 6:29 a.m. of her and her friends dancing at the Nova Music Festival. She then showed a strikingly different video from 6:31 a.m., at which point chaos had erupted — with rockets flying above and shots fired.
After failing to escape by the road that led out of the festival grounds, Ben Haim and two friends made a run for it, traveling east towards crop fields.
Ben Haim recounted that one group of Hamas soldiers wore stolen Israeli Defense Forces uniforms to confuse festival goers, but she noted that she was able to recognize them by the rocket-propelled grenades they carried. In the other direction, there were snipers, and she said she saw “a lot of people falling down.”
“The best way for me to describe it is if you ever had one of those nightmares when you try to run faster, but you can't and you can feel like someone's about to grab you,” Ben Haim said. “So this is how I felt, but I [couldn’t] wake up.”
Ben Haim became emotional as she described how hopeless she felt in the moment. After two hours of running, she and her friends hid in a bush.
“It was kind of this psychological torment because you hear the shooting getting closer and further and closer and further,” Ben Haim said. “At a certain point, we suddenly didn't just hear the shooting and the screaming in Arabic, but we [could] hear them walking and talking and laughing.”
A year since the attacks, over 60 living hostages remain in Gaza, according to Israeli authorities.
“I want to use this moment to ask you all to think about the fact that my worst nightmare is the everyday reality of all of our hostages and that we need to do whatever we can to advocate for them, to speak up [and] to make sure that they're back home,” Ben Haim said.
As the militants got closer, Ben Haim found herself “praying that a rocket [would] hit [her].” She said she “knew” if the Hamas militants saw them, they “would rape [her and her friends]” — but by what she described as a “miracle,” the Hamas militants walked by the bush her and her friends were hiding in and did not notice them.
Soon after, Davidian and others he was working with found Ben Haim and her friends and brought them to safety.
When Davidian began to check bomb shelters, he said that he saw dead bodies that matched the descriptions of children that parents asked him to look for. In the field where the festival had taken place, he said he saw naked, dead bodies tied up to trees.
“He cried, he screamed, ‘Who? Who can do that?’ He tried to untie the bodies and cover them. He did that for 20 minutes, then he had to continue … with his mission,” Ben Haim said.
Davidian spoke about how he has felt in the 13 months since the attack. During the first two months, he was doing “relatively okay.” Then, he experienced an “emotional toll,” feeling physically and mentally ill and requiring hospitalization.
“He is certain that his dad was looking out for him that day,” Ben Haim translated for Davidian.
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Ava Littman is a Trinity sophomore and an associate news editor for the news department.