Yarden Gonen admits she still finds the absence of her sister Romi “unbearable”, three months after the 23-year-old was taken hostage during an attack by Hamas at a music festival in southern Israel.
On Friday, Yarden came to Reim, an open-air site in the Negev desert that hosted the Tribe of Nova festival on October 7, along with other families desperate for a resolution to the hostage crisis.
She said she had “mixed feelings” to be at the site of her sister’s disappearance, but that quickly gave way to devastation when trance music began playing in tribute to the victims.
“When they started the music earlier, it was crushing,” Yarden, dressed in a T-shirt emblazoned with her sister’s portrait, told a news conference organised by the campaign group Hostages and Missing Families Forum.
The festival attack was part of a wave of violence unleashed by Palestinian Hamas militants that resulted in the deaths of 1,140 people on the Israeli side, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on the latest official Israeli figures.
At the festival alone, 364 people were killed.
Some 250 people were captured and taken as hostages to Gaza, of whom about 100 were freed during a truce in late November.
Israel responded to the October 7 attack by vowing to eradicate Hamas, launching a bombardment and invasion of Gaza that has so far left 22,600 people dead, most of them civilians, according to the latest figures given by the health ministry in the territory.
‘Absorbing the atmosphere’
The Reim kibbutz is less than five kilometres from the Gaza Strip and the sounds of trance music have long given way to the daily thudding of Israeli rockets launching into the territory.
But the ground in Reim still has grim reminders of that day in October — bullet casings still litter the area.
In a bid to leave a more positive mark at the site, a memorial has been set up with portraits of the victims, flowers, candles and Israeli flags.
Among the festival-goers killed were Haodya and Tair — 27 and 23 years old — nieces of Asaf Pozniak, one of the founders of the Hostages and Missing Families Forum.
Pozniak, 30, said he accepted his nieces could never come back, but there were “always lives that can be saved”.
“We must do everything we can to keep up the pressure on the international community and the Israeli government to bring them home now,” he said.
Michael Levi has taken Pozniak at his word and now devotes his waking hours to meeting politicians and diplomats in a bid to get the remaining hostages freed.
Levi’s brother Or, 33, is among those held captive.
Surrounded by eucalyptus trees with the constant hum of drones and helicopters overhead, Levi admitted the visit to Reim had been harder than he had expected.
“Just standing here I feel different,” he said. “Absorbing the atmosphere, seeing what happened here, seeing the bullets on the ground.”
But no matter how devastating the trauma of the past three months, he still hopes he and his brother will one day be reunited.
“We both love basketball, we went to games together,” he said. “That’s one of the things we will do when he’s back.”
