Crestview students hear the horrors of Hamas attacks

COLUMBIANA -- Inor Kagano described a scene of love and community, a "celebration of life," at the Supernova Sukkot Gathering-- an open-air electronic trance music festival that took place near kibbutz Re'im during the Jewish holiday of Shemini Atzeret-- when thousands of Hamas militants suddenly stormed the Israeli border with the Gaza Strip and started killing people at the festival and other locations on Oct. 7, 2023.

"You don't really need to love each other to really feel like brothers and sisters," Kagano said of the community at the festival. That moment of peace and harmony was all shattered when the music suddenly stopped and the bombs and shooting started.

Four survivors of the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack recounted the horrors of their experience during an emotionally-heavy talk for about 20 junior and senior students at Crestview High School last week. The Youngstown Area Jewish Federation hosted the event and Crestview was the first stop of three that day for the speakers. They also appeared at Youngstown State University and the Jewish Community Center of Youngstown.

"More than 1,200 Israelis (Jews, Muslims, and Christians) were massacred by a terrorist group openly and proudly committed to killing all Jews," Crestview teacher Lisa Long, who helped organize the event, said at the start. "More than 5,000 people were injured, and more than 240 were kidnapped and taken hostage into Gaza, including babies as young as 9 months old. At least 35 Americans were among those kidnapped or murdered."

Several countries-- including the United States and European Union-- have classified Hamas as a terrorist organization because of their indiscriminate attacks.

After the four survivors spoke, students sat with them and ate lunch while asking questions.

"The focus is on student interaction," Long said.

The surprise attack happened at dawn on Oct. 7. Kagano, a professional photographer, was taking a video at 6:21 a.m. The 3,500 or so concert-goers were amped after a long night of dancing and partying and were waiting for the highly anticipated sunrise, the main event of the festival-- when the music stopped.

"Everybody dance like crazy, one big wave, such a big energy," Kagano said. "And then the music shut down."

Suddenly, air raid sirens started blaring, an unfortunate normal occurrence on the Israeli border with the Gaza Strip, a Palestinian territory and the home of Hamas. Police started telling everyone to shelter. Bombs could be heard exploding.

All four of the survivors of the attack said they were used to the sirens and calls to shelter because of almost daily rocket attacks in the area. At first, they did not think much of the commotion.

"I was not panicking," Kagano said. "Most of us were not panicking. It's just rockets, it will pass."

Klil Valiano, who was also at the music festival, said that Israelis are required to have bomb shelters in their home, especially near the Gaza border.

Israelis Eitan Frankl, Gitit Botera, Valiano, and Kagano all spoke of their personal experiences fearing for their lives during the series of attacks where approximately 2,900 members of the Palestinian militant group Hamas stormed the Israeli border with the Gaza Strip and fired a barrage of thousands of rockets at several Israeli cities and kibbutzim in the early morning hours of Oct. 7.

Kibbutzim is the plural for kibbutz, a traditional communal and intentional society of between 100 and 1,000 people, according to The Jewish Agency for Israel. Currently, there are approximately 250 Kibbutzim in the country, where about 125,000 people live.

Israel has occupied the Palestinian territories, including the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, since the Six-Day War in 1967. Among other things, Hamas is demanding an end to Israeli occupation and settlement of those territories.

Approximately 364 civilians were killed at the Supernova Sukkot Gathering music festival alone, and at least 40 were taken hostage. The Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas sparked the ongoing Israel-Hamas War, in which Israel has invaded Gaza, seeking to destroy Hamas. Since the war began, at least 30,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed, including over 12,300 children and 8,400 women, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.

All four survivors talked about seeing bodies on the side of the street, the widespread death and destruction, and how, at first, none of them thought the attacks could possibly be as bad as they turned out to be.

Kagano and Botera both spoke of the psychic trauma from the attacks. Kagano said that anywhere he goes now, he is always looking for the exits and calculating how fast he would have to run and to where if people were to come in and start shooting.

"(We are) smiling , dancing, communicating-- but subconsciously, we are seeing death all the time," Kagano said. "Life continues, but not in the same way."

Botera spoke of the post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) she now experiences as a result of the attack.

She was living in Sderot, one of the cities near the Gaza border that was attacked and where civilians were slaughtered, with her four-year-old daughter when the attack began. At first, they hid in the safe room in their house, until a rocket came and destroyed the house. Botera said she's lucky they weren't killed right then and there.

"I hear a big bomb, and open my eyes and the room is smoke and everything is smashed," Botera said.

Eventually, they made it to a central shelter, packed in with other people with no light, no food, and no bathroom for 10 hours.

"I was afraid some people would hear my daughter and come to kill us," Botera said, choking up slightly at the recollection. She had to put her hand over her daughter's mouth at one point when she kept asking what was happening.

Valiano talked about a similar friendly and loving community at the Nova music festival to what Kagano described.

"One special thing about the trance music community in Israel is that we are all beautiful people. But not in the sense of symmetrical face," Valiano said. "But when you look into each of those people's eyes, you can see they are people of love. They are people of dancing, of celebrating."

He and the group he was with had been dancing all night in anticipation of the big celebratory moment at sunrise.

"Then we heard a big boom...that wasn't coming from the great sound system the festival had. It was coming from the sky," Valiano said of the rockets from the Hamas attack.

He described the horror of how people's required bomb shelters in their homes became "death traps," because everyone thought it was only rockets, not soldiers on foot with automatic weapons as well. The soldiers rooted them out and slaughtered many in the different cities and kibbutzim that were attacked.

"People hid from it and then the terrorists came and had them in their own shelters," Valiano said.

Many of the things the group saw cannot be recounted anywhere. They are too gruesome and too horrible to even talk about, an emotional 26-year-old Frankl said.

"We cannot talk about it. It's too much," Frankl said.

Frankl ended up packed in a community center with 450 people in his kibbutz, Nirim, waiting for hours to finally be rescued by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF).

"I've never been afraid like that in my life," Frankl said.

"We thought for years that the fence and intelligence would save us. We have three barricades that are supposed to save us, and then the army. But nobody was there. For 10 hours, nobody came to help us," Frankl said.

ehouk@mojonews.com