Minute by minute, hour by hour, what happened at the Nova Music Festival in Israel on 7 October 2023? As I watched the news reports in the days after Hamas fighters attacked last year, information still coming piecemeal, I imagined (because I needed to) something fast; a heinousness that was as swift as the hundreds of rockets that were fired across the sky that day.
But it seems that I was wrong. All of us? We knew nothing. The true horror of 7 October was its unbearable duration. A woman spends so long hiding in a refrigerator she can no longer breathe. A man lies in undergrowth for so many hours he finds he can hardly walk when the coast is clear. Yet another man is among bodies: they’re piled up like sacks of corn. There is nothing to do but to stay among them, hoping that the men who murdered these people do not come back. The morning ticks by, and with it, his dawning awareness that he is not the person he was yesterday.
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