How to Destroy a Witness: The Nova Massacre and the Campaign Against Memory

The Testimony They Tried to Erase

On October 7, 2023, Hamas killed 364 people at the Nova Festival. The massacre included systematic sexual violence against women. Jewish witnesses documented it. Then institutions tried to make that documentation disappear.

A woman calls her mother. The shooting has started. She knows she will not survive the day.

"Mom, stop screaming, just listen. You are the best mom I could ever ask for. I love you so much."

This is Libby Cohen Meguri. She is calling from the Nova Festival. Moments later, Hamas militants shoot her. She survives the first shot. She calls again.

"Mom, they are coming to shoot me again."

Those are her final words. The call ends. Libby Cohen Meguri is 20 years old.

On October 7, 2023, at 6:29 a.m., Hamas fired a massive missile barrage at Israel. The primary targets were military installations. But the missiles also hit civilian areas. Some of those missiles struck near the Nova Festival, a music festival in southern Israel near the Gaza border. Thousands of people were there. They were dancing. They were celebrating. They were alive.

When the first missiles hit, the partygoers ran to their cars. They understood nothing about what was happening. They only knew that they needed to leave. But the road north, Road 232, was blocked. Hamas militants had positioned themselves along the escape routes. They were waiting. They opened fire on the cars with rifles and rocket-propelled grenades. The people who tried to escape were trapped between the militants on the road and the militants in the festival grounds. Some ran back. Some stayed. All of them understood they were going to die.

The festival security guards, untrained for combat, ran toward the militants. Almost all of them were killed.

By the time the Israeli military arrived, 364 people at the Nova Festival were dead. The number is documented. It is precise. It is a fact.

What is also documented but difficult to speak about is that the killing included systematic sexual violence against women. Hamas militants raped women at the festival. They beat them. They filmed themselves doing it. Some of the evidence exists on the phones of the militants themselves, recovered after October 7. Some of the evidence exists in the testimony of survivors who witnessed the violence.

Yoni Saadon was at the festival. He is 39 years old. He survived by lying beneath the corpse of another woman. He pulled her body over him and covered himself in her blood so that the militants would think he was dead. When the killing stopped and the silence came, he remained there for hours. He says he sees her face every night. He says he wakes up apologizing to her for surviving.

Hadar Sharvit was at the festival. She hid beneath a citrus tree for five hours while the killing continued around her. She heard women being raped. She heard gunshots. Then she heard silence. She survived. When she speaks about what she witnessed, her words are precise and measured. She witnessed something that was designed not to be witnessed.

Shani Louk was 23 years old. She was a German-Israeli, born in Germany, living in Israel. She went to the Nova Festival with friends. When the missiles hit and the militants arrived, she ran with the others. She was killed in the initial barrage or in the massacre that followed. Her body was photographed. It was placed on a truck. The photograph was documented. It was shared on Arab and Russian Telegram channels. It became evidence of something that Hamas wanted to document and display. Shani Louk's family received calls from people they did not know, telling them that the body on the truck was their daughter. There was no ambiguity. She was dead. The evidence was public.

Noa Argamani was 28 years old. She was also at the festival. When the militants arrived, they grabbed her. The violence against her was documented on video. A militant filmed himself taking her. Noa screamed. She called for her family. The video circulated. For months, no one knew if she was alive or dead. The video was the only evidence that she had survived the initial massacre. But survival meant something different for Noa. She had been taken. She was a hostage. She was a victim of sexual violence that was recorded and broadcast as propaganda.

In December 2023, Noa was released in a hostage exchange. She survived. She lived while Shani Louk did not. Both women experienced the same massacre. Both women experienced sexual violence that was documented. One was killed. One was taken. Both are testimony to what October 7 was.

In the months after October 7, institutions in the West began to document the massacre. The Museum of Modern Art in New York organized an exhibit about the festival and the killings. The exhibit was called "Witness/Nova." It included photographs. It included testimony from survivors. It was an attempt to document what happened and to ensure that the testimony of survivors would not disappear.

In January 2024, Nerdeen Kiswani came to the exhibit. Kiswani is the head of Within Our Limits Palestine, an activist organization. She called the exhibit "atrocious." She said the museum was displaying propaganda. She said the testimony of survivors was being used to justify violence against Palestinians. She and other activists occupied the space. They blocked access to the exhibit. They disrupted the documentation of testimony.

What Kiswani was doing was erasing. She was saying that the testimony of survivors, the documentation of sexual violence, the evidence of a massacre, was propaganda. She was saying that bearing witness to what happened to Jews was itself an act of violence against Palestinians. She was saying that the photographs of Shani Louk and the video of Noa Argamani should not be seen. She was saying that the words of Libby Cohen Meguri should not be heard.

This is what institutional erasure looks like. It does not deny the facts. It denies the right to bear witness. It does not say the massacre did not happen. It says that documentation of the massacre is propaganda. It does not say survivors are lying. It says that survivors speaking about their experience is a tool of oppression.

The Jewish community has a long history of being the ones whose testimony is disputed, whose suffering is denied, whose documentation is called propaganda. After the Holocaust, Jews documented what happened. They made photographs. They made films. They preserved testimony. The world at first denied it. Then it tried to contextualize it. Then it began to say that bearing witness to what happened was itself a form of aggression.

On October 7, 2023, Hamas killed 364 people at a music festival. It did this in the daytime. It did this with cameras recording. It did this with militants filming themselves. The evidence was preserved not because the killers were ashamed but because they were proud. They wanted the world to see what they had done.

Bearing witness to this is not optional for the Jewish community. It is a duty. It is an obligation to Shani Louk and Noa Argamani and Libby Cohen Meguri and Hadar Sharvit and Yoni Saadon and the 360 other people who were killed at the Nova Festival on October 7. It is an obligation to speak their names and to document what happened to them.

When institutions try to erase that testimony, when activists try to silence that documentation, when the world tries to contextualize that killing as something other than what it was, Jews must insist on bearing witness. Not as a political act. As a survival act. As a refusal to allow the erasure of evidence that someone lived and was killed.

Shani Louk was 23. Libby Cohen Meguri was 20. Noa Argamani survived. All of them were witnesses. All of them are evidence. The question is not whether their testimony will be heard. The question is whether Jews will be allowed to bear witness to what happened to their own.

Testimony sources: Survivor interviews, public statements by Hadar Sharvit and Yoni Saadon; documented calls from Libby Cohen Meguri; video evidence and hostage release documentation (Noa Argamani, December 2023); MoMA "Witness/Nova" exhibit and activist responses, January 2024.

Sources: MoMA "Witness/Nova" exhibit documentation; Within Our Lifetime organizational statements; Stop Antisemitism documentation of January 2024 protest; Jerusalem Post reporting; Freedom News coverage of October 7 anniversary activism.

Testimony sources: Survivor interviews, public statements by Hadar Sharvit and Yoni Saadon; documented calls from Libby Cohen Meguri; video evidence and hostage release documentation (Noa Argamani, December 2023); MoMA "Witness/Nova" exhibit and activist responses, January 2024.