OP-ED: Nova exhibit reveals truth Hamas terrorists want the world to forget
Sue-Ann Levy writes, "Eliyah Cohen and Ziv Abud were talking to all of their friends at the Nova Music Festival in the early morning hours of Oct. 7, 2023, when the music suddenly stopped."
By Sue-Ann Levy
Eliyah Cohen and Ziv Abud were talking to all of their friends at the Nova Music Festival in the early morning hours of Oct. 7, 2023, when the music suddenly stopped.
It was 6:38 a.m.
They thought the organizers would start the music within 5-10 minutes and they’d dance.
That’s until Abud looked up and saw “thousands and thousands of missiles” blocking the sky.
Life changed in an instant for this couple, who’d been together 6 ½ years and used to travel and attend a lot of festivals and parties every weekend.
Cohen was released in February after 505 days in captivity.
The survivors told their story during an appearance at the Nova Festival exhibit in Toronto, a moving and heartbreaking account of what happened to more than 370 Israelis who attended a festival dedicated to love and peace.
The highly interactive and immersive exhibit has been in town since late April after appearing in Miami, New York, L.A. and Buenos Aires.
Tens of thousands of people have visited, according to the organizers, around 75% Jewish and the rest non-Jews.
Mayor Olivia Chow and three members of council have been to see it, including Brad Bradford.
Chief Myron Demkiw attended and sent 94 police academy cadets to see it just a few days ago. Some 50 members of TPS also attended, along with 25 RCMP and 10 OPP officers.
Premier Doug Ford took a tour and reports are that he was very moved by what he saw.
PM Mark Carney was there just this week. Conservative leader Pierre Polievre and deputy leader Melissa were among the federal politicians who attended.
It is a masterpiece and it is raw— recreating the festival with artifacts from the event, including burnt out vehicles, bullet-ridden bathroom stalls and the clothing, shoes and other personal belongings left behind by those Israelis who tried to escape the terrorists.
There is a recreated roadside shelter and a wall paying tribute to all those festival goers and first responders who perished that day.
After it leaves Toronto on June 23, it will travel to Washington.
As Abud and Cohen told exhibit attendees, they ran to their car on that fateful October day and drove for six minutes until they got a phone call from a cousin warning them that snipers were shooting at cars.
”I thought she was high,” she said, thinking the IDF would come within minutes.
They decided to stop their car beside a small roadside shelter — a small room without a door for 10 people maximum.
Some 29 people crowded into the shelter — which came to be called the death shelter.
Cohen said 14 or 15 terrorists came and a Muslim guy tried to help the Israelis by saying all the people in the shelter were his family members.
The Hamas terrorists knifed and killed him anyway.
Cohen, 28, and Abud, 26, said they loved each other, adding that “maybe in the sky they will not be separated.”
The first grenade exploded inside and then Aner Shapira — considered a hero in Israel — threw out eight grenades.
He was shot and one exploded inside.
American Hersh Goldberg-Polin — who was in the same shelter —tried to throw out a grenade and it exploded in his hand.
To survive, Cohen said they covered themselves with the dead bodies.
He said the terrorists just put their guns in the shelter and started shooting at random.
Then Cohen was kidnapped to Gaza.
As he came out, he saw “so many terrorists with guns and grenades.”
He thought Ziv had been murdered in the shelter.
Abud said the last thing she remembered was all the bullets before losing consciousness.
At 11 a.m. she woke up choking.
When she realized she was alive, she said she tried to rescue herself from under the bodies and body parts but not before seeing her nephew, Amit, and his girlfriend.
They’d been murdered.
But she hadn’t been shot.
At 3 p.m. someone came to a shelter.
She said it was an Israeli man looking for his son, who’d been murdered. He saved her and six others.
On the one-hour drive to the hospital, she said she remembers a road “full of burnt cars and dead bodies.”
Terrorists were still trying to shoot her from the bushes.
When she got to the hospital, she saw a picture of Eliyah kidnapped to Gaza.
She thought he’d be gone for a maximum of three months.
They were taken to an infirmary and were “really afraid” as the civilians threw stuff at them and one tried to kidnap him.
He begged the terrorists to kill him but instead the terrorist beat the man who tried to kidnap him.
The civilians who came into the infirmary were “really aggressive,” he said.
So much for peaceful Palestinians.
His kidnappers dressed him as a woman with a headscarf as they walked outside.
”It was insane…,” he said.
At another house a 19-year-old took care of the bullet in his leg. Cohen said the young man pulled it out with tweezers while a shirt was stuffed in his mouth.
Some civilians found him in the house after a bomb exploded in the next house and screamed that he was a Jew.
”I believe everybody there is a terrorist… I saw the anger in their eyes,” he said.
He was in the house for two months. For two weeks, there was a lot of interrogation, Cohen said.
After 48 days, they took them to the first tunnel where to his surprise there was a “big kitchen, a big living room and a TV.”
They had three days there with other hostages including Goldberg-Polin, who gave him a book in English before he was taken away.
”We didn’t sleep for three days because we wanted to hear their stories,” he said.
He was in the tunnel for 39 days.
After not being given much, if anything, to eat, they planned that one of the hostages would pass out.
After that his kidnappers gave them dates for 7 days.
They constantly had to beg for food.
Before he was released in late February, Hamas gave him more food so he wouldn’t look as emaciated as the three hostages released before him.
Ahud said she learned four days before he was released that he was coming home.
She called them the longest four days she felt in her life because something happened each day before his release.
Cohen said he survived the incredible ordeal of 505 days just to know Ziv “was alive.”
”We are here and we love and we are good but in Gaza there are at least 20 people
alive…they don’t eat (one pita a day)…they are abused and tortured everyday,” he said.
”We have to do everything to get them out…it’s really really serious.”
I continue to be shocked by how little mention is made of the hostages in the Western mainstream media commentary on the ongoing war in Gaza. Lots of “peace” and “cease fire” calls - almost no “return the hostages”.
Kanaduuh is rotten to the core. People stand up for hamas terrorists, instead of what's right. And the communist government there is of course standing with these murdering sand diggers.