Nova Festival survivor shares how God saved her from Hamas

WASHINGTON — Noa Beer didn’t believe in God until she found herself surrounded by Hamas terrorists at the Nova Music Festival massacre on Oct. 7, 2023, and even though they were looking right at her and firing, none of their bullets struck her. 

The 30-year-old survivor guided The Christian Post through an exclusive preview of the Nova Music Festival Exhibition on Thursday, which tells the story of the dance event that became the site of a massacre in southern Israel carried out by Hamas, a terror organization that has controlled the neighboring Gaza Strip since 2007. The exhibit opens Saturday in Washington, D.C., and runs until July 6.

As Beer walked through the exhibit, she shared what she witnessed when murderous terrorists interrupted the festival and detailed how she managed to escape as hundreds of event attendees were slaughtered or abducted.

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Camping area 

The sounds of gunfire and the wail of multiple car horns blasting, followed by the harsh voices of Hamas militants shouting “Allahu Akbar!” reverberated through the Gallery Place entryway, which currently houses the Nova Music Festival Exhibition. 

Before stepping inside, Beer said the first room was the only one that she could not guide CP through, as she has post-traumatic stress disorder due to the attack.

CP walked through the first section alone, which resembled an abandoned camping ground. 

Tents, lawn chairs, snack bags and electronic devices littered the first-floor room, and the smell of smoke filled the air. Later, Beer said that people left their belongings behind at the festival site when they were forced to flee, and those items are now on display as part of the exhibit.

Leaves and sand crunched underfoot as visitors walked through the exhibit hall, with footage of the Hamas attack on the festival playing on video screens and cell phones. The burnt remains of cars throughout the room told a story without words about the attendees murdered by terrorists while attempting to flee in their vehicles. 

In between scenes of the Oct. 7 onslaught were walls of text explaining what happened at the festival site and video testimonials from survivors.

At the end of the first room, a wall of text describes the mass sexual assaults Hamas committed during the Nova Music Festival massacre. The display featured a quote from Rami Davidian, a civilian who led a rescue effort to save festival attendees, who said he saw naked girls in sexually compromising positions. 

In his testimony, Davidian described cutting the bodies down from trees and covering them before saying the prayer Sh’ma Yisrael over them. 

“Unfortunately, most of the sexual assaults ended in the person being assaulted dead,” Beer told CP outside of the first exhibit hall. “So we don’t have a lot of live people to actually tell us exactly what happened, but we do have people who saw things that happened. We do have a lot of voice recordings from situations that happened.” 

The Nova Music Festival survivor said the sexual assaults are “among the most terrible things that happened that day.” Beer stressed that the assaults had “nothing to do with war” and were just a “crime against humanity.” 

Noa Beer’s story

A brief video followed the camping ground section, showing footage of festival attendees of various ages and ethnicities dancing together and smiling before the attack began. After the video concluded, Beer shared more of her story with CP as she led the way upstairs to the next room. 

The survivor worked as a booking agent, and she attended the Nova Music Festival in October 2023 alongside a Hungarian DJ whom she had helped schedule to play a set at the event. The DJ, who is also a friend of hers, survived the attack, but like Beer, he also carries the weight of the horrors he witnessed that day. 

“One of the things that people need to understand is that this was a massacre,” Beer told CP. “[Hamas] came there with only one purpose: They came to kill, and they did not care how or who.”  

Before the violent onslaught that claimed the lives of nearly 400 festival attendees, Beer remembered seeing so many “beautiful people” ages 19 through 60, “dancing together in harmony.” 

“So many hugs on the dance floor and so many smiling people,” the survivor recalled. “We were people who went to a music festival to dance. None of us came to dance on occupied land, or for war or wanted to kill anyone. No, we came to dance like anyone else would at any other festival anywhere else in the world.” 

The festival atmosphere changed after Beer’s friend finished playing his set. The two decided to stay and enjoy the event, but around 6:30 a.m., a security guard drew the booking agent’s attention upward, where a stream of rockets had lit up the sky. 

“I understood that we needed to stop the music because people did not know what was happening,” Beer said, explaining that the festival music had been so loud that many didn’t hear the rockets launched from Gaza. 

After shutting off the music, Beer yelled, “Red alert!” into the crowd, and then she went to look for her DJ backstage. Due to the lack of bomb shelters nearby, she instructed the DJ to lie down on the ground with his hands over his head, expecting the rocket barrage to end after a minute or two. 

“But it went on and on,” the survivor explained. “It wasn’t stopping. I could feel the ground shaking from the missiles. It was terrifying, but at the time, all we knew was that there were missiles in the sky, and we needed to lie down on the ground.” 

After several minutes, a security guard eventually took the microphone on stage and instructed everyone to leave the premises. At the time, it seemed like a routine rocket attack, and wanting to avoid a traffic jam, Beer suggested to her DJ friend that they head back to the car and leave quickly. 

“We were driving north for about 10 minutes, and there were cars around us,” the survivor recalled. “Some cars were stopping in bomb shelters on the way. I don’t know what came over me, but I had a very bad gut feeling, and I didn’t want to go into a shelter. That ended up saving our lives.” 

‘An angel guarding me’

Those who had sought refuge in bomb shelters had no idea at the time that armed Hamas terrorists would start shooting and hurling grenades at them. The survivors who made it out alive hid underneath bloody corpses for hours or played dead.

Ten minutes into the drive, Beer saw one of the two cars in front of her suddenly hit the brakes, and the second vehicle slammed right into the first one. Beer had served as a medic in the Israeli military, so she decided to go over and offer assistance. 

“I opened my car door, and the first thing that happened after a second of me opening the car door was that a bullet flew right next to me,” the survivor said. “And then another one and another one. I raised my eyes, and I saw there was a terrorist about 20 meters in front of us, just shooting at us like crazy.” 

Beer didn’t realize at first that the man shooting at her and the DJ was a terrorist because he was wearing a stolen Israeli Defense Forces uniform. As the bullets kept flying, she understood then that they were under attack by terrorists.

One detail about the terrorists that she remembered vividly was how happy they all seemed as they tried to kill her. Beer recalled how one of the terrorists even had a massive smile on his face as he shot at her.

“And I’m thinking to myself, how evil can a person be? I have nothing to defend myself with. You’re enjoying yourself, you’re laughing,” she said. 

On the road, Beer saw three injured people crawling on the ground toward her, and she let them into the back seat of her car. The DJ who attended the festival was also in the car, and just like Beer, no bullets had hit him. 

“I truly, to this day, can say that there was an angel guarding me because the bullets had hit everything around me except me,” the survivor said. 

Hitting the gas, Beer drove away as Hamas militants fired at her car and other vehicles filled with people trying to flee the festival. While Beer was unhurt, two of the passengers she had picked up on the road were shot. She drove East to a nearby hospital, where the strangers she had picked up received medical attention.

Before the Nova Music Festival massacre, Beer said that she didn’t believe in God but now feels as if she must, not seeing any other explanation for her survival.

“They were looking straight at me and shooting straight at me, and they missed,” the survivor said. “So if there isn’t a God, then it’s something else, but I’m guessing it’s a God.”