Mazal Tazazo would not be alive today unless she played herself dead.
On October 7 last year, the 34-year-old was partying with friends at the Nova music festival in southern Israel, about five kilometers from the border with Gaza. “The night was incredible: love, peace, everyone smiling,” recalls the architecture graduate. “Arabs, Jews, Christians, blacks, whites.”
Around 6:30 a.m., the sound of trance music was replaced by gunfire and rockets as Hamas militants entered the festival site and began firing on revelers. As bullets flew everywhere, one of the militants hit Tazazo in the back of the head with a rifle. He felt his legs being tied with rope and blood pooling around his torso. She thought she might never see her son, then nine, again. “I knew I needed to kill myself, so I held my breath,” she says. One of the terrorists approached her, decided she was dead and untied the rope.
Survivors of the October 7 attack Mazal Tazazo and Remo Salman El-Hozayel are visiting Australia to tell their stories.Credit: Kate Geraghty
After losing and regaining consciousness, he ran to a nearby car, curling up in a ball in the back seat until the violence subsided. Her friends, Danielle and Yochai, were not so lucky. Both were among an estimated 364 festival-goers who died that day. A friend of a friend she danced with at the festival died after being taken hostage in Gaza. His body remains there.
“These people were very, very sick,” Tazazo says of the militants who killed his friends. She massages her temples with her long acrylic nails as she speaks, searching for words to describe the horror.
Tazazo is in Sydney this week on a visit organized by the NSW Board of Jewish Deputies. “I want the world to remember what happened on October 7,” he says, when asked why he has made the trip. The fact that some people deny that partygoers were raped and mutilated that day – or see it as a justified act of resistance – drives her crazy.
Mazal Tazazo on the day of the October 7 attacks at the Nova music festival in southern Israel.
He also wants to clear up the misconceptions he often hears about his country. “A lot of people don't understand that not only white Jews live in Israel,” says Tazazo, an Ethiopian-Israeli Jew whose parents immigrated to Israel in the 1980s.
Accompanying Tazazo is Remo Salman El-Hozayel, an Israeli Bedouin Muslim police officer. He was at the festival to provide security. El-Hozayel arrived for his turn eight minutes before the massacre began. He says it was just him and about 35 police colleagues against about 350 fighters, including those from Hamas' Nukhba special forces unit. The police carried guns; Hamas fighters were armed with rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns.
