- Natalie Sanandaji is an American who attended the Tribe of Nova music festival on October 7.
- She and her friends spent four hours running through the desert before they were rescued.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Natalie Sanandaji, a 28-year-old New York resident and "American Jew born to Israeli and Iranian parents." It has been edited for length and clarity.
Sanandaji originally went to Israel for a friend's wedding but was at the Tribe of Nova musical festival on October 7 when a Hamas terror attack resulted in the deaths of at least 260 concertgoers and employees.
From the beginning of my trip, I knew I was going to be at the rave. I arrived with three other friends around 1 a.m. We were there dancing for about two hours and around 3 a.m., we decided to take a break and sit at the campsite on the festival grounds, take a nap, and wake up for the sunrise set.
We were woken up by one of the girls in our camp, who informed us that there had been some rockets that were sent our way and intercepted overhead. She just wanted us to be alert.
No other people would react the way that the festival attendees reacted. They were fairly calm. She reassured me that it would just probably be a few rockets and that this was a normal situation for the area.
After a few minutes, the rockets kept coming. We started to realize that this wasn't just another normal situation. The festival security, at this point, had turned off the music and asked everybody to go straight to their vehicles. We picked up our things and went to our car. At this point, we thought that it was only rockets and that the worst danger that we could be in was that our car would get hit by some scraps from the rockets that were being intercepted by the Iron Dome.
Everyone was trying to leave at the same time, so we thought it would probably take a few extra hours to get home. So I asked my friends if they thought it was okay if I went back to the campgrounds to use the bathroom. I went back to use the bathroom, and a couple of days ago I saw a video that surfaced of the terrorists coming to those exact bathrooms and just shooting at the bathroom stalls trying to kill anybody who might have been inside. If I had been there moments later, that could have been me.
After getting to our car, the festival security asked everybody to drive down in one direction on the dirt road. You couldn't drive on most of the open field and everybody was trying to get out at the same time on the same road. We started driving and the festival security started asking everyone to turn around and go in another direction. This was the second time where we started to really realize that something else was happening that we didn't fully know of yet. I'd also like to point out the fact that the security did their best to get everyone out safely and many of them died in the process.
We started going in the other direction. Suddenly security was asking everyone to please pull over on the side of the road, get out of their cars, and start running. And for a second, we sat there and we didn't understand why they would say something like that. To us, the fastest way to get out of here was by car.
When we heard the first gunshots, that's when we realized that it wasn't just rockets and that the terrorists had come on foot, and they had guns, and they were coming after us. As soon as we heard the gunshots we just opened our doors and started running for our lives. Nobody knew what direction to run in. We started to realize after a while that they were coming at us from every direction.
One of the scariest things at that moment was running in a certain direction and thinking that you were running to safety and then seeing dozens of kids run in your direction and realizing that they were being shot at. Every decision you made either saved your life or got you killed, and you had no idea of knowing which choice was the right choice.
At a certain point, when we were running, we passed by a ditch. There were a number of kids hiding in the ditch and they told us to come down and hide with them. We were about to do that until one of my friends said, "If we hide in this ditch and they find us, we're going to get shot." We decided to keep running. We later found out that the people who stayed in the ditch were killed.
Eventually, we ran into a police officer. He didn't have much to protect us with, but he walked by our side trying to guide us to safety. He couldn't even call for backup because the local police station had been taken over.
We ran for about four hours. Eventually, we decided to stop, sit under a tree, and get some shade as we were running in the sun. We had no water. We didn't hear any gunshots for a minute or two. I decided it was a good moment to just sit down and catch our breath. At this point, a large white pickup truck was coming in our direction. And our first thought was that this could be a terrorist coming to kill us. We thought to get up and running, but we realized we had nowhere to run.
It turned out to be a man from the nearby town that we were running towards — the town of Patish. He had risked his own life to pick up people and bring them to safety in his town. I don't even know his name. We just hopped in the back of his truck and he drove us to Patish, and as soon as he dropped us off, he turned around and went back to go save more kids.
I hadn't told my mom that I was at the festival until I had gotten back safely home to a friend's house. Everyone's reaction to me being safe was just that God was watching over me and I just got very lucky.