October 7 attack survivors Mazal Tazazo and Remo Salman El-Hozayel are visiting Australia to tell their stories.Credit:Kate Geraghty
About 6.30am,the sound of trance music was replaced by gunshots and rocket fire as Hamas militants streamed into the festival site and began firing at the partygoers. As bullets flew everywhere,one of the militants hit Tazazo in the back of her head with a rifle. She felt her legs being bound together with rope,and blood pooling around her torso. She thought she may never again see her son,then aged nine. “I knew I needed to play dead,so I held my breath,” she says. One of the terrorists approached her,decided she was dead and untied the rope.
After losing and then regaining consciousness,she ran to a nearby car,curling up in a ball on the back seat until the violence subsided. Her friends,Danielle and Yochai,were not so lucky. Both were among the estimated 364 festival attendees who died that day. A friend of a friend with whom she was dancing at the festival died after being taken into Gaza as a hostage. Her body remains there.
“These people were really,really sick,” Tazazo says of the militants who killed her friends. She massages her temples with her long acrylic nails as she talks,grasping for words to describe the horror.
Tazazo is in Sydney this week on a visit organised by the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies. “I want the world to remember what happened on October 7,” she says,when asked why she has made the trip. The fact some people deny female partygoers were raped and mutilated that day – or see it as a justified act of resistance – drives her mad.
Mazal Tazazo on the day of the October 7 attacks at the Nova music festival in southern Israel.
She also wants to clear up misconceptions she often hears about her country. “Many people don’t understand that not only white Jews live in Israel,” says Tazazo,an Ethiopian-Israeli Jew whose parents migrated to Israel in the 1980s.
Accompanying Tazazo is Remo Salman El-Hozayel,a Muslim Bedouin Israeli police officer. He was at the festival to provide security. El-Hozayel arrived for his shift eight minutes before the massacre started. He says it was just him and about 35 fellow cops against about 350 fighters,including from Hamas’ Nukhba special forces unit. The police officers carried pistols;the Hamas fighters were armed with rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns.