A Parliamentary hearing was held in the Knesset on Tuesday for a State Audit Commission on the treatment of the survivors of October 7. At the hearing, Ben Shimon, a survivor of the Nova music festival massacre, testified that at least 50 survivors of Oct. 7 have committed suicide since the Palestinian attack.
“Few people know, but there have been almost 50 suicides among the Nova survivors. This number, which was true two months ago, may have increased since,” Ben Shimon said, emphasizing that many of his friends who escaped the massacre could not recover from what they had experienced.
“There are many survivors who had to be forcibly hospitalized due to their psychological state. My friends are not getting out of bed, neither am I,” he said.
“I am practically unable to do anything. I had to get a dog to help me survive in my daily life. The goal for all of us is to return to work and function normally, but we cannot do it without adequate help,” Ben Shimon added.
The Health Ministry firmly denied the claim. In a statement, the ministry said that the widely reported “figures of the number of suicides and the number of those institutionalized among survivors of the Supernova festival are not known to the Health Ministry and the medical system and are not correct.”
He said the ministry checked with groups who have been treating Supernova survivors and with the Tribe of Nova Foundation set up following the massacre and found no basis for the claim.
Health Ministry representative Gilad Bodenheimer said at the same Knesset meeting: “We know of only a few cases of suicide. We must be cautious with numbers that could do public damage.”
“Why should I constantly prove what I experienced? Why am I forced to go back to the details of what I experienced for them to believe me?” Naama Eitan, another survivor of the music festival, asked during the hearing.
“I participated in a study that monitored my pulse and other parameters and revealed how bad my health is. I sleep on average two hours a night. Each morning at seven o’clock, I relive the moments when I was hidden in the bushes with terrorists passing by me. I can no longer move on my own, I need to be constantly accompanied,” she described.
.The hearing focused on alleged failures of the state bodies towards the survivors of October 7, including bureaucratic difficulties the survivors faced in getting their post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) recognized and receiving the requisite care. At a hearing in November, a health official said around 10 survivors had been involuntarily committed to psychiatric hospitals after their ordeals.
As part of the October 7 massacre carried out by Palestinians, 364 civilians were murdered and many more wounded by Hamas at the Supernova Sukkot Gathering, an open-air weekend-long music festival held near kibbutz Re’im. At least 40 hostages were also taken. During the massacre, according to survivor and emergency responder testimony, Hamas militants raped women attendees. The massacre at the festival was the largest terror attack in Israel’s history, and the worst Israeli civilian massacre ever.
