Toronto photographer captures escape from Israel music festival massacre

Warning: Details may be disturbing to some readers

Toronto-born photographer Shye Klein Weinstein had just recently moved to Israel when he joined his cousin and a group of friends at the Nova music festival on Oct. 7 in southern Israel.

“Everybody is happy, everybody’s smiling, everyone’s laughing. It feels really safe. It feels safe and it feels fun. The trees were all illuminated with string lights and wow, it was spectacular,” the 26-year-old recalled in an interview with Global News.

“It really was some of the most fun that I’ve had since coming to Israel.”

All of that changed when the sun came up, hours after he’d arrived at the festival.

“No sirens, just rockets. Lots of them. Dozens upon dozens upon dozens and dozens more rockets. And the music stops,” Klein Weinstein said.

It was that morning, Oct. 7, that Hamas launched an attack on Israel, leading to the capture of hostages and the death of more than 1,000 civilians, Israeli officials say.

Israel responded with air strikes and a military operation it said was designed to attack Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip. Around 11,000 Palestinian civilians have died in the fighting and bombing that followed, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry.

Growing up in Canada, he said, Klein Weinstein had never heard anything like that before.

“This was so many rockets. I didn’t know what was going on. I just felt on edge. I felt anxious. I felt really tense. My whole body was tightened up,” he recalled.

Klein Weinstein told his one friend, “Let’s go back to the camp. Party’s over. It’s done.”

As confusion set in among the crowd, Klein Weinstein continued to take pictures and videos.

“Nobody is running for their life. People are leaving because people know the party is over…. It’s an overwhelming sense of anxiousness amongst everybody. No one knows what’s going on. Still rockets. It takes over half an hour before the sirens actually kick in,” he said.

Then the gunfire started.

“Now everybody hears the gunfire. Everyone hears it very clearly, and everyone’s like, ‘We have to go now,’ because nobody knows what’s going on,” he said.

His instincts told him “something really bad” was happening.

“Both my cousin and I, I think we knew, like, no one told us, we didn’t know Hamas had attacked us. But like, who else?” he remembered wondering.

In dozens of short videos, Klein Weinstein captured the chaos as terrified partygoers began running for their lives through the desert with shots being fired all around them.

“Everyone’s trying to leave. You know, the festival has over 3,000 people there. Some of them have already left. It’s still a lot of people to try and leave at the same time. And there’s only two exits,” he said.

A series of split-second decisions guided the friends into a nearby field.

“My cousin’s girlfriend screams for us to get out of the car. She says, ‘Shye, Mordechai, get out. Everyone get out. Get out, get out, get out,’ as shooting as gunfire is towards us,” he said. “All five of us leave the car and run into this field…. We get down low to the ground, we start to cower so we don’t get shot.”

Meantime, Klein Weinstein continued to film.

“At this point, I just start taking photos and I start filming because what else am I going to do? We don’t have cell reception. I can’t use Waze. We’re in a field,” he said.

The group managed to get back into the vehicle and rush from the field to a paved road.

“On the way home after a period of driving, I don’t know exactly when or after what, we did see two jeeps with personnel and they were driving back towards where we came from. I don’t know if it was to the festival or if it was to the nearby kibbutz because many places were being attacked. It wasn’t just us,” he said.

One of his videos captured a moment of terror for the group.

“We passed by a car with two men, black balaclava masks, one wearing jeans, the other wearing cargo pants, one wearing a tactical vest. One wearing boots, the other one wearing something else…. We’re less than 15 metres away from them and we can see them clearly and we can see in the car next to them is two bodies in the driver, in the passenger seat and we can see they’re dead and one of the men, his hands are literally red with blood,” he said.

Along their route back home to Tel Aviv, Klein Weinstein said they continued to see dead bodies and abandoned vehicles.

“We got really lucky…. It’s hard for me to comprehend because all of my friends are OK. My family’s OK,” he said.

Klein Weinstein hopes people watch his videos and see his pictures to understand what really happened on the day of the attack by Hamas.

“I was there and I wouldn’t believe it happened if I didn’t have photos and videos of it happening. I want people to see what happened to us as we saw it, as we experienced it. I want them to see what our reality was because it’s a very real thing that happened to us,” he said.

“You can be at your first music festival and then have people massacred less than five hours later.”