Fifty Israelis allegedly committed suicide after surviving Hamas attack at music festival

About fifty survivors of the Hamas cross-border attack at the Nova Music Festival on 7 October have allegedly committed suicide after the attack, a survivor of the attack said Tuesday.

“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,” said Guy Ben Shimon on Tuesday at a Parliamentary hearing for a State Audit Commission on the treatment of the survivors of 7 October. He stressed that many of his friends who escaped the attack could not recover from what they had experienced.

“There are many survivors who had to be forcibly hospitalised due to their psychological state. My friends are not getting out of bed, neither am I,” he added.

“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 parliamentary hearing focused on the State’s alleged failures towards the survivors of 7 October, including bureaucratic difficulties in getting their post-traumatic stress disorder recognised, as well as in receiving the needed care.

“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.

For its part, the Israeli Ministry of Health said it does not have any information or statistics about the alleged 50 survivors who have committed suicide.

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