“At that moment, I realized that I was sitting on a pile of bodies,” Eitan Halley, a survivor of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre, told JNS on Friday.
“I and the other survivors were in that migunit [roadside bomb shelter] for another seven hours until a civilian looking for his son popped his head in. It was like seeing an angel,” he added.
Halley’s story features in Paramount+’s documentary “We Will Dance Again,” which premiered on Sep. 24 and is directed by Yariv Mozer. The documentary includes 15 survivors of the massacre.
“This film documents the truth about Hamas and of what happened on Oct. 7. A story of pure good vs. evil. Look at what Eitan and the Nova crowd represent,” Mozer told JNS on Friday.
“Purely innocent, young, beautiful [people] who came to celebrate love, peace and freedom and encounter the worst of evil,” he continued.
“Hamas is not a ‘resistance movement,’ this is pure evil. It’s a fundamentalistic, Muslim regime pointed toward jihad, that wages war against Western values. They did not differentiate between Jews, Muslims or Christians, they targeted everyone,” he added.
On Oct. 7, Halley attended the Supernova music festival near Kibbutz Re’im, where Hamas massacred 364 people. As he attempted to escape, he found himself taking cover in the same roadside bomb shelter as Hamas victims Hersh Goldberg-Polin and Aner Shapira.
“We go in and there are already 15 people, it’s pretty packed. More people started arriving. At one point, Hersh came with Aner, who was an off-duty soldier at the time, and started giving us updates. When we heard that there were terrorists inside Israel, we all started panicking,” Halley recalled.
Soon they began to hear Hamas trucks pull up, and shouts in Arabic.
“They started shooting at the entrance and screaming at us. There was a Bedouin with us who really wanted to help us, but he went out and was beaten to death as he tried to reason with the terrorists,” he said.
“They threw anywhere between eight and nine grenades [into the shelter]. Aner told us if we saw a grenade, we’d either have to point it out to someone or grab it and throw it out ourselves. I was pretty close to him, pointing out the grenades, and he was taking all the responsibility [for] throwing them out,” Halley continued.
“It was either the eighth or the ninth grenade that went off. I went flying back, I hit my head on the wall and lost consciousness for a few minutes. When I came to, Hersh’s hand had been blown off by the explosion and Aner was dead,” he added.
Halley found himself standing at the entrance to the shelter when a grenade landed at his feet.
“I don’t know where I found the strength to pick it up and throw it out,” he said.
Then, two terrorists came close to the entrance and threw in two more grenades, one of which bounced off the wall and landed inside the shelter, in between a few people.
“I turned around and started yelling, ‘Get the grenade, get the grenade,’ and then boom. I flew back again, and lost consciousness. Everyone was sitting in a cloud of black smoke,” Halley recounted.
“I opened my eyes and looked at the entrance. I see one of the terrorists walk in, he had an AK-47 pointed at Hersh’s head. He was wearing a bulletproof vest, a green Hamas bandana, and he was smiling,” he continued.
“The one thing that came to my mind was, how is he smiling? Is this a game? They’re trying to murder innocent civilians on drugs, scared out of their minds, and they’re looking at this as a game,” he said.
One of the terrorists grabbed Halley by the head and started shaking him. As he did not react, the terrorist directed his attention at those conscious, taking them outside.
“Then, they came back in and started yelling ‘Allah Akbar.’ At this point I was unconscious, but other people told me what happened,” Halley said.
“They started unloading their magazine into civilians, wounded by the grenades, scared out of their minds and begging for their lives. They left everyone there to die,” he added.
Out of 29 people who had taken cover in the shelter, five were kidnapped. One was killed on the way to Gaza, another one, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, was executed in Hamas captivity in August. Seven people survived.
“You really see the bravery of the kids that were there. You can learn a lot about the people of Israel just by watching that movie,” said Halley.
“I think everyone copes in a different way. For some people it can take a day and for others a couple of years, but everyone needs to remember that there is hope,” he added.
It is nearly impossible to keep one’s eyes dry while watching “The Killing Roads,” another Oct. 7 movie, which focuses on Route 232 and Highway 34, on which Palestinian terrorists murdered 250 people that day.
“I wanted to make this film first to counter the denial that exists in North America, Europe and beyond, but also for people to see the sheer barbaric savagery of Palestinian terrorists that Israelis unfortunately had to endure on that horrific day,” Igal Hecht, who wrote and directed the film, told JNS on Wednesday.
“After I realized that no one in Canada would fund the film and that broadcasters were glossing over Oct. 7 while focusing only on Gaza, I decided to just do it. I had the capability, the equipment and a small team I worked with in Israel, with producer and filmmaker Lior Cohen,” he added.
Hecht spent January and February conducting research. Based in Toronto, he traveled to Israel in early March to film Israel’s south and interview 22 people. Eventually, the movie focused on nine stories. The film, released for free on Oct. 1, gathered more than 2.5 million views collectively on X and over 60,000 views on YouTube.
“Aside from Hamas’s footage and the horrific videos I got from the survivors featured in the film, United Hatzalah allowed us to access 50 hours of raw dashcam footage from their ambulances,” said Hecht.
“We were able to visually illustrate and prove everything we say in the film. The entire film is filmed on the road at the exact spots where those people lost their lives, at the spots they escaped from and the spots where they survived,” he continued.
“I went frame by frame and found the bodies of our victims, their cars stuck in the middle of the roads. We knew exactly where to look because they had sent a pin to their relatives and we had the coordinates,” he said.
Hecht referred to the story of Daniela Gandi, featured in the film, who was on the way to the Supernova festival with DJ Naor Levy when they were ambushed by Hamas. Gandi filmed herself and her surroundings as the pair were laying riddled with bullets. Levy died and Gandi was rescued.
“She’s filming from a first-person point of view, with her phone, everything she sees. After she was rescued, the dashcam of the ambulance captured her being taken from the warzone. She’d never seen that footage until she watched the movie,” said Hecht.
“She was out of it back then, and all of a sudden she sees herself and the people that saved her. It’s a remarkable, visceral journey on the roads that you experience in this film, and very heartbreaking,” he added.
The audience, Hecht said, is broad.
“It’s Jews, because we want to have historic material that later generations can come and learn from. But it’s also the general public. I’m not going to convince the glorified antisemites wearing their keffiyehs, but I am hoping to convince individuals who are unaffiliated,” he said.
“They watch the film and say, ‘Wait, these people murdered raped and burnt Jews on that road, civilians, and they did so with so much joy and pride and praise of Allah. I want them to watch it and understand why Israel has to go into Gaza and take out Hamas. It’s not to kill civilians, it’s to protect Israelis,” he continued.
“Given the opportunity, they will continue to terrorize Israelis, and I want people who watch this film to understand what Israel has to face, barbaric savages who on any given day would be more than happy to enter Israel again and burn, murder and rape Jewish women, Jewish men and Jewish children,” Hecht said.
While Hecht made seven films about genocide, including films on the Yazidi genocide, Rwanda, Cambodia, Bangladesh, Sudan and the Holocaust, he said this movie feels different because of how personal it is for him.
“My family lives in the south and had to go into Sderot and fight. All my family and friends live in Ashkelon and they were fired upon with thousands of rockets, so this was extremely personal,” he said.
“Marching up and down the streets of Toronto, terrorists supporters are doing the same thing, yelling genocidal chants in Arabic. … And the only reason they are not being prosecuted here is because the Toronto police can’t afford translators,” he continued.
“Western societies have to acknowledge the fact that this isn’t just about Israel anymore, this is a war waged by Islamo-fascist Nazis against them,” he said.
Hecht, who is working together with Dotan Nave, Lior Cohen and Gabriel Volkovic on a film following seven female survivors from Kibbutz Kfar Aza, shared a message of hope with regards to “The Killing Roads.”
“I hope it helps people understand and come to terms with what occurred on that day, but at the same time, that date doesn’t define us as Jews,” said Hecht.
“We shouldn’t be afraid, whether in Canada, the United States, France, across Europe or in Israel, we shouldn’t be afraid of these terrorists, we should stand up against them,” he continued.
“Israel morally is in the right and these people are barbaric terrorists savages whom we should expose for who and what they truly are and what they committed on Oct. 7,” he said.