CBS News
Israeli who escaped Hamas attack on Nova Music Festival struggles a year later with physical and mental scars
Eitan Halley and his friends were looking forward to the Nova Festival last fall, in part because the tickets were affordable.
“We were all looking for jobs, so we didn’t really have a bunch of money,” said Halley, 28. “The second the Nova tickets came out, they were really cheap. We all liked going to parties, and it seemed like a perfect thing to do right before the [school] year started.”
Halley and his friends didn’t know the exact location of the festival ahead of time — part of its mystique — but they planned to drive south to Be’er Shiva, a kibbutz in the general area, a few days early to get supplies.
“I remember driving and looking out the window and seeing Gaza and just thinking about my time in the army, and how I used to just guard a couple of kilometers away from where I was at the moment,” Halley said. “You grow up in Israel and you feel, in a way, very safe. Even though every year or two you hear sirens and you see rockets exploding over your head, you feel like you have a very stable army and government. And then this kind of thing happens.”
When the Nova Festival location was announced, the group was excited. They went to the site, set up their tents, and started enjoying themselves. There were trance DJs playing, and lots of people drinking, dancing and doing drugs. People stayed up all night, with the party set to crescendo at sunrise.
But the dancing and fun gave way quickly to violence and fear.
On the morning of Oct. 7, Hamas militants broke through the border fence of Gaza at 60 different locations. Israel says some 1,200 people were murdered and more than 251 taken hostage in the Hamas assault, according to Israel.
The attack would trigger an Israeli military response that has caused a humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza that has killed more than 41,000 Palestinians so far, according to the Health Ministry in the Hamas-run enclave. Israeli airstrikes in Gaza are still ongoing.
The first sign people at the Nova Festival had that something was wrong were lights from a barrage of rocket fire.
“I look up and I see the largest — the most rockets I’ve ever seen in my life. And I want to remind you guys, I was on the border of Gaza in other wars, so I’ve seen rockets going over my head, but I’ve never seen it at this volume,” Halley said
The group ran back to their car and began driving towards the festival entrance they had used to come in. They soon got stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic.
“There was nowhere to move. Everyone was panicking. Rockets were exploding over our heads. We didn’t understand if we’re safe or we’re not safe, we just knew we had to get out of there. And all of a sudden some guy screams to us: ‘There’s another entrance over there.’ So we, the second he said that, we turn around our car and we start driving the other way.”
See It Now Studios/Paramount
The group made it to the main road and turned right to return to Be’er Shiva, where they had been staying the last couple days. Many others turned left, toward Tel Aviv.
“All the people that took a left hit the terrorists, and a lot of them didn’t make it out,” Halley said.
The group drove for a few minutes, with rockets whizzing overhead, until they passed a small, roadside shelter. A makeshift structure to protect members of the public who might be caught driving during rocket attacks, it didn’t have a door that closed, just a wall that blocked the entrance from flying debris.
The group pulled over and ran inside to find the shelter already crowded. People continued to squeeze in, including Aner Shapira and Hersh Goldberg-Polin, until a final group of three entered and said they had fled terrorists shooting at their car.
“And at that point, my heart jumped a beat, and I realized that something bad is about to happen,” Halley said. “I remember a few seconds after that happened, we heard cars pull up, a group of people jump out screaming in Arabic, and they started firing at the entrance.”
Halley said everyone in the shelter was trying to call for help — phoning the police, the army — but no matter who they spoke with, they couldn’t get anyone to come to their rescue.
“I’m talking to them, and telling them they’re shooting at us and they’re going to try to kidnap us or kill us, and we’re not getting any reactions,” Halley said.
Then his phone was blasted out of his hand, and he realized the terrorists were throwing grenades into the shelter.
Shapira, who had entered earlier with Goldberg-Polin, immediately jumped into action, picking the live grenades up off the floor and throwing them back out through the shelter entrance.
“He was focused. He understood that he had a mission and he wasn’t willing to do anything else but stay there. He wasn’t looking to hide or to get away or anything. All he was looking for was to fight, to stay alive,” Halley said.
The grenades kept coming. Shapira caught and threw back around eight until, “at one point, there was a really big explosion, and I flew back. Someone flew on me, and when I finally got up, I remember Aner wasn’t standing anymore. He wasn’t with us. Hersh lost his hand up to, I think, right under his elbow,” Halley said.
The attackers threw more grenades, and Halley says he took up the job of throwing them back until they threw in two at once, and one of them exploded. He was knocked unconscious, eventually waking up to see a masked attacker walking over him inside the shelter, carrying an AK-47 and wearing a bandana with the symbol of Hamas.
“I remember you could see his mouth through the mask. He had a little opening and he was smiling, like it was a game that they won, and I was able to keep my eyes open for a second before I passed back out,” Halley said.
The attackers started taking hostages, including Goldberg-Polin, an Israeli-American who was among six hostages killed in September shortly before Israeli forces found them. Goldberg-Polin’s body was found in a tunnel beneath the southern Gaza city of Rafah.
In the shelter, Halley had survived the grenade blast.
“They checked if I was still alive. I don’t know how I remember this because I was out. I was 100% out. I remember I was trying to open my eyes to see what was happening and I just couldn’t, and they just passed me over,” he said.
The attackers sprayed the remaining bodies with bullets, and when Halley woke up, they’d left the shelter.
“I realized that I was sitting in a pile of bodies, and I think we were seven survivors. There were another two or three people that were critically injured. They were trying to be as quiet as possible, because they knew that if they made noise, the terrorists might just walk in and throw another grenade and we wouldn’t be able to do anything. And this haunts me till this day,” Halley said. “They couldn’t be quiet anymore, and they started screaming, because they had gun bullet wounds or shrapnel from the grenades… At some point, they just stopped screaming, and I’m almost sure that they passed away at that moment or they passed away a little bit after that, and from that moment on, we were there for another six hours.”
Halley and the others were eventually found by the father of a festival-goer who’d gotten a frantic phone call from his son from inside the shelter. Upon receiving the call, he grabbed a pistol and drove to the scene.
He managed to call in some army support, and Halley was eventually put into a jeep and driven toward Be’er Shiva.
“I remember seeing on the side of the road — I don’t even know how many, but so many cars just, that looked shot up. A lot of the cars had passengers in it that you could see that they were dead,” Halley said.
Of the more than 3,000 people who went to the Nova Music Festival, 364 were murdered and 44 others were taken as hostages back into Gaza. Hundreds more were wounded, and thousands are still receiving psychological counseling. Some have taken their own lives.
Halley is among the survivors left with both physical and psychological scars.
“I can find myself crying in the middle of the day for no reason,” he said. “It’s very, very tough.”
“I still have headaches from the explosions and from passing out, I think. Dizziness, nausea, I lose my balance, I think, because of my eardrums. My hearing was damaged. Obviously, sleeping is all of a sudden a lot tougher,” he said. “I still do have shrapnel in most of my body. I can still feel, at times, my skin burning.”
See It Now Studios/Paramount
Halley said he tries to avoid things that trigger memories about the attack.
“I haven’t really listened to trance music ever since the 7th of October, and I’m not really willing to listen to it today either,” he said. “One day, I hope that I will be able to go back to parties and dance again and enjoy myself the way I used to.”
Halley is one of several festival-goers who told their stories of survival in “We Will Dance Again,” a See It Now Studios documentary. Stream it now on Paramount+.
STOCKHOLM – Two researchers working in Massachusetts have been awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine.
MicroRNA
Americans Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun were honored Monday for their discovery of microRNA, a fundamental principle governing how gene activity is regulated.
The Nobel Assembly said that their discovery is “proving to be fundamentally important for how organisms develop and function.”
Steffen Trumpf/picture alliance via Getty Images
Victor Ambros
Ambrose performed the research that led to his prize at Harvard University.
He is currently a professor of natural science at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester. Ambrose was born in Hanover, New Hampshire. He earned his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1979.
Gary Ruvkun
Ruvkin’s research was performed at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Harvard Medical School, where he’s a professor of genetics, said Thomas Perlmann, Secretary-General of the Nobel Committee.
Ruvkin was born in Berkeley, California. He earned his PhD from Harvard in 1982.
Nobel Prizes
Last year, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to Hungarian-American Katalin Karikó and American Drew Weissman for discoveries that enabled the creation of mRNA vaccines against COVID-19 that were critical in slowing the pandemic.
The prize carries a cash award of $1 million from a bequest left by the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel.
The announcement launched this year’s Nobel prizes award season.
Nobel announcements continue with the physics prize on Tuesday, chemistry on Wednesday and literature on Thursday. The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced Friday and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences on Oct. 14.
The laureates are invited to receive their awards at ceremonies on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death.
Associated Press writers Daniel Niemann and Mike Corder contributed to this report.
The mayor of a city in southern Mexico has been murdered less than a week after taking office, authorities said Sunday, the latest in a series of attacks on politicians in the violence-plagued Latin American country.
The killing of Chilpancingo mayor Alejandro Arcos “fills us with indignation,” Guerrero state governor Evelyn Salgado wrote on social media, without providing further details of the circumstances.
Local media reported that Arcos was decapitated, but there has been no official confirmation.
Reuters reported that photos circulating on WhatsApp showed a severed head on top of what appeared to be Arcos’ vehicle, but the news agency could not independently verify the photos’ authenticity.
JESUS GUERRERO/AFP via Getty Images
Arcos was elected in June representing an opposition coalition that included the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which denounced his killing as a “cowardly crime” and called for justice.
“Enough of violence and impunity! The people of Guerrero do not deserve to live in fear,” it said on X.
His murder came days after the killing of another city official, Francisco Tapia, according to PRI president Alejandro Moreno.
“They had been in office for less than a week. Young and honest officials who sought progress for their community,” Moreno said on X.
Guerrero, one of Mexico’s poorest states, has endured years of violence linked to turf wars between cartels fighting for control of drug production and trafficking.
Last year, 1,890 murders were recorded in the state, which is home to the beachside resort city of Acapulco, a former playground of the rich and famous now blighted by crime. Guerrero is among six states in Mexico that the U.S. State Department advises Americans to completely avoid, citing crime and violence.
Across Mexico, more than 450,000 people have been killed and tens of thousands have gone missing in a spiral of violence since the government deployed the army to combat drug trafficking in 2006.
Politicians, particularly at the local level, frequently fall victim to bloodshed connected to corruption and the multibillion-dollar drugs trade.
Tackling the cartel violence that makes murder and kidnapping a daily occurrence in Mexico is among the major challenges facing Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico’s first woman president.
Sheinbaum, the former mayor of Mexico City who was sworn in on October 1, has pledged to stick to her predecessor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s “hugs not bullets” strategy of using social policy to tackle crime at its roots.
She is due to unveil her security plan on Tuesday.
At least 24 politicians were murdered during a particularly violent electoral process leading up to the June election that the key ruling party figure won by a landslide, according to official figures.
In June, at least three politicians in Guerrero were killed. Acacio Flores, who represents Malinaltepec, was killed just days after the killing of Salvador Villalba Flores, another mayor from Guerrero state elected in June 2 polls. Earlier in the month, a local councilwoman was gunned down as she was leaving her home in Guerrero.
Her murder came a few days after the mayor of a town in western Mexico and her bodyguard were killed outside of a gym, just hours after Sheinbaum won the presidency.
The number of migrants crossing into the U.S. illegally at the southern border reached the lowest point of President Biden’s administration in September, three months into his crackdown on asylum claims, according to internal Department of Homeland Security statistics obtained by CBS News.
In September, U.S. Border Patrol agents recorded nearly 54,000 apprehensions of migrants who crossed into the country between legal entry points along the border with Mexico, the government figures show. It’s a smaller figure than the previous Biden-era low in July, when Border Patrol processed roughly 56,000 migrants who crossed the border without authorization.
Border Patrol’s tally of migrant apprehensions in September is the lowest number recorded by the agency since August 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic and the travel restrictions countries enacted in response to it led to a sharp decrease in migration to the U.S. southern border. It’s also a 78% drop from a record high in December, when illegal border crossings soared to 250,000.
U.S. immigration officials processed another 48,000 migrants in September at legal border entry points, known as ports of entry, according to the internal federal data. Most of them secured appointments to enter the U.S. via a phone app the Biden administration has transformed into the main gateway into the American asylum system.
September’s numbers show migration to the U.S.-Mexico border has plateaued following a precipitous drop at the start of the summer, when President Biden invoked sweeping presidential powers to disqualify most of those entering the country illegally from asylum. In July, August and September, Border Patrol agents at the southern border recorded between 54,000 and 58,000 migrant apprehensions each month.
Designed to be temporary, Mr. Biden’s move to sharply restrict asylum is likely to remain in place indefinitely after his administration made the policy’s deactivation threshold harder to meet last week. Vice President Kamala Harris has also vowed to continue the strict measure if elected president and make it even more difficult to lift.
The Biden administration’s support for drastic limits on asylum reflect a broader rightward shift on border policy by Democrats that would have been unthinkable in 2020, when the party faced pressure to reverse the Trump administration’s hardline immigration rules. It’s a shift that has occurred amid a marked increase in support for tough immigration measures among the American public.
The dramatic reduction in illegal border crossings this year, however, has given Democrats a much-needed political win on immigration ahead of the presidential election next month. Former President Donald Trump, who is pledging to carry out mass deportations if voters return him to the White House, has sought to make immigration a defining issue of the 2024 race for the president.
With September’s tally, fiscal year 2024 saw the lowest level in unlawful border crossings under the Biden administration. Border Patrol recorded over 1.5 million migrant apprehensions in fiscal year 2024, compared to a record high of 2.2 million in fiscal year 2022.
While the Mexican government’s efforts have also played a major role in the lower number of migrant arrivals along the U.S. border this year, American officials have credited Mr. Biden’s stringent asylum rules in June for the current four-year low in illegal immigration levels.
During its first three years in office, the Biden administration struggled to respond to an unprecedented migrant influx that was, in great part, fueled by arrivals from far-flung countries, including nations like Venezuela where the U.S. cannot deport migrants on a regular basis due to frosty diplomatic relations. In many cases, migrants were released into the U.S. with notices to appear in immigration court simply because the government did not have the resources and personnel to vet their asylum claims at the border.
But since Mr. Biden’s partial ban on asylum claims took effect, there has been an 80% drop in migrant releases, a senior Customs and Border Protection official told CBS News, requesting anonymity to speak candidly about migration trends. The U.S. government has long viewed migrant releases as a “pull” factor that fuels migration to the southern border, alongside economic conditions and other “push” factors in migrants’ home countries.
More than 70% of migrant adults and families apprehended by Border Patrol have been deported from the U.S. since Mr. Biden’s asylum crackdown began, up from 25% in May, according to DHS data. Since the policy took effect, the U.S. has carried out over 121,000 returns and deportations of migrants.
The asylum restrictions do not apply to unaccompanied children or those with acute medical conditions. It also exempts more than 1,000 migrants who enter the U.S. at legal border entry points each day under the phone app-power appointment system. The Biden administration has paired that process and other legal migration channels, including a program that allows migrants from four countries to fly to the U.S. if they have American sponsors, with the asylum restrictions to deter unlawful crossings through a carrots-and-sticks strategy.
While it has arguably been responsible for ending, at least temporarily, large-scale illegal crossings and chaotic images at the U.S.-Mexico border, the Biden administration’s asylum crackdown has been derided as an election gimmick by Republican lawmakers and a draconian policy by migrant advocates, who are challenging the policy in court.
In a conference hosted by the Migration Policy Institute last week, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas challenged those critical of the asylum restrictions to find an “alternative proposal,” calling the situation at the border before the policy change “unworkable.”
“We have to understand the fact that the American public does want, does expect and does demand the delivery of order,” Mayorkas said, adding later, “And I would respectfully submit that, at least in particular times over the past three years, we haven’t had order.”
