Former Gaza hostage Elkana Bohbot tried to help as many people escape from the Nova music festival during the October 7 massacre as possible, he told N12 in an interview on Tuesday.
"I produced the party. I brought a ton of people to that place, I begged people to come," said Bohbot, detailing the guilt he carries for inviting people to what turned into a massacre.
When the attack began, Bohbot recounted, he tried to gather the sound equipment as people called him asking what to do. "A traffic jam started to form at the parking lot exit. I told them, 'I don't know how you'll get through that traffic jam.' Sure enough, some of them stayed there, and they didn't survive."
He started handing out water bottles, reassuring people they would get out and it would be all right. "Then, wounded people and cars with bullet holes started showing up," Bohbot said. "I went to one of the barriers the police had set up. I grabbed them and said, 'I'm one of the producers, you need to open an escape route now for everyone to get out behind you, otherwise we're doomed.'"
Bohbot stayed behind to ensure the vehicles escaped, helping snap people out of their shock by shouting at them, telling them to get out through the escape route. He made his attempt at escaping afterwards, forcing him to be witness to bullet wounds and narrowly avoiding an RPG, which hit a car he'd been hiding under seconds before.
"I could hear the carnage - a man cursing, a burst of shots, and then silence. Girls screaming for their mothers, hard stuff, and then gunfire silences all these lives. It got deathly silent. And then I start hearing shouts of 'allahu akbar' and gunshots getting closer."
He described being captured, handcuffed, and brought to Gaza. "They tore my shirt. A terrorist saw my back tattoo, pulled out a knife, and said he was going to peel it off me," Bohbot said. "I was terrified."
Facing psychological torture in Gaza
Bohbot described moments of psychological torture when he was convinced he was going to die. On one occasion, he was brought to a backyard containing a ladder going down a shaft.
"He threw me down," Bohbot recalled, "I was in a tiny tunnel, walking like a frog, and he was pushing me forward with his knife. I was sure that this was it, this was where it ends."
Instead of killing him, the terrorist, Bohbot said, pulled out a bag of wafers and gave him one. "I told him I didn't want to eat it. He put his knife to my throat and said, 'Eat.' I took the wafer and ate it. When I finished, we went back up the ladder."
Another time, Bohbot and Bar Kupershtein, another hostage, were being kept captive in an apartment alongside each other. In an IDF air strike, one of their captor's sister and her children were killed. A second captor told the first that Bohbot and Kupershtein had been happy about it.
"He told me, 'Today I'm going to kill you,'" Bohbot said. "'Today you're going down to the tunnels, and you're getting a bullet in the head.'"
As soon as it got dark, the two were blindfolded and forced outside. "I tripped on the curb and fell to the ground. He lifted me forcibly, and in my head, I understood that this was it, it was over. I heard a door open. He brought me inside and told me not to move. I said 'Shema Yisrael' and 'Shir Lama'alot,' shivering and waiting to be shot."
Instead of being shot immediately, Bohbot was taken down a ladder into the tunnels. He heard a Hebrew voice calling up to him, telling him not to be afraid. "I reached the bottom and saw, like a kind of tunnel gnome, a terrorist with a mask and flashlight, who told me, 'Pleased to meet you, I'm Joker.'"
During his captivity, Bohbot was forced to endure the terrorists lying about the fate of his family, cursing them, and playing for the death of his son. But his hopes were raised when he saw an activist, Menashe, on TV holding a sign with his face on it. Later, he even got a photo of his son. "Menashe came all the way to the Strip's border, wearing a shirt that had Ram David's picture on it. They [the terrorists] took the picture, enlarged it, and printed it for me."
Bobot described his mental state as slowly deteriorating over the course of his captivity. His captors took advantage of this, forcing him to appear in videos showing off his distress, including one unreleased film portraying a fake suicide attempt.
If the terrorists felt that he wasn't crying enough during a film, they would shove an onion into his eyes to elicit tears. "We were so hungry," Bohbot recalled, "We would take that onion to eat."
Since being freed from captivity, Bohbot has been struggling with trauma and loss - not just his own, but that of his surviving friends. "There are dozens in rehab centers and mental hospitals," he said. "It's not like you come out completely fine. You need to continue living this sick nightmare your whole life."