Israeli veteran Gal Gilboa Dalal was delighted to accompany his younger brother, Guy, to his first psytrance music festival. Gal had been to several—in Israel and abroad, in places like Hungary. But this was to be Israel’s best-ever, produced in partnership with Brazil’s Universo Parallelo, the biggest in the world.
Guy, 22, arrived with three friends on Friday, Oct. 6. Gal, 29, a former combat infantry soldier now working as a customer support technician for a tech company, was a little late, due to his best friend’s engagement party. Early in the morning on Saturday, Oct. 7, he arrived at the Nova Festival on the property of Kibbutz Re'im near Israel’s Gaza frontier.
The festive surroundings would soon become the tragic, bloody site of Hamas’s surprise attack and massacre of unarmed Israeli civilians. Intended to be about peace and love, the site will long be remembered for exactly the opposite—war and hate.
The Supernova Sukkot Gathering began on Oct. 6, the final day of the Jewish harvest-season holiday of Sukkot and the day before another holiday, the Simcha Torah, was to begin.
The festival has often been referred to as a “rave,” but Gal objects to that term. It is more accurately described as a spiritual festival, he told The Epoch Times.
Online sources call the events dance festivals, generally featuring psytrance music.
Psytrance festivals stem from a tradition begun in the 1970s by hippies hanging out in the former Portuguese colony of Goa in India, attracted by the area’s religious and spiritual traditions, plus then-legal marijuana. Trance or psytrance music grew out of that, and such festivals proliferated around the world.
While there is some overlap with the rave scene, which also features electronic dance music, the latter has a more controversial image, including liberal drug use and sometimes unauthorized use of vacant buildings such as warehouses.
Raves are places where women may be relentlessly hit on, Gal told The Epoch Times, but that’s not a problem at spiritual festivals.
“Everything is being done with a lot of respect for each other.” There is less drug use at spiritual festivals, he said.
“The people that go to the Nova events are a kind of community, which means most of the people know each other,” Gal said. “And the crowds are very spiritual. These people really believe in peace and love. They go there to celebrate life.
“There’s much more than just music in this festival. You have a lot of small groups that do meditation. You have a lot of little shops that have spiritual things,” he said.
“That’s why I don’t like when people call it a rave or a party. It’s much more than that.
“The people who go there, they are free-spirit people ... There was the slogan, ‘Arabs and Jews are refusing to be enemies.’ These are totally people that believe in the peace-and-love lifestyle.”
“There are a lot of hugs. There are a lot of kisses. There is a lot of love. Even with people you don’t know. Really special places.”
Being in a big crowd of people who are all part of it, Gal said, “really brings you another energy.”
The Nova group’s collaboration with Universo Paralello drew much attention in the psytrance world. The Brazilian festival takes place every two years on the beaches of Bahia, starting a few days before the New Year’s Eve celebration. This year it decided to mount several smaller festivals at various locales, including Brazil, Germany, Portugal, and Israel.
“A lot of people just heard about it, and they knew it’s going to be a big, big festival.”
‘Spiritual’ doesn’t imply any specific religion, he said, and people are told to downplay nationality as well and not to bring flags.
“They don’t want anyone to feel like there’s a religion between them. People go there as people. Not as a Jew. Not as an Arab. Not as nothing.”
“My brother, he never went to this kind of festival before. He was so excited because he was always seeing me go. I was always having so much fun, and I was always telling him about it.”
Gal had been to festivals in Israel but said he preferred foreign ones like the Ozora Festival in Hungary. He knew Nova put on authentic spiritual festivals.
“But this one was supposed to be different.”
Guy had arrived Friday night along with a childhood friend and a young man and woman who had just become a couple that week. His friends had been to psytrance festivals before.
“[Guy] joined them for the first time,” said Gal.
“I didn’t plan to go to this festival. But since it was his first one, I wanted to go there and watch over him ... to see that everything would go well.” With all the people and it being a long festival, “it can seem kind of weird to someone who never has been.”
“He could be overwhelmed by the amount of people ... I wanted to go there and see that he really gets the vibe,” he said. “You don’t have a bedtime at a festival.”
Indeed, Guy and his friends had camped out, then gotten up around 2 or 3 a.m. to participate. Gal arrived around 5:30, and by the time he got inside, it was 6:15 a.m.
“My brother waited for me in the entrance. And as soon as I got in, he jumped at me and kissed me and hugged me, and he took a selfie of [us], and he sent it to our mother.”
“He’s the kind of guy that always informs Mother that he’s okay because she gets worried. Even [at] the festival, he was writing her like every hour and a half.”
Gal greeted Guy’s friends on arrival, and Guy wanted him to go to the dance floor with him.
“I told him to give me a couple of minutes so that I can settle my things,” he said, set to drop off his belongings at their campsite.
“He was so cute. He was like, ‘Oh, my big brother, I waited for you. Come with me to the dance floor,’ And I was like, ‘Man, give me a couple of minutes.’ And he was, like, ‘Okay, I’m waiting for you.’ He was so excited. It was so joyful.”
They never got there. About 15 minutes later, the sirens began to wail.
“In Israel, when you hear sirens, you don’t think about [a] terrorist attack. You think about [a] missile attack,” he said.
Security people advised them to take cover or leave. Gal urged Guy and his friends to come to his apartment in Herzliya, about a 40-minute drive, just north of Tel Aviv.
“I told him, ‘We’ll put on some music.‘ They were so happy I offered that. And they all hugged me, and they said, ’Okay, so let’s go and hang out.'”
“You see, they are also friends of mine. I mean, yeah, they’re 22 years old, and I’m 29. But me and my brother, we’re best friends. And I really like these guys.”
They had come in separate cars. Gal, since he arrived late, had parked farther away, closer to the exit. Guy’s friends had parked closer to the festival site. They might have driven together but weren’t able to rendezvous as traffic gridlock immediately ensued, with everyone trying to leave at the same time.
“I was stuck, surrounded by cars that were blocking me. So I couldn’t move,” said Gal. “And my brother, he was also stuck. But he was way in the back.”
Gal had offered Guy to ride with him.
“He paused for a second, and then he told me, ‘I want to, but I came with them. I don’t want them to feel like I left them, so I will go back with them. I’ll see you at your apartment.'”
“So, while we were waiting for the traffic to get going, we started to hear massive rounds of bullets. In seconds, massive amounts of shooting started. You could hear the bullets just hitting cars and whistling above you.
“People started to run and panic. All of them got out of the cars. Almost all of them. You could see some were frozen and couldn’t move. Some people ran in circles; they didn’t know where to run, yelling out their family and friends’ names.”
He then descended to lower ground, Gal said, as the festival site was on a hill.
“I went to the valley, and I found a place where I could find cover. It was between bushes so I could stay hidden.”
He called his brother, who told him he and his friends were together and had also left their cars and found cover.
“There was a force of four cops with them,” he said. He is unclear whether his brother meant festival security or police.
“I told him to stay as close as he can to our forces, and to stay in cover,” said Gal, drawing on his military training.
“People were starting to run in my direction ... Some of them were covered in blood. And they started screaming that the terrorists were closing in on us [and] we should keep moving. And you could hear the sound of the shooting.”
Gal was with a group of 20 or so Israelis, on ground that was lower than the main roads and open fields. They did not initially see the terrorists, so they didn’t know how many of them there were or how close.
“They were just above us, but ... we couldn’t see them.”
To put distance between them and the terrorists, the group went deeper into the valley.
Gal called his brother again, having had to abruptly end their previous call.
“He didn’t answer me ... I tried to call him multiple times, and I started to panic. I called his friends, and none of them answered.
“That was like the worst part. I never felt so helpless in my life. The issue was that we had to keep running.”
The shooting kept getting closer.
“You could hear them next to us again, but you couldn’t see where they were because there were a lot of bushes.
“So we had to start running again. We ran into a bamboo field. People were running into each other and falling in the field, and it was really horrible.”
They saw other groups of people.
“It was scary because you didn’t know if it was Israelis or Arabs at first. It was like chaos.”
When they got to a main road, Gal split from the group.
“They wanted to keep moving to the next kibbutz,” he said. “I thought that wouldn’t be so smart because we don’t know where the terrorists are.”
Gal wanted to stay off the roads, so he found a better place to hide. “It was between two rocks and under a tree.”
He was now with four other Israelis from the festival.
“My parents called. And I told them to do everything they can to try and get Guy. I tried to call him, and ... yeah, that was hard.”
After seven hours, they were rescued. It was around 2 p.m. They had sent their location via GPS. One of the people hiding with Gal knew someone on a police team and called him. That man gathered his team and came to get them.
“All I could think about was my brother. I was going insane,” said Gal. “It was terrible because I couldn’t go back to him at any point because of the shooting.
“Even though we got out of there, all I can see is countless dead bodies. And all I can think about is him. And you can see bodies that were burned and bodies that were corrupted.” Gal said.
“You could see cars that were burned with people inside ... I could see faces that were sprayed fully with bullets. Not just one hit. Sprayed."
The rescuers got them to a police station in Ofakim. The town, 15 miles from the Gaza border, had had its own attack that day, and 53 people were killed. It was Hamas’s farthest penetration into Israel.
Gal called his father to tell him he was safe. “He sounded real bad. Like, broke. And he told me I should go back home as soon as I can.”
“So I told him, look, if something happened to my brother, just let me know.”
“And he said that my brother was kidnapped and that Hamas released a hostage video of him at 11:30 a.m., which was two and a half hours before I was able to escape.”
His aunt saw the video on TikTok and notified his parents.
“That was the hardest thing I had to hear in my life,” Gal said.
“Honestly, I saw the video after, and it got me mad.”
The video showed Guy and four other festival goers—including his friend, Avyatar David—on the floor with their hands tied. Guy was sitting; the others were lying down. The terrorists made them show their faces to the camera.
“It was probably [in] a tunnel. I mean, by the time of the video, they were already in Gaza when the video was published.” Gal said the family did not recognize the other three prisoners with Guy and his friend.
It took the authorities two days, Gal said, “to let us know that my brother was kidnapped along with his childhood friend and sent up to Gaza. And that the other friends, the ones that became a couple just a week before, they were murdered.” The two friends lost were Ron Zarfati and Idan Haramati.
Gal said he doesn’t know if the two were murdered in front of Guy before he was kidnapped or if they had split up at some point when they ran. “We just don’t know.”
Authorities haven’t been able to provide any more information, although army officers come to their home almost every day to keep them updated.
“They never give us anything new, and they don’t know anything. I mean, the last piece of information we have about my brother is this video. We have nothing else.”
“I mean, my parents knew it even before I got rescued.”
After the massacre, Gal moved back home with his parents in Kfar Sava.
He has paid his brother a supreme compliment: Gal used to go by Gal Dalal, while his brother is Guy Gilboa Dalal, including his mother’s last name. Gal has changed his last name to Gilboa Dalal, so there will be no doubt Guy was his full brother, which he is. The two also have a sister, Gaya.
Representing the hostages’ families, Gal came to the United States to raise awareness about the hostages and spoke in various places, including New York, Washington, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and in Florida.
“I wanted people to really know who are the people who were kidnapped. I want them to know and understand what this festival is.
“I want them to understand that Hamas, what they did, is just unacceptable. They killed, tortured, and burned little kids. Babies. They burned kids alive. They took a baby out of his mother’s stomach.
Gal’s roommate, a reservist, went back with the army the next day to Kfar Aza, a hard-hit community close to the festival location. As of mid-October, 52 people were confirmed dead, and another 20 missing. The roommate had come with Gal to the festival and stayed with him throughout the ordeal.
“He told me he saw everything. He saw bodies that were burned, and then they ran over them with cars. The corpses were stuck to the road.
“They took my brother. What I want people to know the most is to know my brother, to hear his story,” said Gal.
“He really is my best friend. We share the same interests. We hear the same music. And we go to the same concerts. We see the same movies. We watch the same shows.”
Guy is a musician and plays the guitar, Gal said. He works in customer support for Sodastream and is learning Japanese as he plans to travel to Japan. He plans to go into high-tech afterward.
“He has such great energy, and he just loves everyone so much. He always makes sure that the people around me, around him, feel confident and loved.”
Gal doesn’t want the hostages forgotten. He said it’s tough for the families; they don’t get information about who’s alive and who’s not. The hostages haven’t gotten medical attention or Red Cross visits.
“It’s just crazy. You can’t treat people this way,” he said. “They’re not soldiers. They’re innocent people. They’re civilians.”
For Gal, though, is all about his brother now.
“Our family is broken since this happened,” said Gal, who plans to stay with his parents until Guy’s return.
“We miss him so much.”
