“I probably won’t be able to get out of here. I love you with all my heart.”
This is the text that Israeli-American Aviv Oz sent to his girlfriend while he hid, motionless, for hours during the massacre at a Hamas music festival.
Oz, 34, was working as a visual artist at the Nova festival last Saturday (7), when the music was suddenly replaced by the sound of blaring alarms.
Like many others, Oz and his friends instinctively ran to their cars to escape, but a traffic jam quickly formed. Moments later, gunshots and screams echoed from different directions. Then “complete chaos” began, he said.
“It was like a scene from Call of Duty, from a battlefield. A real-life nightmare,” Oz explained.
After deciding to abandon the car and run away, Oz was separated from his friends and found himself jumping into the bottom of an empty concrete pool. Before his phone ran out of battery, he managed to send a few messages to his loved ones.
“From what I understand, I was going to die and I needed to say goodbye,” Oz told CNN .
“When I decided to lie down and wait for my death, I could see the terrorists passing by,” he said. He could hear them laughing and smelled smoke and gunpowder as he “pretended to be dead,” he said, adding that he lay motionless for five hours.
When he thought it was safe, Oz slowly climbed out of the pool and ventured back to his car – which he found “smashed by bullets” – to charge his phone and call for help.
“The land was full of innocent people”, he lamented.
He returned to his hiding place while waiting for help to arrive.
“There was another person, an Israeli woman, who was hiding in the bushes all this time,” he said. “She joined me and we waited in panicked silence until the special forces found us.”
Although he is grateful to be alive, Oz said he is deeply mourning friends and co-workers who were killed.
Oz, who has family roots in Queens, New York, is living in Israel and plans to make the country his permanent home.
See also: 260 bodies are found at festival in Israel
Source: CNN Brasil
Bruce Belcher is a seasoned author with over 5 years of experience in world news. He writes for online news websites and provides in-depth analysis on the world stock market. Bruce is known for his insightful perspectives and commitment to keeping the public informed.
