Oct. 7 massacre survivor commits suicide

(JNS) — A survivor of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, Nova music festival massacre, Shirel Golan, took her own life on Oct. 20, her 22nd birthday. She was found lifeless in the yard of her home in Moshav Porat in central Israel. The exact cause of death was not made public. 

She was set to have visited the Western Wall in Jerusalem and the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron with her family.

According to family members, despite suffering from post-trauma, the state failed to provide Shirel with mental health services. 

“She said she received no assistance from the state. She said that she only had assistance from the [Tribe of] Nova foundation,” her brother, Eyal, told Israel Hayom.

The Tribe of Nova Foundation was set up following the massacre to provide mental, financial and occupational assistance to survivors, bereaved families and hostages’ families. 

More than 380 people were murdered at the music festival near Kibbutz Re’im on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas overran southern Israel, massacring 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and kidnapping 251. 

“The State of Israel murdered my sister twice. Once in October, mentally, and a second time today, on her 22nd birthday, physically,” Eyal told Israel’s Channel 12 News. 

“My mother had to take early retirement to be near her daughter,” he said. “We didn’t move a millimeter from her, and the only time we left her alone was today—and she decided to end her life.”

Eyal said that during the Oct. 7 massacre, Shirel had joined a group of friends in a car to escape. But at some point she got out. Her brother told Israel Hayom that she had a bad feeling about being in the vehicle, a “bad intuition.”

“It turned out that later everyone who was in the car was murdered. Eleven people were murdered there. It was a death vehicle. She switched to a police car that rescued her to Kfar Maimon [a town in southern Israel]. And that’s how she was saved,” her brother said.

The last time her brother saw her was during the start of the Sukkot holiday. He asked how she was and she said she was fine.

Eyal said his sister’s death should be a wake-up call.

“We are five siblings, and she was the youngest. The government needs to wake up. If it doesn’t, there will be more cases like this. If the state had provided proper care, this wouldn’t have happened. I’ve lost my sister, but I want to raise an outcry so others don’t lose their loved ones,” he said.

The Israeli Ministry of Welfare and Social Affairs issued a statement expressing “deep pain over the untimely death of the Nova survivor, and shares in the grief of the family and the sorrow of the entire Nova community.”

The ministry added that together with partners and the Nova foundation, it provides a “wide variety of answers” for Nova survivors.