Following the Hamas-led massacre at the Nova Music Festival on Oct. 7, about fifty survivors have committed suicide, revealed Guy Ben Shimon.

I need to inject a note of caution here. The Jerusalem Post reported here that the Israeli Health Ministry said on April 16 that it does not know how many survivors of the Nova Music Festival have taken their own lives:

A statement released by the ministry on Tuesday read, “The data on the number of suicides and the number of hospitalizations among survivors of the Nova festival – are not known to the Health Ministry and the mental health system and are incorrect.”

The head of the mental health division at the Health Ministry, Dr. Gilad Bodenheimer, noted that “the rumors about the number of suicides and the number of hospitalizations among survivors of the Nova festival are not true.”

He further stated that based on an examination “conducted with the Nova Community Association, as well as with other parties that take part in the treatment of the Nova survivors, it emerged that such data is unknown.”

It is uncertain, then, if there have been fifty, thirty, or twenty suicides among the survivors of the murders at the Nova Music Festival field. But I will report on what two of those survivors testified to the Knesset. Again, from Algemeiner:

Ben Shimon, a survivor of the massacre, spoke on Tuesday at a parliamentary hearing for a State Audit Commission on the treatment of the survivors of Oct. 7.

“Few people know, but there have been almost 50 suicides among the Nova survivors. This number, which was true two months ago, may have increased since,” Ben Shimon said, emphasizing that many of his friends who escaped the massacre could not recover from what they had experienced.

“There are many survivors who had to be forcibly hospitalized due to their psychological state. My friends are not getting out of bed, neither am I,” he described their condition since the Oct. 7 attack.

“I am practically unable to do anything. I had to get a dog to help me survive in my daily life. "The goal for all of us is to return to work and function normally, but we cannot do it without adequate help,” Ben Shimon added.

The parliamentary hearing focused on alleged failures of the state bodies towards the survivors of Oct. 7. There were complaints about the difficulties, notably bureaucracy, that the survivors faced in getting their post-traumatic stress disorder recognized, as well as in receiving the needed care.

“Why should I constantly prove what I experienced? "Why am I forced to go back to the details of what I experienced for them to believe me?” Naama Eitan, another survivor of the music festival, asked during the hearing.

Should they report again and again on what they witnessed? The rapes, the gory mutilations, the murders of their friends, their own terrifying struggles to escape that left them, in the days and months following, half-crazed with despair and survivor’s guilt?

“I participated in a study that monitored my pulse and other parameters and revealed how bad my health is. I sleep on average two hours a night. Each morning at seven o’clock, I relive the moments when I was hidden in the bushes with terrorists passing by me. I can no longer move on my own, I need to be constantly accompanied,” she described….

It's the trauma of terror that won’t subside, won’t let Naama Eitan, and so many others, sleep more than a few hours a night. They keep rerunning the same ghastly scenes in their mind’s eye. Why should we have expected them to be able to slough it off? Instead of joy at having survived, many of those survivors suffer now from Survivor’s Guilt — why was he, or she, murdered, and not me?

The world expects the Israelis to “get over it.” Too many of us are insufficiently sympathetic. Too many do not realize that the torment from the Hamas attack did not end on October 8. It continues, and for some it has been too much to bear; there is no conceivable solace, and those who are unable to deal with it, take to their beds with severe depression, or in some cases, do away with themselves. These last are the people who survived the massacres, but cannot survive the memory of the massacres. And for those who remain alive, the mental torment will continue long after Hamas has been dismantled. We do not know how many have killed themselves. Ben Shimon testified that there were about fifty, but the Ministry of Health says the number of such “survivor suicides” is still unknown.

Try to imagine what life must be like for those survivors, not only those who saw the rapes and murders at the Nova Music Festival, but those who witnessed the even more horrifying events that took place at the kibbutzim. They saw, from their tremulous concealments, babies and small children burned to death, women whose breasts were sliced off and then used by Hamas men to play catch, men with their genitalia cut off and their eyes gouged out, while they were still alive, and only then were they put to death. These were their relatives, their friends, their spouses and siblings. The horrors of what they saw, and the guilt of having been spared, have proven too much for some.

Whether there have been fifty suicides, or ten, any number above one, should make us exclaim “As many as that?” Or should we say instead, as few as that?

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Glazov Gang: Missing Israeli Hostages – The True Horror of What Hamas Did

This new Glazov Gang episode features Jeff Crouere, author of America’s Last Chance.

Jamie, Anni and Jeff discuss Glazov Gang: Missing Israeli Hostages – The True Horror of What Hamas Did, reflecting on Moral clarity on the good and evil in a spiritual war.

Don’t miss it!

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