Survivors of the music festival massacre describe babies born after Oct. 7 as a triumph over death, while nightmares, hypervigilance and fears for their children continue to shape everyday parenthoodEti Abramov|At 6:28 a.m. on October 7, 2023, Chen and Ofir Attias were still an ordinary couple from Rishon LeZion. She worked in insurance, he was a plumber, and they loved dancing and celebrating life.After three years of fertility treatments, they had one overriding dream to become parents. Less than an hour later, their dream had become far more basic: they just wanted to stay alive.Gallery“My whole life flashed before my eyes.” Chen and Ofir Attias with Maya and twins Liv and Reef(Photo: Avigail Uzi)“We got to the Nova festival at around 6 a.m., and just as we finished settling in, all hell broke loose,” Chen recalled. “I remember that in the first moments we somehow stayed calm, probably because we were in shock. Friends called and said, ‘They’re shooting at us,’ and we didn’t really understand what was happening. We heard gunfire and bullets whistling overhead, but we said ‘Maybe the IDF is responding.’”As the situation deteriorated, the couple got into their car and tried to escape. “There was insane panic,” Ofir said. “They were shooting at us with rifles and then machine guns. It didn’t feel real. At one point we saw a ditch and hid in it.“I remember that even though I was terrified, I looked at Chen and promised myself, ‘I’m getting her out of here.’ I held her hand and said, ‘I love you, and everything is going to be OK.’ My whole life flashed before my eyes. What I had done, what I hadn’t done. I thought: Is this it? Is everything over? I only just got married. I haven’t even started a family.”Nearly three years after the couple lay trembling in that ditch, Chen and Ofir are now a family of five, with 2-year-old Maya and 7-month-old twins Liv and Reef. Most days, the terror of death has been replaced by worries about diapers, baby formula and which preschool to choose.Shlomi and Asthar Tubi were also very different people in October 2023, at what seemed like the height of their lives. The couple, who had met, fittingly, at a trance party, came to Nova to celebrate their bachelor and bachelorette party. Just two weeks earlier, Shlomi, a multidisciplinary artist, had proposed to Asthar, an insurance professional who was then four months pregnant.“It was actually the first time I was meeting Asthar’s friends,” Shlomi said. When rockets began being intercepted overhead, Shlomi went to get their car while Asthar got into another vehicle, separating the couple amid the chaos.Shlomi’s escape included hiding in the ground as gunfire raged around him. “I was lying in a potato field while a powered paraglider was shooting at me from above, RPGs were being fired to my right and left, and bullets were hitting the ground next to me,” he said. “I told myself, ‘This is not going to be my grave. There’s a woman waiting for me.’“Everywhere around me I saw people being kidnapped and taken to jeeps, and I told myself, ‘I promised Asthar’s parents I would protect her. If I have to, I’ll go into Gaza instead of her. I won’t let my child grow up there.’”Run without looking back. The escape from NovaAsthar, meanwhile, had abandoned the car she was in and begun running.“I ran without looking back because I didn’t want to see the horrors,” she said. “I remember talking to God in my head. I said, ‘There’s no way I waited until now to become a mother and this is how it ends. I trust you that the baby will come out healthy and whole.’ I asked that Shlomi survive too, because, ‘What, am I going to be a mother alone?’”As she ran, Asthar also spoke to the unborn child inside her. “I told him, ‘Protect yourself. It’ll be OK. God is watching over you, Mom is here protecting you, we’ll be somewhere safe soon.’”After hours of escape, the couple finally found each other near the community of Patish. “I ran toward Patish for 20 minutes until I found her among hundreds of people who were fleeing,” Shlomi said. “That was when I knew God was with me and we were getting out.”“God saved us so he could be born.” Asthar and Shlomi Tubi with their son, Benaya-Moshe(Photo: Avigail Uzi)A nurse examined Asthar in Patish, but she said she did not truly breathe again until the next day, when doctors at the hospital told her the fetus had a heartbeat and everything appeared normal. “The feeling I carried throughout the pregnancy was that God saved us so this child could be born,” she said.They named him Benaya-Moshe, “Because Ben Yah means ‘son of God’ in Hebrew,” Asthar said. “But also because the rabbi told us that the Hebrew numerology of Benaya-Moshe equals 412, which at the time was the number of people killed at Nova.”Benaya-Moshe, Maya, Reef and Liv are just four of 120 babies born to survivors of the southern Israel music festivals, including Nova and Psyduck, and to bereaved Nova families.According to the Nova Community nonprofit, which tracks the figures and provides mothers and families with emotional, psychological and financial support, another 12 babies are expected soon, representing new lives emerging from the ashes of the dance floor near Kibbutz Re’im.Nova survivors who became parents(Photo: Avigaill Uzi)Sarah Dahan had set herself a reminder to take a pregnancy test on October 9, 2023. She had married Adir, a musician and trance producer from Bat Yam, that June. The couple spent their honeymoon in Mexico surrounded by music and celebration, returned to Israel in September and quickly bought tickets for their next trance party, where they planned to reunite with friends including Chen and Ofir Attias.“We got to the party at 2 a.m., and I remember looking at the clock at 5:55 and telling Adir, ‘What a beautiful time,’” Sarah said. “Half an hour later it started.”At first, they got into their car and waited for things to calm down. Then they began driving toward Route 232 while receiving increasingly terrifying calls. “People were calling us saying a friend had been shot, girls were screaming that another friend had been shot,” Sarah recalled. “We thought they were having a bad trip. We couldn’t process that this was actually happening.“Only when we got stuck in traffic and saw police officers shouting, ‘Get out of the car, there are terrorists,’ did we grab ourselves and run.”Sarah and Adir had arrived with brothers Ron and Gal Segev but became separated while running through the fields. “All the time I felt someone was watching over us, as if someone had decided, ‘You are getting out of here alive,’” she said. “I remember looking up at the sky and talking to God: ‘I just got married. I waited so long. What, you let me get married just to take me away? Don’t you want me to have a family?’“And then I remembered the pregnancy test I was supposed to take. The moment I thought, ‘Maybe I’m pregnant,’ I suddenly felt certain I wasn’t going to die.”“The moment I thought, ‘Maybe I’m pregnant,’ I felt certain I wasn’t going to die.” Sarah and Adir Dahan with Shaya and Ari(Photo: Avigail Uzi)In the end, the Dahans were rescued by brothers Ron and Gal Segev, who found a running vehicle and began picking up people fleeing through the fields.“One of them later told us that he thought he was going to die, closed his eyes and suddenly saw his bar mitzvah in his mind and thought of the number 13,” Sarah said. “Afterward he found the vehicle and rescued us. When we got home, I thought, ‘He said he saw the number 13, but there were 12 of us in the car.’ Two days later I found out I was pregnant. So actually, there were 13.”Their daughter, now 2, was named Shaya, meaning “gift from God” in Hebrew. Her younger brother, born about six months ago, was named Ari (lion, in Hebrew) after Operation Roaring Lion. “Shaya was actually supposed to be called Emma,” Sarah said. “That was the name we had wanted for years, but when she was born, I felt it didn’t suit her because she was a gift from God.”For Nati Ganon, a barber from Bat Yam who loved trance music and living life at full speed, the chapter of having children appeared to be over. He and his wife, Shiran, went to Nova after leaving their three older children at home.“We lived the dream,” he said. “We had an apartment in a tower with a doorman and a gym, a new SUV. I worked hard and Shiran helped me. We traveled a lot. Every two months we would go on vacation, go out to restaurants, cafés. Whenever I talked to Shiran about having more children, she always said, ‘May God protect what we have and give children to those who want them.’”Shiran Ganon z"l(Photo: Courtesy of the family)They arrived at Nova at about 3:45 a.m. “We said we’d watch the sunrise, stay a few hours and be home by noon,” Nati said. When the rocket fire began, they packed their belongings into the car and tried to leave but became trapped in traffic. “At one point our car got stuck, and we were left trying to figure out what to do. You don’t know where to go, you don’t know the area.“Shiran and I held hands from the beginning until the moment I was shot, for about an hour and a half. At one point we got into one of the cars, the driver made a U-turn and then the car came under fire. Shiran, who had been hit in the thigh, asked, ‘What is this, Nati?’ I told her, ‘Don’t worry, everything will be OK,’ and made her a tourniquet out of my hoodie.“We decided to run. As soon as I opened the door, I turned my head to the left and saw a terrorist standing about 200 meters away. He shot me in the leg and completely shattered it. Instinctively, I tried to keep running, but I couldn’t. My whole leg had collapsed. Shiran could still move despite her injury, so I told her, ‘Run and don’t look back.’ That was it. That was the last time I saw her.“From that moment on, I lay on the ground pretending to be dead. There was gunfire all around me, footsteps, cries of ‘Allahu Akbar.’ I could already hear the terrorist above me loading his weapon, and I told myself, ‘This is it.’ But somehow they moved on. Then a terrorist threw grenades and explosives into cars next to me, and they blew up. The blast lifted my body off the ground.”“I lay there in the field for five hours and prayed. I told God, ‘For my children, I’m willing to get out of here even without a leg.’ I was rescued at 1:15 p.m. They took me to Soroka Medical Center and from there to Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv. I still have injuries to my back and leg.”How did you find out Shiran had been murdered?