Shaken to the Core: A Raw Window into the Oct 7 Massacre, Annabel Denham Senior Political Commentator 30 May 2026 The Telegraph

 

Through survivors’ testimonies and personal relics, a raw exhibition commemorates Hamas’ victims and confronts Western indifference. What emerges most strongly from the exhibition is not rage, but a mix of frustration and hope.

The terrorists laughed when they dragged Avi Dadon from the hole where he was hiding in the early hours of Oct 7 2023. Moments later, they forced his hands behind his back and stabbed him repeatedly in the chest. May Hayat bore witness to his murder. She had huddled in that pit near the Nova music festival with him, the strangers holding hands and praying as Hamas terrorists searched the area around them, closing in on their hiding place.

Now, the 33-year-old describes Dadon as her “angel”. Had she not survived the massacre, nobody would have known his story. How, earlier that morning, amid the chaos and bullets ripping across the festival grounds, Dadon had spotted Hayat standing, paralysed, in an open field. He forced her to run when her legs would not move, urging her onwards when she had already mentally surrendered herself to death.

Hayat does not doubt that, had she remained where she was, indiscriminate gunfire would have killed her. Instead, urged on by Dadon, the pair hurried to the pit, where, after 20 agonising minutes spent crammed together, they heard footsteps on the dry leaves above their heads.

The terrorists had discovered them, and pulled Dadon out first. After he was savagely murdered, Hayat was convinced that she would be next. “The gunmen looked at me with an energy and expression that leaves a woman in no doubt of what is coming,” she says.

May Hayat had ‘mentally surrendered herself to death’ during Hamas’ attack at the Nova music festival

But then they noticed the burn scar running along her right arm, a childhood injury. “According to their beliefs,” she says with thinly veiled contempt, “a scar like this means a strong woman. If something happened to me because of them, the 72 virgins will not come looking for them in heaven.”

They let her go, and she started to run towards one of the festival’s stages. After crawling into the space underneath it, she lay next to the body of a dead man. “I apologised to him, took blood from his head and smeared it across my body.” Two-and-a-half hours later, a soldier rescued her from beneath the decking.

06:29AM: The Moment Music Stood Still

Every afternoon, Hayat bravely tells her story of horror to visitors at 06:29AM: The Moment Music Stood Still – the immersive exhibition in London about the Hamas attack on the Nova festival on October 7. And every afternoon, her testimony changes slightly, according to the atmosphere in the room.

“I feel the energy of the crowd,” she tells me on the day of my visit. “I sense what my message should be.” After she finishes speaking, audience members wait quietly in line to embrace her. I later ask whether she ever finds that intimacy intrusive or uncomfortable, but she describes it as part of her healing.

Hamas brutally murdered 378 people at the Nova festival, including Hayat’s best friend, Liron Barda, who had been working alongside her at the event and was killed as she tried to help the injured escape. The attack accounted for about a third of all those Israelis killed in the Hamas incursion, with dozens more people abducted from the event in the Negev desert and taken into Gaza.

And yet the pogrom, which led to the war in Gaza, has not prompted an outpouring of sympathy, but has rather unleashed a wave of anti-Semitism throughout the West, Britain included. Much of this hostility is cloaked in the language of anti-Zionism, allowing prejudice against Jews to be presented as misplaced political conscience.

Days before my own visit to the Nova exhibition, the British Museum cancelled a talk marking Jewish Culture Month amid concerns that the event would be targeted by protesters, which is just the latest example of a British cultural institution retreating rather than confronting anti-Jewish hostility directly.

Those behind the Nova commemoration – survivors from the festival and international partners – even tell me that some venues refused to host their event, which opened in Shoreditch earlier this month and runs until July 5. At another time, an exhibition about young people slaughtered at a music festival might have existed simply as memorialisation. Here, organisers are fighting not merely grief and trauma, but disbelief, indifference and, from Hamas and its useful idiots in the West, deliberate lies.

The title of the exhibition refers to the exact moment the DJ stopped the music on October 7 – 6.29am – as rocket sirens pierced what had, only moments earlier, been an all-night trance festival devoted to “peace and love”. Visitors first watch footage of the festival before the onslaught – young people dancing beneath a pink desert sky as dawn breaks over the Negev, and survivors speaking ecstatically about music, freedom and the almost spiritual experience of greeting sunrise together in the open air.

That they are being interviewed after the attack lends their words particular poignancy. They speak about the music as though it’s almost transcendent, something you feel rather than hear. The sense of foreboding is almost unbearable.

The exhibition features layers of chaotic noise to viscerally recreate the horrors of the Nova music festival

The main room is chaos, a deliberately disorienting, deafening, jarring experience that viscerally recreates the horrors of that hellish morning. There are layers of noise everywhere: trance music, sirens, screams, gunfire, panicked voices. Louder than anything else is the repeated footage of Shani Louk’s partially clothed, contorted body being paraded through Gaza as Hamas militants shout “Allahu Akbar” around her.

However many times public conversation attempts to abstract October 7 into geopolitics or ideology, you cannot intellectually sanitise the sight of a dead young woman being treated as a trophy by people who, in that moment at least, seem barely human.

Screens play footage continuously from every direction: terrorist body cameras, CCTV, mobile phones recovered from victims. You can never settle into the role of detached observer, and you crave the relief of silence. More than anything, after a while, I want to go home. Awful, I know, but to put the horror out of my mind.

Charred vehicles sit beneath dimmed lights, their metal warped. Yellow portable-toilet cubicles are riddled with bullet holes, where terrified festival-goers tried unsuccessfully to hide.

Toilet cubicles bear the scars of bullet holes, where festival-goers took shelter

Tents and camping chairs remain abandoned beneath artificial trees. The floor is thick with dirt and sand, and machines churn smoke into the air. Everywhere lie fragments of ordinary lives interrupted at violent speed: toiletries, half-empty water bottles, car keys, a deflated football.

Rows of shoes are laid out across long tables in the centre of the room alongside memorial candles and photographs of the dead, chillingly reminiscent of Holocaust exhibitions at Auschwitz.

Rows of victims’ shoes have echoes of those on display at Auschwitz

A side room addresses the sexual violence perpetrated that terrible day – rape, mutilation and brutality described in testimony and recent investigations into what researchers called “systematic, widespread” abuse. It is perhaps the hardest section of the exhibition, because it confronts one of the most grotesquely contested aspects of October 7.

Confronting Reality

One organiser tells me later that the exhibition was intentionally designed to overwhelm visitors physically and emotionally, because social media has fundamentally altered how the public views atrocity. People believe they know what happened that day because clips circulated online almost immediately. But witnessing 10 seconds of suffering through a pocket-sized screen is not the same as confronting it in reality.

Visitors are encouraged to touch the objects scattered throughout. “You’re picking up someone’s phone,” says Jo Woolfe, one of the London organisers, “and you’re picking it up because they’ve been murdered.” Everything has been done with the permission of the bereaved, though some relatives understandably chose not to have images of their loved ones displayed publicly. It’s not, as might have been feared, a ghastly voyeurism – it deliberately shrinks the space between spectator and victim for a purpose.

Visitors of the exhibition are encouraged to touch the objects scattered throughout

The exhibition has already been staged in nine cities worldwide – including New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, Miami and Berlin – with pieces of the original festival site transported painstakingly between countries like rare art objects inside shipping containers, trucks and planes. Every piece is catalogued and labelled. The scale of the operation reflects the organisers’ commitment to truth, which they believe can be best encountered physically.

Ofir Amir, a co-producer of the exhibition and co-founder of The Tribe of Nova Foundation, which supports October 7 survivors, was shot twice in the legs before escaping the attack. He watched as his friend was fatally wounded in the back and neck, then hid in a nearby field for roughly three hours before being rescued.

Amir’s wife was at home, heavily pregnant with their daughter. Now, he travels from city to city alongside the exhibition as part of what he describes, without self-pity, as both an educational mission and a healing process.

Above all, he wants the exhibition to be “mind-changing”. However fiercely people debate Israel and Gaza, however much misinformation is spread, it is impossible inside these rooms to deny the reality of what happened to these young people at Nova.

Ofir Amir, who survived the massacre with two bullet wounds, wants the exhibition to be ‘mind-changing’

Perhaps the clearest example of the audience that organisers hope to reach is Taryn Thomas, a former leader of pro-Palestinian demonstrations at Stanford University, who visited the exhibition in Los Angeles expecting, she later admitted, “propaganda”. Instead, she encountered the final messages that victims sent to their families and footage of young people her own age being hunted down, prompting a drastic change of heart.

So far, around 60 per cent of the 600,000 visitors worldwide have been Jewish. But the exhibition is meant to be seen by everyone. When considering where to host it in London, the organisers deliberately opted for Shoreditch rather than Golders Green because, as one put it, “We can’t just preach to the converted.”

Amir is insistent that the exhibition itself is not political. There are no Israeli flags hanging from the ceilings, and no slogans urging visitors to support retaliatory action. Yet he is painfully aware how quickly the public conversation shifted away from the massacre itself and towards attempts to contextualise or minimise what happened. “Hamas were ready on October 8 to distort the narrative,” Amir tells me. “They were running a sprint. We’re running the marathon.”

Outside, inevitably, security guards patrol the entrance. When the display opened in New York in June 2024, protesters gathered nearby, accusing organisers of spreading propaganda. Their action was so poorly received, Woolfe says, and so widely condemned, that it almost went in the exhibition’s favour. There’s been no copycat behaviour since – not yet, at least.

Defiance Through Reflection

What emerges most strongly from this display is not rage, but a mix of frustration and hope. My conversation with Amir is interrupted repeatedly as visitors, friends and colleagues stop to warmly embrace him. Some survivors have taken their own lives since October 7. Many remain unable to work or leave their homes. The trauma hangs over Amir and Hayat – but they are resilient.

Amir’s grandparents survived the Holocaust. Without intending to, he says, they gave him the emotional tools to survive Nova, too. “To be kind,” he says of the lessons they taught him, smiling easily. “Not to hate. Not to be angry.”

The exhibition’s closing slogan reads: “We will dance again.” At first glance, it would seem impossible after everything visitors will witness. But on reflection, the phrase feels less sentimental than defiant – a refusal to allow the final memory of Nova to belong only to violence.

Exhibition Details: The Nova Exhibition is open in Shoreditch, London, until July 5. Tickets and more information at novaexhibition.com.

Annabel Denham
Senior Political Commentator
Annabel Denham is a Columnist and Senior Political Commentator at The Telegraph. 
Previously she edited the newspaper's Comment and Opinion pages. 
Annabel formerly worked at the Institute of Economic Affairs, City AM, and as a Parliamentary researcher for Lord (Peter) Lilley. She can be reached at: annabel.denham@telegraph.co.uk / @AnnabelDenham1.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/05/30/annabel-denham-oct-7-nova-exhibition/