AT 6.29am, the exact moment Hamas began massacring young people at the Nova music festival, mourners stood in the pre-dawn darkness yesterday remembering their loved-ones a year on.
The families and friends of the 364 people killed at the festival gathered at the site, gazing at the shrines they had crafted in their memory, lighting candles and weeping over treasured photographs of those they had lost.
The deeply moving ceremony was punctuated by the deep booms of bomb blasts and machine gun fire, a chilling reminder that the battle with Hamas triggered by the October 7 atrocities is still raging in Gaza, just three miles from the festival site.
ATTACK
British mother Lisa Marlowe, whose 26-year-old son Jake was among those murdered by Hamas, spoke to us as she set up his memorial. London-born Jake was an unarmed security guard at the festival and called his mum in the UK as the music event came under attack from gunmen and rocket launchers.
Lisa told us: "I have been back here five times now to remember Jake and it does not get any easier. I feel close to him here, though.
"He called us at around 6.30 Israeli time telling us the rockets were flying above but he assured us he would be OK. We now know that he was not.
He told us he loved us and that he would be in touch.
"We called him back but we were getting no answer.
"It was four days before we found out what had happened to him. He was missing for that long.
"I miss him so much.
This is absolutely horrendous, it's beyond imagination." Close by, a woman dressed all in black wept and screamed with pain as she hugged and kissed photographs of her lost loved ones, Nitzan. Goldenberg and Yarin Efraim.
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