KIRYAT GAT, Israel — The memorial to the place where 364 Israelis and tourists were brutally murdered by Hamas terrorists on October 7 at the Supernova music festival is hidden, tucked behind a small forest of trees in southern Israel. But it is already busy.
Breitbart News visited the site on Thursday, a bright and sunny day not unlike that fateful Saturday, when terrorists flying paragliders and driving pickup trucks descended on unsuspecting revelers, murdering or abducting anyone in their path.
The memorial site consists of hundreds of stakes, each holding a portrait of a person who was murdered. Many of the stakes have additional decorations added by family and friends. The effect is to create a forest within the forest — a forest of human faces.
Nearby, there is a grove of saplings, where new trees have been planted, each for one of the people killed at the festival.
All around the saplings, red poppies — for which the western Negev desert region is famous — have already begun to blossom.
Nearby, by the roadside, are several bomb shelters. These are where many young people took shelter — only to be attacked by Hamas terrorists, who fired machine guns into the shelters and threw grenades inside, turning each into a concrete bloodbath.
One of the shelters has been turned into a memorial, decorated with photos of those who died, and messages of resilience.
The final death toll at the Supernova music festival was updated in November to 364, amounting to a third of all October 7 deaths. Forty people were kidnapped from the festival, many of whom remain in captivity, since Hamas considers young Israelis soldiers.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent book, “The Zionist Conspiracy (and how to join it),” now available on Audible. He is also the author of the e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.