Israeli Music Festival Survivor Says She ‘Wouldn’t Be Here Today’ if Not for Stranger Who Saved Her

Natalie Sanandaji believes she’d be dead if it weren’t for the heroic act of a fearless stranger.

The Israeli-American and New York-based real estate professional was among the several thousands of revelers at the Supernova Music Festival on Oct. 7 when Hamas terrorists attacked, killing at least 260 revelers as part of a wider assault on Israel that took the lives of 1,400 people that day and sparked war.

Sanandaji, 28, was dancing with friends when rockets first appeared above the outdoor festival. Security ordered everyone to evacuate.

“We were just all running in different directions. Nobody knew where to go and where it was safe,” Sanandaji explains during an interview with The Messenger.

Sanandaji and her friends were on the run for four hours through the vast desert of southern Israel. They dodged gunfire, evaded capture and narrowly avoided death on several occasions, where split-second decisions had to be made, she says.

“The scariest part was not knowing what direction bullets were coming from. You’d hear the whistle of the bullets fly past you, but you couldn’t even tell where it was coming from and where to run,” she recalls.

At one point, “we contemplated getting into a ditch with others, but then one of my friends said, ‘If we get into this ditch and they [the Hamas attackers] come from above us, we’re dead. There’s nothing we can do.’ So, we decided to keep running instead of hiding in the ditch,” she continues. “We later found out that the people who did hide in there were shot.”

Exhausted from their harrowing journey to safety, Sanandaji and the others decided to take a minute to rest at another point. But they soon noticed a vehicle barreling toward them.

“We thought maybe it could be a terrorist,” she says. “We contemplated getting up and running, but at that point you realize there’s nowhere to run, there’s nowhere to hide.”

For a brief moment, Sanandaji lost all hope, until she realized the driver was there to rescue them.

“It ended up being a man from the town of Patish — a man whose name I still don’t even know,” she explains of the stranger who loaded about 15 people into the bed of his pickup truck. “And as soon as he dropped us off [in Patish], he went back to risk his life again, and save the lives of more innocent young people.”

Sanandaji and her friends were escorted to a bomb shelter, where the residents of Patish gave them food and water.

Later that evening, they returned to Tel Aviv. On Saturday, Sanandaji was back safely in New York.

More than a week after she witnessed the slaughter of innocent Israelis at a festival meant to promote peace and love, the images of the deadly massacre remain etched in her memory.

“A lot of the people that we were camping with at the festival did not make it out alive,” Sanandaji recalls. “People that were just a few feet behind me had died. And it’s just so scary to think how close that was to being me.”

Sanandaji continues to ruminate over the trauma of the life-or-death experience, but says she has compassion toward people on both sides of the Israel-Hamas war.

She is praying for the safe release of the hundreds of hostages still in Hamas custody and for an end to the mindless slaughtering of thousands of innocent individuals — Israeli and Palestinian.

“It saddens me how many people are misinformed of the situation — how people think that Hamas is for the Palestinian people,” she explains.

“Hamas is just as complicit in the deaths of innocent Palestinians as they are in the deaths of innocent Israelis,” Sanandaji adds. They are not for the Palestinian people. They do not care about the rights of the Palestinian people. They’re using them as human shields in this war.”

As the conflict rages on more than two weeks since the violence began, Sanandaji says she won’t let fear or oppression interfere with her plans to return to her home country, where she hopes to one day identify and express her gratitude to the stranger who selflessly delivered her and so many others to safety.

“If it wasn’t for him,” she says, “I probably wouldn’t be here today.”