Hamas massacre survivor shares chilling selfie taken two minutes before attack

21 November 2023 , 22:47

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Millet Ben Haim has shared her story (Image: INSTAGRAM)

A survivor of the Hamas massacre in Israel has shared a chilling selfie taken just two minutes before the attack.

Traumatised Millet Ben Haim, 27, hid in a bush for six hours after Hamas gunmen opened fire on the Supernova music festival near the Gaza border on October 7. The attack, which sparked the current conflict in the region, left 364 festivalgoers dead and another 40 snatched and taken back to Gaza.

She has now revealed to German media how she feared she would be hunted down, raped and then shot by the Hamas killers as the ordeal began, and said: "I imagined what I would do if they found me. If I cry or beg for my life, they will probably laugh at me." Millet also told of how she took a smiling selfie with her friends at 6.29am - just two minutes before the first Hamas gunmen appeared.

Millet took a smiling selfie with her friends at 6.29am, just two minutes before the first Hamas gunmen appeared (INSTAGRAM)

She said: "For me it was a normal weekend until the music stopped at 6:30. It was a really good party up until that point. We felt like a community, everything was full of love, we felt safe and completely surrendered to the moment. Then came the rockets. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of rockets covered the sky. Security then began evacuating the area. Many people were helpless and didn’t understand what was happening at all."

At first she had tried to escape by car and followed the direction of police officers, but realised Hamas had taken control of the road after she was alerted by people screaming about more attackers in front of her. "Several people in the cars in front of us were murdered, they were simply shot", she said. Millet added: "The terrorists were on all sides, we couldn't go anywhere. And we knew they were getting closer and closer. We began to understand that there were many terrorists, not just a small group. But of course, we couldn’t imagine that thousands of terrorists had entered Israel at that point."

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Millet said her traumatic experience reminded her of the suffering of Jewish people during the Holocaust (INSTAGRAM)

After abandoning the car, Millet said she tried to flee on foot. She said: "It was pure chaos. You run for your life and no matter where you run, other people come towards you screaming and saying that they are being shot at from there too." Confused and terrified, Millet ended up wandering for hours, before finding a bush where three other women were hiding. Even though there was not much cover, the group were too frightened and exhausted to go any further.

As they cowered in the undergrowth for six hours, Millet tried calling the police for help - but got the grim news that no help was coming, as all surrounding villages were occupied by militants. She explained: "I wasn't angry with him. I realised something really big happened. And that the army simply can’t help us now." Millet said it was only then that she understood the scale of the Hamas invasion, which left 1,200 dead and 240 kidnapped and has been described as the biggest slaughter of Jewish people since the Holocaust. She was finally saved by civilian Ramy Davidian, who rescued more than 100 people from Hamas. He had contacted her, and told her he would honk his car horn and that she should come towards him when she heard it.

Millet said her traumatic experience brought to mind the suffering of Jewish people during the Holocaust, and said: "It was a thought I had about the Holocaust since I was a child. I remember as a child thinking about how some people managed to survive. How some in the ghetto had the strength to fight or flee. I remembered a film about the escape from the Sobibor concentration camp. I thought: If you accept the fact that you're going to get killed anyway, then you can do it. That's how I felt. I said to myself: If you get killed, you get killed. That gave me the courage to leave my hiding place. I crawled out and saw a car with a Hebrew sticker. So I lifted my head for a second so he could see me.”

Millet is thankful she was saved, but she said: "I don’t feel like it’s over. The trauma is so great, it affects me so deeply. My cousin was shot. We miss our friends and family members."

Benedict Tetzlaff-Deas