I HAVE ALL MY LIFE TO CRY.FOR NOW, I AM FOCUSED ONLY ON ELIYA

Ahead of the first anniversary of the Nova music festival massacre, survivor Ziv Abud reveals how she escaped death at the hands of Hamas terrorists by chance, buried under a pile of bodies...and why she's determined to bring home her hostage fiancé

- Jane Warren

WITH DIRT, rubbish and human faeces on the ground beneath her feet, Ziv Abud was one of 29 people who fled the Nova trance music festival and entered a small graffiti-covered bunker known as a 'migunit'. These small concrete structures had been erected as air-raid shelters along roads near the Gaza Strip to protect the residents from rocket fire from Gaza.

However, it had not been designed to protect them from grenades tossed inside by armed Hamas gunmen intent on murdering the terrified occupants. And, when those same gunmen entered and opened up with machine-gun fire, the migunit became a mausoleum from which escape was impossible.

Ziv, 27, only survived the massacre because she was buried beneath a pile of bodies. The murdered young people included her nephew and his girlfriend.

"I have not really realised what happened on October 7," Ziv says movingly of her lost friends ahead of next week's anniversary of the atrocity. "I think maybe they are travelling somewhere and soon they will show us where they are."

This lack of closure stems in part from the distressing fact her partner of seven years, Eliya Cohen, now 27, was kidnapped from the bunker known today as the "death shelter" and notorious in Israel for the horrors that occurred there that fateful day.

His whereabouts remain unknown.

"For now, I am focused only on Eliya, and not on my trauma," Ziv explains. "I have all my life to cry about what happened to me.

For now, I am thinking about him. Eliya entered Gaza when he was alive and this is how we want to have him returned."

The current conflict began on October 7 last year when thousands of Hamas terrorists infiltrated from the Gaza border and took more than 240 hostages into the Gaza Strip.