Israeli Survivor of Oct. 7 Hamas Attack Shares His Story with Loyola Community

Content warning: Violence

A survivor of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel spoke with Loyola students and community members March 13 at the Hampton Inn Chicago North-Loyola Station in collaboration with Faces of October Seventh, an organization that provides first-hand survivor accounts of the attack to communities and college campuses in North America. 

The survivor, Israel-native Shalev Biton, spoke at the event hosted by Loyola Hillel and Loyola-Israeli Student Alliance. 

The Oct. 7 invasion by Hamas resulted in an estimated 1,200 Israeli deaths, according to the Associated Press. It was the most deaths of Jews in a single day since the Holocaust, according to NPR. The event targeted the Nova Music Festival, an outdoor music festival in Re’im forest, about 3 miles east of the Gaza Strip.

“I’m not here to change someone’s idea or change people’s minds,” Biton said in an interview with The Phoenix. “I’m not here for that. I am only here to show people what happened. Show them my story.”

Biton said he didn’t originally plan to attend Nova Music Festival but decided to go to reunite with five of his friends who he hadn’t seen in multiple years. 

Biton shared photos and videos from the night where he and his friends went to dance and listen to music at the festival. After going to sleep in tents they set up, Biton said he woke up to a loud noise around 5:55 a.m. that was different from the beat of the music playing. He initially assumed it was nothing until around 6:29 a.m. when he heard the sound of a missile. 

Although those sounds marked the beginning of the attack, Biton said he didn’t realize the magnitude of what was happening as he and his friends packed up their stuff, thinking he could return home to sleep.  

“I thought to myself, ‘OK, I actually didn’t want to go to that party,’” Biton said. “‘Thank God it’s finished now. We’ll go to sleep.’” 

When Biton and his friends reached the car, Biton said he saw a screaming woman who had been shot being carried by her friend but hadn’t yet realized Hamas had attacked. He said he had thought the woman was shot in Gaza. 

Biton said the gunshots got louder, so he and his friends began to run until they heard them close by and dropped to the ground to crawl.

“We actually laid on the floor and started to crawl together and for me, it was a very absurd situation because I didn’t do it even in my army service, I hadn’t had to crawl,” said Biton, who served in the Israeli military for almost three years.

After running almost four or five miles without any water, Biton said his group arrived at a farm around 9:20 a.m. where they met a man, Younis el Karnawy, who spoke Hebrew in an Arabic accent, causing Biton to be initially hesitant, fearing the man would side with the invaders. However, Biton said Karnawy gave the group food, water and phone chargers and allowed them to stay with him. 

Biton said at the farm, the group armed themselves with steel rods, but they felt safe and decided to sleep. While they slept, Biton said Karnawy shouted “terrorists were coming,” so they ran outside of the building. 

Biton said the group noticed one of the farm buildings was about eight centimeters above the ground, so they crawled underneath the building and, for about two hours, waited for the men to leave the farm. He said at that moment, he thought he was going to die. 

“I thought to myself, ‘OK, the game is over,’” Biton said. “‘It’s very sad, and I have a lot of things to do and risks to make but now the game is over.’” 

Biton said Karnawy eventually came to tell the group it was safe to get out from under the building. 

In his speech, Biton recognized and shared photos of his friend Tiferet Lapidot, a 23-year-old woman who was missing following the festival and later found dead. 

“She was very beautiful,” Biton said. “We lost a very beautiful soul.”

Biton said it’s important to him to keep going and not let the attackers instill fear in him like they tried to do. 

“The first month for me was a nightmare,” Biton said. “There was a time that I thought to myself, ‘Wow, that time was so hard.’ I thought to run away from terrorists was the most scary and hard thing I would do in my life, but it wasn’t. I think the hard job is coming after.”

Biton said he has learned a lot from the Jewish and Israeli community abroad, and he thinks of Israelis living outside of Israel as ambassadors for the Israeli people. 

Andrey Pikovskiy, a member of the Loyola-Israel Student Alliance board involved in planning the event, said first-hand accounts like Biton’s are important because they prevent misconstrued information from social media.

Pikovskiy said he wanted the community at Loyola and in Chicago to have a chance to grieve since the attack was the largest number of Jewish deaths since the Holocaust. He said the event isn’t political but rather a chance to share stories and collective grief. 

“I feel a lot for the Palestinian side because it is just massive death,” Pikovskiy said. “But my allegiance is foremost with Israel because my family is there. I have some friends there, my friends from school, they’re from there, and it’s the only place where Jews can actually live without being attacked by antisemites.”

Since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, Israel’s retaliation against Gaza has resulted in more than 30,000 Palestinian deaths and wide-spread starvation for about a quarter of Gaza’s population, according to AP.

Pikovskiy said he was born in Chicago and is a first-generation American. His family fled the USSR/Russia and Ukraine as Jewish refugees, half coming to the United States and half going to Israel.

Pikovskiy said he met with Loyola’s Dean of Students Will Rodriguez prior to the event to discuss logistics and security about holding the event on campus, specifically in response to a protest at UC Berkeley which shut down an event organized by Students Supporting Israel at Berkeley and Berkeley Tikvah because of intimidation actions taken by protesters who broke windows outside the event, according to AP. 

In the meeting, Pikovskiy said he spoke with Rodriguez, Dawn Collins — assistant vice president of campus support, conferences and auxiliary services — and Samantha Maher Sheahan — associate dean of students. 

About 20 minutes after the meeting, Pikovskiy said Rodriguez called him to say Loyola would be unable to staff the event on campus, so it needed to be moved to a different date. 

Pikovskiy said the event couldn’t be moved since Biton would only be in Chicago for two days with eight other engagements. In a final Zoom conversation over Loyola’s spring break, Pikovskiy said Collins recommended transferring to Zoom. 

“It was really apparent that they really didn’t want the event on campus,” Pikovskiy said. “I spoke a lot about how this whole situation kind of makes students feel both on campus and off. And she disregarded those comments.”

Loyola spokesperson Matt McDermott wrote in an email to The Phoenix that the Division of Student Development reviewed Loyola-Israel Student Alliance’s and Loyola Hillel’s request like all activity requests, assessing whether the university could accommodate space and staffing for the event.

“Given the available staffing resources on that day, DSD was not able to host the event on campus and was willing to work with the Registered Student Organizations to find alternate dates and times,” McDermott wrote. 

Executive Director of Metro Chicago Hillel Charles Cohen said he believed the event turned out well despite the last minute location change to a hotel nearby campus.

Katherine O’Neil, Jewish life associate at Loyola, said honoring lived experiences such as Biton’s is important during polarizing times because it helps humanize people’s stories. 

“It’s not a betrayal of a cause,” O’Neil said. “It’s not a betrayal of justice to recognize suffering where you see it. It’s the opposite actually. To turn away and to ignore the suffering of one people because they’re not on your ‘side’ or they’re not your people who are suffering, it’s a denial of our humanity or shared humanity.”

O’Neil said many of her Israeli and Jewish students feel isolated, alone and scared in response to an increase of antisemitism both on campus and globally. 

Lauren Viteri, Loyola Hillel Treasurer and member of Loyola-Israel Student Alliance board, said she hoped non-Jewish people would attend the event so they could understand the pain Jewish and Israeli students have been going through. 

Viteri said the lack of conversation on campus surrounding Israeli hostages taken by Hamas has disappointed and saddened her, and she hopes people are able to choose humanity rather than taking sides. 

“I think that we really need to just have empathy for each other and realize that neither group is going anywhere,” Viteri said. “We need to coexist on this one sliver of land that’s the size of New Jersey and just choose humanity. We’re just so divided right now, but we’re really fighting against the same enemy — extremism on both sides — on the Israeli side and the Palestinians.”

Featured Image by Lilli Malone / The Phoenix