Yoni Diller, a 28-year-old Israeli filmmaker, arrived at the Supernova Music Festival just hours before Hamas terrorists launched their unprecedented attack on Israel that killed 1200 people, including 401 at the music festival alone. Yoni escaped the festival on foot, walking for hours through southern Israel’s desert to safety. 

Having survived this harrowing experience, Yoni is now traveling the world to share his story with political leaders, college students, and others, providing firsthand testimony of the horrors he and his fellow festival attendees witnessed on that fateful morning of October 7th.

*The views and opinions expressed by guests do not necessarily reflect the views or position of AJC. 

Episode Lineup: 

• (0:40 ) Yoni Diller

Show Notes:

Listen – People of the Pod on the Israel-Hamas War:

• Tal Shimony Survived the Hamas Attack on the Nova Music Festival: Hear Her Story of Courage, Resilience, and Remembrance

• How to Mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day in a Post-October 7th World

• A Spider Web of Terror: How Iran’s Axis of Houthis, Hezbollah, and Hamas Threaten Israel and America

Follow People of the Pod on your favorite podcast app, and learn more at AJC.org/PeopleofthePod

You can reach us at: peopleofthepod@ajc.org

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Transcript of Interview with Yoni Diller:

Manya Brachear Pashman:

During the Grammys this past Sunday, Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. remembered the 401 people murdered and 40 kidnapped by Hamas terrorists during the October 7 attack on the Nova Music Festival. 

Yoni Diller is a 28-year-old filmmaker from Ra’anana, a town outside Tel Aviv. Yoni and his friend Nadav arrived at the Supernova Music Festival just a few hours before rockets began flying overhead. At daybreak, he had expected to send up a drone camera to capture the scene of unadulterated song and dance in the desert. But he never got the chance to get his camera ready. Yoni is with us now to describe that harrowing day that started at dawn. Yoni, welcome to People of the Pod.  

Yoni Diller:

Thank you for having me. 

Manya Brachear Pashman:

Could you please walk us through what you saw that morning? 

Yoni Diller:  

So, when the sirens went on at 6:30 , we saw hundreds of missiles heading our way. So we rushed back to our campsite. We packed up our stuff, we tried to leave, the parking lot was chaotic. And I suggested going a different way. This decision to head south towards Re’im, which is another village. I didn't think it would change or it will change everything, but it did. On the road, people originally told us to turn around, to do a u-turn. 

Manya Brachear Pashman:

You told me earlier that was when a car riddled with bullet holes approached you and you found yourself helping a wounded women. That was 25 year old Shani Gabay whose remains were identified seven weeks later. At that time, when you were helping her, you heard gunfire in the distance and you tried to take cover in a nearby valley. 

Yoni Diller:  

Yes. I saw terrorists from a distance and continued to hide. A short moment later, mass shooting started in the Be’eri area, north of us.  I checked my phone to assess our surroundings and our current location. At the same time, my friend's sister called him to check on him to check everything's okay. He promised everything's gonna be alright. And about that time about a dozen others had joined us and we start walking. But the best thing I could do at that moment is to scream for everyone to get down because bullets are flying up on top of our head. 

So when the gunshots stop for a second, we decided to head towards Patish, it was more than 24 kilometers away. My intuition told me that this will be safer there. 

Manya Brachear Pashman:

Did you just say 24 kilometers away? How did you make it through an almost 15-mile walk?

You're walking in fields, the open fields in the desert, without food or water for over four and a half hours. It's really really tough. The fear and uncertainty made it even harder. At some point, Nadav found a single grapefruit that gave us enough energy to finish the long walk to Patish. 

Throughout this journey we continued to hear automatic gunfire. Finally after 4 ½ hours we arrived at Patish. Emotions were mixed because we began to learn the enormity of what happened. Friends were missing and there were rumors of many people hurt and worse from the festival.

Later on around 2 in the afternoon, a bus came to take us away, bringing us to Be’er Sheva and then to Tel Aviv. Then I arrived to Ra'anana finally. Safe and sound in one piece. I hugged my family and I understood just how lucky I had been. 

Manya Brachear Pashman:  

So can you kind of explain to our audience what is so wonderful about this festival, this trance culture and this music, this experience?

Yoni Diller:  

So trance, psy-trance, electronic music, personally for me it's not a genre. It’s like you said, it's a culture, it’s the people in it. It's the free spirit people, liberal people, just all about spreading love. It doesn't have to be in a hippie way, just more in a way that everything is very simple, you know. Simply just be a good person, giving, ego’s not involved, very laid back people. And that's the whole idea behind all these festivals and that's what's for me. It's about the people, it's about the music, it’s about the art, everything together. 

I joined a group of friends, friends of friends, we were like total more than 20 people and two of them lost their lives there and two others that I know from another group that went with me to high school also. 

One got killed and actually the one the other one got kidnapped. These festivals,  from event to event, you get to know people from everywhere. It's a small world.

Manya Brachear Pashman:  

Your companion who was kidnapped, has he been released, any word on where they are now?

Yoni Diller:  

No, one of them is still there. Hopefully he's still alive. I’m not even sure what's less worse, being kidnapped, or hostage, or being killed. We don't really know what they're going through over there. The best we can do is just wish for them to be released, no matter what the circumstances are.

Manya Brachear Pashman:  

Yes, my colleagues here at AJC are working to bring about the safe return of all the hostages. Listeners can go to AJC.org/BringThemHome to learn more about those efforts. 

Yoni, do you feel like people outside Israel fully grasp the gravity of what happened to people there, or really how truly innocent the festival goers were?

Yoni Diller:  

Unfortunately, you know, this generation wants to get fast news and simple news comfortably, and a lot of them consume content from, you know, platforms like Tiktok, or Instagram. And unfortunately, there's a lot of fake news out there, a lot of false accusations. And, you know, people sometimes deny that October 7 happened. And that's really unfortunate. I'll give you an example. 

I flew to the US after the event, I was part of this special delegation to do advocacy and telling the story to politicians in DC, in New York. And also, independently later after this delegation, I stayed another week in the States, and I took the train to these campuses. And I spoke and told my story. You know, campuses like NYU, Columbia, I went to Harvard, MIT, Yale, and Princeton. 

Six campuses in three days. It wasn't easy. I was really exhausted. But the fact that I had that meaning that, you know, I'm there to tell the story. 

Not for me, not telling the story for me. I’m telling that story for people to actually know what really happened, you know, the truth. I'm saying this for people who weren't lucky to tell them to tell the story themselves, or for the families. 

So what I saw, when I told the story, is a lot of people were actually in shock, like, wow, I didn't know if this would really happen. Like, how can you not know, we're in 2023. Information hasn't been easier to be delivered from place to place up until this moment, and how do you not know exactly what happened? There's videos everywhere. 

Manya Brachear Pashman:  

You mentioned that students were actually sh