The rockets had already started raining down when a group of friends posed for a final selfie at the Nova Festival in Israel, unaware of the horrors that awaited them.
Two of them – British-Israeli Aner Shapiro and Yoad Pe’er – did not survive the day, as they were victims of the brutal Hamas attacks of October 7.
Another, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, was held hostage in Gaza for 11 months before being killed by terrorists as the Israeli army closed in on their hideout.
The photo of the friends will be revealed in a BBC documentary called Surviving October 7th: We Will Dance Again, which will be shown on September 26, telling the full story of what happened to the Nova festival goers.
The film, directed by award-winning Israeli director Yariv Mozer, consists largely of footage shot by the youth at Nova, as well as video footage shot by the terrorists as they carried out their murderous campaign.
Mozer was given exclusive permission to visit the Nova site just 24 hours after the attacks.
Smiles of innocence: Aner Shapiro – third from left – and next to him, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, pose for a group photo at the Nova Festival. Aner died in the attacks while Hersh was kidnapped and later murdered
An arrest of a Palestinian militant at the Nova music festival in the Negev desert in southern Israel last October
The selfie was taken by a group that included Halely Ben Tzion, a 21-year-old woman who, like Goldberg-Polin, came from a religious family and had not told her parents she was attending the trance party because she snuck out of the house on Oct. 6.
She was friends with Mr Shapiro, 22, a non-commissioned Israeli Defense Forces soldier who was best friends with Mr Goldberg-Polin.
The film shows how at first no one was too worried when the rocket attacks started. On stage was British-Israeli Noa Beer, a 29-year-old booking agent who had brought a DJ from Hungary to the rave.
As the sun rose in the early hours of October 7, the party was in full swing. ‘The sun comes up and you suddenly see the people around you, you suddenly see their smiles and you see the dance floor moving.
And then someone took my hand and showed me the sky. It was full of rockets,” Mrs. Beer says.
At first, many partygoers thought it was fireworks. Mrs. Bear instructed the DJ to stop his set and grabbed a microphone to shout “Red alert.” The party was over and people started to leave.
But accustomed to rocket attacks that were usually over as quickly as they began, many thought nothing of rushing.
Unbeknownst to festival-goers, Hamas terrorists had infiltrated the Israeli border in dozens of places and were approaching them from several directions.
Mrs. Ben Tzion, Mr. Goldberg-Polin and Mr. Shapiro all went to the campsite to pack their belongings.
“We are in our camp, hugging each other and laughing about the situation,” Mrs. Ben Tzion recalled of the moment the photo was taken.
‘Aner, Hersh, all my friends that were there. We took a selfie, one last selfie. And then everybody moved on.’
Mrs. Ben Tzion did not rush: ‘I went behind the center stage to get a beer. I thought that as soon as the rockets stopped, we would leave and go away. But suddenly a guy says ‘psst’ to me. I look at the stage and see four guys hiding. They said: ‘Listen, girl, go under the stage, there are terrorists’.
And then she heard gunshots. She recalled, “We hear gunshots all the time, they’re getting closer. People are screaming, begging, and then, boom, silence. The scream was, ‘Terrorists! Run! Now! Everybody run!'”
Survivors of the deadly October 7 attack attend a memorial service on September 1, a day after the bodies of six hostages were discovered in Gaza
Discarded items and trash after Hamas attack on Nova festival
Mrs. Beer, whose car was in the VIP section, was among the first to leave. But Hamas terrorists were still in front of her.
“We were driving on Route 232 and rockets were exploding over our heads. Then two cars in front of us suddenly slam on their brakes,” she said.
‘It looked like an accident at first, so I opened my door to help and that’s when I heard the first bullet. They just happened to miss us.
“I looked in the mirror and saw that the car behind me had stopped. The driver and the man next to him had been shot in the head. All the cars nearby had been blown off the road. People were trying to run out of the cars and there were terrorists shooting them.”
Mr. Shapiro and Mr. Goldberg-Polin, along with Mr. Pe’er and his friend Adi Kaufman, were the last to enter a roadside shelter where others from the festival were hiding. That’s when they heard the terrorists.
“Aner tried to calm everyone down as much as possible,” recalled Eitan Halley, 28, one of the few survivors from the shelter.
She added: ‘I saw Aner pick up (a grenade) and throw it away. And then they threw another one in. And every time they threw a grenade in, he just picked it up and threw it away. I thought to myself, ‘this child is throwing live grenades.’
Mr. Shapiro’s luck ran out on the eighth shell. “There was a really big explosion,”
Mrs. Halley said, “When I finally got up, I remember Aner wasn’t there anymore – he wasn’t with us.”
Mrs Halley said that when Israeli soldiers entered the shelter to check if anyone was still alive, ‘I realised I was sitting in a pile of corpses’.