Ben Raab, Contributing Photographer

Yoni Diller grew up with a passion for maps and a keen sense of direction. On Saturday, Oct. 7, a choice between north and south became a matter of life or death, he told a crowd gathered at Yale’s Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life on Monday evening. 

Diller, a filmmaker from Tel Aviv, Israel, was one of 3,500 attendees at the Supernova music festival that took place in Re’im — a town near the Israel-Gaza border —  the day of Hamas’ surprise attack on Israel, which killed 260 festival-goers according to Israeli rescue service Zaka, as reported by CNN.

Diller spoke to a group of around 75 students at Yale’s Slifka Center on Monday about his experiences on that day.

“People deserve to know the truth about what really happened,” Diller told the News. “I survived this, I am the evidence for the horrors of this terrorist organization, Hamas, and I want students to feel secure in standing against the hate on campuses right now.”

His visit comes less than a week after a string of antisemitic incidents on college campuses, including at Cooper Union College, Tulane University and Cornell University. On Sunday evening, The Cornell Daily Sun first reported on online threats made on Saturday, Oct. 28 and Sunday, Oct. 28, including a threat to shoot Jewish students at a building that houses the Kosher dining hall. 

Jason Rubenstein, the University’s Jewish Chaplain and a Slifka staff member, expressed gratitude that Diller could give his talk and “help the world understand the stakes of this conflict.”

“When something this awful happens we can only sustain our humanity by listening with open ears and hearts,” he wrote to the News. “Hamas’s massacre of over a thousand innocent Israelis wasn’t abstract – it was a brutal crime against real, defenseless individuals – and hearing from survivors really brings that home.”

At the event, Diller recounted how he arrived at the festival with his friend, Nadav Morag, at 4:30 a.m on the morning of Saturday, Oct. 7. He said that two hours later, while on the dance floor, he noticed the bright orange sparks of rocket fire lighting up the still-dark sky.

At first, he said, many of the festival attendees were unphased. He said that police eventually came to the stage and told people to begin evacuating. 

“In Israel, it’s not uncommon to hear occasional rocket fire,” he said. “Everyone knows to get in the shelters and just wait it out. At first, people weren’t that concerned, but after about an hour I decided it was time to evacuate.”

Some people, he said, chose to stay at the festival. Most people packed their stuff, got in their cars and headed north on the main road leading to other nearby cities and towns, according to Diller. But traffic quickly accumulated, resulting in a logjam of vehicles, he said. At this point, Diller said he suggested to Morag that they leave via a less crowded, south-facing side road, which eventually would loop back to the north and merge back with the main road.

But after a couple of minutes driving, Diller said that he and his friend came across a young woman trapped inside a car covered in bullet holes. He said that the woman was struggling to open the door, and blood was pouring from her shoulder and down her legs. In the background, he said, the sound of machine gun fire could be heard from the west.

Diller said that he, Morag and passengers in nearby cars ditched their vehicles and took cover in the bushes of an arid valley a couple of meters away. There, they hid for hours, as the sound of gunfire drew closer, Diller told the crowd at Slifka. 

Diller said that he remembers pulling people to the ground in order to avoid the bullets, which were whizzing over their heads.

“Some people were still drunk from the festival,” he said. “They were disoriented and couldn’t even process what was happening. I wasn’t even sure what was happening. We assumed it was terrorists, but didn’t know.”

Diller said that he and Morag decided that their best chance of survival was to escape by foot. He said that he and others began a five-hour journey to the nearby village of Patish, which Diller found on Google Maps. 

They eventually reached the outskirts of Patish, where residents awaited them and brought them into a community center to rest and have food and water, he said. Diller said that he later found out that two of his friends were dead while two others were kidnapped.

All of the festival-goers who chose to stay put or continue hiding were killed, Diller said. He added that many of those who had fled via the main route heading north arrived at towns that had been overtaken by Hamas. 

In those towns, he said, “the Hamas terrorists did things I can’t even bring myself to say — unspeakable things.” 

On Oct. 7, Hamas launched a surprise attack against Israel that killed at least 1,400 Israelis, according to Israeli officials, as reported by the Associated Press. Israel responded to the attack with airstrikes, a siege of Gaza and a formal declaration of war against Hamas. The Associated Press reported Monday night that according to the Hamas-run Health Ministry, Israel’s attacks have killed at least 8,306 Palestinians in Gaza. United Nations officials have called these attacks an “unprecedented catastrophe” and “collective punishment” in violation of international law.

At the end of his speech, Diller urged students to “remain strong,” referencing shooting threats at Cornell and antisemitic incidents at other college campuses.

As Diller took questions, many students in attendance expressed feeling scared and overwhelmed. Several students said that they have faced the trauma of both Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack and of rhetoric on Yale’s campus. These students mentioned that they have seen their peers reposting messages on social media claiming that Israel was responsible for the Oct. 17 bombing of the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza. They also mentioned chants that Yale students led during a walkout on Cross Campus last week including, “when people are occupied, resistance is justified.” 

“With all the misinformation and different narratives being spread across campus, I felt it was important to hear firsthand from someone who was at the [Oct. 7] festival,” Grace Bowden-Stone ’26 said. 

One student in the audience asked Diller what he suggested they do to combat the spread of antisemitism and misinformation on campus.

Diller said that it is important for community members to spread awareness through “safe, respectful dialogue.”

Yossi Moff  ’27 told the News that Diller’s speech “gave him strength.”

“It’s hard to be a Jew on campus right now,” he said. “But seeing someone who can hold his head so high after surviving a massacre, an event far more horrible than what’s happening here, it’s powerful.”

Before coming to Yale, Diller also spoke to students at New York University and Columbia University. He said he plans to continue visiting college campuses.

The Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life opened in 1995.