A former Israeli hostage who is credited with saving 2,000 lives at the Nova music festival on October 7, 2023 has described being beaten, starved and threatened with death during 738 days of captivity in Gaza's tunnels.
Bar Kupershtein, now 24, was working as a security guard and medic at the Nova trance festival in southern Israel when Hamas launched its attack. Rather than flee, he jumped into an all-terrain vehicle and persuaded a security officer to open an emergency access road, diverting thousands of terrified festivalgoers away from routes that were already ambushed by Hamas gunmen.
Some 413 people were killed at Nova and 44 were taken hostage. Without the emergency road Bar helped open, drivers were forced toward Kibbutz Be'eri and Kibbutz Re'im, both of which were under attack at the time.
Bar said he told police they were in the middle of a death trap. He and five other armed security personnel then positioned themselves behind a vehicle and exchanged fire with Hamas gunmen. Four of those men were killed.
He also ferried wounded festivalgoers in his ATV to paramedics near the site. He said he kept going until he understood he could no longer help anyone else and needed to save himself.
He ran toward scrubland with gunfire all around him and crawled on the ground as bullets passed near his head. When a prolonged gunfight broke out between Hamas fighters and Israel Defense Forces soldiers who had arrived, he believed it was over. Then he heard what he described as chanting, and realized the terrorists had prevailed.
He said they came to him and he prayed and waited to be killed, but instead they took him hostage.
738 days underground
Footage later shared on Telegram showed Bar tied up on the ground, bound at his wrists and ankles with a cord around his neck, alongside fellow hostage Elkana Bohbot. He and others were loaded onto a truck and driven into Gaza, where he was moved several times before arriving at an apartment and then a tunnel.
He said conditions in the tunnel were extreme. Prisoners were forbidden to talk or move. He was kept in handcuffs, foot cuffs and a blindfold. He said guards threatened to kill them every day, gave them small amounts of food, and provided water that was salty and sometimes contained fish.
After two weeks, he said guards brought a large stick and beat him and fellow hostage Yosef-Haim Ohana in a separate room, breaking his leg in the process. He said he prayed not to let the ordeal break him, knowing he would one day be released.
His captors also forced him to record a propaganda video in which he was made to say that Hamas were acceptable. He agreed to the filming, he said, because it meant his family would see he was alive.
A voice on the radio
A turning point came when his captors gave him a transistor radio, telling him to use it to study the Koran. Instead, Bar retuned it to an Israeli station. For the first time, he and fellow hostages could hear news of the war, the protests and what had happened at Nova.
Two weeks after discovering the station, a presenter on the broadcast wished Bar a happy birthday on air. He said the moment confirmed that no one had forgotten the hostages. Shortly afterward, the same presenter announced a special guest. Against all expectations, it was Bar's mother, Julie Kupershtein.
He said it was the first time in a year and a half that he had heard his mother's voice, and called it the best birthday present he had ever received.
On October 13, 2025, Bar was released alongside 19 other surviving hostages as part of a ceasefire agreement. He described emerging from the tunnel with his eyes covered but feeling the sun on his face and hearing cars, birds and people. Hours later, his father Tal, who had previously suffered a stroke, rose from his wheelchair to embrace him.
A reunion in London
Bar shared his account publicly during a speech at the Nova Exhibition in London's Shoreditch, where he was reunited with one of the people he had saved that day. Nova survivor Eden Rozner, 28, said he broke into tears when he realized that the man speaking on stage was the reason he was still alive.
Eden, a physical therapist from Kfar Saba, said that on October 7 he had spent two hours trying to determine which direction to flee as he witnessed death all around him. He and friends drove at speed onto the emergency access road without knowing who had opened it. He had not met Bar in person until the London exhibition, where the two embraced on stage.
Eden said the moment was very emotional because he was finally able to thank Bar in person, nearly three years after the attack. He said none of those who were there that day truly survived. They became somebody else.
Fellow survivor Anita Conforty, 49, a piano teacher who was at Nova celebrating a friend's 40th birthday, also heard Bar's testimony at the exhibition. She described hiding in bushland with her husband Yaniv, who has vascular scoliosis and could not run, as gunfire came closer. She said she saw friends she had been dancing with moments earlier being shot and falling to the ground.
Anita and her husband eventually escaped through the same emergency access road. Her friend Sharona Shmunis-Harel, however, was not among them. Twelve days later, Anita learned that Sharona had been killed when terrorists struck an abandoned emergency vehicle, in which she and 17 others had sought refuge, with missiles and set it alight.
The minibus driver Anita had hired to bring the group to Nova was also killed. Anita said Hamas were not coming only to kill Jewish people. They just came to kill.
The Nova Exhibition, which displayed burned-out cars, bullet-riddled toilet cubicles and abandoned personal belongings from the festival site, drew more than 40,000 visitors during its 10-week run before closing last month. Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, London Mayor Sir Sadiq Khan and senior government figures including Wes Streeting, David Lammy and Angela Rayner were among those who attended.
