She became one of the faces of the attack on October 7 last year on a music festival near the Gaza Strip.
A woman with a red scarf around her shoulders was photographed fleeing the NOVA Festival during the terrorist group’s attack, and in the weeks following the tragic incident many wondered if she had survived.
It later emerged that the woman was Vlada Patapov, a model of Ukrainian nationality, who had managed to get into a car and leave the venue.
A year after the attack, the woman gave an interview to the Daily Mail in which she says what she most regrets not having done that day.
“If I could make just one wish, I wish I could have warned all those people an hour before [the attack] that something bad was going to happen and given everyone time to escape,” she says, noting that she ‘survived but not everyone was so lucky’.
Since then, Vlada has struggled with the trauma of what happened, often asking herself who “can help her when all this is still happening around us and the fear is still here and still real?”.
On October 7, 2023, during Hamas’ unprecedented attack on southern Israel, the Palestinian Islamist movement’s commandos took 251 people and the remains of other hostages to Gaza.
Of this total, 117 people, mostly women, children and foreign workers, regained their freedom during the only truce in the conflict, which lasted a week at the end of November 2023.
Today, on the first anniversary of the Hamas attack and the start of the war on Palestinian territory, 97 people were still held captive, including 63 who are presumed to be alive, 34 declared dead by the Israeli army or the Hostage Families Forum. The death of 28-year-old Idan Shtivi was announced today.
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