Yuval Rephael played dead for eight hours in a portable bomb shelter as Hamas terrorists repeatedly entered and sprayed gunfire into the room.
By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News
A survivor of the Hamas massacre at the Nova dance rave was chosen to be Israel’s representative at this year’s Eurovision song contest after winning the “Rising Star” competition Wednesday evening.
In the final round, Yuval Rephael, a neophyte singer, beat Valerie Hamaty, an Arab Christian who has performed before at Memorial Day ceremonies, and for wounded IDF soldiers over the course of the war.
Rephael received a 98% approval from the audience at her first audition, the highest of the season, and her performance wowed one judge to the point that he said on the spot that she was “unequivocally” his pick to represent Israel at the annual European competition.
In a pre-taped interview aired as she stood onstage, Rephael told the story of how she had escaped death at the festival held in a forest near Kibbutz Re’im on the Gazan border on October 7th.
“I was in a migunit (portable bomb shelter),” she said, “on Route 232 between Be’eri and Re’im,” which was later nicknamed the “road of death” because Hamas terrorists ambushed and slaughtered dozens upon dozens of those trying to flee the carnage, as well as rescuers racing down the narrow highway trying to get to them.
Terrorists entered the small concrete room “some 20 times over eight hours,” spraying the interior with machine gun fire and tossing grenades, she recalled.
“We were around 50 people inside,” she said. “Eleven of us came out.”
They hid underneath the bodies of those who had been murdered, and while hiding she called her father, begging him to call the police. He told her, “Yuvali, take a deep breath, hide, play dead.”
She said she hung onto this scrap of a “tool” to survive, and it worked.
Rephael stated that she had absolutely “refused” to become a post-trauma victim in the year since, and started talking everywhere about her experience, including the UN, which she said also helped her heal.
She wanted to appear in the talent show because it would be a combination “of the two things holding me together right now, music and public diplomacy. I am dying to represent” the country, she said.
The 24-year-old’s English is nearly perfect, as her family spent three years in Switzerland during her childhood. It would “close a circle” for her, she said, to perform in Basel at Eurovision 2025 this May.
While Israelis certainly thought she was an excellent choice to symbolize courage and human triumph over the barbarity and evil of terrorism, haters of the Jewish state lost no time making poisonous comments on social media to link Rephael to Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza.
Israel’s representative last year, Eden Golan, was inundated with hatred both before and during the contest, with thousands demonstrating against Israel in Malmo, Sweden while she sang a song whose explicit references to the slaughter at the Nova festival had to be removed because they were “political,” according to the Eurovision powers-that-be.
Golan and her singing team had to be protected by Israel’s security service, the Shabak, and their movements in the city were extremely limited due to fears for t heir physical safety.
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