This article examines smartphone testimonies during the #Nova massacre, highlighting ethical implications of witnessing real violence.
The October 7, 2023 massacre at the Nova Music Festival near the Gaza border in southern Israel was unprecedented not only in its scale and brutality, but also in the way it was documented. For the first time, a terrorist attack was filmed simultaneously by both victims and perpetrators: festivalgoers recorded their flight and hiding through smartphone cameras, while Hamas militants documented the assault through body-mounted GoPro cameras. #Nova, composed of videos, voice messages, and WhatsApp recordings, reconstructs the attack in real time. Drawing on theories of found-footage horror cinema, media witnessing, and documentary gazes, this article examines two contrasting modes of looking: a “prophylactic gaze,” associated with the victims' recordings as a form of psychological survival, and a “violent gaze,” embodied in the perpetrators' footage. Situating #Nova alongside The Blair Witch Project, the article argues that the film blurs the boundary between fictional found-footage horror conventions and the audiovisual documentation of real violence, redefining spectatorship in the age of smartphone testimony and digitally mediated terror.
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Shmulik Duvdevani (2026) studied this question.
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