Natalie Sanandaji, a Long Island woman who survived the attack by Hamas on a music festival in Israel on Oct. 7, told Newsmax on Friday that concertgoers faced "choiceless choices" while trying to escape from the massacre.
Sanandaji told "American Agenda" that she was attending the festival while in Israel for a wedding and sleeping in a campsite when "we were woken up by rockets being sent our way."
She said, "Originally, when the first few rockets started coming, we just thought it would just be a few. I was one of the only Americans in my group and the Israelis that I was there with were telling me that this is normal to the area that we're in, that sometimes it'll just be a few rockets and we'll continue with our day. And they were hoping that the festival would continue."
Sanandaji added later that "as we're driving out," security staffers at the venue "started yelling at us, telling us to please pull over and get out of our cars and start running. And at that point, we still didn't know that there were terrorists on foot just a few feet away from us with guns."
She said that "kids were running in every direction" and "nobody knew what direction was the direction of safety."
Sanandaji said that she ran in one direction only to realize she was "running towards the terrorists, and I now have to make a decision and change directions."
She added that an interviewer who had spoken with many survivors of the Holocaust told her that "they called it a 'choiceless choice' ... where you just need to make a choice in that moment, and there's no way of knowing if that choice was going to get you killed or save your life, you simply had to make a choice. And I think that perfectly describes every decision we made along the way while running from the Hamas terrorists. They were all choiceless choices."
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Theodore Bunker ✉
Theodore Bunker, a Newsmax writer, has more than a decade covering news, media, and politics.
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