Mystery of Hannibal's Alpine march solved? Scientists calculate how 46,000 men and 37 elephants could have made military history's greatest journey
Scientists may have finally solved the 2,200-year-old mystery of Hannibal's legendary Alpine crossing.
In 218 BC, the young Carthaginian general marched 40,000 men, 7,000 horses, and 37 war elephants across the Alps into Italy to wage war against Rome.
For hundreds of years, historians have struggled to pin down the exact route of military history's greatest journey.
But now scientists have used the science of elephant athletics to trace Hannibal's steps through the mountains.
With historical evidence so sparse, researchers used modelling based on modern African elephants to estimate how much energy each possible route would require.
This revealed that the most popular theory, the Col du Clapier route, would have been one of the most arduous options available.
Instead, the researchers found that the most efficient route would have been to take the Col de la Traversette, a mountain pass connecting France and Italy at 9,669 feet (2,947 m).
This would have used between 11 and 19 per cent less energy than the alternative options - making it the most likely path for a pack of exhausted soldiers.
Scientists have revealed the route that Hannibal might have used to cross the Alps in 218 BC, showing that the Col de la Traversette would have been the most efficient route
Hannibal’s likely route through the Alps
Hannibal's crossing of the Alps is often seen as the climactic moment of the Second Punic War between Carthage and Rome in the third century BC.
Having conquered much of what is now modern-day Spain, the 28-year-old general Hannibal led his army northwards to march on Rome.
Rather than battle through Roman-allied garrisons or risk crossing the Mediterranean Sea where Roman naval forces dominated, Hannibal decided to take his army over the Alps and enter Italy through the Po Valley in the north.
Not prepared for the Carthaginians' boldness, Rome's northern forces were defeated by December that year and Hannibal spent the next 15 years rampaging through Italy.
'The question of Hannibal's exact route has been debated for generations,' says co-author Dr Emilio Berti, of the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research.
To try and solve this puzzle, Dr Berti and his co-author Professor Fritz Vollrath, of the University of Oxford, used a model that combines body mass and terrain slope to work out how much energy a route would consume.
They used these calculations to work out how efficient each of the four most likely routes through the Alps would be for men, horses, and elephants.
In 218 BC, the young Carthaginian general marched 40,000 men, 7,000 horses, and 37 war elephants across the Alps into Italy to wage war against Rome
Scientists found that the Col de la Traversette would have used between 11 and 19 per cent less energy for the men, horses and elephants than other possible paths
These revealed that the route via the Col de la Traversette is the most efficient path, consuming 5.42 terajoules of energy for the whole army.
That is 11 per cent less than the second best option, going via the Col de Montgenèvre and reaching the Po Valley from Susa, which used 6.02 terajoules.
The route via the Col du Clapier, which had been seen as the most likely choice, was even less efficient - costing 6.28 terajoules.
A proposed route along the Col du Mont Cenis was the least efficient option, at 6.45 terajoules for Hannibal's entire army.
Dr Berti says: 'The new analysis does not eliminate all ambiguity, but it does strengthen the case for the Traversette route by demonstrating that it would better accommodate the demands of moving a large army that included elephants through extremely difficult alpine terrain.'
However, even though this route is more efficient than the alternatives, the researchers also showed just how gruelling the march would really be.
Following this route, the men in Hannibal's army would lose 19 per cent of their body fat reserves.
This, combined with the cold weather and hazardous terrain, could explain the high mortality rate for the human part of the army.
Hannibal's surprise attack in North Italy allowed him to gain the upper hand over Rome. However, scientists say the crossing consumed 19 per cent of his men's body fat reserves, leading to high fatalities
The elephants would have handled the crossing better than men due to their large fat reserves and surprisingly good climbing skills, losing just four per cent of their body fat. Pictured: An African elephant demonstrates its climbing ability
The elephants, meanwhile, would have fared much better than you might expect.
According to the researchers' calculations, the elephants would have lost just four per cent of their fat reserves by the time they reached Northern Italy.
This is partially because elephants naturally have large fat reserves, but also because elephants are far more capable mountaineers than they often get credit for.
In their paper, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers write: 'Indeed, in addition to having large fat energy reserves, we now know that elephants move akin to a four-wheel-drive vehicle.
'This would make them particularly suitable for mountaineering.'
The fact that none of the elephants died during the crossing is a testament to just how tough these animals really are.
However, the fact that all had been left to die by the following winter suggests that Hannibal might have come to regret bringing such enormously expensive war animals with him after all.
THE CARTHAGINANS
Pictured: the location of Carthage, with the extent of the Carthaginian Empire in blue
Ancient Carthage was a Phoenician civilisation centred around Carthage, on the Gulf of Tunis, which was founded by colonists from Tyre in 814 BC.
At its height during the fourth century BC, the city–state became the largest metropolis in the world, with an empire that dominated the western Mediterranean.
It had a mercantile network that extended from northern Europe down to West Africa and across to West Asia.
Far less is known about Carthage's peoples than those of ancient Rome or Greece, as most indigenous records were destroyed — along with the city — following the Third Punic War in 146 BC.
Their victory in this conflict paved the way for the Roman civilisation to become the dominant power in the Mediterranean.
From elite universities to Soviet handlers, the Cambridge Five helped Stalin penetrate Britain’s security and decision-making core.
From the 1930s up until Stalin’s death in 1953, six million people were sent to the Soviet Gulag. A quarter did not survive. Another 16-17 million were transported to strict regime labor camps, where the death rate was around 10%.
Within these numbers are the names of tens of thousands of Jews of every kind, from the devout hassid to the assimilated Communist.
Stalin’s rule was fortified by spies who believed that they were repairing the world and saving it from the ravages of fascism. The most effective of these were five young idealists who were at Cambridge University in the 1930s and who bore witness to the rise of Hitler and the march of Nazism across Europe.
The Cambridge Five: Guy Burgess, Donald McLean, Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt, and John Cairncross sold their collective soul to Stalin. While their story has been retold countless times in many books, the remarkable Stalin’s Apostles: The Cambridge Five and the Making of the Soviet Empire by Antonia Senior sheds new light on their treachery, even though it is 75 years since Burgess and McLean defected to Moscow.
With McLean and Cairncross embedded in the British Foreign Office, Stalin was able to read the personal correspondence exchanged between Churchill and Roosevelt and to understand British thinking at the most crucial junctures of decision-making.
Gut Burgess, 1935. (credit: Wikimedia Commons)
The Foreign Office in the 1930s had no security precautions.
Officials could take home important documents, and spies could indulge themselves by photographing files and delivering the copies to a handler by the shovel load. These were taken to a safe house in Copenhagen and then passed on to Moscow, where their Russian translations were typed onto pale green paper and bound in only five copies. One was delivered to Stalin.
This laxity was embellished by visits by some of the spies to gay brothels at a time when homosexuality was illegal in the UK. Some also regarded perpetual bed-hopping as their right as members of the British upper class. This was further fuelled by a liking for pink gin, followed by drunkenness on a dissolute scale. This loosened the tongues of Burgess and McLean as to their true views on many occasions.
McLean sent the minutes of the Imperial Defense Committee and revealed that there was an ongoing fuel shortage for the Royal Navy. He also sent the command structure and revealed the names of the senior personnel at MI5.
Together with Cairncross, he passed on information about British thinking during the Spanish Civil War.
Philby had posed as an ardent pro-Franco enthusiast in order to enter sympathetic circles in London and was actually awarded a medal by the Spanish dictator.
Unlike George Orwell, Philby had no qualms about the Soviet persecution and killing of Trotskyists and anarchists in Spain who were similarly opposed to Franco’s fascism.
One particular strength of Senior’s excellent book is that it highlights the terrible cost in lives lost during Stalin’s purges and mass killings. She quotes Osip Mandelstam’s famous poem about Stalin: “He rolls the executions on his tongue like berries.”
The Cambridge Five are usually characterized as being upper-class, gay, and intellectually brilliant. This book rightly veers away from portraying them in a pseudo-romantic light in the understandable service of a mistaken cause.
The first inkling that Britain harbored a nest of spies came in January 1940, when a defector told British intelligence that a “young aristocratic man” who had attended public school at Eton and gone to Cambridge University was a Soviet mole in the Foreign Office.
Senior notes that by the end of the Great Terror in the USSR in the 1930s, 275 out of the 450 foreign operatives who had been run by the NKVD, the forerunner of the KGB, had been shot or sent to the Gulag. Many of these defectors, believing they had escaped, met unexpected and suspicious deaths.
Lost world of Jewish Communism
The Cambridge Five dwelled within the lost world of Jewish Communism. The Balfour Declaration and the Russian Revolution occurred within days of each other in 1917. It set parallel paths to the future before 20th-century Jews.
Blunt’s handler in London was Arnold Deutsch, who posed as an observant Jew. Deutsch had been in Mandatory Palestine and operated in several European capitals. He moved to London, and his cover was to carry out research in psychology at University College London. His task was to seek out the brightest and the best at British universities, spark their idealism, and recruit them for the cause.
Deutsch lived in Hampstead, where he held soirèes for an interested intelligentsia. Many of these Anglo-Jewish
Communist émigrés came from central Europe. Philby himself lived in nearby Belsize Park.
Philby’s first wife was Litzi Friedmann. Teddy Kollek, the future mayor of Jerusalem, was at their wedding in Vienna. Senior notes that in September 1950, Kollek bumped into Philby at CIA headquarters and was speechless. He rushed to tell the legendary James Jesus Angleton of the Office of Special Operations that “a known Communist sympathiser” was walking the corridors of the CIA. Angleton waved the complaint aside, saying that he was “a good friend of the Agency.”
Harry Smollett, aka Hans Peter Smolka, was another Viennese Jew who was a friend of Litzi, as was Edith Tudor-Hart (née Suschitzky).
Gossip and information from a network of friends reached Philby, and the others who passed such tidbits on to their Soviet handlers.
Flora Solomon was a long-time friend of Philby, who had tried to recruit her in the 1930s. Like many other associates, she said nothing. But her suspicions deepened when Philby was publicly accused of being “the Third Man,” even when he had been exonerated by Foreign Secretary Harold Macmillan in the House of Commons.
Solomon made certain to block Philby’s employment by the Anglo-Jewish firm of Marks and Spencer. In virtual exile in Beirut, Philby acted as a stringer for The Observer but annoyed Solomon, an ardent Zionist, because he praised Egyptian Gamal Abdel Nasser, president of the United Arab Republic, then Israel’s greatest foe.
She told British intelligence about her suspicions shortly before Philby defected.
In 2022 and in January 2025, the National Archives in the UK released a tranche of MI5’s files on the investigations of Philby, Blunt, and Cairncross. Some have been held back, and Antonia Senior raises pertinent questions about this.
All five died free, in their own beds, albeit unhappily.
In Moscow, Burgess, McLean, and Philby read the British press daily and followed the cricket scores religiously. Burgess commented, “I hate Russia – I am a British Communist,” while Philby’s suave, convincing charm earned him the sobriquet of “the most English of traitors.” He viewed defection as salvation and not betrayal.
Philby died in 1988 and has been forgotten by today’s generation, but not by Vladimir Putin, a KGB man in Dresden at the time of Philby’s passing. A stamp bearing Philby’s image was issued in 1990, and a Moscow square was named after him in 2018.
In July 2023, Putin erected a statue of Philby near the battleground of Kursk, where the Red Army defeated the Nazis in 1943.
Senior’s brilliant and absorbing book is meticulously researched and adds much to all previous accounts of the Cambridge Five. It deserves a merited place on the bookshelf of anyone who is dismayed by the rise of authoritarian figures today. ■
STALIN’S APOSTLES: THE CAMBRIDGE FIVE AND THE MAKING OF THE SOVIET EMPIRE By Antonia Senior PublicAffairs 480 pages; $29
A former Hamas hostage has opened up about the cruelty 'deliberately' inflicted on her by Palestinian doctors who reattached her ankle at a 90-degree angle after she was shot by terrorists.
Maya Regev, who was 21 when she was kidnapped on October 7, 2023, also revealed how medics in Gaza needlessly sliced open her skin before pouring alcohol, chlorine and vinegar over her wounds while watching her helplessly scream in pain.
Just days earlier, Maya had been enjoying 'the best four hours of my life' after joining fellow trance revellers at the Nova Festival, alongside her younger brother Itay, 18, and their close friend Omer Shem Tov, 20.
All three would later fall into the hands of Hamas terrorists, who ruthlessly shot them at close range before hauling them onto a truck across the Gaza border.
Maya and Itay were later released in November 2023 during the first ceasefire negotiations, having spent 50 days under the control of their brutal captors.
But Omer, who went on to be held in isolation and kept largely in darkness, was only finally released after 505 days.
Maya, from Herzliya, central Israel, is one of several survivors appearing at an immersive exhibition in London - running until July 15 - showing the atrocities that took place at the Nova Festival on October 7.
Some 413 people were killed and 44 taken hostage to Gaza from the annual outdoor trance festival in southern Israel, with terrorists inflicting similar barbarities in nearby Kibbutzim, including Be'eri, Kfar Aza and Nir Oz.
Former Hamas hostage Maya Regev has opened up about the cruelty inflicted by Palestinian doctors who 'deliberately' reattached her gunshot ankle at a 90-degree angle
Maya was kidnapped alongside her brother Itay on Octover 7, 2023 at the Nova Festival
Maya, seen on crutches, walks with her father Itay days after her release in December 2023
A report published last month by The Civil Commission, an independent Israeli women's rights NGO formed in the wake of October 7, 2023, also detailed how several men and women were sexually abused, raped and mutilated.
Speaking to the Daily Mail, Maya, now 24, detailed how the atmosphere at Nova turned within mere moments from 'celebration' to 'shock, panic and running for our lives'.
At 6.29am, the music suddenly turned off amid the sounds of missiles overhead and gunfire in the near distance.
Thousands of festivalgoers began running through the nearby fields, heading to cars and trucks to make their escape from the impending Hamas terrorists who were flooding into Israel from the border with Gaza.
Maya, Itay and Omer ran for more than two hours desperately trying to find a place of safety.
'I remember running and the people next to me were just falling because they had been hit. I couldn't even stop to help them, because if I did so I might be next. So I had to keep running, the bullets whistling past me all the time.
'I saw many bodies, a lot of blood, a lot of people just terrified for their lives. I saw things no young woman should have to see.'
At one point, their friend Ori Danino, 25, phoned them to ask where they were. Ori had managed to get to his car and was driving away from the scene, but decided to do a U-turn to save his friends.
It was a decision that ultimately cost him his life - Ori found the group and helped them into his car, but he was subsequently kidnapped with the others to Gaza.
Ori was one of six hostages later found murdered in a tunnel, with IDF soldiers recovering his body in September 2024.
Maya recalled how after being picked up by Ori they believed they might yet evade the Hamas terrorists - and she called her father, Ilan, to tell him what was happening.
She said: 'But the minute he answered the phone was the minute we saw this pickup truck filled with terrorists.
'Nine of them just came off of it and started shooting like crazy while I was on the phone with my father.
'He heard everything. He heard Arabic. He heard me screaming that I was shot, that I loved him. I was basically saying goodbye.
'Dad asked me to try to hide, but I told him: "We're in a car, we can't escape, I love you."
'The terrorist opened the door and dragged me out of the car. I remember screaming "Abba" [father] as they pulled me onto the ground. And this is how the call ended.'
Maya was seen being escorted to a Red Cross vehicle flanked by Hamas terrorists on November 26, 2023
Emotional footage shows Maya being surrounded by her parents and younger brother after she was released and taken to a hospital in Israel. She would need to be admitted for a year after contracting serious infections in her leg
A disturbing recording of the last phone call Maya made to her father, believing she would die imminently, was played by her tearful parents to the media in the aftermath of her being kidnapped.
Even now, close to three years since her ordeal began, Maya has to close her eyes every time she hears the 'chilling' recording again.
Now in the hands of Hamas terrorists, Maya said she was forced to sit between two armed men in the rear of their vehicle, with two more in the front. On the outside of the truck, Itay and Omer were forced to lie down in the truck at gunpoint, surrounded by another five men.
As they crossed the border into Gaza, Maya knew she had been taken hostage - and began suffering the searing pain from her horrific gunshot wounds.
She explained: 'On my right leg, it didn't hit the bone luckily, the bullet just took a little muscle from the calves.
'On my left leg, it hit the bone and crushed six centimeters or almost three inches.
'My foot was basically hanging on strings of flesh, and I had to hold it so it wouldn't disconnect.
'This is how I was for eight days. The bullet inside my leg with a very open wound and a lot of infection, untreated.'
Maya described how Itay and Omer were taken into an apartment while she was placed in another on a different floor in the same building.
Given her distress, she asked her captors if she could send a message to her brother and they agreed. For a short while the siblings were able to pass notes back and forth between one another, giving each other the strength to get through their traumatic situation.
'I still have the notes - I hid them in my clothes,' said Maya. 'It was just things like "be strong, eat whatever you have, don't worry, soon we'll be home".
'We didn't say how miserable we are. We always said, think good and it will be good.
'We were just cheering each other up because this is the only thing we had. I always say if I would cry myself to sleep every night, I would probably not survive.
'You have to be strong mentally so you can survive physically.'
As the days wore on, Maya became unable to stand or walk and had to be carried from one place to another. After eight days, her kidnappers agreed to take her to Al-Shifa hospital, in northern Gaza City.
She recalled: 'That's where they took the bullet out and connected my foot, but they connected it almost 90 degrees to the left and my leg was a lot shorter.
'I remember looking at it and tried to move my toes - and they moved.'
She spent more than 40 days afterwards lying in the hospital bed until the day she was released.
During this time, Maya said she was subjected to nothing less than torture at the hands of the doctors and medical staff tasked with looking after her.
'There was one time they put an external fixation on my leg and the doctor just came in the room and grabbed me by it. He tilted my leg up in the air and began yelling at me.
'People ask if he did it on purpose - so I want to say of course it was on purpose. He didn't have to do it. He didn't need to do it.
'There was another time they poured alcohol into my wounds and cut my skin when they didn't need to do it. I still have the scars of where they cut my skin.
'And I remember sitting there not being able to do anything because there's only one of me and there are so many of them - and they have guns and knives.
'If I would yell at them or kick them, they would have just killed me.'
She detailed how while at the hospital, an armed terrorist stood in one corner of the room with others outside in the corridor, while an Arab woman sat close to her by her bedside.
'This woman, who was a teacher, was with me 24/7, and there was one terrorist that would always go in and out of the room. Once a day, he would come with a plastic bag with a little rice and sometimes a very tiny piece of chicken.
'They would sit with me and we had to share the food. Even though they had anything they wanted to eat, she would take my food.
'Sometimes they placed food on a table in the room but I couldn't move and I couldn't reach it. The woman was the one who decided whether I would get to eat or not.'
At times her kidnappers would also taunt her about being released - telling her 'nobody wants you, you're going to die here'.
Then on November 25, 2023, the terrorist came into her room and 'tossed' new clothes at her. He ordered her to get dressed and told her she was finally going home as part of a ceasefire deal between Hamas and Israel.
News of her salvation however came at a cost when she realised Itay and Omer would not be with her and would instead be 'left here in this hell'.
As she was handed over to the Red Cross in Rafah, and then on to an Israeli ambulance, she finally allowed herself to smile for the first time in weeks.
And when she saw her parents and younger brother again, an emotionally-charged video captured the moment she sobbed tears of relief and happiness.
'For 50 days I was alone. There was no one to tell me that everything will be okay, there was no one there to wipe my tears. I was there only for myself.
'I had to take a deep breath and say to myself, "when you'll be home you can cry".
'So when I saw my mum and dad and my brother, and I touched them, that's when I just let everything out.'
Maya's mistreatment resulted in deep, life-threatening infections, including a fungus growing inside her bone.
When she was finally released, other hostages were able to be reunited with their families and return home. But Maya remained in hospital for more than a year, where she was given intravenous antibiotics and underwent 10 operations.
Miraculously, Maya can now walk again - though she still has to undergo regular blood checks and has lost the ability to run.
'Captivity really changed me,' reflected Maya. 'Before October 7, I was very naive, very innocent, like I felt like there is only good in the world and no-one means to do bad to you.
'Then I met this pure evil, face to face. It changed the way I look at life, it changed the way I have faith in people.
'But I realised there is also good in this world and there is still hope, because of my family, my friends, the doctors who saved me.
'Captivity changed the way I look at life. Now I don't take anything for granted.'
Locked up like an animal in cage...forced to witness rape and slaughter...tortured until they prayed for death: October 7 hostages' most horrifying accounts yet of what they endured at the hands of Hamas
Mia Schem was shot in the arm at point-blank range by a Hamas gunman, losing five litres of blood as she was dragged by terrorists into Gaza.
There, she was held like an 'animal in a cage', and told she would never return to her home in Israel, but would instead be married off to a man in the Palestinian enclave.
Omer Wenkert was beaten with a metal rod, sprayed with pesticides and lost 40 per cent of his body weight while suffering for 505 days in an underground tunnel.
He began to crave death and even did a ritualistic ceremony where he bid farewell to his family, accepting his fate.
Hadar Sharvit overheard the screams of Israeli women being raped by Hamas militants at the Nova festival site, and still remembers the smell of hundreds of burnt bodies.
Hiding from terrorists only a few metres away from her, she apologised to her father over the phone, telling him she loved him — sure that her murder was only a few seconds away.
On October 7, 2023, thousands of Hamas gunmen breached the southern border of Israel, slaughtering 1,200 people, mainly civilians, and taking 250 others hostage in the single-worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.
Over two years after the terrorist attack that triggered the Israel-Gaza war, October 7 survivors are attempting to psychologically heal by recounting the traumatic memories that still keep them up at night.
Mia Schem
Twenty-four-year-old Mia Schem shot to prominence when she became the first person to appear in a Hamas hostage video on October 16, 2023, lying on a hospital bed in an unknown location in the enclave
Hamas terrorists had shot the French-Israeli woman in the arm at the festival before transferring her to the Strip, where they locked her in isolation for 55 days
Mia Schem pictured reuniting with her family following 55 days in Hamas captivity on November 30, 2023, in Be'er Sheva, Israel
Recounting her story at the Nova Exhibition in Shoreditch, London, on Thursday evening, Schem, 24, routinely had to take pauses in her speech as she became choked up with tears.
The exhibition, open until July 15, offers an in-depth commemoration of the 378 people massacred at the music festival, as well as the chance to hear firsthand testimonies from survivors.
'I don't want to die now. I don't want to die now,' she remembers repeating to herself after Hamas militants stormed the site, taking 44 Israelis hostage.
When trying to flee, she was shot in the arm, and felt her hand 'almost disconnect' from her body.
She watched in horror as Hamas soldiers took her friend, 28-year-old Elia Toledano, captive to Gaza with his arms tied behind his back.
That was the last time she would see Toledano, who was later killed by militants.
When taken to the Strip herself, Schem described how a terrorist screamed: 'Welcome to Gaza!'
Without proper medical attention, her wound was allowed to deteriorate, after doctors attempted to tie her hand to a 'piece of plastic'.
'They treated me like an animal in a cage,' she says, recounting how she spent days locked in a room without windows, with a guard watching her every move.
'They didn't give me any medicine... my body was broken, it's a miracle that I have a hand, I don't know how I survived 55 days without treatment,' she adds.
She was tormented by her guard's wife, who she describes as 'crazy' and cruel, depriving Schem of water for days at a time.
'I thought maybe I will never return back to Israel,' Schem says, adding: 'One of the terrorists came to me and told me: "You will never go back home. You stay here. You marry here."'
She was forced into recording a video for Hamas where they told her what to say, but, knowing her mother back in Israel would see the footage, she tried to communicate the truth of her experience with her eyes.
'My body was broken but my soul was strong like it never was before. I felt like my soul disconnected from my body because I didn't feel the pain. I imagined my mother all the time, and how the first meeting would be. I imagined my future wedding,' Schem says, describing how she maintained mental strength.
Before her release on November 30, 2023, after 55 days in captivity, Schem was transferred from a house to an underground tunnel, where she was put in a cage with a number of other women.
'I couldn't stand up,' Schem says, recounting how there was 'no air and no light'.
She admits that it is only by speaking to the audience on Thursday that she has finally begun 'healing' from the experience, because up until now she hasn't been in touch with the pain — perhaps in an attempt to suppress the memories.
'It's something that I know will be with me all my life. But now I need to learn how to deal with the trauma...
'Sometimes I'm up, sometimes I'm down, but I will never give up on myself.'
Hadar Sharvit
Hadar Sharvit overheard the screams of Israeli women being raped by Hamas militants at the Nova festival site, and still remembers the smell of hundreds of burnt bodies
Hiding from terrorists only a few metres away from her, she apologised to her father over the phone, telling him she loved him — sure that her murder was only a few seconds away
When the music suddenly stopped at the Nova festival at 6.29am, Sharvit thought there must have been a problem with the sound system.
A few seconds later, she began seeing rockets and enormous smoke plumes in the sky.
Speaking to the Daily Mail at the Nova Exhibition, she described how she and her friend, Shalev Navarsky, attempted to flee the festival by car, but they soon got stuck in a traffic jam and were forced to escape on foot.
They ran through a forest, but terrorists soon closed in on them, forcing the pair to hide under a bush.
'I'm lying down, with my face on the ground. The terrorists are ten metres from me, and they're shooting,' she says, recounting how the sound of grenades and gunshots rang in her ears.
Throughout the ordeal, Sharvit was texting her 65-year-old father, who demanded that she send him her location, so he could come and help her reach safety.
But Sharvit, a maths teacher, was too scared to send her father the address, worried that he might endanger himself.
Instead, she decided to accept her fate and wish him farewell.
'I realised that probably, I need to say goodbye, and that I love him. He's telling me to stay calm, to buy some time, and that he's coming to find me. So he was on the way, and at that moment, I couldn't say no, because I needed help.
'All the police officers that were around me got killed. I realised, in that moment, that I'm alone. He was telling me buy some time, to stay calm, saying: "I'm on the way to you." And again, I say: "I'm dying, I’m sorry, I love you."'
After running through a forest, the friends took cover under a citrus tree in a nearby orchard, yet before long the area was swarmed by Hamas militants too.
From her hiding place, she overheard Israeli women being raped by gunmen.
'Everywhere, people were screaming, begging for their lives, getting murdered, and being abused by terrorists,' she says. 'The smell was unbelievable. Burnt bodies, blood, fire.'
Eventually, the orchard began to erupt in flames, so Sharvit and Navarsky decided to run to the nearest army checkpoint in an attempt to save their lives.
'I saw all the things that I heard. Parts of bodies on the ground, smoke everywhere, terrorists dead and alive,' she says.
'Everything was just like a horror scene that Hollywood would never create itself.'
From the army checkpoint, Sharvit managed to call her father, who was about to get into his car to come and find her.
When they reunited, 'he held me so tight, I thought he would break my bones', she says.
Seeing him again was surreal, because Sharvit had already accepted she wouldn't make it home from the massacre alive.
'I was preparing myself to die,' she says, recalling how she did a 'death meditation' from under the citrus tree, where her life flashed before her eyes.
On returning home, Sharvit's PTSD was so severe that she felt like a 'three-year-old baby' again, with every knock on the door reminding her of a bomb or a grenade.
She wasn't able to sleep with the light off, nor was she able to drive. She has also struggled with her memory, feels anger, and copes everyday with the strain of survivor's guilt, knowing that so many others died.
Nevertheless, she has found solace and community with fellow survivors. 'For me, to stay alive after this, it's a gift,' she says.
Omer Wenkert
Omer Wenkert pictured being escorted by Hamas militants as he is released as part of the ceasefire and a hostages-prisoners swap deal between Hamas and Israel, in Nuseirat, central Gaza Strip, February 22, 2025
Wenkert was beaten with an iron rod, had pesticides sprayed all over his body and his eyes, and lost more than 36kg due to food deprivation
He was released on February 22, 2025, after 505 days in Hamas captivity, as part of a hostage release-ceasefire deal between Israel and the terror group that collapsed after its first phase
In June 2024, Wenkert reached his breaking point in Hamas captivity.
Alone, starved and abused in an underground tunnel, Wenkert had just spent his 23rd birthday the preceding month in the company of no one except violent terrorists.
He had been kidnapped as a hostage at the Nova festival massacre, where his 22-year-old close friend, Irish-Israeli Kim Damti, was killed by grenades as the pair hid together in a bomb shelter.
That June, after over eight months in captivity — 197 days of which he spent totally isolated — Wenkert felt like a ‘broken vessel’.
‘They completely ripped my soul. There was nothing left inside me anymore… Even if they had, that second, teleported me to my house, to my family, I felt that I would never be a normal person again.’
For the next six hours, he began a ‘goodbye ceremony’, first to himself, and then to his brothers, his sisters and his parents, telling them out loud that he was sorry and that he would not be returning home alive.
But miraculously, Wenkert eventually conjured the internal power to survive, and was released after 505 days of torment on February 22, 2025.
Speaking to the Daily Mail before his speech at the Nova Exhibition, the 25-year-old described the 'humiliation' and torture he suffered at the hands of his Hamas captors, including being beaten with an iron rod, having pesticides sprayed all over his body and his eyes, and losing more than 36kg due to food deprivation.
Before he was kidnapped and his life changed forever, Wenkert was the manager at restaurant Nina Bianca, south of the central Israeli city of Rehovot, working up to 400 hours in a single month.
Twelve months before the Hamas-led invasion of southern Israel, Wenkert had lost his best friend in a separate terrorist attack. That year, partying became part of his healing, his ‘rehabilitation’, where he felt he could ‘clear the soul’.
In a spur-of-the-moment decision, he convinced his friend Damti to attend the Nova music festival, with the pair purchasing their tickets at 3.30am on October 7, 2023.
A few hours later, at 6.30am, only an hour after arriving at the festival, the pair heard the first bombs, and rocket sirens began blaring.
Wenkert got a text from his mother, asking if he was afraid. In the last message he sent to his family before disappearing into the Gaza Strip, he told her he was terrified.
After escaping the festival site in a car, the two friends rushed to a roadside bomb shelter along Route 232 with about 40 others. Only 12 made it out alive.
Hamas found the shelter and threw grenades inside, forcing Wenkert to hide behind bodies to survive. But when he realised the terrorists were preparing to burn everyone inside, he stepped outside, where gunmen captured him and threw him into a pickup truck en route to Gaza.
For the next 505 days, Wenkert didn’t see daylight once.
His first 54 days were spent underground with Liam Or, who had been abducted from Kibbutz Re’im, along with several Thai foreign workers.
‘It was very hard. We barely ate, we barely drank, we didn’t get a shower — even once — and we were unable to stand up, to move,’ he says.
‘I was terrified, one hundred per cent of the time.’
When his cellmates were freed in the first hostage deal in November 2023, Wenkert was transferred to another tunnel, around 90cm wide and 8-9m long, beginning his period of total isolation.
Without the comfort of fellow captives, Wenkert was sure he would ‘get crazy, real fast’.
For the next 197 days, Hamas guards visited him twice every 24 hours, each time for only a total of one minute, delivering him half a pita bread and a litre of water.
He was allowed to wash himself — using water from a two-litre bottle — only once every 60 days.
‘That’s it. They don’t talk to me, they don’t let me talk to them. Nothing.’
Over time, Hamas grew frustrated at their inability to secure a deal with Israel, and they let out their anger on Wenkert.
The showers stopped, and the humiliation began.
‘Every two or three days, the guard told me to stand up, go to the edge of the tunnel, and he sprayed bug spray on me — on my eyes, my mouth, all over my body, on my mattress, my spoon, my toothbrush, my plate.
‘It was May 22, 2024, my 23rd birthday, and he hit me with a huge iron rod… he just ran straight into me, hit me directly on my head, then my shoulders, my legs, my toes.’
The beatings went on for more than a week, multiple times per day.
By June, tortured and alone, Wenkert craved the peace of death.
‘For three days, I was literally broken,’ he says.
‘Lying on the ground on my back, looking at the ceiling, my eyes open. I didn’t feel anything, I didn’t do anything, I stopped thinking. I was just completely empty, for I had nothing inside me anymore.’
Then came a turning point.
On day 197, after Wenkert was ready to give up, fellow Israeli hostages Tal Shoham, Evyatar David and Guy Gilboa Dalal were transferred to his tunnel.
‘I looked at them like my lifeguards,’ he says, adding: ‘They really saved my life.’
Together, the four ‘became a family’, playing cards, chess, and talking about television and their favourite films to pass the time and keep each other sane, even while surviving the unimaginable.
‘We were still human, even there, underground, as terrorists guarded us in captivity,’ Wenkert says.
‘We created a human life in the most inhumane conditions… it was hard, but we made our unit so powerful that nothing could break us.’
He was released on February 22, 2025, after 505 days in Hamas captivity, as part of a hostage release-ceasefire deal between Israel and the terror group that collapsed after its first phase.
Describing the day of his release, Wenkert said Hamas militants forced him and the other hostages into wearing 'stupid uniforms' and blindfolds as they were finally escorted out of the tunnel network.
Together, they sang the song Shir Lamaalot, 'A Song of Ascents', seconds before leaving their underground cell.
'It felt like victory spread all over my body,' he says, remembering the experience of seeing daylight again. At the time, he gestured a 'V' symbol to the sky with his index and middle finger as he stood on stage.
Eventually, he and the other hostages were transferred to the Red Cross, and were finally reunited with their families in Israeli hospital.
'I met my mother and my father for the first time,' he says. 'A moment I can't describe with words.'
The Nova Exhibition London, in-depth remembrance of the brutal massacre, is open in Shoreditch until July 15.
Tickets and information are available at www.novaexhibition.com.
