In one of the killing fields of southern Israel, trance music sounds afresh in commemoration of the more than 400 revellers lost to the Hamas rampage at an outdoor dance festival.

Thousands of young people were partying in the dawn hours of October 7 when the armed Palestinian infiltrators swept in. All that faced the five Israeli DJs on the stage this time were silent and unmoving placards showing pictures of the dead.

“It’s strange to see that all these people, all these pictures, are pictures of people that actually died here,” said Yahel Irony, 18, who survived the attack when he took refuge in a nearby bomb shelter.

“Those people danced with me and they didn’t survive.”

Organisers called Tuesday’s event “The Set for the Angels”. Asher Swissa, known as DJ Skazi, said that the event sparked mixed emotions. Sadness for all his friends lost and happiness for bringing music back to the rave-goers, whom he described as people of love, peace and music.

“I believe that each one of these people celebrated life and they wanted us to celebrate for them, with music,” said Swissa.

According to police, 364 people were shot, bludgeoned or burned to death at the Nova festival in a stretch of tree-dotted brush near Kibbutz Reim. Another 40 people were taken hostage by Hamas back to the Gaza Strip, 5 km away, police said.

An 85-year-old Israeli woman abducted by Hamas on October 7 and set free two weeks later said she met its Gaza leader Yahya Sinwar while in captivity and asked him how he was not ashamed for having acted violently against activists like herself.

Yocheved Lifshitz, 85, was taken from her Kibbutz Nir Oz home in Israel to Gaza. She told the Israeli newspaper Davar she confronted Sinwar when he visited the hostages in an underground tunnel where Hamas was holding them captive.

“Sinwar was with us three to four days after we arrived,” Lifshitz told the Hebrew-language Davar newspaper.