Yuval Raphael survived the Hamas terror on October 7 – now she is preparing for the boos at the Eurovision Song Contest

In the final moments of the conversation, something seems to shift within the young woman. The smile that had been playing around Yuval Raphael's mouth for 19 minutes disappears. Urgency replaces professionalism. Time is almost up, warn the PR people sitting off-screen.

Raphael speaks quickly: "Before we end the interview, I'd like to say something: All hostages must come home. Now." Then the screen goes black. The conversation is over. No further questions are possible.

Yuval Raphael is competing for Israel at the Eurovision Song Contest in Basel. She recently said on Israeli TV that she expects "100 percent boos from the audience." A realistic assessment.

For Israel's opponents, Yuval Raphael is the figurehead of a country whose army has killed tens of thousands of people in Gaza and whose president is wanted by the International Criminal Court on arrest warrants. A figurehead, like a target. Several open letters, signed by Nemo and others, demand her exclusion from the competition. Calls for protest and boycott against Israel's participation in the Eurovision Song Contest are resounding from all channels. Demonstrations have been announced in Basel, and the security situation is massive.

The Israeli public broadcaster KAN – whose delegation Raphael will also accompany to Basel – is accordingly concerned that it will still be excluded from this staged European cultural alliance. Not only the time, but also the choice of topics for the conversation with the Israeli was therefore strictly limited: no politics, no questions about October 7th. It would be solely about the music, they said – just like at the Eurovision Song Contest.

For 19 minutes, the 24-year-old singer sits in front of the screen, professionally interested. Winning the Eurovision Song Contest in Basel for Israel would "mean the world" to her, she says in the video call. She also says that her ESC song, "New Day Will Rise," speaks to her heart because it speaks of hope and unity. Then the final minute of the conversation begins.

Raphael straightens her back in her chair in front of the camera. Now we see that she's wearing a yellow ribbon on her lapel – a symbol of solidarity with the victims of October 7, including herself. This final moment becomes a miniature of the agony many in Israel feel: There's the fear of saying the wrong thing – and at the same time, the urge not to remain silent about what's important.

On the night of October 6th to 7th, Yuval Raphael, then 22 years old, danced into the sunrise with her friends at the Nova Festival. At around 6:30 a.m., the first rockets from Gaza flew over the festival grounds. Raphael's warning app was now flashing constantly. But growing up in Israel, it's hard to avoid a trusting, numb resignation to fate. Rockets in the sky are sometimes more frequent here than the full moon.

Seven survivors recount what followed the first rockets in the documentary "Saturday October 7." Yuval Raphael is one of them. Just two months after the incident, she is speaking about the horrors of Hamas at press conferences, memorial events, and in interviews in Switzerland.

On her tour against forgetting, Raphael will be at Zurich's Rämibühl secondary school in December 2023, for example. A journalist from the NZZ is among the audience. Talking about what happened can help prevent the development of post-traumatic stress disorder. Raphael knows this from her mother, a psychotherapist. Her daughter says she consciously confronts her fears and memories.

"During the week she spent in Switzerland, she told her story about 20 times. You could see how something more opened up inside her with each telling," says Ron Guggenheim, co-founder of the Yellow Umbrella initiative, which brought Raphael to Switzerland at the end of 2023. He remembers a strong young woman who wasn't afraid to take a stand.

Raphael told Tamedia newspapers in 2023 that she didn't know whether a ceasefire could lead to the release of more hostages. "All I know is that you can't trust terrorists."

Now, less than two years later, October 7 is taboo for the interview with Raphael – the questions could retraumatize the young woman, management explains. The fact that it is Raphael herself who reminds us of what happened with her statement at the end may be a strategy to convey one's own message without having to answer uncomfortable questions afterwards. But it may also demonstrate how close the trauma lies beneath the professional surface.

At 7 a.m. on October 7, Hamas terrorists breached the border fence between Gaza and Israel. According to Israeli investigative reports, they knew nothing about the music festival. It took them just over an hour and a half to regroup: elite fighters were to attack the festival, with its young, reveling crowd.

Around 8 a.m., Raphael and her friends seek shelter in a Migunit, a public roadside air-raid shelter. Designed for ten people, soon about 50 are crammed in. The Migunit offers protection from attacks from the air, not from the street. There is no door. The people inside are exposed to Hamas's rifle fire and hand grenades. The shelter becomes a mass grave.

Raphael sits in the farthest corner of the shelter. Everyone who follows her becomes a human wall for her. During the initial shelling, Raphael holds the hand of a young, sobbing woman. When the gunfire dies down, the woman is no longer crying. She is dead. Her head falls onto Raphael's shoulder. When the sound of engines echoes from the street, the people in the shelter know: the terrorists are back. Then they play dead. The shooting continues anyway. When a grenade tears apart a man's body, his blood sprays onto Raphael like water from a showerhead.

Raphael's story can be reconstructed using video footage from festivalgoers and from the terrorists who filmed themselves. Of the 4,000 festivalgoers, 364 were killed on the grounds. Others were chased while fleeing and died on the streets. Numerous others were injured, some seriously. Hamas abducted 40 people as hostages and sent them to Gaza. It wasn't until 2:30 p.m., six hours after Hamas invaded the festival full of young people, that the Israeli army arrived and put an end to the massacre.

Of the approximately 50 people who sought shelter in the bunker, eleven survived. Two months later, in the Rämibühl schoolhouse, Raphael said: "In the end, I had to step over the bodies of the others to reach freedom." Shrapnel remains in her head and legs to this day. She has banished fear from her body: "I didn't survive to die."

Music helps her connect with her own feelings, Raphael says in a video call. One of her favorite childhood memories: It's evening in Geneva, where the Raphael family moved when her daughter Yuval was six years old. The door to the children's room is open a crack. Voices and, sooner or later, singing can be heard from the living room.

"My parents often invited friends over. There was a lot of laughter, and at some point they sang Hebrew songs." Lying in bed, the girl Yuval Raphael once was feels safe, "although I hardly know anyone who sings worse than my mother—sorry, Mom," Raphael says, laughing. The conversation is still relaxed and easygoing.

When Raphael was nine years old, the family moved from Switzerland. Now his mother is accompanying her daughter back to her former homeland. "My mother is part of my Eurovision delegation. That's important, too. She's the person I feel most connected to." The rest of the family and friends will watch the Eurovision Song Contest at home in Israel. "My family isn't traveling much at the moment," says Raphael. She doesn't want to say why. Instead, she tells how she saw the Eurovision Song Contest for the first time in 2015. She's wanted to go ever since.

Raphael's ticket to Basel was her victory in the music competition "The Rising Star." Two of the four top-place winners are survivors of the October 7 attack. Daniel Wais survived the massacre in Kibbutz Be'eri; his father was murdered on the spot, and his mother was taken hostage to Gaza and killed there.

The fact that two young musicians with such a story made it to the top of the competition may also have strategic reasons. For the Israeli population, those affected in the spotlight are symbols of a wound and its slow healing.

In the video call, Raphael said of her Eurovision song: "One line is: 'Everyone's crying, don't cry alone.' We all have ups and downs, and going through them together is better than going through them alone." In the finale of "Rising Star," Raphael sang "Dancing Queen" by former Eurovision winners ABBA. She dedicated the performance to "all the angels"—all the people who were killed at the Nova Festival.