Karin Journo

Karin Journo didn’t let a broken leg stop her from heading to the October 7 Supernova event with friends, but it may have hampered any possible escape from the Hamas terrorists who rampaged the desert rave.

At 8:43 that Saturday morning, the French-Israel airport worker sent a final text to her loved ones, according to her father, Doron Journo: “To the whole family, I want to say that I love you a lot, because I am not coming home,” according to an AP report.

“Since that message, we have heard nothing. We don’t know if she is dead, if she is in Gaza. We know nothing,” said Doron Journo. “My daughter didn’t go to war,” he says. “She just went to dance.”

An account written on Instagram by Journo’s best friend, Neta Abir Lev, describes the events as they took place that morning.

At 6:30 a.m., the sun was rising, they were dancing until the music suddenly stopped, as rockets streaked across the sky and they lay down on the dance floor to protect themselves.

They decide to stay where they are, sitting in a circle, laughing and talking, said Abir Lev.

She said to her friends, “Let’s take a picture to remember this moment.”

According to a video shot that night, Journo had been partying, dancing to the techno beat but standing in place, given the gray protective boot that encased her right foot and calf all the way up to her knee.

When Journo’s friends started hearing gunshots, they began an endless cycle of hours of running and hiding, hysteria and fear, trying to escape the gunmen and Abir Lev lost Journo in the tumult.

At one point, the two friends reconnected as Journo was on the phone with her mother who was sitting with Abir Lev’s father. Journo handed her own phone to Abir Lev, who stepped into another area to speak to her father.

At that moment, the terrorists closed in again, and Abir Lev sprinted for her life, Journo’s phone with her. Abir Lev writes that she was running with another friend, who was concerned that Journo wouldn’t have been able to keep up with them.

For seven hours, wrote Abir Lev, she sprinted and ran, crawled and hid as bullets flew by her, trying to decide whether she should write her last words to her mother. She couldn’t stop thinking about Journo.

Abir Lev survived, somehow, and now Journo is missing.

“I pray that my miracle is our miracle,” wrote Abir Lev. “That you’ll come home and we’ll have a cigarette and go over it all.”

However, the family later learned that that 8:43 a.m. Saturday morning text had been her final message.

After an awful wait of more than a week for news and of not knowing whether Karin was a hostage in Gaza, the family got word from the Israeli military that her remains had been found.

The military said the ambulance Karin had been sheltering beside was subsequently hit by a rocket, her sister, Meitav Journo, told AP by text message.
Source: The Times of Israel