Survivors of the October 7 attacks at a music festival in Israel’s Negev Desert are urging students at American universities to look beyond the politics of the unfolding war and recognize “the truth” of Hamas’s atrocities. 

“We’re speaking for the ones that cannot speak,” a 28-year-old Israeli-American, Jonathan Diller, who narrowly escaped the attacks, told a crowd of students at New York University on Saturday. Two of his friends who also attended the Nova music festival were kidnapped by Hamas terrorists. More than 1,400 Israelis and other nationalities died that day.

Mr. Diller, who previously served in the elite Egoz unit of the Israel Defense Forces, led a group of concert-goers to safety after trekking four hours on foot. “Gunshots kept coming,” he recalls. “The best thing I could do in that moment was just yelling to everyone next to me, ‘Just keep your head down and keep moving forward.’”

“I don’t even want to talk politics,” said another Nova survivor, 27-year-old Maya Parizer, whose friends have also been captured by Hamas. “It’s not relevant to this subject. I just want my beloved ones back home.” 

At New York and other cities across the world, thousands of the “KIDNAPPED” posters displaying the names and photos of Hamas’s hostages have been torn apart. “For us, it’s saying, ‘we support terror,’” Mr. Diller says of the ripped posters he saw while walking the streets of New York last week. “This wave of hatred, I don’t want it to become a tsunami.” 

The campus on which the survivors spoke has been consumed by anti-Israel demonstrations. Last week, hundreds of students and faculty staged a walk-out to demand that NYU end its study abroad program in Tel Aviv and that the United States stop military aid to Israel. Protestors held signs that the university condemned as “antisemitic, repugnant, and a disgrace.”

Asked how American universities can support the people of Israel, Ms. Parizer urged them to denounce Hamas. A number of university leaders have hesitated to do that, drawing nationwide criticism. “When people in 2023 take babies and put axes in their heads and when people burn people alive,” she said, “it is inhumane and it should be condemned.” 

Ms. Parizer implored the crowd of students to play a part in combating the international vitriol directed at the Jewish state and its diaspora. “Study, and then speak,” she said. “Don’t be silent. You guys are students, just like us. Most of the people that went to the Nova festival are students themselves. Many of them are not here. And they would like their stories to be told.”

“People just want to hear the truth,” Mr. Diller expressed. “We’ll keep doing what we’re doing to spread the truth first-hand.”

Organized by an NYU alumnus, Avery Stern, the event sought “to foster a collective acknowledgment of the human cost of terrorism,” according to a press release, “and encourage a unified stand against organizations that perpetrate such atrocities.”