"Sunrise at the festival is the greatest moment," recalls one survivor of the Nova Music Festival that drew 4,000 young people to a spot in southern Israel about three miles from Gaza's border the first weekend of October 2023. "People just came to dance," she said. "It felt like nothing could go wrong."

Something did.

After two years of training and preparing to invade Israel in order to slaughter as many Jews as possible and to continue that slaughter as deep into Israel as possible, at 6:29 a.m. on Oct. 7, 2023, about 3,000 Hamas gunmen, in trucks and on motorcycles, armed with assault rifles, rocket-propelled grenades and hand grenades, breached Israel's border, bent on genocide.

Some committed their massacres in peaceful, sleepy villages, machine-gunning families as they begged for their lives, terrified. Other families were burned alive.

At the Nova Festival, the gunmen surrounded the festivalgoers, mowing them down as they ran for their lives, or hid in shelters, or as they tried desperately to escape by car. There were blood-curdling screams, as young Israelis were murdered en masse, or murdered after first being savagely tortured, mutilated or raped. Four hundred eleven souls were deliberately, pitilessly torn from the world that day at Nova alone.

"The sights I saw there will be engraved in my mind 'til the end of time," says one person who entered the festival grounds after Hamas' massacre had finally been stopped. "It's not every day that you see young people tied to trees. Naked girls with their legs spread-eagled. And I'm cutting them down and covering them. I'm covering these wonderful girls."

"I lost about 15 friends at that party," says a survivor of the slaughter, who like 3,500 other survivors, will suffer from severe trauma the rest of his life. "That isn't something you can comprehend."

The killers whose mission was to massacre as many Israelis as possible were, and are, part of a genocidal death cult, whose mission was genocide and who are steeped in genocidal ideology. It is part of the grotesque moral inversion that has taken place that Hamas and its defenders have successfully persuaded so many that the victims of a pure, unadulterated genocidal attack are guilty of ... genocide.

"Dad! I'm calling you from the phone of a Jew!" exulted one of the murderers in a call back to his father in Gaza on the morning of Oct. 7, the recording retrieved in the massacre's aftermath. "I killed her and her husband! I killed 10 with my own hands!" He had videotaped his slaughter of innocents, proud of it. "Open your WhatsApp!" he told his father, so that his father would praise him. "Allah praise you," replied the proud father on the recording.

Oct. 7 didn't have to happen, and what followed wouldn't have if it hadn't. The murdered, maimed or kidnapped Israelis would be safe and sound. So would the thousands upon thousands of Gazans intentionally sentenced to death by brutal Hamas masters who quite literally saw their deaths as a big plus for Hamas, which calculated that countless Gazans would die in Israel's inevitable response. Hamas approved of these deaths, because they served its purpose.

It takes no genius to "get" that a genocidal regime that carries out a genocidal attack and which pledges to repeat genocidal attacks over and over can't be permitted to do so. On the question of what, precisely, Israel was supposed to do in response to this, Israel-haters — increasingly unhinged, increasingly venomous, increasingly vapid-sounding — have nothing to say.

On Oct. 7, one of the Nova Festival organizers, Ofir Amir, instructed those present to leave immediately as soon as the sirens went off. He saved hundreds by doing so, but those for whom it proved too late are on his mind two years later. Amir was himself shot up badly, and barely survived. He watched his friend gasp for air and die next to him as they tried to escape.

He has organized an exhibition entitled "6:29 a.m.: The Moment Music Stood Still," on a world tour, to show people — vividly, wrenchingly — what happened that day. "It's on us now," he says about the need to try to penetrate the moral fog that has settled on, and obscured, the memory of Oct. 7.

And so it is.

Jeff Robbins' latest book, "Notes From the Brink: A Collection of Columns about Policy at Home and Abroad," is available now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books and Google Play. Robbins, a former assistant United States attorney and United States delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, was chief counsel for the minority of the United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. An attorney specializing in the First Amendment, he is a longtime columnist for the Boston Herald, writing on politics, national security, human rights and the Mideast.

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