‘Yes… But…’. It is a phrase that Jews in Britain and around the world have become accustomed to hearing since the 7 October Hamas terror attacks on Israel and the subsequent war. It is a twisted attempt to contextualise atrocities, to justify the unjustifiable. When you hear, as I have, the stories of those who survived the massacre at the Nova music festival, though, or whose family members are still being held hostage, when you see the footage from that event, you realise there is no ‘but’.

In the documentary Supernova: The Music Festival Massacre, a number of survivors of that day’s horrors tell their story. They include Gali Amar and Amit Amar. The best friends hid for hours in a festival portaloo, lying on the floor to avoid the shots aimed at head height, praying that the terrorists would not open the door. Others, some piled into small cars with strangers, thought they had escaped, only to be attacked in the shelters that line the roads going to and from the south of Israel.

Want a ceasefire now? Demand the hostages are returned home immediately

I watched another survivor, Ziv, break down as she recalled hiding under a pile of dead bodies. Her boyfriend, Eliya Cohen, remains a captive in Gaza and it is unclear whether he knows that his partner is still alive.

The families of the hostages have united and are astonishingly calm. They display dignity and remarkably little anger. They do though fear that their loved ones are being dehumanised and ultimately forgotten, knowing that each day the crisis drags on the chances of seeing them alive again diminish. For them, these are not pawns in a geopolitical game but their brothers, sisters, sons and daughters.

Those hostages include 27-year-old Almog Sarusi. He, his friends and his girlfriend tried to drive away from the festival but were shot; his friends died at the scene. Almog escaped with his badly injured girlfriend, who he tried to save. She ultimately died from her injuries, although Almog may not yet know this, held as he is in Gaza. He had intended to propose. The family of another, Omer Shem Tov, had to endure watching a video of him handcuffed and thrown into the back of a pickup truck being driven into Gaza.

People demand more evidence, even though we know irrefutably that mass murder and torture was conducted by Hamas terrorists. Rape denialism has been rife. Organisations like UN Women have disgraced themselves. Those that have spent years demanding that we must believe all women failed to explain that there is a caveat – unless they are Jewish.

When you see the evidence, hear the stories, it is hard to process the scale and the horror of what happened. Young people dancing to trance music and celebrating the sunrise were mown down by machine gun fire and grenades. The sheer panic and terror these people felt is impossible to comprehend.

‘Yes… But…’. Watching the footage from the festival, I could only think of the joyous few days I’d spent at a festival with friends last summer. Although we were jumping to heavy metal instead of trance, much else was familiar. The tents, the drinks, the sense of people stepping out of real life into the magical, escapist world of a festival. For the partygoers at Nova, that feeling was shattered as wave upon wave of terrorists descended on the site.

Here in London, you would hardly know that just five months ago the world witnessed the greatest slaughter of Jews in one day since the Holocaust. Week after week, people march demanding a ‘free Palestine… from the river to the sea’. Many doing so are not calling for a two-state solution but the elimination of the Jewish state. The freedom of the hostages seems irrelevant to them.

While it was festival goers, kibbutzniks, civilians and soldiers in Israel who were killed on 7 October, the ripple effects hit Jews everywhere. We all know people, or know people that know people, who have been affected. When you make up just 0.2 per cent of the world’s population, it is relatively easy to be connected.

The Jewish community feels shaken. From the UN to the Metropolitan Police, the institutions that we thought would protect us, that would keep the promise of ‘never again’, seem to be failing.

It makes communal events all the more important. Things like attending the Jewish Literary Foundation’s annual Book Week or even a regular Friday night service in synagogue feel both comforting and like acts of defiance.

While nobody denies or wants to diminish the humanitarian catastrophe taking place in Gaza, the fault for it lies with Hamas. These terrorists keep their own people in poverty, instigated a war and are holding hostages as human shields. Want a ceasefire now? Demand the hostages are returned home immediately.

The images from the Nova festival cannot be unseen. It is hard to believe that any other people, any other country, could have been subjected to the kind of brutality that took place on 7 October and then almost instantly see much of the world turn against them.

‘Yes… But…’