Heartbreaking final phone call of Nova festival victim who rang family to send final message of love after being shot three times by Hamas… only to be executed as her mother could only listen

Twenty-two year old Libby Cohen Meguri was already mortally wounded by Hamas terrorists when she made a last-minute phone call to her family to tell them how much she loved them.

Minutes later, she was murdered in a volley of shots that her distraught mother, stepfather, twin brother, and younger sister heard on the other side of the phone. 

The young woman, described by her mother as ‘the happiest person this world has ever known,’ was one of the 1,200 victims murdered during Hamas’ attack in southern Israel on October 7, 2023.

She was partying with friends at the Supernova music festival in the Negev desert, when armed militants stormed the border and transformed the celebration of life into a bloodbath.   

At 6.29am, the booming music was so loud that many revellers didn’t realise that rockets were firing through the skies and motorised paragliders were soaring through the air.

It was around that time that Libby called her mother, Shelly Meshel-Yogev, telling her that she was heading home to the north with close friend Adi Maizel – not mentioning the unprecedented terror attack.

Half an hour later, an alarm went off, and Hamas militants – garbed in body armour and carrying AK-47 assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades – arrived to the rave in trucks and motorcycles, wreaking carnage.

At 8.11am, Libby rang her mother again, calm and collected, and told her to usher the family around the phone so that she could deliver them the most painful news they would ever hear.

That final phone call was eight minutes long, during which the 22-year-old delivered a special message of love for each of her relatives that she repeated like a mantra until the final round of gunshots.

‘Mum, they shot Adi in the head. She’s dead, next to me. I was shot in the arm and stomach. I’m losing a lot of blood. I’m going to die,’ Libby told her mother, as per an interview Shelly did with State of Tel Aviv.

Libby had been shot three times and knew she didn’t have much time left, so made the most of every second she had with her loved ones. 

‘She told me that I’m the best mother she could have. She told her father that she loves him so much,’ Shelly said.

‘She spoke with her twin brother, and then with her little sister, she told everybody that she had the best family ever.

‘And then she said: “They are coming to shoot me again”.’

On the other end of the phone, her parents heard the final gunshots that stole away their daughter. 

When they originally heard rocket fire, Libby and Adi desperately tried to get away from the scene of carnage in a car, but they were shot by terrorists hiding by the side of the road. 

Libby’s stepfather, Dr Yariv Yogev who heads the Lis Maternity Hospital, refused to believe that she was about to die.

‘I tell her: “Listen, you are not going to die, put a bandage on your arm, drive straight up, run them all over.”‘

Libby told him she couldn’t, so instead he told her to ‘lie down on the ground and pretend to be dead’.

‘Then we start hearing some voices speaking Arabic, gunshots, and that was it,’ he told Israeli news outlet Mako.

Shelly received a video of Libby lying dead on Route 232, the Israeli highway where many died that day, next to her car, ‘like a dog that had been run over and its body left on the road,’ she said.

‘I received this video, I recognise Libby, I thought you would want to know,’ someone wrote to the distraught mother.

She blames the Israeli police for creating a ‘death trap’ on the highway by blocking the road, causing a ‘crazy traffic jam’ that she said prevented partygoers from escaping the massacre in the south. 

If the police hadn’t blocked roads on October 7, the 3000 terrorists who stormed the border may have made it deeper into the country, reported Israeli newspaper Haaretz. 

On the bodies of terrorists, police recovered maps with other targets for attack marked, including Ashkelon, Tel Aviv, the Tel Nof air base and the nuclear reactor at Dimona.

But some blockades were catastrophic for Israelis trying to flee Nova, the outlet claimed, who got fatally caught up in Hamas crossfire.

Libby was ‘the sun, the love, the laughter of our lives,’ her mother said in a video published by the Consulate General of Israel to Atlanta.

‘All we want is for you not to forget Libby: so please, be with her, and do not forget her.’

She was one of almost 400 young people who were massacred at the outdoor party just three miles from the Gaza border, on the grounds of Kibbutz Re’im.

The rave had been billed as ‘a journey of unity and love’ with ‘mindblowing and breathtaking content’; its location had been a secret in the run-up, but partygoers were promised a festival in a place ‘stunning for its beauty’.

For weeks, lovers of trance – a type of electronic dance music characterised by hypnotic melodies and rich atmospherics – had been looking forward to Nova, which coincided with the end of the week-long Jewish festival of Sukkot.

Libby was one of them. She completed her compulsory army service as an officer in an infantry unit, and had been spending time abroad in South America as a break – but she made sure to cut her trip short in time for the festival.

Her parents didn’t know she was returning home, and so she gave them the best surprise by coming to Israel early after seven months of travelling.

She and her mother embraced with tears of joy that morning, as they shared a long-awaited hug in the family living room.

On October 6, a day before the party, Libby had a fever, and her parents begged her to stay home, but the 22-year-old was determined to dance with her friends through the night.

‘I’m going to dance to trance music. And even if I die, dance to trance music for me,’ she told her family as she walked through the door defiantly.

Playful defiance was one of Libby’s main characteristics, as exemplified by the way she’d sometimes skip school to run to the sea in the mornings – a place where she felt ‘the freest, the happiest,’ her mother wrote in a moving post on social media, dedicated to her memory. 

Ever since she was murdered, her family have taken over her Instagram account and transformed it into a remembrance page where Shelly pens heartbreakingly lyrical letters to her daughter.

At the time of Libby’s death, the account had 1,200 followers. Now, it has almost 120,000.

In poetic posts dedicated to her daughter, Shelly often refers to Libby as ‘my heart’ – the meaning of the Hebrew translation of her name. 

In one particularly emotional post, Shelly described her pain and inability to sleep at night in vivid terms: ‘Maybe this is what a heart attack feels like? And then comes the realisation – my heart is dead, the little, beautiful, beloved body of my girl is buried, it really is a heart attack – my heart was attacked with bullets of pain, the grief attacked the heart, the longing slowly destroyed it, the realisation that my heart won’t come back destroys my heart and hurts it so much.’ 

Libby was buried in the Kiryat Shaul cemetery in north Tel Aviv, and her gravestone reads: ‘Our sun was extinguished.’

Ever since her death, the family has organised an annual trance party at a nightclub in Tel Aviv in her honour, called ‘Libby’s Party’.

The event captures the young woman’s joyful spirit. Libby loved to be active – whether that meant mastering salsa in South America, winning equestrian championships with her horse, Sebastian, or dancing with friends to trance.

You’ll find photos, stickers and magnets of the 22-year-old all across Israel – available to pick up from 50 collection points – thanks to the extensive efforts of her family to immortalise her memory.

In the month after Hamas’ massacre, Shelly founded a charity called ‘Libby Itach’, which translates to ‘Libby my heart is with you’. 

So far, the not-for-profit has organised a dog adoption day at the shelter where Libby volunteered, and a ‘ropes course’ day for children with autism.

When Libby was in the IDF, she always made sure to invite lone soldiers back to her family home for food and comfort.

To carry on her legacy, ‘Libby Itach’ works to assign private doctors to lone soldiers across Israel, providing them with care free of charge. 

Her stepfather, Yariv, told the Kan public broadcaster: ‘God sprinkled Libby with charisma powder.’

‘She could never be passive about any suffering, or any weakness in society,’ he said. ‘To anyone who needed help.’

He is the director of the Obstetrics and Gynecology Department at Ichilov hospital in Tel Aviv. After his stepdaughter’s death, his colleagues suggested naming a trauma clinic for women after Libby as a way to remember her.

‘The clinic exactly embodies what Libby had,’ Yogev said. ‘Her ability to give, to be very, very sensitive to the needs of other people.’

‘She was a chunk of energy, happy, light, and laughing, from the moment she woke in the morning until the moment she went to sleep,’ her mother told Channel 12.