Pop

One of the survivors of the Oct. 7, 2023 invasion and massacre of Israelis by Hamas forces will represent her county at this year’s Eurovision Song Contest. According to The Hollywood Reporter, 24-year-old aspiring singer Yuval Raphael — who escaped the mass killing of hundreds at Israel’s Nova Music Festival — punched her card this week to sing for her nation at this year’s contest in Basel, Switzerland after she won the 11th season of Israel’s singing competition Rising Star. The victory resulted in her being tapped to represent Israel at the global sing-off.

Previous Eurovision representatives from Israel who went on to Eurovision after winning the show include Israeli singer Netta, who won Eurovision in 2018; pop stars Noa Kirel and Eden Golan finished in third and fifth place, respectively, over the last two years.

According to THR, Raphael won Rising Star on Wednesday (Jan. 22) after performing a stripped-down version of ABBA’s “Dancing Queen,” a nod to the Swedish pop supergroup that blew up after their 1974 Eurovision win; she also performed a cover of Sam Smith’s 2015 Oscar-winning song James Bond Spectre track “Writing’s on the Wall.”

In addition to praising her vocal abilities, the show’s judges said Raphael’s gripping personal story of surviving the massacre resonated with them. The singer described running away from the EDM festival and taking cover inside a public bomb shelter outside of Kibbutz Be’eri, where she hid in a cramped cement bunker, trapped under dead bodies as she herself played dead for more than eight hours to escape being murdered by Hamas invaders.

The singer who is fluent in English, French and her native Hebrew, was rescued by the father of another Nova attendee, who drove into the battle zone to save his daughter, and others’, lives. “Every time we [those who were still alive] raised our heads, we couldn’t understand why there were less and less people in the bomb shelter,” Raphael said in a March 2024 speech in front of the UN Human Rights Council on behalf of the Jerusalem Institute of Justice. “We thought the terrorists were taking the dead bodies. We didn’t realize it was because of the grenades, blowing up their bodies.”

Raphael has been an advocate for Israel over the past year and has said that she hopes, “the world will hear a first-person account of what I went through and have been dealing with every day, so no one could claim otherwise.” The Oct. 7 assault in which Hamas militants killed, sexually assaulted and abused more than 1,200 mostly civilian Israelis and took 251 hostages led to a nearly three-year war between Israel and Hamas that ended over the weekend thanks to a tenuous ceasefire.

The world’s biggest music event — which regularly draws 200 million viewers in more than 40 countries — is headed into its 69th year. Typically averse to any displays of political speech or nationalism, the European Broadcasting Union defended the inclusion of an Israeli contestant last year in the midst of the war that Palestinian authorities said resulted in the death of more than 46,000 residents of Gaza. As some called for Israeli contestant Eden Golan to be left off the stage in much the same way that Russia was uninvited in 2022 following its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, the singer faced boos when she sang “Hurricane” on the show. Golan, who finished fifth, later said she faced death threats during her run in last year’s contest.