10,000 Mourners Attend Funeral of Brazilian Woman, 24, Slaughtered by Hamas at Music Festival

An estimated 10,000 people answered a call to attend the funeral on Tuesday night of Bruna
Instagram
Frances Martel

An estimated 10,000 people answered a call to attend the funeral on Tuesday night of Bruna Valeanu, 24, a Brazilian immigrant to Israel murdered by Hamas terrorists during the ongoing assault on Israel that began on Friday.

Valeanu was a student at Tel Aviv University and had lived in Israel for ten years when, while attending the electronic music festival Universo Paralello on Saturday, radical Islamist terrorists killed her and hundreds of others. Valeanu reportedly only had two family members in Israel, her mother and sister Florica, so her family posted a request on social media for ten men to attend her funeral.

Jewish law requires a minyan – a quorum of ten men aged 13 or older – for an official prayer service to take place; her family feared that Valeanu’s funeral would be unable to reach a quorum given her small family circle in the country.

Instead of being too small to take place, the funeral attracted so many people that cars snaked across the roads leading to the funeral home for over a mile. Israeli media reported an estimated 10,000 people came to mourn Valeanu. Some who attended reported that police had to stop some attendees from entering due to the size of the crowd and fire safety concerns.

Eylon Levy, a former adviser to Israeli President Isaac Herzog who attended the event, reported that mourners eventually left their cars on the road and walked to pay their respects.

“The traffic jam was terrible, several people left the cars on the road and walked to the place,” Army reservist Yishai Bonnie, who drove an hour to attend the funeral, told the Brazilian newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo. “Most of them didn’t know her, but they were there, I believe, to express solidarity with the family and show that we are all together at this moment.”

Bonnie was among the thousands who said they saw a notice requesting the attendance of ten men on Whatsapp and answered the call.

The Brazilian government confirmed Valeanu’s death on Tuesday, following verification with the Israeli government and her family.

“The Brazilian government laments and expresses its profound grief at the death of the Brazilian citizen Bruna Valeanu, 24 years old, native of Rio de Janeiro, the second [Brazilian] victim of the attacks on October 7 in Israel,” the Brazilian Foreign Ministry announced. “In solidarity with the family and friends of Bruna, the Brazilian government reiterates its total repudiation of all acts of violence against civilians.”

The Brazilian government under socialist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has attracted widespread criticism for not identifying and condemning Hamas for its terrorist atrocities directly, and for responding to the attacks by reiterating Hamas’s demands for the establishment of a Palestinian country carved out of Israel.

“I was shocked by the terrorist attacks carried out today against civilians in Israel, which caused numerous victims. In expressing my condolences to the families of the victims, I reaffirm my rejection of terrorism in any of its forms,” Lula said in a statement published on Twitter. “I call on the international community to work to immediately resume negotiations that lead to a solution to the conflict that guarantees the existence of an economically viable Palestinian State, coexisting peacefully with Israel within safe borders for both sides.”

Hamas launched a full-scale attack on Israel from Gaza, which it has branded the “al-Aqsa flood,” on Saturday – the Jewish holiday of Shemini Atzeret, the final day of the annual High Holy Day cycle. The attack involved shooting thousands of rockets into civilian areas and butchering citizens in their own homes in residential areas.

WATCH: Video Shows Hamas Rockets, Paragliders, Terrorists Streaming into Israel

Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades via Storyful

Hamas terrorists targeted families, including the elderly and infants, and on many occasions filmed their killings and posted videos online of themselves desecrating corpses. On one occasion, a family reported finding out that their grandmother had been murdered after Hamas terrorists uploaded images of her dead body to her Facebook account using her phone. In another community attacked, Israeli soldiers reported finding the bodies of murdered babies.

“I’m talking to some of the soldiers and they say what they’ve witnessed as they’ve been walking through these different houses, these different communities,” i24news correspondent Nicole Zedeck narrated in a report on Tuesday. “Babies, their heads cut off. That’s what they said. Gunned down families — completely gunned down in their beds.”

Bruna Valeanu was confirmed dead at the grounds of the outdoor music festival Supernova Sukkot Gathering, an Israeli offshoot of the Brazilian electronic music festival series Universo Paralello, along with at least 260 other people.

“It was a massacre,” Yaniv, an emergency medic who responded to the scene at the festival, told reporters. “I’ve never seen anything like it in my life. It was a planned ambush. As people came out of the emergency exits, squads of terrorists were waiting for them there and just started picking them off.

Survivors described the Hamas assault as a scene out of a “horror movie.”

“They were going tree by tree and shooting. I saw people were dying all around. I was very quiet. I didn’t cry, I didn’t do anything,” Gili Yoskovich, a survivor, told the BBC. “But I was on the one hand breathing, saying: ‘OK, I’m going to die. It’s OK, just breathe, just close your eyes,’ because it was shooting everywhere, it was very very close to me. Then I heard the terrorists open a big van…and get more weapons from this car. They were in the area for three hours. No-one was there, no-one.”

The death toll of the ongoing Hamas assault stands at 1,200 people as of Wednesday.

Follow Frances Martel on Facebook and Twitter.

COMMENTS

Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.