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Bar Asraf, 30, who survived the Nova music festival attack, ended his life at the grave of his girlfriend Liron Barda on Saturday evening at Alkana Cemetery.
The Nova survivor ended his life at the grave of his girlfriend Liron Barda, killed in the massacre nearly three years earlier, and medical responders pronounced him dead at Alkana Cemetery Saturday evening.
Emergency medical teams discovered Asraf with a gunshot wound to the chest, and paramedics initiated extended resuscitation efforts but were forced to declare him dead at the scene.
Liron Barda, 26, of Shaarei Tikva, was murdered by Hamas terrorists at the Supernova music festival on October 7.
Barda, who was working as the bartending manager at the rave, refused to leave the site of the party even when the terrorists invaded, instead staying behind to provide care to those wounded, and footage of her final moments show her caring for injured partygoers at the site of the festival.
Avi, her father, told Ynet, “I spoke to her that morning, I asked her to leave the area — she refused, she said there were wounded people and she was staying.”
Asraf, originally from Petah Tikva and based in Tel Aviv, had been living with unrelenting grief since the massacre, when Barda was murdered at the music festival.
Rather than withdraw from her family, Asraf maintained close ties to Liron’s relatives.
Asraf maintained close ties to her parents, visiting frequently and honoring her memory.
As recently as Wednesday, Asraf attended his brother’s wedding, a family celebration that suggested a path forward, a moment of normalcy in the extended aftermath of October 7.
But grief overwhelmed him.
The weight of years of unrelenting grief proved insurmountable.
The death of Asraf is the latest tragedy among Nova survivors grappling with the psychological aftermath of the massacre.
During a recent parliamentary hearing in Israel, one survivor, Guy Ben-Shimon, revealed that nearly 50 survivors had since taken their own lives due to the trauma they experienced during the attack.
However, Israel’s Health Ministry has disputed that figure.
Despite these alarming revelations, Israel’s Health Ministry has refuted these claims and stated that the number of suicides among the festival survivors is unknown.
The most prominent case prior to Asraf’s death was that of Roi Shalev, 30.
In the viral moment that gripped the nation in October 2025, Roi Shalev, whose girlfriend Mapal Adam was murdered in front of him as he tried to shield her at the Nova festival on October 7, 2023, died by suicide on Friday night.
Hours before his body was found, Shalev wrote a post on social media explaining that he “couldn’t take it anymore,” and asking for forgiveness.
“Please don’t be angry with me, please. No one will ever understand me, and that’s okay because you can’t understand. I just want this suffering to end. I’m alive, but inside everything is dead,” he wrote.
The post — just three days after the two-year anniversary of his girlfriend’s murder — prompted concern among his friends and Mapal’s sister, television presenter Maayan Adam, who organized searches.
Emergency services were later called to the scene on Route 2, near Netanya, where a car was found on fire, and Shalev’s body was recovered from the vehicle.
Shalev is survived by his father and sister — his mother died by suicide two weeks after October 7.
On Saturday, Maayan Adam said she hoped Shalev and her sister were reunited. “Roei was murdered on October 7 and died yesterday. I have no words and it will take time to find them. I hope these two kids are hugging and smiling right now,” she wrote.
Shalev’s father, Ronen, called the trauma across the survivor population a national crisis.
“People need to wake up and treat this as a national emergency,” said Ronen Shalev, whose son Roi, a survivor of the Nova music festival massacre, took his own life two days ago.
Speaking through grief, he described families “shattered” since October 7, the struggles his son faced, and “the happy boy, full of friends and love for life” that Roi once was.
Ronen also spoke of his wife — Roi’s mother — who died by suicide shortly after the massacre because of the trauma, and who has yet to be officially recognized as a victim of terrorism.
“The Nova festival wasn’t a small event,” he said. “There were 4,000 people there — 4,000 broken families, 4,000 survivors clinging to life somehow.”
Experts describe the mental health crisis among survivors as unprecedented.
Even after two years, they barely go out, with extreme cases presenting psychosis, suicidality, addiction, and deep depression.
Many patients receiving care through Nova survivor organizations, by estimates one in nine, have worsened and are considered extreme cases, with suicidal thoughts, psychotic breaks, or addictions requiring specialized treatment beyond what the groups can provide.
One survivor, Shye Klein, described the trapped feeling many experience.
“After Nova I was trapped in trauma and grief. I used MDMA almost every weekend to escape. I was suicidal and angry.”
Eventually, through photography, I stopped.
Many haven’t.
The scale of substance abuse and mental health struggles has alarmed officials.
The latest report by Israel’s Center for Addictions and Mental Health shows alarming national trends: tranquilizer and sleep-med use up 2.5 times, opioids and stimulants nearly doubled, and risky use reported by one in four Israelis, with one in three among 18–26-year-olds.
Another survivor, Maayan Dee, spoke about the delayed reckoning many face now that the immediate crisis period has passed.
“I kept saying for two years, ‘We’re still at war, there are hostages in Gaza. Only the day after will real healing begin,'” says Maayan Dee, a Nova survivor. “Maybe that was my shield, and others’ too. In survival mode there’s no time to think. Now, in the day after, when there’s no war to hide behind, everything rises to the surface.”
Ronen Shalev called on the government to “flood the issue, treat it as a national emergency.”
The country needs to “push for and establish a proper and professional system specifically to treat the Nova families,” and the festival was attended by some 4,000 people.
Asraf will be buried in Elkana.