Israeli Music Festival Survivor, 25, Shares Horror as Hamas Attack Began: 'I Was Prepared to Die' (Exclusive)

David Bromberg recounts hiding for seven hours and "running for his life" as others fell dead around him at the Nova music festival in Israel

The Nova music festival near Kibbutz Re’im began on the night of Oct. 6 as a way for concertgoers to celebrate Sukkot, one of the most joyful holidays in Judaism. But as the sun began to rise and the dancing began to slow down, horror ensued.

“Everyone came to enjoy their weekend, their holiday,” 25-year-old David Bromberg, an Israeli who attended the festival, tells PEOPLE. “And suddenly at 6:30 in the morning, there were sirens and bombs. People started to leave and the missiles kept on coming, nonstop missiles.”

The missiles signaled the start of a surprise attack on Israel by the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas. The Israeli military said the nation was attacked on land, sea and air via paragliders, in addition to approximately 2,200 rockets fired from the Gaza Strip that were heard over Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and in southern Israel. The Israeli death toll has now reached 1,200 people, with more than 2,700 wounded. Palestinian authorities say more than 1,100 militants and citizens in Gaza have been killed due to retaliatory attacks.

At the music festival, hundreds of people escaped the festival gates only to come face-to-face with Hamas fighters surrounding the premises. “They were dressed up as police on the road waiting for them, and then they told them to go toward this facility,” Bromberg explains. “And then that's basically where they were kidnapped or killed.”

Bromberg urged his friends to get in his car and they drove toward the exit, but when they escaped the festival grounds they came to a fork in the road. “We were going to take a right, but then a car came from the right side full of bullets and blood, and he said, 'Don't go that way, they're shooting.' They started shooting from the right side, a bunch of bullets with heavy machine guns. And then they came from the other side of the road as well, from the left side, so we were basically trapped from both sides. All that was left to do was get out of the car and start running.”

Related: Israeli Music Festival Survivors Recount Mass Casualty Hamas Attack: ‘A Trauma Like I Could Never Imagine’

As he began “running for [his] life” through the open field, Bromberg says others running were “falling next to him and getting murdered . . . The gunshots, the machine guns shooting toward us from everywhere, just knocking down people, just killing people. That was still the easy part.”

Related: Israeli Father Recalls Panicked Phone Call Before His Wife and 2 Young Girls Were Kidnapped and Taken to Gaza

After running for almost two miles, Bromberg, his friends and a group of strangers stopped and hid in the bushes. “We were 10 people there with no water or food, seven hours where we're laying in the bushes and bombs are literally flying and falling right next to us and we can hear the ricochets, and machine guns keep shooting toward us,” Bromberg recounts. “[People] were having panic attacks, throwing up, shaking, not knowing what's going on . . . I was staying super optimistic for others but I was prepared to die.”

Bromberg and the people he was hiding with were not rescued by the overwhelmed police or army — “we tried to call help, no one came to help us” — but one of the fathers of the 10-person group came to rescue them. “He came from a city over an hour away in his big truck. Him and his friend came with handguns to a war zone because no one came to rescue us.”

The group squeezed into the car and drove to a nearby gas station where they saw many “wounded and dead people” surrounding them. “That was the hardest part for me to see,” Bromberg says.

Bromberg says that compared to others he knows, his experience "is still pretty gentle . . . I have friends that watched Hamas cut off people’s heads next to them,” he says. “I have friends that have been kidnapped, friends that have been killed."

One of Bromberg's good friends, Shani Luke, was kidnapped at the festival and seen in a video released on Oct. 7 lying naked and unconscious in a pickup truck headed towards the Gaza Strip.

Related: CBS Mornings' Tony Dokoupil Says His Children in Israel Are Safe amid Hamas Attacks: 'Roller Coaster Weekend'

Only one day after returning from the festival, Bromberg was sent back to the Israeli army after previously serving: “I got called up and I slept one night, got all of my army equipment and went right away.”

Though it was a fast turnaround and not enough time to process what happened to him, Bromberg is happy to be with his friends. “Me and my buddies are here, so I think this is the best place for me to be after something like this, and not at home watching the news.”

While grappling with the tragedy of what is happening in Israel, to both Israelis and Palestinians, Bromberg hopes for the day that they can find peace.

“At the end of the day, I would love peace,” he tells PEOPLE. “Me and whoever surrounds me, we were brought up in this world to love, to care, to take care.” But in order to find that peace, he says, people have to take into account all perspectives. “If you actually care about a conflict, you have to listen to both sides. You have to actually hear what people have to say and what people went through… I want peace in my lifetime.”

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Read the original article on People.