Three years after Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre, a long stretch of highway in southern Israel remains a haunting open-air memorial, marking where festivalgoers’ desperate attempts to escape ended in slaughter.

The highway, Route 232, was the only way out of the Nova music festival — but for hundreds fleeing the attack, it became a road to tragedy as its roadside bomb shelters turned into death traps and surrounding fields into killing grounds.

As rockets flew overhead, terrified revelers streamed onto Route 232, where concrete bomb shelters built to protect civilians from rocket attacks are as ubiquitous as bus stops.

Some crammed inside, believing they had found refuge. Others abandoned their cars and scattered across the countryside, desperately searching for cover.

Hamas gunmen hunted them down, firing into the shelters, hurling grenades through their narrow entrances, and then pursuing and ambushing those who fled on foot and by car.

Today, the highway is referred to by locals who spoke to The Post as “Death Road” — a sprawling, miles-long memorial where one bullet-riddled shelter gives way to another, their walls covered with smiling portraits of the dead, flowers and handwritten tributes.

Beyond the asphalt, makeshift shrines dot the fields where people were gunned down trying to escape. 

At the nearby Nova festival grounds, photographs stand where thousands once gathered to dance, while faded “Bring Them Home” posters still hang from residential gates.

Together, the memorials trace the extraordinary reach of the massacre, marking the places where people were murdered across miles of roads and farmland.

Nearly 300 people were killed along a 33-mile stretch of Route 232 and connecting roads, including festivalgoers, motorists, cyclists, farmworkers and police officers, according to the October 7 Parliamentary Commission Report.

Among those who escaped was Israeli-American Gilad Karplus, 34, who was shot in the head while fleeing through the fields.

“People scattered to all different places for survival,” he told The Post. “Most of our survival story is off-road.”

A road with nowhere to run

Karplus had not come to Nova to party.

“I was a professional who came to work at the festival as a masseuse, to heal people,” he said.

“On the morning of the attacks I saw my entire childhood area, where I grew up, going in flames while at the festival.”

When rockets began raining down, Karplus and his friends packed their massage equipment into a Jeep.

But moments later, Karplus, who had served in the Israeli special forces, soon recognized the distinctive sound of AK-47 gunfire.

“They were shooting, and before I noticed, all these kids around me just fell to the ground,” he recalled.

He jumped into the car with friends, beginning a desperate escape through a landscape swarming with terrorists.

Rather than follow the crowds onto the highway, he urged his friend to drive through the surrounding fields.

“I was thinking they were going to attack more people on the road, which was correct, and in the kibbutzim,” he said.

“So I told my friend to drive off-road.”

But the danger was everywhere.

“Then we found there were also terrorists off-road,” he continued.

As they drove, Karplus recalled finding an apparently attacked military vehicle, with blood on its exterior.

He retrieved an M16 rifle but said it was too badly overheated to fire.

Shooting, screams and smoke surrounded them.

“Just for a moment, time stood still, and it was like time died,” he said.

At one point, gunmen in pickup trucks approached while some of the group were outside the Jeep.

Karplus and the others tried to draw the attackers away so their friends could hide.

“They just started chasing us towards the fence of Gaza,” he said.

One friend was abducted into Gaza and later killed, according to Karplus.

The remaining group sped through agricultural land, only to encounter more attackers near Kibbutz Be’eri.

“They came from both sides,” he recalled.

“They shot at us, and one of the bullets hit my side of the car, and I was shot in the back of the head through the side.”

He remained conscious, using his hat to stem the bleeding while clutching the useless weapon.

“I did not feel any pain because of adrenaline,” he said.

“It was crazy, and I felt like I was going to die.”

Eventually, the group found refuge in a bathroom next to a bicycle shop, where they hid for six and a half hours.

“For the entire 6.5 hours, we could hear them; they just didn’t know we were there,” he said.

“I told [my friend] to breathe through her nose to not attract sound.”

His thoughts turned to his grandmother, a Holocaust survivor.

“I was just thinking of her and what she’s been through,” he said.

When Israeli soldiers finally reached them, the devastation outside was almost incomprehensible.

“There was just unimaginable death and carnage, cars burned and blood on the road,” Karplus recalled.

The shelters that became death traps

Along Route 232, the most chilling memorials are also the simplest.

Built to protect civilians from rocket fire, the door-less roadside shelters offered little defense against gunmen attacking at close range.

At one near Re’im Junction, 22-year-old Aner Shapira repeatedly threw grenades back through the entrance as Hamas attackers targeted those hiding inside.

He was eventually killed.

Among those abducted from the shelter was 23-year-old Israeli-American Hersh Goldberg-Polin, whose arm was partially blown off during the attack. He was murdered in captivity in Gaza in 2024.

At the Be’eri Junction shelter, other festivalgoers were slaughtered after seeking refuge.

Today, their photographs crowd the concrete walls, flowers and personal belongings piled beneath them.

These are not monuments erected somewhere convenient. They stand where the killing happened — beside an otherwise ordinary highway where traffic continues to pass.

Where the dancing stopped

At the Nova festival grounds near Re’im, the roadside tributes give way to a vast field of remembrance.

Photographs stand across the site, including the former dance-floor area, showing young men and women laughing, smiling and embracing before their lives were violently cut short.

Bereaved relatives return to stand before familiar faces, some overcome with tears even outside anniversary commemorations.

Among the memorial’s most disturbing exhibits is an ordinary yellow rubbish container.

When the attack began, terrified festivalgoers climbed inside and concealed themselves among the rubbish bags.

According to the memorial’s account, they hid for hours until a gunman entered at 11:47 a.m. and opened fire.

Nine people inside were murdered and seven survived.

The original container was recovered and returned to the festival site in August 2024.

Inside are photographs and messages sent by those hiding there — pleas for help, declarations of love and final farewells.

The fight to preserve the scars

The shelters’ future has become deeply contentious.

In June, Ynet reported that the Eshkol Regional Council was considering moving some to a formal memorial because of the dangers posed by visitors gathering beside busy roads.

Bereaved families fiercely opposed the proposal.

“We have to preserve them where they are,” Hila Abir, whose brother Lotan was killed at the Be’eri Junction shelter, told the outlet.

On the massacre’s third anniversary this week, Israel’s heritage minister declared the shelters national heritage sites, restricting their removal or alteration without professional approval, according to local media.

For Karplus, Route 232 remains too painful to fully revisit.

Three years after being shot in the head, he says he still lives with shrapnel and struggles to obtain adequate rehabilitation.

He now provides massage treatments to fellow survivors, returning to the healing work that brought him to Nova.

Yet despite living only half an hour away, he has never retraced his entire escape route.

“I haven’t been through the entire route of what I’ve been through,” he said.

For survivors, Death Road holds horrific memories.

For visitors, it’s a place to witness the scale of the slaughter, to stop at a shelter, read the names and try to comprehend what happened.

Traffic moves past. Flowers are replaced. New messages appear beneath the photographs.

But mile after mile, the faces of the dead remain — a heartbreaking record of those who escaped the festival, but not the massacre.