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A few months later, he’s hosting tours of the place where he narrowly escaped death and lost three of his closest friends.
Although mentally exhausted, Moussaei returned to the scene of her trauma at least three times a week to earn a few hundred dollars at a time to pay her mortgage, support her two children and help support a friend’s orphaned children.
“I’m in a situation where I have to make a living,” he told Business Insider. “I have to provide for my family. I’ve been unemployed for over six months.”
On October 7, 2023, a Hamas attack on Israel killed more than 1,000 people (mostly civilians), with the Nova Music Festival being the venue with the highest number of casualties.
Israel retaliated against Gaza, according to the UN. More than 35,000 Palestinians were killed.
As a result, many tourists Vacation canceled and Major airlines halt flights to Israel The end result was that Moussaei and other tour guides like him were left without an income.
Moussaei said after two years of booked tours were cancelled, he was now trying to eke out a living by guiding small groups of tourists to the site of the October 7 atrocities.
BI spoke to four tour guides who said this form of dark tourism was their only way to make a living.
The burden is heavy, but they feel they have few other options.
Danny Herman, who runs “Danny the Digger” tours, was recently hospitalized with high blood pressure but believes it was caused by the psychological stress of repeatedly visiting “death scenes.”
“I had no intention of going to meet them,” he told BI, “but I realised that this was the only product in demand at the moment to make a living, so I decided to go.”
For many years, Herman has led tours to the Dead Sea, Jerusalem and other religious and archaeological sites.
He said demand for such tours has fallen to virtually zero, but that tours to the Gaza Envelope, the Israeli territory within about four miles of the Gaza Strip border, are fully booked for next week.
“I never thought I’d go on these kinds of tours, as I call them, ‘Holocaust tours,'” he said. “It’s like going to Auschwitz or Yad Vashem, and it’s something I never thought I’d do and I wish I hadn’t.”
Herman said many visitors want to witness history, pay their respects and maybe even volunteer.
But there is no escaping the harsh reality, he noted: roadside memorials to those who died, the sounds of distant artillery fire, tanks passing by and smoke rising into the sky over Gaza.
Ali Melnick, another tour guide, said that’s an attraction for some tourists.
“If you tell people there’s a bombing going on, some people will panic and some people want to hear that,” he told BI.
“They might be disappointed if they don’t hear it,” Melnick added.
Melnick said he was comfortable taking tourists to the Gaza border and educating them about current events, but he was uneasy about certain aspects of the tours.
He said he knows the victims do not want their community to become a “zoo” and he doesn’t know how to respectfully show people the kibbutz with its burnt-out homes and cars.
“It’s not a question of if we’re going to get there, it’s a question of how we’re going to get there,” he said.
Another source of anxiety, he said, is how much to charge.
Melnick said he’s been short on funds for months, but he lets tour participants decide how much they want to pay.
“We’ve been flexible because we’ve been nervous about charging for this,” he said.
Another tour guide, Slava Bazarski, collects a fee and asks for a donation to the local kibbutz.
He said he didn’t want to charge but had no other choice.
“We have to do something to survive,” he told BI.
He added: “Whether you like it or not, you have a family, you have children. It’s uncomfortable, it’s unpleasant, it’s hard, but it has to be done.”
Even after pivoting, he says his business is still struggling.
Bazarsky said he has received “only 10 percent” of the tour bookings he had for the same time last year.
Bazarsky said even if demand and tourism increases, the number of tours must be limited because doing them too frequently can be traumatic.
But for Moussaei, a survivor-turned-tour guide, the visits several times a week have provided unexpected comfort.
“For me it’s trauma therapy,” he says. “Every time I talk about my experience it’s another opportunity to process it.”