Yuval Raphael is the winner of the Rising star 2025 finale and will represent Israel in the Eurovision. (credit: Ortal Dahan Ziv/Keshet 12)
Yuval Raphael, a survivor of the Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023, has been chosen to represent the country in this year's Eurovision Song Contest, which takes place between May 13 and 17 in Basel, Switzerland.
The 24-year-old singer, from Ra'anana, north of Tel Aviv, won the Rising Star show on Wednesday with a rendition of Abba's "Dancing Queen", earning her the top spot. representative of Israel at the festival.
Yuval was at the Nova music festival, one of the first venues in southern Israel to be attacked by Hamas on the morning of October 7, 2023. The attack left more than 1,200 people dead and 250 people taken hostage.
Yuval Raphael revealed that she managed to escape the attack alive by hiding in a bomb shelter and lying under dead bodies, and was later rescued about eight hours later by Israeli police.
Advocacy for Nova survivors
In March 2024, Raphael joined the Jerusalem Institute of Justice at the United Nation, in Geneva to give testimony of her experience hiding in the far corner of the public bomb shelter just outside Kibbutz Be’eri with around 50 other festival attendees.
She spoke about being trapped under the dead body of another young woman for eight hours, playing dead. “I can’t explain how heavy a body becomes when it is dead,” she said.
The singer qualified for Eurovision at the HaKokhav HaBa contest on Wednesday night, January 22, where she sang a version of ABBA's Dancing Queen and dedicated it to "all the angels" who were killed at the festival. “Music is one of the strongest ingredients in my healing process.”
Source: Correio da Manhã, The Jerusalem Post
