Killing of Shani Louk

On 7 October 2023, during the Hamas-led attack on Israel that included a massacre of attendees at the Supernova Sukkot Gathering music festival near Re'im, Shani Nicole Louk, a 22-year-old German-Israeli tattoo artist and Instagram influencer, was killed while attempting to flee the festival grounds. Louk had been at the festival with her boyfriend, Orión Hernández Radoux, and had spoken to her mother by phone during the attack, saying she was searching for a place to hide.

Hours after the attack began, a video circulated online showing Louk's body, partially clothed and with a visible head injury, being paraded through the streets of Gaza City in the back of a pickup truck by Hamas militants, who were joined by cheering onlookers, some of whom spat on the body. Security experts described the footage, part of a wider wave of videos showing hostages and bodies, as deliberate propaganda intended to demoralize and humiliate. The video became one of the first viral images of the Gaza war and was widely discussed, including in relation to content moderation on Twitter, which prompted a European Commission investigation into the platform on 12 October 2023. A related photograph taken by an Associated Press freelance photojournalist as the truck returned to Gaza was later included in an award-winning series of war photographs, and the circumstances of its creation became the subject of civil lawsuits filed by Louk's family and others against the AP and Reuters in Israel and the United States; a U.S. lawsuit was rejected in December 2024.

In the weeks following the attack, Louk's mother, Ricarda Louk, publicly stated she had received information suggesting her daughter was alive and receiving treatment at a hospital in Gaza, and she appealed to German officials, including Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock and Chancellor Olaf Scholz, for assistance. German authorities initially counted Louk among their nationals believed to have been taken hostage. On 30 October 2023, German and Israeli authorities confirmed Louk's death after forensic examiners identified a fragment of her skull, bearing her DNA, on a road leading out of the festival site, indicating she had been killed before her body was taken to Gaza. Statements by Israeli President Isaac Herzog describing her as "decapitated" were later clarified by his spokesperson, though the claim continued to circulate.

On 17 May 2024, Israeli forces recovered Louk's body from a tunnel in the Gaza Strip, alongside the remains of three other people, two of whom were also festival victims. She was buried on 19 May 2024 in her hometown of Srigim. Her family has since promoted an exhibition of her artwork in Tel Aviv and encouraged people to use her tattoo designs in her memory.