Woman says she hid with child in freezer as gunmen attacked nearby Hanukkah event in Sydney

A woman who was at a nearby venue when gunmen opened fire at a Hanukkah event in Sydney, killing at least 11 people, says she hid with a child in a freezer as people fled the scene of the terror attack.

“My heart is still pounding very hard,” Livnat Avrahami, an Israeli citizen who grew up in Australia and was attending a bar mitzvah at a venue right next to where the attack was carried out, tells Channel 12 news.

They suddenly heard the gunfire, Avrahami continues, saying, “I was certain it was fireworks. I said, there’s no way, this is Australia, it doesn’t work like this here.”

“They started closing the doors of the venue, but we could hear the gunshots very clearly. And we suddenly realized that something had gone completely off the rails,” she says.

She says that children “started running in all directions — they weren’t with their parents at all,” leading her to run after one child who “was completely hysterical.”

“I took him and brought him into a cold-room freezer that was nearby. We went inside for a few minutes and we waited,” she says, until a woman who worked in the area came and directed them to leave, saying it wasn’t safe to stay.

“While the gunfire was still continuing,” she says, they ran about 150 meters to a nearby police station. Despite the station being so close by, local authorities did not seem to have a handle on the situation, she adds. “Everyone was screaming, everyone was in a state of hysteria.”

She says the shooting “went on for minutes,” and that nearly an hour after the attack began, friends of hers were still locked inside the bathrooms of a nearby hotel, and it took a long time until they were evacuated from the area with their children.

“I couldn’t believe this was happening — and that I was in Australia. I felt a kind of fear that I never felt in Israel, even with all our wars. I was simply in a state of hysteria. Honestly, it was horrific,” she says.