Nir Forti, 29: Slain just before his 30th birthday trip to Spain

Nir Forti, 29, a dual Italian-Israeli citizen from Omer, was murdered by Hamas terrorists at the Supernova music festival on October 7.

He attended the rave with his girlfriend, Shai Regev, who was also murdered that day.

His body was not identified for more than two weeks. He was finally buried on October 25 in Omer — just a few days before what should have been his 30th birthday.

He is survived by his parents, Tova and Eli, and his three older sisters, Efrat, Michal and Tamar.

Nir did a year of national service at a kibbutz in the Arava before enlisting in the IDF and serving in the Nahal Brigade, according to Ynet. For the past two years, he was living in Tel Aviv and working at the med-tech startup TytoCare. Just a few weeks before they were both slain, Nir and Shai moved in together in Tel Aviv.

On what would have been his 30th birthday, Shai’s mother, Efi, shared a dedication that she found in Shai’s phone that she was planning to post that day: “The man that I will grow old with is taking a significant step toward our future today, and celebrating 30 years of perfection,” Shai wrote, not long before they were both killed. “The universe, and all of you, don’t know what angel is among us. Thank you for the biggest love my heart has known, for the humor that is only ours, for your ability to listen and accept and for your unwavering emotional intelligence. Nobody else has a great love like ours, but that’s something only we know.”

Nir’s close friend, Jonathan Lahat, told Ynet that “Nir and Shai were a happy and in-love couple, they were supposed to fly this month to Madrid to celebrate their relationship and his birthday,” he said. “Instead, we — his friends — celebrated without him at a bar in Tel Aviv with beer and a lot of tears.”

Lahat said that in his current job, “Nir was praised and promoted very quickly, and he also registered for philosophy studies and was satisfied with his ability to successfuly combine all of his loves. He was in the best time of his life, and everything was cut short in one fell swoop.”

His mother, Tova, told Channel 12 news that Nir “was in the midst of an incredible time in his life, he had been wandering between different sales job abroad and when he returned to Israel, he was accepted to TytoCare and really succeeded and got alot of praise and a raise in salary.” At the same time, she said, he “met his incredible girlfriend, and it looked like it was going to be serious, they were talking about forever, and the romance was blossoming.”

Tova said Nir “was a child who gave us so many moments of happiness, he was very, very social, even to the degree that at times we were annoyed that he dedicated so much time to his friends, but now we realize that he was the anchor for so many friends in different circles.”

Nir’s sister, Tamar, wrote on Facebook on January 1 that “I cannot accept that your heart is no longer beating.”

“I am flooded with waves of pain that hurt my chest — maybe in the same exact place they shot you,” she wrote. “I move around in circles and always return to the same spot — longing for your voice, your smell, your laugh, for the Nir who was mine.”

Tamar wrote that Nir “was left behind like a pillar of salt in cursed soil, and I am continuing forward in time to 2024, clinging to crumbs of spirit and corporeality, telling myself a story that will ease my mind. But you’re not here with me, in what is left of life. And all that I can do is to hallucinate you.”

Read more Those We Have Lost stories here.