Actor Nushrratt Bharruccha, who recently returned to India from Israel, took to Instagram on Tuesday to detail the ordeal she faced as the country broke into a full-blown war against the Palestinian militant group Hamas.
On an expansive note, the actor informed that she, along with her producer and stylist, was in Israel’s Tel Aviv to attend the Haifa International Film Festival for the screening of her film Akelli. She wrote that after the film’s screening on October 3 and two days of visiting the historical places in Israel, they had ended their trip on October 6 after a celebratory dinner with the film’s cast. The group had plans of flying out on October 7 but couldn’t as war broke out in the nation. “We were woken up to the deafening sounds of bombs going off, a blaring siren, and complete and utter panic as we were all rushed down into a ‘shelter’ in the basement of our hotel. It was only when we emerged from in there, after what seemed like an endless wait, that we learnt that Israel was under attack. Nothing could have prepared us for this news,” she wrote.
The actor further detailed the tense situation she found herself in. “In a state of complete terror, our first impulse was to somehow reach the Indian Embassy, situated barely 2 km from our hotel, but a distance that seemed impossible to cover without any mode of transport whatsoever and only the dreadful sounds of explosions at very close range. We were then informed that Hamas militants had infiltrated several cities in Israel and were also out now on the roads, pulling civilians out of their homes and shooting people at random. Furthermore, there was open fire on vehicles on the roads, and the situation out on the streets was ‘extremely dangerous’. Just then, we heard a second siren go off and were rushed back down into the basement shelter,” she added.
The actor also stated that it was a race against time for them as flights were soon going to be cancelled, and Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport would be shut down. “Phone batteries were fast running out, and we were also beginning to lose cell network,” she wrote.
“Our journey out of our Tel Aviv hotel was not easy, to put it mildly… praying the whole time, even crying sometimes, we held onto each other for courage to keep on going, somehow making it to Ben Gurion Airport. The wait between one formality to the next for boarding a flight has never been more excruciating…what would otherwise have been routine was an uncertain and completely unpredictable few hours, to say the very least…surreal is a very weak word to describe how exactly we felt when we were finally airborne,” she added.
Nushrratt went on to thank the Government of India, the Indian Embassy and the Israeli Embassy for their support. She also said that the “experience has made me immensely grateful for the safety and security that we almost take for granted.”
In Akelli, the actor plays a girl who gets stuck in Iraq as war breaks out in the country.