"This was a beautiful music festival - young men and women just having fun, celebrating the joy of life, the beauty of music, having an amazing time. This was entirely calculated by Hamas. It was sickening and evil.
“Antisemitism is a virus in the human bloodstream. Sometimes it's dormant beneath the floorboards for a hundred years, and over hundreds of years it’s been dormant. And sometimes it comes out - and it's out now, and it's horrific.
"People need to look at what happened on October 7th and understand the madness that's going on in the West right now, because it needs to end.
Reflecting on the exhibits themselves, which include personal items salvaged from the festival grounds, first-hand witness phone footage from the day, and in-person testimonies from survivors, returned hostages, and bereaved families, he added: "There were some things I find very hard to look at - some very graphic stuff, stuff I hadn't seen before.
"I'm here to pay my respects to the survivors, victims of the October 7 massacre, but also to stress how vital it is that people remember what happened and the sheer naked cruelty of what Hamas did to a lot of completely innocent, wonderful, happy young people.”
_(copy).jpg?f=3x2&w=732&q=0.6)
Boris Johnson with freed hostage Bar Kuperstein (R) and Nova survivor May Hayat (L) at the Nova Exhibition in London on July 14, 2026 (Nova Exhibition)[Missing Credit]
He also paid tribute to those behind the exhibition, saying: “I'm very grateful to everybody who's put on this exhibition, and particularly to the survivors and very, very brave relatives of people who were murdered relatives, whom I met today, who've had the courage to come and try to explain what happened.
"I think they've shown huge bravery in putting this exhibition on. It's been very important for me to come. Personally, I wish I'd come earlier. I think if you've got a spare hour, please come to this exhibition. People need to see what happened. And they need to be reminded because I think the horror is hard to appreciate unless you come.
“I think this exhibition is crucial to remind people of what actually happened. These are young people having fun at a great music festival.
"And then the unbearable horrors of what happened, driven by a demented ideology, I think any democratically elected politician of any country faced with this kind of suffering by the people of that country, would do everything in their power to stop happening again.”
Johnson’s visit comes just days after his successor as Mayor of London, Sir Sadiq Khan, toured the exhibition last week.
