The parents of Sunny Luke, the 23-year-old tattoo artist whose body was recovered from Gaza months after she was killed in the October 7 Hamas attack in southern Israel, are shocked.

Sunny Luke’s father said his daughter’s rest will be a gift. “She really looks like she’s alive“, the 23-year-old’s father, Nissim Luke, told the New York Post, adding that the young woman’s body was probably “in one of the tunnels that was very, very cold.”

In any case, Sani’s parents expressed their relief that their daughter’s body was returned to Israel.

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“The army came and told us that Sani’s body was found and taken back to Israel. We are glad she is back and we can give her a proper burial. It’s a small relief that we know where her body is and that she will be here in Israel buried,” said Sunny’s mother Ricarda Luke.

Luke, a 23-year-old tattoo artist, was partying with friends at the Nova music festival before she was attacked by gunmen from the Palestinian militant group. Her body appeared in a video, in the back of a truck, parading in Gaza surrounded by gunmen.

On Friday, the Israeli military informed her parents, Nissim and Ricarda Luke, that their daughter’s body had been found by Israeli commandos in Gaza. Nissim Luke said that to be sure, he had seen pictures.

“We also saw the tattoos on her hands,” he said on Saturday. “Now she’ll have her own place next to us and we can go there whenever we want. And she can rest.”

She said the funeral will take place on Sunday, which is the birthday of her mother, Ricardo Luke.

“I think Sunny said ‘let’s give my mother a birthday present and come back to her,'” he added. Having Sunny’s grave nearby is a comfort, said Ricardo Luke. “Maybe we’ll find more peace,” she added.

Nissim Luk said she is also comforted by the fact that Sunny was doing what she loved most before she died and probably didn’t suffer. She was pronounced dead by Israeli authorities in late October, based on findings at the Nova rave site, where more than 360 people were shot, stabbed or burned to death.

Videos of a smiling Sunny at the party, before the attack, made the rounds on the internet in the following weeks.

“She was dancing all night. She was so happy,” Nissim Luke said. “She never thought there was any harm in the world because she was a free spirit. She only saw it for a few seconds.”

Ricardo Luke said she was pained by the ignorance and misinformation she sees in some protests on US college campuses against Israel’s war on Gaza.

“It’s horrible to see,” he said. “We can tell you from our own experience. We lost our daughter in this carnage.” “There is no resistance that justifies what happened here,” he said.