Survivors of the Hamas attack in the early hours of Saturday on an electronic music festival in Israel report a scene of violence and horror that left at least 260 dead.
Thousands of young people – men and women – gathered for a weekend music festival on a vast field in southern Israel, near the Gaza border, to dance without a care in the world.
However, the open-air music festival Tribe of Nova will go down in Israeli history as the country’s worst civilian massacre.
In the early hours of Saturday, Maya Alper stood at the back of the bar with teams of volunteers collecting rubbish and handing out free shots of vodka to festival goers who reused the glasses.
Shortly after 6 a.m. (local time), as dawn broke, air raid sirens cut through the music as rockets flew overhead.
Alper, 25, got into his car and ran onto the main road, only to encounter a crowd of festival goers shouting at drivers to turn around as gunshots that sounded like fireworks rang out.
Panicked men and women stumbling across the road fell to the ground in pools of blood.
Dozens of Hamas militants who crossed the heavily fortified separation wall into Israel from the Gaza Strip opened fire on young Israelis who had gathered for a joyful evening of electronic music.
Some participants were drunk or drugged, adding to the confusion and anxiety.
“We hid and ran in an open field, the worst place you could be in that situation,” said Arik Nani from Tel Aviv, who attended the party to celebrate his 26th birthday.
As rockets rained down, festival-goers said militants gathered in open fields while others waited at bomb shelters and shot at people seeking refuge.
Israeli communities on both sides of the festival site were also attacked, with Hamas gunmen abducting dozens of men, women and children – including the elderly and disabled – and killing dozens of others in the unprecedented surprise attack.
The festival’s toll only became clear Monday morning, when Israel’s rescue service revealed that paramedics had recovered at least 260 bodies.
Festival organizers said they are still helping Israeli security forces locate participants still missing.
The death toll could rise if crews continue to clear the festival site.
As the carnage unfolded before him, Alper pulled some disoriented partygoers into his car and sped off in the opposite direction.
One of them said he lost his wife in the chaos and Alper had to stop him from getting out of the car to look for her.
Another person said she had just seen Hamas gunmen shoot and kill her best friend; another muttered over and over, “We’re dying.”
Nowhere was safe: the roar of explosions, shouts and automatic weapons fire seemed closer as she drove, when a man a few meters away shouted, “God is great!”, prompting Alper and his new companions to get out of the car and running through open terrain. fields towards behind some bushes.
Alper felt a bullet pass her left ear, aware that the armed men would catch up with her and force her to dive further into the bushes.
For more than six hours, Alper – and thousands of other concertgoers – hid without help from the Israeli army, while Hamas militants fired automatic weapons and threw grenades.
Alper, an Israeli army tank instructor, knew she was safe when she heard a different kind of explosion: the sound of an Israeli army tank coming to her aid.
Alper said the Israeli army, which had arrived to fight Hamas militants in the Be’eri kibbutz near the Gaza border, did not know what to do with it.
At that moment, a truck full of Palestinian citizens of Israel stopped: men from the Bedouin town of Rahat searched the area to help rescue the Israeli survivors, helped Alper into the car and took her to a police station, where she ended up. crying in the arms of her father, who came looking for her.
“This is not just war. This is hell,” Alper said, recalling the events of Saturday morning.
Source: DN
