How a night of music and dancing turned into Israel’s worst civilian massacre

It was supposed to be an all-night dance and music festival. Thousands gathered in a rural farmland near the Israel-Gaza border to celebrate the Jewish holiday of Sukkot. The Tribe of Nova trance music fest was dubbed as a celebration of “infinite freedom”. It’s where hundreds met death.

Festival-goers partied into the wee hours on Saturday. Videos showed young Israelis grooving to trance music. The first sound of explosions was drowned by the revelry. Then they saw rockets being launched from Gaza one after another, leaving many of them starled. And the music stopped.

A voice from loudspeakers warned. “Guys, we have red alert.”

People left hurriedly. A report in The Washington Post said that videos show people jogging as rockets flashed across the sky. Sounds of gunfire filled the air.

The attack on festival-goers

Hamas terrorists who had infiltrated the country from Gaza descended upon the celebrations. It was one of their first targets as they launched a surprise attack on Israel.

“The attack at the festival appeared to be not only premeditated but also highly coördinated. Videos uploaded by attendees showed the sky above them suddenly dotted with militants on hang gliders,” writes Ruth Margalit in The New Yorker.

The masked men began a massacre. They killed around 250 people who attended the outdoor event. “In the area where the party took place, and at the party itself” it could be estimated that “there were 200-250 bodies,” Moti Bukjin, a spokesman for the humanitarian NGO Zaka, was quoted as saying by AFP. He estimated the dead on the number of trucks that ferried away the corpses.

Ortel, who was at the festival, told Israel’s Channel 12, “Fifty terrorists arrived in vans, dressed in military uniforms.”

“They fired bursts, and we reached a point where everyone stopped their vehicles and started running. I went into a tree, a bush like this, and they just started spraying people. I saw masses of wounded people thrown around and I’m in a tree and trying to understand what’s going on,” she recalled.

Gunmen blocked roads as festival-goers tried to escape and they ambushed cars. As chaos reigned followed by terror, attendees started to run for their safety. “Everyone just started running in all directions. Nobody knew where to go,” Eliav Klein, who was the Tribe of Novat, told NBC News.

He said that a friend witnessed victims on their knees at gunpoint, while another jumped off a cliff as he was trying to run away from terrorists.

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Gunshots and pools of blood

Maya Alper, 25, was picking up trash with a team of environment-conscious volunteers when air raid sirens cut through the music. She jumped into the car and raced toward the main road. But at the intersection she encountered crowds of stricken festival attendees, shouting at drivers to turn around. Then, a noise. Firecrackers? Panicked men and women staggering down the road just in front of her fell to the ground in pools of blood. Gunshots, reports The Associated Press (AP).

As the carnage unfolded, Alper pulled a few disoriented-looking revellers into her car from the street and accelerated in the opposite direction. One of them said he had lost his wife in the chaos and Alper had to stop him from breaking out of the car to find her. Another said she had just seen Hamas gunmen shoot and kill her best friend. Another rocked in his seat, murmuring over and over, “We are going to die.” In the review mirror, Alper watched the dance floor where she had spent the past ecstatic hours transform into a giant cloud of black smoke.

Thirty-one-year-old Gal Raz narrated his ordeal. He was quoted as saying by The Washington Post that there were corpses on top of cars which blocked the road as they tried to get out. They got into a friend’s car but eight to ten terrorists started firing toward it. They drove a few hundred metres, then abandoned the car and ran past several bodies of revellers who fell victim to the Hamas terror.

Ben Haim saw the militants closing in and managed to escape. She took the car keys from an inebriated friend put as many people in the vehicle and left. “The people who stayed, most of them got kidnapped or murdered,” she told the publication.

Kidnappings and torture

Several Israelis are missing – at least 100, according to media reports. Hamas says the hostages are held in tunnels and other secure locations in Gaza. However, it is unclear how many of those kidnapped are from the festival.

The Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, Gilad Erdan, told NBC News that “few” Americans were at the festival.

Twenty-five-year-old Noa Argamani was there with her boyfriend, Avinatan Or. The couple appear to have been abducted by Hamas terrorists. They were seen in a video circulating on Palestinian social media. It shows the woman screaming and pleading for mercy as she is separated from Or. In the video, the man is seen being restrained by another group of terrorists, as Argamani is dragged away, the NBC News report says.

Families of several young Israelis who went to the festival but are now missing have been searching for them. Some have been recognised from videos posted online.

In a video, an unconscious woman was seen being displayed by armed militants in Gaza. Her identity was confirmed by CNN as Shani Louk, a German-Israeli dual national.

In the video, Louk is seen motionless. One gunman, carrying a rocket-propelled grenade, has his leg draped over her waist; the other holds a clump of her dreadlocks. “Allahu Akbar,” they cheer – meaning “God is great” in Arabic, reports CNN.

The grounds where the festival was held turned into a graveyard. Bukjin, who was clearing bodies, told AFP, “They butchered people in cold blood in an inconceivable way,” he said.

A night of revelry turned into a nightmare. It will go down in Israeli history as the country’s worst civilian massacre.

With inputs from agencies