The Israeli rescue service Zaka removed at least 260 civilian bodies from the site of a music festival near the Gaza border fence in southern Israel, which was attacked by Hamas militants on Saturday, Israeli media reported.
THE FIRST rockets were fired just before dawn, arcing through the sky over thousands of revellers who had been dancing through the night at a trance music festival – billed as an event celebrating “friends, love and infinite freedom”.
Initially, some of the ravers didn’t notice the sound of the explosions over the thumping music. Others, used to rockets from Gaza, shrugged them off.
“We heard sirens and rockets, tons of rockets,” said Millet Ben Haim, 27, who attended the festival with a group of friends, posing with one of them just minutes before the attack and sticking her tongue out for the camera.
Then the music stopped.
A voice boomed from the loudspeakers over the tented stages and the chill-out area that organisers described as a “playground for adults”.
“Guys, we have red alert,” the voice warned, in a video. “Red alert.”
Videos verified by The Post show people leaving hurriedly and in droves, a few jogging, many glancing back to look at the sky. “Everything okay,” a voice off camera says in English.
A person wearing a yellow safety vest, dressed in black directs crowds away from the stages.
Then the gunfire started.
“We started running; we didn’t know where to go,” Ben Haim said. “Nobody knew what to do.”
The Tribe of Nova trance music festival, near Kibbutz Reim, was one of the first targets for Hamas militants as they launched their unprecedented attack on Israel in the early hours of Saturday morning, overrunning the concert area, shooting into the crowd and grabbing as many hostages as they could.
At least 260 bodies have been recovered from the site, Zaka, a volunteer emergency response group in Israel, told local media on Sunday. Across the country, at least 600 people were killed. Dozens are still missing, according to the Israel Defense Forces; Israeli media has put the figure at more than 100. Hamas says hostages are being held in tunnels and other secure locations in Gaza. It remains unclear how many of them were taken from the festival.
Organisers have not responded to requests for comment, but posted a message on the festival’s Instagram saying they were “stunned” and “share the grief of the missing and murdered families”.
“We hope and pray that good news will reach us and you soon,” the post said.
Israeli forces began to collect the dead from the site of the rave on Sunday. Soldiers put bodies in the back of a large refrigerated truck parked next to hundreds of cars abandoned by partygoers. In one clearing, the shells of burned vehicles lay beside discarded tents, camping mats and coolers.
Relatives searching for the missing at a nearby intersection said more than a thousand people were at the event when the militants attacked.
The attendees had not been given the exact location of the festival until the day of the party. “The event will take place in a powerful natural location full of trees, stunning in its beauty and organised for your convenience, about an hour and a quarter south of Tel Aviv,” ticket buyers were told in the lead-up.
The festival site was just three miles from the fence that divides Israel from the Gaza Strip and its besieged millions. The ravers were told not to bring firearms or sharp objects onto the festival grounds. They were tired and defenceless, trapped in a wide-open area that offered few hiding places.
Ben Haim saw the militants in the distance, closing in on foot. “I took the car keys from a friend of mine that was really wasted and got as many people in the car as possible and started driving like crazy,” she said. “The people who stayed, most of them got kidnapped or murdered.”
But cars were being shot at on the roads and there were gunmen everywhere, she said.
Gal Raz, 31, thinks it was less than an hour after the attack began when it became clear the area was being overrun. He also started to drive out with a group of friends.
“We heard shots. There were cars with corpses on top of them that blocked the road,” he said. “We couldn’t get out.”
Ben Haim and her friends jumped out and started to run through the fields.
“Every direction we ran we had more people shooting at us; we were running for two hours trying to escape. We started crawling in bushes. Eventually I realised I couldn’t run anymore.”
She and her friends and a stranger lay down in a bush and covered themselves with leaves.
“We stayed silent and tried to reach the police and people to help us. The police said they can’t help us because too many people were kidnapped.”
Noa Argamani, 25, was also hiding in the bushes with her 29-year-old boyfriend Avinatan Or, who messaged Argamani’s father around 10am to let him know they were safe.
The couple were trying to reassure him, said Shlomit Marciano, 25, a childhood friend of Argamani’s. It was the last message the family received.
On Saturday, they saw the couple in a video circulating on Palestinian social media. It shows Argamani screaming as she is separated from her boyfriend and driven off on a motorcycle.
Or appears to have his hands bound and is pushed along by several young men.
“You can absolutely see it was her,” said Marciano, who is staying with Argamani’s parents. “I think I haven’t fully accepted it yet; I slept in her bed last night. It’s crazy.”
Argamani had debated not going to the festival, but not because of security concerns. “If she knew it was tense right now, then I think she wouldn’t have gone, but we knew nothing,” Marciano said. “She wasn’t sure because it was far and expensive. I told her, ‘Go, you’re young.’ I regret that.”
A later video appears to show Argamani being held captive, sitting on cushions in a room with a tiled floor, sipping from a bottle of water. “At least we know she’s alive,” Marciano said.
Others don’t have that assurance.
Tali Atias believes that her 23-year-old daughter Dorin who she last heard from shortly before 7am on Saturday might be among the hostages. She told her mother that the area was being attacked and that she was seeking shelter.
Atias has posted on on social media and called her daughter’s friends to find out where she is, but to no avail. “We don’t know what’s going on” or “what to do,” Atias
The family of Shani Louk feel similarly helpless. The 22-year-old posed for a mirror selfie just before parting for the rave, her long dreadlocks partially covered by a headscarf, looking coyly to the side, eyelids flicked with eyeliner.
“She loved to party,” said her cousin Tom Weintraub Louk, 30. Family members desperately tried reaching Louk and her Mexican boyfriend after news broke of the festival being overrun.
But then they saw the video posted online.
“We recognised her by the tattoos, and she has long dreadlocks,” Louk said.
In the video, the woman is facedown in the bed of the truck with four militants, apparently being paraded through Gaza. One holds her hair while another raises a gun in the air and shouts, “Allahu akbar!” A crowd follows the truck cheering. A boy spits in her hair.
While she appears lifeless, the family is still holding out for news. “We have some kind of hope,” Louk said.
– THE WASHINGTON POST
