Day: October 10, 2023
The first rockets were fired just before dawn, arcing through the sky over thousands of revelers 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.
A voice boomed from the loudspeakers over the tented stages and the chill-out area that organizers described as a “playground for adults.”
“Guys, we have red alert,” the voice warned. “Red alert.”
Videos verified by The Washington Post show people leaving hurriedly, a few jogging, many glancing back to look at the white rocket flashes in the lightening sky. They appear confused but not panicked.
A person dressed in black with a yellow safety vest was directing 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. Festivalgoers described how the gunmen blocked roads, ambushed escaping cars and scoured the area looking for people to kidnap.
At least 260 bodies were recovered from the concert site Sunday, according to ZAKA, a volunteer emergency response group in Israel. Across the country, at least 700 people have been 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. Survivors have been inundated with messages from people who are still looking for their loved ones.
The festival’s organizers have not responded to requests for comment but posted a message on 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.
At the site of the rave Sunday, Israeli soldiers put bodies in the back of a large refrigerated truck parked next to hundreds of abandoned cars. In one clearing, the shells of burned vehicles sat 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. Some festivalgoers estimated the true figure was closer to 3,000 or 4,000.
The attendees had not been given the exact location of the festival until a few hours before it began at 10 p.m. Friday. “The event will take place in a powerful natural location full of trees, stunning in its beauty and organized for your convenience, about an hour and a quarter south of Tel Aviv,” ticket buyers were told in the lead-up.
The festival was held just three miles from the fence that divides Israel from the Gaza Strip and its roughly 2 million inhabitants. The ravers were told not to bring firearms or sharp objects onto the festival grounds. They were tired and defenseless when the attack began, 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.”
Cars were being shot at on the roads and there were gunmen everywhere, she said.
Gal Raz, 31, also tried to drive away with his friends when he realized the area was overrun.
“We heard shots. There were cars with corpses on top of them that blocked the road,” he said. “We couldn’t get out.”
They got in another friend’s car but were quickly ambushed.
“There were about seven to eight terrorists, and they started to shoot at us in our car,” he said.
They drove on for a few hundred meters and then abandoned the car, running past another with several dead bodies next to it. As he hid, Raz thought about his girlfriend, whom he is planning to marry, and about his family.
“It’s clear that there was a failure here,” he said. “Now we need to get these people back who are missing. And to tell these people’s stories.”
Ben Haim and her friends had also jumped out of their car and were running 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 realized I couldn’t run anymore.”
She and two friends and a stranger lay down in a bush and covered themselves with leaves.
“We stayed silent and tried to reach the police. The police said they can’t help us because too many people were kidnapped.”
After seven hours, with her phone battery at 2 percent, Ben Haim was picked up by a local resident who was driving around trying to rescue people. Raz was eventually picked up by the military.
Help didn’t arrive in time for Noa Argamani, 25, who was hiding in the bushes with her boyfriend, Avinatan Or. Or messaged Argamani’s father around 10 a.m. 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.
The Post wasn’t able to independently confirm the location of the video, but the geography and sunlight are consistent with other visuals from the scene.
“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, whom she last heard from shortly before 7 a.m. Saturday, might be among the hostages. Dorin told her mother the area was under attack and she was looking for shelter.
Atias has posted on social media and called her daughter’s friends to try to find out what happened to her, to no avail. “We don’t know what’s going on” or “what to do,” she said.
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 flecked with eyeliner.
“She loved to party,” said her cousin Tom Weintraub Louk, 30. Family members desperately tried reaching Louk and her Mexican boyfriend when the news broke.
Then they saw the video posted online.
“We recognized 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 her cousin appears lifeless, the family is still holding out for news. “We have some kind of hope,” Louk said.
Morris reported from Berlin, Piper from London, Lee from Washington and George from southern Israel. Shira Rubin in Brussels, Meg Kelly and Sarah Cahlan in Washington, Samuel Oakford in New York and Annabelle Timsit in London contributed to this report.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The night was a getaway. Thousands of young men and women gathered at a vast field in southern Israel near the Gaza border to dance without a care. Old and new friends jumped up and down, reveling in the swirl of the bass-heavy beats.
Maya Alper was standing toward the back of the bar with teams of environmentally conscious volunteers, picking up trash and passing out free vodka shots to party-goers who reused their cups. Just after 6.a.m., as a light-blue dawn broke and the headliner D.J. took the stage, air raid sirens cut through the ethereal trap music. Rockets streaked overhead.
Alper, 25, jumped into her car and raced to 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.
The open-air Tribe of Nova music festival will go down in Israeli history as the worst civilian massacre in the country’s history, with at least 260 dead and a still undetermined number taken hostage. Dozens of Hamas militants who had blown through Israel’s heavily fortified separation fence and crossed into the country from Gaza opened fire on about 3,500 young Israelis who had come together for a joyous night of electronic music to celebrate the Jewish holiday of Sukkot. Some attendees were drunk or high on drugs, magnifying their confusion and terror.
The Associated Press reviewed more than dozen videos taken during the massacre and interviewed survivors to reconstruct how the deadly attack unfolded. The party was held in a dusty field outside of Kibbutz Re’im, about 3.3 miles (5.3 kilometers) from the wall that separates Gaza from southern Israel.
“We were hiding and running, hiding and running, in an open field — the worst place you could possibly be in that situation,” said Arik Nani from Tel Aviv, who had gone to the party to celebrate his 26th birthday. “For a country where everyone in these circles knows everyone, this is a trauma like I could never imagine.”
While rockets rained down, revelers said, militants converged on the festival site while others waited near bomb shelters, gunning down people who were seeking refuge. Many of the militants, who arrived in trucks and on motorcycles, were wearing body armor and brandishing AK-47 assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades.
Videos compiled by Israeli first responders and posted to the social media site Telegram show armed men plunging into the panicked crowd, mowing down fleeing revelers with bursts of automatic fire. Many victims were shot in the back as they ran.
Israeli communities on either side of the festival grounds also came under attack, with Hamas gunmen abducting dozens of men, women and children — including elderly and disabled people — and killing scores of others in Saturday’s unprecedented surprise attack.
The staggering toll from the festival was becoming clear Monday, as Israel’s rescue service Zaka said paramedics had recovered at least 260 bodies. Festival organizers said they were helping Israeli security forces locate attendees who were still missing. The death toll could rise as teams continue to clear the area.
As the carnage unfolded before her, Alper pulled a few disoriented-looking revelers 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 rear-view mirror, Alper watched the dance floor where she had spent the past ecstatic hours transform into a giant cloud of black smoke.
Festival-goers who managed to make it to the road and parking lot where their vehicles were parked found themselves trapped in a traffic jam, with militants stalking the cars and spraying those inside with gunfire. Drone footage of the scene taken after the attack and reviewed by the AP show chaotic lines of cars where drivers had attempted to flee. Some burned-out vehicles were flipped onto their sides, while others had bullet holes visible in shattered windows.
Nowhere was safe, Alper said. The roar of explosions, hysterical screams and automatic gunfire felt closer the further she drove. When a man just meters away shouted “God is great!”, Alper and her new companions sprung out of the car and sprinted through open fields toward a mass of bushes.
Alper felt a bullet whiz past her left ear. Aware the gunmen would outrun her, she plunged into a tangle of shrubs. Peering through thorns, she said she saw one of her passengers, the girl who had lost her friend, shriek and collapse as a gunman stood over her limp body, grinning.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared war against Hamas Saturday after the Palestinian militant group launched a surprise attack on Israel, which the IDF says left at least 700 dead and thousands injured.
“I can’t even explain the energy they (the militants) had. It was so clear they didn’t see us as human beings,” she said. “They looked at us with pure, pure hate.”
Videos show the gunmen executed some of the wounded at point-blank range as they crouched on the ground. Some of the militants even rifled through the vehicles of their victims, grabbing purses and backpacks.
An unknown number of people from the festival were taken hostage. A video posted to social media by militants and verified by the AP shows an Israeli couple, Noa Argamani and her partner Avinatan Or, being dragged away by their captors.
Argamani, her face contorted in panic, shouts “No, no!” in Hebrew while being forced onto a motorbike, sandwiched between two gunmen. She reaches out for Or, whose hands are bound behind his back as a group of militants march him forward.
Their whereabouts are now unknown. But it is believed that Hamas is now holding more than 100 Israelis as hostages. On Monday, the group threatened to begin systematically killing captives if the Israeli military bombs Palestinian areas without warning.
For over six hours, Alper and thousands of other concert attendees hid without help from the Israeli army as Hamas militants sprayed automatic gunfire and threw grenades.
Her limbs were so contorted into a tangled mess in the bush that she couldn’t wiggle her toes. At different points, she heard militants speak in Arabic just beside her. A yoga devotee who practices meditation, Alper said she focused on her breath — “breathing and praying in every way I knew possible.”
“Every time I thought of anger, or fear or revenge, I breathed it out,” she said. “I tried to think of what I was grateful for — the bush that hid me so well that even birds landed on it, the birds that were still singing, the sky that was so blue.”
A tank instructor in the Israeli army, Alper knew she was safe when she heard a different kind of explosion — the sound of an Israeli army tank round. She shouted for help and soon soldiers were lifting her out of the bush. Around her lay the lifeless body of one of her friends. The girl from her car she had seen collapse was nowhere to be found; she believes that Hamas militants took her into Gaza.
Alper said the Israeli army, on its way to fight Hamas militants in the hard-hit kibbutz of Be’eri near the Gaza border, was at a loss as to know what to do with her.
At that moment, a pick-up truck full of Palestinian citizens of Israel pulled up. The men from the Bedouin city of Rahat were scouring the area to help rescue Israeli survivors. Helping Alper into their car, they drove her to the police station, where she collapsed, crying, into her father’s arms.
“This is not just war. This is hell,” Alper said. “But in that hell I still feel that somehow, we can choose to act out of love, and not just fear.”