Celebrating "Friends, Love and Infinite Freedom" in Israel

"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."

Publicity for The Tribe of Nova trance music festival

 

"We heard sirens and rockets, tons of rockets. We started running; we didn't now where to go. Nobody knew what to do."

"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."

"The people who stayed, most of them got kidnapped or murdered."

"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."

"We stayed silent and tried to reach the police. The police said they can't help us because too many people were kidnapped."

Millet Ben Haim, 27, music festival attendee, Israel

"We heard shots. There were cars with corpses on top of them that blocked the road. We couldn't get out."

"There were about seven to eight terrorists, and they started to shoot at us in our car."

"It's clear that there was a failure here. Now we need to get these people back who are missing. And to tell these people's stories."

Gal Raz, 31, music festival attendee, Israel

The aftermath of an attack on a music festival by Palestinian militants, near Kibbutz Reim in the Negev desert in southern Israel on October 8

 

It was billed as a night of dancing, a trance music festival, to celebrate "friends, love and infinite freedom". People were dancing, singing, the music thumped and thrummed. And just before dawn arcing through the sky over the thousands of revellers came the first rockets from Gaza, over the border. Many of the dancers took little notice of the explosions over the loud music. Accustomed to rockets from Gaza, others who did become aware shrugged them off. But not for long.

The music suddenly stopped. The thousands of young Israelis stopped dancing, snapping happy photos of the event and of each others' smiling faces. They felt a cold draft as a voice boomed over the loudspeakers over at the tented stages. "Guys, we have red alert" warned the voice. "Red alert!"

People swiftly began leaving, some jogging off, many looking at the white rocket flashes appearing in the sky just beginning to greet the dawn, as they ran. Videos showed they confused in appearance, but no one seemed to be panicking. Someone in black wearing a yellow safety vest directed crowds away from the stages. And soon the gunfire began. 

Located close to Kibbutz Re'im, the music festival became one of the initial targets the Hamas terrorists attacked in force, launching their surprise invasion of Israel in the early morning hours of Saturday as they overran the concert area, shooting into the crowd, pulling away as many hostages as they could manage. The terrorists had blocked roads, ambushed escaping cars, scouring the mostly open area for others to abduct.

When the ZAKA, an Israeli volunteer emergency response group arrived, they recovered an initial 260 bodies. Many people remain missing, according to the Israel Defense Forces. The figure has been put at over 100 by Israeli media, but it is growing, tragically. Hostages, states Hamas, are being held in tunnels and other secure locations in Gaza. If they are indeed being held in tunnels that will be an added complication since there will be plans to bomb the tunnels.

Survivors of the mass atrocity have been flooded with messages from other people frantically searching for their loved ones. Bodies were placed by the military in the back of a large refrigerated truck parked next to hundreds of abandoned cars. The shells of burned vehicles sat beside discarded tents, camping mats and coolers in one of the clearings. At a nearby intersection relatives searching for the missing said over a thousand people attended the event.  

Festivalgoers, however, estimate the true figure to be between 3,000 and 4,000 attendees. The exact location of the festival was not released until a few hours prior to the festival opening at 10 p.m. on Friday. Held five kilometres from the fence dividing Israel from the Gaza Strip, the festival was a ready target as the terrorists surged through a fence built with defensive materials and electronic devices, when explosives were used to blast through, enabling hordes of terrorists on foot, motorcycles and jeeps to enter Israel.

 

Instructions to attendees was to bring no firearms or sharp objects to the festival grounds. When the attack began, the ravers were tired, and defenceless, they were trapped in a wide-open area offering few places where they might conceal themselves from the relentless death-delivering search of the terrorists.  On the roads the terrorists were shooting at cars.

Those who tried to escape in their vehicles soon realized they couldn't get much further than a few hundred meters before they ran into groups of terrorists shooting at anything that moved. Abandoning their cars, the Israelis began running wildly, hoping to outrun their tormentors and find shelter somewhere, and as they ran passing vehicles with dead bodies. 

Ben Haim and her friends leaped out of their car and ran through the fields. Finally, she and two of her friends along with a stranger concealed themselves in a dense bush, covering their bodies with leaves. With her phone battery at two percent, after seven hours Ben Haim and her group were rescued by a local resident driving around with the intention of rescuing people. Raz was picked up eventually by the military.