The details of the massacre are revealed hour by hour, as the conflict continues to rage this Monday. On Saturday October 7, the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas launched a surprise attack against Israel from the Gaza Strip which it controls. A conflict declared fifty years and one day after the start of the Israeli-Arab war of 1973, in a context of strong tensions between the Israeli far-right government and the Palestinian populations of Gaza and the West Bank. According to the latest figures from AFP this Monday morning, more than 700 Israelis and 436 Palestinians have been killed since the start of the offensive.
After thousands of rocket attacks between the two territories and around a hundred hostage-takings of Israeli civilians by the Palestinian movement, the astonishment of the first hours gave way to fear on Saturday: five kilometers from the Gaza Strip, More than 250 attendees of a music festival were found dead after a Hamas attack. Story of a dark morning for the Jewish state.
From joy to terror in minutes
The lighthearted atmosphere of the festival gave way to horror early Saturday morning. 3,500 festival-goers celebrated the last night of dancing psychedelic trance festival Tribe of Novaorganized from October 6 to 7 near the kibbutz of Re’im, when the first Hamas rockets disrupted the party.
While Millet Ben Haim, 27, published at 6:29 a.m. on Instagram a smiling selfie of her and her friendanother video published two minutes later shows the first Hamas missiles crossing the sky, tells the American daily Washington Post. “At first, some partygoers did not notice the sound of the explosions above the loud music. Others, accustomed to the rockets launched from Gaza, ignored them,” the media said.
The music finally stops to give way to a “red alert” broadcast over the festival loudspeakers. In other videos verified by the Washington Post, we then see many participants “hurriedly” leaving the party by crossing the large flat expanses of the surrounding area on foot. A relative calm, quickly disturbed by the first gunshots. The festival then turns into a massacre: “We saw terrorists killing people, burning cars, shouting everywhere,” says festival-goer Shoam Gueta at the agency Associated Press.
Millet Ben Haim tells the American media that he had the chance to escape by car, before having to take refuge in the bushes with three other people without making any noise. Seven hours later, when the police had still not arrived, they were picked up by a local resident who came to rescue the festival-goers.
Festival-goers kidnapped?
If many participants managed to survive, recounting the long hours during which Hamas militants sought to flush out hidden festival-goers, others were not so lucky: according to a count by the Zaka organization, which specializes in first aid and the identification of corpses in accordance with Jewish law, around “200 to 250 bodies” were found on the festival site, spokesperson Moti Bukjin told AFP.
Beyond the deaths, the Israeli army estimates that dozens of people are still missing, according to the Washington Post. Other videos verified by the American media New York Times allow us to imagine their fate: in an extract of around twenty seconds posted on the Telegram messaging service, a young woman sitting on the back of a motorcycle screams while a group of men seem to take her by force onto the vehicle , while another prisoner is escorted on foot with his hands tied behind his back.
THE New York Times identifies them as “Noa Argamani, 25 years old” and her “boyfriend […] Avinatan Or”. According to messages sent around 10 a.m. and consulted by the media, the two Israeli festival-goers had time to hide from Hamas soldiers before being kidnapped. A few hours later, the family of the young woman identified him in another video where she appears detained in Gaza. An explanation for the disappearances from the festival which seems to be confirmed by Hamas: according to Washington Post, the movement claims that hostages “are being held in tunnels and other secure locations in Gaza.”