Music festival was attacked by Hamas, 260 dead, their number is increasing (video and photos 18+)

More than 250 bodies of young people were found at the site of a music festival in Israel following a Hamas attack on Saturday. Miraculously, survivors talk about the tragedy.

How writes The Times of Israel, a spokesman for ZAKA, a volunteer group that recovers human remains after terrorist attacks and other disasters, said it had so far recovered more than 260 bodies from the site of a music festival in the south of the country. Many parents of young people have been desperately searching for news about their missing children since Saturday. Testimonies of eyewitnesses of the tragedy, presented The BBC is like a horror movie script.

For weeks, music lovers have been eagerly awaiting the Supernova festival, which will take place in the desert in southern Israel and coincides with the Jewish holiday of Sukkot. “And how fun it will be!” the organizers announced before the start of the event. A few hours later, their social media pages were filled with messages from desperate people trying to find their loved ones after the militants stormed them.

One of the event participants named Artel said that first at dawn they heard the sound of sirens. The rockets were soon followed by shots:

“They cut the power and suddenly out of nowhere they [боевики] went inside and opened fire in all directions. Approximately fifty terrorists arrived in vans dressed in military uniforms.”

According to her, people tried to leave the place, running on the sand and getting into their cars to leave, but there were jeeps full of militants shooting at the cars:

“They were firing in bursts and everyone left their cars and ran. The militants simply started shooting people. I saw the wounded scattered around, I hid behind a tree and tried to understand what was happening.”

The festival site with three stages was located in the Negev desert, not far from Kibbutz Reim. It is close to the Gaza Strip, where Hamas fighters infiltrated at dawn to launch the attack. They entered towns and villages, taking dozens of people hostage.

Festival-goer Adam Barel told Haaretz newspaper that everyone knew there was a possibility of rocket fire in the area, but the shooting came as a shock. Like many others, he tried to escape in his car, but the gunmen were shooting at them, so he got out and ran.

Esther Borohova told Reuters she was driving away when her car was hit. She saw a young man driving another car, who told her to sit down. She did so, but then the man was shot at point-blank range. Esther said she played dead until she was finally rescued by the Israeli military. Already in the hospital she says:

“I couldn’t move my legs. The soldiers came and took us away.”

Many festival-goers hid for hours in nearby bushes and orchards, hoping the military would arrive and rescue them. Altel says:

“I put my phone on silent and then started crawling through the orange grove. Living fire whistled above me.”

Gili Yoskovich told the BBC how she hid in the garden: “They went tree by tree and shot. I saw people dying around me. I was very quiet. I didn’t cry, I didn’t do anything.” Three hours later she heard the voices of Israeli soldiers… Another witness said it was “four or five hours of a horror movie… We were running like crazy, it was just crazy.”

“It was a massacre,” said ambulance medic Yaniv, who was called to the festival. He told public broadcaster Kan News:

“I have never seen anything like this in my life. It was a planned ambush. When people came out of the emergency exits, squads of terrorists were waiting for them and simply started shooting them. There were 3,000 people at the event, they probably knew about it. They had intelligence information.”

Friends and family members of missing loved ones are desperately hoping to find them…

Gaza’s Hamas-controlled Health Ministry said Sunday that 413 Palestinians have been killed and another 2,300 wounded in the Gaza Strip since Saturday in Israeli retaliatory strikes. The Israel Defense Forces said it had killed at least 400 Palestinian terrorists both in Israel and in strikes in Gaza.

During the attack on Israel, Hamas militants took more than 100 people hostage, including high-ranking officials, and another 30 Israelis were captured by militants of the Palestinian group Islamic Jihad, said the representative of the terrorist organization Hamas Musa Abu Marzouk and the head of the Palestinian group Islamic Jihad. Ziyad al-Nahala. They noted that the hostages would return home only if Palestinian prisoners were released from Israeli prisons.

The Israeli government has not given an accurate estimate of the number of citizens captured by Hamas militants. It is believed that between 150 and 200 people may be captured. According to media reports, among the hostages there may be citizens of other countries – the USA, Germany and Thailand.

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