On the day of the Hamas attack, there was a music festival happening in the desert not far from the Gaza security fence. Hundreds of young people had been up dancing all night and were just settling down around 6am when they heard rockets passing overhead. Hamas militants arrived and began shooting people. As much as a third of the Israeli death toll (reports say 260 bodies were found) as well as many hostages taken by Hamas are connected to this festival. Today we’re getting some of the stories from people who survived.

Let’s start with this dashcam video showing some of the Hamas terrorists shooting at people and then looting their cars.

WARNING EXTREMELY GRAPHIC:

This is dash camera footage from the music festival targeted by HAMAS.

It shows the execution of at least 1 festival attendee, 1 being taken captive, and targeting another before the video cuts.

It’s been shared in sections, this is the longest found pic.twitter.com/MMz3ZmB8hH

— FUNKER530 (@FunkerActual) October 9, 2023

Here’s how CNN describes it:

The video has no audio, but a militant is seen yelling, then pointing his machine gun at a man taking cover next to the car. It’s unclear if the gunman is firing a warning shot, or if he’s just shot and injured the civilian, who is then seen being led away. His fate is unknown.

A second individual is seen in the video lying on the ground at the back of another car. The person begins to move and suddenly another militant appears on screen, aims at the person, fires and walks away. The person on the ground stops moving.

Another video from the dashcam, timestamped at 12:09 p.m., shows two militants approach the body of the second individual. They rifle through the person’s pockets, and one picks something off the body and puts it into his own back pocket.

Less than three minutes later, militants grab a woman out of the back of the car. She is led away, and the militants begin to open another car’s trunk and empty a suitcase on the ground to be pilfered.

Here’s another video showing people at the festival who suddenly realize they are under attack. They run for their lives and are protected by several police officers but people are being shot.

A new video compilation recorded by a young woman shows how quickly the music festival in Israel went from a good party to fight for survival.

After a while, Israeli police officer and a tank show up to protect the young festival goers, but they come under heave fire from Hamas pic.twitter.com/ZgUv67ClF1

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) October 9, 2023

There’s also an interview with a man who survived the attack but witnessed dozens of people being murdered all around him. I don’t have a full translation but the French tweet reads:

The moving testimony of Sahar, one of the survivors of the music festival massacre.

– We fled under bullets
– We found refuge in a small concrete shelter
– The terrorists threw a grenade inside which exploded into pieces, there was blood everywhere
– A terrorist entered and opened fire at point blank range, everyone around me died before my eyes

Let the world watch and listen to this testimony.
Let the world open its eyes and understand who we are fighting against.

Le témoignage bouleversant de Sahar, l'un des survivants du massacre du festival de musique.

– Nous avons fui sous les balles
– Nous avons trouvé refuge dans un petit abri en béton
– Les terroristes ont jeté une grenade à l'intérieur qui a explosé en morceaux, il y avait du… pic.twitter.com/H7luGelmaa

— Julien Bahloul (@julienbahloul) October 9, 2023

Another story from someone who made it to their car and pulled in other people who were fleeing:

As the carnage unfolded before her, eyewitness Alper pulled a few disoriented-looking revellers into her car from the street and drove 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.”…

When a man just metres 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.

“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.”

She and the others hid for six hours before help arrived. Finally, AG Hamilton share this account from a woman who was at the festival named May Hayat. When the attack began she ran to a police station where people were hiding but their safety their didn’t last long.

The noise of the gunshots began to get closer, the policemen stood in the doorway ready with their weapons and looked at each other with a frightened look and shouted to “storm!”.

They turned to us just before leaving the room and told us to “run and pray.” They came out and got shot one after the other. The terrorists fired bursts of gunfire at the room and for a moment there was shocking silence. We left the room running to the battlefield, and while I’m running I turned back and I saw Liron. She stayed there and didn’t come with us.

They got into someone’s car but as soon as the car started to move, Hamas started firing at it. They were herded in a big circle until a wheel got stuck in the sand and they all ran. May and one man found a place to hide and tried to play dead but the terrorists found them.

They found us. 8 terrorists in front of both of us. I closed my eyes tightly because I was sure they gonna shot us but then they grabbed us and lofted us from the ground. They took our phones and everything we had in our pockets. They announced in their walkie-talkie, ‘We have 2 more abductees.”

One of the terrorists started talking to me in Arabic and I told him I can’t understand him. I didn’t shout, I didn’t went crazy, I became apathetic. He put his jacket on me while the rest of them was looking at me like I was a piece of meat because I was wearing a tank top. In one hand he holds my hand, and in the other hand he holds a missile…

The guy who was with me didn’t stop crying and begging for his life. I tried to explain to him that he needs to stop crying, “It annoys them, stop crying and everything will be fine.” They had knives and hammers. I realized we were in danger.

At first he listened to me but very quickly he returned to his initial and fell on his knees and again screamed and begged for his life. And then – he didn’t scream anymore. They murdered him in front of my eyes. I was left alone with them.

One of them took a board and every few seconds hit me on the head. The other one was holding a knife and every few seconds approached me threateningly. It was important for them to humiliate me.

One of the men threatened to kill her but another one told her to run. She doesn’t know why but she ran and hid among several dead bodies for three hours while other terrorists were passing by speaking Arabic. Eventually she heard someone speaking Hebrew and screamed for help. She later found out that her friend Liron, who had stayed behind in the police station, had been murdered.

Aftermath of the Supernova music festival in Israel, where Hamas gunmen killed 260 people.#Hamas #Palestine #Palestinian #IronDome #Israel #IsraelUnderAttack #Palestinian #IsraelPalestineWar #Palestine #Gaza #hamasattack #AFTERMATH #Supernovafestival pic.twitter.com/T7UpKdnrku

— mishikasingh (@mishika_singh) October 9, 2023

Update: From Tablet.

I’ve spent the last 12 hours speaking to Israelis who were at the Supernova music festival. Their testimonies, as you would imagine, are very emotional. At least one broke down mid-conversation and wasn’t able to continue his recollection…

“I saw videos with a male getting held by a group of Arab kids. Like, they’re like 16, 17,” one survivor recalled. “They’re kids, but they’re young men already, and they’re holding this guy, and he looks as his girlfriend is being mounted on a bike and driven away from him. God knows what she’s going to experience … Women have been raped at the area of the rave next to their friends bodies, dead bodies.”…

One survivor who’d returned to the scene later in the day to look for his friends spoke, in a breaking voice, of what he’d seen. Of the bodies, mainly of young women, lying cold and mutilated.

Update: One of the festival organizers, a woman named Noa Beer, barely escaped.

As people began to move to the exits, Beer and her friend went to their car, which was close by in the VIP parking area. She said their decision to leave quickly may have saved their lives…

“There were only two cars ahead of me and they crashed into each other,” she said. “I saw a motorcycle in the road and someone was lying on the ground.”

She thought it may have been an accident until she saw that the motorcyclist had been shot…

She saw people crawling on the ground toward her, and she got three of them in the back seat of the car and tried to pull away. She revved the car as she worked to release the parking brake with bullets flying around her…

She described two men shooting at her car for six straight seconds.

“They looked me in the eyes. They saw terror, and they gave zero s—s about it,’ she said.

Two of the people she picked up were shot but survived. She was able to drive them directly to the hospital.