Israeli Music Festival Survivors Recount Mass Casualty Hamas Attack: ‘A Trauma Like I Could Never Imagine’

“It felt like existential dread. I’ve never felt so close to death,” shared one survivor of the brutal massacre of civilians that killed at least 260 festival-goers

When sirens interrupted an electronic music festival in Israel over the weekend, many attendees were unaware that a short distance away, rockets from Gaza were falling on civilians. Then the vans pulled up, and Hamas militants began firing into the crowd.

At least 260 attendees were killed at the Tribe of Nova music festival. Now, survivors of the mass casualty incident are beginning to describe what happened in the Negev desert on Saturday morning, as fighting continues between Israel and Hamas-controlled Gaza.

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Maya Alper, a 25-year-old volunteer, was handing out free shots of vodka to partygoers who reused their cups and picked up trash, but just after 6 a.m. local time, air raid sirens began wailing over the festival music as rockets fired overhead, AP News reports.

Alper told the AP that she ran to her car, but as she tried to get out, she encountered crowds of panicked men and women who were also trying to escape. The young volunteer pulled several festival-goers into her vehicle, including a man looking for his wife and a woman who watched a Hamas gunman fatally shoot her best friend.

“I can’t even explain their energy [the militants] had, it was so clear that they didn’t see us as human beings,” said Alper. “They looked at us with pure, pure hatred.”

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Alper told AP that as she was leaving the festival area, explosions rang out around them. She and her passengers ran out of the car and ran towards an open field. Alper jumped into a bush to hide; a woman who had earlier watched her friend die was shot dead by a grinning assailant.

While Alper and the concertgoers hid from Hamas militants for more than six hours, she tried to stay calm “breathing and begging in every way [she] knew possible.”

“Every time I thought of anger, fear or revenge, I breathed it out,” Alper said. “I tried to remember what I was grateful for – the bush that hid me so well that even the birds landed on it, the birds that were still singing, the sky that was so blue.”

After her rescue, Alper explained that the Israeli army — on its way to fight Hamas militants near the Gaza border — wasn’t sure what to do with her. Then a truck full of Palestinian citizens of Israel pulled up. The men were from the Bedouin town of Rahat and were on the scene to rescue the surviving Israelis. They brought her to the police station, where her father met her, reports AP.

“This is not just a war. This is hell,” said Alper. “But in that hell, I still feel that somehow we can choose to act out of love, not just fear.”

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Arik Nani, a 26-year-old who went to the festival to celebrate his birthday, ended up running away from the massacre. “I heard shots from all directions, they were shooting at us from both sides,” he told Reuters. “Everyone was running and didn’t know what to do. It was total chaos.”

Speaking to the AP, Nani said: “We were hiding and running, hiding and running, in the open field, the worst place you can be in that situation. For a country where everyone in those circles knows everyone, this is a trauma like Never I couldn’t imagine.”

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Gal Levy, a 22-year-old man who was shot in both legs, told CBS News that everyone immediately panicked when violence erupted at the festival. “We heard the shots… everyone started running.”

He shared that the “terrorist” demanded to give him his phone and money while standing “up there.” [him] with a gun.” Levy lost two pints of blood and told CBS he was “really sure” he was going to die while hiding. He is not sure if he will be able to walk again.

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Festival goer Zohar Maariv shared with Reuters that “at one stage me and a friend got into a car with people we didn’t know and we just jumped into a car with a lot of people and started driving.” The 23-year-old explained that after the car was opened fire, she and the other passengers fled on foot and hid for hours. They were soon rescued, but her boyfriend remained missing.

“It wasn’t until this morning that I realized the scale of what happened, that what happened wasn’t just at the party, the whole south was on fire,” Maariv said.

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Source: HIS Education