September 7. The Supernova, a music-dance desert festival near the Gaza-Israel border, attracted thousands of young men and women. It was an all day and night dance party coinciding with the Jewish holiday of Sukkut. ‘Everything was so amazing, the best party I’ve been to in my life, until it went from paradise to hell in one second,’ said Elad Hakim.
As dawn broke, the music festival turned into a massacre. You could hear sirens and rockets. A handful of police-officers soon arrived screaming “Code Red”. In Israel it means: “Incoming rocket fire.”
Dozens of Hamas militants who had blown through Israel’s heavily fortified separation fence and crossed into the country from Gaza opened fire on about 3,500 young Israelis who had come together for a joyous night of electronic music to celebrate the Jewish holiday of Sukkot.
Party goers scrambling to their cars. Some lay on the ground hoping for the barrage to pass.
Suddenly, pickup trucks arrived at the spot filled with HAMAS terrorists. Many of the militants, who arrived in trucks and on motorcycles, were wearing body armor and brandishing AK-47 assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades. They stormed the festival grounds and opened fire. They were shooting people. They were carrying out executions. Many victims were shot in the back as they ran.
The Supernova Festival was one of the first sights targeted by HAMAS’ shock-grounded attacks. At least 260 bodies were found at the site of the Tribe of Nova Music Festival, according to the Israeli rescue service Zaka.
Israeli communities on either side of the festival grounds also came under attack, with Hamas gunmen abducting dozens of men, women and children — including elderly and disabled people — and killing a great many others.
An unknown number of people from the festival were taken hostage. A video posted to social media by militants and verified by the AP shows an Israeli couple, Noa Argamani and her partner Avinatan Or, being dragged away by their captors.
As Israeli security forces work to find and apprehend an unknown number of Palestinian terrorists who infiltrated this morning from Gaza into Israeli communities and gunned down people in the streets and in their homes, Sderot Mayor Alon Davidi tells residents to stay in their homes behind locked doors and not open them until instructed otherwise.
Many of the Israeli victims were civilians who were murdered in their homes, on the streets of their communities and at other locations along a broad swathe of territory bordering Gaza, leading the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, to describe the Hamas assault as an “indiscriminate terrorist attack”.
