2023-10-12 17:47:07
12:43 PM
Hamas attacked attendees at the Tribe of Nova music festival, organized by brothers Osher and Michael Waknin. Images taken from social networks.
Brothers Osher and Michael Waknin wanted to celebrate “friendship, love and infinite freedom,” but the last party they threw turned into a nightmare. Below, the story of a massacre erected as a symbol of the unprecedented attack against Israel launched by the Palestinian movement Hamas.
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His idea of organizing the first edition in Israel of Tribe of Nova, a music festival born in Brazil two decades ago, was announced as a success. Some 3,500 people, including Israelis and foreigners, have been attending the event in the south of the country since Friday.
Three stages, several DJs from all over the world, a camping area, bars to supply festivalgoers… Nothing had been left to chance in this open-air venue located in the Negev desert, five kilometers from the border with the Gaza Strip.
At dawn on Saturday, October 7, the young people were still dancing when suddenly the techno music stopped around 06:30. In the distance, muffled noises were heard. “Guys, red alert, regroup,” they warned over the public address system.
Sparks followed by explosions invaded the orange sky. Iron Dome, Israel’s air defense system, intercepted the first rockets launched by the Islamist group Hamas from Gaza.
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“We are used to rockets” launched from the enclave, he says. The Gaza Strip, an impoverished territory where 2.3 million people live overcrowded, has been subject to an Israeli blockade since Hamas took full control in 2007.
The young man and his friends began to disperse calmly, but they quickly realized that nothing was as usual. The danger did not come only from the sky, but armed men burst in, some on motorized paragliders, others on motorcycles or trucks.
“When we saw the terrorists, panic broke out,” he recalls.
Persecution
Then the chase began. The assailants methodically shot down those who crossed their path, indiscriminately. The security agents and police present were quickly overwhelmed and were also targets of attacks.
Everyone ran for their lives: some towards the fields surrounding the site, others tried to reach their vehicles in the festival’s two parking lots. But a traffic jam quickly formed.
“I looked back and saw that there were three bodies in the car behind me and that all the windows were broken,” the soldier explains.
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There were only two options left: hide or flee on foot across the plain. Mordejayev chose the second and ran through the bushes, terrified, until a packed vehicle picked him up in an open field.
Route 232, the only way out of this hell, was not very safe either. Located parallel to the border wall separating Israel from the Gaza Strip, the highway connects the neighboring kibbutz of Reim to the city of Sderot, about 30 kilometers further north.
“I saw people dying around me”
07H39: A camera on board a car that managed to escape showed how the trap closed on its occupants. The rounds fired by Hamas fighters burst the windshield and forced the driver to stop, without it being known if he was hit.
The young Gili Yoskovich decided to abandon her car to run, but in this desert landscape there was hardly anywhere to hide. The woman spotted an orchard and ran for cover with the attackers following close behind.
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“They went tree by tree and shot. I saw people dying around me. I stayed very quiet. I didn’t cry, I didn’t do anything,” she told the BBC after managing to escape with her boyfriend. But not everyone was as lucky.
For hours, as the explosion of automatic weapons grew closer and closer, some ran behind a car, scattering in disarray. Panicked, some even lay down among the corpses in the hope of surviving.
Point blank
Three hours after the start of the attack, Hamas militants continued their massacre without encountering resistance.
Video surveillance images show at 09:23 local time how a man with a black cap and bulletproof vest takes a hostage with a bloody t-shirt.
In the background, a young man who is playing dead moves slightly thinking he can flee, but another assailant approaches him from behind and kills him at point-blank range.
Several survivors explained to the media that they waited up to seven hours for the Israeli army to rescue them. The first rescuers to arrive discovered to their horror the extent of the carnage: 270 dead.
Dozens of burned-out vehicles crowded the access to the place. For hundreds of meters, sleeping bags, mattresses, shoes and refrigerators lay abandoned.
Four days after this tragedy, in addition to mourning the dead, anguish gnaws at the families searching for the missing. Dozens are believed to have been kidnapped and held hostage in the Gaza Strip, bombed day and night by the Israeli army.
Is Michael Waknin, one of the organizing twins, one of them? Is he alive and hiding somewhere? That’s what his sister Ausa wants to believe about him, who has no news about him. As for his brother Osher, witnesses saw him get out of his car to help people in the middle of the case. His widow Sunny Waknin says he died a “hero.” His remains were buried on Tuesday in Jerusalem.
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