At least 260 bodies have been recovered by Israeli emergency services from the desert area near the Gaza Strip where hundreds of young people were celebrating an electronic music festival in the early hours of Saturday, when members of the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas burst in, shooting at the crowd. crew. That is the figure offered to Israeli media by a spokesperson for ZAKA, a group of volunteers that is responsible for recovering human remains after attacks and other disasters. The festival was held near the kibbutz (agricultural cooperative)Reim, in the south of Israel and close to Gaza. Hundreds of parents have been desperately waiting since Saturday for news of their children missing in this massacre that has shocked Israel. This Sunday many went to the police station in the city of Lod, near the Ben Gurion airport, which was set up as a reporting center for missing persons, according to the Efe agency.
Arik Nani feels that his 26th birthday, which he was going to celebrate precisely at the festival, has become the “second day of a new life”, after escaping under the sound of automatic weapons fire and the smell of gunpowder from rockets . He says that the star DJ’s performance was designed to coincide with dawn. In a video, you can see the crowd dancing 15 minutes before the moment when suddenly, Nani says, they saw dozens of projectiles pass through the sky. “I didn’t know where north or south was. Some had a panic attack, others fell to the ground and others remained frozen. And then we thought they were just rockets,” he says, with a tone of voice that mixes guilty gratitude for being alive with the trauma, which makes him stop the conversation: “Sorry, every slightest noise upsets me.”
After the rockets, the music stopped and the organizers announced over the loudspeakers the cancellation of the festival. The attendees went to their cars. “There was like an obstacle to leaving and then we started to hear the TA Ta ta of automatic weapons,” continues this young man. “Very close and on all sides, so we were not sure where to go. We decided not to go towards the kibbutz. More rockets fell, we got out of the car and lay down. We start to run. I, as best I could, was in sandals. Then we saw a huge group of people running in absolute panic across an open space while gunshots continued to ring out. We went in another direction,” he recalls. Then he tried to guide himself by the sun, he hid at some point and – in order not to use up the little battery he had left on his cell phone – he looked at the Google Maps geolocation tool from time to time to understand where he was. “The shots kept ringing, sometimes closer, sometimes further away.” Five hours later he arrived at a shelter.
I was also in the rave Dorin Atias, a 23-year-old girl who works as a waitress in Tel Aviv. At dawn, she sent a whatsap to his mother, Tali Atias, as soon as the rockets began. “Mom, there is an alert, they have canceled the festival. Don’t worry. I’ll tell you how things go as soon as the car arrives,” says Tali. From there, she sent him a voice message. “And then communication was cut off,” says her mother, exasperated by the lack of answers about the whereabouts of her daughter. Around that same time, a friend she went to the festival with also sent a message to her mother: “The Arabs have caught us.” It is unknown if they were together at the time. The number of Israelis kidnapped in Gaza is estimated at around one hundred. “48 hours have passed and we know nothing. We are trying to reach all the Government ministers, but we still have no answers,” she laments.
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Israeli security forces prevent access to the site, which is located in the area near Gaza where the militants arrived. As the Israeli Army admitted this Monday, some are still in Israeli territory. Israel declared itself in a state of war on Saturday, after Hamas launched a multiple attack, by land, sea and air, that caught the country by surprise, on an unprecedented scale, with the launch of thousands of rockets and ground incursions in Israeli soil, where dozens of citizens have been massacred and kidnapped.
Kidnapped
One of the survivors of the festival, Ortal, told Channel 12 how 50 armed men suddenly appeared in vans, while the rocket warning competed with the loud music. “Suddenly, out of nowhere, they came in, opening fire in all directions,” she detailed. “I grabbed the car keys and we started moving forward to escape the gunshots. At one point they caught up with us, they shot at our vehicles and we got out […]. I climbed a tree and they started shooting people. I put my phone on silent mode and started crawling through an orange grove. He heard the whistle of gunshots. I saw injured acquaintances. Suddenly, a tank approached. I was sure he would rescue me, but the driver told me: ‘I can’t let you in, I have a dead person in the tank.’ “A lot of people climbed on top.”
In the last few hours, Channel 12 has also collected the testimony of Gal Ofir, another of the survivors of the massacre: “While we were making a turn [con el coche]”, he said, “they shot at us from the other side, so we took another turn. And as we drove past the bodies, we literally saw on both sides of the road between 10 and 15 terrorists together and they just started shooting at our car.” “We hunkered down and drove at almost 150 kilometers per hour,” continued Ofir, “we wanted to turn left towards Ofakim. Right there, on the curve, were four other armed terrorists. Instead of turning left, we continue straight. “We saw a factory with a guard who opened the door for us and we just went in and hid the car.”
Some of the festival attendees have suffered worse luck, currently missing. “I came to rescue my daughter, she is kidnapped in Gaza. I saw a tiktok where she appears surrounded by terrorists,” an Israeli father told Efe this Sunday under the condition of anonymity. This man last contacted his 30-year-old daughter while she was at the concerts.
In two days, the dead in Israel exceed 700 and more than 2,200 injured, although the numbers may rise as Israeli troops regain control of areas taken by Hamas. Emergency services have not clarified whether or not any of the 260 recovered bodies are included in the overall death toll. On the other hand, heavy Israeli retaliatory bombings on Gaza have left more than 500 dead and 2,300 injured.
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