Dawn has just broken, electronic music hammers the desert and hundreds of girls and boys dance wildly, happy and unaware of the terrible fate that awaits them: death, for at least 260 of them. Who is making yet another video on a night of celebration, at the rave party for celebrate Nature in the Jewish holiday of Sukkot, point the lens towards the horizon. Paragliders led by heavily armed Hamas militiamen stand out threateningly in the sky. A few minutes pass, at half past six in the morning all hell breaks loose: first the anti-aircraft sirens, then the rocket explosions. Dozens of armed men arrive on the esplanade of the party, aboard motorbikes and armored vans. There are those who claim to have seen at least 50 militiamen.
Nobody has time to understand, it seems like a tragic re-edition of the Bataclan. A volley of shots goes off everywhere, the mass escape towards the cars breaks out, but the terrorists leave no escape for anyone and shoot “at anyone”, without mercy. It’s the massacre of the Nova Music Festival, the Tribe of Nova, an electronic music event of the trance genre. Mega party with three stages and dozens of DJs on the bill, a camping space, one for catering in the middle of the Negev desert, a stone’s throw from the border with the Strip targeted by Hamas. “I saw at least 200 corpses on the spot”, says an Israeli paramedic, Yaniv, who miraculously survived the massacre. “It was a massacre, I have never seen anything like it in my life. An ambush, teams of terrorists were waiting for us in front of the emergency exits, others mowed down those who ran towards the car park and those who were hiding in the bathrooms”, he says him again. He managed to save himself: “While they were shooting everyone and everything, I hid among the trees. After three hours I moved until I met our agents, who took me back there because they needed a doctor. All the my friends were killed, and I was the one who had to witness their death.”
Another survivor, Esther, managed to get to her car unharmed, but once it left in the chaos it was rear-ended. She jumped into another car driven by a boy. An instant and the young man driving collapses, fatally hit by a bullet. Esther played dead next to the corpse of her savior for hours until the soldiers arrived. Ortel instead crawled into an orange grove “with bullets whistling above my head”, while a boy continued to run without stopping, “the trees were few, they were hunting us one by one among the brambles, there were dead everywhere”.
There are no official figures yet, at the party “there were at least three thousand people”, the number of dead, injured and those taken hostage is uncertain. Among these there is Noa, the girl kidnapped and taken away on a motorcycle, or Shani, the young German girl who disappeared at the rave and was then shown by Hamas militiamen aboard a pickup as if she were a trophy, unconscious and half naked. “Allahu akbar,” they shout to the crowd, as one lifts her head by a lock of her hair. She, whose only fault was going dancing. “We share the pain of the missing and murdered people,” Tribe of Nova organizers wrote on social media. “We are doing our best to help the security forces, maintaining constant contact and are in the area taking part in searches to locate the missing.” In the evening, a spokesperson for the Zaka rabbinical organization, responsible for recovering bodies in areas that have been the scene of attacks, reported that 260 bodies have been found so far, “but the searches have not yet been concluded”. On social media there is a deluge of appeals, of photos of girls and boys who are still missing and who family and friends hope to be able to find. Maybe not in that sea of horror.
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