"The music stopped suddenly. We thought there was some electrical problem, but suddenly we started hearing like a bombardment. At first we thought it was a sound coming from the speakers. It was half past six in the morning. That's when We started to see missiles in the sky."
This is how Niv Cohen, one of the attendees at the Supernova festival, a trance music event held six kilometers from the Gaza Strip on October 6 and 7, attacked by Hamas, narrates his experience in an interview on RAC1.
Early Saturday morning, while some 3,000 young Israelis were dancing to electronic music at a festival in the desert, Hamas militants from Gaza burst in, armed to the teeth, massacring 260 people and kidnapping several more, in what is the bloodiest episode of this new war.
Around 06:30 on Saturday morning, with the first rays of the sun, the anti-aircraft alarms and the sound of rockets launched from Gaza forced the festival's music to stop. Cohen, one of those who was able to survive the massacre, says that the first indication they received when they saw the Hamas guerrillas was "that we should lie down on the ground, because that is the procedure: stretch out, put your hands on your head and wait for you." 10 minutes".
"We tried to leave the party area but we understood that many terrorists had come to massacre us," Gal Raz, a 31-year-old Israeli, told Efe from his home on the outskirts of Tel Aviv.
While some stayed hidden, others, like Cohen and his friends, felt another impulse, however, which led him to react: "I felt that we had to do something more. That's why we ran away. Those who stayed on the ground have ended or shot dead or kidnapped.
That's when he and his friends decided to run to the cars. "We had arrived at midnight and we didn't even know where we had parked." "It was chaos," he remembers, "there was a lot of traffic of people who wanted to flee."
That's when they realized that the terrorists were on the ground. "They came down from the sky on paragliders, but they also arrived with cars and motorcycles. And they shot at everything. At the people who were fleeing, at the cars... Even when we managed to escape and left the parking lot and entered the road, we saw dead people on the sides of the road and we were aware that we were in a war zone.
Luckily, they managed to escape. "It was a second, just a second before everything happened. We saw that they were shooting at the people who were in the car. We managed to escape successfully, but we saw many people who left the car and ran away."
Others had much more trouble fleeing. Raz, who with the first rockets and the sound of gunshots separated from the friend he had come with, then decided to escape towards the south with another group of Israelis, but a few meters away they encountered an ambush by Palestinian militiamen who opened fire on him. vehicle in which they were traveling.
"We managed to escape, but the car stopped and we had to continue on foot," he says. His plan then was to run to the nearest community, six kilometers away, but his relatives informed them that Hamas had taken control of several nearby towns and suggested they hide in the brush.
There he remained with four people, lying down and with his head next to the ground, watching militiamen pass by a few meters from where he was, during the eight hours it took for the Army to arrive. It was at that moment when he was able to watch a video on his cell phone in which he saw his friend, Avinatán Or, being kidnapped and taken to Gaza with his girlfriend, Noa Argamani, images that quickly went viral in the media. social networks.
Since then they have lived with sadness, despair and fury. While he expresses frustration at the slow reaction of Israeli security forces, his anger is directed at the Palestinian militias: "After what they did on Saturday, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad must cease to exist."
"They not only took Avinatán and Noa, they took mothers, pregnant women, children, elderly people. They only came to cause panic and disaster to our people," concludes Raz, who has joined a campaign to pressure for the liberation of the more than 100 people captured by Hamas.
Among the countless number of Israelis who have been searching since Saturday for their loved ones without receiving an answer, is Daizy Moshe, whose younger brother, Oz Moshe, has not shown any signs of life since he tried to escape from the same festival.
That morning, the 24-year-old young man communicated with his sister by video call while fleeing the attack after having been shot three times: one in the leg, one in the chest and another in the back.
"We were in contact for about 15 minutes, we could hear the gunshots and explosions in the background and Neomí, his girlfriend, was talking to the emergency services so they could tell her how to help him," Daizy narrates in dialogue with Efe.
"At one point he told me that the girl who was driving had been shot and then I began to hear desperate screams, followed by a wave of gunshots. Then it was all silence. I was on the call for 10 minutes, in silence," he says, with the broken voice and fresh from the funeral of Neomí, whose body was identified yesterday by a DNA sample.
After receiving no information about his brother, Daizy traveled with the rest of his family to the festival site to try to find him.
"We didn't find his car, his body, anything. We saw a lot of destroyed cars and bodies everywhere. We haven't found his friends either, we believe they are all dead or kidnapped, but the only information we receive is what we see on television" , Add.
