“We heard sirens and rockets, tons of rockets,” said Millet Ben Haim, 27, who attended the festival with a group of friends, posing with one of them just minutes before the attack and sticking her tongue out for the camera.
A voice boomed from the loudspeakers over the tented stages and the chill-out area that organizers described as a “playground for adults.”
“Guys, we have red alert,” the voice warned. “Red alert.”
Crowds began to leave the covered stages, more confused than panicked. They wore ponchos or strings of fairy lights, some still buzzing from the recreational drugs that partygoers said fueled the rave.
Then the gunfire started.
The Tribe of Nova trance music festival was one of the first targets for Hamas militants as they launched their unprecedented attack on Israel in the early hours of Saturday morning, overrunning the concert area, shooting into the crowd and grabbing as many hostages as they could.
At least 600 people were killed across the country in the surprise assault. Dozens are still missing, according to the Israel Defense Forces; Israeli media has put the figure at more than 100. Hamas says hostages are being held in tunnels and other secure locations in Gaza. It remains unclear how many of them were taken from the festival. Organizers have not responded to requests for comment.
Israeli forces began to collect the dead from the site of the rave on Sunday, near Kibbutz Reim. Soldiers put bodies in the back of a large refrigerated truck parked next to hundreds of cars abandoned by partygoers. In one clearing, the shells of burned vehicles lay beside discarded tents, camping mats and coolers.
Relatives searching for the missing at a nearby intersection said more than a thousand people were at the event when the militants attacked.
The attendees had not been given the exact location of the festival until the day of the party. “The event will take place in a powerful natural location full of trees, stunning in its beauty and organized for your convenience, about an hour and a quarter south of Tel Aviv,” ticket buyers were told in the lead-up.
The festival site was just three miles from the fence that divides Israel from the Gaza Strip and its besieged millions. The ravers were told not to bring firearms or sharp objects onto the festival grounds. They were tired and defenseless, trapped in a wide-open area that offered few hiding places.
“We started running; we didn’t know where to go,” Ben Haim said. “Nobody knew what to do.”
She saw the militants in the distance, closing in on foot.
“Some people tried to get in their cars and run,” she said. “The people who stayed, most of them got kidnapped or murdered.”
“I took the car keys from a friend of mine that was really wasted and got as many people in the car as possible and started driving like crazy,” she said. But cars were being shot at on the roads and there were gunmen everywhere, she said.
Ben Haim and her friends jumped out and started to run through the fields.
“Every direction we ran we had more people shooting at us; we were running for two hours trying to escape. We started crawling in bushes. Eventually I realized I couldn’t run anymore.”
She and her friends and a stranger lay down in a bush and covered themselves with leaves.
“We stayed silent and tried to reach the police and people to help us. The police said they can’t help us because too many people were kidnapped.”
Noa Argamani, 25, was also hiding in the bushes with her 29-year-old boyfriend Avinatan Or, who messaged Argamani’s father around 10 a.m. to let him know they were safe.
The couple were trying to reassure him, said Shlomit Marciano, 25, a childhood friend of Argamani’s. It was the last message the family received.
On Saturday, they saw the couple in a video circulating on Palestinian social media. It shows Argamani screaming as she is separated from her boyfriend and driven off on a motorcycle.
Or appears to have his hands bound and is pushed along by several young men.
“You can absolutely see it was her,” said Marciano, who is staying with Argamani’s parents. “I think I haven’t fully accepted it yet; I slept in her bed last night. It’s crazy.”
Argamani had debated not going to the festival, but not because of security concerns. “If she knew it was tense right now, then I think she wouldn’t have gone, but we knew nothing,” Marciano said. “She wasn’t sure because it was far and expensive. I told her, ‘Go, you’re young.’ I regret that.”
A later video appears to show Argamani being held captive, sitting on cushions in a room with a tiled floor, sipping from a bottle of water. “At least we know she’s alive,” Marciano said.
The family of Shani Louk doesn’t have that assurance. The 22-year-old posed for a mirror selfie just before parting for the rave, her long dreadlocks partially covered by a headscarf, looking coyly to the side, eyelids flicked with eyeliner.
“She loved to party,” said her cousin Tom Weintraub Louk, 30. Family members desperately tried reaching Louk and her Mexican boyfriend after news broke of the festival being overrun.
But then they saw the video posted online.
“We recognized her by the tattoos, and she has long dreadlocks,” Louk said.
In the video, the woman is facedown in the bed of the truck with four militants, apparently being paraded through Gaza. One holds her hair while another raises a gun in the air and shouts, “Allahu akbar!” A crowd follows the truck cheering. A boy spits in her hair.
While her cousin appears lifeless, the family is still holding out for news. “We have some kind of hope,” Louk said.
Morris reported from Berlin, Piper from London, Lee from Washington and George from southern Israel. Shira Rubin in Brussels and Meg Kelly in Washington contributed to this report.
