The first rockets were fired just before dawn, arcing through the sky over thousands of revelers who had been dancing through the night at a trance music festival — billed as an event celebrating “friends, love and infinite freedom.”
“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.
Then the music stopped.
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.”
Videos verified by The Washington Post show people leaving hurriedly, a few jogging, many glancing back to look at the white rocket flashes in the lightening sky. They appear confused but not panicked.
A person dressed in black with a yellow safety vest was directing crowds away from the stages.
Then the gunfire started.
“We started running; we didn’t know where to go,” Ben Haim said. “Nobody knew what to do.”
The Tribe of Nova trance music festival, near Kibbutz Re’im, 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. Festivalgoers described how the gunmen blocked roads, ambushed escaping cars and scoured the area looking for people to kidnap.
