Behind the Israel-Gaza War
At dawn on October 7, a sprawling music festival was underway outside the southwestern Israeli settlement of Re’im kibbutz, roughly three miles from the border of the Gaza Strip. Founded in 1949, Re’im had a population of a little more than 400 people. But thousands more had turned up for the Supernova music festival, an event intended to honor the Jewish holiday of Sukkot. At about 6:30 in the morning, the sky above the partygoers filled with rockets out of Gaza, and air-raid sirens began wailing. From long experience of such periodic bombardments, most of those at the festival knew that staying outdoors was usually the safest option during a rocket attack. Milling around uneasily, they waited for the latest attack to subside, taking videos of the rockets flashing overhead.
Some of the videos, however, captured something else: black dots in the sky across the countryside that, unbeknownst to the many doomed spectators, were airborne Hamas commandos riding paragliders deep into Israeli territory, the vanguard of a larger ground invasion that was to come.
About half an hour after the rocket barrage had begun, the partygoers began to hear approaching gunfire and explosions, and the word ran swiftly through the crowds: The terrorists are coming! The more fortunate ones acted immediately, jumping into cars and fleeing the scene at breakneck speeds. Others began running across the open fields, now fully aware that something far worse than rockets was closing in fast. Within minutes, scores of heavily armed Hamas militants converged on the festival grounds from the west and north and began firing indiscriminately with automatic weapons and RPGs at the crowds of people. Moving quickly, they surrounded large groups of partiers who had not been quick enough to escape and began methodically massacring them. Dashcam videos from parked cars recorded additional horrors: people cowering behind and inside vehicles shot to death at point blank range, while others were dragged, bloody and screaming, into the terrorists’ vehicles for transport back to Gaza.
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