In the south of Israel, near the border with Gaza, thousands of young people, Israelis and foreigners, danced until dawn, in a rave partywhen Hamas commandos surprised them, massacring around 250 people.
Volunteers in a state of shock, called to collect the bodies, recounted on Monday the morbid spectacle they witnessed.
“They massacred people in cold blood in an absolutely inconceivable way,” says Moti Bukjin, spokesperson for Zaka, an organization specializing in first aid and the collection and identification of bodies in accordance with the law. Jewish.
“They just went and shot people in their cars,” he told AFP.
The young people were gathered near Kibbutz Reim, in a remote region of southern Israel, close to the border with the Gaza Strip.
The celebration turned into drama when a thousand Hamas fighters crossed the border on Saturday morning, launching their offensive on Israel on motorcycles, in vans, with speedboats and motorized gliders.
Some gliders were seen flying over the festival in a video widely shared online. Young people fled towards their cars while shots rang out, in several videos whose authenticity AFP was unable to verify.
Many young people were killed, others taken hostage. A video posted on social media showed a 25-year-old woman, Noa Argamani, crying for help on the back of a motorbike as she was kidnapped.
“In the area where the rave partyand for the rave party itself, my estimate, based on the number of trucks, each truck carrying 50 bodies — and there were four or five trucks — I would say around 200-250 bodies,” adds Moti Bukjin.
This grim estimate means that the number of deaths during the festival represents more than a third of the total toll, on the Israeli side, of the offensive launched by the Palestinian Islamist movement, or more than 700 dead, according to the Israeli army.
“Shot while trying to flee”
“I have been volunteering at Zaka for 28 years, and after the Meron disaster [une bousculade meurtrière lors d’un pèlerinage juif dans le nord d’Israël], I thought I had hit rock bottom. I wanted to finish Zaka after seeing 45 corpses,” Mr. Bukjin said, reached by telephone as he prepared to return to areas of southern Israel struck by Hamas fighters.
“I thought it was the end of the world, but clearly things can be significantly worse, significantly worse,” he added, his voice shaking with emotion.
Aerial images obtained by AFP showed dozens of cars burned on the side of the road leading to the festival site.
“There were cars on the side of the road, a car overturned, a car on its side. In each car, there were two or three bodies, or just one body,” Mr. Bukjin said.
He said all the bodies he collected were those of people shot in the head while the attackers set their cars on fire.
“Some had a bullet in the head or chin,” he testifies.
Festival-goers trying to flee on foot were also killed. “Some of the bodies were in ditches, they were shot while trying to escape and fell,” he recalls.
On Monday, the Israeli army announced that it had “control” of the targeted localities in the south of the country. Zaka will then be able to begin recovering the bodies of victims in these localities, including elderly people, children and babies.
“It’s going to be a hard day,” says Moti Bukjin.