Day: December 26, 2023

At sunrise on Saturday morning, Hamas gunmen launched hundreds of rockets and breached the border between Gaza and Israel, speeding through farmland towards a psychedelic trance music festival that had continued through the night, into the morning.

Assailants who broke through barricades at the border drove down Route 232, cutting a deadly path through rural kibbutzim communities. They blocked off the road to the festival from the north and the south, before swarming the sprawling site on foot, videos show. Then the militants encircled crowds on three sides like a scythe, gunning them down and forcing them to flee over fields to the east.

The Islamist militant group’s terror attack on the rave was not only highly coordinated, but designed for maximum carnage, the scale and scope of which is only just beginning to come to light now, one week on. Heavily armed gunmen choked off almost all avenues of escape, trapping crowds, while simultaneously targeting shelters where people were hiding, killing them en masse, CNN’s analysis of more than 50 videos and interviews with 13 survivors shows.

Thousands of Israelis and foreign nationals had descended on the Negev desert in southern Israel for the music festival, known as Nova, marking the Jewish holiday Sukkot and touted as an event celebrating “unity and love.”

When the booms of rockets rang out overhead around 6:30 a.m., few noticed over the whomping electronic beats. Others, accustomed to rocket fire from Gaza, thought little of it. But not long after organizers stopped the music, and security ushered people towards the exits, the chaos started.

The split-second decisions revelers made next were ones of life or death.

Many of those who jumped in their cars and drove to nearby bomb shelters were met by militants on the roads, who fired on them at point-blank range and lobbed grenades inside the packed reinforced concrete blocks, according to videos and eyewitness testimony.

Others dispersed into the wilderness, scrambling under cactus scrub and bushes, or covering themselves with sand. They said they were relentlessly hunted for hours, shot at with live gunfire and rocket-propelled grenade launchers, and watched helplessly as people were killed or dragged away by armed captors. Several festivalgoers taken hostage by Hamas have since appeared in videos in Gaza.

Revelers who managed to escape ran across open farm fields and along dry riverbeds, as militants fired on them, trekking several miles to the safety of towns further from the border. Most eyewitnesses told CNN they hid for six to 10 hours, before they managed to escape – or authorities and emergency services arrived. Others said they survived by pretending to be dead.

Drawing on video analysis, eyewitness testimony, satellite imagery and reporting by teams on the ground, CNN reconstructed the terror attack, which has emerged as one of the deadliest episodes in Hamas’ unprecedented, multi-pronged assault on Israel by land, sea and air.

CNN has identified at least four bomb shelters on Route 232 – two in Re’im, one in Be’eri and one by Alumim – where dozens of people were killed. More than 260 bodies were found at the Nova festival site itself, according to Israeli rescue service Zaka, but based on CNN’s analysis of several focal points of the massacre, the total death toll could be even higher.

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For this investigation, CNN examined over 50 videos filmed by festivalgoers and passersby before, during and after the massacre at Nova festival in Re’im, Israel, on October 7, 2023. Most of these were obtained directly from festival survivors, while some were collected from public Telegram groups, such as South First Responders.

A team of journalists with open-source training verified the videos by geolocating them where possible and checking the metadata for timestamps and GPS coordinates. For those without timestamps, we made estimates of the time of day based on the sunlight, using the website SunCalc. CNN built a map based on those verified videos to understand how the attack unfolded, establish the movement of Hamas militants, and the various ways in which civilians were hunted down as they tried to flee.

The team used a variety of mapping services to help locate the videos, including satellite imagery from an official Israeli government site, Planet Labs, Maxar Technologies, Google maps and Google street view. Reporting from CNN’s Nic Robertson and Muhammed Darwish from the site was also used to corroborate locations and events.

CNN interviewed 12 survivors of the festival, identifying themes that matched both the testimonies and video evidence. One key finding was the systematic killing of those sheltering in nearby bomb shelters. The videos revealed multiple incidents of survivors fleeing to bomb shelters and being killed there.

Writer

Eliza Mackintosh

Reporters

Eliza Mackintosh, Gianluca Mezzofiore, Katie Polglase, Allegra Goodwin, Benjamin Brown, Teele Rebane

Contributing reporters

Muhammad Darwish, Nic Robertson, Paul Murphy, Elise Zeiger, Courtney Yager, Jeremy Diamond, Amir Tal, Sharif Paget, Kirsten Appleton, Carlotta Dotto

Visual editors

Mark Oliver, Henrik Pettersson

Developers

Byron Manley, Kenneth Uzquiano

Video editors

Juliette Bahramand, Julie Zink, Connie Chen

Photo editor

Brett Roegiers

Editors

Hannah Strange, Kathryn Snowdon

Gaza militants who attacked an all-night music festival in southern Israel shot and killed revelers at point-blank range, then looted their belongings, new car dashcam video verified by CNN reveals.

The video began circulating on social media on Sunday and – alongside footage of harrowing kidnappings from the same event – has been scrutinized by horrified families desperate for news of loved ones missing since a series of coordinated attacks triggered Israel’s declaration of war on Sunday.

Israeli officials counted at least 260 bodies near the site of the Nova festival, outside Re’im, where earlier footage showed carefree partygoers from Israel and overseas dancing in the desert soon after sunrise on Saturday.

Some survivors are among more than 100 hostages that the militant group Hamas claims to be holding in Gaza, according to friends and family members who have seen them in videos shared on social platforms.

The dashcam video verified by CNN gives a glimpse of the terror as militants took over the festival, preventing some partygoers from leaving with deadly force.

The first clip, begins at 9:23 a.m. according to its timecode, just under three hours after the first explosions were reported at the Nova festival.

The video has no audio, but a militant is seen yelling, then pointing his machine gun at a man taking cover next to the car. It’s unclear if the gunman is firing a warning shot, or if he’s just shot and injured the civilian, who is then seen being led away. His fate is unknown.

A second individual is seen in the video lying on the ground at the back of another car. The person begins to move and suddenly another militant appears on screen, aims at the person, fires and walks away. The person on the ground stops moving.

Another video from the dashcam, timestamped at 12:09 p.m., shows two militants approach the body of the second individual. They rifle through the person’s pockets, and one picks something off the body and puts it into his own back pocket.

Less than three minutes later, militants grab a woman out of the back of the car. She is led away, and the militants begin to open another car’s trunk and empty a suitcase on the ground to be pilfered.

The video picks up at 12:14 p.m., with the captured woman running back into view. Her hands in the air, she appears to be waving toward the festival grounds.

Dirt and dust are seen flying as bullets hit the ground around her. Next to the emptied suitcase and open trunk, she takes cover again. Her fate is unknown.

The parents of Alexandre Look, a 33-year-old Canadian, told CNN news partner CBC they were on the phone with him as he tried to escape the gunfire. Look and others sought shelter in a bunker without a door during the militant attack, his parents said.

“And then I heard him tell his friends, ‘They’re coming back. There’s a lot of them. And then all I heard was a lot of gunshots, lots of rounds and then we heard nothing,” Look’s mother, Raquel Ohnona Look, told CBC.

Look’s parents said he died trying to shield others from the gunfire.

“Like a true warrior, he left as a hero wanting to protect the people he was with. Alex was a force of nature, endowed with a unique charisma and unparalleled generosity,” his father, Alain Haim Look, posted on Facebook on Saturday. “The world will never be the same without you. Goodbye my son, I love you and watch over us from above.”

François Legault, premier of the Canadian province of Quebec, sent his condolences to the family on Monday.

“My thoughts are with the family and loved ones of Quebecer Alexandre Look who lost his life in one of the Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel,” Legault posted on X, formerly Twitter. “I am saddened by the dramatic circumstances of his death.”

Ricarda Louk last spoke to her daughter Shani when she phoned her at the festival after hearing rockets and alarms sounding in southern Israel.

“She was going to her car and they had military people standing by the cars and were shooting so people couldn’t reach their cars, even to go away. And that’s when they took her,” Louk told CNN.

Aerial footage posted on social media showed dozens of cars along the side of the road near the entrance to the festival grounds, some burned, others with windows missing and doors hanging open.

Later, Ricarda Louk saw disturbing video of her daughter lying face down in the back of a pickup truck heading to the Gaza Strip, an isolated coastal enclave of almost 2 million people crammed into 140 square miles.

One gunman, carrying a rocket propelled grenade launcher, has his leg draped over her waist and the other holds a clump of her dreadlocks. “Allahu Akbar,” they cheer – meaning “God is great” in Arabic.

Ricarda hopes she will see her daughter again, but the situation is bleak.

“It looks very bad, but I still have hope. I hope that they don’t take bodies for negotiations. I hope that she’s still alive somewhere. We don’t have anything else to hope for, so I try to believe,” she said.

Tomer Shalom told CNN he last spoke to his 20-year-old daughter Noam when she called, frightened and crying, from the festival around 8:30 a.m. He said he could hear gunshots in the background.

Shalom said Noam, who is a paramedic, spoke to a friend on the phone around 9:15 a.m. from an ambulance where another friend was being treated for a gunshot wound to the leg. It was the last time anyone heard from her, he said.

“It’s beyond understanding. You cannot imagine this situation that kids are going to dance and you know have fun … and they are not coming back home,” Shalom said.

Mark Peretz was on the phone with his daughter Maya who was at the festival when he heard gunshots and screaming and immediately realized “it’s something bigger than what we thought,” Peretz’s son Gilad Peretz told CNN’s Anderson Cooper.

“When we started to figure out that Hamas just crossed the borders … my father understood that my sister’s gonna be kidnapped soon, so he decided to take the car and started to drive south,” the son said.

Gilad Peretz said his father reached the site of the music festival at 8:30 a.m. on Saturday.

“I called him to see what’s going on at the time, and I heard shots and he tried to say ‘don’t shoot them,’” the son said, adding that he lost contact with his father at 8:48 a.m.

Gilad said his sister Maya managed to escape by running and hiding in bushes, then took shelter in a police station and is now home. Of their father, Gilad said: “He might be kidnapped or dead.”

Yakov Argamani last saw his daughter on one of the cellphone videos that have emerged in the aftermath of Saturday’s raid.

Noa Argamani, 25, is seen pleading for help from the back of a motorcycle driven by Hamas militants at the festival site.

Her tearful father struggled to find words to convey his shock and grief on seeing the video: “I couldn’t believe it … I didn’t want to believe it,” Yakov told CNN.

Noa was attending the festival with her boyfriend, Avinatan Or, who is also seen being led away by militants.

Noa’s childhood friend Shlomit Marciano, who was helping comfort her family when they spoke to CNN, said the text messages they received suggest their friends were hiding for hours as militants rampaged through the festival site.

Or texted Noa’s father around 10 a.m. to say the couple were safe, almost four hours after the first reports of an attack. Other friends also texted, begging for help, Marciano said.

“Since that, no contact. We suppose they were abducted at 12. They probably were hiding for three, four hours begging for help. They started hiding after hearing the massacres and the shooting. And then (the militants) found them,” Marciano said.

Now Yakov is relying on his faith, Marciano said.

“He believes in God. He’s praying that she’s okay. And she will come back to him, to the family and to us safely. She’s their only child.”