Israeli woman played dead for three hours as Hamas militants stormed music festival

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An Israeli woman has described the terrifying moment Hamas militants stormed a dance festival and opened fire.

Gili Yoskovich said she hid under a tree for three hours as hundreds of people at the all-night trance music rave in the desert near Kibbutz Re’im, close to the Gaza Strip, ran for their lives.

“I saw people were dying all around. I was very quiet. I didn’t cry, I didn’t do anything,” she told the BBC.

“I was saying: ‘OK, I’m going to die. It’s OK, just breathe, just close your eyes’.”

Yoskovich said gunmen were going tree by tree and shooting.

“I saw people were dying all around. I was very quiet. I didn’t cry, I didn’t do anything.”

She remained beneath the fruit tree in the middle of the field for three hours until she heard people speaking in Hebrew and was rescued.

The violence erupted amid the multi-front assault by Hamas fighters over land, air and sea. Israel has declared war and launched a retaliatory missile campaign that has already claimed the lives of hundreds of Palestinians. Deaths on both sides of the conflict continue to rise.

Local media and witnesses have described people at the Nova Festival fleeing for safety early on Saturday morning (Israel time), attempting to escape in cars or on foot, while others were gunned down in their tracks.

A young man who said he was at the festival wrote on a message board: “People were shot in their cars as they tried to drive away. A lot of people just started running. It was crazy. Nobody knows where their friends are.”

Family and friends of the Israeli revellers have taken to social media groups to post callouts for missing loved ones in a growing list populated with photos and pleas for any information of their whereabouts.

Tom Weintraub Louk, 30, told The Washington Post that her first cousin, Shani Louk, was missing after the outdoor dance party was stormed.

“We knew she was in the party. She didn’t answer,” Louk said of the family’s attempts to contact her cousin. The Post reported that the family later identified the young woman in a harrowing video of a woman taken hostage by armed militants in the back of a utility vehicle.

“We recognised her by the tattoos, and she has long dreadlocks,” Louk added.

The violence waged across Israel has shocked the country and intelligence services, which have been criticised for failing to warn of the Hamas assault. It marks the deadliest attack on Israeli soil in decades and the addition of more direct person-to-person fighting than rocket barrages.

Some of the worst reports of violence have emerged from the southern town of Sderot, which lies about four kilometres from the Gaza border, where locals are never far from a bomb shelter and some locals carry guns on their belts.

In the town of about 30,000 people, residents have only seconds between a missile warning alarm sounding and an explosion, due to the proximity to the Gaza conflict zone.

Every home, every park has a bomb shelter. At children’s playgrounds the protective shells take the shape of brightly painted animals or cartoon characters.

A playground bomb shelter in Sderot, a few kilometres from Gaza .

Witness and local media accounts described civilians’ bodies strewn across streets where they had encountered advancing gunmen, including at least nine people gunned down at a bus shelter. Their bodies had been laid out on stretchers on the street, their bags still on the kerb nearby.

Graphic videos circulated on social media included scenes of Hamas gunmen dragging Israeli civilian and military hostages, parading some through the streets of Gaza. London’s Telegraph reported that a video too graphic to publish showed men spitting on a woman’s corpse.

Sderot mayor Alon Davidi pleaded with residents on Saturday to stay locked in their homes while Israeli security forces tried to locate the militants who had infiltrated the community.

“Don’t open the doors, stay inside, close the windows … we’re still searching the area,” Davidi told a local TV station, calling for Israel’s leadership to deal a significant blow to Hamas.

The death toll in Sderot is unknown. However, the many killed so far are believed to be victims of Hamas gunmen on foot, rather than rocket fire which has rained across Israel since Saturday morning.

Hundreds of young Israelis are still believed to be missing from the festival near Urim, which started late on Friday night and continued into Saturday morning, while the Times of Israel and local television said dozens of bodies were being removed from the site.

Israel said the number of hostages taken by Hamas militants across the country since the beginning of the onslaught was “substantial”, and included children. It has not provided specific figures.

Hamas deputy chief Saleh al-Arouri said the group was holding dozens of Israelis hostage, including senior officials, indicating that Hamas wants to trade its hostages for militants imprisoned in Israel.

Natan Sachs, the director of the Centre for Middle East Policy and a senior fellow in the foreign policy program at think tank the Brookings Institution, said capturing civilians and soldiers was aimed at achieving two things.

“The first is they can serve as human shields in the Gaza Strip. Now, Hamas would hope that they would stop some of the Israeli strikes, and the second … is as bargaining chips in exchanges in the future for prisoners that Israel holds both from Hamas and Islamic Jihad,” he told CNN.

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