‘Miracle We Got Out Alive’: Jews Recall Horror of Hamas Attacks
It was supposed to be a fun-filled weekend of music and dancing.
Instead, it turned into a massacre after Hamas, the Islamist terror group that controls Gaza, launched missiles into southern Israel, then stormed over the border from the Gaza Strip armed with machine guns.
Within hours, over 260 people were slaughtered and many taken hostage at the Tribe of Nova Festival in Re’im, just three miles away from the Gaza border, in one of the deadliest sites of last Saturday’s Hamas’s surprise.
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Survivors recalled this week how Hamas terrorists stormed the festival campgrounds after launching a barrage of missiles.
“It started raining missiles,” said Almog Senior, 30, who survived the attack. “We didn’t know what was going on.”
Senior recalled seeing “smoke and explosions in the sky and the music stopped.”
What came next were frantic moments that included trying to drive to safety and hiding out under trees and bushes after spotting Hamas gunmen shooting at Israelis and taking some of them hostage.
“I know we are super lucky,” Senior said. “It was a miracle that we got out alive.”
A week since the attacks and Isreal remains saddened and shocked. The the number of dead civilians has topped 1,300, making it the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust and the worst terror attacks in the history of the Jewish state. As a result, the Israeli military has called up more than 300,000 reservists, many of whom were either traveling or living abroad.
In response to what Jews have likened to a pogram, Israel has been bombing Hamas targets and directed the evacuation of northern Gaza, a region that is home to 1.1 million people, in anticipation of a possible ground assault. Six days of Israeli airstrikes, Palestinian officials said, have killed 1,800 people who live in Gaza. Israel said roughly 1,500 Hamas members were killed inside Israel.
Senior was one of several survivors who recalled the attacks this past Thursday via a Zoom meeting organized by Combat Antisemitism Movement, a U.S.-based organization.
Sacha Roytman Dratwa, who serves as the organization’s CEO, said people around the world needed to hear what Jews went through that day.
“Unlike the Holocaust, today we can share our stories so that the world knows,” he said. “That the world is aware of what happened to our people and share what we have witnessed ourselves.”
Despite the harrowing accounts, Dratwa assured that, unlike in the years that led to World War II, Jews were “not alone this time.”
“We have allies. We have friends around the world,” he added. “They need to know. They need to know what happened to Jews in Israel in 2023.”
Alon Marek, 24, who also attended the music festival, “there was panic” once the rockets started exploding around them.
He recalled trying to flee, but cars had a tough time getting away because of traffic. That’s when Marek said he realized that Hamas terrorists had infiltrated the grounds with the use of paragliders, leaving a trail of death and destruction in their wake.
Alon Marek (Photo via Zoom)
“All the [car] windows were broken. There was blood on the road,” Marek said.
He added, “This Hamas terrorist was firing at every car that was coming.”
Three Israeli police officers eventually got involved, Marek said, and traded fire with the terrorists — the engagement taking attention away temporarily from civilians.
“They saved our lives,” he said of the officers.
Once home, Marek discovered in a social media post uploaded by Hamas that a friend at the festival had been killed.
“This is how we discovered the first person who died that we knew,” he said.
In the days following the attacks, Marek said, “Each morning, I have been checking for people that I knew that were killed, slaughtered.”
While people were being killed at the music festival, some 50 miles away, Michal Rahav was trying to repel a Hamas attack at Kibbutz Nirim in Negev. She said terrorists had penetrated through the fence and set fires to homes in order to force come out of them.
“We could see the rockets being fired behind our house,” she said. “It was crazy.”
Rahav said her husband, a police officer, grabbed his gun while she and her three children huddled inside a safe room.
“We heard a lot of shooting and Arabic,” she said, adding that it was at the point that they knew Hamas “had penetrated the kibbutz.”
That’s when Rahav said she gave her children – two daughters and a son – a dire warning: “I laid them down on the floor and I told them: Whoever comes through that door, we fight. We don’t go down without a fight.”
Rahav said her husband shot a terrorist while they hid inside.
“They kept shooting at the safe room door and the iron window behind us,” she recalled.
It took hours for Israeli Defense Forces to reach the kibbutz and kill the terrorists.
“We saw the damage [to the house],” she said. “The whole house was broken and shattered.”
Rahav said her home wasn’t the only thing that was shattered.
“So was our reality,” she said.
Clemente Lisi is the executive editor at Religion Unplugged. He is the author of “The FIFA World Cup: A History of the Planet’s Biggest Sporting Event” and previously served as deputy head of news at the New York Daily News and a longtime reporter at The New York Post. Follow him on Twitter @ClementeLisi.