‘Crazy Chaos’: Israeli survivor describes attack on beach rave

Rockets showered down on music festival in southern Israel, survivor recalls, seconds before terrorists landed and began massacre of partygoers.

By Pesach Benson, TPS

The Supernova Sukkot Music Festival was supposed to be an all-night rave on the beach of Kibbutz Re’im. But Sahar Ben Sela and the event’s 3,000 participants could not have known that they would be at the epicenter of the deadliest terror attack on Israeli history.

The festival was well-advertised on social media, and it is believed Hamas was aware of it too. Terrorists attacked the festival, killing at least 260 people and taking captives back to Gaza. Other nearby communities came under similar attack while Hamas also fired rockets at Israeli cities. The Israeli death toll from the four days of violence stands at 900 and is expected to climb.

Recovering from his injuries at Tel Aviv’s Ichilov Hospital, Ben Sela, from Herzliya, said he arrived at the party at 3:00 AM.

“When we went to the tent to get a friend from there, rockets flew at us in a shower. They stopped the music, we heard alarms. Within a second we saw a terrorist attack. We got into the car and started to escape. There was crazy chaos. People were driving 120 [km/hour] under live fire,” Ben Sela recalled.

Unable to hold back tears, he said, “They started shooting at us, threw a grenade and after a minute, when everyone was screaming like crazy, another grenade passed over me and rubbed my head. I saw behind me bodies that absorbed the shrapnel. My friend was shot from point blank range. Everyone who was in the first and second row — they were murdered.”

A bullet hit Ben Sela in the elbow while he also took shrapnel injuries in a leg and the ribs.

At that point, the terrorist’s gun jammed. Ben Sela looked on the floor for any weapons, but not finding any, he got into an abandoned police car and managed to call for help on its radio.

“They told me to run. I tried to start the car and failed, while my friend tried to perform CPR on his partner,” he recalled.

“The terrorists shouted ‘She’s dead’. They are human animals, killers with evil in their eyes. They slaughtered us from point blank range. They shot and saw that they enjoyed it, they smiled.”

It took hours to evacuate the site.

“I was evacuated to an ambulance that was waiting to receive more wounded. They brought up parents with a child who was injured all over his body and an elderly man who was dying next to me, but I couldn’t even support him. Three hours passed, chaos.”