At daybreak, Hila Fakliro looked up to the sky from the vodka and Red Bull cocktails she was mixing: “Oh, my God,” she said. “Look! There are fireworks!”
A 26-year-old fitness instructor, she was drawn to trance music festivals as a means, she said, “to disconnect your mind from all the tension in Israel”. The Tribe of Nova gathering, celebrating the Jewish holiday of Sukkot amid groves of eucalyptus trees only 3 miles (4.8 kilometres) from the Gaza Strip, seemed particularly well organised, so the fireworks struck her as no more than an extravagant flourish.
Her fellow bartender, whom she had met just hours before, turned to her: “I don’t think those are fireworks.”
They were, in fact, the white flashes of Hamas rockets from Gaza, the fire at dawn signalling an attack that would turn fields full of young Israelis dancing to psychedelic music into a slaughterhouse. In this massacre, Israel’s 75-year-old quest for some carefree normalcy met the murderous fury of those extremists who deny the state’s right to exist.
If some sinister choreographer had sought a consummate staging of the failure of Israelis and Palestinians to reach beyond hatred and war, this savage meeting of two adjacent but distant worlds in idyllic undulating countryside came close, leaving at least 260 partygoers dead.
They were rounded up and shot like animals within hours of losing themselves, and the pressures of Israeli life, in thumping soundtracks of mystical peace and love. “There were these crazy maniacs with guns and people falling one by one,” Fakliro said. “It was like a shooting range.”
Initially, she froze. The music stopped; the cancellation of the festival was announced. She lay down between refrigerators at the bar. Carefree dancers in galaxy leggings, even a reveller looping rhythmically on a Segway, turned in an instant to a terrified, stunned human mass. All of the psychedelics and other drugs used at trance parties redoubled panic attacks and the accompanying screams.
“Just run,” her colleague said. “JUST RUN!”
But where? Into the trees, where some people grabbed their tents and hammocks as they fled, or into open fields? Toward her car, where traffic was already piled up, or away from that mayhem?
One Israeli police officer, his pistol a pitiful riposte to the automatic weapons of Hamas terrorists, screamed at her to go east, away from Gaza.
This, for many hours after the Hamas attack began through multiple breaches in the supposedly impregnable multimillion-dollar Israeli fence around Gaza, was the sum of the state’s presence in the area: some 30 police officers recruited by the festival organisers to provide security. Hamas was able to kill more than 1300 people before the Israel Defence Forces awoke.
Israel — lulled and distracted by growing acceptance in the Middle East, by lacerating internal divisions, by settlement projects in the occupied West Bank, and by the increasing marginalisation of the Palestinian issue on the global stage — had switched off to the central threat against it.
Yet, just over the Gaza fence, about 2 million Palestinians lived in an enclave blockaded by Israel, a desperate place that is often referred to as “an open-air prison”.
Hamas was there, governing and inculcating hatred through the education system. It never disavowed its covenant that urges the slaughter of Jews “smitten with vileness wherever they are found” and the obliteration of the state of Israel.
“Hamas strives to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine,” the covenant says, as it casts familiar slurs on Jews as the moneyed manipulators of the world. If, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu believed, the organisation could be used to undercut the more moderate Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, and so bury any possibility of a Palestinian state, that tactic came at a price.
“The government was sleeping standing up,” said Elad Malka, who served in the Israeli military in Gaza in the early 2000s and was injured by a Palestinian suicide bomber. “Its smart fence was a mirage.”
Fakliro started running in a large group without knowing where she was going, wondering if perhaps she was running toward her would-be killers.
Eventually, with the sound of gunfire fading at last, desperately thirsty after hours of flight, she reached Moshav Patish, a small agricultural community. She was able to drink; she was able to breathe. But five of her friends, two of them hostages in Gaza and three of them dead, were less fortunate.
“Hamas needs to cease to exist — this terror organisation needs to be annihilated,” she said. “After 9/11, who stood with al-Qaida? But if Hamas kills Jews, and people are partying and celebrating that in Gaza, we hear that you Jews had it coming. And what comes around, goes around.”
We were seated in her parents’ house in Oranit, a small Israeli settlement just inside the West Bank.
A young man, Amit Parpara, approached. Fakliro stood up. They hugged and started sobbing.
In Israel these days, almost every meeting involves tears.
Parpara did not attend the party, having decided the $100 price tag was too high. But his closest friend, Noa Argamani, did, and was pictured in a video crying out in anguish as she was kidnapped on a motorcycle, with her boyfriend, Avinatan Or, being dragged and manhandled behind her, his hands bound behind his back.
The couple has since disappeared into Gaza. They appear to be among the more than 150 hostages held there.
“At first, I was so angry I just wanted to grab a gun and drive south,” Parpara said. “Now I am just filled with sadness, and I scream in the night when I hear thunder. The feeling of being here in Israel has changed.”
This is a widely expressed sentiment, a reflection of the sense that suddenly menace lurks everywhere, may not be controllable and may make life unbearable. At the same time, a strong conviction has taken hold that Israelis must come together, whatever their divisions, and, in a commonly used phrase, “finish it”, by which they mean destroy and eliminate Hamas from Gaza.
The two sentiments coexist uneasily, leaving many Israelis with wild mood swings as the shock of vulnerability sinks in.
Nadav Morag, a software developer and trauma therapist, decided a few days before the festival to accompany his friend Yoni Diller, a filmmaker, to the party.
When the rockets came, Morag had no hesitation. “We were too close to Gaza to be protected, and I told Yoni we needed to get the hell out of here right now.”
They raced to their car, drove away, and thought momentarily that all was well, until a car came careening toward them from behind. Inside was a young woman with her leg crushed and bleeding, and blood seeping from her shoulder. The sound of gunfire drew closer.
Israel had long viewed Hamas as a ragtag terrorist group that could inflict some pain but was not capable of a large-scale operation.
But this was an organised multipronged attack executed with great sophistication. Hamas blocked the main road out to north and south. It had gunmen dedicated to slaughter, to kidnapping, to killing around the main stage, to killing in the parking area, and to encirclement.
Morag and Diller ran east for their lives.
“I am sorry I brought you here,” Diller said.
“Wait until we get out of here, and I will thank you,” Morag shot back.
He feels he has learned a fundamental life lesson: do not take anything for granted in this one and precious life you have.
Morag is hoping that eventually there will be a big rave party dedicated to the memory of everyone lost.
He gazed into the distance from his Tel Aviv terrace before adding another thought: “For now, however, we can only use force to respond.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Roger Cohen
Photographs by: Avishag Shaar-Yashuv and Sergey Ponomarev
©2023 THE NEW YORK TIMES