—
New car dashcam footage verified by () shows Gaza militants attacking an all-night music festival in southern Israel, shooting revelers at close range and then looting their property.
The footage, which began circulating on social media on Sunday, joins harrowing footage of abductions from the same incident and has been met with panic among people desperate for information about their missing relatives since a series of coordinated attacks prompted Israel to declare war on Sunday. Close attention from the family.
Israeli officials counted at least 260 bodies near the site of the Nova festival outside Reim, where earlier footage showed carefree party-goers from Israel and abroad dancing in the desert shortly after sunrise on Saturday. .
The militant group Hamas claims to be holding more than 100 hostages in Gaza, including some survivors, according to friends and family members who saw the survivors in videos shared on social platforms.
Dashcam footage verified by provides a glimpse into the horrific atmosphere as militants took over the festival and used lethal force to prevent some partygoers from leaving.
The first clip, according to the time code, begins at 9:23 a.m., less than three hours after the first explosion was reported at the Nova Music Festival.
There is no audio in the video, but one militant can be seen shouting and then pointing a machine gun at a man hiding next to a car. It was unclear whether the gunman was firing warning shots or if he had just shot and injured a civilian who was then taken away. His fate is unknown.
A second man can be seen in the video lying on the ground behind another vehicle. The man starts moving and suddenly another militant appears on the screen, targets the man, shoots and walks away. The people on the ground stopped moving.
Another video from a bicycle recorder, time-stamped at 12:09 p.m., shows two armed men approaching the body of a second man. They searched the man’s pockets and one man picked something off the body and put it in his back pocket.
Less than three minutes later, the militants grabbed a woman from the back seat of the car. She was taken away and the gunmen began opening the trunk of another car and dumping a suitcase on the ground in preparation for theft.
The video begins at 12:14 pm, with the captured woman running back into view. She raised her hands as if waving to the festival grounds.
Mud and dust could be seen flying as bullets hit the ground around her. She hid again among the empty suitcases and open suitcases. Her fate is unknown.
Ricarda Louk last saw her daughter Shani lying face down in the back of a pickup truck heading toward the Gaza Strip. The Gaza Strip is a remote coastal enclave covering 140 square miles and home to nearly 2 million people.
She spoke to her daughter for the last time and called her to ask if she had reached safety after hearing rockets and sirens in southern Israel. Shani told her mother that she was attending a music festival, which was held in an empty venue with few places to hide.
Aerial footage posted on social media showed dozens of cars on the roadside near the festival entrance, some burned out and others with missing windows and open doors.
Shani’s mother said she was trying to approach one of the cars.
“She was walking to her car and they had military personnel standing by the car and shooting so people couldn’t get to their cars or even leave. That’s when they took her away,” Ricarda told Us .
Mother describes seeing video of daughter’s abduction on social media
Disturbing footage of her daughter in the back of a pickup truck and two attempts to use Shani’s credit card in Gaza after the attack were her only hints about her daughter’s whereabouts.
In the video, she doesn’t move at all. One gunman, armed with a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, had his legs draped around her waist, while another grabbed a strand of her braid. They hailed “Allahu Akbar” – Arabic for “God is Great”.
Ricarda hopes to see her daughter again, but the situation is bleak.
“It looks bad, but I still have hope. I hope they don’t negotiate with the body. I hope she’s still alive somewhere. We don’t have any other hope, so I try to believe,” she said.
Like Ricarda Luke, Yaakov Agamani last saw his daughter in a cellphone video that emerged after Saturday’s raid.
Noa Argamani, 25, pleaded for help while sitting on the back of a motorcycle driven by Hamas militants at the festival.
Her tearful father struggled to find words to express his shock and sadness after seeing the footage: “I just couldn’t believe it… I didn’t want to believe it,” Yakov told .
Noah, who attended the festival with boyfriend Avinatan Or, was also seen being taken away by armed men.
Noah’s childhood friend Shlomit Marciano, who was helping comfort her family in an interview with , said text messages they received indicated they had been attacked as militants rampaged through the festival. friends hid for several hours.
Or texting Noah’s father to say the couple was safe around 10 a.m., nearly four hours after the attack was first reported. Marciano said other friends also sent text messages asking for help.
Video shows militants taking festival goers hostage
“Since then, there has been no contact. We speculate that they were kidnapped when they were 12 years old. They probably hid for three or four hours looking for help. They went into hiding after hearing about the massacre and shootings. Then (armed) elements) found them,” Marciano said.
Now, Marciano said, Yakov relies on his faith.
“He believed in God. He was praying that she would be okay. That she would come back to him, to her family, to us safely. She was their only child.”
