Timeline Israel

"Alper, 24, jumped into her car and raced to the main road. But at the intersection she encountered crowds of stricken festival attendees, shouting at drivers to turn around."

"Then a noise. Firecrackers?"

"Panicked men and women staggering down the road just in front of her fell to the ground in pools of blood."

"Gunshots."

AP report

"We were hiding and running, hiding and running, in an open field -- the worst place you could possibly be in that situation."

"For a country where everyone in these circles knows everyone, this is a trauma like I could never imagine."

Arik Nani, 26, Tel Aviv

A soldier mourns at the grave of an Israeli soldier who was killed following an attack by Hamas gunmen from Gaza. (Ronen Zvulun/Reuters)

 

It all began at dawn on Saturday when the first sirens began sounding to warn Israelis that rockets were being launched out of Gaza, striking urban centres like Rehovot, Ashkelon. A hospital was hit. And then the rockets reached Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, to the north. Over 2,200 rockets launched by the time noon came around. Israel's secure border between it and Gaza had been breached in no fewer than 28 places.

Terrorists on fan-powered hang gliders flew across the border, using explosives to blow up sections of the barrier to enable men on foot and motorbikes to drive through the gaps. Bulldozers were brought forward to flatten the fences, so enough space was cleared for vehicles to drive through. "The idea of a bulldozer getting that close to the fence at all just boggles the mind", said Matthew Levitt, director, counterterrorism program, Washington Institute for Near East policy.

A few hours on, Israel formally declared war. By the end of the day hundreds of Israelis, soldiers and civilians together, would be murdered, and a still-questioned number taken as hostages into Gaza; children, infants, mothers, grandmothers, men and women, soldiers and civilians alike. Many of them wounded, the women raped before dragged by their hair and herded onto the backs of trucks, the seats of jeeps, squeezed onto motorcycles.

The invading terrorists came in on motorcycles, in pickup trucks and vans invading Ashkelon, Sderot and Ofakim, and nearby kibbutzim; a large-scale, co-ordinated operation, with an estimated thousand members of the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists arriving in Israel. From the sea they arrived in speed boats. At least one boatload of Hamas 'commandos' was blown up in the water by the Israeli navy.

Hanging from paragliders, some powered by propellers, they arrived by air. In Sderot and other towns near the border, armed men kicked in doors, shooting residents, hunted down people, took hostages. The terrorists had the freedom to prowl Israeli streets, with no military presence, shooting civilians wherever they were, taking hostages back to Gaza in vans and motorcycles. The police station in Sderot was taken over. 

 

Hamas attack on music festival in Israel unfolded – video report

 

In the Negev desert a music festival, the Supernova Sukkot Gathering was in full play, roughly 3,500 young Israelis present in a field outside of Kibbutz Re'im, some five kilometres from the
Gaza border wall. AP reporters heard reports from survivors, including Maya Alper who had been helping to pick up trash when the first rockets streaked across the dawn sky and the sirens began sounding.

Soon 50 Hamas attackers were on scene, arriving mostly in vans, some in motorized paragliders to cut the power and begin shooting automatic rifles into the panicked crowd. Some of the festival goers fled toward trees to be hunted down and shot point blank while others fled across fields and hid in bushes. The desperate young people attempted to drive away in cars, only to be overrun and turned back by their attackers.

 

An aerial picture shows the abandoned site of the Supernova Festival, following an attack by Hamas terrorists, in the Negev desert in southern Israel, on Oct. 10, 2023. Jack Guez—AFP/Getty Images

Some of the fleeing festival-goers encountered roadblocks that appeared at first like Israeli army, but were Hamas terrorists who stopped the cars and shot the occupants. Cars were overturned, burned out, pock-marked with bullet holes. Alper fled with a handful of others, the car soon abandoned, leaving them to bolt across a field where she hid in bushes for six hours being hunted by the Hamas men coming close enough she could hear them talking until finally Israeli tanks arrived to fight them and soldiers scooped the survivors to safety.

But not before over 260 people were killed on that sad site, a count given out by the Israeli emergency services collecting the bodies. As for the number of festival-going young people taken hostage; unknown. A video on social media shows an Israeli couple, Noa Argamani and her partner Avinatan Or, being dragged away by his captors. Her face contorted in panic, Argamani screams, "No, no!" while forced on a motorbike between two gunmen. 

She reaches imploringly out toward Or, whose hands are bound behind his back, a group of terrorists marching him forward. And then, just after 8 a.m., on a horribly disastrous morning, Israel declared a state of alert for war, calling up reservists. By mid-morning the war began in ferocious responses as Israeli fighter jets hit targets over Gaza. Reportedly 21 buildings over the next two hours were hit that were used for Hamas military operations.

By 11:35 a.m. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced Israel to be at war with Hamas. Israeli troops moved into the Hamas-raided towns after noon, following six hours of terror. An Israeli cabinet meeting in early afternoon issued a statement that Israel would reinforce other borders to the threat from Hezbollah in Lebanon. All sites used to launch the rockets from Gaza into Israel were reported destroyed the following day, Sunday. 

 

The operation to mass Israeli troops for a potential invasion of Gaza began.

An Israeli mobile artillery unit fires a shell from southern Israel toward the Gaza Strip Wednesday. (Erik Marmor/The Associated Press)