Re'im music festival massacre

Supernova Sukkot Gathering was a weekend-long outdoor trance music festival that began on 6 October 2023.[12][13] It took place in the western Negev desert,[5] approximately 5 km (3.1 mi) from the Gaza–Israel barrier, near the Re'im kibbutz.[3][14] Produced by an organizer called Nova[14][5] (also referred to as Tribe of Nova),[15] it was the Israeli edition (pre-festival event) of Universo Paralello, a psytrance festival started 23 years prior in Bahia, Brazil.[12] The line-up included artists well-known in the psytrance scene, such as Astral Projection and Man With No Name.[12] The organizers switched to the site only two days before, after the original location in southern Israel did not work out.[16] Scheduled to coincide with Jewish holidays: the final day of Sukkot (6 October) and Simchat Torah (7 October),[3] the rave was billed as a celebration of "friends, love and infinite freedom".[14] The festival site had three stages, a camping zone, and an area with a bar and food.[3] Attendees described the crowd as mostly consisting of Israelis of ages 20–40 from across the country.[5] Attendance was reported to be 3,500, but figures vary.[17][lower-alpha 1] Security guards and police were present at the festival.[5][16]

The musical festival was one of the first targets of Hamas' surprise attack against Israel in the early morning hours of 7 October 2023.[14] It is not known whether Hamas knew beforehand that the festival was taking place there or whether they heard the music and came across it by chance.[18] One attendee stated that after cutting the electricity, a group of approximately 50 Hamas gunmen arrived in vans and sprayed gunfire in all directions.[3] Some of the Hamas gunmen who attacked the festival infiltrated Israel via motorized paragliders,[19] arriving around 6:30 am.[19][20][21]

As festival attendees fled in panic, jeeps filled with gunmen began firing at the escaping cars.[14][5] Gunmen also blockaded roads.[14] The open terrain left few places to hide.[14] Many attendees who hid in the trees were murdered as militants methodically shot them.[3] Others who hid in bushes and orchards managed to survive.[3] The massacre took place amid a rocket siren, signaling a barrage of rockets fired into Israel.[5] Independently verified drone footage of the site showed dozens of scorched, burnt cars and skid marks.[22] Footage of the attack, posted on a Telegram channel, included graphic depictions of murder and hostage taking.[22][17]

The Hamas militants kidnapped an unknown number of participants; videos on social media showed them being seized.[23] The abducted concertgoers were taken to Gaza,[20] where some were filmed in Hamas propaganda videos.[24] Relatives and friends of the missing searched for information about the missing.[20][25] Those apparently abducted by Hamas included Shani Louk – a 22-year-old German-Israeli dual citizen,[26] a British man,[27] and a 25-year-old Chinese-Israeli woman.[28] Three dual Brazilian-Israeli nationals who had attended the festival were also missing.[26]

Witnesses have reported that some of the captured women have been raped. The Israel Defense Forces have not verified the claims.[29] Testimonies were also provided by eyewitnesses who survived the massacre.[30]

Photographs from the aftermath of the attack show dozens of bodies at the festival grounds, including a badly burned body bound by cable ties.[31] ZAKA, Israel's volunteer community emergency response group, reported retrieving at least 260 bodies from the party grounds.[14][32][33] The death toll was expected to rise, as other paramedic organizations also responded to the scene.[33]

One of those killed was a British man serving in the Israeli military.[27] Lior Asulin, a retired football striker who had played for Hapoel Tel Aviv Football Club, was also among those killed in the massacre.[34] Journalists Shai Regev and Ayelet Arnin, who worked for the Ma'ariv newspaper and KAN broadcaster respectively, were also killed in the attack.[35][36] The event's organizers, Osher Vaknin and his twin Michael Vaknin, were killed in the attack.[37][38]

As of 14 October 2023, German authorities are aware of eight of its nationals being taken as hostage in the overall events of 7 October 2023, including the case of Shani Louk,[39] which had gained public interest.[40][41] They opened a criminal probe against unknown Hamas members to investigate "belonging to a foreign terrorist group, hostage-taking and murder".[42][40][43]

Hamas denied that the attack was against civilians and said that it viewed the victims as "soldiers".[44] Later Hamas changed their stance claiming that forces under Hamas never targeted civilians but the massacre was carried out by independent groups of Gazan civilians after Hamas had defeated the Israeli forces in the region.[45] Later still Hamas denied that any massacre had taken place at the festival.[46]

• Outline of the 2023 Israel–Hamas war
• Battle of Re'im, a 2023 Hamas attack on an Israeli military base as part of the same offensive
• Dolphinarium discotheque massacre, a 2001 Hamas attack in the Israeli city of Tel Aviv
• Coastal Road massacre
• List of massacres in Israel
• List of events named massacres
• List of terrorist incidents in 2023

• Official festival website