A spokesperson for ZAKA, a volunteer group that handles human remains after terror attacks and other disasters, has reportedly said that they have so far collected more than 250 bodies from the site of a music festival in Israel, which was attacked by Hamas militants.
Many parents of youth who were attending the rave near Kibbutz Re’im in southern Israel have been desperately searching for news of their missing children since Saturday, The Times of Israel reported.
Earlier reports said that the terrifying attack on an Israeli music festival was just one of multiple locations hit on Saturday morning by the most sustained and coordinated assault inside Israel ever carried out by Hamas militants, CNN reported.
The gunmen left multiple revellers dead at the scene and at least one attendee was taken hostage, seen in social media video authenticated and geolocated by CNN being paraded and unconscious around Gaza by armed militants.
The outdoor Nova Festival event in a rural farmland area near the Gaza-Israel border was supposed to be an all-night dance party, celebrating the Jewish holiday of Sukkot. But as dawn broke, Tal Gibly said they began hearing sirens and rockets.
“We didn’t even have any place to hide because we were at (an) open space,” she told CNN. “Everyone got so panicked and started to take their stuff.”
Explosions can be heard in a video taken by Gibly of her and friends walking through the quickly emptying concert grounds, roughly two miles from the border.
Video circulating on social media shows hundreds of attendees fleeing their cars, running across an empty field with gunshots echoing in the background.
Israel formally declared a state of war on Sunday as the death toll from an unprecedented Hamas attack a day earlier rose above 700 and was expected to rise further, with the fate of over a hundred people abducted and taken to the Gaza Strip still unclear, as per media reports.
Officials estimated Sunday that over 700 people were killed in the massive assault launched by Hamas terrorists in Israeli communities near Gaza and by the thousands of rockets fired into Israel, making it the bloodiest day in the nation’s history, according to reports, The Times of Israel reported.
The spokesperson for ZAKA told Hebrew media that the death toll rose sharply, as Israeli teams managed to clear Hamas gunmen out of communities along the border and recover victims.