Carnage at Israel’s Supernova festival ‘worst of any disaster site’

In the massacre at the Supernova festival at a kibbutz near Gaza, 270 revellers were gunned down or burnt in their cars.

The abandoned site of the weekend attack on the Supernova desert music festival by Palestinian militants. Picture: AFP

As an Israeli volunteer who recovers corpses, Moti Bukjin has worked at ­horrific disaster sites for decades, but nothing readied him for the carnage Hamas gunmen unleashed on a desert music festival on Saturday.

“It turns out things can be much, much worse,” said Mr Bukjin, who was among first responders to the site of the massacre at the Supernova festival at a kibbutz near Gaza, where 270 revellers were gunned down or burnt in their cars.

Most were young people, dressed to party, who had danced through the night under the stars.

Soon after the sun rose above the Negev desert on the Jewish Sabbath, survivors recount, rockets started streaking through the sky from nearby Gaza.

The revellers were stunned by what they saw next: Islamist militants with assault rifles racing toward them in trucks, on motorcycles and even flying motorised paragliders.

Spraying gunfire, they “butchered people in cold blood, in an inconceivable way”, Mr Bukjin said, detailing that many victims had been shot in the head at close range.

Describing the aftermath, he said: “They were shot trying to flee and fell into the ditches on the side of the road.”

It was obvious the militants had time to act methodically, Mr Bukjin said. “They had so much time till the security forces got there. Some of the cars, they burnt with people inside. We saw a gunshot to the head, a bullet to the head, a bullet to the chin.”

It showed the killers were “not randomly spraying bullets and hoping they hit”, he said.

Hamas took at least 100 hostages – including several from the festival – back into Gaza, where some were paraded before cheering crowds.

One mother, Ahuva Mayzel, last heard from her 21-year-old daughter, Adi, who was at the festival, an hour after sunrise.

“It was our last call, in which we heard a lot of noise and shootings and bombing – chaos, total chaos,” she said from her home in Karnei Shomron, an Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank.

Waiting for news of her daughter, Ms Mayzel said: “We are just helpless, completely helpless as her parents. Really, this is unimaginable. So many casualties, so many dead, so many missing.”

Aerial footage of the scorched festival site showed the main tent still standing and dozens of cars piled up, many charred, in a sign of the panicked rush to speed away.

AFP