Palestine

music festival (advertised for on the web, not very secret)

Often referred to as the “Nova music festival” by Western media, the event on its official webpage actually named itself the “Supernova Sukkot Gathering.” A recent film about the event showed that it was more akin to the illegal raves often organized in secret locations in many Western countries.

Supernova was not illegal and was coordinated with the local Israeli police force (which was armed and present in advance to guard the event). But for reasons that are not entirely clear, the rave’s location was not announced until 6 October.

Participants in the high profile Israeli film We Will Dance Again confirmed that the Supernova location was kept secret from ticket holders until the last minute.

This (rather than any confusion about the days of the event or extension of the time, as is sometimes erroneously said online) explains why Hamas had no clue about the presence of the rave in the fields between Gaza and the biggest military base in the area – the regional headquarters at Re’im.

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Israeli intelligence has concluded that the Palestinians had no prior knowledge of the rave.

decided to abandon their mission

“Operation Al-Aqsa Flood,” as Hamas called it, was, by any objective military measure, a stunning success.

It was said at Israel’s military headquarters that day that “the Gaza Division was overpowered,” a high-level source present later recalled to Israeli journalists. “These words still give me the chills.”

Covered from the air by armed drones and a barrage of rockets – which opened the offensive at 6:26 am exactly – Palestinian fighters launched a lightning raid over the Gaza boundary line.

The army bases were conquered for hours. Some of the settlements still had an armed Palestinian presence two days later.

The military communications infrastructure was instantly smashed. Simultaneous attacks took place by land, air and sea.

Palestinian drones took out tanks, guard posts and watchtowers.

Caught completely unprepared, most of the soldiers manning the bases were either killed or captured and taken back to Gaza as prisoners of war. A reported 255 Israelis were captured, including soldiers and civilians. Since then, 154 of them have been released, mostly by Hamas in November’s prisoner exchange.

murder and kidnap anyone they could see there instead

The rave is often reported to be the largest single site of deaths that took place on 7 October. The UN report said that 364 out of the 3,000 total ravers were “killed either at the site, near Kibbutz Re’im or in adjacent locations.”

But a detailed breakdown of the deaths recently published by The Times of Israel (based on an Israeli TV channel’s investigation) shows that more than 60 percent of this figure actually died outside of the designated grounds of the rave.

This is important for two reasons.

Firstly, despite the fact that the film We Will Dance Again tries to paint a picture of villainous Palestinian terrorists deliberately attacking civilians, it is clear from all available evidence that the rave was not a planned target of the Hamas offensive that day.

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Secondly, the breakdown published by The Times of Israel places the deaths of ravers outside the rave grounds as far away as Sderot (11 miles north of the Supernova site) and the Re’im military base (only 2.3 miles south)

Plotting these sites of death onto Google Earth and cross referencing them with the sites of ambushes set up by Hamas’ elite commando force – as detailed by the 7 Days investigation – shows the two often coincide.

It is therefore likely that the deaths of some of these fleeing ravers were the unintended consequences of Palestinian ambushes set up to intercept Israeli army reinforcements headed to the region.

“While many reinforcements were flowing south,” Ronen Bergman and Yoav Zitun wrote in the 7 Days investigation, Hamas’ commando force “had foreseen these reinforcements and took over the strategic junctions … where they awaited the forces … a lot of blood was shed at those junctions, both of soldiers and of civilians.”

The 7 Days piece also relates instances of Israeli soldiers rushing south to join the fight on their own initiative – including in their own civilian vehicles.

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What is still unclear about the Supernova rave is how many of the dead were killed by Palestinians, and whether any were killed in “Hannibal” attacks by Israel.

Unlike in the more built-up areas such as the military bases and the kibbutzim – where there is clear visual evidence of bombed buildings and conclusive eyewitness accounts – the visual situation in and around the Supernova site was more chaotic.

There were few built-up structures for Israeli aircraft or tanks to explode, as they did in the settlements.

Video and other photographic evidence does show that the fields around the exit of the site next to the armed Israeli checkpoint were intensively burned and blackened.

It is unclear whether this was the result of the helicopter or tank attacks, or the result of fires which may have caught alight after Palestinian rocket-propelled grenade strikes.

What is known is that Israeli armed forces on site set up a roadblock at the main exit, causing a massive backlog of cars waiting to leave the site. Many ravers ended up fleeing on foot, east across the fields as the firefight broke out.

While the We Will Dance Again film conspicuously fails to mention the roadblock set up by Israeli forces, an early CNN report does show the roadblock on its map of the scene, and The Times of Israel report states that it was probably set up as early as 7:00 am.

Journalist William Van Wagenen has detailed in a report for The Cradle that the roadblock likely led to Israeli forces unintentionally trapping some escaping ravers in a firefight between them and Palestinian fighters advancing on the Re’im military base from the north.

I really recommend you read the article.