Eyewitness recounts Hamas attack on music festival in Israel
Up to 250 young Israeli and foreign partygoers were killed by Hamas militants at the Supernova music festival in Israel near the Gaza border. DW speaks with Omri Ben Shushan who was at the trance festival and escaped the attackers by hiding for six hours.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00 Omri Ben Shushan was at that festival when the attack happened.
00:04 Welcome to DW, Omri. How are you feeling now?
00:07 Now I'm feeling better. The experience that
00:13 happened to me there was very terrible.
00:22 Would you mind?
00:26 And very not easy for me.
00:28 I can absolutely imagine that. Would you mind just talking us
00:36 through the moment it became clear on Saturday that something terrible was happening?
00:41 Okay, we start from the beginning. We were in the dance floor at the party and we started to
00:53 see all the rockets that fired from Gaza through Israel.
00:59 And you know, we are the Israelis. This is a regular situation for us. This is not a
01:13 very special thing that Gaza fired rockets to Israel. And after like one hour ago,
01:24 they started to tell us that the terrorists go through Israel from Gaza by open back tenders,
01:39 like open back jeeps with guns and rockets and RPG and
01:52 bombs and everything. And we start running and escape with the cars.
02:05 When all the cars get to traffic stuck, we start to hear fire that the terrorists are shooting on us.
02:20 And we leave the cars and start running to the fields. Something like
02:32 400 people start running to the field. And it was a terrible experience.
02:44 If I can just interrupt you there. I'm sure it was. You've talked about a situation where you saw
02:52 rockets coming across the sky, which you said was not unusual. Now we have hundreds of people
02:59 driving down this road. The road is congested with cars and you heard shots.
03:05 Did you know what those shots meant when you heard them?
03:09 Yes, for sure. We know that it's not. We know that it is the terrorists because they coming,
03:23 like I said, in the back open jeeps. Okay. Yes. And so when they came and you ran, what happened then?
03:37 And we ran into the orange field and hide under a tree, under an orange tree,
03:52 something like six and a half hours. All over these six hours we sound bombs and rockets and
04:03 shooting from the terrorists that, you know, pass over my head. So I heard the
04:19 with the whistle of the shootings. It was very scary. Something like six and a half hours.
04:30 Not a nice moment. And while that was happening, in that six and a half hours, what were you thinking?
04:42 You know, we just hide under the tree. We slept on the ground that,
04:54 and just want to do not every sound, you know, that the terrorists don't sound us because if
05:10 they sound me, they're going to kill me. This is what's the feeling.
05:15 And so what made you think after six and a half hours that it might be safe to move?
05:21 We don't know that it's safe to move. We still hear the shooting, but we meet an Israeli guy
05:36 that say to us that he heard the Israeli military that call from the jeeps to all the Israelis to
05:54 come. That is a safe jeep that going to take there to the safe point. And we trust him because we
06:07 know that he is Israeli. And when we search from the Israeli military jeep, something like two and
06:17 a half hours that we escape in the field and then try to move slowly and keep our heads.
06:31 That the shoots don't hurt us. And when did you realize the scale of this massacre? When did you
06:45 realize that this was such a massive event? From the first moment. So when you hear every
07:04 some minutes, shoots, when you hear every minute shoots, you know that every time you sound the
07:17 shoots, someone of our guys falling down. So when you hear the shoots again and again and again and
07:27 again, and you know that next time maybe it will be you. Thankfully it wasn't. Thank you so much
07:37 for talking us through that terrible event. We wish you well. That's Omri Ben Shushan, who was
07:44 an eyewitness at that music festival in southern Israel when he came under attack from Hamas