The sun was spreading its rays across the desert in southern Israel last Saturday morning when sirens wailed and rockets thudded. But at an all-night festival at a kibbutz near the Gaza border, the sounds blended with the music and the people danced on.
A few miles to the west, hundreds of Hamas forces had breached the hi-tech security fence that surrounds Gaza, a narrow strip of land blockaded by land, sea and air where 2.3 million Palestinians live mostly in misery and hardship.
In unbelievable and deeply shocking scenes, armed men poured into Israel on motorbikes, trucks, bicycles and paragliders. Thousands of rockets were fired at towns and communities in southern Israel and as far away as the major cities of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
Israeli families – parents, grandparents, teenagers and toddlers – rushed to bomb shelters and safe rooms. At the Supernova festival at Kibbutz Re’im, panic took hold as people realised Hamas gunmen were in their midst.
Over the next few hours there was chaos, confusion, terror, disbelief and horrific bloodshed as hundreds of Israelis were slaughtered in a terrorist attack that shocked the world. And since what US president Joe Biden described as “the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust”, Palestinians in Gaza have also faced violence, destruction and a humanitarian catastrophe on an unprecedented scale.
The attack
It came from the air in the form of at least 2,500 rockets, and on the ground as hundreds of Hamas forces invaded Israel. The attack caught Israeli security forces and intelligence agencies, politicians and the public off guard.
Video shot by Hamas showed a detonation at Erez, the high-security crossing at the northern end of the Gaza Strip. Members of Hamas’s special forces – Nukhba – gained control of the complex and the access gate used by the Israeli military to enter Gaza during incursions.
In dozens of places, Hamas forces bulldozed the long barrier around Gaza – supposedly one of the most impenetrable and closely watched frontiers on the planet – allowing their men to cross and begin a day of carnage.
It was the most audacious attack in Hamas’s history. Founded in 1987 as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, the group is dedicated to extinguishing the state of Israel and reclaiming all of historic Palestine using force against soldiers and civilians. It is proscribed as a terrorist organisation by countries including the US and the UK.
It won elections in Gaza in 2006, and seized full control of the strip the following year. Whether it continues to command support among the people of Gaza is unclear: there have been no elections for 17 years, and Hamas brutally represses signs of dissent.
As its forces were massacring Israeli citizens last Saturday, Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s political leader, who lives outside Gaza, restated the organisation’s goals in unambiguous and chilling terms.
“Our objective is clear: we want to liberate our land, our holy sites, our Al-Aqsa mosque, our prisoners. We have no hesitation about this. This is the goal that is worthy of this battle, worthy of this heroism, worthy of this courage,” he said in a speech.
To “the enemy”, he concluded: “We have only one thing to say to you: get out of our land. Get out of our sight. Get out of our city of Al-Quds [Jerusalem] and our al-Aqsa mosque. We no longer wish to see you on this land. This land is ours, Al-Quds is ours, everything [here] is ours. You are strangers in this pure and blessed land. There is no place of safety for you.”
Saturday’s attack was planned by around half a dozen top commanders in Gaza and even the group’s closest allies were not informed in advance about the timing, according to Ali Barakeh, a member of Hamas’s exiled leadership. “Only a handful of Hamas commanders knew about the zero hour,” he said.
Armed men appeared on the streets and in the homes of 20 towns and communities in southern Israel, many of them peaceful kibbutzim just a few miles from the border with Gaza. Some Israeli citizens were killed immediately in their houses, on the streets or in their cars.
Others spent hours in safe rooms and shelters. Daniel Rahamim, 68, from the Israeli village of Nahal Oz, and his family were trapped at home for hours. “We have terrorists in our community, I’m locked in my security room with my wife from 6.30am. We hear a lot of gunshots. We know the army is here, but not with enough forces,” he said.
Amid the unfolding atrocities of the day, the response of the army and the police was slow and inadequate. People cowering in dark safe rooms as gunmen occupied their homes and killed their neighbours sent messages pleading for rescue. “There is no army. It has been hours. People are begging for their lives,” said one Israeli in a southern kibbutz.
Nadav Peretz and his partner, Eli Dudaei, both 42, who have lived in Nahal Oz for seven years, shut themselves in their safe room with their dog Mack. “As the time wore on, we realised that the army hadn’t come to help,” said Dudaei.
Panicked messages started pouring into the community’s WhatsApp group, said Peretz. “The messages said, ‘please save us’, ‘please send the army’, ‘they are killing us’, ‘they are in my house’, some of them were saying goodbye. When we heard the men in the garden, I also sent messages to my mum, telling her I loved her.”
In some kibbutzim, Hamas forces lit fires or threw molotov cocktails to smoke terrified families out of safe rooms.
In Kfar Azar, the army took 20 hours to reach some of its terrified residents. Davidi Ben Zion, the deputy commander of Unit 71, a team of paratroopers, said Hamas gunmen had killed families, including babies. Some victims had been decapitated, he said.
Maj Gen Itai Veruv, of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), told reporters visiting Kfar Azar: “You see the babies, the mothers, the fathers, in their bedrooms … It’s not a war, it’s not a battlefield. It’s a massacre. It’s something that we used to imagine from our grandfathers, grandmothers in the pogrom in Europe and other places.”
Across the area, the smell of death hung in the air as the bodies of Israeli residents and Hamas men lay on the ground outside gutted homes and torched cars. Israel said it had recovered the bodies of 1,500 Hamas men inside Israel.
At the Supernova festival, revellers were gunned down as they tried to escape on foot or in cars. Videos posted on social media showed hundreds of young people running as Hamas gunmen pursued them on motorbikes. Some played dead for hours until they heard voices speaking in Hebrew and knew help had arrived.
Steve Markachenko, 25, and his girlfriend, Elisa Levin, 34, had driven four hours to join the party that started at about 10pm on Friday, just hours after the end of the week-long Sukkot religious festival.
The couple apparently managed to escape the initial chaos, Markachenko’s brother Dima said, with their car’s GPS system showing the vehicle about three miles from the party site. But 24 hours later, no one had heard from them.
“We don’t know anything. The Home Front, the police, the army, no one has any information to give us. We’ve been to every hospital in the country, nothing,” Dima Markachenko said.
Jake Marlowe, a 26-year-old British man who was working on the festival’s security team, was not heard from after he called his mother, Lisa, at dawn on Saturday to say rockets were flying overhead. An hour later he texted to say “signal very bad, everything OK, will keep you updated I promise you”.
On Wednesday, Marlowe’s parents said in a statement: “We are heartbroken to have to inform you the crushing news that our son Jake has been confirmed dead in southern Israel.”
Marlowe was one of 260 people killed at the Supernova festival. The overall death toll from Hamas’s murderous rampage and its aftermath did not become clear for several days, but after a week it stood at more than 1,300, mostly civilians.
It was the deadliest day in Israel’s history.
The response
“We are at war,” Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, declared within hours of the Hamas onslaught.
In a televised address on Saturday night, he told the Israeli public that the military would use all its might to destroy Hamas’s capabilities. The people of Gaza should “get out of there now”, he said – although there is no escape for the 2.3 million people living in the blockaded territory.
Gaza has been hit by powerful airstrikes day and night for the past week, and at least 360,000 Israeli military reservists have been called up before a widely expected ground invasion of the territory.
By Friday, 1,799 people had been killed in Gaza, and 6,388 wounded, according to Gaza’s health ministry. The casualties include hundreds of children.
Information from inside Gaza has been sketchy. With scant power and internet, communications have been difficult, and Israel has not allowed journalists in to report on the war.
But harrowing stories have emerged. Nasser Abu Quta, 57, said 19 members of his family and five of his neighbours were killed in an airstrike on their building in a refugee camp in Rafah, southern Gaza. The building housed only civilians, he insisted. “This is a safe house, with children and women,” he said.
Attiya Fathi Al-Nabaheen, 24, and 12 members of his family were killed in a “targeted airstrike” without prior warning, said a Palestinian rights group. Among the dead were children playing at the building’s entrance, they said.
Rama Abu Amra, 21, a university student, spoke of “bombs falling all around us”. She said: “We are so afraid about what will happen next.… They are trying to kill us, not with bombs but psychologically. I am terrified of losing my home, or a member of my family. We are so afraid of the night coming. It feels like the darkness is enveloping us.”
The Israeli military said it had hit hundreds of targets in the relatively well-to-do al-Rimal neighbourhood of Gaza City, home to members of the Hamas government as well as universities, aid agencies and media organisations. “The whole district was just erased,” said resident Radwan Abu al-Kass.
Statistics issued by the IDF were hard to comprehend: in the first six days, 6,000 bombs, weighing 4,000 tonnes, were dropped on more than 3,600 targets in Gaza.
On the Gaza border, Israeli forces were installing “an iron wall” of tanks and helicopters before an expected ground invasion, an Israeli military spokesperson said. Hamas leader Ali Barakeh, in Beirut, said the group was prepared for a prolonged war.
On Friday, a different kind of bombshell dropped on the people of Gaza. In an unprecedented move, the IDF ordered the entire population of the northern half of the strip to evacuate to the southern half as it prepared to intensify military action.
Relocating 1.1 million people – including children, older people, and those who were sick or disabled – across a war zone was impossible, warned aid agencies. A panicked scramble south began. But the order also stirred up visceral fears among people for whom memories of the 1948 Nakba, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians lost their homes and became lifelong refugees, burn bright.
Hamas urged people to stay put. Eyad Al-Bozom, spokesperson for the Hamas interior ministry, said: “The occupation wants to displace us once again from our land … We will die and we will not leave.”
The hostages
Soon after the attack, Hamas began releasing videos of what it said were people snatched by its forces from their homes and the music festival and taken into Gaza as hostages. Many were covered in blood, some hooded or with hands tied behind their backs, most with terror in their eyes.
Hamas understands well the value of Israeli hostages. In 2006, the year Hamas won elections in Gaza, Gilad Shalit, a young Israeli soldier, was seized and held in Gaza for more than five years. For most Israelis, whose sons and daughters do compulsory army service on leaving school, his captivity was a cause of immense pain and shame. Shalit was eventually released in exchange for more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners.
Israel has always vowed that none of its own would be “left behind”. Now it faces its biggest hostage crisis ever with up to 150 Israelis – civilians and soldiers, children and elderly people – being held in Gaza by Hamas in unknown locations and conditions, and under heavy Israeli bombardment.
One video from the Supernova festival showed Noa Argamani being driven away on a motorbike by two men, her arms outstretched and pleading for life. Her partner, Avinatan Or, was marched away by gunmen.
Another video appeared to show a partygoer, reported to be Shani Louk, a 23-year-old German-Israeli dual national, being paraded through the streets of Gaza. CNN said it had verified a video showing her being driven in a truck guarded by a man carrying a rocket-propelled grenade, while another held her by the hair.
Louk’s mother, Ricarda, later said: “We were sent a video in which I could clearly see our daughter unconscious in the car with the Palestinians and them driving around the Gaza Strip.”
Yoni Asher said his wife, two young children and mother-in-law had been abducted from Kibbutz Nir Oz, and he had tracked his wife’s phone to the Gaza Strip. “My two little girls, they’re only babies. They’re not even five years old and three years old,” he said.
Many relatives complained about the lack of information. Israel set up a “hostage situation room” to gather information on the identity of each hostage. By Thursday, 97 people had been identified.
In London, the families of Israelis believed to have been seized pleaded for their safe release. Noam Sagi, who says his mother Ada Sagi, 75, was abducted from her home in the Nir Oz kibbutz, said: “We are bleeding. We are in pain. We are in disbelief.”
Sharon Lifschitz said she had felt “hollow” since her parents, peace activists in their 80s who also lived in the Nir Oz kibbutz, went missing in the attack. “Somewhere in Gaza there are children and mothers, and this is our fight,” she said. “We need these people to come back home.”
The presence of hostages in Gaza is a hugely complicating factor in Israel’s military response to the Hamas attack. By Friday, according to Hamas, 17 hostages had been killed in airstrikes. Any ground invasion would risk killing more.
The organisation also vowed to kill a hostage for every airstrike carried out by Israel without prior warning to residents of the area.
According to a diplomatic source, the hostages were spread out across the enclave, with some being held in private houses. Islamist factions in Gaza were unsure of the total number of hostages.
On Thursday, Lt Gen Herzi Halevi, the IDF chief of staff, warned: “The price of war is high and difficult. We will do everything to bring the captives back home.”
The security failure
No one saw it coming. The failure of Israel’s vaunted intelligence services to foil Hamas’s unprecedented sea, air and ground offensive is likely to reverberate for decades to come.
On day six, Halevi acknowledged the catastrophic error. “The IDF is responsible for the security of the country and its citizens, and on Saturday morning in the area surrounding the Gaza Strip, we did not handle it,” he said.
Gaza is closely monitored by the Israeli security establishment. Phones and other communications are tapped, surveillance drones constantly fly overhead, and Palestinians are recruited as informants, usually with the help of blackmail or other coercion. The Hamas operation must have taken detailed planning over months, if not years. It’s almost inconceivable that nothing caught the attention of intelligence officials.
Yet Egypt perhaps did see it coming. An unnamed Egyptian official claimed early last week that his country had warned Israel that “an explosion of the situation is coming, and very soon, and it would be big. But they underestimated such warnings.”
Netanyahu dismissed the claim as “fake news”. But then a senior US politician caused a stir when he shored up the Egyptian official’s claim. Michael McCaul, the Republican chair of the US House foreign affairs committee, said: “We know that Egypt has warned the Israelis three days prior that an event like this could happen. I don’t want to get too much into classified [details], but a warning was given. I think the question was at what level.”
He added: “We’re not quite sure how we missed it. We’re not quite sure how Israel missed it.”
A British intelligence expert suggested Israel had suffered a “failure of imagination”. In 2001, there had been another one, said Alex Younger, a former head of MI6. “9/11 classically was that. The assumption was… that it essentially wasn’t possible,” Younger told BBC Radio 4.
Hamas may have been able to achieve surprise by “the complete abandonment of any electronic device or signature”, thereby evading electronic surveillance or signals intelligence, Younger added.
Others said Israeli intelligence had focused on the most serious unrest and violence in the West Bank for 20 years, and there was a belief that Hamas was uninterested in confrontation. Hamas gave the impression that it was “not ready for a fight … while preparing for this massive operation,” said one Israeli security source.
When the immediate crisis has passed, there will be demands for a major postmortem into Israel’s security failures. But the faith and confidence of Israeli citizens in the ability of their intelligence and military leaders to protect them may have been irrevocably shaken.
The humanitarian crisis in Gaza
With Israelis in a state of shock and grief, the country’s political leaders ramped up the pressure on Gaza. As well as the most sustained bombardment of any of the previous four conflicts between Israel and Hamas over the past 14 years and on top of a 16-year blockade that had already impeded the flow of food and fuel, they ordered a “complete siege” of Gaza. “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel – everything is closed,” said defence minister Yoav Gallant.
On Thursday, Israel’s energy minister, Israel Katz, doubled down despite mounting concern over the rapidly deteriorating humanitarian situation. “No electrical switch will be turned on, no water hydrant will be opened and no fuel truck will enter until the Israeli abductees are returned home. Humanitarianism for humanitarianism. And no one will preach us morality,” he wrote on social media.
At least 400,000 people were internally displaced by the bombardment even before the IDF’s order that 1.1 million people in the north of Gaza should move to the south. Families were crammed into UN schools, camping in corridors, classrooms and playgrounds, in the hope the premises would offer some degree of safety.
The grounds of the Shifa hospital in Gaza City, the largest medical facility in the strip, quickly became a refugee camp. “The grounds are full of families with children sleeping on mattresses or makeshift rugs,” Ghassan Abu Sitta, a British-Palestinian surgeon working at the Shifa, wrote on social media on Wednesday. The following day, he said: “We are at breaking point … All hospitals are beyond, beyond capacity.”
The Shifa and other hospitals warned that fuel supplies for their generators would soon run out. “Without electricity, hospitals risk turning into morgues,” said Fabrizio Carboni, regional director of the International Committee of the Red Cross. Lack of power would put “newborns in incubators and elderly patients on oxygen at risk. Kidney dialysis stops, and X-rays can’t be taken,” he said.
By midweek, Mohammad Abu Selim, the Shifa’s general director, said the hospital was full. “The patients are now on the streets. The wounded are on the streets. We cannot find a bed for them.”
Water and medical supplies are running out. In these dire and dangerous circumstances, some 5,500 women are due to give birth in the next month, bringing new life into what many see as hell on earth.
The political and diplomatic fallout
In response to the overwhelming crisis, Netanyahu invited the opposition to join an emergency wartime government. A war cabinet, comprising Netanyahu, Benny Gantz, a senior opposition figure and formerly an army general and defence minister, and Yoav Gallant, the current defence minister, was formed. Gantz, who has been a strident critic of Netanyahu’s far-right government, said it was time to close ranks. “We are all in this together. We are all enlisting.”
The government’s planned judicial reforms, which have been the cause of huge protests in Israel, were put on the back burner.
Internationally, country after country rallied to Israel’s side, emphatically endorsing its right to defend itself. America’s top diplomat, secretary of state Antony Blinken, travelled to Israel to offer “unwavering support” for the country and to declare: “We will always be there by your side.”
The US promised arms for Israel to deploy in its war with Hamas, and the UK also offered to “bolster security” by sending naval ships, surveillance aircraft, helicopters and a detachment of Royal Marines to the eastern Mediterranean.
Rishi Sunak called Netanyahu on Thursday to pledge the UK’s “steadfast support for Israel following Hamas’s appalling terrorist attack”. By the end of the week, Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, Lloyd Austin, US defence secretary, and James Cleverly, the UK foreign secretary, had all visited Israel to show solidarity.
Diplomats warned that the war between Israel and Hamas risked drawing in other players in the region.
Following the Hamas atrocities, there was immediate speculation about Iran’s involvement in the planning and execution. It was dismissed by both Tehran and western diplomats, but Iranian officials congratulated Hamas on its “commendable operation”.
And on Friday came a warning from Iran that the violence could spread. Foreign minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian said: “If these organised war crimes that are committed by the Zionist entity don’t stop immediately, then we can imagine any possibility.”
Earlier in the week, Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed force based in Lebanon, launched rockets across Israel’s northern border, prompting concerns about a second front opening.
On Thursday, Syrian state media reported that Israeli airstrikes had hit airports in Damascus and the northern city of Aleppo, putting them out of service.
One reason mooted for the Hamas attack was to scupper moves by Saudi Arabia to “normalise” relations with Israel. On Thursday, the Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman and Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi spoke on the phone about “the need to end war crimes against Palestine”.
Meanwhile, Qatar, Turkey and Egypt – which had previously brokered agreements between Israel and Hamas – pressed for humanitarian assistance to civilians in Gaza. Qatar tried to negotiate a partial release of hostages, suggesting Hamas might release women and children in exchange for 36 Palestinian women and adolescent prisoners held in Israeli jails.
Amid fears that the conflict could spread across the Middle East, Blinken embarked on a tour of six Arab capitals after leaving Israel. Egypt came under US pressure to open its border with Gaza at the southern end of the strip.
As well as the wider region, the bombardment of Gaza and killing of civilians are likely to fuel resentment and resistance among Palestinians living in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, as well as Palestinian-Israelis living in Israel itself.
Israelis who had come to believe that the Palestinian issue was broadly containable have witnessed a painful new reality over the past week. And for western governments that had lessened their engagement with the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, and had eased pressure for a long-term peace deal, a brutal lesson has been learned.
On the ground, Israelis and Palestinians buried their loved ones and braced themselves for what lies ahead. A week that started with unspeakable terror ended in grief, shock, anger and the fear of yet more violence, more bloodshed and more agony to come.
Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report
