Danielle Yehiel and her boyfriend drove around the festival area for hours, playing a game of ‘cat and mouse’ with Hamas terrorists.
The rave started at midnight on Friday. Hundreds of young Israelis came prepared to party well into Saturday evening.
Danielle Yehiel came with a group of eight friends to the Supernova music festival, held in the Negev desert in southern Israel. They had planned the excursion three months in advance, to celebrate their college graduation. Between the DJs, dancing, and light show, it was a spectacular production, Yehiel told National Review.
When the sun rose around 6:30 a.m., “it was the peak of the party,” Yehiel said. Many ravers were drunk and under the influence of psychedelic drugs.
Suddenly, peculiar clouds appeared in the sky. Missiles.
Yehiel and her boyfriend were used to regular rocket warnings, as they had grown up in southern Israel by the Gaza border. For decades, Hamas had attacked Israel from the territory. But Israel’s Iron Dome system usually neutralized the incoming projectiles.
This time, “the amount was not logical,” Yehiel said. “It looked like fireworks, like the fourth of July.”
Within hours, 260 of their fellow festival-goers would be dead.
Maya Parizer, another Israeli festival attendee who came with a different group of twelve, agreed that bombardment on that scale “had never been seen before.”
Festival security began telling everyone to evacuate, but there was little indication of what was going on, Yehiel said.
Parizer, a resident of northern Israel where rocket fire was uncommon, had a panic attack. She had a gut feeling something was very wrong, so she packed up her stuff and left. Many people, however, stayed put.
“A lot of people were thinking, ‘We’re so drunk, we’re so high on drugs, maybe we should wait it out, maybe the party will continue,’” she said.
Yehiel and her boyfriend, Ronald, separated from their friends to find their car. Due to stress and their dazed mental state, many partiers were driving haphazardly, still unaware of what was happening. “People were [getting into] accidents inside the parking lot of the party,” she said.
Yehiel thought it wise to wait for the inebriated drivers to clear before they drove to Ronald’s parents’ house, a short 20 minute drive away. “We figured we’d be fine,” she said.
That delay nearly cost them their lives.
By 7:00 a.m., it became clear to Yehiel and Ronald that Hamas had infiltrated the entire festival. Then began a deadly cat and mouse chase between the pair and the terrorists.
Yehiel and Ronald staked everything on their tiny, urban car.
“The car we drove is a model you don’t even have in the states,” Yehiel said. “It’s a really small car. Only a little bit bigger than a smart car. It’s a city car, not anything suitable for driving or escaping through roads.”
Searching for an exit, the two began hearing what sounded like automatic gunfire.
“It’s not like a bullet here, a bullet there,” she said. “It’s like ten bullets at a time, 20 bullets at a time. We see a mass of people running by foot in total chaos.
They decided not to leave the car, thinking “this is what will keep us alive.”
From 7:15 a.m. or so until 8:30 a.m., Yehiel and Ronald navigated the desert under gun fire.
“We played with them,” Yehiel said. “It was like a game. They came from the right, we went left. They came from the left; we drove to the right. We got locked in the party. The terrorists had surrounded the exits. For an hour we drove inside the party area. We were constantly shot at. We saw the terrorists, we saw them shoot people, they shot the car. They shot the car nonstop.”
Festival attendees ran towards their car, desperate for help. They left their car doors open so anyone could jump in while they tried to escape.
By 8:30 a.m., the carnage was everywhere. Yehiel and Ronald witnessed a massacre, they said. Many people were murdered at the exits. Other people ran on foot towards the woods and managed to flee. They noticed theirs was the only car driving amid a sea of immobile vehicles.
“We are the only car in the lot, and we are the biggest target because we are the only ones moving,” Yehiel said. “There are thousands of [terrorists] and it’s just me and my boyfriend.”
With Yehiel’s parents abroad, they called Ronald’s family, who stayed on the phone with them for three hours as they desperately tried to escape the violence.
They realized they needed to hide. Recognizing an Israeli soldier, Yehiel and Ronald drove to him and hid under their car for an hour. The terrorists had wiped out the soldier’s entire unit except for him, they said. He didn’t have a walkie talkie, and only had one case of bullets left for his gun. He was simultaneously tending to two injured people, one of whom was unresponsive.
Yehiel and Ronald laid there while the explosions erupted. “It was like a festival of booms,” she said. “Because each boom was different, and you had to recognize which boom is it and where is it compared to your location.”
They thought, with the soldier there, they only needed to stall before reinforcements arrived. About an hour later, they realized nobody was coming to save them. At 9:30 a.m., Yehiel heard, “They’re here! They’re here!” followed by screams of “Allahu Akbar!”
They made the split-second decision to get back in the car, leaving the soldier behind.
“It was very hard,” Yehiel said. “We think about that solider every day. If there’s something else we could have done. I don’t even remember his name. I have no idea where he is now.”
As they frantically drove away, a few boys from the festival begged for help, as terrorists were chasing them from behind. They hopped in the car while Yehiel yelled, “Close the door”
The terrorists got in front of them, and shot at the car, which now carried five people.
“During all of this my boyfriend is able to maneuver the car,” Yehiel said. “He puts it in reverse, and returns to the other direction, and we just started to drive. We were the only car driving in the lot of the party. It was like David vs. Goliath.”
Once again, they made it to the exit, where they found burning cars and bodies. The terrorists had infiltrated all corners of the party scene. As they drove through fields, they saw terrorists in heavily armored vehicles much more suitable for the rough terrain than their own.
“They’re shooting at us nonstop,” Yehiel said. “I cannot stress that enough. They’re not far away; they’re on us, they’re on the car.”
They knew the terrorists were aiming at the car’s wheels to stop them, possibly to kidnap them. They darted from the field onto another road, after which Ronald immediately screamed, “Heads down, heads down! Nobody raise their head!’” The terrorists had also laid siege to the road, they discovered.
Once again, theirs was the only moving car on the road. Then it was “truly David vs. Goliath,” Yehiel said.
“Any terrorist with any type of ammunition is shooting at us” she added. “They made barriers. They took cars and flipped them over, they lit them up, so we couldn’t even cross straight through the road. It was truly Ronald and his amazing driving skills and exceptional decision making. It was something I can’t even explain.”
Ronald floored it and ran through the terrorists, even running over one with the car. He swerved on and off the road, Yehiel said. The tires on the wheels were gone, leaving just the rims. The car started to smoke, barely functioning.
“Our saving grace is that we came from the opposite direction of the party,” she said. “They were expecting us to come from north to south and we came from south to north. We surprised them in a way.”
Passing the last mass group of terrorists, they arrived at a roundabout leading to a kibbutz. They had no idea that multiple kibbutzim had already been attacked and occupied by terrorists. Pulling into the kibbutz, they saw civilian forces standing guard, and breathed a sigh of relief.
“We said, ‘That’s it, it’s over,’” Yehiel said.
The reprieve was short-lived.
“The moment that thought was done, we took our heads down,” she said. “We’ve been to the army. We know how army people think. We are driving super-fast in a broken car that is smoking. People are hiding inside the car. Our forces think we are the terrorists.”
The civilian forces shot at their car.
“Our forces are very good shooters,” she said. “They aim exactly where you need to aim to take someone down. Most of the bullets were aimed towards me because I sat next to the driver and the one next to the driver is the one usually holding the weapon. They shot our windshield and the window where I sat next to the driver.”
Yehiel thought, “this is how I’m going to die.”
Once the forces broke all the glass, they heard Yehiel and Ronald’s screams, “We’re Israelis!, we’re Israelis!, don’t shoot!”
The call with Ronald’s’ parents cut out. The last thing the parents heard was “They’re shooting, they’re shooting!” At that point, the parents thought they were dead, Yehiel said.
Luckily, the civilian forces stopped shooting and let them enter. Kibbutz Saad, known as one of the safest in southern Israel, gave them safe harbor. The five learned later that Saad, a religious kibbutz with a militia and many armed residents, was alone among kibbutzim in the region in thwarting the terrorists. Maya Parizer also made it to Saad, where she hid in a family’s in-home shelter.
“It was truly pure luck,” Yehiel said. “We had no idea where we were. It was the same probability that we ended up in Re’im and Be’eri or in any other kibbutz where horrific things occurred.”
Of the eight friends that went to Supernova with Yehiel, four found refuge at Kibbutz Re’im, closer to the party perimeter. There, a terrorist, speaking Hebrew and pretending to help, led people into a migunit, a door-less public shelter in the street of the kibbutz.
From the early morning until around 4:00 a.m., terrorists threw grenades into the migunit. Trapped inside, two of four of Yehiel’s friends survived eight grenades and one RPG rocket, she said. “They hid under bodies to stay safe. They saw legs flying, arms flying, people dying.” One of the four died and another one is still missing.
“They were 100 percent baited and tricked to go into the communal shelter,” Yehiel said. “You can easily say it’s like gas chambers. What’s the difference?”
Parizer said friends of hers went to Re’im as well. Inside the migunit, some Israelis threw the grenades that were lobbed inside back outside, losing body parts in the process, she said.
“As Israelis, we have extreme strength,” Yehiel said. “It takes a lot to break us.”