Among the bullet-ridden cars and abandoned tents, a Hamas militant was hiding at the festival massacre scene
I walked up the hill to the main stage area of the Nova Festival site knowing we were entering a murderous scene the world has heard so much about but has yet to fully understand.
As I passed bullet-ridden cars where people trying to escape were gunned down; burnt-out cars where some young people had tried to hide; and past camping chairs, sleeping bags, roll mats and unopened snacks, it struck me that it seemed almost suspended in time.
Colourful tents flap in the breeze and bars with bottles of whiskey left as the massacre began haven’t been touched.
It’s taken days to get access to the Nova Festival site; the authorities have been collecting the bodies of more than 250 young men and women killed here.
The scene at the site of Nova Festival
People’s belongings are seen strewn on the ground
Throughout our wait, they told us it was simply too dangerous.
The site is remote and on public land between two kibbutzim – Be’eri and Re’im – both of which were attacked like the festival on Saturday morning.
Hamas, it seems, came determined to abduct people, but mainly to murder them. And these locations constitute the worst terror attacks in Israel’s history.
An abandoned bar at the Nova Festival site
At the festival campsite, teams of recovery specialists are conducting fingertip searches for human remains burnt during the attack.
Stunned looking soldiers are making their way through the site, checking for personal belongings and potential booby traps left by the Hamas raiding party.
IDF soldiers patrol the site
The cars that people tried to escape in but found themselves trapped in litter the entire festival site.
Some cars are burnt beyond recognition, others are riddled with bullets.
Burnt-out cars
Cars are seen pockmarked with bullet holes
An abandoned car
The cars that have been checked for booby traps are marked with a blue X. The ones that have yet to be checked by the bomb squad are marked with a yellow one.
It’s eery and it’s tense.
Suddenly we hear one gunshot, followed shortly after by another. We start to hear lots of shouting and see soldiers running toward the outer edge of the festival site.
A suspected Hamas militant has appeared, brandishing a knife.
A man is apprehended at the Nova Festival
Soldiers said they feared the man may have a suicide vest
Machine guns raised and pointing at him, he is told to undress – they worry he has a suicide vest on.
Once he is undressed, he is forced to the floor, blindfolded, and his hands bound.
Other soldiers take defensive positions to protect their colleagues – there could easily be more Hamas militants still hiding.
This type of encounter has been happening since Saturday in southern Israel and shows just how volatile the situation still is.
And even now after another day, more troops are being deployed to this and many other sites.
Only Hamas knows how many of their assassins remain inside this country.
Belongings abandoned in a tent by party goers
Israel ‘strikes Syrian airports’; 447 children killed in Gaza – Israel-Gaza latest
“The reason we have so many forces here is because this whole area is still dangerous – we waited an hour on the outskirts of this area because they were afraid there are still terrorists here,” an Israeli Defense Forces spokesperson told me.
“We’re here under guard, but we have to let people do their jobs. People were massacred here, there is a reason to be on high alert.”
The festival was abruptly stopped when rockets started exploding around the partygoers.
Many decided to stay where they were and others joined traffic queues trying to leave, but then the shooting started.
Many simply didn’t stand a chance.
We came across Anel, one of the festival organisers, who was packing up the equipment he had left behind and loading it into his pick-up truck and trailer.
A survivor of the massacre
He is a survivor. He says it’s a miracle he is alive, and that the attack was lightning quick.
I asked him how he got away.
“We were just on autopilot you know, pure instinct, this is what I can say about myself, but a lot of friends, a lot of people, didn’t make it…” his voice trails off.
This is a massive crime scene of course and Israel is promising to avenge the deaths of its young people.
But for the many families of those young people murdered here, time may really feel like it has stopped.
That Saturday morning will never be forgotten.
World
Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi confirmed dead in helicopter crash after charred wreckage found
Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi has died after the helicopter he was travelling in crashed in a mountainous area of northwest Iran.
Rescuers found the burned remains of the aircraft on Monday morning after the president and his foreign minister had been missing for more than 12 hours.
“President Raisi, the foreign minister and all the passengers in the helicopter were killed in the crash,” a senior Iranian official told Reuters, asking not to be named.
Live updates – Iranian president killed in crash
Iran‘s Mehr news agency reported “all passengers of the helicopter carrying the Iranian president and foreign minister were martyred”.
State TV said images showed it had smashed into a mountain peak, although there was no official word on the cause of the crash.
“President Raisi’s helicopter was completely burned in the crash… unfortunately, all passengers are feared dead,” an official told Reuters.
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President of Iran killed in crash
The crash happened in Iran’s East Azerbaijan province
As the sun rose, rescuers saw the wreckage from around 1.25 miles, the head of the Iranian Red Crescent Society, Pir Hossein Kolivand, told state media.
Iranian news agency IRNA said the president was flying in an American-made Bell 212 helicopter.
Read more:
Who is Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi?
Many will be fearing instability after ‘butcher of Tehran’ killed
Iranian TV showed the president on the helicopter during a trip to Azerbaijan
TV pictures from Sunday showed thick fog at the search site. Pic: IRNA
Mr Raisi, 63, who was seen as a frontrunner to succeed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as Iran’s supreme leader, was travelling back from Azerbaijan where he had opened a dam with the country’s president.
Iran’s foreign minister, Hossein Amirabdollahian, also died in the crash.
The governor of East Azerbaijan province and other officials and bodyguards were also said to have been on board when the helicopter crashed in fog on Sunday.
Iranian media initially described it as a “hard landing”.
The chief of staff of Iran’s army had ordered all military resources and the Revolutionary Guard to be deployed in the search, which had been hampered by bad weather.
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi was among the first to react to the news of Mr Raisi’s death.
“India stands with Iran in this time of sorrow,” he said in a post on X.
A helicopter carrying Iran’s president crashed during bad weather on Sunday.
But who is Ebrahim Raisi – a leader who faces sanctions from the US and other nations over his involvement in the mass execution of prisoners in 1988.
The president, 63, who was travelling alongside the foreign minister and two other key Iranian figures when their helicopter crashed, had been travelling across the far northwest of Iran following a visit to Azerbaijan.
Follow live: Rescuers search for president after helicopter crash
Mr Raisi is a hardliner and former head of the judiciary who some have suggested could one day replace Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Because of his part in the sentencing of thousands of prisoners of conscience to death back in the 1980s, he was nicknamed the Butcher of Tehran as he sat on the so-called Death Panel, for which he was then sanctioned by the US.
Raisi and Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev on Sunday. Pic: Reuters
Both a revered and a controversial figure, Mr Raisi supported the country’s security services as they cracked down on all dissent, including in the aftermath of the 2022 death of Mahsa Amini – the woman who died after she was arrested for allegedly not wearing her hijab properly – and the nationwide protests that followed.
The months-long security crackdown killed more than 500 people and saw over 22,000 detained.
People light a fire during a protest over the death of Mahsa Amini in Tehran, 2022. Pic: Reuters
In March, a United Nations investigative panel found that Iran was responsible for the “physical violence” that led to Ms Amini’s death after her arrest for not wearing a hijab, or headscarf, to the liking of authorities.
The president is seen as a frontrunner to replace Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (pictured). Pic: Reuters
The president also supported Iran’s unprecedented decision in April to launch a drone and missile attack on Israel amid its war with Hamas, the ruling militant group in Gaza responsible for the 7 October attacks which saw 1,200 people killed in southern Israel.
Involvement in mass executions
Mr Raisi is sanctioned by the US in part over his involvement in the mass execution of thousands of political prisoners in 1988 at the end of the bloody Iran-Iraq war.
Under the president, Iran now enriches uranium at nearly weapons-grade levels and hampers international inspections.
Iran has armed Russia in its war on Ukraine and has continued arming proxy groups in the Middle East, such as Yemen’s Houthi rebels and Lebanon’s Hezbollah.
Keep up with all the latest news from the UK and around the world by following Sky News
He successfully ran for the presidency back in August 2021 in a vote that got the lowest turnout in the Islamic Republic’s history as all of his potentially prominent opponents were barred from running under Iran’s vetting system.
A presidency run in 2017 saw him lose to Hassan Rouhani, the relatively moderate cleric who as president reached Tehran’s 2015 nuclear deal with world powers.
‘Very involved in anything’
Alistair Bunkall, Sky News’s Middle East correspondent, said the president is “a major figure in Iranian political and religious society” but “he’s not universally popular by any means” as his administration has seen a series of protests in the past few years against his and the government’s “hardline attitude”.
Mr Raisi is nonetheless “considered one of the two frontrunners to potentially take over” the Iranian regime when the current supreme leader dies, Bunkall said.
He added the president would have been “instrumental” in many of Iran’s activities in the region as he “would’ve been very involved in anything particularly what has been happening in Israel and the surrounding areas like Lebanon and Gaza and the Houthis over the last seven and a bit months”.
World
Iran president helicopter crash: The ‘butcher of Tehran’ has a fearsome reputation – and many will be fearing instability
Ebrahim Raisi has been one of Iran’s hardest of hardliners, a fanatical and absolute believer in the Iranian revolution and its mission.
If he has died on a mountainside in the north of the country, as looks increasingly likely, it will be a major moment for the country and the region.
It will remove from the Middle East one of its toughest most uncompromising players.
Follow live: Rescuers search for president after helicopter crash
A man who launched the first direct attack on Israel in his country’s history and a hardliner on whose watch hundreds of Iranians have been killed in the brutal repression of recent women-led protests, Mr Raisi has a huge amount of blood on his hands.
The president is seen as a frontrunner to replace Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (pictured). Pic: Reuters
His fearsome reputation goes back to the 1980s – a period that earned him the dubious soubriquet the Butcher of Tehran.
He sat on the so-called Death Panel of four Islamic judges who sentenced thousands of Iranian prisoners of conscience to their deaths during the purge of 1988.
Mr Raisi has personally been involved in two of the darkest periods of Iranian repression. And he was seen as one of the favourite contenders to replace the elderly and ailing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
Read more:
Ebrahim Raisi: Who is Iranian president?
Iran helicopter crash: Contact made made with passenger and crew member
His accession to that role would have guaranteed years more of the same… and years more meddling abroad.
Raisi and Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev on Sunday. Pic: Reuters
With Mr Raisi as president, Iran has engaged in more and more adventurous interventions beyond its borders.
With him in charge Iran has helped Houthis menace international shipping in the Red Sea; helped Hezbollah engage Israel in a seven-month duel over its northern border; aided militia in Iraq to attack, and in some cases kill, American soldiers; and helped Hamas fight its own war against the Jewish state.
After two years of unrest, economic failure and stuttering recovery from the pandemic, Iran is divided and weakened.
Its government has lost much of its credibility and support because of the atrocities it has meted out to its women.
Few outside the regime and its ranks of ardent followers will mourn a man who has overseen the death, incarceration or torture of so many.
Iranians may dare yearn for less repressive times without him. Outsiders will hope for a less troublesome Iran.
Read more:
Who is Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi?
Keep up with all the latest news from the UK and around the world by following Sky News
But there are plenty more where he came from and the Supreme Leader is likely to find another hardliner to replace him.
The fear will be of instability in the run-up to elections. The government has been undermined by recent events, its Supreme Leader is unwell.
If Mr Raisi is dead, his government will try to secure the succession as quickly and smoothly as it can.
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