2023-10-10 05:49:00
The videos show the escape attempts, the arrival of the jihadists and how the area was left
Everything was prepared for it to be a Saturday night celebration. In the middle of the Israeli desert, near the Gaza Strip, thousands of young people were dancing to the rhythm of electronic music when the worst happened.
At the height of the party, Hamas rockets first began to fall and were repelled by Israeli air defenses. At that time, the worst was yet to come. The Hamas terrorists who crossed the border and directly attacked the attendees of the event as it began to dawn in the desert.
Among the audience, there was an Argentine woman who spoke with Infobae following the moments of terror she experienced last weekend.
Live to tell
Daniela Gimena Russo is 36 years old, she is a DJ and tattoo artist. She left Argentina 5 years ago. From that moment on she spent her time traveling between Latin America and Europe. On October 1 she had arrived in Tel Aviv with friends. Before she had passed through Paris and Hungary. In Budapest she met with the group with whom they would experience the festival of terror in Israel.
The girl in a selfie on her social networks and working as a DJ in Cancun
From Israel, the young woman answered the Infobae journalist’s questions via WhatsApp. “I’m fine, I still can’t fully understand what happened,” Daniela describes her feelings. “I felt like I was in a movie running for my life.”
The Argentine DJ had the idea of staying a week in Tel Aviv. She had a flight back to Paris just the followingnoon following the electronic party. In fact, it was not in her plans to participate in the event until the last minute.
“We found out that a Mexican friend was playing and we decided almost that Friday night to go see him,” remembers Daniela, trying to rewind those hours before the disaster. We rented two cars and started for the typical area at 11 p.m., following eating. A friend stayed at the apartment because she was tired. We didn’t know that it was so close to the Gaza Strip. We arrived following midnight and there were still not many people. It was a large open-air place, fenced and in the background an olive tree plantation.”
Russo’s friend they went to see had just played at noon on Saturday. “That’s why many people brought tents and lounge chairs because the party looked like it would be very long,” explains Daniela.
The flyer for the electronic party that ended in a massacre in Israel
Escape from the massacre
Then comes the moment when the horror begins. Here Daniela’s film might have a parallel montage between the two situations.
On the one hand, the Argentine DJ with her friends spent a night that seemed eternal with the light desert breeze that hit her face, while they moved to the rhythm of the music.
Meanwhile, the first rockets began to be fired from the Gaza Strip. At the same time, terrorists were infiltrating across the border and also arriving by air on paragliders. The attack on Israel had already begun.
At that same moment, Daniela and two of her friends went to the car to rest for a while from the frenzy of the night. “We sat in the car and started to see the sky light up. At first we thought they were fireworks. Until the music cuts off and we hear a voice in Hebrew giving a message that we did not understand.”
What Daniela was actually seeing was the Israeli defense shield that made the Hamas rockets that were aimed at the heart of the electronic party where the Argentine DJ was at explode in the air. At the same time, the terrorists arrived at the doors of the place armed and ready for anything.
With no music at the party, a young Israeli approaches Daniela and tells her in English what was happening. It is the moment that the escape begins. “We started to leave by car and when I contacted my other friends who were in another car they shouted at us: ‘get out of the car and run.’ And that’s what I did with my two friends and the Israeli boy who joined us in the escape,” Russo remembers.
A Hamas terrorist lands with a paraglider in Israeli territory to begin the attack
Run for your life
The girl ran through the field and while she began to hear the first shots. They were the Hamas terrorists who had already broken into the electronic party with blood and fire. The next day, the Israeli Government recovered some 260 bodies of that night’s victims that were scattered across the desert near the Gaza Strip.
Daniela and her friends reached a bunker where there were more people who had escaped Hamas attacks. “In the background shots might be heard from the area where the party had been.”
The place did not give security to the young Argentine. It was just a concrete warehouse full of scared people. Daniela can’t explain it or put it into words for now. But that fear was palpable in the air, as dawn began to dawn in Israel.
Something of his survival instinct told him that he had to get out of that closed space. That there they would be an easy target. “With other people we started running through the field. Shots might be heard from all sides. Sometimes in front of me and sometimes behind. At one point I lost a friend who took refuge in a wooded area. Luckily, later we met once more in Tel Aviv – Daniela says almost without pause -. When she had been running for a few minutes, an explosion and a flash occurred. Later we found out that they had attacked the shed where she had been sheltering at the beginning when I left the party with grenades.”
Israel responded with bombings to the refugee camps in the Gaza Strip (Europa Press/Saher Alghorra)
Daniela ran for four hours cross-country. She did part of that journey barefoot. “I had some boots that my sister had given me. That she loved them very much. At one point she breaks the sole of her left shoe. In fact, I have a sprained ankle, which is the only injury I suffered, says the Argentine DJ. For a moment I carried the boots, but they were already so heavy that I discarded them in the middle of the field.”
Thus, Daniela continued “running for her life.” In the background gunshots might be heard more and more sporadically. But always, when she thought it was all over. Another stampede brought the young Argentine girl back to the reality she was living. “At one point we entered an olive grove and from there to a container in which there were 7 other people, some with gunshot wounds,” Russo remembers. There, one of the girls was a soldier who was on duty and had gone to the party. She sent messages to her colleagues with her location. A while later the first rescue squad arrived and evacuated the injured. And then a couple of trucks for the rest of the people who were in that shelter.”
Thus, following undergoing a medical examination, Daniela returned to Tel Aviv barefoot and still without fully understanding what had happened. First the fireworks, which were actually rockets fired from the Gaza Strip, then the escape, the first shots and the four hours of traveling through the Israeli countryside with gunshots ringing in the background.
Daniela might not take the plane she had scheduled for last Saturday. She had planned to return to a friend’s house in Paris. She thanks the Israeli family who gave her the first shelter before returning to the capital. “There were regarding 15 of us in the home. They gave us water, food and even cell phone chargers. So, I called my family in Argentina and told them everything that had happened. “They didn’t know anything, only that I was in Israel but they hadn’t found out that I was at the party.”
The girl’s plans were frustrated. She is still in Tel Aviv, perhaps thinking regarding her favorite boots that were forever lost in the Israeli desert. In her ears the latest songs she heard at the party and the sounds of gunshots mix. Those who made her run for four hours barefoot through the countryside with one goal: to save her life. Survive the massacre.
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