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‘The Holocaust, all over again’: The massacre at the Israeli rave, in survivors’ words

TEL AVIV (JTA) — One of the earliest shocking atrocities to emerge from Hamas’ invasion of Israel on Saturday happened at the Tribe of Nova music festival, an all-night rave near Kibbutz Re’im on the Gaza border.
Terrorists descended upon the festival on Saturday morning, spraying the thousands of revelers, most of them young adults, with gunfire as they escaped by car and fled through an open field. Photos and video show panicked crowds running for their lives, cars riddled with bullets and a road strewn with dead bodies.
By the end of the massacre, 260 people were murdered — some, survivors say, after being raped. Others were captured by the attackers or wounded by the gunfire. Missiles rained down on the area throughout the attack.
The Jewish Telegraphic Agency asked four survivors to share how they escaped. Here are their stories, in their own words:
The rave began on Friday night in a large outdoor space. At about 6 a.m., partygoers begin to hear sirens warning them of incoming rockets from Gaza.
Yaelle Bonnet, 21: We went to Nova, we got there at something like 1 and didn’t stop dancing until 6:30 in the morning, when suddenly, sirens started. … The producers stopped the music pretty early and asked everyone to break up, go to their cars and go home. We found the car we came in, got in and started leaving. No one really understood the extent of the situation.
Gad Liebersohn, 21: I got to the party at 4 at night. Around 6, 6:30 the sirens started, the music stopped. Missiles and rockets started coming from everywhere. We heard booms everywhere.
Yarin Amar, 22: The sights I have seen won’t leave my mind for a long time yet. Dancing at a party with friends, and out of nowhere rockets that won’t stop. You get a warning about terrorists driving out. Not a second has gone by, and those hundreds of terrorists are shooting at us from every direction.
A view of the destruction on the grounds of the Israeli rave. (Ilia Yefimovich/picture alliance via Getty Images)
Initially, many of the partygoers attempt to escape by car, but a traffic jam quickly forms and they are unable to leave the area before the shooting begins. Drivers exit their cars and begin to flee on foot.
Yaam Grimberg: I grabbed two good friends that were with me, and another friend. We escaped to the car, we started driving. We were blocked everywhere. They started shooting at us.
Yaelle: There was traffic and we understood why, when two cars ahead of us, they just came out of the pickup truck. I don’t remember exactly how they looked. It was a white pickup truck, they were also wearing white. They got out of the pickup truck with really big rifles, started to point and shoot everywhere.
Gad: At some point there was an announcement from the police, shouting into a megaphone that all the cars need to leave via the exit. I got in the car and started driving toward the exit, and that’s where the yelling had started: “Terrorists! Terrorists! They’re shooting at us!”
They started to shoot at the cars, at us. At that moment everyone parked their cars, left their cars there and just started fleeing.
Yarin: Cars are getting shot up. I left the car and ran, just ran, and on the way I see people murdered and falling to the ground in front of me.
Video from the massacre shows a crowd of people running through an open field, in full view of the terrorists. Many get shot in the back and are killed or injured.
Yaelle: We kept going with the car until it got stuck in the field. We didn’t know if we should stay with the car or escape on foot. What do you do when you’re being shot at?
Gad: You see people being massacred like ducks falling next to you. One person falls next to you, gets hit by a bullet, then another person falls next to you, gets hit by a bullet. You hide under some car, the car starts driving.
I was left out in the open so I ran to the forest to my left. I started to run into the forest and hide. Then they started to shoot everywhere. There were rockets at the same time.
Yarin: With helplessness and tears in my eyes I grabbed hold of a guy I didn’t know and said, “Please stay with me, I’m scared, don’t go.” With the shooting, we had to keep running. We ran to the field to escape to the kibbutz, and then we realized they were everywhere.
A view of destroyed vehicles near the grounds of the Tribe of Nova music festival after Saturday’s deadly attack by Hamas (Ilia Yefimovich/picture alliance via Getty Images)
Some of the survivors escape the attackers by hiding alone or with others. Some go into bomb shelters and others hide in the area’s greenery as terrorists continue to advance on them. Two of the survivors told JTA that their calls to police went unanswered.
Yaam: We were able to hide in a shelter. Within a few minutes, I understood that if we stayed there they would just come and slaughter us, so I took the friends and we sprinted back to the car as bullets flew over our heads.
Yaelle: We joined a pretty big group of some people who had all escaped in the same direction, to the fields. We kept going, and there was a police officer, he didn’t have any bullets left in his gun, he seemed pretty scared, just like us. He didn’t have reception on his radio. He didn’t have much of anything.
Gad: After two hours of hiding and trying to get rescued — call the police, nothing helps, army, nothing comes to us — for two hours I’m hiding and hearing people getting kidnapped and women getting raped, and without end you hear people dying, begging for their life, women begging for their life. And you can’t make a sound, because they’ll find you too, kidnap, kill you too.
Yarin: We hid in the trees, trying to get help from the police with no answer. We heard shouting in Arabic, unending shooting, and then three terrorists were in front of us.
As terrorists continue to hunt for people to kill and capture, the people they are chasing have to escape again and again, running as fast as they can and finding new places to hide.
Gad: At some point, the terrorists found us hiding. We were about 20 people hiding in the same place. They found us, they killed some of us. I was able to get away.
I kept running, running, running. There were four terrorists coming in my direction. I couldn’t move. I froze in place. A friend who was hiding came out of his hiding place and pulled my hand and took me with him to the hiding place. We hid in the hiding place for four hours.
I heard terrorists getting closer and closer to us, and we didn’t move. Then we heard them finally getting farther and farther away. When there was total quiet, we left the bush where we were hiding. As we left the bush we saw we had run too far and reached the fence with Gaza.
Yarin: We escaped, we just ran anywhere, knowing the terrorists were chasing after us and shooting at us. That’s when I saw my death with my own eyes. I knew that as I was running I could get hit by a bullet. It was the two of us, with the knowledge that I didn’t know what had happened to the others.
I tried to call people who could help, who would find me, and after call after call to the police with no answer I understood that my chances were slim. Hour after hour passed as we were sitting in the bushes, and the shooting was only growing louder, and unending explosives, rockets and grenades.
A dead body on the grounds of the Tribe of Nova music festival after Saturday’s deadly attack by Hamas. (Ilia Yefimovich/picture alliance via Getty Images)
After hours of running and hiding, the survivors were rescued because they made contact with the army or police or with Israelis passing by who were able to bring them to a secure town. Yaelle’s group connected with the police and was directed to safety. Gad hid in a tree with a friend. Yarin sent a series of panicked texts to a soldier in her phone contacts named Naveh, begging him to come rescue her and her companion, Netanel.
Yaam: At some point, a team from the IDF arrived, so I took advantage of their fighting to take cover. We got into the car and started to drive crazy fast through the area.
I kept the window open so I could hear where they were shooting at me, and try to drive in the opposite direction. They just shot at us from every direction, so you have no idea where to drive. After a couple hours I was able to take us to Kibbutz Tze’elim and there, thank God, we were safe.
Yaelle: In the end, they directed us to Moshav Patish, that was the closest and safest place. They directed everyone there. We walked I don’t know how much time.
We walked three to four hours, 20 kilometers, according to what I saw on the map.
Gad: As we were hiding in the tree we heard yelling. Someone was screaming, “Hello! Hello!” We didn’t know if it was an Arab or Jew who had come to save us but at that point we had nothing to lose. We went out to see who it was, and it was a Jew who managed to extricate us.
We got into his car and drove a bit in the car to find other people. We found three other people hiding in the forest and got them into the car, and he took us to a nearby farming community that was safe.
Yarin: I looked at Netanel, I said to him, “Don’t breathe now and don’t move.” We played dead for a few hours without moving, hoping some miracle would happen. I looked at the sky and it was just me and God. I prayed and said to Him, “Please God, I want to live, I’ll do anything, I’m still just a child.”
After a long time Naveh, the soldier, was able to find us as he promised me.
The survivors imparted that the horrors they saw that day will stay with them.
Yaelle: We didn’t have water, everyone was pretty quiet. It felt like a death caravan, like we’re experiencing the Holocaust all over again. That’s very hard to say, and I’m letting myself say it.
We didn’t have water, we didn’t have anything, but I knew we were getting somewhere, so we kept going.
Only coming back, on the bus, did I see corpses on the ground from cars that had been shot.
Gad: When you drive on the road, you see bodies in every direction, without end — a lot of corpses, a lot of dead people. The army got there only after about nine hours, that’s it. By the time we got to the road we saw corpses everywhere of people who were at the party.
Yarin: I’m sad that I need to be scared in my country, and thankful for the life I got back.
—
The post ‘The Holocaust, all over again’: The massacre at the Israeli rave, in survivors’ words appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Hamas Says No Interim Hostage Deal Possible Without Work Toward Permanent Ceasefire

Explosions send smoke into the air in Gaza, as seen from the Israeli side of the border, July 17, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Amir Cohen
The spokesperson for Hamas’s armed wing said on Friday that while the Palestinian terrorist group favors reaching an interim truce in the Gaza war, if such an agreement is not reached in current negotiations it could revert to insisting on a full package deal to end the conflict.
Hamas has previously offered to release all the hostages held in Gaza and conclude a permanent ceasefire agreement, and Israel has refused, Abu Ubaida added in a televised speech.
Arab mediators Qatar and Egypt, backed by the United States, have hosted more than 10 days of talks on a US-backed proposal for a 60-day truce in the war.
Israeli officials were not immediately available for comment on the eve of the Jewish Sabbath.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said in a statement on a call he had with Pope Leo on Friday that Israel‘s efforts to secure a hostage release deal and 60-day ceasefire “have so far not been reciprocated by Hamas.”
As part of the potential deal, 10 hostages held in Gaza would be returned along with the bodies of 18 others, spread out over 60 days. In exchange, Israel would release a number of detained Palestinians.
“If the enemy remains obstinate and evades this round as it has done every time before, we cannot guarantee a return to partial deals or the proposal of the 10 captives,” said Abu Ubaida.
Disputes remain over maps of Israeli army withdrawals, aid delivery mechanisms into Gaza, and guarantees that any eventual truce would lead to ending the war, said two Hamas officials who spoke to Reuters on Friday.
The officials said the talks have not reached a breakthrough on the issues under discussion.
Hamas says any agreement must lead to ending the war, while Netanyahu says the war will only end once Hamas is disarmed and its leaders expelled from Gaza.
Almost 1,650 Israelis and foreign nationals have been killed as a result of the conflict, including 1,200 killed in the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on southern Israel, according to Israeli tallies. Over 250 hostages were kidnapped during Hamas’s Oct. 7 onslaught.
Israel responded with an ongoing military campaign aimed at freeing the hostages and dismantling Hamas’s military and governing capabilities in neighboring Gaza.
The post Hamas Says No Interim Hostage Deal Possible Without Work Toward Permanent Ceasefire first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Iran Marks 31st Anniversary of AMIA Bombing by Slamming Argentina’s ‘Baseless’ Accusations, Blaming Israel

People hold images of the victims of the 1994 bombing attack on the Argentine Israeli Mutual Association (AMIA) community center, marking the 30th anniversary of the attack, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, July 18, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Irina Dambrauskas
Iran on Friday marked the 31st anniversary of the 1994 bombing of the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association (AMIA) Jewish community center in Buenos Aires by slamming Argentina for what it called “baseless” accusations over Tehran’s alleged role in the terrorist attack and accusing Israel of politicizing the atrocity to influence the investigation and judicial process.
The Iranian Foreign Ministry issued a statement on the anniversary of Argentina’s deadliest terrorist attack, which killed 85 people and wounded more than 300.
“While completely rejecting the accusations against Iranian citizens, the Islamic Republic of Iran condemns attempts by certain Argentine factions to pressure the judiciary into issuing baseless charges and politically motivated rulings,” the statement read.
“Reaffirming that the charges against its citizens are unfounded, the Islamic Republic of Iran insists on restoring their reputation and calls for an end to this staged legal proceeding,” it continued.
Last month, a federal judge in Argentina ordered the trial in absentia of 10 Iranian and Lebanese nationals suspected of orchestrating the attack in Buenos Aires.
The ten suspects set to stand trial include former Iranian and Lebanese ministers and diplomats, all of whom are subject to international arrest warrants issued by Argentina for their alleged roles in the terrorist attack.
In its statement on Friday, Iran also accused Israel of influencing the investigation to advance a political campaign against the Islamist regime in Tehran, claiming the case has been used to serve Israeli interests and hinder efforts to uncover the truth.
“From the outset, elements and entities linked to the Zionist regime [Israel] exploited this suspicious explosion, pushing the investigation down a false and misleading path, among whose consequences was to disrupt the long‑standing relations between the people of Iran and Argentina,” the Iranian Foreign Ministry said.
“Clear, undeniable evidence now shows the Zionist regime and its affiliates exerting influence on the Argentine judiciary to frame Iranian nationals,” the statement continued.
In April, lead prosecutor Sebastián Basso — who took over the case after the 2015 murder of his predecessor, Alberto Nisman — requested that federal Judge Daniel Rafecas issue national and international arrest warrants for Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei over his alleged involvement in the attack.
Since 2006, Argentine authorities have sought the arrest of eight Iranians — including former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who died in 2017 — yet more than three decades after the deadly bombing, all suspects remain still at large.
In a post on X, the Delegation of Argentine Israelite Associations (DAIA), the country’s Jewish umbrella organization, released a statement commemorating the 31st anniversary of the bombing.
“It was a brutal attack on Argentina, its democracy, and its rule of law,” the group said. “At DAIA, we continue to demand truth and justice — because impunity is painful, and memory is a commitment to both the present and the future.”
31 años del atentado a la AMIA – DAIA. 31 años sin justicia.
El 18 de julio de 1994, un atentado terrorista dejó 85 personas muertas y más de 300 heridas. Fue un ataque brutal contra la Argentina, su democracia y su Estado de derecho.
Desde la DAIA, seguimos exigiendo verdad y… pic.twitter.com/kV2ReGNTIk
— DAIA (@DAIAArgentina) July 18, 2025
Despite Argentina’s longstanding belief that Lebanon’s Shiite Hezbollah terrorist group carried out the devastating attack at Iran’s request, the 1994 bombing has never been claimed or officially solved.
Meanwhile, Tehran has consistently denied any involvement and refused to arrest or extradite any suspects.
To this day, the decades-long investigation into the terrorist attack has been plagued by allegations of witness tampering, evidence manipulation, cover-ups, and annulled trials.
In 2006, former prosecutor Nisman formally charged Iran for orchestrating the attack and Hezbollah for carrying it out.
Nine years later, he accused former Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner — currently under house arrest on corruption charges — of attempting to cover up the crime and block efforts to extradite the suspects behind the AMIA atrocity in return for Iranian oil.
Nisman was killed later that year, and to this day, both his case and murder remain unresolved and under ongoing investigation.
The alleged cover-up was reportedly formalized through the memorandum of understanding signed in 2013 between Kirchner’s government and Iranian authorities, with the stated goal of cooperating to investigate the AMIA bombing.
The post Iran Marks 31st Anniversary of AMIA Bombing by Slamming Argentina’s ‘Baseless’ Accusations, Blaming Israel first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Jordan Reveals Muslim Brotherhood Operating Vast Illegal Funding Network Tied to Gaza Donations, Political Campaigns

Murad Adailah, the head of Jordan’s Muslim Brotherhood, attends an interview with Reuters in Amman, Jordan, Sept. 7, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Jehad Shelbak
The Muslim Brotherhood, one of the Arab world’s oldest and most influential Islamist movements, has been implicated in a wide-ranging network of illegal financial activities in Jordan and abroad, according to a new investigative report.
Investigations conducted by Jordanian authorities — along with evidence gathered from seized materials — revealed that the Muslim Brotherhood raised tens of millions of Jordanian dinars through various illegal activities, the Jordan news agency (Petra) reported this week.
With operations intensifying over the past eight years, the report showed that the group’s complex financial network was funded through various sources, including illegal donations, profits from investments in Jordan and abroad, and monthly fees paid by members inside and outside the country.
The report also indicated that the Muslim Brotherhood has taken advantage of the war in Gaza to raise donations illegally.
Out of all donations meant for Gaza, the group provided no information on where the funds came from, how much was collected, or how they were distributed, and failed to work with any international or relief organizations to manage the transfers properly.
Rather, the investigations revealed that the Islamist network used illicit financial mechanisms to transfer funds abroad.
According to Jordanian authorities, the group gathered more than JD 30 million (around $42 million) over recent years.
With funds transferred to several Arab, regional, and foreign countries, part of the money was allegedly used to finance domestic political campaigns in 2024, as well as illegal activities and cells.
In April, Jordan outlawed the Muslim Brotherhood, the country’s most vocal opposition group, and confiscated its assets after members of the Islamist movement were found to be linked to a sabotage plot.
The movement’s political arm in Jordan, the Islamic Action Front, became the largest political grouping in parliament after elections last September, although most seats are still held by supporters of the government.
Opponents of the group, which is banned in most Arab countries, label it a terrorist organization. However, the movement claims it renounced violence decades ago and now promotes its Islamist agenda through peaceful means.
The post Jordan Reveals Muslim Brotherhood Operating Vast Illegal Funding Network Tied to Gaza Donations, Political Campaigns first appeared on Algemeiner.com.