Hamas didn’t know about music festival in advance says Israel police

An investigation carried out by Israeli police has concluded that the Palestinian resistance factions involved in last month’s Operation Al-Aqsa Flood had no prior knowledge of the Nova music festival held near the border with the besieged Gaza Strip.

According to a report by Haaretz yesterday, the resistance had no prior knowledge of the rave, which took place next to Kibbutz Re’im, and targeted the gathering spontaneously. The incident reportedly left 364 people dead and was one of the events that was used by the occupation forces to justify the ongoing genocidal war against Gaza, which has so far claimed the lives of over 12,000 people.

Haaretz noted that “The assessment is based on terrorist interrogations and the police’s investigation of the incident, among other things, which reveal that the terrorists intended to infiltrate Re’im and other kibbutzim near the Gaza border.”

An Israeli police investigation has found that an IDF helicopter firing at Hamas fighters at the desert rave site also hit civilians, Haaretz reports. There is also a “growing assessment” that Hamas didn’t know about the desert rave in advance: https://t.co/UyvWi1XJgG

— Evan Hill (@evanhill) November 18, 2023

The police probe also revealed that an Israeli military combat helicopter arrived at the scene and opened fire indiscriminately, killing festival participants, some of whom were from other nationalities.

“The event was attended, according to our estimate, by some 4,400 people, the large majority of whom managed to flee following the decision to disperse the event made four minutes after the rocket attack,” a senior police source said.

READ: Israel men accused of stealing from Israelis who were killed at music festival

A separate report by Israeli broadcaster Channel 12 said that investigators could not find maps on the bodies of dead resistance fighters linked to the outdoor event, whereas in the cases of other attacks that day, they carried maps specifying their targets.

The Palestinian resistance reportedly only realised a major event was happening in the area after the police began dispersing partygoers because of the wider operation and subsequently headed toward it.

The development comes as Israel revised the official death toll of the 7 October attacks, lowering the figure to about 1,200 people, compared to the 1,400 originally cited. Israeli government spokesperson Mark Regev was challenged on the Mehdi Hasan Show regarding the false claims.

“We understood that we’d overestimated, we made a mistake. There were actually bodies that were so badly burnt we thought they were ours, in the end apparently they were Hamas terrorists,” he said.

The occupation state has so far failed to explain how Palestinian resistance fighters could have carried out a large scale attack that led to hundreds of people burned beyond recognition, in addition to parked vehicles, especially armed with just light weapons.

In an interview with a radio programme on state broadcaster Kan, one Israeli witness, Yasmin Porat exposed the occupation forces’ role in the deaths of Israeli citizens, saying: “They eliminated everyone, including the hostages. There was very, very heavy crossfire and even tank shelling.”

READ: 7 October testimonies strike major blow to Israeli narrative