Beyond Management’s Raz Gaster was there when Hamas raided the Electrosound meeting in the desert near Gaza
The numbers are shocking. Over 260 mostly young people were killed in an attack by the Palestinian terrorist militia Hamas at a rave not far from the Gaza Strip; others were abducted while the digital camera was running.
Now the promoter Raz Gaster, who represented various artists there, is in touch. “A complete nightmare. What we saw was a heavy bombardment,” says the man from the international agency Beyond Management.
As various US media reports, including the trade magazine “Billboard”, Gaster arrived at the festival site in the desert zone around half past five on Saturday, October 7th.
The open air party Universo Parallelo had already started the evening before. It should last through Saturday. The event is called the “Supernova Sukkot Gathering” after the Jewish holiday of the same name. The rave is an offshoot of the “Parallello Universo” festival series, which was founded almost 20 years ago in Brazil. In terms of sound, it is a further development of the Goa techno variety, which is very popular in Israel, and which here focuses on the subgenre “Electronic Psytrance”. A dance happening for several thousand visitors.
Gaster describes that an hour after his arrival, rockets and missiles fired by Hamas from the Gaza Strip detonated on the site. The targeted bombing was reminiscent of the deadly attack in 2015 on guests at a concert by the band Eagles of Death Metal in the Paris nightclub “Bataclan”. Apparently Western pop culture that is considered decadent is being targeted. The raid was part of a broader Hamas and Hezbollah attack on Israel.
“We heard the first explosions around half past six in the morning,” said Gaster. “We left the backstage area and saw that there was heavy shelling going on everywhere. Hundreds of rockets and mortars were flying from everywhere, and there were explosions all around us!”
According to him, festival security initially advised all festival visitors to lie on the floor and hold their hands over their heads to protect themselves. After almost ten minutes, the instruction came via megaphone: “Okay, everyone in the cars and off we go!”
“The moment the stewards said, ‘Now,’ I sprinted off,” says Gaster, “I didn’t wait a second. We knew it was a rocket attack. You have to be quick.”
Since his car was parked near the stage, Gaster and three other men – including Universo Paralello co-founder Juarez Petrillo – were able to immediately get into Gaster’s car. Minutes later it started. After Gaster made sure his artists were also in vehicles leaving the venue.
Gaster says he was “driving super fast and didn’t stop. Not even when rockets were coming down. My instincts told me, don’t stop for shelter, just drive… We were driving so fast we didn’t even know what we were doing.”
Gaster and the others made it to a villa 30 kilometers away that the production team had rented. They learned via text message and phone call that within minutes of their rapid escape, Hamas fighters had come “with machine guns, with rocket-propelled grenades, with grenades and simply slaughtered everyone they could find.”
The attackers arrived about 20 minutes after the first rocket attack on motorcycles, quad bikes and trucks. Gaster and his companions turned their property into a command center. They contacted the Israeli army, other security services and “all our friends that we know personally who own firearms and are capable of defending themselves.”
Meanwhile, more messages arrived from those who remained on the festival grounds. They reported that the attackers shot at fleeing ravers in their cars.
A friend of Gaster’s reported that the driver of her car had been shot and that she and another friend were pretending to be dead to avoid being killed too. He states that these women remained there for a total of five hours before they were rescued.
Current reports from Monday, October 9th around 8:30 a.m. now speak of “more than 260 victims,” according to the Israeli rescue service Zaka.