The first rockets were fired just before dawn, arcing through the sky over thousands of revellers who had been dancing through the night at a trance music festival - billed as an event celebrating “friends, love and infinite freedom.”
A person wearing a yellow safety vest, dressed in black directs crowds away from the stages. Then the gunfire started.“We started running; we didn’t know where to go,” Ben Haim said. “Nobody knew what to do.” Relatives searching for the missing at a nearby intersection said more than a thousand people were at the event when the militants attacked.
Ben Haim saw the militants in the distance, closing in on foot. “I took the car keys from a friend of mine that was really wasted and got as many people in the car as possible and started driving like crazy,” she said. “The people who stayed, most of them got kidnapped or murdered.”Gal Raz, 31, thinks it was less than an hour after the attack began when it became clear the area was being overrun. He also started to drive out with a group of friends.
On Saturday, they saw the couple in a video circulating on Palestinian social media. It shows Argamani screaming as she is separated from her boyfriend and driven off on a motorcycle.“You can absolutely see it was her,” said Marciano, who is staying with Argamani’s parents. “I think I haven’t fully accepted it yet; I slept in her bed last night. It’s crazy.”