(12.01.2024)
As Nova attendee Gilad Karplus, also a former Israeli soldier, told the BBC:
„We pretty much knew they would probably block the road. I‘m pretty sure a lot of people got killed on those roads…We drove into the field and tried to hide from them… afterwards we got a bit deeper into the fields and then they started firing sniper rifles on us from different places and also heavy artillery.“
Though Karplus and other partygoers were being fired on by the Border Police, they couldn’t make sense of this, and initially believed the shooting was from Hamas fighters disguised as police or soldiers. In other words, these witnesses actually saw Israeli forces firing on them.
For Hamas to have executed a plan involving elaborate disguises, the Nova operation would have had to be pre-planned, and the Israeli police investigation has already ruled that Hamas was unaware of the festival in advance. Moreover, no other site of clashes on 7 October reported sightings of Palestinian fighters donning Israeli uniforms – neither at the various breached settlements, nor at the Israeli military bases they entered.