Israel admits killing its own people at music festival on October 7 – Doha News

The Israeli regime has used the October 7 attack by Hamas as an excuse to continue its relentless bombardment of the enclave which has so far killed more than 12,000 Palestinians.

Israeli forces killed some of their own citizens during the Hamas attack on October 7, according to an Israeli police investigation looking into the Nova music festival near the Gaza border, Haaretz reported.

An Israeli combat helicopter was dispatched from the Ramat David base to target Hamas fighters who had crossed the border from Gaza into Israel during the unprecedented Al Aqsa Flood Operation, killing a total of 364. However, a police source has now confirmed that the helicopter had also opened fire on and killed several Israeli settlers attending the music festival.

The admission marks the first such acknowledgment that Israeli occupation forces (IOF) were responsible for a portion of the fatalities at the festival, challenging previous claims by the Israeli military and rescue services that all deaths were a result of deliberate killing orchestrated by Hamas.

Previous reports in Israeli media had already hinted at Israeli forces causing civilian casualties near the Gaza border.

In Be’eri, a settlement close to the border, Israeli forces killed both Israeli civilians and Hamas fighters with tank shells as they responded to the Hamas attack. A similar scenario unfolded in Sderot, where Hamas fighters took control of a local police station and prompted Israeli forces to fire tank shells, resulting in several casualties on both sides.

Haaretz also reported on a “growing assessment in the security establishment” that fighters who targeted the festival “did not know in advance about the Nova festival held near Kibbutz Re’im, and decided to come to the place after discovering that a mass event was taking place there.”

Senior security officials believe that Hamas fighters learned about the festival’s existence through drones and directed its fighters to the location using their communication system, according to Haaretz. A video from a body camera of a captured Hamas fighter backs this assessment, as he is heard asking a captured Israeli for directions to reach the festival.

One key detail supporting this theory is that the first Hamas fighters arrived at the Nova festival from the direction of road 232, not from the direction of the Gaza border fence, as initially assumed.

The probe into the Nova festival incident has left uncertainties about the exact breakdown of casualties between those caused by Hamas and those caused by the IOF. It has also raised questions about the Israeli forces’ refusal to negotiate for the release of captives, feeding into the complexity of which side is responsible for the deaths on October 7.

Initially, Israel claimed that Hamas killed 1,400 Israelis during the October 7 attack, later revising the count to 1,200. Israeli spokesperson Mark Regev admitted to a mistake, stating that 200 of the alleged victims were Hamas fighters or Palestinians whose bodies were initially assumed to be Israelis due to severe burns.