Soaring over a sparkling azure sea, a paraglider whoops with joy next to a beach in Gaza. He is a German diplomat and after a scenic flight he lands to triumphant cheers and gleefully proclaims: ‘Everything is possible in Gaza.’
Clutching his deflated parachute, Sven Kühn von Burgsdorff – an EU envoy – boasted to a camera that he had performed ‘the first Gaza paragliding flight in history’, to demonstrate to the world what could be achieved in the troubled enclave. ‘What does it tell us? You can fly here,’ he announced.
That was three months ago. Whether the pro-Palestinian EU diplomat now regrets his political stunt is open to question.
For, as the world now knows to its cost, he was not the first to paraglide in Gaza – as the airborne wing of Hamas proved with such savagery last Saturday.
Pictured, still from footage showing fighters training ahead of Hamas’ operation into Israel
Festival goers flee the carnage as Hamas terrorists gun down revellers at a music festival
It turns out the terror group’s ‘Air Force Falcon Squadron’ had been training with their motorised paragliders for months, if not years, to unleash death from the skies.
As partygoers at the Nova music festival danced in the sands of the Negev desert at sunrise, they were oblivious to the horror about to descend upon them.
In one of the most spine-chilling videos, filmed by a carefree reveller in the moments before joy turned to unspeakable terror, the paragliders appeared simply as innocent grey specks in the sky.
Flying in formation, the fleet of Falcon Squadron fighters swooped low over the stunned partygoers and opened fire with machine guns mounted on the frames and Kalashnikov rifles.
Some of the Hamas ‘pilots’ were flying solo, others were in two-man aircraft.
But how on Earth did Hamas manage to establish an air force in Gaza – an area smaller than the Isle of Wight?
How did its pilots train to such a high standard right under the noses of the formidable Israeli security services?
The Falcon Squadron pilots landed smoothly on the sands on one side of the festival and continued their barbaric bloodletting. Petrified young people were mown down as they scrambled to escape.
And, in a sickening tactic, those fleeing the carnage were deliberately driven into an ambush at the exit where more Hamas gunmen lay in wait.
The Hamas paragliders – who even had uniforms emblazoned with ‘Air Force Falcon Squadron’ insignia – were just as brutally effective in attacks unfolding elsewhere.
The slick PR wing of the terror group has since put out a professionally-filmed video boasting how the fighters rehearsed.
But how on Earth did Hamas manage to establish an air force in Gaza – an area smaller than the Isle of Wight? Pictured, Hamas terrorists training
According to multiple security sources in Israel this week, the paragliding rehearsals had been noticed – but were dismissed as ‘ridiculous’. Pictured, pictures of the music festival just before the terrorists struck
It shows them starting up the engines with parachutes stretched out.
A handful of sand is thrown into the air to gauge the wind direction -– a technique also seen in the video of the German diplomat preparing for his flight.
The Hamas video, set to thumping Hollywood-style music, shows gun-toting paragliders hovering above the desert scrub before landing beside a mocked-up Israeli village marked with blue Star of David signs, before storming it.
How did all this deadly training go unnoticed in one of the most surveilled few square miles on Earth?
The Gaza Strip, 25 miles long, five miles wide and governed by a ruthless terror organisation hell-bent on destroying its neighbour, must have more spy satellites and eavesdropping equipment directed at it than almost anywhere else.
According to multiple security sources in Israel this week, the paragliding rehearsals had been noticed – but were dismissed as ‘ridiculous’.
Motorised paragliders are noisy, they fly relatively slowly and they make a big, easy-to-spot target for any halfway decent Israeli sniper or soldier with a shoulder-fired surface-to-air missile.
During the seven-week Gaza War of 2014, Hamas sent paragliding fighters over the fence to attack Israel and all were easily shot down, said Shalom Ben Hanan, a former major general in the Israeli Security Agency.
He told me: ‘They have been training in the Gaza Strip for years, and we saw them training.
‘We felt it was something ridiculous because we had intercepted them easily in 2014.’
Ilan Lotan, another former intelligence officer, added: ‘We saw them training with the paragliders, we saw the propaganda videos Hamas made.
The twin Berdichevsky brothers Guy and Roi with their parents Itay and Hadar Berdichevsky
Survivors of the attrocities Guy and Roi at a relative’s home a week after the massacre
‘There were no new tools used in this attack, we knew them all.’
Hamas ‘air force’ was apparently regarded as no more than a joke.
Until, that is, a week ago. As dawn broke, the worst atrocity in Israel’s history was set in motion as another wing of Hamas’s primitive air force, the ‘Zouari’ drone squadron, sent unmanned aircraft to drop bombs on surveillance towers along the fence – rendering the Israeli military ‘blind’.
Then members of the Falcon Squadron soared over the 20ft fortified cement wall in paragliders to secure terrain on the other side, allowing Hamas’s commando units to use explosives to break through the barrier at multiple points.
Bulldozers widened the gaps, allowing terrorists armed to the teeth to stream through in cars, pick-up trucks and on motorbikes.
Yesterday the vast scale of the incursion was laid bare as it was estimated that more than 2,000 terrorists breached the barrier.
And while all this was going on, another Hamas unit sent a ‘shock and awe’ barrage of 3,000 rockets streaking into Israel, overwhelming its ‘Iron Dome’ defence system and causing chaos in military control centres.
Yesterday, Israel said it had killed the Hamas ‘air force’ chief Merad Abu Merad with a fighter jet strike on his headquarters in Gaza.
But no one thinks Hamas launched such an extraordinary operation without outside help, the finger of blame being pointed squarely at Iran for financing and sending weapons and equipment.
Foreign fighters – with their own warped expertise – are believed to have joined the bloody venture.
I have seen evidence, so far uncorroborated, of at least six Taliban insurgents said to have been killed fighting alongside Hamas.
Colonel Richard Kemp, a former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, told me yesterday: ‘The hand of Iran is very firmly on the shoulder of Hamas, and pushing them from behind as well.
‘It is possible they conducted, or helped to conduct, the paragliding training. You can’t just jump in and fly those things.
‘It may have been in Iran or somewhere else, possibly Lebanon. But there seems no doubt they could train inside the Gaza Strip as well.’
There are security questions to be answered – even our friend the German diplomat reportedly managed to bring his own paraglider into Gaza, despite Israel banning such items under its ‘no fly’ restrictions on the enclave.
The vast bulk of Hamas’s material would have been smuggled in through a network of tunnels in Gaza. Thirteen years ago, I was shown one.
There was an 80ft vertical drop, lined with strings of fairy lights. At the bottom, the tunnel was almost tall enough to stand in, and ran for more than half-a-mile to a cellar in a house over the border in Egypt.
The boss of this tunnel boasted he could shift 40 tons a day through it, saying: ‘I charge around $100 for a motorbike and $15 for a sack of food. We bring everything.’
‘Everything’ included sheep, goats, a baby camel and even lions – sedated – on order from Gaza’s zoo. But the boss insisted he did not import weapons.
There are countless other tunnels though, and by the evidence of last weekend they have been doing a brisk trade of late.
It is now becoming clear just how meticulously Hamas planned its bloodbath. Amir Avivi, a retired Israeli general, said Hamas had ‘gone back to the Stone Age’ to avoid its plans being detected.
Terror commanders had avoided using phones and computers, and conducted their business in rooms specially guarded from technological espionage, or they have gone underground altogether.
Many Hamas leaders were said to be unaware of the plans and, while training, the hundreds of fighters deployed in Saturday’s assault were in the dark over the exact purpose of the exercises.
That will not be the case if a new front of the war breaks out in Israel’s north.
There, Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon will know exactly what they have been training for. They have an ‘air force’ too.
There were panicked reports of ‘up to 100’ Hezbollah paragliders flying over the border on Wednesday evening, as a red alert sent Israel’s entire northern population fleeing terrified to their shelters.
Thankfully it was a false alarm. But it seems only a matter of time before Israelis again face the spectre of slaughter from the skies.
