Multiple Witnesses Report Helicopters Over Nova Music Festival on October 7

Helicopters over the Nova Music Festival

Despite efforts to deny their presence, helicopters were operating above the Nova music festival at Re’im on October 7.

Multiple festival attendees reported seeing or hearing military helicopters in the area. Israeli police officer Sagi Abitbol told i24 in December that he was at the rave early on and encountered Hamas fighters. At one point he fled to a water pipe in a field and played dead after an RPG landed about ten meters away. He subsequently saw “two army choppers” that militants shot at before they departed.

Gili Yoskovich, one of the first witnesses featured by the BBC, spoke to i24 as well. Although the BBC article does not mention helicopters in its short video clips, her testimony included the statement: “I heard some helicopters, I was sure the army would come down with helicopters and ropes and go down into this field and save us. But no-one was there.”

Assaf Ovadya reported seeing a helicopter that had spotted him. Yarin Levin, who had served in the IDF and understood how different munitions sounded, left the festival during the evacuation, about half an hour before gunfire erupted. He drove east for about 200 meters, saw people hit by “mortars, missile attacks,” and later heard the Iron Dome, “helicopters,” tanks, and artillery firing. He eventually reached Patish on foot with around 700 others after abandoning his vehicle when drivers on that eastbound road reversed direction to warn that people were being killed “at another party.”

Laura K locked herself in a caravan on the festival grounds while Arabic speakers tried to break in to kidnap her. From 12:30 onward she heard retaliatory fire and helicopters. Yagil, the owner of the security company, sent a message stating they had stayed to fight, taken control of the area, and instructed those in hiding to come to a specific location with hands raised high and moving slowly to avoid friendly fire.

Sahar R left the Nova site with friends and was directed toward a dirt road. They encountered a traffic jam and complications, abandoned their car upon hearing shooting, returned when they thought they had imagined the sounds, abandoned it again when the gunfire continued, and ran in the opposite direction from where they heard it. After walking about ninety minutes, they saw a helicopter above and finally reached Patish.

The timing in the short clip is confused because it interweaves footage not presented chronologically. Additionally, it claimed fifty-eight police died at the festival when in reality only seventeen perished there—as opposed to across the entire Gaza envelope that day.

Nadav Hanan considered hiding in a barn with friends until a young woman running past warned him that “something big was coming.” Loud booms echoed behind him. “An Israeli helicopter appeared to engage Hamas on the ground.” Since they had been “running for three hours,” it must have been around 11 a.m.

In the late morning Liv S reported seeing planes. She described the ordeal: “We ran for three hours, about 10 to 15 km, threading through prickly bushes alongside hundreds of other people, volleys of gunfire from every direction. There were missiles and interceptions above us. Little by little, people disappeared. Every now and then, I turned my head back and there were fewer people behind me. The police were not answering. Everyone was helpless. We were literally scared to death. Everywhere we ran, the sound of gunfire grew closer. There were planes in the air. Behind us, everything was engulfed in flames, but we didn't stop. My body ached and burned, my legs didn’t have the strength to run. The air was thin, the sun had risen, it was hot, and there was no water, but we didn’t stop running.”

Some witnesses did not explicitly mention helicopters, but loud explosions were nonetheless reported. Lior C evacuated early, drove for a while, was told to reverse, encountered a “mess of cars” amid fighting, and was instructed by an officer to abandon the vehicle and run into the fields. She and her friends hid in the bushes and heard “insane booms” for “hours and hours.” At 1 p.m. they smelled burning, decided to risk being shot, and returned “to the parking area and the car we had come in was burned, but there were a few cars that were only half destroyed.” She was eventually rescued.

Helicopter noise can be inferred from recordings. Maya Alper did not follow the direction of those evacuating and hid in bushes northwest of the main site. She filmed herself meditating and uploaded the video to Facebook; helicopters are audible in the background. Similarly, Noa Kalash spent eight hours in bushes, and footage from her location captures helicopter sounds.

Hamas fired RPGs at helicopters, as confirmed by video footage shared by Itay Blumental on X, who wrote: “Watch: Dozens of Hamas-ISIS terrorists came to murder young Israelis at Nova festival near Kibbutz Ra'em. One of the terrorists fired an RPG missile at an IDF helicopter.”

A well-circulated clip (via OsintTechnical and repeated in the Mail) shows two helicopters, though barely visible. They appear in the top left for under one second at the 53-second mark. South First Responders posted footage explaining that Hamas shot RPGs at a helicopter. The survivors’ journey to Patish was 15 miles, and journalist Peter Beaumont explained that the group did not travel directly because they encountered Hamas several times.

Around 9:30, Haaretz journalist and witness Bar Peleg, perhaps further north toward Sderot, noted fires, helicopters, and confusion in a post on X.

Many helicopters appeared to be heading south around 1:15 p.m., at a rate of one roughly every three minutes, according to reports.

Some cars were abandoned early on, but many were not incinerated. Footage from Shye Weinstein shows this, as noted by Eagle Eye on X: “Shye Weinstein, a Canadian who had recently moved to Tel Aviv, documented how his group got out of the desert rave massacre.” From this evidence one can suppose the helicopters hit targets at the site, possibly to clear it of danger pending troop arrival in the early afternoon.

Several fires were active just before noon. This is supported by the fact that at 10:17 Ben Rudaeff hid in the bushes and filmed fires at the rave for ABC. At 11:53 at least one vehicle burst into flames at the site, captured on CCTV. This is unlikely to have been the work of Hamas elite forces, who had probably returned a couple of hours earlier. The person killed may have been among the “second wave” of “privateers and opportunists” who, in at least one instance, kidnapped Israelis while unarmed.

Exactly where this explosion occurred and the camera orientation have been geo-located. Satellite images detected smoke at noon from this area.

Dashcam footage shows Hamas entering the Nova site around 9:30, then cuts out mysteriously until it resumes at noon, when unarmed Palestinians are visible at the location, as reported by Le Monde. About 150 minutes are thus unaccounted for.

Vehicles damaged at the scene—civilian or Hamas—were marked with a red cross (as opposed to blue or yellow) before being towed, presumably indicating the Israeli military believed they had been destroyed by friendly fire. One vehicle was not completely wrecked, with its roof collapsed and entirely incinerated, but several others showed this level of damage, leading many to suspect the work of helicopters using hellfire missiles.

Additionally, scorch marks on Route 232, visible in widely seen footage at 1:35, suggest a helicopter damaged multiple vehicles. The marks appear as four evenly spaced blackened patches on the northbound side and two similar patches on the southbound side, separated by consistent distances. While not impossible that the burns occurred at different times, this pattern strongly implies a single aircraft vehicles in a convoy, as occurs in films released by the IDF.

The fact that cars were hit on both sides of the road suggests they were moving and had passed or passed someone who then disabled them, or were abandoned after traveling in both directions. The possibility that Hamas caused the carnage seems unlikely for scattered stationary vehicles on both sides of a road they were not blocking: any would‑be attacker shooting vehicles stopped on the road would have to approach them, creating a hazard for himself.

Nevertheless, CCTV footage from Sderot does show Hamas using an RPG to target an oncoming vehicle, so they cannot be ruled out for some vehicles destroyed early on, rather than toward noon. Another Hamas dashcam clip shows cars burning on a road, possibly the mentioned dirt road running east‑west that appears here, “at the edge of the treeline.”

A police report now confirms that live fire was directed at festival attendees, without explicitly admitting to deaths or injuries. It is known that some kind of Hannibal protocol led to destruction of vehicles heading back toward Gaza, with one elite forces report estimating seventy such vehicles destroyed within the following week. Several witnesses reported experiences consistent with gunfire, explosions, and being clattered in the Havoc and other forms of IDP.

Reports also indicate pilots were confused, some under the impression that they were misled to target children in uniform when walking rather than present military. Many interpret one pretext given by pilots: an assessment or assumption allegedly by the false IDP facility suggesting that the attackers knew child victims could not act, or other attempts at excuse occurred:

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Update — 30 June

An article from YNet published June 30 describes an IAF squadron commanders' testimony regarding October 7 counts. Specifically: “IAF attack helicopter pilots recount operations on October 7 in detail.” According to initial passage, helicopters visited the Re’im military base, possibly to have included person at the party venue contradiction emerges that “It’s a stroke of good fortune we didn’t go to the Nova Music Festival. I don’t know who we’d have killed there. If you were to tell a pilot that there are lots of terrorists there, and he should make it to Nova, and see that amount of people, what does he know? You must understand, what you see in the picture is black figures.” Also, multiple independent part

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