Trance music can sound almost dreamy at times, as if from a different world. At others, it is high energy with plenty of beat. An electronic journey that can sweep you away, say those who like it. It can almost be like a drug trip. Some of those who came out for this desert festival are part of the "Nova" community and traveled to Israel from Brazil, Mexico – from all over the world. The festival is called Universo Paralello. Parallel universe.

Lile Tergiashvili is there, looking forward to dancing through sunrise with her boyfriend. Peleg Orev is working as a bartender. Shani Louk with her dreadlocks. Gal Raz, who is excited to dance with his friends.

Sunrise will be the climax, and many festivalgoers arrive in the middle of the night so as not to miss it. Sunrise is the moment when the colors of the night slowly give way to daytime, gradually becoming more pronounced. It is that time of day when the light is incredibly soft, a moment that photographers refer to as the golden hour.

On October 7, the sun will rise at 6:39 a.m.

At 6:35 a.m., the music stops.

Days later, the evidence of what then happened is still strewn about everywhere. Torn up tents, water and alcohol bottles lying everywhere, along with glowsticks and makeup. A small car full of blood and flies. A motorcycle with a sticker from Gaza. Investigators are here, and so are – still – body bags. The dead, the injured and the kidnapped still haven’t been conclusively counted, but 260 people are thought to have been killed, perhaps more. The murderers, Hamas fighters from the Gaza Strip, arrived with four-wheelers, paragliders and pickups just like the ones that are still parked here on the rural road leading to the kibbutz. White Toyotas, the terrorists’ belongings still in the bed: army boots, plastic flipflops, Arab cigarettes, vanilla cookies from Turkey. The bodies of some of the attackers are still lying in the open field. Flies are buzzing and the smell of decay is in the air.

Thirty-five kilometers away, Dr. Tzachi Slutsky is sitting on Wednesday morning in the emergency room of Soroka Hospital in Beer Sheva, the largest hospital in southern Israel. The doors outside are covered with photos of the missing, paired with messages begging for a phone call. Next to them are tables with water and sweets.

Back inside, Slutsky is staring at a black monitor showing a patient’s vital signs on the other side of the room. But he’s not really focusing. He says it is the first time since Saturday that he has managed to sleep for more than half an hour at a stretch, though he still hasn’t left the hospital once since that time. Victims have been coming into the emergency room since 7:45 a.m. last Saturday morning. More and more of them came in the first 12 hours, until the clinic was crammed with 100 people from the festival alone. "It was a very difficult day for us," he says, his eyelids twitching. "We saved a lot of lives."

Slutsky is all too familiar with war wounds. He's a soldier and has long been deputy head of the emergency room here. He is familiar with the injuries a bullet leaves behind when it rips through human tissue. He has experienced war. But the stories he heard from these people who, just moments before, had been dancing, laughing, celebrating life: "They were difficult to stomach."

The entire country is in shock. A festivalgoer, now back in Tel Aviv, says he wants to talk. He says he feels it is his duty, so that everyone learns what happened. And perhaps he also wants to remind himself that it wasn’t just a bad dream, but reality. First, though, he says he wants to visit his brother-in-law, who was with him at the festival and is now in the hospital. One day later, he still wants to talk, but is unable to. His brother-in-law is not doing well, and more victims have since been found. The truth, it seems, only slowly burns its way into our consciousnesses.

Another, now near Hebron, also says he wishes to talk, tomorrow. But he has just received a call asking him to come identify his younger brother in the morgue. The next day, it becomes clear that his older brother has also been killed. Three brothers, close since childhood, and only the middle one has survived. He apologizes and says he cannot speak after all.

DER SPIEGEL spoke with other festivalgoers, those who were able to discuss their experiences during the festival and during the massacre – on the phone, through video calls or in person. They discussed their thoughts, their feelings and their ideas about what comes next for them, for society, for the country of Israel.

The Happiest Girl in the World

Lile Tergiashvili, 23, is attending the festival with her boyfriend, and they arrive in time for sunrise, getting there at 4 a.m. There has never been a festival like it in Israel before, she says during our call. Great DJs, beautiful tents, an intimate atmosphere. "On that morning, I was the happiest girl in the world," she says.

Peleg Orev, 26, is tending bar at the festival, earning a bit of money to help with his computer science studies in Beer Sheva. It is a warm night, as Orev would later say over the phone, with just a few clouds in the sky. A beer at the festival costs 28 shekel, the equivalent of almost 7 euros, while an arrack with mint lemonade goes for 46 shekels. Over the phone, he says he remembers discussions at the festival about how expensive the drinks were. And they are all served in recyclable cups that customers have to buy. No glass, so that nobody gets injured.

Shani Louk, a 22-year-old Israeli with relatives in Germany’s Black Forest, uploads an Instagram story the evening before the party, posing in front of the mirror. In the image, she is wearing black lace shorts and has a scarf tied around her dreadlocks, her pointy fingernails painted green.

Gal Raz, 31, is looking forward to seeing his friend Avinatan Or and Or’s girlfriend Noa Argamani at the festival. He arrives at 3 a.m. while the other two, whose names would soon be known to many others once a video of them began circling the globe, get there half an hour later. The music is thumping as they sip arrack and put up their tent. At around 5 a.m., they make their way over to the festival stage.

The site of the festival, around three hectares (7.5 acres) in size, stretches across the fields along Route 232. There is a section for tents, a parking area for cars and an access road from the northwest. There are also security guards present, but she never even considered the possibility of any kind of danger, says Lile Tergiashvili. She never wondered whether this was a good place for a festival. "The fact that I went to a party so close to Gaza and the thought that something could happen never even entered my mind is proof of just how safe I felt."

Sagi Gaboy, 28, takes a sip of his drink as he stands in the parking lot and looks up at the sky as the sun comes up. "That might be the most beautiful sky I’ve ever seen," he thinks, as he would later recount. Until he realizes that he’s not looking at fading stars but incoming rockets. He throws himself into the dust and thinks: "Shit. Party’s over."

Peleg Orev, the barkeeper, glances at the red alarm on his mobile phone. It happens relatively often, but this time the warning indicates an attack on the entire country. But he doesn’t immediately digest it. "I figured that as long as they don’t shoot at us, we can keep partying." They didn’t hear the explosions, he says. "The music was too loud."

When the music stops and a voice comes over the loudspeaker saying: "Everyone on the ground," it’s nothing they haven’t heard before. If you’ve grown up in Israel, you know the technique. Hands behind your head, elbows to your temples. Peleg Orev, discussing the moment over a video call, demonstrates. Just like he learned as a boy in elementary school.

What happens next is difficult to document with a map and timeline. If you’re running for your life, you aren’t constantly looking at the clock or your mobile phone display. Some videos and chat messages provide clues, but unsurprisingly, the narrative isn’t clean.

One of those who must have had his wits about him, even though he is smoking a bong as he tells his story, is Raziel Tamir. Like all young Israelis, he served in the military, and he has a keen eye and a sharp memory. We meet with him in Tel Aviv three days after the massacre.

Tamir raises reptiles to make a bit of extra money, but he earns his primary income by selling sandwiches. He spends the night before the festival with his animals, cleaning lizard and snake cages, and is tired when he arrives at the festival. He lays down for a nap in his tent.

When he wakes up, he says, his tent is already full of holes.

Outside, he sees people falling to the ground after being struck by bullets, while others stumble and pitch forward before getting up and then stumbling again. Immediately, as he would later relate, he understands that it is a terrorist attack.

His initial assessment: terrorists coming from the Gaza Strip to the west on Toyota pickups and motorcycles. On the eastern side of the festival: motorized paragliders landing in the field. He estimates that there are around 40 fighters.

The ones on the motorcycles are armed with automatic rifles and machetes. The ones on the pickups also have heavy machine guns. Later, he also sees mortars and shoulder-fired anti-tank weapons. The attackers level their weapons at the festivalgoers, some of whom, says Tamir, are so high on drugs that they just keep dancing as the slaughter begins. Terrorists, he says, simply walk up and execute them.

Among the guests at the festival site, there are no weapons. Glass and aerosol cans were not allowed, says Tamir. The partygoers, many of them barefoot and with no shirt on, are completely defenseless.

"It was the easiest massacre in the world," says Tamir.

Tamir believes in God and in trance music. When he’s dancing, he says, he feels free. "It’s just you, nature and the sound." There is "nothing better than feeling the wind on your skin and the grass under your feet when you’re dancing."

In a Parallel Universe

The Nova festival is a special one. It generally only takes place once every two years over New Year’s, getting its start in Brazil. But the desert, with its endless skies and open countryside, is perfect for the concept. Festivalgoers are eager to enter the Universo Paralello, where the other universe is blocked out. The rave and trance community has dedicated itself to the principle they call PLUR: "Peace Love Unity Respect." They see themselves as an international community full of tolerance, committed to peace and able to overcome all manner of conflicts and contradictions, with or without mind-altering substances.

The trance scene got its start in the 1980s in a number of places, including the state of Goa in India. Originally, the music came from hippies, most of them from the U.S. Many moved to Goa to boycott the war in Vietnam, and later also ended up in Nepal and elsewhere in the Himalayas. From there, the music came to Europe. Attendees of trance festivals tend to be alternative, apolitical and escapist. But the music and the festivals are no longer just for hippies. Trance is seen as underground music, but it’s extremely popular in Israel and is even played on the radio.

It's a peaceful community, says Berlin-based DJ Piet Kämpfer, adding that his sets can feel quite intimate. The 41-year-old had been scheduled to play a set at the Nova festival in the Negev Desert on Saturday. Better known by his stage name Protonica, Kämpfer has been a trance DJ for 20 years. On Saturday morning, he is woken up in his Tel Aviv hotel room by the sound of explosions, as he would later relate. He is tired from the flight and he feels so safe in a city with the best rocket defense system in the world that he rolls over and goes back to sleep.

When he wakes up again at 9 a.m., his mobile phone is full of messages – and calls, including one from his Israeli manager Raz Gaster. When Kämpfer answers, Gaster tells him to stay where he is.

"Piet, your appearance has been cancelled," says Gaster, who is fleeing through the desert. "Hamas has attacked the festival." To Kämpfer, his voice sounds remarkably composed and doesn’t initially fully comprehend what Gaster is telling him. It is only when he begins reading the messages on his phone that he understands. By the time he gets out of bed, there are already 200 dead bodies at the festival site.

Barkeeper Peleg Orev and a female coworker have laid down in the dust in the parking lot next to his car. With other festivalgoers blocking the way, using it to escape is impossible, as he would later relate. He loses all sense of time. He hears people screaming and crying in panic. At some point, he is able to drive off after all and he receives news of the Hamas invasion on his mobile phone. He sees a police blockade, and the officers direct him to drive east across the fields. He reaches another road, and someone gestures for him to turn around immediately. He sees a car full of bullet holes, two bodies inside. Then shots are fired at them from the festival site – they haven’t made it far at all. They jump out of the car and run to some nearby bushes. "We were quiet. So quiet."

Lile Tergiashvili and her boyfriend have found refuge in a car belonging to people they didn’t know. She looks out the window, as she will later relate, and watches as the terrorists hold their guns to people’s heads, lifeless bodies strewn around them.

Sagi Gaboy, the one who thought that morning that he was looking at the most beautiful sky he had ever seen, runs with his girlfriend across an open field – for three or four hours it seems to him, maybe 20 kilometers. But he doesn’t know for sure, nor does he know which direction.

Shiit Malov, who was at the festival with a group of 20 friends, has lost four of them. And she finds herself wondering over and over again what it was that saved her life. Why is she alive, but four of her friends are dead?

Shani Louk gets a call from her mother when the sirens start howling across Israel. "Are you in a saferoom?" her mother wants to know. "We are now leaving to go find one," Shani says. It would be the last time the two spoke.

On the Other Side of the Fence

The effort to understand such a horrific crime necessarily involves looking into the possible causes. And they lie on the other side of the fence in the Gaza Strip that Lile Tergiashvili never even thought of when arriving at the festival on that morning as "the happiest girl in the world."

Why would armed men attack thousands of people at a trance festival? Who are these attackers?

If you ask people who live in the Gaza Strip over the phone about their views of Hamas terrorism, they either fall silent or try to rationalize. Perhaps because they sympathize with Hamas. But perhaps because they are afraid of Hamas, which aggressively pursues its political opponents.

Omar Shaban lives in Gaza. He completed his university studies in Egypt and Scotland and writes analyses for the Middle East Institute in Washington, D.C., and has his own think tank in Gaza City. He remembers a time when Gaza was just another city on the shores of the Mediterranean with cinemas and cafés, a place where Muslims and Christians could meet up for a swim in the sea.

The young men of today, says Shaban, have no experience of that era. For the last 15 years, they have largely been cut off from the outside world and have lived through four armed conflicts during that time. They are driven by hatred, frustration, poverty and ideology, he says. He condemns the killing of innocent civilians, but "20 fathers killed produces 40 new enemies," says Shaban. "That is human nature."

In Iran, merely listening to techno music can land you in prison or earn you an electric shock punishment. But that’s not the case in the Gaza Strip. There are music videos from MC Abdul, a rapper who sings in English amid the rubble. There are Gangnam Style remakes performed on the beach and delirious wedding celebrations. Still, alternative music festivals with scantily clad men and women dancing together are inconceivable.

In discussions, the murder of civilians, the killing of children and youth, is accepted with a shrug. "Israel has also killed thousands of children or taken them prisoner," says a resident of Gaza City before the connection breaks off. On X, formerly Twitter, users see the taking of hostages as the "incarceration" of occupiers and festivalgoers as soldiers of the occupation. "The pigs are desecrating Palestinian land," one writes.

The Universo Paralello festival in the Negev Desert is indeed a different world, a parallel universe. On the day of the attack, at 7:47 a.m., the Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, upload a video of their leader, showing just a shadow of his profile. Mohammed Deif is a phantom, wanted by the Israeli military for decades. His people are the ones who, as he speaks, are ravaging Israel, murdering, kidnapping.

Deif’s speech adheres to the official PR rules of Hamas, according to which attacks in Israel are always portrayed as revenge for Israeli killings of Palestinian civilians. He demands that his fighters throw all they have into the attack, explicitly mentioning in his address that the "enemy in our country" is partying and reveling. It is time, says Deif, to put an end to it. His men on this day try to do exactly that.

Raziel Tamir, the reptile breeder, finds himself in a large group of people running across the festival grounds. As he would later recount, he realizes that his only chance of survival is staying at the center of the group. The bullets are hitting those on the edge. He guesses that the group is made up of around 600 people, and only half, he believes, end up making it to the fruit orchard of the neighboring kibbutz.

Once they reach the orchard, his idea is to form smaller groups. Find a tree, break off a branch and hide beneath the leaves. Change locations every couple of minutes. Don’t panic no matter what, something he knows from his time in the army. Breathe calmly, lie flat on the ground.

He can hear what happens not far away: Pleading, crying, screaming. A short burst of gunfire. Silence.

He says he saw a young woman whose clothes were being torn off. When she fought back, they shot her. Once, when a terrorist got too close, he tore a pomelo from the tree and threw it as a distraction. It worked, and the terrorists went off toward the noise.

Gal Raz, who is friends with Avinatan Or and Noa Argamani, describes over the phone the moment when he and his friends parted ways. He says he ran with others to his car, but they didn’t drive off. "Many were drunk or high," says Raz. "We didn’t want to cause an accident. We waited for a bit."

Then, he received a WhatsApp from his mother.

Gal Raz responds with a lie:

They first head north, but everything is blocked and they hear gunfire. They make a second attempt to the south, driving at 70 or 80 kilometers per hour. They get away, but after a hundred meters, the car stops. They run, finding shelter in a dried-up streambed in the middle of the field.

Raz writes to his friends Avinatan Or and Noa Argamani over WhatsApp.

It was the last message that Raz would get from his friend.

Raz and the others spend the next seven-and-a-half hours lying in the streambed, somewhere in the middle of an open field. They write messages to their family and beg for help from the police or the army. But nobody shows up. From a distance, they hear gunfire. At some point, terrorists begin approaching. "We tried to be a quiet as we possibly could. We tried not to move so as not to make a noise. We tried to survive."

At 3:30 in the afternoon, they are found by Israeli soldiers. "I immediately called Avinatan, but he didn’t answer." Just over an hour later, Raz learns that his friends have been taken hostage.

The kidnapping can be seen in a video that begins circulating on the internet a short time later. It shows Noa Argamani, 26, sitting on a motorcycle between two men. A group of attackers separates her from her boyfriend. The men bind his hands and lead him away on foot. Noa Argamani reaches out her arms and screams in his direction: "Please don’t kill me!" Then, the motorcycle drives off.

Peleg Orev, the barkeeper, describes Noa as "one of the most upbeat people I know." There is a photo of him with Noa at a party around six months ago, a group of young people all smiling into the camera. Noa is wearing a red dress, red lipstick and black Doc Martens.

And then there are stories from the desert that give one a bit of hope, if only a sliver. One of those involves Sharon Shabo, a hardcore cyclist who knows the festival site well after having taken many training rides in the area. On Saturday morning, he is on a final practice ride with a friend ahead of a race on Wednesday.

Of course, they hear the rockets coming from Gaza and the defensive rockets from Israel. But they keep riding. Shabo lives in the Beeri kibbutz in southern Israel and is extremely familiar with the sound of rockets.

But then, messages begin popping up on his mobile phone, first one, then 10 and then a whole flood of them. One is from his son: Papa, come home quick. He and his friend throw their bikes in the car and head toward the festival site along a sandy road. As he would later relate, he sees a dozen cars strangely scattered about on the main road in eerie silence. He then sees someone peep out of one of the concrete bunkers of concrete that are scattered throughout the region, even along hiking paths. He then catches sight of pickups full of heavily armed men.

He floors it, stops at another bunker, throws two young women and a man into the backseat and drives off. They come under fire and the windows shatter as bullets strike the car. "Get down! Get down!" he yells as the young man screams that he’s been hit. It’s only then, Shabo would later say, that he feels his own blood seeping from a gunshot wound to his arm.

Sharon Shabo and the others hide for five hours in the fields, climbing trees and concealing themselves among the branches. Meanwhile, his son is writing him from their home in Beeri: Papa, save us, terrorists are everywhere, they are shooting into every home. Shabo says he was convinced he was going to die. He writes back: Be strong. Fight back. Help is on its way. Five hours later, they are saved.

Shabo saved three lives that day. His wife and four children also survived. He lost a lot of blood and is in the hospital. But he is going to make it.

Safe Rooms

Since the beginning of the 1990s, every new home built in Israel must include a "safe room." In the desert, there are also small concrete bunkers spread throughout the landscape. And the country has the Iron Dome, the air defense system that is able to intercept incoming rockets.

Before the massacre, the festival grounds were a part of a popular area for outdoor barbecues and mountain biking. It was not considered to be a dangerous place. Not by Israelis and perhaps especially not by some members of the trance community – such as the festivalgoer from Germany who says she had no idea that the Gaza Strip was so close by.

And even then, everyone assumed the army would provide protection.

A WhatsApp chat demonstrates just how deep that faith was.

The man is at the festival, and the woman is not.

Lile Tergashvilie says they always believed that Israel was a safe place for its residents, despite all the threats surrounding the country. Now, she is no longer quite as sure. She describes how she and her boyfriend made it to the home of a family they didn’t know in a town in southern Israel and were taken into their safe room. They stayed there from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m., playing cards with the children, relating stories from the Old Testament and praying to God that they would survive.

She is a young woman with blond hair, sitting on her bed in Mickey Mouse sweatpants, knees to her chin, during our video call. She repeatedly rests her forehead on her knees, hiding her face.

Peleg Orev also makes used of Biblical vocabulary as he sits with his mother in what used to be his childhood bedroom. "It was like an exodus," he says. A policeman, armed with a pistol, led him and hundreds others through a dried-out riverbed. "It was hot, we had no water. But we walked and walked." To get away. To survive.

In between the three video calls with Peleg Orev, he goes to two funerals. He says he has always been in favor of a two-state solution. Now, though, he says, perhaps the bombardment of the Gaza Strip is the correct course of action. "They kill people just because they are Jewish. All trust has been destroyed."

He has found a psychologist. And then, at the supermarket, he bought himself ice cream with nuts and caramel. Grateful to still be alive.

Raziel Tamir, the reptile breeder, can hardly sleep any longer unless he smokes several joints. He says he doesn’t know if he will ever again go to a trance festival.

The house of Ricarda Louk, Shani’s mother, is full of Israeli relatives, neighbors and family friends. They have brought food, including pots of rice, dark sauces and salad. It’s what happens when someone is sitting shiva – in mourning – just that Ricarda Louk cannot believe that Shani is dead. She is familiar with the video in which her daughter is lying motionless on a truck, but thinks – or, at least, she wants to think: "She is just unconscious."

And now, four days after the attack, someone has reported seeing her daughter in a Gaza hospital. She may be alive. She says that something must be done, insisting that the German government do something. Negotiate.

"If she is dead," says her husband, "we will accept it."

"We will not accept it," the mother responds.

Israel is in a state of shock. Tel Aviv – that self-confident, young, loud metropolis – has grown quiet, mistrustful, withdrawn and shaken to the core. Most of the restaurants are closed, cafés empty. People are at home, somber expressions on their faces. Long-held certainties have vanished: Our army is strong, our intelligence services know everything, our soldiers will protect us. The conviction that the country of Israel is safe.

And many keep asking themselves: Where were the soldiers? Where was our army?

David Abramov and his wife Roni Lamfert have been looking for their son ever since he called his father from the festival on Saturday morning. They want to talk. They have set up a kind of headquarters in David’s office north of Tel Aviv, a place where they coordinate the search for their son La’or and for the many other young festivalgoers who are missing. They examine information, look at chats, speak with witnesses – all on their own. They say they haven’t yet heard much from the authorities.