When Police Superintendent Eyal Aharon began his journey towards Kibbutz Re’im from his home in the southern Kibbutz Beit Kama at 8:00 a.m. on October 7, he was determined to get his sons back — alive.
An hour and a half earlier, Hamas had launched what would be the largest terror onslaught in Israeli history, as thousands of gunmen flooded into southern Israel under the cover of heavy rocket fire. Aharon’s two sons, Geva, 20, and Shaked, 23, were at the Supernova music festival on the Gaza border near Kibbutz Re’im when the rockets started flying overhead. Fleeing the chaos, they quickly jumped in their car and drove to the kibbutz while dialing their father.
But without realizing it, the boys were following a truck full of terrorists. Passing several dead bodies at the kibbutz entrance, they cruised into a neighborhood crawling with invaders. Still unaware, they parked next to more Hamas vehicles and made their way to a public bomb shelter.
“Dad, don’t come. There are terrorists,” they told him. But Aharon was already on his way.
The unprecedented scale of the invasion that day made the victims all the more vulnerable. It was unimaginable at the time that thousands of Hamas-led terrorists could breach the border and occupy Israeli towns for long hours on end. Kibbutzim and villages were overrun with terrorists, who murdered 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and kidnapped 251 to the Gaza Strip while committing horrific acts of brutality and rape.
At the Supernova.
