The two terrorists were right in front of him, firing shots at passing cars from their motorcycle. One was driving, the 50-year-old said, and the other was sitting behind, shooting at every target he saw. At least one was wearing body armor.
“He didn’t see me,” Michael Silberberg said. So Silberberg made a decision.
He and two friends had already managed to escape the massacre at the Supernova music festival near Kibbutz Re’im, where hundreds of terrorists from the Palestinian group Hamas streamed through crowds, killing at least 260 people and taking an unknown number hostage.
A few minutes later they survived another attack, with two hiding in a roadside bomb shelter while the other hid outside.
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Shortly afterwards, they drove off in Silberberg’s car, trying to escape the massacre when they saw the motorcycle.
“I knew either I hit him or I know I’m dying, or other people are dying, or someone is going to die,” Silberberg said.
The site of a music festival is seen near the Gaza Strip border in southern Israel on October 12, 2023. At least 260 festival-goers were killed in the October 7 attack by Hamas terrorists. (Ohad Zwigenberg/AP)
So he stepped on the accelerator and crashed his four-door sedan into the motorcycle.
The shooter died immediately, he said. The driver survived, but left him crawling on the road with serious injuries.
“They were neutralized,” Silberberg said.
The men quickly drove away, leaving the front end of the vehicle badly dented, the car alarm sounding and smoke billowing everywhere. They drove like that for 20 minutes until they reached a friend’s house and found safety.
Silberberg, an Israeli-born German, said he has long been politically liberal and hopes for a peace that gives Palestinians their own homeland.
“You know, ‘It’s all good. Let’s all live together. Let’s give them the land.’”
But not anymore.
“My opinion has changed. I’m sorry – I’m not sorry,” he said, sitting in his seaside apartment in Tel Aviv, where he and his two friends huddled after the attack.
“You can’t make peace with these people,” he said. “They don’t want to coexist with us. They want to kill us.”
Early on October 7, the Gaza Strip-based terrorist group Hamas broke through Israel’s security fence and poured into Israel. The brutal attack killed more than 1,300 people in Israel, the vast majority of them civilians, and abducted 150 to 200 to the Gaza Strip. Subsequent Israeli airstrikes on Hamas sites killed more than 2,000 people in Gaza, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry. According to Israel, about 1,500 Hamas members were killed in Israel.
Israeli soldiers surround a Palestinian terrorist who attacked them with a knife at the site of a music festival near the Gaza border on October 12, 2023. At least 260 Israeli festival-goers were killed in a Hamas-led attack in October 7. (Erik Marmor/AP)
The Supernova festival, held in the semi-forested fields outside Kibbutz Re’im, just a few miles from Gaza, was one of the first targets of the Hamas massacre.
Videos show terrorists arriving in trucks and motorcycles, gunmen storming into crowds and shooting at people trying to escape into the fields.
Israeli communities near the festival were also attacked, with Hamas kidnapping people – soldiers, civilians, the elderly and small children – and killing scores of others in their homes.
The bloodshed has stunned Israel, which has not seen such bloodshed in decades and has never been hit by a bloodier terrorist attack.
On Thursday, a man who had worked as a bartender at the festival returned to the scene. He said he had no choice.
“I think I owe them, you know, all the people who were here and were murdered,” Peleg Horev told an Associated Press journalist who was allowed to visit the crime scene. “I am alive, I stayed alive. I have to tell her story. Every single one of them.”
The bodies have been cleared from the festival site, but the rubble of the attack is everywhere.
Bullet-riddled cars, many with blown out windows, are scattered across the festival grounds and surrounding streets. Clothes leak out of broken suitcases. A woman’s shirt is left hanging on a tree where it was hung to dry. There are glasses on a windowsill. The cash registers are full of shots.
“Lost and Found,” announces a festival poster hanging on a fence. “Campground,” says another.
Leaves blow in a gentle breeze as soldiers patrol the area, occasionally falling to the ground as gunshots are heard in the distance. Security forces fear terrorists could attack again or that some may still be hiding in the fields and undergrowth.
Peleg escaped by pushing deeper into Israel for hours. He avoided the streets where many who tried to escape by car were killed because they were stuck behind other vehicles that had been attacked.
“All the time you hear shots and screams in the distance,” he said. “We’re just going to go as far as we can as quickly as we can.”
He is deeply shocked by the fact that he survived and so many others did not.
“I really owe them one.”