Hamas Assailants on Oct. 7 Ambushed Israeli Bomb Shelters

Yossi Landau, the southern region commander for ZAKA, a search-and-rescue organization, entered one bomb shelter on Route 232. Inside, he said, he found about 20 burned bodies fused together, adding, “It was difficult to separate them.”

Ms. Abud; her boyfriend, Eliya Cohen, 26; her nephew Amit Ben Avida, 19; and his girlfriend, Karin Schwartzman, 20, left the rave together after the rocket fire began.

Mr. Cohen’s aunt, traveling in a different car, called from farther up the road to say her vehicle had been shot at. Assuming the gunshots were coming from Gaza, Ms. Abud and her companions stopped to take refuge in the shelter with the bird.

“We were the first in,” she said. “Then more and more people came inside.”

Agam Yosefzon, 20; her boyfriend, Itamar Shapira, 22; and three of their friends, all from Misgav in the Galilee, arrived at the shelter around 7:20 a.m. At first, Ms. Yosefzon said, people milled about between incoming rocket alerts. “We were in a good mood,” she said. “We laughed and connected a bit.”

Aner Shapira, 22, an off-duty soldier from Jerusalem, soon arrived with three friends and the news that Hamas had infiltrated the border area. He reassured everyone that there was a large army base nearby and that they should remain calm, unaware that base would also fall.

As the sound of gunfire drew closer, everybody crowded into the shelter littered with trash, wasps’ nests and excrement. Aner Shapira took command, witnesses said, and stood at the entrance.

Soon after 7:41 a.m., according to time-stamped texts and survivors’ testimonies, the attackers arrived outside the bunker. “We thought maybe they would pass us by and not see us,” Ms. Abud said. “We kept silent.”

Dashcam footage from a nearby vehicle later posted online shows seven gunmen abusing an Arabic-speaking Bedouin man seated on the ground outside the bunker’s entrance at 7:56 a.m. Survivors said the man pleaded with the gunmen not to enter the building. The man’s family later identified him as Osama Abu Eisa and said he had been killed.

The dashcam footage then shows a gunman tossing a grenade into the shelter as the assailants run for cover. A young man flees the shelter, running across the road. The gunmen fire at him in a frenzy. Witnesses said he was killed.