Bodies of Disabled Teen, Father Found at Music Festival Site Nearly Two Weeks After Gaza Massacre

The government of Israel confirmed on Wednesday the discovery of the bodies of 16-year-old Ruth Peretz and father Erick at the site of the Supernova music festival, which was interrupted on October 7 by murderous hordes of Hamas terrorists, who killed hundreds of people at the event.

Ruth Peretz suffered from cerebral palsy and was mostly non-verbal; she required special medical attention, such as needing to be fed through her stomach and special care. Her family told multiple news outlets that her father, Erick, often took her to music festivals because she enjoyed the atmosphere and appeared to be at her happiest at music events.

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The bodies of Erick Peretz and his daughter Ruth who has cerebral palsy, were found today.

They have been missing since the Nova music festival on October 7th.

They were brutally murdered by Hamas terrorists.

May their memory be a blessing. pic.twitter.com/FoYvsshAGe

— Israel ישראל 🇱 (@Israel) October 18, 2023

“For years he goes to these parties and takes Ruth, because it makes her really good and she loves it. There were times when he would take her and she didn’t want to come back,” Yaarit Peretz, Ruth’s sister, told the Israeli outlet Ynet on Monday, according to a translation by the New York Post.

Yaarit Peretz attended the festival but left early. In prior interviews, she said her last moments with her sister were “the happiest I’ve ever seen her, dancing in her wheelchair.”

“He said that they barely had reception, and he didn’t know where to go,” Yaarit Peretz said in the Ynet interview. “He said that almost everyone ran away, and I told him that there were terrorists on the streets.”

Peretz added that she feared for Ruth’s life had she been taken hostage and driven to Gaza, where she would most likely not receive the medical care she needed to survive.

Erick and Ruth Peretz had been missing since October 7, when the genocidal Islamic terrorist organization Hamas launched a murder spree throughout Israel that it has branded the “al-Aqsa flood.”

At press time, the death toll in the killing stands at 1,200 people. Many others remain missing, while thousands of injured civilians required medical care in the aftermath of the attack. Hamas terrorists targeted civilian families, going door-to-door in residential communities and massacring them. Israeli authorities found extensive evidence of torture on the bodies of many victims and horrific scenes such as charred bodies, children with knives left in them, and babies missing their heads.

October 7 marked the Jewish holiday of Shemini Atzeret, the final day of the annual High Holy Day cycle.

Israeli soldiers visiting the sites of Hamas attacks detailed harrowing scenes of violence.

“What I saw, hundreds of terrorists in full armor, full gear, with all the equipment and all the ability make a massacre,” Israeli Major General Itai Veruv told CNN last week. “Go from apartment to apartment, from room to room and kill babies, mothers, fathers in their bedrooms … They locked themselves in the protection rooms of their houses and people were out with their children and they killed them.”

“I have heard during my childhood about the pogroms in Europe, the Holocaust, of course. All my family came from Europe, they are survivors. But I never thought I would see in my eyes pictures and things like that,” he added.

Some of the most horrifying images from the slaughter came directly from Hamas terrorists, who stole the mobile phones of their victims and uploaded videos of themselves online, desecrating corpses and celebrating the killing. Mor Bayder, whose grandmother was among those killed, said she found out about her fate when Hamas terrorists uploaded a photo of her dead body to her Facebook account.

“A terrorist came home to her, killed her, took her phone, filmed the horror and published it on her Facebook wall. This is how we found out,” Bayder said in an interview.

Other victims reported receiving phone calls from loved ones, only to find that Hamas terrorists were on the other end of the line, mocking their losses.

The Supernova music festival, taking place at a site near the Hamas stronghold of Gaza, had an estimated 3,000 attendees when the terrorists struck. Israeli authorities have confirmed the discovery of over 260 dead there and have continued to find Hamas victims for nearly two weeks.

“It was a massacre,” Yaniv, an emergency medic who rushed to the site, said in an interview with the outlet Kan News. “I’ve never seen anything like it in my life. It was a planned ambush. As people came out of the emergency exits, squads of terrorists were waiting for them there and just started picking them off.”

“Eleven days after the terrible massacre, ZAKA’s teams are still continuing their activities in the field and at any given moment dozens of volunteers are busy with the most difficult holy work of all,” Haim Otmazgin, the head of a volunteer group helping find Hamas victims known as ZAKA, said this week. ZAKA confirmed the discovery of more bodies at a separate site, Kibbutz Be’eri, on Wednesday, including a woman and child whose bodies were burned.

“We will continue our work and do everything in our power to bring all the holy victims for a Jewish burial,” Otmazgin said.

Editor’s Note:  This story was updated to reflect a revised number on the death toll from the October 7 Hamas attack in Israel.  The Israeli government estimate of 1,400 was revised to around 1,200, according to Reuters.

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