A survivor of the rave massacre – in which over 260 young revellers at a party near the Gaza Strip were gunned down by Hamas terrorists – has said that women were “raped next to the dead bodies of their friends”.

Speaking to US website Tablet, the survivor said that several of the rape victims appeared to have been executed later, while others were taken to Gaza.

Another survivor returned to the scene later in the day to look for his friends spoke, of seeing cold and mutilated bodies, mainly of young women. He said he saw scantily clad corpses, many of whom appeared to have been shot at point-blank.

“I felt like they were shooting right above our heads,” another survivor told the Tablet. “I dove into a bush … It felt like the shooting was coming from 180 degrees, all around us. I understood we’re going to be there for at least a couple of hours. And I had nothing on me. And I was like, the only thing I want is a weapon. I want something to protect us.”

Some of the revellers escaped to a nearby wadi and hid themselves the shrubbery, he said. 

Eventually, he and his friends - some of them without shoes - decided to make a dash for safety by following a road. They walked close enough to see it but not so close so that they might be seen.

“I said, if we see like army or police cars, we’re going to go to the road. Otherwise, we’re going to stay away. When we saw police and army cars, we knew that it’s a safe place,” he told the Tablet.

Later, when the massacre was finally over and IDF soldiers managed to subdue the attackers, they searched trucks and found RPG launchers, high-end communications devices, assorted AK-47s and other mostly Soviet-made weapons, along with numerous copies of the Quran.