# October 7, hour by hour: the morning Hamas broke through

From the 06:29 barrage to nightfall: a sourced, hour-by-hour record of the October 7 massacre the terrorist organization Hamas planned and carried out.

## Key takeaways

- The war opened with about 2,500 rockets, the IDF later recorded; a compilation of IDF findings counted 119 fence breaches and some 3,800 Nukhba terrorists among about 6,000 people who crossed (FDD sitrep; Jewish Virtual Library).
- A 2025 UK All-Party Parliamentary Group compilation put the dead at 1,182 and the abducted at 251; in November 2023 Israel itself revised an inflated first tally down to about 1,200 (APPG via JVL; FDD).
- The IDF’s Be’eri inquiry found 101 civilians and 31 security personnel killed there, 32 people taken hostage, and about 340 attackers inside the kibbutz (IDF inquiry via JVL).
- The same parliamentary compilation recorded more than 370 people killed at the Nova festival, the deadliest single scene of the day (APPG via JVL).

## 06:29 to 07:00

Start with the date, because Hamas chose it. It was Simchat Torah and a Saturday. In the dark before dawn, people in the Gaza envelope were asleep, on night shift, or still dancing. At 06:29, according to the IDF investigation of the Nahal Oz camp, an intense barrage hit the base while female spotters were reporting movement on the fence. Golani soldiers along the line saw the same rocket fire wake the border at 6:30.

How big was the barrage? An IDF accounting later said the war began with about 2,500 rockets. A reconstruction of the massacre compiled from Israeli investigations put the day’s total above 4,300; a 2025 All-Party Parliamentary compilation, drawing on later Israeli data, spoke of nearly 5,000. The counts differ. The purpose does not. Sirens tore through the south, then toward Ashkelon, the center of the country, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, while civilians dropped into safe rooms and highway shelters. Iron Dome intercepted most of the incoming projectiles. It could not intercept all of them. And it could not stop men on the ground.

That was the point of the rockets: cover. Under the noise, units of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad blew and bulldozed the border barrier. An early battlefield reconstruction described the first wave striking about 29 points, with drones hitting observation towers and motorcycles crossing a fence built to stop exactly that. By the end of the day, an IDF investigation reported 119 breaches by land, air and sea, and about 6,000 people from Gaza inside Israel, some 3,800 of them identified as Hamas Nukhba terrorists. They came on motorcycles, in pickup trucks, on paragliders and, in a smaller naval attempt near Zikim, by boat. Quadcopters struck communications and observation gear, including generators at the base of towers near the border. The Gaza Division camp at Re’im was itself attacked. Commanders trained for a single infiltration struggled to grasp that many places had been hit at once. This was not a raid. It was a plan.

The Nova nature party near Re’im, a few kilometres from the fence, was one of the first civilian targets. Thousands of young people, Israelis and foreigners, had been dancing toward sunrise. When the rockets started they ran for cars, trees, portable toilets and the concrete roadside shelters along Route 232. The terrorists arrived behind the barrage. A reconstruction of the massacre describes hundreds of attackers hitting the forest site. The parliamentary report later counted more than 370 dead there, higher than some early festival-only tallies of about 260 and close to commemorations that speak of nearly 400. Many did not die on the dance floor. About half to three-fifths, in that parliamentary count, were killed while running: on the road, in cars raked with automatic fire and RPGs, or in those small shelters, where grenades were thrown in after them.

At the Nahal Oz outpost, field observers saw the approach around 06:29. An IDF investigation, as summarized later, found 162 personnel on the base that morning, only 81 of them trained for combat. After the barrage, most soldiers followed the only procedure they had been given and ran to shelters. Around 65 Nukhba terrorists entered just after 07:00. The women’s shelter, with 31 female soldiers, was overwhelmed; seven female spotters were taken captive from it later in the morning. The same inquiry counted 53 soldiers and officers killed in combat at the camp and ten soldiers kidnapped. Early public tallies sometimes gave a higher death figure for the base, and not every secondary account has reconciled the two. What the investigation establishes is enough: the outpost meant to watch the fence was overrun in the first hours, and the communities behind it were left largely on their own.

## 07:00 to 09:00

Then the second wave. The reconstruction of the massacre describes about 1,200 Hamas terrorists in the first half hour and around 2,000 more terrorists, including members of other terrorist groups, in the two hours after 07:00. Other terrorist factions and, later, looters came through the same holes. Mohammed Deif, commander of Hamas’s military wing, announced the attack in a pre-recorded “Al-Aqsa Flood” message, claiming a first strike of more than 5,000 rockets and calling for a wider rising. Ask yourself who records a victory speech before the first shot. Hostages were already being moved into Gaza as the morning went on.

Kfar Aza, a kibbutz of about 900 people a short drive from the border, was hit by rockets and then, around 06:45, by hang-gliders, according to an IDF investigation summarized in the same reconstruction. Roughly 100 infiltrators entered first; a second wave followed. The local security team, fourteen people, fought perhaps 150 terrorists. Most of the killing of residents happened in that first hour. The same summary records 64 murdered and 19 taken hostage; the parliamentary compilation lists 62 civilian dead in Kfar Aza. Small differences like that run through the day’s statistics. They do not change what happened. Families were shot in their homes and safe rooms. Some of the worst images the world later saw came from here.

Be’eri’s ordeal began with rockets and then vehicles at the gates. The IDF inquiry divided the morning into stages: movement from Gaza toward the kibbutz from 06:30 to 06:45, then a ground assault from 06:45 in which the first terrorists entered from two directions. Residents and the civilian rapid-response team fought that stage alone. From 09:00, the inquiry says, the enemy gained control. The first IDF soldiers to arrive were hit, evacuated wounded, and pulled back to the gate. About 340 attackers would pass through Be’eri. The army later said plainly that it had failed in its mission to protect the residents. An army that writes that sentence about itself is not hiding the record.

In Sderot, a few kilometres from the fence, the opening wave went for the police station as well as the streets. A reconstruction of the massacre counts 41 terrorists in the city and 53 people killed there: 37 civilians, 11 police officers, two firefighters and three soldiers. Another early account from the front described Hamas terrorists overrunning the station itself before a counter-terror force stopped the attack on the city. The parliamentary report groups Sderot with Ofakim and Netivot as three cities attacked in the western Negev, together suffering 88 deaths, Sderot the worst hit.

Nir Oz, a small kibbutz of some 400 people, was entered early and left almost undefended by the army. The parliamentary compilation found it suffered the most kidnappings of any community: 75 people taken alive and seven bodies abducted. A resident later said that of the 350 to 400 people there when the attack started, only about 200 were left when it was over. The battle lasted about eight hours. No large IDF force arrived in time to stop the withdrawal.

Not every encounter ended that way. Youssef Ziadna, a Bedouin driver who had brought partygoers to Nova, turned his bus around under fire and took about thirty people out. He later told interviewers, as recorded in the massacre reconstruction, that he would throw himself at death if it meant he could save lives. Off-duty soldiers, police and kibbutz emergency squads did the same with rifles from bedroom closets. Some communities held, Nir Am among them, according to an IDF probe that credited a Golani company, the local standby squad and reinforcements. Many did not.

## 09:00 to noon

From 09:00 the assault was no longer only the first wave of terrorists. The reconstruction of the massacre describes a third surge: a civilian mob, incited by Hamas’s military commander, coming through the holes already cut in the fence. Special forces and other reinforcements began reaching parts of the envelope, too few to reverse the assault, enough in places to slow it. The Gaza Division’s camp at Re’im had already been hit. For hours, commanders lacked a coherent picture while local security coordinators shouted one over the radio. An FDD reconstruction of those first hours noted that it took several hours to organize a real defense at the border, and that the air force had difficulty striking because terrorists were mixed with civilians and with Israeli forces.

At Nova and along Route 232 the killing went on as survivors of the first pass tried to drive east. Attackers held junctions and fired into every car. Hamas terrorists livestreamed abductions. They wanted the world to watch. Among those seized at the party were young civilians the world would later know by name as hostages.

In Be’eri, the IDF inquiry describes the kibbutz under enemy control through the late morning, with abductions completed by 13:30. In Kfar Aza, a second wave of attackers shifted from killing to taking captives; only after 12:00 did the army arrive in significant numbers. In Nir Oz, units lost touch with their commanders. By midday most of the organized hostage-takers were already back inside Gaza. The remaining terrorists, from Hamas and other groups, were still fighting at dozens of points inside Israel.

## Afternoon into nightfall

A larger force of security personnel began re-entering Be’eri around 13:30, seven hours after the first break-in. House-to-house fighting against men nested in family homes is slow. A hostage standoff developed at the house of Pesi Cohen, where terrorists had herded civilians; Israeli forces later fired on the area, including with tank shells, in an episode the IDF inquiry examined. The inquiry concluded that commanders had exhausted negotiation, that the tank fire was meant to pressure the terrorists, and that most of the hostages inside were likely murdered by the terrorists. It presented the circumstances of each civilian death to the bereaved families. Its casualty count for Be’eri: 101 civilians and 31 security personnel killed, 32 hostages taken, houses across the kibbutz heavily damaged. The parliamentary compilation used 99 civilian dead for the same community. Clearing the kibbutz took until the next day.

From the afternoon the army began to win locally. By 18:00 about 700 soldiers and security personnel were operating in Be’eri. Isolated cells would be hunted into 8–10 October. The massacre reconstruction notes Israeli airstrikes on Gaza beginning around 17:00. The rockets from Gaza did not stop at dusk. An IDF spokesman put the rocket total above 3,200 by the morning of 8 October.

Nightfall did not end the day for people still locked in safe rooms, or for parents refreshing a silent phone. Israel’s first public death figures were too high, and Israel corrected them. In November 2023 the Foreign Ministry revised the estimate to about 1,200, down from a previous public figure of about 1,400, after some bodies were identified as attackers rather than Israeli victims. Later compilations kept moving by tens: one Jewish Virtual Library casualties page updated an early total above 1,400 first to 1,151 and later to 1,195. The 2025 parliamentary compilation, working from later Israeli data, lists 1,182 killed and more than 4,000 wounded, with 863 of the dead civilians (about 73 percent), and 251 people taken into Gaza, 210 of them alive and 41 as bodies. The Anti-Defamation League still summarizes the day as more than 1,200 killed and 251 hostages. Women and children were 27 percent of those killed and about half of those taken alive, in the parliamentary count. Citizens of dozens of countries were murdered or abducted; Thai agricultural workers were the largest foreign group.

Notice what that correction tells you. Israel published a number, checked it, and lowered it in public. Then compare it with the Hamas-run Health Ministry’s figures you will be asked to accept without question, and ask which side lets itself be audited.

## Where the clock starts

Strip away the rhetoric and the record is still heavier than any slogan. The terrorist organization Hamas, designated as such by the United States and many other countries, with Islamic Jihad and others, used a rocket barrage to cover a planned cross-border massacre of civilians in their homes and at a music festival. Local police, kibbutz squads and a handful of soldiers fought before the state could assemble a front. By sunset, whole communities of the western Negev had been emptied by murder and kidnapping, and the war that followed had already begun. Every later accusation against Israel starts its clock after this morning. Start yours here.

The officers who fought the war that followed tell it on camera, identified by role, in [the film](https://nazadocumentary.com/film). Then read [what investigators documented of Hamas’s October 7 atrocities](https://nazadocumentary.com/blog/the-massacre-in-the-kibbutzim) and [who the hostages of October 7 were and what happened to them](https://nazadocumentary.com/blog/the-hostages-of-october-7).