The Car Wall

The car wall is a pile of burnt cars west of the Tkuma in the Gaza envelope, resembling the shape of a wall. Originally, this pile was created by evacuating the burnt cars from Route 232 and other places in the Gaza envelope after the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, in general, and the massacre at the Nova Festival in particular, from where most of the cars came. Later, the wall of burnt cars became a memorial to the massacre that took place at the festival, which was the largest terrorist attack in the history of the State of Israel.^[1][2][3]

Next to the wall of burnt cars, there are hundreds of other cars that are out of use, and they too are displayed as a memorial to the massacres committed against their owners.^[4][5]

On the morning of October 7, 2023, the Hamas organizations and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad launched a surprise attack on Israel. Under the cover of launching thousands of rockets, about 3,500 militant from the Gaza Strip infiltrated dozens of Israeli settlements and military facilities in the Gaza envelope area and its surroundings, conducting shooting battles against a few security forces. The militant committed acts of massacre and rape, murdering and killing 1,150 people, including the massacre of 779 civilians, and abducted about 253 people to the Gaza Strip, including women, the elderly, and infants.^[6] In the first hours, they fought against the readiness squads, Israeli police officers, Yamam fighters, and IDF soldiers while being numerically inferior. In the battles, about 1,550 militants were killed on Israeli territory, and on the Israeli side, 301 soldiers, 55 police officers, and 10 General Security Service personnel were killed.^[7]

After the massacre at the Nova Festival, which left hundreds of burnt and damaged cars scattered along the sides of Route 232,^[8] the cars were evacuated to a car lot located west of the Tkuma settlement and northwest of Netivot, in order to clear Route 232 and to concentrate the cars of the victims for the process of locating and identifying the remains of the bodies. A total of 860 vehicles were evacuated there from the Gaza envelope area, most of them from the Nova Festival. Out of all the vehicles that arrived at the lot, only 62 received approval from the examiners to return to the road, while the rest were marked as having severe safety defects, due to the fact that the militant shot at the engines of the vehicles in order to disable them, and then shot the occupants to death.^[9][1][10]

Next to the cars, there is also a pile of motorcycles on which the militants rode.^[3]

In November 2023, archaeologists arrived at the lot with the aim of finding items from the victims inside the burnt vehicles. Members of ZAKA also arrived at the location in order to find items that could lead to a proper burial in Israel.^[11]

• Shocking evidence of the massacre: behind the burnt car lot from October 7