“All the [car] windows were broken. There was blood on the road,” Marek said.

He added, “This Hamas terrorist was firing at every car that was coming.”

Three Israeli police officers eventually got involved, Marek said, and traded fire with the terrorists — the engagement taking attention away temporarily from civilians.

“They saved our lives,” he said of the officers.

Once home, Marek discovered in a social media post uploaded by Hamas that a friend at the festival had been killed.

“This is how we discovered the first person who died that we knew,” he said.

In the days following the attacks, Marek said, “Each morning, I have been checking for people that I knew that were killed, slaughtered.”

While people were being killed at the music festival, some 50 miles away, Michal Rahav was trying to repel a Hamas attack at Kibbutz Nirim in Negev. She said terrorists had penetrated through the fence and set fires to homes in order to force come out of them.

“We could see the rockets being fired behind our house,” she said. “It was crazy.”

Rahav said her husband, a police officer, grabbed his gun while she and her three children huddled inside a safe room.

“We heard a lot of shooting and Arabic,” she said, adding that it was at the point that they knew Hamas “had penetrated the kibbutz.”

That’s when Rahav said she gave her children – two daughters and a son – a dire warning: “I laid them down on the floor and I told them: Whoever comes through that door, we fight. We don’t go down without a fight.”

Rahav said her husband shot a terrorist while they hid inside.

“They kept shooting at the safe room door and the iron window behind us,” she recalled.

It took hours for Israeli Defense Forces to reach the kibbutz and kill the terrorists.

“We saw the damage [to the house],” she said. “The whole house was broken and shattered.”

Rahav said her home wasn’t the only thing that was shattered.

“So was our reality,” she said.

Clemente Lisi is the executive editor at Religion Unplugged. He is the author of “The FIFA World Cup: A History of the Planet’s Biggest Sporting Event” and previously served as deputy head of news at the New York Daily News and a longtime reporter at The New York Post. Follow him on Twitter @ClementeLisi.