Shani Kupervaser was about to start a new job when she went to the SuperNova X festival with three of her friends. It was a prebirthday celebration, as she turns 28 on Oct. 17.

Her mother hasn’t heard from her since 8 a.m. Saturday, when Hamas attackers massacred 260 people at the desert locale.

"It’s like she vanished,” Diana Kupervaser, Shani’s mother, said in a telephone interview.

Eitan Halley, also 28, was with Kupervaser, and they and two other friends hurriedly drove away from the festival amid the mayhem. “We were hearing explosions and sirens,” Halley said by phone today. The road was chaotic, she said, and they decided to leave the car and run to a roadside bomb shelter, a concrete bunker with no door designed to withstand incoming rockets.

A man outside the bunker motioned for them to get inside. The friends and about a dozen other people crammed in.

Soon, Halley said, he realized they’d been lured inside as a trap.

The man who gathered them inside started yelling: “I’m a Christian! I’m a Christian!” At that moment, Halley said, a group of armed attackers descended upon the bunker shooting and throwing grenades.

“I think that was their signal to attack,” he said.

A young Israeli still in the army started throwing the grenades back at the attackers until one blew him up, Halley said.

Then Halley started throwing the grenades back, until he missed one and was thrown to the back of the bunker and hit his head.

“I passed out,” he said. Others inside were wounded. He decided to play dead as one of the attackers grabbed him by the hair.

He lost track of Kupervaser and one of their other friends. The fourth friend in their party was pulled out of the bunker. “She was almost kidnapped, but she said, ‘Please don’t take me,’ and he pushed her back inside,” Halley said.

The wounded tried to stay quiet, he said,  but ultimately they cried out in pain until they fell silent, presumably dead.

“We were pretty much waiting in a pile of bodies for six or seven hours,” he said.

Finally, a resident of a local village came to the bunker and helped Halley out. Now, still in shock, he is dismayed that the Israeli authorities couldn’t come to the rescue.

“So many people injured who died because no one came. It was horrible,” he said.

Meanwhile Shani Kupervaser’s mother is waiting for word from authorities.

“We gave DNA samples, and we hope to get proof of life,” she said.

The U.S. is committed to backing Israel but has no plans to get directly involved in the Israel-Hamas conflict, National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby told reporters on a media call this evening.

"There's no intention to put U.S. boots on the ground," Kirby said. "That said, as evidenced by the changes in our force posture in the region, including the moving of the Gerald R. Ford carrier strike group into the Eastern Med, President Biden will always make sure we are that protecting and defending our national security interests, wherever those interests are."

He added he hoped Congress would not let support for Israel hold up the White House's proposal for aid to Ukraine. "We are a large enough, big enough, economically viable and vibrant enough country to be able to support both," Kirby said.

TEL AVIV, Israel — Eight rockets were intercepted over Tel Aviv Monday night local time, as the situation worsens every hour, NBC’s Ali Velshi reported.

Israel has called up 300,000 reservists, which is the largest number they’ve ever called up, he said.

“In fact, they don’t even have all those people in the country so El Al, the airline, has organized flights to bring reservists into Israel from other parts of the world that they might live in,” Velshi said on MSNBC.

Eight rockets were intercepted by the “Iron Dome” system over Tel Aviv, which is around 40 miles north of Gaza, he said.

Israel has imposed a “siege” on Gaza, which means no fuel, food or water will be shipped into Gaza from Israel, Velshi reported. Electricity generation in Gaza relies on diesel fuel, and it has three to four days of fuel remaining, he said.

Around 135,000 people in Gaza are without their homes, he said, and Hamas has threatened to kill hostages if Israel strikes homes of people not involved in the conflict.

"It is just worse and worse with every few hours here,” Velshi said.

France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States today expressed unified support for Israel and condemned Hamas’ attack and tactics.

The leaders of the five countries said in a joint statement: “We express our steadfast and united support to the State of Israel, and our unequivocal condemnation of Hamas and its appalling acts of terrorism.”

Citing kidnappings and the killing of hundreds of Israelis, including an estimated 260 civilians at a music festival, the nations said they would back Israel.

“Our countries will support Israel in its efforts to defend itself and its people against such atrocities,” they said.

They also said Hamas "does not represent" the aspirations of Palestinians and would only plunge them into more violence.

"All of us recognise the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people, and support equal measures of justice and freedom for Israelis and Palestinians alike," the statement said. "But make no mistake: Hamas does not represent those aspirations, and it offers nothing for the Palestinian people other than more terror and bloodshed."

There have been no credible threats to the United States in connection with Hamas' attacks on Israel, the FBI said today, but noted it is prepared to adjust its stance in the face of any evolving perils.

"While the FBI does not have specific and credible intelligence indicating a threat to the United States stemming from the Hamas attacks in Israel, we are closely monitoring unfolding events," the FBI said in a statement.

The FBI added that it would not hesitate to change its posture "to protect the American people."

The agency said it's also working in Israel to help locate and identify missing, dead, injured and sheltering Americans affected by the war.

"Reports of deceased, injured, or missing Americans are being treated with the utmost urgency and aggressively investigated," it said.

An historic church in Gaza took to Facebook to debunk a claim that it had been destroyed by Israeli bombs.

On Monday, posts on X began to circulate claiming that Christian Saint Porphyrios Orthodox Church had been destroyed by Israeli attacks.

Misinformation has flourished on X in the last few days, with verified accounts bringing in millions of views on their monetized content with some recycled and fake content.

Saint Porphyrios Orthodox Church dates back hundreds of years, and social media users quickly latched onto the misinformation in an attempt to advocate for their own causes.

The misinformation was eventually republished on other website, which cited the false posts on X.

But later on Monday, a post appeared on the church's Facebook page, saying, "We would like to inform you that Saint Porphyrios Church in Gaza is untouched and operating in service of the community and our congregation. The news circulating about it being damaged are false. We appreciate your concern for the safety of our church and people and request your prayers for us."

Under Elon Musk's policies, few posts on X are taken down or moderated. Many false posts about the church remained up Monday afternoon, where they can still bring in ad dollars via the platform.

The son of a 75-year-old woman living a few hundred feet from the Gaza border said on Sky News that he fears his mother has been abducted by Hamas, alongside many other elderly people in her community. Ada Sagi was hiding in a safe room in her home on Saturday morning when her son Noam said the phones went dark.

“She is 75 years old with a hip replacement,” Noam Sagi told Sky News. “She is not going to hide somewhere.’’

Sagi said that when he saw Palestinian media broadcasting from his mother's front lawn, his heart sank. Later that afternoon, he said the Israel Defense Forces went into her home and reported that she was missing.

''The only assumption, not just about her but so many of her neighbors and people around, is that if they've not been found, it's because they've been taken," Sagi said. ''There is over 90 people from [her] community of about 300 people that is now missing.''

Sagi said that many of people who live in his mother’s community are in their 80s.

Power outages have caused near-total internet blackouts in parts of the Gaza Strip, affecting hundreds of thousands of people, data from internet content delivery network Cloudflare shows.

The blackouts began Saturday morning local time, with two major internet providers — Fusion and DCC North — going offline, Cloudflare’s data shows. And while two other providers operated at half-capacity through the weekend, both are nearly completely dark as of Monday night local time.

In addition to the blackouts, internet infrastructure in the region has been the target of frequent cyberattacks since fighting broke out Saturday, as Cloudflare’s data shows a drastic increase in distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks targeting Gaza and Israel. News and communication sites are the most frequent target of the attacks. Cloudflare said.

What must emerge from ongoing turmoil in Israel and Gaza is "a commitment to a future of peace," said Stefanie Fox, executive director of Jewish Voice for Peace, a grassroots progressive Jewish anti-Zionist organization.

"The pain and trauma of this moment is so raw and real for all sides, and we believe that what must emerge from this horrifying time is a commitment to a future of peace that's rooted in justice and freedom and equality for all people," Fox said.

But that cannot happen, Fox said, without acknowledging what she said is the root cause of the violence: "75 years of Israeli dispossession and discrimination and state violence on Palestinians."

"Reality is shaped by when you start the clock, you know, and while the Israeli government may have just declared war, its war on Palestinians started over 75 years ago," Fox said.

Jewish Voice for Peace is hopeful for a better future in the region.

"We believe in a future of a just peace that’s rooted in equality and dignity and freedom, where there is a society rooted in belonging not domination, in equality, rather than discrimination, in a shared actual multiracial democracy instead of apartheid and occupation," Fox said. "And we believe that that is possible if we are very focused in this moment."