For weeks, excited music-lovers had looked forward to the Supernova festival, held in the desert in southern Israel to coincide with the Jewish festival of Sukkot.

"The time has come when the whole family is about to get together again," organisers wrote on social media before it began. "And what fun it is going to be!"

Just hours later, their social media pages are now flooded with desperate people trying to find loved ones, after Palestinian militants stormed the festival and opened fire as part of a huge surprise attack on Israel.

More than 260 bodies have reportedly been recovered from the festival site, according to rescue agency Zaka.

One partygoer, Ortel, said the first sign that something was wrong was when a siren went off at around dawn, warning of rockets. Eyewitnesses said the rockets were quickly followed by gunshots.

"They turned off the electricity and suddenly out of nowhere they [militants] come inside with gunfire, opening fire in every direction," she told Israel's Channel 12.

"Fifty terrorists arrived in vans, dressed in military uniforms," she said.

"They fired bursts, and we reached a point where everyone stopped their vehicles and started running. I went into a tree, a bush like this, and they just started spraying people. I saw masses of wounded people thrown around."

Gilad Karplus, who was working as a masseuse at the festival, told the BBC he also saw people being hit by bullets and managed to escape into the fields in a vehicle with his friends.

"Then they [the militants] started firing sniper rifles on us from different places and also heavy artillery."

Mr Karplus, who used to work for the Israel Defense Forces, was injured after being fired at from motorcycles but said he and his friends managed to escape and hid in a building.

"We heard them [the gunmen] going from door to door, and in a few hours they could have found us, but they didn't know we were there."

Eventually, Israeli soldiers and police arrived and Mr Karplus was taken to hospital for treatment.

The festival site - with three stages, a camping area and bar and food area - was in the Negev desert, near Kibbutz Re'im. It was not far from the Gaza Strip, from where Hamas fighters crossed over at dawn to launch their attack. They infiltrated towns and villages, taking dozens of people hostage.