They swooped in to kill dozens at the Nova music festival. Now we reveal… How Hamas trained its murderous paraglider squadron – right under the noses of Mossad

Soaring over a sparkling blue sea, a paraglider glides with joy along a beach in Gaza. He is a German diplomat and after a scenic flight he lands to triumphant cheers and gleefully proclaims: ‘Everything is possible in Gaza.’

Holding his deflated parachute, Sven Kühn von Burgsdorff – an EU envoy – boasted to a camera that he had carried out ‘the first Gaza paragliding flight in history’ to demonstrate to the world what can be achieved in the troubled enclave . ‘What does this tell us? You can fly here,’ he announced.

That was three months ago. Whether the pro-Palestinian EU diplomat now regrets his political stunt is doubtful.

Because, as the world now knows to its cost, he was not the first to hover in Gaza – as the air wing of Hamas proved with such brutality last Saturday.

Pictured, still from footage showing fighters training ahead of Hamas’ operation in Israel

Festival goers flee the carnage as Hamas terrorists gun down revelers at a music festival

It appears that the terrorist group’s ‘Air Force Falcon Squadron’ has spent months, if not years, practicing with their motorized paragliders to unleash death from the sky.

As partygoers at the Nova music festival danced in the sands of the Negev desert at sunrise, they were unaware of the terror that was about to descend upon them.

In one of the most spine-tingling videos, filmed by a carefree reveler in the moments before joy turned to unspeakable terror, the paragliders appeared merely as innocent specks of gray in the sky.

The fleet of Falcon Squadron fighters flew in formation and swooped low over the stunned partygoers, opening fire with frame-mounted machine guns and Kalashnikov rifles.

Some of the Hamas ‘pilots’ flew alone, others were in two-man planes.

But how on earth did Hamas manage to establish an air force in Gaza – an area smaller than the Isle of Wight?

How did it train pilots to such a high standard right under the noses of the formidable Israeli security services?

The Falcon Squadron pilots landed smoothly on the sand at one end of the festival and continued their barbaric bloodletting. Petrified youths were cut down as they scrambled to escape.

And, in a sickening tactic, those fleeing the carnage were deliberately ambushed at the exit where more Hamas gunmen lay in wait.

The Hamas paragliders – which even sported uniforms with ‘Air Force Falcon Squadron’ insignia – were just as brutally effective in attacks that unfolded elsewhere.

The slick PR wing of the terrorist group has since released a professionally filmed video boasting of how the fighters trained.

But how on earth did Hamas manage to establish an air force in Gaza – an area smaller than the Isle of Wight? Pictured, Hamas terrorist training

According to several security sources in Israel this week, the paragliding exercises were noticed – but were dismissed as ‘ridiculous’. In the photo, photos of the music festival just before the terrorists struck

It shows them starting the engines with parachutes extended.

A handful of sand is thrown into the air to determine the wind direction – a technique also seen in the video of the German diplomat preparing for his flight.

The Hamas video, set to pounding Hollywood-style music, shows gun-toting paragliders hovering above the desert bush before landing next to a mocked-up Israeli village marked with blue Star of David signs, before storming it.

How did all this deadly training go unnoticed in one of the most guarded few square miles on earth?

The Gaza Strip, 25 miles long, five miles wide and controlled by a ruthless terrorist organization bent on destroying its neighbor, must have more spy satellites and eavesdropping equipment aimed at it than almost anywhere else.

According to several security sources in Israel this week, the paragliding exercises were noticed – but were dismissed as ‘ridiculous’.

Motorized paragliders are noisy, they fly relatively slowly and they make a large, easy-to-target target for any halfway decent Israeli sniper or soldier with a shoulder-fired surface-to-air missile.

During the seven-week Gaza war of 2014, Hamas sent paratroopers over the fence to attack Israel and all were easily shot down, said Shalom Ben Hanan, a former major general in the Israel Security Agency.

He told me: ‘They have been training in the Gaza Strip for years, and we have seen them train.

‘We felt it was something ridiculous because we intercepted them easily in 2014.’

Ilan Lotan, another former intelligence officer, added: ‘We saw them practicing with the paragliders, we saw the propaganda videos that Hamas made.

The twin Berdichevsky brothers Guy and Roi with their parents Itay and Hadar Berdichevsky

Survivors of the atrocities Guy and Roi at a family member’s house a week after the massacre

“There were no new tools used in this attack, we knew them all.”

Apparently, Hamas’s ‘air force’ was no longer considered a joke.

Until, that is, a week ago. As dawn broke, the worst atrocity in Israel’s history was set in motion when another wing of Hamas’ primitive air force, the ‘Zouari’ drone squadron, sent drones to drop bombs on observation towers along the fence – which made the Israeli army ‘blind’. .

Then members of the Falcon Squadron hovered over the 20ft reinforced cement wall in paragliders to secure terrain on the other side, enabling Hamas commando units to use explosives to breach the barrier at various points.

Bulldozers widened the gaps, allowing terrorists armed to the teeth to pour through in cars, vans and on motorbikes.

Yesterday the sheer scale of the incursion was exposed as more than 2,000 terrorists were estimated to have breached the barrier.

And while all this was going on, another Hamas unit sent a ‘shock and awe’ barrage of 3,000 rockets into Israel, overwhelming its ‘Iron Dome’ defense system and causing chaos in military control centres.

Israel said yesterday it had killed Hamas air force chief Merad Abu Merad with a fighter jet attack on his headquarters in Gaza.

But no one thinks Hamas launched such an extraordinary operation without outside help, and the blame has been pointed squarely at Iran for financing and sending weapons and equipment.

Foreign fighters – with their own warped expertise – have reportedly joined the bloody enterprise.

I have seen evidence, so far unconfirmed, of at least six Taliban insurgents said to have died fighting alongside Hamas.

Colonel Richard Kemp, a former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, told me yesterday: ‘The hand of Iran is very firmly on the shoulder of Hamas, also pushing them from behind.

‘It is possible that they conducted, or helped to conduct, the paragliding training. You can’t just jump in and fly that stuff.

‘It might have been in Iran or somewhere else, possibly Lebanon. But there seems no doubt that they can also train inside the Gaza Strip.’

There are security questions to be answered – even our friend the German diplomat apparently managed to bring his own paraglider into Gaza, despite Israel banning such items under its ‘no fly’ restrictions on the enclave.

The vast majority of Hamas’ material would have been smuggled into Gaza through a network of tunnels. Thirteen years ago I was shown one.

There was an 80-foot vertical drop, lined with strings of fairy lights. At the bottom, the tunnel was almost high enough to stand in, and ran for more than half a mile to a cellar in a house across the border in Egypt.

The boss of this tunnel boasted that he could move 40 tons a day through it and said: ‘I charge about $100 for a motorcycle and $15 for a bag of food. We bring everything.’

‘Everything’ included sheep, goats, a baby camel and even lions – sedated – on order from Gaza’s zoo. But the boss insisted he did not import weapons.

However, there are numerous other tunnels, and on the evidence of last weekend, they have been doing a brisk trade of late.

It is now becoming clear how carefully Hamas planned its massacre. Amir Avivi, a retired Israeli general, said Hamas “went back to the Stone Age” to avoid detection of its plans.

Terror commanders shunned the use of phones and computers and conducted their business in rooms specially guarded against technological espionage, or they went completely underground.

Many Hamas leaders were said to be unaware of the plans, and while they were being trained, the hundreds of fighters deployed in Saturday’s attack were in the dark about the exact purpose of the exercises.

This will not be the case if a new front of the war breaks out in Israel’s north.

There Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon will know exactly what they have been training for. They also have an ‘air force’.

There were panicked reports of ‘up to 100’ Hezbollah paragliders flying over the border on Wednesday night, while a red alert sent Israel’s entire northern population fleeing to their shelters in terror.

Fortunately, it was a false alarm. But it seems only a matter of time before Israelis once again face the specter of slaughter from the sky.