Israel war: Hamas brutality comes into full focus in kibbutzim days after attack
Israel war: Hamas brutality comes into full focus in kibbutzim days after attack
Israeli authorities are only beginning to understand and uncover the extent of the gruesome scenes
Mike Brest, Defense Reporter - OCTOBER 10, 2023
Israeli authorities are only beginning to understand and uncover the extent of the gruesome scenes in areas that were overrun by militants this weekend in the unprecedented multipronged terrorist attacks.
Hamas began its terror campaign early Saturday morning with a barrage of rocket fire to overwhelm Israel's primary short-range air defense system known as the Iron Dome, while hundreds of militants got through the border between Gaza and Israel. The current Israeli death toll is above 900, though that will likely continue to increase. Many of the terrorists attacked nearby kibbutzim, the plurality of a kibbutz, which is a small socialist community within Israel where its members live together, pool their resources, and ensure everyone has what they need.
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The kibbutzim on the border live with bomb shelters in their homes and in their neighborhoods due to the frequent rocket and mortar fires from Gaza and only have seconds to reach them when the air sirens sound. But this weekend, they faced a new threat: the terrorists coming into their communities and attacking.
Israeli authorities found more than 100 bodies in the Be'eri kibbutz, which is near the border. The kibbutz has about 1,000 residents, meaning about 10% of the population was killed, and it was one of the first places Hamas attacked on Saturday. Most of the dead were locals, while some were Israeli security forces, a search and rescue spokesperson told CNN. Residents told Israel’s Channel 12 television station that the terrorists went door to door, trying to break into their homes.
"Today the volunteers entered kibbutz [Be'eri] and it is impossible to explain in words the terrible sights - some were adults, some were children. These are horrors that cannot be grasped in the mind or soul," a spokesperson for ZAKA Search and Rescue told IDF radio.
The situation from another kibbutz, Kfar Aza, which is only about a quarter mile from the Gaza border, was just as horrific. Israeli forces found the bodies of roughly 40 children and babies, some of whom had been decapitated, according to i24 News. Israeli forces are still going house by house to ensure there are no additional threats and to recover the bodies.
“It’s not a war, it’s not a battlefield. You see the babies, the mother, the father, in their bedrooms, in their protection rooms, and how the terrorists killed them,” IDF Maj. Gen. Itai Veruv first described the scene. “It’s a massacre. ... It's something I've never seen in my life. It's something that we used to imagine from our grandfathers, grandmothers in the pogrom in Europe and other places. It's not something that happens in new history."
A senior U.S. defense official said on Monday that Hamas acted with "ISIS-like savagery" with the intentional killing of civilians and children.
"Hamas militants going across Israel, murdering children in front of their parents, massacring with indiscriminate violence in music festivals, burning down entire houses, while families sheltered in their bunkers," the official said. "This is different, and we want to be very clear about what that is."
Another 260 or so civilians were murdered at the Tribe of Nova music festival, while many more remain missing. In addition to opening fire at the concertgoers, survivors of the attack reported seeing women get raped, with one survivor telling Tablet magazine, "Women have been raped at the area of the rave next to their friends bodies, dead bodies.”
"I thought that maybe I could hide there, and I decided it is the best option so I went inside of this bush," Amir Ben Natan, one of the concertgoers, said on CNN on Tuesday. "Honestly, I kind of have blackout from this hour. I don’t really remember what I heard. It's this bush, but about after one hour, two policemen arrived and I was there with a few other people, so the policemen told us to move from there, and then saw, I believe, one dead body on the way. I did not feel safe, so shortly, I decided to hide again in another bush. And while I was in the second bush, I heard like war outside. Like serious war ... I knew that any time, like a bullet or a grenade or something can fall on me. And then after a while, it was silence, and I heard the terrorists talking right nearby, and I just prayed that they would not, they would not discover us."
CNN correspondent Nic Robertson got emotional while on-air on Monday afternoon sharing details of what he saw in a rocket shelter near the music festival.
"This stuff on the floor is what you fear it is," Robertson added. "It's blood, and you realize in an instant, looking at the strewn shell casings on the floor, looking at the bullet holes in the concrete in front of you, and you can understand what happened. People were used to going to these shelters for safety and security from Hamas rockets. ... Hamas had gone in there with guns and quite literally shot them in calculated, cold blood as they were cowering there on the floor."
Hamas also kidnapped between 100-150 people from the concert and kibbutzim and brought them to the tiny enclave of Gaza, according to Ambassador Gilad Erdan. Hamas threatened to execute the hostages and broadcast it due to Israel's retaliatory campaign.