Piling horror on horror... scenes at kibbutz where 40 children died
AROUND 40 babies and young children were killed – some beheaded – when Hamas terrorists launched a massacre at a kibbutz close to the Gaza border, Israeli soldiers said yesterday.
In scenes likened by hardened officers to the deadly pogroms of the 19th century, bloodthirsty fighters overwhelmed the community and meted out appalling atrocities on even the youngest residents.
The onslaught saw around 70 Hamas fighters – yesterday branded ‘animals’ and ‘worse than Isis’ by the Israeli army – armed with machine guns and grenades overwhelm the complex on Saturday, killing men, women and children indiscriminately.
After finally regaining control of the Kfar Aza kibbutz after door-to-door fighting with the attackers, Israeli soldiers spoke of the incomprehensible scale of death and destruction that they had found.
Piling horror upon horror, as many as 40 babies and small children were killed, they told reporters after taking them to the scene of the atrocity.
‘When Hamas came here they decapitated women, they decapitated children,’ Major David Ben Zion, 37, a reservist called up to try to rescue any survivors, told
The Independent. ‘We saw dead babies, girls. We succeeded in saving some of them but we found most dead in their houses. They came with just one mission – to kill more and more of our people.’
Harrowing images from the scene show a baby’s cot covered with blood, her small, bloodied dress lying next to it.
Israeli soldiers were seen comforting each other after witnessing such horrors, including the bodies of entire families who were gunned down in their beds. Amid the burned-out houses, bullet-riddled bodies of Israeli residents and
Hamas militants lay on the ground beside scattered furniture and torched cars. The stench of corpses hung heavy in the air. ‘You see the babies, the mothers, the fathers, in their bedrooms, in their protection rooms and how the terrorist kills them,’ said Major General Itai Veruv, escorting journalists at the scene near Sderot.
‘It’s not a war, it’s not a battlefield. It’s a massacre.
‘It’s something we used to imagine from our grandfathers, grandmothers in the pogrom in Europe and other places.’ Stunned soldiers – many reservists scrambled from their homes following the surprise attack – told Israeli TV correspondent Nicole Zedeck how they saw the bodies of babies next to their cots, their heads chopped off.
One shouted: ‘Tell the world what you saw here.’ Among the palm trees and banana plants, football nets where children would
‘It’s not a war. It’s a massacre’
previously have played stood on a pocket of grass – but in the background, the bodies of families were laid on the ground.
A destroyed perimeter gate showed where the gunmen had entered, while some of the houses had been almost totally destroyed in the attack with collapsed, burned walls.
After checking the site for booby traps, soldiers were still securing the paths of the kibbutz as bursts of gunfire and explosions could be heard in the distance.
Jets roared above and smoke could be seen rising from Gaza. Sirens warned of incoming rockets intercepted overhead. ‘What the journalists saw today is a massacre: children, women and elderly who were butchered,’ said Nir Dinar, an Israeli Defence Force spokesman.
‘These are animals, worse than Isis.’ He said that the casualties numbered in ‘dozens’, adding ‘we are still counting’.
Tens of thousands of Jews were massacred in pogroms – anti-Jewish riots tolerated or even orchestrated by police and soldiers – in the Russian Empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
They fuelled a climate of hatred and murder that would be exploited by the Nazis in the 1930s and 40s.