‘Tell The World What You Saw Here’: Even Military Men Are Shocked By Hamas Atrocities

A report from Kibbutz Kfar Aza.

Kibbutz Kfar Aza, an Israeli border community 3 kilometers from the northeastern border with the Gaza Strip, has become a new synonym for the atrocities committed by Hamas militants during the invasion of southern and central Israel.

On October 10, the IDF allowed the international press here to demonstrate the scale of the inhumane brutality with which Hamas militants attacked civilian Israeli communities. It was kibbutzim — small communities in which about 125 thousand people live throughout Israel — that became the targets of the first wave of terrorist attacks on October 7. Only now, day after day, the IDF is discovering the scale of the atrocities committed in these communities.

Journalists from the world's leading publications, including reporters from CNN and Reuters, witnessed shocking scenes in the farming kibbutz of Kfar Aza as the Israeli military evacuated and removed the bodies of the dead. According to the IDF, up to 40 children, including infants, and dozens of adults, including women and the elderly, were brutally killed there. The exact number of residents of the kibbutz, located southwest of the city of Sderot, killed by militants has not yet been announced. In total, about 750 people lived here, many families with small children.

Houses in Kfar Aza were ransacked and set ablaze. Overturned mattresses, destroyed furniture, broken trinkets and unexploded grenades lay strewn across the grounds, along with bodies, including the dead militants, CNN writes.

“It's not a battlefield. It's a massacre,” Major General Itai Veruv warned journalists who were about to enter Kfar Aza where atrocities have taken place at the hands of Hamas terrorists. He compared the massacre by Hamas with the brutality of the ISIS terrorists. According to him, about 70 terrorists, fully armed and equipped, went from “house to house, from apartment to apartment, and killed babies, mothers, fathers in their bedrooms.”

“I have never seen anything like this in my career, never in 40 years of service could I imagine something like this,” CNN quotes General Veruv as saying. He spoke to reporters at kibbutz Kfar Aza after the Israeli military regained control of the settlement. An IDF commander said it took his soldiers “about 48 hours” to fend off “waves and waves of terrorists” on local roads and in neighboring communities.

Veruv said he had been retired from the IDF for eight years before rushing to join the counter-offensive efforts on Saturday morning, but nothing could have prepared him for what he saw.

“I have heard during my childhood about the pogroms in Europe, the Holocaust, of course. All my family came from Europe, they are survivors. But I never thought I would see…things like that,” he said about the scene in Kfar Aza.

In the video below, CNN correspondent Nic Robertson says that among the bodies of those killed by militants there are decapitated victims and those killed with their hands tied.

Reuters reporters complement his words with their own impressions of what they saw in the kibbutz: “A baby's crushed crib lying outside a burnt-out home. Corpses strewn on streets. Body bags lined up on an outdoor basketball court. The stench of death everywhere.” Hamas militants killed people in their beds, in shelter rooms, in dining rooms, in gardens.

Kfar Aza attack survivor Avidor Schwartzman said he hid with his wife and one-year-old daughter in the safe room of their house for more than 20 hours before being rescued by Israeli soldiers and emerging to confront a scene of “pure hell”, the man says.

“There were bodies everywhere. Dead bodies everywhere,” the man said. "We saw our little piece of paradise, our little piece of heaven, was totally burnt – burnt and with blood everywhere,” he said.

“Tell the world what you saw here,” shouted an Israeli soldier, quoted by Reuters, at the tragedy site.