Israel war: More than 100 bodies found in Israeli kibbutz Be’eri after Hamas attack
Israeli soldiers have revealed how they made the harrowing discovery of butchered bodies, including 40 babies and young children. Warning: Graphic content
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It was the thick blood trail that ran to and from several homes that hinted at the horror that was about to be discovered.
It was clear to the workers from the Israeli emergency response group ZAKA that the small self-sustaining farming community in the kibbutz Be’eri, in the western Negev desert had been attacked by Hamas.
And the scale of the horror in this tiny community was next level.
For the last 24 hours ZAKA workers have been following the blood trails to each home and have so far removed 108 bodies. That includes 66-year-old Australian-born Sydney grandmother Galit Carbone, her body found metres from her door. They described the scene before them in one word – “hell”.
But the bloodbath of hell is extended to at least five villages, within a 5km radius from the breached Gaza border, including kibbutz Kfar Aza where more bodies including those of 40 babies — some which had been beheaded — were found.
As a 40-year military veteran, Major General Israel Defence Force General Itai Veruv thought he had seen it all.
“It’s not a war,” General Veruv said, visibly shaken.
The scenes of destruction were indescribable, atrocities not seen since the days of ISIS and then worse since many of the butchered victims were children and babies.
“It’s not a battlefield. You see the babies, the mothers, the fathers in their bedrooms, in their protection rooms, and how the terrorists kill them. It’s not a war… it’s a massacre.”
“Some people came out with their children and [Hamas attackers] killed them.
“They killed babies in front of their parents and then killed the parents. They killed parents and we found babies between the dogs and their families killed before him.”
Some were slain where they hid in their homes, others clearly dragged out of the structures to be executed outside or beaten and kidnapped. Many here were of retiree age.
Militants literally went house-to-house killing and filming as they went.
Be’eri is the largest of the 25 village settlements that make up the Eshkol region, famous for its art galleries and sculptures and printing, but now is one of the ground zeros of the horror that has fallen on Israel.
There is no mystery about what happened here, the bloodshed captured on both local CCTV footage but also video clips by the bloodthirsty Hamas militants, who filmed their victims or themselves going about the massacre and shared or posted the footage on Telegram and other social media sites.
They captured locals here begging for mercy as they were beaten and then executed or snatched. It was indiscriminate — Hamas decided who would live or die, in the instance of that moment.
They decapitated some, tortured and mutilated most, with footage showing them grinning ear to ear as they carried out their atrocities.
They even took time to torture pets.
Israel’s Director of the Digital Diplomacy Bureau David Saranga posted graphic pictures to social media showing the bloodyremains of what appears to be a child’s bedroom, including a plastic tub full of children’s toys.
Another shows a lounge room with massive pools of blood on the floor.
“Women and girls raped. People burned alive. Young kids kidnapped. Babies brutalized. Parents executed in front of their youngchildren,” Mr Saranga wrote.
While it was a heavily gated community, CCTV footage shows militants struggling to get in before a local car approaches and inadvertently opens the gate electronically from his car before militants jump from the bushes and shoot him and his passengers dead.
The village, down the road from the kibbutz Re’im music festival that also suffered a slaughter of innocents, was well under siege when calls to the Israeli Defence Force were made.
There were unconfirmed reports the Israeli air force dropped two platoons of Special Forces Shaldag units in the village but they became overwhelmed by the militants who were already well encamped. In footage being shown on Arab channels, the bodies of many Israeli soldiers in Be’eri can be seen.
The IDF wanted to take foreign media through the two kabbutz to see the death and destruction and had a simple message.
“Tell the world what you saw here,” said one IDF soldier.
Village survivor statements reveal when militants could not get into homes or specifically into panic-like locked safe rooms they would torch the property and wait for the smoke to force occupants out to be killed.
Accounts were horrific as locals waited for help.
In one, an unidentified man recounted a telephone exchange with his 22-year-old paramedic sister Amit in the kibbutz, hiding in her clinic kitchen armed with a knife.
“It’s six hours, and we ask ‘where is the army? Where’s the rescue…’,” he recounted from the call.
“Then she sends a message ‘they are here, they are in the clinic, I don’t think I will get out of this, I love you’ … I try a desperate attempt, call her, she answers me screaming that she was shot in the legs, that they murdered everyone there, and she is the last one, that they are on her! I hear gunshots and the call disconnects.”
Be’eri had a rough population of 1000 residents so lost a tenth of its population in that dawn assault.
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