“It’s not a war. It’s not a battlefield. … It’s a massacre,” Israel Defense Forces Maj. Gen. Itai Veruv said on Tuesday as he led the first group of journalists to enter the area where Hamas terrorists carried out their murder spree over the weekend.
“You can see the babies, the mothers, the fathers, in their bedrooms, in their protection [rocket-safe] rooms. And how the terrorists killed them,” said Veruv.
He led the rescue mission in the communities bordering the Gaza Strip following the terrorist invasion.
“You can look for yourself. It’s something that I never saw in my life,” Veruv continued. “It’s something we imagined our grandfathers, [our] grandmothers [experienced] in the pogroms in Europe and other places.”
Among the places media entered for the first time was Kibbutz Kfar Aza, where one of the biggest battles between terrorists and the IDF took place.
Terrorists invaded the kibbutz and turned it into a stronghold. They went house to house, killing residents who had taken shelter in their safe rooms and specially reinforced spaces against missile attacks. Soldiers reported seeing babies with their heads cut off, i24News reported.
Some kibbutz residents were taken to Gaza.
It was part of an offensive involving more than 1,000 Hamas members, who tore through the Gaza security fence on Saturday morning in a surprise attack that killed more than 900 Israelis and wounded more than 2,700, mostly civilians. They targeted men, women and children. Over 100, many young women, were taken to the Gaza Strip as captives.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in an address to the nation on Monday: “This war was forced upon us by a despicable enemy, human animals celebrating the murder of women, children and the elderly.
“We have not seen the atrocities that Hamas committed since the horrors of ISIS,” he said.
