Journalists from the BBC and the New York Times have been allowed into Kibbutz Kfar Aza, an Israeli community on the border with Gaza where people were killed when Hamas broke through the border on Saturday. Infants and children were among the dead, the New York Times reports.
“Soldiers who spent much of the day in the ruins recovering bodies of civilians said that there had been a massacre. It seems likely that much of the killing happened in the first hours of the assault on Saturday,” the BBC reports.
The Israeli army took 12 hours to reach the community, Davidi Ben Zion, the deputy commander of Unit 71, an experienced team of paratroopers who led the assault, told the BBC, and fighting continued until Tuesday morning.
“Thank God we saved many lives of many parents and children,” he said.
“Unfortunately, some were burned by Molotov [cocktails].”
Ben Zion told the BBC that Hamas gunmen who killed families, including babies, were “just a jihad machine to kill everybody, [people] without weapons, without nothing, just normal citizens that want to take their breakfast and that’s all”.
The New York Times reported:
Past the village dining hall, kindergarten and culture center, the tidy rows of one-story beige houses came into view. And the scale of the horror began to unfold …
After days of stunned national numbness and chaos, the dimensions of the atrocity that took place here were now coming into clear focus. In all, more than 1,000 soldiers and civilians have been killed in Israel. Nobody could say how many of them were lying here, in Kfar Azza, but it is emerging as one of the worst sites of the bloodshed. Soldiers and rescue workers said scores, possibly hundreds, had been slaughtered here, including grandparents, infants and children.”
Source: The Guardian
