12:34 am ET, October 11, 2023
‘Slaughtered’ children found in kibbutz as new details of Hamas atrocities emerge
From CNN’s Muhammad Darwish, Nick Robertson, Artemis Moshtakian, Amir Tal, Ivana Kotasova and Sana Noor Haq
Alexey J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images
The bodies of Israeli residents and Palestinian fighters lay outside burned homes in the Israeli kibbutz Kfar Asa on Tuesday, days later. Hamas A was launched A large-scale surprise attack On Israel, it sent heavily armed militias across the border from Gaza and infiltrated rural communities.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) escorted a CNN crew and other foreign media to the site as they went door-to-door collecting the dead in body bags and loading them into a truck. The IDF said children, women and the elderly were among those killed in Kfar Aza.
The horrifying details of attacks on border communities are beginning to emerge. Kfar Asa was one of several kibbutzim, small agricultural enclaves, that bore the brunt of Saturday’s ground attack by Hamas.
“Massacre”: Hamas militants carried out a “massacre” during weekend attacks in Kafr Azza, in which women, children, infants and the elderly were “brutally massacred by ISIS operations,” the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) told CNN on Tuesday. .
The IDF said it could not confirm the number of people killed there and would not go into details about how people were killed.
Houses were looted and set on fire in Kfar Aza. Overturned mattresses, destroyed furniture, broken trinkets and unexploded grenades littered the floor alongside bodies — a window into the scale of devastation wrought by Hamas in the region.
“I’ve never seen anything like it in 40 years of service,” Major General Itai Veruv told CNN on Tuesday, hours after Israeli troops secured the Kfar Aza kibbutz. Hamas fighters.
Verue said his soldiers spent “about 48 hours” fighting “waves and waves of terrorists” on the roads and in neighboring communities. He said he began fighting militants in the Yakini moshav (community) on Saturday, then moved “from battle to battle” on his way to Sterot, before reaching the Biri kibbutz on Monday evening.
“I saw hundreds of terrorists in full armor, full gear, all the equipment, all the ability to kill, going from apartment to apartment, room to room, killing children, mothers, fathers in their bedrooms,” Verue said. .
