An Israeli emergency responder with two decades of experience in recovering bodies said he found it difficult to deal with what he witnessed in communities ravaged by the onslaught of Hamas terrorists, a picture that could only be described as hellish.
“Do you want me to tell you about the hardest sights? Bodies of babies tied up,” Mendy Haviv, a commander of non-governmental rescue and recovery organization ZAKA, told Epoch Israel.
Mr. Haviv and his ZAKA volunteers entered Be‘eri, a kibbutz near Israel’s border with Hamas-controlled Gaza. Home to more than 1,000 people before Hamas unleashed attacks that Israeli officials characterized as the “worst since the Holocaust,” Be’eri is now a place marked by horror and inhumanity.
“At the end of the kibbutz, in a house that was completely destroyed, they [the babies] are sitting on a fence outside of the house,” Mr. Haviv recalled. “Their bodies are burned. Their parents, sitting in front of them, are slaughtered.”
He moved on to describe even more harrowing scenes: a pregnant woman with her stomach cut open and a woman burned in a wheelchair.
“Burnt bodies, burnt houses everywhere. Decapitated heads of children of several ages,” he added. “The smell of rotting corpses [is so bad] that you can’t even breathe. This is the horror we are dealing with.”
In kibbutz Kfar Gaza, a little more than five miles north of Be'eri, Mr. Haviv said the volunteers encountered booby traps placed under the victims’ bodies.
“The bodies are still there, with the explosive charge, at least until yesterday,” he told Epoch Israel. “The whole activity there for those 24 hours just makes you cry.”
The search and recovery commander said he was not allowed to take photos of the victims. But for the purpose of identification, he only took pictures of unique marks like tattoos and earrings.
“I don’t photograph horrors. I don’t photograph decapitated heads. Definitely not. Because the Jewish religion forbids me to do this,” he said. “But for the purpose of identification, I take pictures of what needs to be taken: tattoos, earrings, all kinds of signs, so that the family will know that the person was found [dead] and was not kidnapped.”
Retired Lt. Col. Yaron Buskila, an Israeli Defense Force (IDF) veteran-turned-military commentator and contributor to Epoch Israel, said he talked to a rabbi who went into the kibbutzim with IDF troops to give the victims proper Jewish burial. He now regrets having that conversation.
“I regret that I even met the rabbi,” said Mr. Buskila, who has seen combat during his service. “His descriptions of things he saw were so shocking to hear that I just threw up.”
In addition to children and adults being decapitated, according to Mr. Buskila, the rabbi saw “babies that were hanged in a row” with their mothers’ bras.
“Even in the [horror] film, it is difficult to see such sights,” he said.
‘Hamas is ISIS’
One of the most high-profile claims came Wednesday night from President Joe Biden, who said he had seen photographic evidence of Hamas terrorists beheading children. The White House later clarified that he had not actually seen pictures or confirmed such allegation independently but had based his comments on news reports about the killings.On Thursday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office released several gruesome photos that purportedly show babies “murdered and burned” by Hamas during the attack on Kfar Aza.
“Here are some of the photos Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu showed to U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken,” read a post by Mr. Netanyahu’s office on X. “These are horrifying photos of babies murdered and burned by the Hamas monsters. Hamas is inhuman. Hamas is ISIS.”
Mr. Blinken, who arrived in Israel on a trip showing solidarity with the embattled country, told reporters that “we did see photographs, videos that the Israeli government shared with us,” and some of those images did invoke memories of crimes committed by ISIS.
“It’s hard to find the right words,” the diplomat said.
“It’s beyond what anyone would ever want to imagine, much less actually see and, God forbid, experience. A baby, an infant, riddled with bullets. Soldiers beheaded. Young people burned alive in their cars or in their hideaway rooms. I could go on, but it’s simply depravity in the worst imaginable way,” he said.
“To me, it, in the most immediate future, hearkens back to ISIS and some of the very things we saw when it was on its rampage that, thankfully, was stopped.”
