In Kibbutz Kfar Aza, located a short distance from the Gaza Strip, residents have fewer than 15 seconds to take shelter when a siren sounds its warning of an incoming Hamas rocket. Shelters are spaced every few yards around the kibbutz as a result — some are painted with purple trees and cartoonish renderings of the IDF soldiers, others are covered in vibrant sunflowers.
There's a school building, its pocked and patched walls showing where the terror of rocket attacks previously sent shrapnel flying toward the children inside and spraying across the playground that sits next to it. Now, the building has a thick concrete roof retrofitted atop the original building meant to ensure the young lives inside are spared from civilian-targeting Hamas attacks.
The cultural center's exterior features wings made up of a rainbow of children's toys.
There's a basketball court and, when this writer visited the kibbutz in August, bicycles neatly lined up next to the paved court as children danced to music under a tree and groups of young boys — with the guidance of an older member of the community — engaged in play fighting with foam swords.
The spirit of everyone in Kfar Aza was a testament to the resilience and unconditional strength and joy of the people of Israel. The carefree kids would have looked at home in any suburban American community even though their kindergarten is a literal bomb shelter ringed in by tall security fences, at any time just seconds from war at the hands of the terrorists a few miles away.
"We're famous," one young boy proudly boasted with bright eyes and an innocent smile as he and his cadre of fellow fighters marched past. They soon spotted another group across a lawn and charged at them with a collective, playful war cry.
Now, however, I don't know if that young boy, who was so full of life and joy, nor any of the other children who danced and sang without a care in the world, nor their younger siblings or parents or loved ones, are alive or were killed by the Hamas barbarians who continue to fire rockets at Kfar Aza days after invading the kibbutz and butchering innocent men, women, and children.
Unlike the warm summer day on which this writer visited, the "stench of bodies" is now heavy in the air as journalists guided by the IDF to witness the horror wrought by Hamas in Kfar Aza now report of the scene where more than 200 innocent Israelis — including 40 babies — were murdered by vile, soulless Hamas terrorists.
Content warning: graphic descriptions and video below.
Israeli Major General Itai Veruv guided reporters through the carnage on Tuesday. "You see the babies, the mothers, the fathers, in their bedrooms, in their protection rooms — and how the terrorist kills them. It's not a war, it's not a battlefield. It's a massacre," Veruv emphasized. Burned and destroyed homes now line the paths, some booby-trapped with grenades by Hamas after their slaughter with the goal of killing more Israelis as they collected their murdered brothers and sisters.
“It’s not a war…It’s a massacre”: A major general with the Israeli Defense Forces provided an inside look at a kibbutz in Kfar Aza, Israel, on Tuesday, just one area that has been devastated in the ongoing conflict with the terrorist organization Hamas. https://t.co/iaaapJX0wi pic.twitter.com/ImYpYJEUJL
— CBS News (@CBSNews) October 10, 2023
Reporters were told that when IDF soldiers arrived, they found an unthinkable scene. "Babies, their heads cut off," retold a reporter for i24 News of the 40 babies butchered by Hamas terrorists, some while peacefully asleep.
Entire families were found in their homes, gunned down, with doors still thrown open. Cribs filled with the blood of Israeli babies slaughtered by Hamas terrorists.
i24NEWS Correspondent @Nicole_Zedek reports from Kibbutz Kfar Aza, a quarter-mile from the Gaza border, and recounts the atrocities that were committed in the small community which remains an active scene as soldiers clear booby traps and recover the bodies of dozens of victims pic.twitter.com/J4ZfWZQYHp
— i24NEWS English (@i24NEWS_EN) October 10, 2023
"It is something that I never saw in my life," Veruv, who's been in the IDF since the 1980s, said. "It's something that we used to imagine from our grandfathers, grandmothers in the pogrom in Europe and other places."
"Tell the world what you saw here," another IDF soldier working to recover the bodies of the innocent dead instructed reporters.