Israeli military guides reporters to border kibbutz village Kfar Azza
There was nothing but burnt car wreckage and bodies… Occupied and recaptured by Hamas forces
On the road leading to Kfar Aza, a rural village near the border between Gaza and Israel, the bodies of Hamas militants were scattered among the remains of burned vehicles.
Even the neat houses on the small village streets were left wide open with all their doors and walls blown out.
The bodies of villagers still awaiting identification were laid out in body bags, and the air under the hot afternoon sun was filled with the stench of the corpses.
This is the scene of an Israeli border village and a neighboring Palestinian village where hundreds of people died after the Israeli army launched a retaliatory war against Hamas’ surprise attack in the Gaza Strip. The Palestinian region was also shattered by Israel’s fierce air raids and bombings.
A 39-year-old Israeli military veteran who guided a reporter on the 10th (local time) said that he led a reserve army of villagers in a battle to reclaim a village occupied by Hamas.
Standing in the middle of the ruins, he said, “As you can see, there are many bodies of babies, mothers and fathers who were killed by terrorists in their bedrooms. This is not a battlefield, it is a scene of massacre.”
On this day, the Israeli military guided foreign reporters, including AP, on a tour of Kfar Aja village. This is a village that the Israeli military recaptured from a village guarded by about 70 Hamas soldiers a day ago.
The village is surrounded by farms, and just a few minutes along the road you can see the heavy barbed wire fence and fortifications built by the Israeli military surrounding the Gaza Strip. About 20 Israeli villages scattered along this border became the target of a surprise attack by Hamas forces in the early morning of the 7th.
Before the attack, this kibbutz, with a population of only 700 people, was a small farming village of ordinary rich farmers with only one school and one temple.
The ruins of the village that the reporters toured clearly showed the horrors of this war. The iron gates of the fence surrounding the village had been blown open, and inside the kibbutz, the doors of numerous houses had been blown off by the explosions of automatic grenades fired by rocket artillery.
The walls of the burned-out vehicles and houses covering the village had numerous bullet holes, and the bedroom mattresses of the destroyed houses were soaked in blood or splattered with blood. There were no safe rooms and the toilet and bathroom were all destroyed by bombs.
On the street outside the house, unexploded grenades were scattered on the ground. As I walked a few more minutes, I also saw a crumpled and discarded Hamas flag near the paraglider used by Hamas paratroopers to invade.
Before reporters arrived, most of the corpses on the streets had been removed by rescue teams, but work to collect the bodies of those killed was still continuing in each village. At the temple yard in Kfar Aja, work was underway to attach name plaques to body bags.
Most of the bodies of about 20 Hamas militants identified by an AP reporter were badly mangled or in bad shape.
Hundreds of Israeli soldiers wearing helmets and fully armed patrolled the village for 10 days, and explosions and gunshots could still be heard in the distance.
[ 크파르 아자( 이스라엘)= AP/뉴시스]
Source: Donga