In Kibbutz Be’eri, where at least 120 residents were killed by Hamas, Israeli officers survey aftermath of attack [Be'eri massacre]

When Hamas militants launched .., Be’eri had just over 1,000 residents. By the time Israeli forces finally recaptured Be’eri more than three days later, at least 120 of those kibbutzniks were dead. And an unknown number of others are being held hostage in the Gaza Strip.

“We find more and more bodies all the time,” said Major-General Itai Veruv, .. and who accompanied foreign and Israeli journalists to the shattered kibbutz on Wednesday. “I served more than 39 years, and I am used to seeing problems and difficulties on the battlefield. But this is not a battlefield. This is a pogrom. This is an ISIS event, something you cannot imagine.”

Veruv said it wasn’t clear yet how much of Be’eri’s population had survived. “There are survivors in Israel that ran away, that we took out of the kibbutzes during the fight. We don’t know how to count how much are in Israel, how much dead, how much kidnapped to Gaza, how much we still didn’t find. We still haven’t found survivors in the kibbutz, but we hope.”

One of those believed to have been taken hostage from her home in Be’eri was Vivian Silver, a 74-year-old grandmother and peace activist with roots in Winnipeg. Ms. Silver, who was a founder of a group called Women Wage Peace, is believed to have been taken to Gaza as a hostage by Hamas. Also seized in Be’eri was 85-year-old grandmother Yaffa Adar, who was filmed being driven into Gaza in a golf cart by laughing militants.

Kibbutz Be’eri was a symbol of the Israeli national dream, the desire and ability to make the desert bloom. This tiny oasis of greenery on the northern edge of the Negev Desert was one of the most affluent of its kind and one of the few kibbutzim that remained true to the co-operative principles it was founded upon in 1946, two years before the state of Israel itself. Today, Be’eri symbolizes the nightmare that has always haunted Israelis – that the massacres and pogroms that had driven their ancestors from Europe and from other parts of the Middle East would somehow follow them here to this supposed refuge for the Jewish people. When Hamas militants launched their surprise invasion of Israel on Saturday morning, Be’eri had just over 1,000 residents. By the time Israeli forces finally recaptured Be’eri more than three days later, at least 120 of those kibbutzniks were dead. And an unknown number of others are being held hostage in the Gaza Strip.

The stench of corpses, a living room that was hit by an anti-tank missile and a trail of blood: a report from Kibbutz the inferno Be’eri
A toothbrush with children’s toothpaste on a sink, a hole in the wall of a house through which a missile entered and cars crushed by tanks. The soldiers of the 890th paratrooper battalion were dropped into the killing fields on Saturday, and now the general has required all of them to be fit for the ground maneuver: “I took their phones, so that no video of horrors would be seen and they would not be diverted”
Yoav Zeytoun. Published: October 11, 2023
[...]
At the entrance to the kibbutz, the vehicles are mostly white, light-colored, belonging to Zaka. Some of them are bulletproof, massive. Only last night, around 6:00 p.m., the white angels finished doing a real act-of-kindness, and removed the body of the last victim, who was found under a broken table.” The smallest child we found is a shot baby, a few months old, the oldest murdered here is 85 years old,” said Kobi Mazka, a 50-year-old veteran volunteer who collected body parts in the inferno bus bombings of Jerusalem during the second intifada. “Here it is different, really similar to the descriptions I read as a child about what the Nazis did to us..”
[...]
“I quickly realized that the terrorists had developed a method, a real technique to increase the dimensions of the massacre,” said last night the commander of Division 99, Lt. Col. Barak Hiram, who arrived here at 9:00 a.m. and took over the fighting sector of the city of Netivot and the kibbutz Alumim and Re’im. “The terrorists knew that the residents would lock themselves in the safe-room, and those who refused to come out, they simply opened the trunk of his car in the yard, took out the spare tire, lit it on fire and rolled it into the house to hasten its burning. We found bodies of people who died of suffocation in the gas tanks. Others were burned alive and those who tried to escape from the window were shot to death.”
[...]
Landau... Despite the mental stress and the heavy concern for his parents who shut themselves in the nearby kibbutz, he led his fighters into fierce battles from point blank range, to save those who remained from Kibbutz Nahal Oz. His commander, Majd 890 Lt. Col. Yoni HaCohen, is the one who was asked to explain what happened here. He preferred to skip over many graphic details. Occasionally a tear falls from his left eye, which is swollen and red, but not from crying. He was hit by shrapnel during the assault and did not stop for a moment , didn’t stop. He fought in Tzuk-Eitan (op.) not far from here, in Khan Yunis, but the battles here were completely different: to open a ‘firing angle’ between the bodies of children, to jump over civilians who were handcuffed and shot. The tough Majd asks not to talk about his part in the battle The long one, which lasted almost a day straight. “Another force of ours was sent at the same time to rescue female observers and Golani fighters who were under heavy siege at the Nahal Oz outpost. We had to distribute the forces correctly,” he said...
https://www.ynet.co.il/news/article/symccuewa

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