Children found ‘butchered’ in Israeli kibbutz, IDF says, as horror of Hamas’ attacks near border begins to emerge

Bodies of Israeli residents and Palestinian attackers lay outside burned-out homes in the Israeli kibbutz Kfar Aza on Tuesday, days after Hamas launched a large-scale surprise assault on Israel.

Hamas sent waves of heavily armed fighters pouring across the border from Gaza and rampaging through rural communities – Israel said it found 1,500 bodies of militants in the aftermath of the assault.

Houses in Kfar Aza were ransacked and set ablaze. Overturned mattresses, destroyed furniture, broken trinkets and unexploded grenades lay strewn across the grounds, along with bodies – a window into the scale of devastation wrought by Hamas in this area.

“I’ve never seen anything like this in my career, never in 40 years of service this something I never imagined,” Maj. Gen. Itai Veruv told CNN on Tuesday, just a few hours after Israeli troops secured the kibbutz from Hamas assailants.

In Kfar Aza, the IDF was going house to house, collecting the dead in body bags and loading them onto a truck. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) told CNN that women, children, toddlers and elderly were “brutally butchered in an ISIS way of action.”