Babies were killed in Israel by Hamas at the kibbutz Kfar Aza, and some of them were beheaded during a surprise attack on the residential community, according to a reporter on the ground for Israel’s i24 News.
The i24 News report by American journalist Nicole Zedeck says, “About 40 babies and young children have been taken out on gurneys — so far.” She wrote on X, “Soldiers told me they believe 40 babies/children were killed. The exact death toll is still unknown as the military continues to go house to house and find more Israeli casualties.”
Her reporting was based on interviews with commanders and soldiers at the scene and videos and photos have not emerged so far.
“They cut heads of children, cut heads of women,” David Ben Zion, Deputy Commandee of Unit 71 told Zedeck.
“@CBSNews learned that Israel body recovery teams have discovered beheaded babies and children in kibbutzim in southern Israel,” American journalist Norah O’Donnell wrote on X.
Other reporters have now made similar claims.
A spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces, Major Nir Dinar, told Insider that babies were decapitated but did not give a number. He said he had not seen videos or pictures but learned this from soldiers.
The Jewish Chronicle reported that the reports emanated from Kfar Aza kibbutz, about 2 miles from the Gaza border, according to The New York Times.
You can watch the i24 News reporter’s original report, which was shared on X, below. In it, she said that babies were beheaded. i24 News is a 24-hour news channel based in Tel Aviv, Israel.
Here’s what you need to know:
The Reporter Said Soldiers Told Her They Found ‘Babies, Their Heads Cut Off’ & ‘Families Completely Gunned Down in Their Beds’
“It’s hard to explain the mass casualties that happened right here,” the i24 News reporter said in the broadcast. “I’m talking to some of the soldiers, and they say what they’ve witnessed as they’ve been walking through these different houses, these different communities. Babies, their heads cut off — that’s what they said. Gunned down. Families completely gunned down in their beds.”
The reporter continued: “You can see some of these soldiers right now, comforting each other. Many of them reserves who jumped into action leaving their own families behind as well not knowing the sheer horror that they were about to come to. They say they’ve never experienced anything like this. This is nothing anyone could have even imagined when you’re walking through here.”
She said there were “baby cribs thrown to the side, doors thrown wide open, still some Israeli bodies still here because the fighting in the community just ended.”
According to the i24 News reporter, it was taking the soldiers 30 to 40 minutes to clear houses because “many of these houses still have grenades in them, booby traps.”
She said people “were with their families playing” when attacked. She added that the area was also “littered with the bodies of terrorists.” She said there were about 70 “armed terrorists” involved in the attack, which she described as “violence with guns, with grenades, with knifes, targeting these innocent civilians in their homes.”
The print version of the story says, “The smell of death — that’s what’s left of a once vibrant community. Now, the foreign press were invited to witness the inhumane crimes, much like the Allies had done after they had won the second World War and liberated the Holocaust concentration camps.”
An Israeli Military Official Confirmed That Babies Were Killed in Their Bedrooms
Israeli Major General Itai Veruv spoke to reporters at the scene of the Kibbutz massacre: “It is not a battlefield. 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, it’s a terror activity.”
“It is something that I never saw in my life,” he continued. “It’s something that we used to imagine from our grandfathers, grandmothers in the pogrom in Europe and other places. It’s not something that happens in the new history.”
CBS News reported that 900 Israelis are dead in the attacks, most of them civilians. Another 2,500 were reported wounded.
Israel responded with airstrikes. According to CBS, the airstrikes “had killed more than 687 people as of Monday, including at least 140 children, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health. It said another 3,700 more were wounded in the strikes.”
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