The Massacre at Kfar Aza: ‘Ground Zero’ of Hamas Atrocities and Symbol of Israeli Intelligence Failure

The attackers arrived just after dawn by air and land, on hang-gliders and motorbikes, to the sleepy kibbutz of Kfar Aza, a self-sustaining farming community about three miles east of Gaza where many Israeli families with young children had made their home.

In all, at least 70 Hamas fighters laid siege to the village of about 700, according to media reports — or one terrorist for every 10 or so civilians.

After two days of fighting, the depths of the depravity that took place at Kfar Aza are coming to light, and are almost too much to bear.

"Mothers, fathers, babies, young families killed in their beds, in the protection room, in the dining room, in their garden,” Israeli Major General Itai Veruv told members of the foreign press on Tuesday as he escorted them to see the aftermath of the horror.

"It's not a war, it's not a battlefield. It's a massacre," Veruv said. "I've never seen anything like this, and I've served for 40 years."

Initial reports suggested that up to 40 babies were killed in the kibbutz — some decapitated in their cribs. Many of those details have now been corroborated, with Western journalists and IDF soldiers at the scene saying that dozens of women and children are among the dead.

As of Wednesday morning, there was no official death toll from Kfar Aza. Israeli forces had been going door-to-door securing the area up until Tuesday, when it was deemed safe enough to allow international journalists in to bear witness to what had happened there.

Reporters and photographers from around the world documented images of blood-soaked mattresses and bullet-pocked doors, baby cribs and strollers left abandoned, front doors blown off their hinges from rocket-propelled grenades, safe rooms breached, and unexploded hand grenades strewn across the ground.

The severely bloated and disfigured bodies of about 20 Hamas terrorists provided evidence of Israel’s response.

That response, too late for the dozens of children slaughtered in the neat stucco homes that dot the settlement, is prompting desperate questions both inside Israel and abroad.

How could a country with a military and intelligence apparatus considered among the best in the world fail so utterly at protecting its most vulnerable?

Early assessments of the intelligence failure, as reported Wednesday by the New York Times, suggest two key components to what went wrong: Before its siege, Hamas had successfully deployed drones to take out Israeli communications along the border with Gaza, as well as remote-controlled machine guns that Israel installed at border fortifications.

In addition, an alert sent from Israeli intelligence to soldiers at the border just before the attack noting that militant activity inside Gaza had surged appeared to have gone either undelivered or unseen, according to unnamed Israeli security officials cited by the Times.

That left Hamas with the ability to breach the border fence, reportedly with bulldozers, giving the terrorist group effectively unfettered access to Kfar Aza and the other kibbutzim and communities of southern Israel that were hardest hit in the surprise assault.

Many more questions remain unanswered, including why it took apparently two full days of fighting for the IDF to secure Kfar Aza. In the meantime, the once-handsome farming settlement since laid waste by terrorists has become a potent symbol of the atrocities of this young war. 

An Israeli military spokesman, Maj. Doron Spielman, compared the scene in Kfar Azza to what he witnessed as a New Yorker after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

“I remember going through 9/11 and waking up the next day, the next week, and everything had changed,” he said. “It’s the same thing again. But worse because we’re such a small country.”

With Associated Press.