KFAR AZA, Israel — On the road approaching this rural village, the bodies of militants lie scattered between the shells of burned-out cars. Walls and doors of what used to be neatly kept stucco homes are blasted wide open. As bags holding the bodies of slain residents await identification, the smell of death hangs thick in the hot afternoon air.
This is the scene confronting Israel’s military as it battles to beat back a sweeping assault launched by Hamas from the Gaza Strip, in fighting that has killed hundreds in this country left reeling and the adjoining Palestinian enclave under heavy Israeli bombardment.
“You see the babies, the mothers, the fathers in their bedrooms and how the terrorists killed,” Maj. Gen. Itay Veruz, a 39-year veteran of the Israeli army who led forces that reclaimed the village from militants, said Tuesday as he stood amid the wreckage. “It’s not a battlefield. It’s a massacre.”
The Israeli military led a group of journalists, including an Associated Press reporter, on a tour of the village Tuesday, a day after retaking it from what they said was a group of about 70 Hamas fighters.
Kfar Aza, surrounded by farms and just a few minutes down a country road from the heavily fortified fence Israel erected around Gaza, is one of more than 20 towns and villages attacked by Palestinian fighters early Saturday. Before the attack, the kibbutz, whose name means “Gaza village” in English, was a modestly prosperous place with a school, a synagogue and a population of more than 700.
Walking through what is left provides chilling evidence of its destruction.
On the town’s perimeter, the gate that once protected residents had been blasted open. Inside the settlement, the doors of many homes had been blown from their hinges by militants using rocket-propelled grenades. Throughout the town, walls and torched cars are riddled with bullet holes, tracing a path of violence that continues inside to bedrooms with mattresses spattered in…
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