FROM OUR CORRESPONDENT
RE’IM – They rot in the sun. Wild dogs come by and sniff them. They lie face down in the fallow fields, thrown onto the embankment, rags lie on the side of Road 234. Three bloated, purple bodies. Stripped naked, underwear pulled down. Another, further ahead, is twisted like a dry tree trunk, his posture unnatural. And another, next to a Peugeot riddled with gunfire, its windows shattered.
How many? Eleven. No, twelve… Look, there are two more up there… The cars are driving fast on the highway. Someone slows down and looks at her as if they were seeing a cat crushed on the asphalt. No one to collect them, take them away, bury them. A soldier comes by, but only to inspect a black bag: “Of course they are terrorists!”. Are they the ones at the rave that caused 260 deaths? The soldier doesn’t give any information. But why do they stay here? The answer is in the eyes: let them rot where they are.
The rockets
To get to the kibbutzim of death, to the Bataclan of the Olive Trees, to the territories captured by Hamas for a few nights, you pass vengeful columns of tanks, you peer into the Iron Dome that explodes rockets from Gaza into the sky, one sets out on a highway called Rabin, and in a very distant time this name even raised hopes of peace. Not now, not here. The fourth day is the inventory of the massacres.
A horror tour along the 234, which runs along the strip and after a few kilometers leaves a trail of monstrous images behind it.
First stop: Kfar Azza, bare houses and well-kept paths in the 1950s kibbutz style. They planted sunflowers outside. Inside, an unbearable stench wafts from the lined up body bags: two hundred dead, forty infants and children. Kfar Azza is even worse than Be’eri, with 108 deaths. “Something I have never seen in my life,” says General Itai Veruv, who is wandering through the slaughterhouse, rubbing his eyes. I was reminded of Eisenhower when he entered the Nazi concentration camps and saw the corpses piled up.
The soldiers carry the dead on stretchers and walk across blood-soaked ground, between washing machines full of laundry and breakfast tables, overturned tricycles in flowerbeds and pink helmets: an Israeli television talks about children aged 2 to 5 who were found beheaded. Yossi Landau, Zaka’s undertaker, confirms having seen her. Some bodies are unrecognizable and General Veruv is responsible for putting them back together: “They set fire to the houses to force people to flee and then kill them: that’s what you do in the worst wars!” But This is not a war, this is not a battlefield. It’s a massacre.”
More shots
The shooting continues. A truck tows a tank pierced by a mortar on the side and right with the serial number: 836687. The buses unload the reservists ready for the Great Siege. And the border with Gaza may be sealed, as Tsahal assures us, but beyond the Saad roundabout lies a fallen terrorist with fresh blood. In Re’im, after crossing the corpses left behind on the 234, the rave field is blocked by the yellow gate.
The soldiers would like to open, show, but better not: trenches were being dug in preparation for the siege of the Gaza Strip until the new machine guns were heard on Sunday. “It’s not over yet,” a Druze official tells us: “The terrorists have arrived for the second time.” And we are unable to recover many of the bodies of the boys who were killed.”
A source reveals that, in order to achieve its goals down to the kibbutzim and the party, Hamas has been preparing underground tunnels for months: this would explain the speed of the terrorists, even when escaping. Behind the free party fence you can see overturned white plastic chairs, the broken beer table, all around a Ford with the doors wide open, a black SUV stuck in flight with its hood sinking into the ditch, a motorcycle left in the middle of the olive groves . At a bus stop, the children at the night parties had graffitied an old Volkswagen van decorated with flowers, like the one used by the Peace & Love generation: it is chipped and almost invisible. “It inspires me,” says Gedalya Fendel, 35, a doctor with a yarmulke and a machine gun over her shoulder, organizer of the kibbutz defense, “to see that many secular Jews have also come to help us: in an emergency it is us. “a united people”.
Hamas’s Black October breaks all records of the longest conflict: the worst slaughter of Israeli civilians ever, the largest Islamic massacre of Westerners since 9/11, the worst Israeli retaliation against Gaza, the more massive exodus than Gazals since Nakba 1948… “It’s like a pogrom,” says Moshe, 31, wearing the black Borsalino of the ultra-Orthodox and is certain: “We are only at the beginning.” They want a Middle East without Jews. Today they are attacking us, tomorrow it will be your turn, Europeans.” Moshe stands in line at the Netivot supermarket and, like everyone else, buys canned food and water for the next 72 hours, “the government says, to prepare us for a long war”: That Video posted by Bibi Netanyahu shows us the two killed terrorists Saturday at the gates of the city: “We live 12 km from Gaza and are used to stocking up on food, but this time it’s different.” Ms. Lea Hadad, a retiree Cook, has lived here for 32 years: “It’s the first time I’ve left the house since Saturday morning…”.
The Thais
Anyone who can will go far. In hotels on the Dead Sea, in Tel Aviv, abroad. On Shamir Street in Sderot, in the desert of a city exhausted by twenty years of rocket attacks and shocked by three days of terror, two Thais ask us for a ride: they worked in the fields, they would like to escape. At five o’clock in the afternoon, when Hamas gives the residents of Ashkelon the ultimatum: “Go away, otherwise hell will come!”, no one is there: “But they didn’t run away – Leon Bakman forces himself, 40 years old.”, while he sweeps the broken windows of his driving school – everyone is at home and praying. We have always stayed here, and here we will stay!”.
He’s ready to fight: “I can’t wait.” Get where? “We have to close the Gaza issue.” There are already almost a thousand dead. And four thousand injured. And in these hours, in Gaza’s hospitals, they are writing names on the bellies of corpses to identify the hundreds of dead from the bombings… “We are better than them.” And we were far too patient. I feel sorry for your children. But they did it to us too. And war is like that.”