Kibbutz Beeri and Nova Beggar Description

The things I saw beggar description…The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick. I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the near future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda.’”   Dwight D Eisenhower

This famous quote from Eisenhower could well describe what we experienced today with visits to the site of the Nova Music Festival where hundreds of young people were slaughtered on October 7 and to Kibbutz Beeri, the largest Kibbutz in what is known as the Gaza envelope, the main area outside the Gaza Strip that was infiltrated by Hamas on October 7.  It felt very much like my visit to the Auschwitz concentration camp, though it’s entirely possible that the cruelty perpetrated in these places was even greater, as hard as that is to believe.

We heard from one of the survivors , a young man named Or, all amidst the backdrop of the noise of explosions from the war thundering loudly every few minutes and the still undissipated smell of burnt homes as he took us from burnt house to burnt house, to what used to be the Kindergarten (which served as Hamas’ makeshift headquarters on that fateful day), to the medical center. Every so often you would see signs of the lives they led, like pots and pans or toys. He kept saying in his heavily accented English that if throw a rock you get a story. There were  91 murdered, 12 are kidnapped and missing. 350 families were affected and an entire fabric of life was cracked, physically and mentally.

In most cases the technique was to go house to house, first setting it on fire, then, when the family would open the window to release smoke, they would throw a grenade in. If the family came out they would shoot them or capture them for kidnapping. Sometimes they would do things to the dead bodies that are truly unspeakable like cutting off breasts of women or decapitation. The survivors may never fully recover from what they saw. 

I feel like I really can’t say much more. I will let the pictures speak for themselves. The red target means someone died in the house. If you wish to learn more or donate to the rebuilding of Kibbutz Beeri, here is a link. It will take at least three years, but they are determined to return. 

https://story.beeri-riseup-again.com/he/c/EHMdN/?cardId=EHMdN

The words on the building on this last picture of their preschool mean “when there is love it will win.”