The smell of rotting flesh permeated the air on Wednesday at Kibbutz Be’eri, a farming community near Israel’s border with the Gaza Strip which was one of the last communities to be freed from Hamas gunmen this week.
About two dozen bodies in white plastic bags lay arrayed on a lawn. Another two lay on a street alongside a kindergarten, victims of an assault which sent terrified residents into hiding in locked rooms, where they waited for help for more than 48 hours.
As Israel’s military opened Be’eri to journalists for the first time on Wednesday, a military official said that soldiers had found the bodies of 110 people, including women and children. Only the bodies of the attackers remained, he said; wrapped in white plastic bags, one of the corpses was spray painted in red with the word mekhabel, or terrorist.