At the entrance to Kibbutz Nir Oz stands a blue Hyundai vehicle. Its front window is smashed and studded with bullets. The side windows are open, and through them the whole story is revealed. Blood stains on the seats, teddy bears lying between the chairs, and passports on the driver's seat. Those who left here hoped to be able to escape the kibbutz, perhaps from the country, before being shot dead.
Photo: Yoni Rikner
The passengers of this vehicle are one story out of hundreds, and probably more. They are just one point in a long sequence of carnage and fighting that stretches across Route 232, from Sderot to Kfar Darom. This road has not yet been opened to traffic, and it is unclear when that will happen. Before that, we must evacuate the remains of the inferno that took place there four days ago: the hundreds of cars strewn along the roadside, the dozens of bodies of terrorists still lying in the area, the remains of the huge party in the Reim Forest that turned into a death trap, as well as quite a few remnants of weapons left by the terrorists and their cars and motorcycles, with Palestinian license plates, which they used to come from Gaza. In between, IDF soldiers, thousands upon thousands, in every meter of soldier, close the border with their bodies and at the same time continue to search for bodies.
That's what's left. Toy bears in a bullet-riddled car in Nir Oz, photo: Oren Cohen
A few minutes before we arrived, United Hatzalah collected another body of an Israeli woman found on the side of the road near Bari. A celebrant at a party who fled on foot for several kilometers, and found her dead under a bush. Dvir Adani, the ambulance driver who led her, spoke about the never-ending horrific scenes. It seems that more than the unimaginable amount, the cruelty is hard to contain: the children who were rounded up and massacred jointly, the bodies found with their heads cut off, the indigestible descriptions of rape and abuse.
IDF soldiers among the ruins in the village of Gaza, photo: Reuters
When you see these sights with your eyes and smell death in the air, you realize that it was not humans who raided the Gaza envelope, but something else, much more like the army of the dead than Game of Thrones. These are not soldiers in the army, but martyrs who came to kill and die - hundreds of them, brainwashed and borderless, while ISIS looks like a youth organization.
On the way, not far from where the death party was held, we met a group of young men on civilian. They came by road, bypassed checkpoints and forces to search for their friend, Yehuda Bachar from Jerusalem, who was at the party. He reached it just as the first rockets flew, and managed to post a story before disappearing. "We have no idea whether he is alive or dead, in Israel or in Gaza," says his friend Uriel. The soldiers allowed the friends to take a short walk around the party area, but they found nothing. There, as everywhere else in the envelope, the silent testimonies of what happened remained: the tents that were erected, the sleeping areas, water bottles and clothes scattered, and even the amplification equipment and food and beverage stalls that were not evacuated, and around hundreds of cars of revelers who remained in the area.
Our correspondent Yoav Limor documenting the Gaza envelope, photo: Oren Cohen
In between, here too, are lots of bodies of terrorists with a note saying "body of terrorist." Some of the bodies are already in a state of decomposition, and the smell is unbearable, but the main effort is to locate Israelis in order to stabilize clear figures of the dead and missing. Sometime in the next few days, these bodies will also be evacuated, along with the vehicles and other evidence of the horror. Only the envelope will be left with a heavy question mark about its future: no one can say what will happen here after what its residents went through, which of them survived.
On the way back north, a convoy of military vehicles stopped us between the village of Gaza and the levels. We asked what the problem was and they said there was suspicion of terrorist infiltration. A moment later, a burst sounded, and a company commander in the reserves announced that he had been hit. We jumped at him with the United Hatzalah team, and it turned out that he had been hit in the back by two bullets. He got into the ambulance with the battalion doctor, and from there galloped toward Soroka Hospital. On the way, it turned out that he was suffering from internal bleeding and that his condition might deteriorate, and an intensive care unit was called to the scene and took him in. We continued toward Sderot, but a few hundred meters later we stopped at the checkpoint again. The IDF closed off the entire area in order to capture the terrorist who infiltrated, and only after a while was it possible to return to routine - a word that lost all meaning in this region.
The field of massacre in Re'im, photo: Oren Cohen
Through the disaster is also reflected the power. The tremendous mobilization of soldiers, regulars and reserves, brothers of army and police fighters who fought here heroically on Saturday. The parallel mobilization of civilians, who shower the IDF and the residents of the envelope with all the warmth and love and luxuries possible. Anyone who thought until a moment ago that the people of Israel had lost it in recent months discovered that they are alive – and alive more than ever. This civilian resilience is the most significant bright spot of these dark days, certainly against the background of the difficult challenges that await us in the south (and possibly in the north as well).
The envelope also makes it easier to understand the omission. Not just what happened, and the question of how it could have happened, but what is happening. The mighty number of soldiers and civilians highlights the disgraceful nothingness of the government. The shameful arguments that are preventing the establishment of a national emergency government, the dysfunction of many government ministries, and the outrageous wastefulness of the ministries without portfolio, and especially the disconnection: each of the ministers and Knesset members must be sent on a short tour of the envelope, on a journey through the land of horrors, so that they will receive shock treatment and connect to the reality in which the citizens of Israel have been living in recent days.
Families of the captives in a joint statement to the media, photo: Gideon Markowitz
At the same time, the Israeli government should do a few more necessary things. The first is to appoint a full-time minister to deal with the issue of abductees and captives. Not a clerk but a minister, who will work in this with a professional team. The second is to appoint a full-time minister who will be responsible for dealing with refugees – yes, that's the correct terminology that the Palestinians have lost ownership of – in order to allow them some future in the near future. The third is to appoint a full-time minister to deal with the rehabilitation of the envelope, so that at some point life will grow there again.
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