The terrorist group Hamas has fired more than 500 rockets aimed at Israel that failed to reach their target, instead falling in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, according to Israel’s military.
The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) said that since the start of the war on Oct. 7, it has “identified about 550 failed launches fired by Hamas that landed inside the Gaza Strip.”
“The Hamas terrorist organization uses the residents of the Gaza Strip as human shields, and launches rockets from civilian infrastructure, areas, and buildings in the Gaza Strip,” the IDF said in a statement on Oct. 21.
The latest figures come after the IDF said Hamas has fired more than 6,900 rockets at Israel since the start of the war. In addition to continuing to launch rockets at Israel, Hamas is holding more than 200 hostages that the terrorist group kidnapped from Israel.
The terrorist group said the hostages were released “for humanitarian reasons” and “to prove to American people and the world that the claims made by Biden and his fascist administration are false and baseless.” It added that the release was made in response to Qatar’s mediation efforts.
Israel, however, provided a counterpoint.
Hellish Scenes
An Israeli emergency responder with two decades of experience in recovering bodies previously told Epoch Israel he found it difficult to deal with what he witnessed in communities that were ravaged by the onslaught of Hamas terrorists, a picture that could only be described as hellish.“Do you want me to tell you about the hardest sights? Bodies of babies tied up,” said Mendy Haviv, a commander of the non-governmental rescue and recovery organization ZAKA.
“At the end of the kibbutz, in a house that was completely destroyed, [the babies] are sitting on a fence outside of the house,” Mr. Haviv recalled. “Their bodies are burned. Their parents, sitting in front of them, are slaughtered.”
He described more harrowing scenes: a pregnant woman with her abdomen cut open and a woman burned in a wheelchair.
“Burnt bodies, burnt houses everywhere. Decapitated heads of children of several ages,” he added. “The smell of rotting corpses [is so bad] that you can’t even breathe.”
In the Kfar Gaza kibbutz, a little more than five miles north of Be'eri, he said the volunteers encountered booby traps placed under the victims’ bodies.
When U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Israel on Oct. 12, he said he saw photos of victims of Hamas that showed “depravity in the worst imaginable way.”
“It’s beyond what anyone would ever want to imagine, much less actually see and, God forbid, experience. A baby, an infant, riddled with bullets. Soldiers beheaded. Young people burned alive in their cars or in their hideaway rooms,” he said.
Morgue Worker Describes Hamas’s Barbarism
An exclusive report from the Daily Mail on Oct. 20 detailed an account of an Israeli morgue worker, Shari, who had been cleaning the bodies of Israeli soldiers who died fighting the Hamas terrorists. She and her team have helped identify at least 800 bodies.“I am a mother from New Jersey. I moved to Israel 20 years ago. I’m a normal person. I never expected to be confronted by what I have seen,” the woman, who didn’t provide a surname for safety reasons, told the publication.
“What these barbarians did to these people is beyond words,” she said. “There is evidence of mass rape of so brutal that they broke their victims’ pelvis—women, grandmothers, children.”
Multiple victims were decapitated, Shari said. She also provided gory, vivid descriptions of other victims.
“Women standing in their night dresses woken up and shot. Faces blasted off. Heads smashed and their brains spilling out.
“A baby was cut out of a pregnant woman and beheaded and then the mother was beheaded. ... Women and children burned to charcoal. Bodies murdered with their hands tied behind their backs.”
“I heard stories about Auschwitz as a child growing up in New Jersey. But what I have seen here with my own eyes is worse than the Holocaust,” she said.
Many residents of northern Gaza are heading south as Israel gears up to carry out a ground invasion into Gaza to vanquish Hamas.
Meanwhile, there are rising concerns about a broader conflict, notably along Israel’s Lebanon-facing northern border with Iran-backed Hezbollah terrorists.
Israel has been evacuating its residents living near its northern border in anticipation of allowing the IDF to “expand its operational freedom to act against the Hezbollah terrorist organization,” Mr. Hagari said.
