Israeli military says babies were beheaded in kibbutz attack

International Spokesperson of the Israel Defense Forces Jonathan Conricus says that Hamas militants did behead babies during their deadly wave of attacks at the weekend.

Conricus says a coroner who visited the aftermath of the massacre at Kibbutz Be'eri had seen the children's bodies and confirmed how they died, BBC reports.

"I admit it took us some time to really understand and to verify that report, and it was hard to believe that even Hamas could perform such a barbaric act," he says.

"I think we can now say, with relative confidence, that this is what Hamas did... there were bodies scattered everywhere, mutilated."

In Kfar Aza, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) was going house to house, collecting the dead in body bags and loading them onto a truck. The IDF told CNN that women, children, toddlers and elderly were “brutally butchered in an ISIS way of action.”

Hamas has denied that its militants beheaded children or attacked women. The militant group’s spokesman and senior official Izzat al-Risheq on October 11 described the accusation as “fabricated and baseless allegations.”

Kfar Aza is one of the several kibbutzim, small farming enclaves, that bore the brunt of Hamas’ ground assault on October 7. A number of kibbutzim and towns were targeted, including Kfar Aza, Be’eri, Ofakim, Sderot, Yad Mordechai, Yated, Kissufim and Urim. Revelers at a music festival held in the desert outside of Be’eri were also gunned down and taken hostage.

The kibbutzim go back to the time of the founding of Israel, when small groups of people set up communities based on the idea of communal living. About 125,000 people live across approximately 250 kibbutzim in Israel, according to the Jewish Agency for Israel. For many, they were symbols of good life and safety.

What happened at the weekend destroyed that idyll.

Babies and toddlers were found “decapitated” in Kfar Aza, Tal Heinrich, a spokesperson for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said on October 11. CNN could not independently verify that report, and Hamas said media reports about attacking children were false.

This comes after the IDF told CNN on October 11 that the killings at Kfar Aza amounted to a “massacre.”