There is no other word for what I saw in Be’eri: carnage.
Destruction and death littered the air and the ground.
Cars, or the burnt carcasses of what was left of them, were strewn on bushes or on top of trees instead of being neatly parked by the roadside.
Two specific cars had been so disfigured and bent around one another that it was almost impossible to tell them apart.
One car door lay several meters from its body as if it had been bitten off and flung into a storm – the storm that tore this village apart and possibly ended its existence (it is unclear whether village survivors will return even after the current war ends).
Houses were carved up or broken into pieces making it easy to peer in through their wall-less sides at scorched rooms and charred remains of belongings.
Here and there somehow a house or bunch of flowers survived mostly untouched, which provided an eerie contrast.
Water poured out onto the streets from broken village pipes causing a slow muddy river to form and progress down the main street which I passed through.
Blood and corpses
IDF Brig.-Gen. and Divisional Commander for the area Kobi Heller showed his disgust as well as pictures of how this and other areas looked when he first arrived, with additional blood and corpses strewn everywhere.
Heller told how the early moments of the battle unfolded on Saturday, the horror and shock of the initial realization at what had happened and what Hamas was doing, and the tenacious fighting that took place afterward.
In addition, Heller said that a group at Be’eri had fought back and that their valor had held back the Hamas attackers long enough that some of those in Be’eri who did survive, were able to do so as a result of those efforts before the IDF’s arrival.
Of course, the war is just starting
While in Be’eri, on top of the constant “normal explosions” overhead from rockets being shot down by Iron Dome which we could only hear, there was a giant much closer explosion of scarlet red and a piercing yellow which lit up the sky and shook the ground.
Although I was ready to dive to the ground, the soldiers surrounding us barely flinched. They were used to close-up combat for their lives, and the explosion fell under that threshold.
Also, while I was there – there were multiple incidents of new small invasions by Hamas nearby, where suddenly I and others were ordered to move our cars from the road, not for an ambulance to come through, but for troops to dash off to challenge the invaders.
As I left Be’eri, I realized that although I have seen war zones before, this was the first time that I was leaving a village-sized, still-uncleaned burial ground.