BBC entered the Kibbutz: This is a massacre; The horrifying details of attacks VIDEO

BBC entered the Kibbutz: This is a massacre; The horrifying details of attacks VIDEO

According to that British media company, that kibbutz is just the beginning of what could follow.

Until this morning, fighting was still going on in that kibbutz, one of the Israeli communities along the border with Gaza. That is why they are only now collecting the bodies of Israeli residents who were killed when Hamas broke through the border fence from Gaza early Saturday morning.

It seems likely that much of the killing happened in the first hours of the assault on Saturday.

"The Israeli army, caught off guard, took 12 hours to get to the kibbutz", said Davidi Ben Zion, the deputy commander of Unit 71, an experienced team of paratroopers who led the assault, the BBC reports.

"Thank God we saved many lives of many parents and children," he said. "Unfortunately, some were burned by Molotov cocktails. They are very aggressive, like animals", added Ben Zion. Mr Ben Zion said Hamas gunmen who killed families, including babies, were "just a jihad machine to kill everybody, [people] without weapons, without nothing, just normal citizens that want to take their breakfast and that's all." Some of the victims, he said, were decapitated.

Another officer pointed to a bloodied purple sleeping bag. A swollen toe poked out. He said the woman underneath had been killed and decapitated in her front garden. I did not ask the officer to move the sleeping bag to inspect her body. A few yards away was the blackened, swollen corpse of a dead Hamas gunman.

Kibbutz Kfar Aza adds to the considerable evidence that is accumulating of war crimes by Hamas gunmen. Like their Israeli neighbours, the community was taken by surprise.

Its first line of defence was the kibbutz guard, residents with military experience who patrolled the perimeter. They were killed fighting the attackers. Their bodies were removed this morning from their positions in the centre of the kibbutz, and like the other Israeli dead, wrapped in black plastic, carried in stretchers to a parking area and laid in a line waiting to be recovered.

The horror and rage of Israelis has been mixed with incredulity that the state and the military failed in its fundamental duty to protect its citizens.

The bodies of dead Hamas gunmen who killed so many of them have been left rotting in the sun, lying uncovered where they were killed in bushes and ditches and the broad lawns of the kibbutz.