Hamas militants ate family's meal after they tortured and mutilated parents and 2 young children, Blinken says
REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun
- US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said a young Israeli family of four mutilated in their home.
- The victims of the atrocity included two children aged six and eight.
- This story includes descriptions of graphic scenes that some may find distressing.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken described how Hamas militants killed a family of four and ate their festive meal during the October 7 terrorist attacks.
Speaking at a Senate hearing on Tuesday, Blinken said: "A young boy and girl, 6 and 8 years old, and their parents around the breakfast table. The father's eye gouged out in front of his kids. The mother's breast cut off, the girl's foot amputated, the boy's fingers cut off before they were executed."
"And then their executioners sat down and had a meal. That is what this society is dealing with," he said.
His descriptions echo those of an Israeli emergency responder, who described discovering the scene in a home at Kibbutz Be'eri during a recent press conference.
Yossi Landau, the head of Zaka, Israel's volunteer emergency response organization as the head of operations for the country's southern region, described the sadistic scene he found after entering a home at Kibbutz Be'eri.
Landau said he saw a father, mother, and two children, aged six and seven, on their knees with their hands tied behind their backs.
"The bodies were tortured," before describing various acts of shocking mutilation. He said he believes the family members would have been forced to watch the horrors being inflicted on their loved ones.
"Fingers being... Fingers being," he said while fighting back tears. "All this happened, and by the end they all had a bullet."
Landau said the militants then ate a meal that the family had prepared for a Jewish holiday.
"They ate this meal while torturing these children," he said.
In an interview with CNN, Landau described the terrible scene he witnessed at Kibbutz Be'eri – an epicenter of the October 7 Hamas invasion of southern Israel, where more than 100 men, women, and children were killed.
Landau said other atrocities he witnessed included a naked and bound teenage girl who had been beheaded, 20 people who had been burned alive, and a mutilated pregnant mother.
The gruesome task of identifying Israel's dead and the circumstances they were killed has fallen to military forensic teams at an army base in central Israel.
They have uncovered evidence of torture and rape among the victims of last week's Hamas terrorist attacks on communities surrounding the Gaza Strip.
The unprecedented Hamas attacks on October 7, dubbed "Operation Al-Aqsa Flood" by Hamas' military leadership, killed at least 1,400 Israelis, per Reuters.
Hamas is also believed to have taken over 200 Israeli and foreign hostages to Gaza.
In retaliation, Israel has carried out waves of air strikes that have killed more than 3,000 Palestinians and are believed to be planning an imminent ground invasion of Gaza.