Israel-Gaza war: Recovered bodies show ‘bloodthirsty’ gunmen ‘took time over torture’ – and that Hamas has changed
We’ve been travelling to the many different scenes where Hamas fighters carried out their terror attack on Israel this week, and it is becoming clear that their tactics and levels of brutality changed from location to location.
Warning – this story contains descriptions and pictures of a graphic nature
In the attack on the Nova music festival, for example, the gunmen abducted some of the partygoers, and then murdered many more, spraying them with gunfire and throwing grenades into places they were hiding.
The hiding places included toilets, dirt bins, cars, and bomb shelters.
Hundreds died at the festival.
War latest: Israel ‘kills Hamas commander’
The attackers’ bodies are picked up with a forklift and put on a bulldozer
Soldiers guard the team as they work
In the various kibbutzim they attacked nearby, their behaviour descended to a whole new level of depravity.
They didn’t just kill – they took their time. They bound families, tortured them, and eventually murdered them.
This is something fundamentally different to the behaviours of Hamas we have seen in the past.
I’ve met Hamas on many occasions and interviewed their fighters.
They were always much more like a militia at war with Israel, rather than bloodthirsty killers and torturers.
Something has changed.
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House in southern Israel hit by Hamas rocket
Bodies ‘tell stories of torture’
The testimony of the people charged with recovering the dead is disturbing and difficult to listen to, but they want everyone to understand just how horrific it was.
Zaka, a volunteer civilian emergency response organisation charged with recovering the bodies here, is still finding bodies of the victims over a week later.
Yossi Landau is the boss for the southern region – he has been doing this work for 33 years all over the world.
He tells me the latest person to be found at the Kfar Aza kibbutz has been beheaded.
An Israeli flag outside a house
He says: “We thought we finished but we came back now this morning after being a week around here, and we just pulled out a body over here – no head – you know it’s the worst…”
He tells me he has never seen anything like this, and that the sheer brutality of Hamas has stunned his entire team.
“We saw women with no clothes and hands tied to the back,” he says. “We saw families… over here in this kibbutz I saw families with hands tied to the back, sitting parents and children, sitting one against the other, tortured.
“We could see the bodies were telling the stories.
“You know they can’t talk but they were telling us their stories, they were crying together with us.”
Yossi Landau with members of Zaka
‘That’s a war crime’
Yossi and his team have carried out their work at all the sites of Saturday’s rampage.
He says there are noticeable differences between the way people were killed at the various locations.
“By the festival, they weren’t tortured – there was no torture because everything was on a field and they had no time for doing that,” he explains.
“There was no torturing, it was mass killing – like if they were hiding in a garbage can or something, they threw in a grenade to make sure everyone was killed.
“That’s a war crime for itself, and most of them, I would say 70%, were shot in the back – that’s a war crime.”
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Gaza: Rescuers pull bodies out of rubble
He continued: “In Kfar Aza and Be’eri, we are talking about a total of 280 bodies, 280 casualties.
“I would say 80% was tortured, and you’re talking children, adults…
“You’re talking a pile, two piles – when we found them in Be’eri, two piles of ten children each were tied to the back, burnt to death…”
He says as far as he can tell, Hamas’s killers had time to do whatever they wanted.
“They had the time, nobody bothered them, they had the manpower – I wouldn’t call it manpower – the butcher power…”
Yossi Landau is Zaka’s southern region boss
‘We collect the terrorists’
When we met up with Yossi and his team, they had just been tasked with recovering the bodies of those gunmen.
We travel to one area of kibbutz Kfar Aza and are turned around – a soldier says it’s too dangerous.
Yossi wants to pick up the bodies – the soldier says he can’t.
They agree a digger will go forward and pick up the dead, and we take another route to another site to collect a handful of bodies.
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The dead fighters are gathered together and placed in individual body bags.
Using a can of spray paint, members of Zaka then mark the bags with an X, designating that they aren’t civilians but that they are the bodies of the killers.
The bodies are then scooped up from the ground with a forklift and transferred onto a bulldozer.
Zaka already knows that their teams are suffering extreme psychological stress.
Their families have been briefed to pass up the line if their loved ones are behaving abnormally, so they can get help.
Damaged cars near a kibbutz
Yossi says humanely retrieving the very people who carried out the attack is itself “very difficult” to do because they “killed our brothers and sisters and tortured the people”.
But he says it’s what they do.
“We do it for the families, for the dead people, and unfortunately we do it for the terrorists too…
“We collect the terrorists, we make sure they get in body bags, they go in for identity and they’re being stored, but that’s not our department it goes further.
“But we have to make sure that to honour – that’s our religion, to honour death and life – because everyone has a family behind them, and that’s Zaka’s work.”
New pictures show the moment of impact as an Israeli missile hit a Beirut apartment block and exploded.
The block was one of five buildings destroyed by airstrikes on Friday alone.
Israel launched airstrikes in the southern suburbs of Beirut in a fourth consecutive day of intense attacks.
There were no immediate reports of casualties.
An Associated Press photographer captured a sequence of images showing an Israeli bomb approaching and hitting a multi-storey apartment building in Beirut’s Tayouneh area.
Richard Weir, a senior crisis, conflict and arms researcher at Human Rights Watch, reviewed the close-up photos to determine what type of weapon was used.
“The bomb and components visible in the photographs, including the strake, wire harness cover, and tail fin section, are consistent with a Mk-84 series 2,000-pound class general purpose bomb equipped with Boeing’s joint directed attack munition tail kit,” he told AP.
Pics: AP
Smoke covers a building that collapses following the strike. Pic: AP
Deadly strikes as bombardment stepped up
Israel stepped up its bombardment this week – an escalation that has coincided with signs of movement in US-led diplomacy towards a ceasefire.
The Israeli military said its fighter jets attacked munitions warehouses, a headquarters and other Hezbollah infrastructure. It issued a warning on social media identifying buildings ahead of the strikes.
Meanwhile, an Israeli airstrike killed five members of the same family in a home in Ain Qana in the southern province of Nabatiyeh, Lebanon’s state media said.
The report said a mother, father and their three children were killed but didn’t provide their ages.
Keep up with all the latest news from the UK and around the world by following Sky News
Three other Israeli strikes killed six people and wounded 32 in different parts of Tyre province on Friday, also in south Lebanon, the report said.
Video footage also showed a building being struck and turning into a cloud of rubble and debris that billowed into Horsh Beirut, the city’s main park.
Residents check the site of the airstrike in Tayouneh, Beirut. Pic: AP
More than 3,200 people have been killed in Lebanon during 13 months of fighting between Israel and Hezbollah – most of them since mid-September.
About 27% of those killed were women and children, according to Lebanon’s health ministry.
Israel dramatically escalated its bombardment of Lebanon from September, vowing to cripple Hezbollah and end its barrages in Israel.
Friday’s strikes come as Lebanon’s caretaker prime minister has asked Iran to help secure a ceasefire in the war between Israel and Hezbollah.
The prime minister appeared to urge Ali Larijani, a top adviser to Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, to convince the militant group to agree to a deal that could require it to pull back from the Israel-Lebanon border.
Iran is a main backer of Hezbollah and for decades has been funding and arming the Lebanese militant group.
On Thursday, Eli Cohen, Israel’s energy minister and a member of its security cabinet, said that prospects for a ceasefire with Lebanon were the most promising since the conflict began.
The Washington Post reported Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was rushing to advance a Lebanon ceasefire to deliver an early foreign policy win to his ally, US President-elect Donald Trump.
“Super high-IQ revolutionaries” who are willing to work 80+ hours a week are being urged to join Elon Musk’s new cost-cutting department in Donald Trump’s incoming US government.
The X and Tesla owner will co-lead the Department Of Government Efficiency (DOGE) with former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.
And in a post on X, the official DOGE account put out a call to arms for people to sign up and help “dismantle government bureaucracy”.
The post said: “We are very grateful to the thousands of Americans who have expressed interest in helping us at DOGE.
“We don’t need more part-time idea generators.
“We need super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting.
“If that’s you, DM this account with your CV. Elon & Vivek will review the top 1% of applicants.”
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Elon Musk speaking at an event held at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. Pic: AP Photo/Alex Brandon
In a reply to an interested party, Mr Musk suggested the lucky applicants would be working for free.
“Indeed, this will be tedious work, make lost of enemies & compensation is zero,” the world’s richest man wrote.
“What a great deal!”
When announcing the new department, President-elect Donald Trump said Mr Musk and Mr Ramaswamy “will pave the way for my administration to dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure federal agencies”.
Mr Musk has previously made clear his desire to see cuts to “government waste” and in a post on his X platform suggested he could axe as many as three-quarters of the more than 400 federal departments in the US, writing: “99 is enough.”
At least 10 people have been killed after a fire broke out at a retirement home in northern Spain in the early hours of this morning, officials have said.
A further two people were seriously injured in the blaze at the residence in the town of Villafranca de Ebro in Zaragoza, according to the Spanish news website Diario Sur.
Two people remain in a critical condition following the blaze. Pic: AP
They remain in a critical condition, while several others received treatment for smoke inhalation.
Firefighters were alerted to the blaze at the residence – the Jardines de Villafranca – at 5am (4am UK time) on Friday.
Several residents were treated for smoke inhalation. Pic: AP
Those who were killed in the fire died from smoke inhalation, Spanish newspaper Heraldo reported.
The residence is home to 82 elderly residents.
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The blaze started in one of the rooms, Fernando Beltran, the national government’s top official in the region, told reporters.
All of the victims were elderly residents, he added.
Relatives wait for news outside the care home. Pic: AP
Fire crews, paramedics and police officers remain on site, said a spokesperson for the regional government of Aragon who confirmed the fatalities.
It took firefighters several hours to extinguish the blaze, they said.
The cause of the fire is unknown and is being investigated.
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