'They raped, murdered, beheaded - everything you saw in that video,' says Kfar Aza kibbutz worker compiling evidence for the International Criminal Court
Like most who lived and worked here, he regarded himself as a supporter of peace – and the Palestinian cause. Now he is compiling evidence of the crimes that were committed here. In the early hours of 8 October, 22 hours after the attack began, Deker Eylan, 41, and his wife and children were escorted out of their safe room in the kibbutz surrounded by a ring of soldiers, as the battles between the IDF and Hamas continued around them.
Further along a little path, with banks bordered with flowers and weeds, the little kibbutz house of 23-year-old sweethearts Sivan Elkabets and Naor Hasidim is now a grisly shrine, pockmarked with high-calibre bullet holes and a crater in the floor where a grenade exploded. “It’s painful for me to look back at that day… there were booby-traps between cars…. I look at all the wrecked cars, each one tells a story.”
“My father, two weeks before he was kidnapped, still drove Palestinians – sick people – to hospitals in East Jerusalem as part of their road to recovery.”She admits she has extreme difficulty reconciling this message with the savage reality of what happened to her family and friends on the day Hamas attacked.