"The deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust," -- Biden tells a round table of Jewish leaders in Washington

 Joe Biden addressed a round table of Jewish leaders in Washington on Wednesday, where he described the bloody assault on Israel by Hamas as "the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust”. The US president said attack was “sheer evil” and a “campaign of pure cruelty against the Jewish people”.

“Silence is complicity,” Biden said. “I refuse to be silent”. He said he had spoken again today with Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and that the US is “surging” additional military assistance to the Israel Defense Forces.

He said the US was “working on every aspect” of the hostage crisis in Israel, but that “the idea that I’m going to stand here before you and tell you what I’m doing is bizarre”.

The smell of death hits you at the entrance to kibbutz Be’eri. Until Saturday morning Be’eri had a population of 1,200, the largest of the 12 villages that make up the Eshkol regional council that runs along the border with Gaza.

Now it is a place indelibly associated with horror and tragedy, as one of the centres of the massacre undertaken by the militant Islamist group Hamas in southern Israel beginning on Saturday morning.

Be’eri, once popular with Israelis as a weekend getaway with its art gallery and nearby mountain-biking trails, had by Tuesday been turned into a war zone, the bloated bodies of the Hamas terrorists who attacked this place still dotted around the kibbutz, and tanks and armoured cars at the entrance where Hamas smashed in.

Audible in the distance the sound of detonations can be heard coming from the direction of Gaza, outgoing artillery firing close by from the positions now occupied by the army. Be’eri, founded two years before the state of Israel, was once a pleasant place to live with houses and apartments set apart among the trees, and grassy verges joined by little sandy roads. Now the homes are broken and violated.  

“I feel anger. I feel speechless and frustration,” said Richard Hecht an army spokesperson accompanying the international media. “You can still smell the bodies here. It’s overwhelming.”

Itai Veruv, an Israeli major general who led the fighting here, could only describe it in historic terms of the Jewish history of persecution. “What happened here was a pogrom,” he says. (some reporting in The Guardian)

It is a word that has been used repeatedly about Be’eri. “[It’s] what happened in Europe in the old days,” adds Veruv. “This was not a war. They wanted to kill and kidnap to Gaza. Women and children.”

The picture of what happened in Be’eri has been emerging piecemeal over several days. How in the space of the horrifying hours of the murderous rampage on Saturday, at least 100 people were slaughtered here, dragged from their homes and murdered or dragged off at gunpoint as hostages to Gaza.