Slaughter Under the Cypresses

The reservist paratroopers were marching north toward Lebanon when they stopped Sunday to take a break under a towering stand of cypress trees outside the gates of Kfar Giladi, the oldest kibbutz in this part of Israel.

Some were resting in the shade on thin, foam rubber mattresses. Others were packed inside two cars. And some were leaning against the old stone wall of the kibbutz’s cemetery, the Garden of Remembrance, founded to inter the victims of Arab uprisings in the early 1920s.

Suddenly, the air-raid sirens began to whine and within minutes as many as three Hezbollah rockets slammed into the reservists. Ball bearings inside the weapons sprayed death for about 30 yards, killing 12 of the reservists in the single deadliest strike on Israel in more than three weeks of fighting.

It is not clear whether the soldiers decided not to seek shelter, or did not know where to go. Some residents of the kibbutz later told reporters that they had urged the soldiers to take cover, to no avail.

The first emergency workers found a hellish tableau. They pulled charred and bloodied bodies from cars that had smoldered for hours. They deposited the bodies, covered with blankets, alongside the road into the kibbutz.

Nine lay there, several with their boots sticking into the air, one with a mangled arm protruding from under the cover.

A single boot sat atop the cemetery’s stone wall, under it a stream of blood.

Helicopters swooped in to retrieve the wounded, ferrying them to hospitals where three more victims died later Sunday. At the kibbutz entrance, soldiers from a specialized unit picked up pieces of flesh and bloodied clothing scattered across the grass and as far away as the trees in the cemetery.

“There were lots of bodies ... and there were not so many injured” survivors, said Lt. Yaron Nili, a 27-year-old reservist from an artillery battalion who was among the first on the scene. He later had to be treated at the hospital for smoke inhalation.

The kibbutz is on a ridge, surrounded by magenta bougainvillea. But by midday Sunday, fires raged on its every side. Gray smoke folded over the kibbutz, choking the air and making it difficult to breathe even as emergency workers struggled to recover the dead.

Each new rocket attack was punctuated by the screams of peacocks from the kibbutz’s zoo, whose frightened caws sounded like their own air-raid alarms.

“We’ve seen lots of things over the years, but never anything like this,” said Gideon Giladi, 61, a resident whose father helped found the kibbutz. “This was horrible.” He said the soldiers from this and other units frequently stopped by the kibbutz, took showers and bought cigarettes.

The bombardment never let up Sunday.

A couple of hours after the deadly hit on the reservists, a new barrage arrived. One rocket plowed into the hillside about 50 yards from where the troops had been killed. It scattered dozens of reporters and soldiers, who dived for cover, their latex-gloved hands stained with blood from the reservists.

Several hours later, still more rockets slammed into the dried brush around the kibbutz, as well as the nearby major city of Kiryat Shemona. The entire valley was shrouded in smoke; it had the feel of the Arabian Peninsula in the worst of its sandstorms.

Aharon Valency, the mayor of the kibbutz, said it was a “disaster” that so much death had been brought upon the community.

“It is a situation where we citizens are in the shelters, but that is not the case for the soldiers. They were outside sitting,” he said. “There is more and more shelling, every day more. Maybe everyone is feeling the end of the story is coming and they are trying to achieve something.”

But he said the spirit of the kibbutz was to persevere. About three-quarters of the village’s population of 700 has remained and refused to evacuate, even though residents sit on a hilltop just miles from the border with Lebanon.

“Most people are here,” Valency said. “They do not want to leave. The kibbutz is part of our life. We don’t want to be refugees. We want to do our work and live our lives.”

Dan Ronen, police commander for the northern district, said that at least 40 Katyusha rockets were fired on Kfar Giladi and Kiryat Shemona on Sunday alone.

“No one is immune to these rockets, and in an open area, impact can be deadly, as it was today,” he said.

Nili, the reservist, said soldiers heard the air-raid alarms but often didn’t pay much attention.

“It is a regular thing you hear, so many alarms, we carry on with our regular activities,” he said from his hospital bed in Safat. “You have your helmet and your [flak] jacket. But if it’s meant to hit you, it will hit you, wherever you are.”

At the kibbutz, third-generation resident Michal Krol, 58, spoke of a certain resilience and resignation that comes with life so close to the border, even on this, the deadliest day of the war for Israel so far. More rockets are being fired at Israel since any time since its founding as a state in 1948.

The kibbutz movement was instrumental in the formation of the state; it represents the love-of-the-land dedication to settling a nation against innumerable hardships.

“As a kid, a mother and now as a grandmother, I experience the same experiences all over,” she said. “I grew up all my life under Katyusha showers. There is a tradition in the kibbutz of getting organized to the situation.”