It’s been a month since the assault on Israel, but stories are still emerging from survivors of Hamas’s mass slaughter attack against civilians. One of the most extraordinary was filmed two weeks ago for Israeli TV, but it has only come my way now. It’s heartbreaking, grotesque, infuriating, and uplifting. What makes it so powerful is how calm the narrator, Avida Bachar, is as he describes the 14-hour siege that killed his wife and 15-year-old son, took his leg, and wounded his daughter.

Bachar was a resident of Kibbutz Be’eri, one of Hamas’s main targets. Ten percent of the community—at least 110 people—was killed. Everyone was a target, whether young or old, male or female. It was a siege that was medieval in its barbarity. Much to my surprise, Reuters, which is no friend to Israel, has written a good essay about what happened at Be’eri. It walks readers through the 27-hour-long siege, all of it directed at a residential community that had no military value.

Bachar lived in Be’eri with his wife, Dana, his 15-year-old son, Carmel, and his 13-year-old daughter, Hadar. They realized early on that they were under attack (helped by their WhatsApp message system) and retreated to their “safe room.” The problem is that it wasn’t really a safe room, complete with guns, food, ventilation, steel-reinforced walls and doors, etc. Instead, it was a back room where Hadar’s cooking supplies were stored.

Bachar, speaking from his hospital bed to a reporter for Israeli media, walks through the day, from the moment the family entered the safe room until 14 hours later when the Israeli military finally rescued them. Through it all, he’s completely calm, as if all emotion has been drained.

Image: Avida Bachar. YouTube screen grab.

With vivid detail, Bachar describes successfully struggling to keep the door closed; having massive Kalashnikov gunfire sprayed into the room, blowing off Carmel’s hand (you cannot use a belt as a tourniquet on an arm, Bachar reveals), taking off Bachar’s leg, and killing his wife; having screw-packed grenades tossed through holes blown in walls; having fires set to burn all you had; watching his son slowly die; and learning through WhatsApp that the neighbors were dying and no one was coming to help.

Hadar—again, only 13—comes through as a heroine extraordinaire, brave, calm, collected, and responsible. Quite amazing.

The reporter keeps crying throughout the narrative. I did, too. It would take a heart of Rashida Tlaib not to be moved.

In addition to the horrors he describes, there are two strong threads underlying Bachar’s narrative. The first is that the Hamas that attacked was unlike the Hamas with which Israelis have dealt before. This was an organized killing force comprised of people of all ages, utterly dedicated to mass slaughter. Bachar kept returning to that point: It’s all different now and, he said, Hamas must be completely destroyed. This new army from Gaza cannot be allowed to continue because it will not stop, and civilians are its target.

The second thread was what Bachar called the collapse: He described an Israel in which every single line of defense intended to protect Israelis from the enemies surrounding them broke down. You can hear his despair as he talks about the military helicopters that never came. In this regard, he said that, while guns did help others, they would not have helped his family. With every system between them and the enemy having failed, he could not have stopped the slaughter. Theoretically, he could have taken down some of the terrorists but, at the center of the maelstrom, there was no real hope for his family’s safe outcome.

The video and the Reuters story are worth watching for three reasons: (1) To understand why Israel is waging all-out war against Hamas, rather than its usual half-hearted war; (2) to appreciate how evil Hamas’s overseas supporters are, from Obama to Tlaib to all the rest of them on campuses and in America’s streets; and (3) to understand that this is what’s coming for the rest of the West as Islamists begin to fulfill their perceived destiny of a worldwide caliphate.