By Humeyra Pamuk
TEL AVIV (Reuters) – U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Thursday said the Israeli government showed him photographs and videos of Hamas atrocities, including of a baby riddled with bullets, soldiers beheaded and young people burned alive in their cars or hideaways.
“It’s simply depravity in the worst imaginable way. It almost defies comprehension,” Blinken told a news briefing in Tel Aviv, where he traveled after hundreds of Hamas gunmen poured across the barrier fence and rampaged through Israeli towns on Saturday.
Blinken said Hamas had no regard for the rule of law or “any basic standard of human decency” and instead target civilians “in the most inhumane ways possible.”
He carefully described the disturbing contents of the images he was shown in meetings with Israeli officials earlier on Thursday.
The atrocities depicted in the images he had seen “harkens back to ISIS,” Blinken said.
“Images are worth a thousand words. These images may be worth a million,” he added.
(Reporting by Humeyra Pamuk in Tel Aviv; Writing by Doina Chiacu, Simon Lewis and Daphne Psaledakis in Washington; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)
