'The sight of the bloodied faces of women and children, their men crying in agony, is gut-wrenchingly, achingly awful'

Chris Hughes describes the devastation he witnessed reporting on the soaring violence in Israel

Chris Hughes on the Gaza border

Hello and welcome to Hostile World with Chris Hughes, a weekly newsletter about the world of defence and geopolitics. You can subscribe here and follow me on Twitter @defencechris. Thank you!

You could smell the bodies of the Hamas fighters littering Be’eri Kibbutz from even outside the gates, along with the rancid whiff of burnt houses and blown-up cars.

We were told of appalling crimes: Israelis burnt alive, women and children murdered and tortured, some whisked off screaming for mercy by gun-toting motorbike riders.

When we arrived, most of the Israeli corpses had been taken for examination but in the fields around us the Hamas attackers were still there, lying where they had been killed.

This was a day or two after the Hamas marauders broke out of Gaza and what we saw was profoundly shocking, evidence everywhere of appalling crimes committed on civilians.

Whatever cause they believed they had, whatever justification for breaking out after years of being kept inside Gaza at the point of a gun, led them to this ground in the Negev desert, then drained away from them, as did the lives of their victims.

And everywhere in Israel, the West Bank and – of course inside the battered Gaza Strip – you can feel, see and hear that this crazed Mad Max-style atrocity cannot be contained.