Police officers evacuate a woman and a child from a site hit by a rocket fired from the Gaza Strip, in Ashkelon. (AP)

As a Jew, I can’t convey the feelings running through my body right now

There are few words that can convey the feelings that are running through my body right now.

There is horror and anger and confusion and disbelief and revulsion, but none can adequately describe or do justice to what has happened and is currently happening to my Jewish homeland, Israel. An unprecedented national apocalypse has descended upon her, bringing with it all the darkness and evil that we thought and prayed were just echoes of history, when the world was more brutal and less civilised.

It seems unreal, like mere figments of our imaginations. But the scenes of horror are all too real and being paraded before our very eyes, in the media and online.

More than 700 Israelis have been murdered and more than 2000 injured so far, with a depravity and brutality that defy the comprehension of ordinary people like myself. That’s 700 lives that have been stolen from their families and their friends. That’s 700 souls than have been vanquished from this earth.

But as horrifying as that figure is, it gets worse. There are more than 100 people who have been kidnapped and dragged to Gaza. Children, old people in wheelchairs, young women. We cannot even begin to imagine the horror they are being subjected to.

Read the article by Joel Burnie in The Sydney Morning Herald.