Haley, your post on reports that the bodies of 40 dead babies were found at a kibbutz targeted by Hamas terrorists on Saturday is, as Andy says, excruciating to read. The accounts from the scene recall a similarly horrifying detail of history that has stuck with me for years.

The 1985 book Holy Days, about the Hasidic community, included an account of what are described as the worst pogroms the Jews would suffer until the 20th century. During the Cossack uprising of 1648 in territory that is now Ukraine, Jews were singled out for special cruelty. “Thousands of Jewish infants were thrown into wells, or buried alive,” the book notes, citing a Russian historian of the time.

The present-day account from a journalist at i24News is that Israeli soldiers arriving at the Kfar Aza kibbutz found families gunned down in their beds and babies with “their heads cut off.”

In a statement on the weekend’s attacks, an Israeli major general said: “It is something that I never saw in my life. It’s something that we used to imagine from our grandfathers, grandmothers in the pogrom in Europe and other places. It’s not something that happens in new history.”

Pogrom. Massacre. Terrorism. Those grasping for other words to describe what happened in Israel over the weekend need moral healing.