More than 1,400 Israeli civilians were murdered during the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7-8. And as has become the custom in the internet age, a cottage industry has sprung up denying that the stories of Hamas atrocities are true, claiming it’s all a giant conspiracy theory.
Rather than ignore the charge, the Israeli government decided to debunk it. Found on dead and captured Hamas fighters were hours and hours of gruesome videos and still photos of Israeli citizens murdered, raped, beheaded, and tortured.
Out of all the footage, this one-minute of video was approved for mass publication. Believe me, it’s still wrenching.
The IDF just screened 43 minutes of horrors from the Hamas massacre on October 7 for foreign journalists. I was not there, my colleague @cjkeller8 was.
Here is the one minute of footage approved for mass publication at this point, barring most of it out of respect for the dead. pic.twitter.com/UDmQSrkYBL
— Amy Spiro (@AmySpiro) October 23, 2023
The descriptions of other videos are beyond belief.
“The footage was collected from call recordings, security cameras, Hamas terrorists’ body cameras, victim dashboard cameras, Hamas and victims’ social media accounts, and cellphone videos taken by terrorists, victims, and first responders,” according to the Times of Israel whose reporters viewed all 43 gruesome minutes of the atrocities.
There’s an audio recording of one of the young gunmen calling home to speak to his family about all the Jews he killed.
“Dad, I killed 10 with my bare hands,” the terrorist excitedly tells his father in Gaza. “Their blood is on my hands, let me speak to Mom.”
“Please be proud of me, Dad,” he adds.
“Please open WhatsApp and look how many dead,” he implored his parents repeatedly, apparently referring to pictures or video he had sent home showing the attack. “Your son killed so many Jews,” he said. “Mum, your son is a hero.”
Another clip shows an Israeli soldier being taken out of a car, bloodied and perhaps already dead, and thrown to a group of Palestinian civilians who beat, kick, and dance on the body.
One traumatic sequence, taken from home cameras inside of a kibbutz, showed a father rushing his two young boys into an above-ground shelter, seconds before Hamas attackers threw a grenade in, killing the father and wounding the boys.
After the two boys, bloodied and in shock, had staggered back into their home screaming, a Hamas gunman calmly entered and looked through the fridge in front of them, pausing to take a drink before walking out again.
In the public relations war to win over the world at large, Israel has been losing ground since the concentrated air campaign against Hamas in Gaza City began. The grim pictures of Gaza civilians being dug out of the rubble and entire blocks flattened by Israeli bombs have given many people around the world the excuse to forget what happened on October 7-8 in Israel and blame the Jews for the violence.
It’s hard to stomach for Maj. Gen. Michael Edelstein, a former IDF Gaza division commander.
“We see that some of the channels are trying to compare what Israel is doing and what those vile terrorists are doing,” Edelstein said.
“I cannot understand anyone who compares,” he said. “And after what we have shared with you, you should know it.”
Gen. Edelstein is correct. There can be no comparison between Hamas terrorists murdering innocent civilians, deliberately killing as many as possible to elicit the maximum amount of rage from the Israelis, and the IDF bombing Hamas positions in Gaza, killing civilians who were being forced to shield the terrorist fighters.
The documents recovered from the bodies of the Hamas militants made it clear that Hamas “came with orders to slaughter and burn citizens”, General Edelstein said.
“They simply decided to burn families within their homes. And they took hostages alive, they were aiming to take children back into Gaza,” he said.
“Orders were there for how many to kill, how many to take as hostages. Orders were there to rape, all was written and ordered.”
As revolting and nauseating as these documented cases of rape, torture, beheading, and infanticide are, we must bear witness to them. Imagine recordings of Jews being led to the slaughter during the Holocaust. The casual barbarity of Nazis being recorded. Imagine images and video of the gas chambers, of naked Jews being herded into the “showers,” and of the screaming, clawing, weeping people slowly dying.
Then the wheeled carts came and the Kapos piled the bodies up — after the hair, gold teeth, and anything else of value was removed. Then, to the crematoriums that operated 24 hours a day to obliterate the evidence of the atrocities.
Imagine if that had all been on video and shown to the people of Europe and the United States. It’s impossible to say that the Holocaust could have been avoided or mitigated. But if even one life had been saved, would it have been worth it?
