wsj.com Oct.23, 2023 The 47-minute compilation of footage is part of government effort to document the scope and severity of the Hamas assault
BY SUNE ENGEL RASMUSSEN AND SHOSHANNA SOLOMON
TEL AVIV—Israel’s military on Monday screened a 47-minute video featuring images of Hamas militants’ killing spree across southern Israel on Oct. 7, as part of a government effort to document the attacks and push back against what it says are denials of their severity.
The footage was gleaned from body cameras worn by Hamas fighters who died, security cameras and the cellphones and social media of Israeli victims, the military said. It showed the video to 170 reporters at a military base on the outskirts of Tel Aviv.
“We are making a collective memory for the future. It will define who we are,” Brig. Gen. Daniel Hagari, the top spokesman for Israel’s military, said at the screening. If Hamas’s doctrine “is crimes against humanity, it’s not just Israel’s problem.”
The video shows scenes of violence and terror from the hourslong attacks. The body of a decapitated Israeli soldier lies on a concrete floor. A Hamas militant uses a garden hoe to try to chop off the head of an-other man. Revelers at a music festival run for their lives.
The Israeli military says it is still collecting evidence from southern Israel, and compiling a comprehensive account of the Hamas attacks. About 1,400 people were killed in Israel and scores of others were kidnapped and taken back to Gaza, where they are being held hostage.
Israel has responded with a campaign of airstrikes hitting what it says are Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip, and the military says it is preparing for a ground offensive. Gaza’s Hamas-controlled Health Ministry says at least 5,000 people have been killed.
As protests in support of Palestinians have spread across the Arab world and Western capitals, Israel has sought to shore up support for its war effort, arguing that Hamas committed crimes against humanity, which should concern not just Israel.
In one scene early in the video, captured on a militant’s body camera, armed Hamas fighters walk through a quiet Israeli community near the border with Gaza. An Israeli man and two boys run and hide in a garden shed. A pursuing fighter lobs a hand grenade inside.
Then he drags out the two boys. “I want my mom,” one of the boys shouts at the militant in English. His brother cries: “Itay, I think we are going to die.”
Hamas has denied it targeted civilians. Khaled Meshaal, director of Hamas’s diaspora operations and a chief spokesman for the group, said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was fabricating allegations of massacres to win sympathy in the West.
Robert Rozett, senior historian at the International Institute for Holocaust Research, Yad Vashem, said people who deny the scale and violence of the attacks are unlikely to be persuaded by any amount of evidence. He said their unwillingness to believe is rooted in antisemitism and antipathy toward Israel.
A series of memes and posts on social media, spread by people with tens of thousands of followers, has called into question whether the toll on civilians was as deadly as described by Israeli authorities.
Fadi Quran, campaigns director at Avaaz, a West Bank-based human-rights group, said there is a difference between antisemitism and questioning the Israeli government’s version of events.
Human-rights advocates say Hamas’s atrocities on Oct. 7 don’t justify Israel’s punishing airstrikes over the past two weeks and its near-total siege of Gaza.
In the footage, many Hamas fighters wore action cameras on their heads as they piled into pickup trucks, jumped on motorcycles and streamed on foot across the border into Israel where they went door-to-door hunting Israeli civilians.
The videos also capture images of Hamas fighters driving injured Israeli victims, one of them with an arm blown off, back into the Gaza Strip.
One video from a kibbutz where 100 people were killed shows two Hamas fighters walking past an empty children’s playground as they look for targets. The pair take a break outside a home. They seemed to have no fear of being attacked, and the video gives a glimpse of the slow response from Israeli security forces.
The videos show Hamas fighters opening fire on elderly women hiding in their homes and young girls hiding in bomb shelters. Photos showed dead babies, charred bodies of infants and Israelis burned alive in their cars.
At the desert music festival, one man plays dead under a parked car, only to be shot by a gunman when he looks up to see if he is safe.
In one voice recording of a Hamas militant who used an Israeli victim’s cellphone to call his parents in Gaza, the fighter brags to his father that he is in Israel.
“I killed 10 with my bare hands,” he says. “Their blood is on my hands, let me talk to Mom.”
“May God protect you,” his mother says, sobbing.
“Mom, your son is a hero. Kill, Kill, Kill,” the fighter says, before his father takes back the phone.
“Please be proud of me, dad,” he says.
“Return to Gaza, return,” his father replies. “Enough.”