Israel Screens Horrific Footage from Hamas Attacks for U.S. Media: What We Saw

By Jimmy Quinn

Friday, October 27, 2023

 

As Israel combats worsening denialism of the atrocities that Hamas terrorists committed on October 7, officials from the country screened footage from the attacks for reporters today in New York.

 

I joined about 20 other journalists in a 14th-floor Manhattan conference room to watch the horrific video, which includes footage and images from a range of sources — such as cameras that Hamas attackers wore, dash cams, traffic cameras, and the phones of terrorists, their victims, and first responders — providing evidence of the crimes that Hamas carried out in Israel this month. The footage shows gagged and bound civilians burnt to an unidentifiable crisp; the casual and summary execution of people, including children, cowering under desks in the dark as they hide from terrorists wearing headlamps; the grisly decapitation of a Thai worker already bleeding from the stomach by a terrorist using a garden hoe; and other horrors.

 

Today’s session was the first time that the video, which is about 45 minutes long, has been screened outside of Israel. Earlier this week, the IDF invited international journalists to watch it near Tel Aviv. Otherwise, officials told us, only President Biden and a few other top leaders have viewed the clips, which will also be taken to the U.N., where anti-Israel sentiment runs rampant.

 

The Israeli officials did not seem to know for certain if the video would be more widely circulated in the future. So far, it’s been shown only to journalists, under the condition that we not record any portion of it. Upon arriving, I had to leave my electronics in a locker downstairs. The primary concern is respect for the families of the victims, who have not authorized the public release of the videos, officials said. Acting Israeli consul-general Aviv Ezra said after the screening that the foreign minister has sought to share the video with specific audiences because we “can’t sugarcoat it” and because of the “conspiracy people” and the reality of Holocaust denial.

 

It is impossible to know the true prevalence of denial of Hamas’s atrocities. But some prominent figures have joined the deniers’ ranks. During an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour this week, Queen Rania of Jordan — a U.S. ally — complained about the media’s purported “double standards” regarding the war. “Even on CNN, at the beginning of the conflict there was a headline that reported on Israeli children found slaughtered in an Israeli kibbutz. It was not independently verified,” she said, asking if CNN would publish something that was not already verified. But atrocities targeting children had already been extensively documented. Queen Rania’s understanding of the situation would benefit from viewing the video: It showed nightmarish images of dead babies and children.

 

One clip, from a home security system, shows a father rushing two of his young sons — it’s early in the morning, and they’re all in their underwear — from their living room into a bomb shelter, really a concrete shed, in their backyard. The video then cuts to the backyard. A Hamas gunman, apparently off-screen, throws something into the shelter. There’s an explosion, a body slumps over into the doorway, and two terrorists appear on screen. They enter the shelter, pulling the boys out by the arm. Later, back in the house, one of the terrorists offers the boys water that he pulled from the family’s fridge. One responds: “I want my mom, mom.” A subsequent clip shows a middle-aged woman approaching the shelter with two armed Israelis wearing helmets but not IDF uniforms; upon seeing the dead father, she slumps over, apparently in despair, and they pull her away, as the Hamas attack was still occurring.

 

The video also hints at the use of rape by Hamas attackers. Early indications of this were shrugged off or batted away by some of the terrorist group’s sympathizers in the West, who said that a widely circulated video of a girl being pulled out of a jeep in Gaza with blood-soaked pants was not enough proof.

 

The Israeli government says there is evidence, however. During a segment of the video centered on the carnage at the now-notorious music festival at Re’im, first responders look at the corpse of a young woman, her skirt pulled up above her waist. At this point, Israeli military attaché Guy Barak provided context to reporters from the first responders: “She was raped, then burned.” The video also apparently shows her friends trying to identify her by her tattoo. Barak later mentioned “evidence that the women were raped and the legs had been broken.” This had occurred “systematically,” he added. When asked by journalists during a briefing that followed the screening if he believes that Israel is losing the PR war, Major General Mickey Edelstein answered by saying that he’s “amazed that some have tried to minimize what happened in Israel” by equating Hamas’s acts to Israel’s strikes in Gaza. He added: “We’re acting by different values.”