The Laughing Monsters

By Seth Mandel

Thursday, May 14, 2026

 

Hamas’s crimes were disturbing not only because of the crimes themselves but because of the manner in which they were carried out. When their defenders in the West refuse to watch video evidence from October 7, they are doing so in part because while they may be able to handle the gruesome details, they cannot handle hearing and seeing the laughter of the murderers.

 

The coddled “anti-colonialists” on university campuses have proved willing and able to defend any act, no matter how depraved, so long as it is for the cause. But even they cannot muster a defense of a rapist’s glee or a torturer’s joy.

 

That is the first of two under-discussed aspects of the report released this week on Gazans’ sexual violence. The other is the deeply sick obsession of the terrorists and “civilians” with the sex organs of Israeli women and men and with disfiguring, even after death, the faces of young women.

 

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What came forth from Gaza that day was a nightmare with few parallels in modern human history.

 

The report relies on video and photographic evidence plus witness accounts that were compared with other witness accounts of the same incidents, as well as other forms of corroboration. As an aside, it is an astonishing feeling to go from a New York Times evidence-free rumor-mill account of fantastical Israeli atrocities to such a careful, meticulous document as the report on Hamas’s crimes. To read the corroboration is to realize how deeply our own media has failed us and continues to do so on a daily basis.

 

And so we recoil as we read a document full of lines like “The torture continued for 45 minutes, while her captors laughed”; “The beating continued while they stood above me, and laughed”; “perpetrators laughing as the women screamed”; “One of them took out a knife and started laughing”; “they were laughing and the last one shot her in the head”; etc.

 

We read that “videos documented armed groups and Palestinian civilians appearing joyful and euphoric, as well as crowds in Gaza cheering or beating victims.” Regarding one of the more famous victims, videos show her “lying upside down on the back of the truck, half undressed, twisted, with her head hanging down, and they are pushing her down. We see the pickup driving, driving, and entering Gaza, into some city there, with lots of people around them, everyone celebrating and happy that they captured an innocent girl on a pickup truck.”

 

As for what had made these many Palestinian perpetrators and spectators so happy—well, it’s a dark document. But the patterns are worth pointing out.

 

Some of the images studied by medical experts and catalogued with the investigating committee:

 

“The body of a young man lying on a sidewalk outside a concrete public shelter on Route 232, with severe burn injuries concentrated in the groin area.”

 

“A young woman with her insides protruding out of the groin area.”

 

“The body of a female victim with what appears to be a gunshot wound to the groin area.”

 

“The bottom half of a female body with bleeding in the groin area.”

 

The report is full of such accounts. The above are from victims who were found at the site of the Nova music festival. The scenes were similar at kibbutzim. One typical example: “On October 13th, first responders discovered two abused bodies in a destroyed home, one of them naked. The rescue efforts are documented in several videos and images that are archived with the Civil Commission. One of the first bodies found was that of a female victim. The body appears to be completely naked. Her ankle had been tied with a thick black chord. According to witnesses who provided testimony to the Civil Commission, the body had several nails driven into her lower abdomen and groin area, as well as a metal or plastic object embedded in the groin area.”

 

Pages and pages and pages of this stuff. Children shot in the face, victims decapitated and dismembered with hoes and shovels.

 

One video shows a terrorist yelling “God is great” while standing over the dead body of a woman who is naked from the waste down.

 

In one disturbing crime scene, a man was found “with his genitals cut off, and next to him, the body of a woman, holding his cut-off genitals, in what appeared to be a staged display to humiliate the victims.”

 

Again, this report is nearly 300 pages long, and it is full of such documented atrocities.

 

Jew-hatred strips the humanity from whatever it touches. There is nothing else like it.