Politics

Portrait of a Massacre

Israel released grisly footage documenting Hamas’s brutal attack

Today, the Israel Defense Forces gathered a group of 200 foreign journalists in a hall at a military base north of Tel Aviv, and gave a macabre viewing of 43 minutes of ghastly footage from Hamas’s October 7th attack. The horrific montage was from security cameras, cellphone videos, dashboard cameras, social media accounts, and footage recorded and posted by the terrorists themselves, many of whom were wearing GoPro cameras as they went about their murderous rampage, making the slaughter of innocent Jews look like some kind of grisly video game.

Unfortunately, the nightmare was all too real, a whirlwind of unspeakable carnage and nihilistic murder and mayhem that has set the entire Middle East on the brink of a catastrophic conflict.

More than 1400 Israelis were murdered, and 224 were abducted and taken into Gaza to be used as human shields by Hamas. The vast majority were unarmed civilians, including the elderly, disabled, young children, infants, and women. They suffered unimaginably violent deaths; they were shot, burned, beheaded, tortured, raped, their bodies mutilated and violated even after they died. October 7th was the single deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust, an almost unbelievable fact that’s still difficult to digest.

The Israeli government apparently felt that it needed to show journalists this gruesome footage in an effort to confirm that these atrocities actually took place, and to underscore the inhuman brutality of these attacks. Spokesman Major General Mickey Edelstein said the IDF showed the footage because of an ongoing “Holocaust-like denial” of Hamas’s attack, often taking place in far-left political discourse and elsewhere that is divorced from the reality about what precisely occurred, amid an intense and ongoing information/propaganda war that is augmenting the physical fighting on the ground.

It’s unfortunate that Israel needs to do this at all, but with protesters around the world denying and rewriting fast-moving events and attempting to whitewash the mass murder of Jews and other war crimes, it’s probably wise. Consider the recent Ahli Arab Hospital bombing in Gaza, which was the result of an errant Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket fired from within Gaza, and which Hamas immediately blamed on Israel, contrary to all available data.

This unleashed massive anti-Israel protests across the Middle East and beyond, despite steadily mounting evidence that Israel wasn’t responsible. Incidentally, the New York Times issued a rare Editor’s Note correcting its coverage of that tragic event, which they said initially “relied too heavily on claims by Hamas” about Israel’s culpability. But the point is that false information can and does alter the political context in ways that are extremely important, even decisive, as the entire Middle East sits on the precipice of the abyss.

The footage might be gruesome and painful, but the underlying truth is essential in order to deprive Hamas and its terrorist partners from constructing false self-serving narratives that smear Israel for their own crimes. An Israeli official at the screening said, “What we shared with you, you should know it.” Indeed, the entire world should know what Hamas perpetrated in all its excruciating detail, lest there be any confusion about why exactly Israel is now seeking to dismantle Hamas, and attempting to end the war it started.

Horror upon horror

The footage shows Hamas terrorists, many dressed in body armor, armed with assault rifles, RPG’s and NLAW’s, and grenades, tearing through the Nova Music Festival, and then moving through the streets of small communities near the border they just breached. They fire into cars driving down the streets until they crash, and then they remove the mangled bodies and toss the corpses into the road like trash. They steal some of the bullet-riddled cars, using them to transport fellow fighters elsewhere to kill their next victims, leaving a trail of dead Jews in their wake.

Two clips show Hamas fighters dressed up in the uniform of the IDF, waving down passing cars and shooting the drivers who stop at point blank range, or killing them on the side of the road, where they leave the victims in ditches. They show fighters who are merciless and bloodthirsty, killing indiscriminately and with pleasure.

In one video, Israeli first responders pour bottled water on smoldering corpses, as they try to put out the burning bodies. Footage shows the body of a young woman laying dead, her dress hiked up to her waist and her underwear removed. Similarly, there’s the infamous video of the female hostage being transferred into another vehicle, the seat of her pants soaked through with blood, presumably from a violent rape.

IDF spokesman Edelstein said “we have evidence” of rape but said that they “cannot share it.” However, in a recent interrogation, one Hamas fighter freely admits that not only were women raped, but that even the bodies of the deceased were violated, as terrorists apparently engaged in necrophilia, in what is perhaps the ultimate dehumanizing violation.

It’s inconceivable horror, unspeakable.

The footage shows Hamas fighters as they enter small towns, and rove door to door, entering houses searching for prey, hunting down their terrified victims, who are hiding in closets, under beds, and in safe rooms. In the latter case, if they can’t get into a safe room, they simply burn down the entire house. They meet shockingly scant resistance during the initial onslaught, having prepared carefully with detailed maps, and a sophisticated and coordinated assault plan based on extensive reconnaissance information.

At one point, Hamas fighters are standing over a badly maimed Thai man with a bullet wound in his stomach, lying on the ground in agony. After a bit of arguing, a terrorist demands a knife. Instead, he finds what looks to be a garden hoe, and he attempts to decapitate the wounded man lying on the floor with it, swinging the blunt blade into his neck over and over again, causing a sickening thudding sound.

This was a special kind of bloodlust. Still, it’s unclear why they were beheading this man, who was Thai, perhaps an agricultural worker. What had he done to deserve this wrath? He didn’t even appear to be Israeli.

In another scene, a Hamas gunman discovers a father and his two young sons hiding, dressed only in pajamas. He throws a hand grenade, which kills the father, leaving his two sons screaming and covered in blood, his and theirs. “Dad’s dead, it wasn’t a prank.” One of the boys lost an eye, and they cried out for their mother, screaming in agony. “I know, I saw it.”

“Why am I alive?” and then, “I think we are going to die.”

“Daddy, daddy.” The man who just murdered their father rummages through their refrigerator, thirsty from his exertions, muttering “Water, water.” It’s unclear what became of the two boys, if they’re dead or alive or kidnapped.

Another scene showed the other side of the family equation. One of the Hamas fighters has stolen a dead Jewish woman’s cell phone, and he calls his family back in Gaza to extol his achievements. He tells his father that he’s now a “hero,” because “I killed 10 Jews with my own hands.” He says, “Their blood is on my hands, let me speak to Mom.” He pleads, “Please be proud of me, dad.” The dark irony that he’s calling his own family to brag about butchering other innocent families is perhaps not lost on his parents, but it’s certainly not clear to him, in the midst of his killing spree.

He urges his mother to open WhatsApp so that he can send them photos of his handiwork, to prove his “heroism.” Amid numerous shouts of “Allahu Akbar,” he explains that he only wants “victory or martyrdom” when his mother asks him to come home to Gaza. He doesn’t want to come home; he wants only to kill Jews or to die himself, in what is an apt metaphor for Hamas’s larger strategic impulse, and the war they just unleashed.

Nightmare scenarios

By all accounts, the Middle East is on the verge of a historic cataclysm, one that could make America’s recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan look like child’s play. The tempo of crossborder fighting between Hezbollah and Israel continues to spike, even as the IDF appears to be preparing to invade the Gaza Strip imminently. The humanitarian crisis in Gaza is dire, even as Israeli airstrikes continue to pound Hamas targets, inflicting a grievous toll on the Palestinian civilians Hamas deliberately hides among. Israel’s siege of water, fuel, and food continues, interrupted only by two meager convoys of aid trucks that finally entered from Egypt at the Rafah Crossing, after intensive diplomatic maneuvering. The likelihood of those trucks being interdicted and stolen by Hamas is high.

Whatever comes next, it’s crucial that we understand how this began, hence the footage. This latest spasm of violence began on October 7th, when more than a thousand Hamas terrorists breached Israeli borders at multiple points by land, sea, and air in a sophisticated and well-planned assault that left 1400 Israelis dead, the vast majority of them civilians. Hamas fighters tore through Israeli towns, and slaughtered or kidnapped everyone they encountered. They massacred hundreds of young people partying at a dance festival, many of whom were hiding in the woods where they were discovered and murdered in cold blood, in attacks that were reminiscent of roving Einsatzgruppen death squads in Eastern Europe during World War II.

The footage shown by the IDF today is unequivocal, and damning. Now, the question is what the immediate future holds. Somewhat surprisingly, the IDF still hasn’t entered Gaza in a major ground incursion 17 days after Hamas’s savage attack, and the Biden administration is reportedly pressuring Bibi Netanyahu and a reeling Israeli government to delay its invasion and hone its war plans. Hamas, perhaps in an effort to push the invasion back still further, has released a total of four hostages, two American and two Israeli.

As has been noted, the longer Israel delays its invasion, the more legitimacy it squanders. That said, going into Gaza carries profound risks for Israel and her American partners. A long, bloody invasion of Gaza could be the spark that lights the entire region on fire, and launches a catastrophic Middle Eastern conflagration that could burn wildly out of control.

However, it’s unclear how, absent a significant ground operation, Israel will rid Gaza of Hamas, something most Israelis are understandably demanding from their government, and which Bibi Netanyahu has promised to accomplish in no uncertain terms. Meanwhile, flagging faith in Netanyahu is at an all time low after this historic security and intelligence failure, even if Israeli society has recovered some measure of temporary unity in the face of what feels like an existential threat to the Jewish state.

There’s already worsening violence on Israel’s borders with Lebanon and Syria, as Hezbollah and Iran’s other regional proxies contemplate their own wars with an Israel that is looking wounded and vulnerable. Iran itself could get directly involved, in what would almost certainly draw the United States into a nightmarish conflict of unknown scope. Likewise, one of Iran’s many proxies across the Middle East, from Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, or Yemen could act on Tehran’s behalf, something that is already happening to a limited but worrisome extent.

The prospect of unchecked escalation and a regional explosion of violence are therefore very much in the realm of possibilities. It’s an extraordinarily dangerous moment, with a war already raging in Europe, and tension continuing to rise between the U.S. and China and Russia. A Middle Eastern bloodbath could be the thing that tips the balance toward conflict, and could lead irrevocably toward a spiraling cataclysm that might be extremely difficult to put back in the box, once opened. Per usual, civilians will suffer and die the most, caught in the middle of every conflict.

To call this moment fraught is a profound understatement. It’s utterly perilous, and the likelihood of a worsening crisis isn’t just likely, but almost a certainty. The only remaining question is how deep this crisis goes, and how far it spreads. It’s as unpredictable as it is dangerous, and the world has Hamas to thank for that, first and foremost, along with a feckless Israeli government that has deluded itself into believing it could somehow bypass the Palestinian question entirely, even as Gaza seethed.

If nothing else, one thing is crystal clear: without re-engaging with a peace process, and honestly seeking a political settlement that resolves the Palestinian question, Israel will never have long-term security or stability. But to address that question, first Israel has to overcome this current firestorm, and come out the other side without getting too badly burned, as the entire region threatens to catch fire and ignite.