Live massacres, rivers of blood, dozens of charred bodies and a decapitated soldier appear in a compilation of audiovisual material, much of it unpublished, that the Israeli Army showed this Monday to the media with the aim of publicizing the horror of the massacre committed by Hamas in Israel on October 7 and prove “crimes against humanity.”
More than a hundred journalists from foreign media – including EFE – were summoned to a military base north of Tel Aviv to view that 43-minute and 44-second footage, which compiles images captured by the members’ own GoPro cameras. of Hamas carried on them, security of the massacred kibbutzim, video surveillance of roads, and videos recorded with their cell phones by victims, soldiers and medical services personnel.
“What you see in the images are crimes against humanity,” Israeli Army spokesman Admiral Daniel Hagari warned before the viewing. “They show that Hamas terrorists entered Israel with the sole purpose of killing civilians,” he stressed.
One of the hardest scenes to digest, and which caused a strong commotion among the reporters in the room, was the one in which he sees a father with his two children, about 12 and 10 years old, just woken up and still in their underwear. , go out to take refuge in the bunker in the courtyard of their house in one of the kibbutz closest to the Gaza Strip, when they hear gunshots and explosions.
Two heavily armed Hamas members see them enter and throw a grenade into the bunker. The father acts as a human shield to protect his children. They come out crying, a Hamas man takes them inside the house and offers them water and Coca-Cola from his own refrigerator, while the children, in a state of shock, cry and scream.
“Why am I alive? Why am I alive?” sobs the oldest, while trying to console his brother, who says he can’t see out of an eye. The shocking sequence combines what was captured by the security cameras inside the house and those of the community, in the outside patio.
Minutes later, the mother is seen arriving with two kibbutz security guards, when they find the father’s destroyed body at the door of the shelter. Without audio, her silent scream of pain transcends the screen, and we immediately see how her guards try to calm her, cover her mouth so that they cannot hear her, and take her to safety.
That sequence ends there, but dozens of clips follow about other assaults on houses in the kibbutz adjacent to the enclave, or the massacre at the Reim electronic music festival: many hid in portable toilets or under cars, the militiamen Hamas members shot them mercilessly, making sure they didn’t come out alive.
Much of the images were captured by the cameras worn by the around 1,500 Hamas members who died in subsequent fighting with Israeli troops, after being inspected by the authorities.
From there the harshest passages have been extracted: in a video you can see how they murder a young woman hiding under a table begging not to kill her, or how they crush the head of a dying man with a hoe, while shouting in Arabic “Allahu Akbar” (God is great).
The call that a Hamas attacker makes to his parents in Gaza from the phone of one of his victims is also heard. “Look at the photos that I have sent to your WhatsApp. I have killed ten. I have Jewish blood on my hands. I hope you are proud of me,” he tells his parents, who, scared and crying, ask him to return.
The Army spokesperson admitted that in recent days they have faced the “dilemma” about whether to show and disseminate these images, but clarified that they are part of the internal process that Israel needs to “understand why it is at war.”
“It has nothing to do with the Palestinians or Islam, it’s about not allowing terror to rule,” he said of the Islamist group Hamas, which has de facto governed the Gaza Strip since 2007.
That brutal and bloody attack, on October 7, began the war between Israel and the Islamist militias in Gaza, which has claimed more than 1,400 victims in Israel – most of them civilians killed that same day in the largest massacre in the history of Israel -, in addition to 222 kidnapped in the enclave and around a hundred missing.
The intense and indiscriminate Israeli retaliatory bombings on the Strip have caused more than 5,000 deaths – at least 70% are women, children and the elderly – and more than 15,000 injured, the largest human catastrophe also experienced in the punished enclave.