The chief rabbi of France, Haïm Korsia, sees the signs of post-traumatic stress manifesting in those around him. People are calling him, agitated, unable to sleep, overwhelmed by the sea of barbaric videos surging across social networks that they have been confronted with since the start of the Hamas attack on Israel. "They're affected by a violent disorder, their bodies shielding them from these unthinkable events," he said. "It's one thing to know someone is dead, it's another to see images of their charred body on Twitter [renamed X]."

He protects himself from the images – "I haven't seen the worst ones" – and tries to dissuade those around him from watching them too. "But it's hard to get children away from it," he said. "We've never seen a terrorist attack with so many images available," said Philippe Corbé, French news channel BFM-TV's editorial director. "Thousands of little filmed moments are coming in all directions."

The bodies of elderly people lying in front of bus stops, young women shot dead in their cars, bloody cradles, charred children's bodies, videos of the wounded shot at point-blank range and parents carrying dead infants in their arms in the middle of bombed-out landscapes: all of these scenes spill unfiltered on to the internet.

Hamas regards such images as another weapon in its arsenal, designating people within its brigades to film and photograph the killings, and even reportedly using one victim's phone to post images of her death to her own Facebook account. On the Israeli side, images are collected and shared en masse as testimonies to the attack that has befallen the country.

One Israeli Telegram channel publishes around 20 videos each day, filmed at the scene of the many atrocities. The documentary aspect is as clinical as the content is staggering: the date, time and a descriptive summary are given below each one. "Unfortunately, a terrorist commando managed to get into the barracks of several Thai farm workers and massacred them. In this video, you can see images of these barracks," for example. Or "a group of Hamas terrorists attack an Israeli civilian next to a bomb shelter next to the Nova festival. After finishing off their first victim, the terrorists realize that people are hiding in the shelter, into which they throw a grenade before shooting at those trying to escape." In another post, the channel's creators say they hope that in this way "the world can see the true horrors taking place here."

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