The House Foreign Affairs Committee showed a video to House lawmakers on Tuesday showing the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks carried out by Hamas and other Gaza-based terrorist groups in southern Israel.
The roughly 45-minute video, which was collected by the Israeli government and shown to U.S.-based journalists at the Israeli Embassy in Washington D.C., includes graphic footage of the worst terror attack in the country's history that left roughly 1,200 people dead. Initial tallies from Israeli officials cast the death toll as higher, at about 1,400, but Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Lior Haiat said late last week that the total is now closer to 1,200, without an explanation, though it's likely indicative of the difficulty of identifying remains, many of which were burnt beyond recognition, and determining victim versus combatant.
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"I worked with the Israeli ambassador to screen at a private screening of the Hamas invasion and barbaric killing of Jewish people. 1,400 of them, 250 hostages, horrific scenes that I can't get into detail about because they're so disgusting," committee Chairman Michael McCaul said on Tuesday. "They are a messianic cult. They are a terror organization."
The footage, which the Washington Examiner has previously reviewed, included a snippet of a conversation one of the Hamas terrorists had with his parents in which he gleefully urged them to check WhatsApp to "see how I killed them." Another part of the footage included a reel of photographs of dead civilians, including several women and at least two babies who appeared to have been shot to death, while helmet cameras worn by Hamas terrorists also showed the attempted beheading of a living but wounded civilian.
"This morning I viewed the horrific footage of Hamas killing, torturing, and kidnapping Israeli civilians," Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI) said on X, the platform previously known as Twitter. "I’m gutted. This is barbarism and an attack on all humanity. We cannot let this ever happen again and we must never forget."
Several lawmakers left the screening visibly distressed after watching the footage, while some of them likened it to the Holocaust, according to Jewish Insider.
“I’m feeling like I felt when I went to Birkenau,” Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) told the outlet. “It’s just war crimes. Unbelievable.”
The video has not been released publicly due to the graphic nature of the attacks.
Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) said on X: "Many of my colleagues are currently watching the video that I saw in Israel of the Hamas killings. Hamas copied the Nazis, lining up families killing kids in front of parents. Burning people alive, in pits. They will hear brothers scream as their father jumped on a grenade."
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Congress has broadly supported Israel historically and since the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks, though there's a growing faction within the Democratic Party that has called on the Biden administration to pursue a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. The administration, however, currently opposes a ceasefire to end hostilities because doing so at this point would keep Hamas in power, which Israel is trying to end, and the U.S. supports that goal.
The administration has publicly said Israel's military should be going to greater lengths to prevent civilian casualties, of which there have been thousands in only five weeks of the conflict. There are officials within the administration that believe, like that small faction of progressive Democrats, that the administration should take a firmer stance against Israel's war.