Israel showed members of the foreign press on Monday 43 minutes of footage from the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attacks as part of an attempt to combat the "Holocaust denial-like phenomenon evolving in real time."
The videos shown to roughly 200 reporters included one of a woman trying to establish whether a partially burned woman's corpse whose dress was pulled up to her waist and without underpants was that of a relative, Hamas terrorists dressed in Israel Defense Forces uniforms, another militant throwing a hand grenade into an Israeli family's bomb shelter, a decapitated soldier, and several charred human remains including those of young children, according to the Times of Israel. In addition, a minute-long video was released on X, a small snippet of what the reporters were shown. In that clip, militants can be seen shooting a car, from both the driver's and the terrorist's perspective.
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Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, an IDF spokesman, said: “Why does a person take a GoPro [to such an attack]? Because he’s proud of what he does.”
Doubts about the attacks that left roughly 1,400 people dead prompted Israel to show the "gruesome" videos, according to Eylon Levy, who explained the decision in a video posted to X, formerly Twitter.
"Now, unfortunately, and I can't believe I'm saying this and I can't believe that we as a country are having to do this as we work to defeat the terror organization that brutalized our people, we are witnessing a Holocaust deniallike phenomenon evolving in real time as people are casting doubt on the magnitude of the atrocities that Hamas committed against our people and, in fact, recorded in order to glorify that violence," he said.
In addition to the 1,400 people who were killed, the vast majority of which were civilians, there are still more than 200 who were kidnapped and taken back to Gaza where they are being held by either Hamas or another smaller Gaza-based terror group. Only two have been freed so far.
Israel’s National Center of Forensic Medicine is also studying the remains and trying to identify those whose identities remain unknown. They discovered remains that were burned beyond recognition, some of which had their hands bound at the wrists, according to the Media Line. Many were burned alive. The scientists also found two spinal cords that had been burned badly, with the experts believing it was likely a parent and child who were bound together by metal wires.
“When you do this job downstairs, you get detached,” Dr. Chen Kugel, the head of the institution, told the outlet. “But then, you learn the stories and connect to the people. It’s hard not to feel the tragedy. It’s so big. And when I go to the Shura camp [where deceased bodies in Israel are first collected] and see containers like you’d see at the port, but they’re all full of bodies … And you hear the stories — that behind their charred bodies, something terrible happened — it’s very difficult. I’ve seen many things in my 31-year career, but the magnitude and the cruelty [here] is terrible,” Kugel added.
Both U.S. and Israeli officials have compared the attacks to the heinous actions carried out by the Islamic State previously.
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“When we say Hamas is ISIS, it’s not a branding effort,” Hagari noted. “We say ISIS in the sense of — [Hamas’s] media elements, cruelty, and barbarism are ISIS elements."
Oct. 7 was the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust.