The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on Monday screened selected footage of Hamas’ atrocities during its Oct. 7 invasion of the Jewish state for international media at a military base outside Tel Aviv.
By Andrew Bernard, The Algemeiner
The extremely graphic videos were intended to counter claims from Hamas and skeptics in the Western media about the extent of the Palestinian terror group’s butchery, including whether Hamas had executed children.
In one set of clips released to the public, Hamas terrorists, some disguised as IDF soldiers, can be seen firing directly into a civilian car, killing its occupants.
The journalists in attendance were allowed to describe, but not record, the remaining 43 minutes of footage, much of it taken from Hamas’ own body cams intended to celebrate their killing of innocents.
“Men, women, and children are shot, blown up, hunted, tortured, burned, and generally murdered in any horrible manner you could predict, and some that you might not,” wrote The Atlantic‘s Graeme Wood, who attended the screening.
“The terrorists surround a Thai man they have shot in the gut, then bicker about what to do next. (About 30,000 Thais live in Israel, many of them farm workers.) ‘Give me a knife!’ one Hamas terrorist shouts. Instead, he finds a garden hoe, and he swings at the man’s throat, taking thwack after thwack.”
“The videos show pure, predatory sadism; no effort to spare those who pose no threat; and an eagerness to kill nearly matched by eagerness to disfigure the bodies of the victims. In several clips, the Hamas killers fire shots into the heads of people who are already dead,” Wood wrote.
Audio from a phone call played at the screening includes a Hamas terrorist calling his family in Gaza from the phone of the Jewish woman he has just killed, bragging that he is a “hero” because he “killed 10 Jews with my own hands.”
Since Hamas’ Oct. 7 invasion of Israel, in which terrorists massacred over 1,400 people, mostly civilians, some journalists have used Israel’s reluctance to release raw footage of people being killed to cast doubt on or deny eyewitness reports of Hamas’ crimes, or to dispute whether Hamas had actually beheaded children.
“Last night, I asserted that this report indicated that babies were beheaded. This was an overstatement. I should have said that the report established that babies were found headless, a fact that lends plausibility to claims of beheading, but which does not prove them,” New York Magazine‘s Eric Levitz posted on X/Twitter on Sunday, referring to a report on post-mortem examinations of people killed by Hamas.
Some pro-Palestinian outlets have also tried to blame Israel itself for the civilian deaths.
“A growing number of reports indicate Israeli forces responsible for Israeli civilian and military deaths following October 7 attack,” the anti-Israel outlet Mondoweiss wrote on Sunday.
While Hamas frequently denies that it targets civilians at all, Hamas strategy manuals published along with the footage on Monday make clear that they instructed their men to kill as many people as possible while securing hostages to bring back to Gaza.
“One cell will take over the eastern part and the other the western part of the kibbutz,” one mission guide says. “They must shoot down as many victims as possible, take hostages and take some of them to the Gaza Strip using various cars.”
Hamas is believed to be holding more than 220 people hostage in Gaza, including children, women, and the elderly.
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