Israel showed horrific footage of Hamas atrocities: reporters cried

Israel showed footage of Hamas killings “to counter the militants’ denial of atrocities.” Chilling CCTV, cell phone and body camera footage was shown to reporters.

Israeli authorities have shown harrowing images of the killings and mutilations caused by militants during the Hamas rampage in southern Israel on October 7, The Guardian writes.

The Israeli government showed a 43-minute selection of footage in a private screening for dozens of foreign journalists at a military base in Tel Aviv on Monday to counter attempts to deny or downplay the militants’ atrocities.

The footage, captured by CCTV cameras, body cameras worn by the Hamas attackers, car dashboard cameras, social media accounts and cellphone videos, left some reporters in tears, The Guardian writes. The grisly material included the murder of children and the beheading of some victims.

Viewers were not allowed to record the clip, but one clip, about one minute long, was made public: it showed Hamas militants stopping a car driving slowly along a rural road. The gunmen opened fire, hitting the car, which swerved and stopped, revealing two people crumpled in the front seats.

In another scene, Hamas attackers entered a house and spoke to a girl hiding under a table. “After some talking, they shoot and kill her,” tweeted Jotham Confino, one of the correspondents present at the screening. “It’s hard to say how old she is, but she looks 7-9 years old.”

In another scene, a father and his two sons, aged about seven and nine, ran in their underwear for shelter. The attacking gunman threw a grenade, killing the man. The boys appear bloody and run away. “Daddy’s dead, it wasn’t a joke,” one of them shouts. “I know, I saw it,” his brother replies, later shouting, “Why am I alive?”

Other footage showed a gunman with a farm tool chopping the head of a man lying on the ground, gunmen killing wounded female Israeli soldiers, and a jubilant Hamas fighter calling his family: “I killed 10 Jews with my own hands. Now I’m using a dead Jewish woman’s phone to call you.”

Another video showed an Israeli woman examining a woman’s partially burnt corpse to ensure it was a family member. The victim’s dress was hiked up to her waist and her underpants were removed. Maj. Gen. Mickey Edelstein, who briefed reporters after the viewing, said authorities had evidence of rape.

The still images showed a beheaded soldier, charred human remains, including small children, and several Islamic State flags, the Times of Israel reported. “When we say that Hamas is ISIS, it is not an attempt to create an image,” Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari told reporters after the screening.

Horrific scenes from the attack, which killed more than 1,400 Israelis, have been widely reported on social media over the past two weeks, but Israeli government spokesman Eilon Levy said the scale of the atrocities was reminiscent of a “Holocaust denial phenomenon.”

The screening, as The Guardian notes, came amid renewed calls for Israel to stop bombing Gaza, which has killed at least 400 Palestinians in the past 24 hours, bringing the total death toll in the territory to more than 5,000, according to the Hamas-run health ministry . It said that among the dead were 2,055 children.

According to the United Nations, some 1.4 million people – more than half of Gaza’s population – were displaced by the retaliatory bombing, resulting in a humanitarian catastrophe for people trapped without water, food and medicine. Israeli authorities said they had launched limited raids into Gaza ahead of an expected ground offensive.