About 70 people had gathered inside a small meeting hall in Atlanta on Jan. 23 to watch a movie none of them was looking forward to seeing.
Israel put together an official video of the atrocities committed by Hamas in its Oct. 7 terrorist attack. More than 900 Israeli civilians and 300 soldiers were killed that day, and 240 more were taken to the Gaza Strip as hostages.
The attack triggered the Israel-Hamas war in that 141 square miles of territory, now in its fourth month.
Seeing the video is an invitation-only affair directed at journalists, community leaders, and other opinion-makers.
No recording is permitted, only handwritten notes. Viewers sign a statement promising not to record. They were asked not to use any names of victims present in the video.
Families of the victims portrayed—people who were dead, injured, raped, kidnapped, mutilated, or abused, often more than one of those—signed releases allowing the government to use the video footage, according to Anat Sultan-Dadon, Israel’s Consul General for the Southeastern United States who led the showing.
Ms. Sultan-Dadon told The Epoch Times those releases specified closed showings only.
She suggested, though, that the feelings in Israel immediately after the attack have now changed, especially as thousands of pro-Hamas demonstrators marching and rioting around the world suggest falsely that the atrocities didn’t happen, that the footage was faked, and focusing attention on the war in Gaza, instead of what started it.
More families want the footage to be seen, she said. Filmmakers are now at work in Israel making documentaries about Oct. 7.
“We think that it is imperative for the world to know what occurred on Oct. 7,” she told The Epoch Times. “Especially in the face of denials and intentional disinformation that is being spread.”
“It’s important to bear witness, for the viewers of this film. Atrocities and crimes against humanity were committed by Hamas terrorists on Oct. 7,” she said.
The footage comes from various sources, the sourcing noted periodically throughout it: Hamas social media postings, footage from body cams and mobile phones belonging to terrorists later killed or captured, community or home security camera footage, phone videos taken by victims, and video footage shot by first responders entering ravaged settings and getting their first glimpse of countless bodies.
One viewer said afterward it was the worst thing he'd ever seen, and most would silently agree. The only items on the conference tables were boxes of tissue.
An Israeli Defense Force officer was introduced as Major Shai, who supervised the video’s showing, said he’s had to watch it a dozen times, and it’s still hard.
“You do not want to see it more than once,” said Eric Robbins, CEO of the Jewish Federation of Greater Atlanta, which hosted the showing at its Selig Center in Midtown Atlanta.
The major noted that the video shows three waves of the attack.
In the first wave, the terrorists from the Gaza Strip breach the frontier, cutting fences and advancing to the target towns, villages, and kibbutzes.
In the second wave, they commit the attack, with its widespread atrocities.
‘Allah Akbar!’
(Editor’s Note: The following contains graphic descriptions of torture and other violence.)The video contains hundreds of individual shots, some only a few seconds long, faster than an observer can take accurate notes.
There was total silence in the audience during the viewing; the only sound an Epoch Times reporter could hear was the scratching of his own pen as he took notes.
All of it is unedited, Maj. Shai said. It does contain closed-caption text in English of what’s being said and occasional titles establishing the location. What follows is a rough chronological account of what’s in the video:
From the very beginning, terrorists are shouting “Allah Akbar!” or “God is great!” even as they cut through the security fence at Israel’s border.
Silent footage taken from the dashcam of a victim’s car shows the car being shot at by terrorists standing along the road as the car drives by. The windshield cracks in a spiderweb pattern but doesn’t shatter.
The driver isn’t visible, but the car slowly starts to veer to the left, its driver apparently now dead or incapacitated, as it rolls without braking to collide with a parked car.
Terrorists shoot passengers in a small car.
They shoot people who are already down.
They shoot people in a small white car.
A terrorist can be heard shouting “Allah is great” on the recording of his car’s dash cam.
Murdered people can be seen lying in the street.
Terrorists check a car with dead people in it, ready to shoot them some more.
‘Why Am I Alive?’
At Kibbutz Be'eri, which lost more than 95 murdered residents and more than 30 taken hostage that day, terrorists near its gate kill people in a car that slows waiting for the gate to open.A terrorist body cam records shouting at an ambulance.
Also, from a body cam, terrorists on foot at the kibbutz murder a dog, taking it down with one bullet and then pumping two or three more rounds into it.
They go into someone’s backyard and fire into the house. They advance onto the patio. The terrorist wearing the body cam can be heard breathing heavily. The footage shows one of his comrades setting the house on fire.
The terrorist fingers the blades on Venetian blinds to peer into the house. Another cuts a screen with Sept. 11-style box cutters. Music can be heard playing, perhaps from the home’s radio or television. They go into the house.
A title now locates the action at Netiv Ha'asara, a moshav or agricultural settlement near the frontier that lost more than 20 people murdered that day.
The view shifts to a home security camera. A father and two sons can be seen in their underwear in another room as they flee. They flee through a doorway off the patio, which appears to be to a garage or shed. A terrorist throws a hand grenade through the doorway.
A terrorist pulls the two boys out, and their father can be seen lying there, probably dead. They’re crying. One of them cries out, “Daddy! Daddy!” the Hebrew word for father, ‘abba,’ is audible. The other tells him, “Daddy’s dead,” as the terrorist hauls them into the house.
They’re now in the kitchen. A terrorist takes a bottle from the refrigerator and asks them, “Is this water?” having just murdered their father. He puts it back and takes another large bottle, red and perhaps a Coca-Cola bottle, drinks from it, and puts it back in the refrigerator.
The boys are bleeding and bruised but still ambulatory. One tries to convince his brother that, yes, their father is really dead. The footage shows them, now alone in the kitchen, one of them saying, “Why am I alive? Why am I alive?” They run outside and get away.
‘They Cut Off Their Heads With Knives!’
A terrorist’s mobile phone shows firing outdoors.Back at Kibbutz Be'eri, they shoot people in a car, pull them out, and steal the vehicle.
Security footage in a kindergarten shows a woman cowering inside an empty room, dimly lit inside. She’s on the ground, and firing can be heard outside the room. A terrorist outside shoots through the door. Her body changes position as the bullets impact. He and another go in to check if she’s dead. They pick her up and carry her out.
The video’s time signature shows it’s 9:57 a.m. The attack had started between 6:30 and 7 a.m.
From a Hamas radio transmission intercepted by Israel and attributed to “Commando Malek,” a voice is heard saying: “They cut off their heads with knives, cut off their heads! Praise Allah!”
On video footage, voices shout, “Kill the Jew! Give me a knife! Kill the Jew!” A man starts trying to chop off a victim’s head with a garden hoe or mattock. “Allah is great!” he shouts, chopping at the man again and again. “Alhamdulilaay!”
A pile of prone bodies is visible. Terrorists pump more bullets into them.
“He said, ‘Israel!’ What Israel?”
A car burns.
“Allah is great!”
A terrorist fires at a man on a bicycle and keeps firing into him after he’s dead.
Kidnapped people are led away and piled into a pickup truck.
The video shows trucks on the streets of Gaza.
A terrorist beats a body in the back of a pickup truck as civilians crowd around and shoot phone videos of him doing it.
Civilians kick a man who’s down in the street.
The scene shifts to a field. A car contains two dead bodies.
Then, there’s an image of a room with at least three dead bodies in it.
There are massive bloodstains in a house and a patio, where a bleeding person appears to have been dragged, leaving a long trail a meter or more wide.
Dead bodies lie in a pool of blood.
A dead dog, a burned body, and more dead bodies are visible.
A woman’s body lies in a laundry room. A man is so burned his face is no longer recognizable.
‘Let Me Speak To Mom!’
A Hamas terrorist uses a victim’s phone to call his family.“Dad, I’m speaking. See how many casualties I killed with my bare hands? I killed her and her husband. I killed 10 Jews with my bare hands!”
The father can be heard saying, “Allah Akbar!”
“Their blood is on my hands. Let me speak to Mom! Mom, your son is a hero.” Someone can be heard in the background saying, “Kill, kill, kill.”
There’s an image of bodies outside what appears to be a community gatehouse or guardhouse.
Civilians hide, primarily young women, talking and crying as they try to decide whether to flee. It’s unclear if they’ve already been captured.
Terrorists sit outdoors and rest, surrounded by the bodies of people they’ve murdered.
A video from a terrorist’s mobile phone shows a girl, perhaps in her early teens, dead with her eyes open. A bloodstain, perhaps from rape, is visible near the crotch of her pants. Another girl’s body is shown, and another, this one also dead, with her eyes open.
A terrorist yanks a woman out of the back of a truck and drags her by the leg to stuff her into the passenger compartment.
Snippets of dialogue are heard:
“Allah akbar!”
“Save ammunition!”
“Two girl soldiers.”
“Wait, wait!”
“We'll take her dogtags.”
“They shot her. Allah is great! Praise Allah! You dogs.”
A woman screams.
“You didn’t kill this one. The fourth is inside.”
“In the head! In the head!”
A terrorist holds a hostage.
“I have her! She’s not dead!”
“Be patient.”
‘We Totally Slaughtered Them!’
From a Hamas radio intercept attributed to “Commando Malek.”“He’s dead. Bring him and hang him, hang him in Al Alam Square!”
“By God, we totally slaughtered them!”
An Israeli soldier is dragged from what appears to be a tank or armored personnel carrier. He’s down on the ground and not moving. A mob surrounds him, beating and kicking him.
A Hamas terrorist takes a selfie. His eyes are aglow. “Allah Akbar!”
A foot can be seen on the soldier’s head, then kicking his head.
A man with a long knife cuts off an IDF soldier’s head. The entire decapitation is visible as he hacks further and further through the neck. The flesh and innards inside the neck can be seen. Two men walk away, one holding the head, still in its helmet.
Ms. Sultan-Dadon said afterward the head was offered for sale publicly in Gaza for $10,000.
The soldier’s family buried the body without the head, but it was later recovered and buried with the body.
Such beheadings, she said in response to a question afterward, were “systematic and widespread,” as was the burning of people who were still alive.
A mob around the body is shown jumping up and down as people kick it and shout, “Allah Akbar!”
The scene switches to the Nova music festival near Kibbutz Re'im. Video from festivalgoers’ cellphones shows the crowd milling around and people smiling. Then, voices begin shouting.
“Why leave here? What’s going on?”
‘Save Some Ammunition!’
Footage from a terrorist’s body cam shows him pumping rounds, one at a time, into the door of each in a row of festival port-a-potties.A festivalgoer’s phone video shows a man sitting inside on one of the toilets and a woman crouching by his feet as they hide.
Footage from the outside now shows a port-a-potty with the door open and a bloodstain on the toilet seat.
Footage from a victim’s mobile phone shows people running and screaming.
“They have snipers! Run away!”
Footage from a terrorist car’s dash cam shows terrorists standing on a road, shooting into a field where people are running.
“How is the murder? High, I swear!”
“Save some ammunition, kids!”
In the Re'im parking lot, where festivalgoers parked, a Hamas body cam shows a car burning.
Gunshots are heard.
“Stop, stop! He’s dead!”
Dead bodies are shown near a car.
A car burns. A terrorist in another car drives slowly by.
A dash cam shows two men trying to escape. One hides under a car, the other going past it and out of sight.
A terrorist drags another victim past the man hiding under a car. Another terrorist shoots the man hiding.
More burning cars are shown from a dash cam. A terrorist drags a man away and then shoots him. The man falls. The terrorist puts another half dozen rounds into him.
“Get rid of her! Come drive!” Terrorists drag a dead woman out of a red car so they can steal it.
A body burns on the highway.
“Allah Akbar! Allah Akbar!”
‘I Want To Take A Selfie With You’
From a Hamas mobile phone: “Load them up!”“Bring her!”
“F*** their country!”
“Bring her!”
“Nobody kills! We want captives!”
A woman wails.
People are thrown into pickup trucks.
From a body cam: “I want to take a selfie with you,” a terrorist says to a victim. They abuse the captives in the truck.
In Gaza, trucks drive down a street with a cheering crowd on it.
Bodies are in a truck.
The scene shifts to a first responder video shot, apparently at the festival’s snack bar. A responder counts bodies.
“I have a dead policewoman here!”
“Oy va voy,” a Jewish expression of woe.
“The whole bar is dead people.” Coolers with Coca-Cola logos are visible.
“Is anyone alive?”
“No signs of life.”
‘See If She Has Tattoos’
A seemingly endless number of dead bodies are visible.Drone footage shows hundreds of abandoned, destroyed, or burned vehicles near the festival.
First responders’ video shows horribly burned bodies outdoors. Some are little more than skeletons.
A first responder counts, “Six, seven, eight, nine. And this is the third cluster, there’s a fourth cluster.”
A woman who was probably raped is dead, her legs spread and naked below the waist.
Someone with the first responders looks for a relative.
“It’s not her.”
“See if she has tattoos.”
Many bodies are shown in a collection area. Some are covered with blankets, some not.
Close-ups are shown of bodies in body bags that are partially unzipped. The faces are blurred out.
More bodies. Some are burned. One of the burned ones is handcuffed.
The video concludes with text indicating 139 dead people had been shown, a tenth of those murdered.
The video was apparently made before Israel revised downward its official estimate of its death toll from 1,400 to 1,200. Two hundred of the bodies were shown to belong to Hamas terrorists.
“This is a glimpse of what occurred on Oct. 7,” Ms. Sultan-Dadon told the stunned and silent audience.
A subsequent video shows a Hamas leader discussing the attack in a television interview. He says, “Israel as a country has no place. We must remove it. We must teach Israel a lesson. We will do this again and again.”
“What we are fighting,” Ms. Sultan-Dadon said, “is an enemy without any sort of political agenda. Their agenda is the destruction of the state of Israel. Their agenda is genocidal.”
That, she said, is stated clearly in the Hamas charter and by all of its leaders.
“We have to fight until we know Hamas no longer has the capability to repeat Oct. 7,” she said.
A man in the audience cited “the relentlessness of the hatred” captured in the video and asked her, “What made them record all their crimes?”
Subsidized By International Aid
Since 2007, when Hamas took over the Gaza Strip following Israel’s 2005 withdrawal, Palestinian children have been relentlessly indoctrinated to hate Jews and Israel in schools run by the United Nations’ UNRWA agency and funded by international aid, Ms. Sultan-Dadon said.International funds similarly pay for Hamas’ and the Palestinian Authority’s pensions for families of “martyrs,” terrorists who attack Israel, with the payment going higher when more damage is done, she said.
“This is the product,” she said. “This is what the international community has been paying for.” Any postwar plan for Gaza, she said, must include “its deradicalization” in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as well.
The Gaza City street scenes were as disturbing as the attack videos themselves, she said, because they show how widespread the hate is among civilians.
She discussed how the government’s outlook had changed since the early days of the war.
At first, it didn’t want to show any of the videos so as not to play into Hamas’ hands. “There was a reluctance to put it out there,” she said.
“It’s different now,” and the hostages’ families want it shown, she said.
Returning hostages have established that women and men alike have been raped.
The mother of a raped Israeli soldier—whom a widely distributed video showed being loaded into a truck with blood on her pants—now talks about it in the media.
Ms. Sultan-Dadon said the Palestinians could have had their own state several times since 1947 when the British territory of Palestine was partitioned into two states, one for Jews and one for Arabs. The Jews took the deal. The Arabs did not.
Several Israeli leaders have been ready since then, “pen in hand,” she said, to make final two-state peace agreements.
“We have yet to find a Palestinian Authority leader who will tell his people the truth, that there will be no Palestinian state at the cost of the Israeli people.”
Israel has willingly signed peace deals over the years with other Muslim states, including Egypt, Jordan, Bahrain, Morocco, and the UAE. “This is not about religion.”
She asked why calls were on Israel for a ceasefire and not on Hamas to surrender.
“If they laid down their weapons, there would be a ceasefire today,” she said.
