‘Amnesty International and Harvard,’ says Alan Dershowitz of the 7 October 2023 massacre, ‘blamed it on Israel even before the first shot was fired in Gaza.’ It was true; the Israel Defence Force (IDF) did not enter Gaza until 27 October, but already there were ‘River to Sea’ anti-Israel demonstrations, anti-Semitic posts on TikTok, the first stirrings of the Tentifada movement on campuses, a deafening silence in the United Nations (especially from its women’s committee which was to take six months to denounce the mass rapine) and a worldwide attempt to blame 7 October on its victims rather than its perpetrators.
On Saturday 15 May 2024 there were two consecutive articles in the Times, a full eighteen months after the 7 October massacres, entitled ‘Jewish Students “scared to leave halls” as societies share Hamas propaganda’ and ‘Anti-Semitism in UK “off the rails” says director of US campuses film’, about Wendy Sachs’ documentary October 8 (which I doubt we’ll see broadcast on the BBC).
We have done this so that future generations will not be misled about the true extent of the massacre
There is therefore every reason to return to the actual events of 7 October, which the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) has done with our report. It details precisely what happened between 6.29 a.m. when Hamas-led terrorists breached the defences in Southern Israel, and over 48 hours later, when the last of them had retreated back into Gaza, or were captured or killed.
The circumstances of all the 1,182 deaths that took place on that horrific day are documented in our report, which at times necessarily makes somewhat gruesome reading. But it reminds us of the sheer sadism, rapine and viciousness that was planned and premeditated. A UN report mentioned ‘fully or partially naked bodies from the waist down [that] were recovered – mostly women – with hands tied and shot multiple times, often in the head.’
Helena Cobban, who co-authored the book Understanding Hamas and Why That Matters that was recently launched at the London School of Economics (LSE) – to its shame – has claimed that ‘a lot of what Hamas did on 7 October was to attack military targets,’ amongst other justifications. Our report comprehensively disproves that, showing that the moment that Hamas managed to prevent the IDF from counter-attacking, it got down to what it had really set out to do all along: slaughtering Israelis. Citizens from forty-four nations were also killed and taken hostage in its bloodlust.
The LSE’s website states that the book examines Hamas’s ‘transformation from early anti-Jewish tendencies to a stance that differentiates between Judaism and Zionism’. This was certainly not apparent on 7 October, where Jews, Zionists, Gentiles, and non-Zionists were killed in a mass murder frenzy reminiscent of the Rape of Nanjing of 1937.
Another reason for writing our report is because of claims that the massacres did not happen. Hamas and its allies, both in the Middle East and equally shamefully in the West, have sought to deny the atrocities altogether. This is despite the ironic fact that much of the evidence for the massacres derives come from film footage from cameras carried by the terrorists themselves – though of course there is also much more from many other sources, as this report delineates.
The phenomenon of Holocaust-denial is a well-known one. Anti-Semites and psychotics who claim that the Shoah – the genocide of Jews by the Nazis during the second world war – did not happen have a long and foul history. Against all the mountainous evidence that six million Jews were indeed deliberately murdered, there have long been claims that it never took place. Whenever such claims have been subjected to the merciless spotlight of rational examination, they collapse in ignominy.
On 4 October 2024, almost a year after the attacks, Khalil al-Hayya, the most senior leader of Hamas outside Gaza, was asked by Jeremy Bowen of the BBC in Doha, ‘Why did you kill so many civilians, women and children?’ He replied:
We ordered our resistance fighters on 7 October not to target civilians, women and children. The objective was the occupation soldiers who are always killing, bombing and destroying in Gaza. We don’t endorse harming civilians. On the ground, there were certainly personal mistakes and actions. The fighters may have felt their lives were in danger.
In fact, the Israeli occupation of Gaza ended in 2005.
‘We’ve all seen how the fighters visited the houses,’ al-Hayya continued, ‘they spoke to the families, they ate and drank.’ Pressed on this bizarre version of events, he added, ‘When they went onto some of the houses, none of the women and children they dealt with were terrified.’ Asked about the taking of women and children as hostages, something even he could hardly deny, al-Hayya claimed, ‘It was not our plan to capture civilians, including women and children.’ Yet as we show, Hamas’s plan to capture children even extended to taking along special incubating units for babies.
Specifically asked by Bowen about sexual assault, al-Hayya stated:
The orders and ethics of all Palestinians and the resistance fighters were humanitarian. We’re brought up according to the Islamic religion, culture and national civilisation. We protect them as we protect ourselves. Sexual, or non-sexual, assault has never been proved.
By total contrast, our report proves that horrific acts of rape and sexual abuse took place in contradiction to Koranic teaching, and that everything Khalil al-Hayya said was a lie, as he must have known it was. We have allowed no embellishment of the facts, which are painful and distressing enough as they are. We have gone out of our way not to include information that we suspect is true but cannot be double-checked. We have done this so that future generations will not be misled about the true extent and the horror of the massacre. Our generation, however, can read the report here.
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