The truth about Hamas atrocities of October 2023
"A savage rupturing of our civilisation"'A new report leaves no doubt: 7 October was a hyper-violent onslaught against Jews and humanity'.This report is titled '7 October Parliamentary Commission Report' and written by the eminent historian Baron Andrew Roberts.The Report, though not an official Parliamentary enquiry (it was commissioned by the All Party UK-Israel Parliamentary Group) was chaired by Lord Roberts of Belgravia. A parliamentary panel took part in testimony collection, chaired by Roberts, consisting of Lord Macdonald of River Glaven KC, Baroness Fox of Buckley, Lord Farmer, Baroness Smith of Newnham, Baroness Hodge of Barking, Greg Smith MP and Sharon Hodgson MP.Its brief statement of objectives says - "Following the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023—one of the deadliest terror attacks in history—parliamentarians sought to create an independent record of the events. The assault resulted in 1,182 deaths, over 4,000 injuries, and 251 hostages taken, making it the deadliest massacre of Jewish people since the Holocaust. Among the victims were 18 UK citizens, marking the largest UK loss in a Middle Eastern terror attack.Amid rising misinformation and efforts to distort the facts, this report provides a clear, factual, and chronological account to preserve historical accuracy. By drawing on survivor testimonies, eyewitness statements, and expert analysis, it ensures the full scale and impact of the attack are properly documented. In an era of denialism, it serves as an impartial, evidence-based record to support informed discussion and prevent the erasure of truth".The report is a long one and I cannot claim to have read all 300 pages.It describes all the attacks by Hamas; names the people they raped, killed and kidnapped and the disgusting actions they perpetrated against them.But the author's synopsis is very pertinent"Holocaust denial took a few years to take root in pockets of society, but on 7 October 2023 it took only hours for people to claim that the massacres in southern Israel had not taken place. Hamas and its allies, both in the Middle East and equally shamefully in the West, have sought to deny the atrocities, despite the ironic fact that much of the evidence for the massacres derives 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 present Report has been undertaken to counter such pernicious views, and to lay down incontrovertible proof - for now and for the years to come – that nearly 1,200 innocent people were indeed murdered by Hamas and its allies, and very often in scenes of sadistic barbarism not seen in world history since the Rape of Nanjing in 1937.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, Israel unilaterally withdrew from the Gaza Strip 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 into some of the houses, none of the women and children they dealt with were terrified. Those videos were published by the Israeli occupation. They weren’t published by us.” Asked about the taking of women and children as hostages, something even he could hardly deny, Al-Hayya claimed, “One of the goals of 7 October was to kidnap a small group of Israeli soldiers to exchange them for Palestinian prisoners. But when the [IDF] Gaza division completely collapsed in the face of the resistance fighters, we took a lot of prisoners. It was not our plan to capture civilians, including women and children.” Yet as we shall show, Hamas not only planned to take hostages, but abused them in the act.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 proven” When Bowen said that evidence of sexual assault was piling up, Al-Hayya said, “I told you the instructions were clear. There may have been abnormal acts by irresponsible people, but these are just allegations.” By total contrast, our Report details that horrific acts of systematic rape and sexual abuse took place, in contradiction to Koranic teaching, and that everything 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 concentrated on the two days between the unleashing of the assault on the morning of 7 October 2023 and the liberation of the last of the Kibbutzim, and we have documented each of nearly 1,200 deaths so that future generations will not be misled about the extent and horror of the massacre.As a Gentile, I believe that it is vital to prevent the emergence of another, more modern version of Holocaust denial, namely 7 October denial. After the Holocaust, non-Jews like me owe the Jewish people nothing less. This can only be done by the kind of facts-based, evidential work in this Report, which is dedicated to Emily Damari, the British hostage who was held in Gaza for 471 days, and daughter of the superbly brave Mandy Damari who our investigation teams have met in Israel and London.Lest anyone doubt the importance of showing the truth about what happened, let us remember that in the British general election of July 2024 there were several parliamentary candidates who openly attempted to justify the 7 October atrocities. Rami Ruhayem, a journalist based in Beirut who appears on BBC News, also sought to question the BBC reports about the massacres. In the Oxford Union in November 2024, Miko Peled, who calls himself a radical anti-Zionist, described the murders, rapes, and kidnappings of 7 October as “acts of heroism”.The Palestinian poet Mohammed El-Kurd, who has equated Zionism with genocide, started his speech by announcing that there was “no room for debate” and ended it by walking out of the chamber. The anti-Israel motion passed by 278 to 59 votes. After fifteen months of fighting, a second ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas was signed in January 2025. Immediately after the agreement was announced Al-Hayya exposed the full extent of the Hamas ideology – 'that Hamas and its supporters viewed the atrocities on 7 October 2023 as a “miraculous and unprecedented military and security achievement...[and] will remain a source of pride for [their] people and [their] resistance, passed down from generation to generation.”Our Report will hopefully permit people to see such denials and justifications for what they really are: a perversion of reason and rejection of human decency. We owe it to the victims and their grieving families to set down the ghastly, unvarnished truth about the sheer barbarism that Hamas and its terrorist allies unleashed on 7 October 2023'. Andrew RobertsLord Roberts of BelgraviaHouse of Lords March 2025 Here are some details from the report that describe despicable acts the brave Hamas freedom fighters inflicted on Jewish women, children and the elderly in the attack written by Brendan O'Neillhttps://www.spiked-online.com/2025/03/20/a-savage-rupturing-of-our-civilisation/'The methods of murder included shooting, burning, asphyxiation, grenade explosions and missile attacks. Many of the victims were subjected to mutilation, sexual violence and ‘other forms of deliberate brutality’, either before or after death. A woman was raped at gunpoint. Other women were raped in their bedrooms before being murdered. Rescue forces found women’s bodies ‘stripped of their underwear’ as well as ‘signs of semen’. The part of the report where I had to take a break from reading describes the discovery of a woman’s body where there had been ‘[the] insertion of a knife into the genital area’.The violence was ferocious. Molotov cocktails were thrown to burn people alive. A father and his baby daughter suffered savage burns when Hamas militants used a butane gas cylinder to make an inferno of their home. Dad spent 58 days in an induced coma, his daughter spent eight days. Hamas entered one home screaming ‘Yahud!’, meaning Jews. And they found Jews: a father, a mother and their four kids. Dad used a piece of furniture in a desperate effort to ward off the invaders – they shot him dead. They then shot his daughter in the face. She had ‘a hole in her cheek and she was gasping her last breaths’, her mother later recounted. Mum and the three surviving kids were taken to Gaza and forced into a ‘hole’ in the ground. Why? Because they’re Yahud.The report is full of accounts like this, of the most bestial violence, visited with extreme prejudice on men, women, children. 7 October feels like a thing from the last century, the century of war and extermination. It was as if atavistic hatreds had leapt from the history books and imprinted themselves on our complacent era. Perhaps the report’s most valuable contribution is to make it crystal clear that this was no impulsive assault. This was not the Wretched of the Earth ‘breaking out’ of their ‘prison camp’ to wreak desperate revenge on their oppressors, as Hamas-adjacent leftists would have us believe. No, this pogrom was years in the making. It was a conscious and thoroughly organised massacre of Jews.Seven-thousand militants took part. That included 3,800 of Hamas’s elite Nukhba forces and its Al-Qassam Brigades and 2,200 individuals from other terror armies, including Palestinian Islamic Jihad. A further 1,000 pogromists remained in Gaza to fire missiles at Israel and provide tactical back-up to the killers on the ground. Hamas had been planning the onslaught since 2018, when it set up a ‘Joint Room for Palestinian Resistance Factions’ to pool terror resources and plot the invasion. On the day itself, the pogromists attacked by land, sea and air. Far from an act of spontaneous violence, fuelled by despair, this was a highly disciplined act of fascist terror with the express purpose of killing as many Jews as possible.Reading this report is a distressing task, but it’s one everyone would benefit from. It is our human duty to know and tell the truth about 7 October. The words of German novelist Herta Müller rang in my ears as I read. She described 7 October as a ‘total derailment from civilisation’. ‘There is an archaic horror in this bloodlust that I no longer thought possible in this day and age’, she wrote. The report brings crashing down the snivelling and unforgivable moral equivalence many Western observers make between Hamas’s violence and Israel’s response. The war in Gaza is awful but it is war. What happened on 7 October was something else entirely. It was the intimate, barbarous torture of Jews, carried out with pride and glee. It was fascism.This, then, is what the activist class has been making excuses for. This is what they referred to as ‘resistance’. This is what they called ‘a day of celebration’. The burning to death of Jews. The rape of Jewish women. The murder of Jewish children. The assassination of a Jew who had survived the greatest crime in history. We now have all the data, all the timelines and all the information about 7 October. But we still await that moment of moral clarity when our intellectual elites finally acknowledge the gravity of this crime against Jews and humanity, and devote themselves to defending the civilisation it so gravely offends'.What do you make of all this Messrs Carter, Ainsworth and Ms Holliday ?
John Hawkes ● 35d15 Comments ● 24d