The real-life horror movie our politicians refuse to see
Raw footage, running for about 45 minutes, captures the unspeakable horror of October 7: innocent people being murdered, beheaded, hunted down, raped, kicked, bashed, burnt alive. Here’s what Australia’s leaders had to say when I asked if they had seen it.
“I saw two little boys. One was maybe six, another eight. And their father had tried to protect them by putting them in a bomb shelter near their home. Hamas terrorists exploded a grenade in there, right on top of the father, who must have laid on top of them.”
Roanne Knox is the Liberal candidate for Wentworth in Sydney’s eastern suburbs. She’s describing what she saw when she watched unredacted footage of what happened in southern Israel on October 7 last year.
“The two little boys came back into the home, one looking badly injured, covered in blood, and his brother was saying to him, ‘Are you OK?’ These boys were so little, they were looking after each other.
“One of the boys couldn’t hear properly because of the blast. And then the terrorists went into the house. They went into the kitchen and started looking through the fridge. They said to the little boys, ‘Do you have Coke? Do you have Pepsi?’ ”
Knox is a highly educated businesswoman, a mother of two young girls. She has studied in Israel. She had read widely about October 7, but she tells Inquirer that nothing prepared her for the package of footage from the October 7 terrorist massacres she viewed five months before being preselected for Malcolm Turnbull’s old seat.
“It’s the banality of evil that they talked about at the Nuremberg trials. The terrorists just couldn’t have cared less. The lack of humanity. They were just literally looking through the fridge: ‘What can we eat? What’s here for us?’ They had just killed their father.”
The raw footage, running for about 45 minutes, was gathered by the Israel Defence Forces. It’s unredacted, unspeakably horrific, sourced from body cameras worn by Hamas terrorists, security cameras in and around the homes of Jewish people living in kibbutzes near the border with Gaza, and from the mobile phones of some of the hundreds of young Jews who went to a music festival in the desert one night a year ago to dance.
It captures some of the horror. Innocent people being murdered, some beheaded, hunted down, raped, kicked, bashed, burnt alive. People ripped from their homes, from that Nova music festival, wounded and taken as hostages. Terrorists shouting with glee. Palestinians cheering the arrival of the trucks laden with human beings as terrorist cargo.
The next day, Hezbollah terrorists in the north started firing rockets at Israel in solidarity with Hamas in the south. In July, Hezbollah rockets hit a soccer field in northern Israel, murdering and maiming children.
Given the wilful blindness among many of our politicians to what Israel confronts, I was heartened when I heard Knox recently tell a small group of Australians Jews that she had watched the footage. “Seeing that brutality makes you better appreciate why Israel is responding in the way it does, in Gaza in the south and against Hezbollah in the north,” she told Inquirer this week.
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The real-life horror movie our politicians refuse to see
Raw footage, running for about 45 minutes, captures the unspeakable horror of October 7: innocent people being murdered, beheaded, hunted down, raped, kicked, bashed, burnt alive. Here’s what Australia’s leaders had to say when I asked if they had seen it.
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She recalls an audio recording of a Hamas terrorist speaking to his parents by phone, telling them he has killed 10 Jews. “His mother is saying, ‘Well done. You kill as many Jews as you can. We’re so proud of you.’
“Life did not mean anything to them,” says Knox. “No free country can remain free for long with that lack of humanity on its borders.”
The existence of this definitive visual and audio account of the October 7 massacre is well known. Shown in small screenings, it is otherwise tightly held by the Israeli embassy in Canberra for obvious reasons. First and foremost, out of respect for the families of the people in the footage. No one should remember the people they love in this way. The barbaric footage can be used for propaganda.
As they hunted down innocent people and murdered them, Hamas terrorists can be heard on their body cams saying: “Is the camera on? Make sure we are filming this so we can show everyone what we have done.”
As the world marks one year since those horrific terrorist attacks on October 7, with around 61 hostages still alive, still in captivity, Inquirer asked the Israeli embassy about the footage, and who they had shown it to.
Israel embassy spokeswoman Illana Rabin Lenk said she “didn’t see the point” of asking who had seen it. The point is crystal clear: informed leadership about evil matters in this country, too.
So, Inquirer asked our politicians, including Anthony Albanese, Foreign Minister Penny Wong, Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus, other government ministers, other Labor MPs and senators, Peter Dutton, senior shadow ministers and members of the influential Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, if they have viewed the unredacted 45-minute footage.
The Greens? We didn’t ask them. They are beyond redemption when it comes to distinguishing between good and evil.
The Prime Minister’s office, claiming to answer on behalf of all Labor ministers and Labor MPs, declined to say whether any had seen the footage.
I’ll take that as a no.
Though Peter Khalil, Labor’s chairman of the PJCIS, and Josh Burns, Labor MP for Macnamara (formerly Melbourne Ports, with a large Jewish constituency) had the courage to buck the party line and give their own answers.
The Albanese government is calling for a ceasefire. Wong chose not to visit the October 7 sites when she finally went to Israel in January. How can a Foreign Minister speak about Israel in our parliament, or at the UN, with a skerrick of gravitas and credibility without viewing first-hand the evil Israel faces? Watching the unredacted horror of October 7 would help Albanese and Wong understand the true nature of the threats facing Israel. Not watching this footage is an abrogation of leadership, of duty.
While Albanese and Wong call piously for a ceasefire and ultimately a two-state solution, neither of them has explained how Israel can remain a thriving democracy with terrorists on their southern and northern borders.
Both Hamas and Hezbollah are explicitly and unashamedly dedicated to the destruction of Israel. Both are prepared to achieve their ends using means that the word “barbarous” only hints at. Not for these barbarians the niceties of the Geneva Conventions or the laws of warfare. A ceasefire would be no more than an opportunity to regroup and re-arm.
The federal Opposition Leader says the impact of the full package of October 7 footage was profound – even for a police officer who has seen terrible things. “I felt physically sick,” Dutton told Inquirer this week. “The depravity of the Hamas terrorists and their callous disregard for human life was something I will never forget.”
What about so-called teals Allegra Spender from Wentworth, Monique Ryan in Kooyong and Zoe Daniel in Goldstein and Labor’s Michelle Ananda-Rajah in Higgins – all representing electorates with high numbers of Jewish voters? I asked them if they had seen the 45-minute footage.
Spender, whose eastern suburbs Sydney electorate has the highest percentage of Jews in the country (about 12 per cent), didn’t answer the question. She did tell Inquirer that it was “extremely powerful to speak directly to survivors, witnesses and family members about the horror of October 7. Telling (the) truth about what happened on October 7 is vital.” No other teals responded. Were they waiting for instructions from Simon Holmes a Court?
Burns saw some of the footage from Kfar Aza, the kibbutz, along with CCTV footage from Sderot when he visited Israel in December. “I saw first-hand the destruction caused on October 7. The footage, devastation and testimonies I’ve seen will never leave me.”
Burns was one of only two Labor MPs to join that first delegation to Israel of federal politicians arranged by the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council.
Who on the PJCIS, the critical body responsible for making recommendations to government about our security, watched the footage when it was made available for them?
As it turns out, Khalil was the only Labor MP on the PJCIS who watched it last November. Inquirer has been told Labor members Raff Ciccone, Jess Walsh, Josh Wilson, Julian Hill, Luke Gosling and Marielle Smith did not. Khalil told Inquirer “that given the graphic nature of the footage, viewing was a matter of personal discretion”.
Sharon Claydon and Brendan O’Connor joined the PJCIS in August. They didn’t respond when asked if they had requested to see the footage after joining.
All five Liberal committee members – Andrew Wallace, Simon Birmingham, Andrew Hastie, James Paterson and Zoe McKenzie – had viewed it. (McKenzie had to leave part way through to give a speech.)
As a former SAS soldier, Hastie has seen more than his fair share of inhumanity.
He told Inquirer: “If people want to sit on the intelligence committee and look at the world through rose-coloured glasses, they’re not going to be serving the Australian people as they should. We have Hamas sympathisers in this country, we’ve got Hezbollah sympathisers in this country. We had ISIS sympathisers in this country, people who actually condone and support this sort of behaviour.”
Hastie reckons it goes wider than the PJCIS, that members of parliament and senators “have a special obligation to sometimes watch or view things that are deeply uncomfortable so that you can accurately understand the threats that the Australian people are facing”.
Wallace, the deputy chairman of the PJCIS, says he will never be the same after watching the footage last November. Speaking to Inquirer this week, he mentioned the two little boys, too. “I remember it like it was yesterday.
“I could see the explosion and then the two boys came running out, one of them with blood all over him. Hamas terrorists throwing hostages into the back of four-wheel utes, like they were dead dogs.” He was deeply disturbed to watch footage of Palestinian civilians celebrating the arrival of hostages on those utes when they arrived back into Gaza.
Wallace, who also travelled to Israel in December, says no one ever talks about the looting. “When the Hamas terrorists moved on to the next place, Palestinian civilians came in from Gaza, waves of them with carts and wheelbarrows to take whatever they could as they looted and stole everything that wasn’t nailed down from the kibbutz. They would’ve been stepping over dead bodies to do that.”
Paterson travelled to Israel in March to see where unspeakable carnage happened that day. No Labor MPs joined the delegation arranged by AIJAC.
Paterson says all members of the PJCIS should have watched the unredacted full package of footage of the October 7 terrorist attacks.
“Some in Labor have said there should be an immediate ceasefire,” he says. “How can there be an immediate ceasefire when hostages are still being held? How can Israel ever live with Hamas alongside them and run the risk of another October 7? If you don’t know the full horror of October 7, you won’t understand why Israel is not prepared to tolerate that threat.”
Writing in Time Magazine in January, Jeffrey Sonnenfeld described the IDF documentation of human carnage as “the worst 45-minute film you will ever see” – and “a dark reality which must be seen”.
A close second is the BBC’s Surviving October 7: We Will Dance Again. Screening since September 26, this 90-minute documentary features spinechilling footage and witness testimony of what happened to hundreds of young joyous Israelis who went to a weekend music festival to dance – and met with barbarism. We can only dream of the ABC commissioning something like this to mark October 7, of chasing younger audiences – as ABC bosses like to say – with a production of such moral clarity.
Inquirer asked the same group of federal politicians whether they have seen it. Dutton was the only one to say yes.