IDF taped terrorist bragging to father about killing Jews
Israel invited world media to view the 40-minute compilation, drawn from raw bodycam and dashcam video, to reveal the true horrors of the October 7 attacks | WARNING: graphic content
A security camera high in the corner of a living room caught the father and his panicked young sons running from their bedrooms, still in their underwear, towards their backyard safe room. In the yard, another camera catches the grenade tossed into the sanctuary and the father’s collapse as the stunned, bloodied boys emerge to find armed Hamas militants in their home.
In the kitchen, the younger boy cries for his father and mother. “Daddy’s dead, Shay, I’m not joking, it’s not a prank,” his brother replies. A Hamas terrorist blunders into the kitchen, takes water from the fridge and glugs. They freeze as he leaves. “Itay, I think we are going to die,” the younger boy sobs.
The Hamas terror attack on southern Israel on October 7 has been seen in footage splashed across the internet - from Hamas’s own live broadcasts from GoPro cameras they strapped to their helmets before the attack, to images relayed by terrified festivalgoers fleeing the automatic gunfire shattering their Supernova “peace party”.
The IDF just screened 43 minutes of horrors from the Hamas massacre on October 7 for foreign journalists. I was not there, my colleague @cjkeller8 was.
— Amy Spiro (@AmySpiro) October 23, 2023
Here is the one minute of footage approved for mass publication at this point, barring most of it out of respect for the dead. pic.twitter.com/UDmQSrkYBL
Yesterday (Monday) the Israeli defence forces invited foreign journalists to a screening too grisly to broadcast. It was a matinee cobbled together with footage from the bodycams of dead Hamas fighters, their dashcams and phones; CCTV from the communities they attacked; video from the phones of Israeli victims and that of emergency responders at each appalling scene.
Such material would, Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said, form part of “a collective memory for the future” for the Israeli people. It was being screened for the international media but not the Israel press “because they do not need to be persuaded”, he said.
“We will not let the world forget about who we are fighting,” Hagari told his audience. “We are not talking about the Palestinians. We are talking about Hamas.”
Operational instructions retrieved by the IDF from the bodies of Hamas men contained a section on “live broadcast” of their footage.
“Direct transfer of the images while verifying the local and other related communication technology is valid,” the instructions read. “Do not waste the camera battery and storage but use them as much as possible.”
The attackers’ cameras captured scene after scene of appalling violence: civilians gunned down; wounded hostages herded into pick-ups and taken to Gaza; a frenzied attack with a shovel on a dying Thai migrant worker in which the terrorists, bickering over what weapon to use, appear to be trying to behead him.
Hundreds of journalists and photographers from media companies all over the world attended today the screening of a film of assorted footage showing the extent of the horrors committed by Hamas.
— (((Emanuel Miller))) 🌻 (@emanumiller) October 23, 2023
Footage was taken from numerous sources, including from bodycams worn by the… pic.twitter.com/c2HRdI98Lh
Helmet-mounted cameras capture bullets pumped into bloodied piles of bodies in which it was hard to imagine anyone was still living. A gunman takes aim at a black labrador cantering towards him, pumping out three bullets before the dog lies dead.
Both the most heartbreaking and chilling of the IDF montage, which they had planned to air for the foreign press in a Tel Aviv cinema before thinking better of it, came from Israeli devices. One was from the cameras that caught the moment the brothers were orphaned and the painful dawning of their circumstances; the other a different interaction, a Hamas fighter calling his father to boast that he was part of the killing spree.
“Dad, I am in Mefalsim, your son killed Jews,” he says in the conversation intercepted by Israeli intelligence, made from the phone of a Jewish woman he boasts he has slaughtered. “I killed ten with my bare hands. Their blood is on my hands! I was the first to enter. Please be proud of me, dad.”
It is far from clear whether either his father or mother are anything other than shocked. “Return to Gaza, enough, enough,” his father says, while his son rants on, demanding his mother open his WhatsApp to see the killings. “Put it on, Mum! Your son is a hero!” he says.
Whether this was murderous braggadocio or he was simply confused about his location. Mefalsim was one of the few places where no kibbutzim were killed, thanks to the heroic actions of volunteer guards there.
Major General Mickey Edelstein said of the terrorists: “They acted very professionally but in an evil way.” Some of those captured and killed had taken drugs; others stayed brutally focused without them.
It was not every day that the IDF would choose to show Hamas’s propaganda videos to journalists, he said. “I will say something personally, we failed to protect our people,” Edelstein added. But “what we showed you, you should know”. He said that however distressing, the footage needed to be aired so that the sadism of the killers could be clearly seen. It pained him, he said, that anyone should believe that any of Israel’s military action could be compared to those of Hamas.
The Times
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