Much like Holocaust-deniers, many Jew-haters around the world continue to downplay or outright dismiss the savage October 7, 2023 terrorist invasion of southern Israel. A British parliamentary group is determined to put the lie to their antisemitic denials by documenting what happened on that black Shabbat, including details of every act of kidnapping, rape, torture, and murder.

The first edition of the report, which which was presented this week to the UK Parliament, is the product of over 14 months of painstaking work by noted British historian Lord Andrew Roberts and the 7 October Parliamentary Commission established by the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) UK-Israel established, whose stated aim is “to ensure the events of that day were meticulously documented and permanently memorialised.”

In his forward to the report, Lord Roberts writes: “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.”

In particular, the reports lays out incontrovertible evidence of numerous incidents of “rape, gang rape, forced mutilation, sexualized torture, forced nudity, and posting sexualized images of victims on social media without consent.”

It’s a historical document more than anything, and it makes for brutal reading. But it’s also an essential reference as the ensuing Gaza war continues to dominate the news cycle nearly 18 months after the attack.

A summary of the report’s main points:

• Scale and barbarity of the attack: The report describes the attack as “scenes of sadistic barbarism not seen in world history since the Rape of Nanjing in 1937,” and concludes that some 7,000 attackers from Hamas and allied Palestinian factions breached Israeli borders across 55 sites, killing 1,182 people (including 18 UK citizens) and taking 251 hostages. ⠀
• Documented atrocities: Evidence from GoPro and CCTV footage substantiates claims of “deliberate civilian murders, sexual violence, and body desecration.”
• Israeli military unpreparedness: The report criticizes the Israeli military for “misjudgment of Hamas’s capabilities and intentions” stemming from a systematic naïveté in the IDF’s upper echelons that saw Hamas as a secondary threat to Iran and Hezbollah.
• Intelligence failures: The IDF lacked “a deep understanding of Hamas’s worldview, culture, religion, language, and history,” contributing to intelligence assessments that failed to anticipate the scale and sophistication of the attack.

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