TEL AVIV — Dead silence interrupted by anguished howls.
That was the reaction among the 200 foreign journalists present at an IDF briefing at a military base in the center of the country who were shown a harrowing 43-minute compilation of Hamas bodycam videos and other raw footage documenting the Oct. 7 massacre of civilians in southern Israel.
Overwhelmed with grief, some journalists stepped out of the auditorium early.
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The grisly documentation featuring decapitations and torture was released on Monday to dispel what Israeli government spokesman Eylon Levy characterized as “a Holocaust-denial-like phenomenon happening in real-time” as some on social media question the veracity of the jihadi terrorists’ atrocities.
More than 1,400 civilians hailing from Israel, the United States, Canada, Great Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Ukraine, Thailand, Nepal, the Philippines and Argentina were massacred. Many of them shot in cold blood at a music festival or murdered inside their home.
Unedited and extremely graphic, the footage was collected from terrorists’ body cameras, kibbutz security footage and car dashboard cameras, Hamas and victims’ social media accounts and cellphones used by terrorists, victims and first responders to record what was going on.
The Israeli Defense Forces grappled with whether to release the horrific videos, given sensitivity to the dead and their families. In the end, offciials determined that since some of the material was already circulating on social media, the footage should be screened to the media to counter Hamas’s propaganda downplaying or denying the atrocities.
At the briefing, journalists were required to surrender their cellphones and other recording equipment before entering the hall at the IDF base. A heavily censored clip was subsequently released.
In one segment, captured through a recording app on a murdered woman’s cell phone, a jubilant terrorist brags to his father in Gaza City: “Dad, I killed 10 with my bare hands. Their blood is on my hands. Please be proud of me.”
Identified by his father as Mahmoud, he urges his family to look at his WhatsApp messages for further evidence.