UK Parliament Presented With Harrowing Report on Hamas’s October 7 Atrocities

Latest Developments

Hamas’s Primary Goal Was to Slaughter Israelis: A new 318-page report presented to the British Parliament on March 18 outlined Hamas’s extensive atrocities in Israel on October 7, 2023. Prepared by the All-Party Parliamentary Group for UK-Israel, the report detailed how approximately 6,000 terrorists, including Hamas’s elite Nukhba forces, members of the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, and nine other armed groups, invaded southern Israel. A total of 1,182 people were killed, over 4,000 wounded and 251 taken hostage during the onslaught. Writing in an op-ed in The Spectator, the group’s chairman, Lord Andrew Roberts, wrote that the report “comprehensively disproves” the claim that Hamas had attacked only military targets, “showing that the moment that Hamas managed to prevent the IDF from counterattacking, it got down to what it had really set out to do all along: slaughtering Israelis.”
Hamas Committed Mutilation, Sexual Violence, and Other Atrocities: The attack resulted in the “largest single massacre of Jewish people since the Holocaust and the deadliest per capita terrorist attack, with just over one in every 10,000 Israelis killed and the third overall deadliest terrorist attack in the world to date.” The report stated that the perpetrators systematically killed their victims, including through “shootings, asphyxiation and burning, grenade explosions, rocket-propelled grenade and missile attacks.” The terrorists also committed acts of mutilation, sexual violence, and other atrocities before and after their victims’ deaths — documenting the attacks through GoPro footage and social media posts.
Witness Accounts of Brutal Rapes and Murder: The report collected firsthand accounts of the attacks in each of the 32 communities impacted. One victim, identified as Sapir, recalled seeing the attackers brutally rape and murder multiple women while she was hiding under dry grass four miles southwest of the Nova festival site, with one terrorist stabbing a woman in the back every time she flinched during the rape. Another witness described hearing the rapes, saying, “I heard [the male victim’s] voices screaming, and when I heard shots, they immediately stopped screaming. [But I] heard the girls [screaming] for a long time.” Another account recalled the death of Kibbutz Kfar Aza resident Roee Idan, a photojournalist for the Israeli news outlet Ynet, whose three-year-old daughter managed to crawl from under her dead father’s body and seek shelter with a neighbor before she was kidnapped by the terrorists.

FDD Expert Response

“The UK parliamentary group recognized the importance of establishing the historical record of October 7, much as General Dwight D. Eisenhower recognized the importance of documenting the horrors of the Holocaust. Atrocity deniers seek to exculpate the perpetrators, deny the victims their right to self-defense, justify the actions that they deny happened, and wish for more of it in the future. Though these aims are contradictory, October 7 deniers exist outside reality, in a world of conspiracy theories and disregard for the truth.” — David May, Research Manager and Senior Research Analyst

“This report is the most comprehensive account so far of the atrocities committed by Hamas and its allies on October 7. It leaves no doubt that Hamas launched a pogrom targeting civilians despite its deceitful insistence that what the world witnessed that day was a military operation. It also leaves no doubt as to the savage nature of the enemy Israel faces and its implacable desire to violently erase Israel from the map.” — Ben Cohen, FDD Senior Analyst and Rapid Response Director