Israel releases bodycam footage from Hamas gunmen who carried out massacre
A father and his two sons run terrified through the kitchen towards their safe room as shots are fired on the streets outside.
Awoken in nothing but their underwear, the family hurry for safety as Hamas terrorists enter their home in the hunt for Israelis to kill.
The father picks up his youngest child and runs with him in his arms as he motions frantically for the older boy to go on ahead, down the stairs to the bunker in the garden. As they get to the staircase, he pushes the boys down to make them go faster.
In home-installed CCTV footage screened by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on Monday, among a tranche of unedited and previously unreleased clips and audio, the horrors of what followed can be seen for the first time.
The Hamas terrorists casually lob a grenade down the stairs, and the explosion flings the father’s body back up the stairs. In his last moments, he had saved his children’s lives.
The boys emerge screaming out of the darkness, before running back into the house.
“I’m not joking, this is not a prank,” the older boy, who looks around 12, tells his little brother from inside their kitchen. “Dad is dead.”
The Israeli government invited a group of journalists to the 43-minute screening as it wanted the world to see the extent of Hamas’ atrocities – and to counter what spokesman Eylon Levy called a “Holocaust-denial like phenomenon unfolding in real time”.
The film was for “journalists who can stomach the horrific truth.”
Indeed, it was appalling beyond measure. Within minutes, some of the audience had left the auditorium in tears. There are images in it that I will never be able to forget. I felt sick throughout. And at points my own tears blurred my vision.
In one clip, which is carefully pieced together through both dashcam and terrorists’ GoPro footage, Hamas fighters walk down a main road pointing their assault rifles as a small silver car drives towards them.
Initially, one of the gunmen waves at the car to stop, before immediately opening fire from just feet away.
The car speeds forward as more terrorists unload their weapons. Its windscreen shatters. Then the footage cuts to the bullet-ridden vehicle surrounded by Hamas gunmen, with its two passengers slumped dead in their seats.
The full film, Israel says, will not be released to the public until all of the families featured within it view the film and give their permission. The government declined to share the fate of the boys whose father was killed outside their bomb shelter as they addressed the press following the screening at Glilot Military Base on Monday.
They are seen in the CCTV footage shaking with fear as the terrorist who had just killed their father rifles through their fridge, swigging from a bottle of Coke.
“I want my mum!” the little one screams.
The boys are left trying to comfort each other after the terrorist leaves the kitchen. One says that he cannot see out of his eye. The other’s shoulder is badly wounded.
“I think we are going to die,” says one.
At the press conference before the screening, Mr Levy said it was vital to put out the footage as people were “casting doubt on the magnitude of the atrocities that Hamas committed against our people.”
Certainly, the footage compiled from dash-cams, home CCTV, traffic control, and body-mounted cameras used by the terrorists, reveals the scope and the scale of the extraordinary savagery of Hamas.
An instruction manual found on the bodies of the terrorists after the massacre detailed their plan.
Within the document, it refers to the gates to the community being guarded and that shift changes take place “every so often”. It instructs its user: “destroy the guarding post at the gate of the kibbutz.”
More gunmen will “breach the kibbutz fence on the northwest side”, it says, allowing two cells to advance. One cell will take over the east while the other pushes through the west of the kibbutz.
Among the footage shown on Monday, a terrorist breaks into a guard post and waits for his first victim. Soon, a car approaches the gate and a young man rolls down his window, asking what is going on.
The gunman riddles his body with bullets, sending him slumping towards the steering wheel as his white T-shirt turns pink with blood.
Next, we see a young brunette woman apparently shot in her car and then left face-down on the road. She is wearing blue jeans and her black tank top has ridden up, exposing her back. Over the road is a young man, who was presumably driving in the same vehicle as her.
When the terrorists reach Israeli dwellings, they follow the instructions of their manual: “shoot as many as possible”, “take hostages and take some of them to the Gaza Strip using various cars.” And so the staggering onslaught continues.
There are families murdered in their beds. A woman’s head mashed into her pillow. The burned corpses of babies still in their baby-grows.
In one video shot on a terrorists’ mobile phone, a man is repeatedly bludgeoned with a garden hoe. The killer shouts “Allahu Akbar” with each plunge into his victim’s chest.
Israeli authorities obtained a recording of a phone call one terrorist made on WhatsApp to his father in Gaza. He declares down the phone: “Dad, I killed 10 with my bare hands.” He repeats the sentence over and over.
The phone is handed to his mother and the terrorist, who responds to the name Mahmoud, shouts: “Mum, your son is a hero. Kill, Kill, Kill.”
The parents ask their son to come home to Gaza. They tell their child: “May God bring you back in peace.”
The desecration of corpses appears utterly routine to the Hamas units. Several terrorists stamp on one corpse as they cheer the slaughter. A group of female Israeli army recruits are incapacitated with a grenade before being shot at point-blank range.
A young woman, covered in blood, is seen limping out of one car before being forced into another. It is unclear what happened to her next.
At the Supernova festival, photographs show teenagers cowering together as Hamas fighters go on the rampage.
The terrorists, filming on their GoPro head-cameras, fire off round after round into the Portaloos.
In a parking lot they are shown again kicking the bodies of the dead. One young man is forced into a truck with other victims. As the camera zooms in, it can be seen that half of his arm has been blown off. Not everyone in the back of the pick-up truck appears to be alive. The terrorists who ride with them are grinning from ear to ear.
And then there are the burnt corpses which litter the streets, cars, and homes.
Some resemble nothing more than charcoal, the only signs of their full human form being segments of skull that have not turned black from smoke.
Admiral Daniel Hagari of the Israel Defense Forces told journalists they had agonised over whether or not to show this footage to the press. They decided to do so because they wanted the world to see such “crimes against humanity”.
“It is not just Israel’s problem, it is a world problem because it affects the whole region,” he said.
“We will not let the world forget.”
