‘I saw the Holocaust... so many dead bodies’:
The horrors of Oct 7 – as told by the survivors
To mark the anniversary of the attacks, I travelled to Israel to hear stories of Israelis forced to face an unimaginably dark ordeal
Allison Pearson
05 October 2024 8:00am BST
Oct 7 first anniversary
I met survivors, soldiers, politicians, bereaved parents, mothers of hostages and just regular people who had to step up for their nation on that dark day.
Three weeks ago, I travelled to Israel to try and work out what October 7 had meant as the first anniversary approached. The massacres committed by Hamas on that black Sabbath were among the foulest of the modern era and saw the worst loss of life for the Jewish people since the Holocaust. Not much time elapsed, though, before the bloodcurdling crimes were sidelined as international attention switched, rather too eagerly, to Israel’s war in Gaza. Thousands of Palestinians were tragically killed as the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) tried to root out an enemy which used billions of charitable aid to build itself a network of tunnels more extensive than the London Underground. One military expert summed up Hamas’s strategy in two chilling words: Human Sacrifice.
A proxy of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Hamas – like Hezbollah – is dedicated to the annihilation of Israel. It’s quite hard to fight a group which hides behind women and children, burrows under nurseries and hospitals; it’s quite hard to do a deal with terrorists whose charter demands your own extinction. Regardless of the provocation, it is always Israel that is blamed for “escalation” and called upon to exercise “restraint”.
As Sir Tom Stoppard, observed exactly a year ago: “Who can say where Israel’s response to October 7 will sit in the calculus of suffering by the time the region subsides into the next configuration of uneasy neighbours… We are aware that Jews are not the only victims of this tragedy, Hamas knew that there would be consequences to October 7, but the consequences did not weigh with Hamas. Before we take up a position on what’s happening now we should consider whether this is a fight over territory or a struggle between civilisation and barbarism.”
I was one of those who thought it was the latter; 7/10 seemed to me to be every bit as pivotal as 9/11, one of those hinges in the history of the world when a profoundly shocking event triggers changes heretofore considered unimaginable. That was not always a popular view, particularly among the young who had been taught to see the only democracy in the Middle East, a haven of women’s equality and gay rights, as a colonialist oppressor. (Even within Jewish families, Israel has the ability to set generations at loggerheads).
Fear of “Islamophobia”, seeded in progressive minds with considerable skill by Islamists, may have been part of it.
One wit put it well on social media: “Israel is fighting to save Western civilisation before Western civilisation can stop it.”
Since I got back from Tel Aviv, events in Lebanon, including the breathtaking and ingenious humiliation of Hezbollah, have moved the dial again. “All part of the rehabilitation of the IDF image – back to what we expect, intel and technological excellence,” one analyst enthused.
But that raises an awkward question: how can a country so smart, so Q from James Bond it can set up a factory to manufacture pagers, fit them with mini explosives, have Hezbollah distribute those pagers to all its members and get them to blow up at the same time, have failed to prevent thousands of barbarians breaching its border security and raping, burning and butchering 1,200 of its citizens?
So many questions still unanswered from October 7. I put those queries to scores of Israelis – survivors, soldiers, politicians, bereaved parents, mothers of hostages and just regular people who had to step up for their nation on that dark day.
Some of what follows is horrifying and hard to bear, I know. I am warning you in case you’d rather not read on. But it is important to write it down. We know how important it is because on the BBC news on Thursday, Hamas’s deputy leader told international editor Jeremy Bowen that Hamas didn’t set out to kill any Israeli women or children on October 7. Hamas “resistance fighters” were ordered only to kill “occupation fighters”, although he did concede that “there were certainly personal mistakes” and the fighters, who just popped into family homes on kibbutzim to have a chat and a bite to eat, “may have felt they were in danger”.
The accounts told to me by the individuals below, and many others who shared their insights, paint a very different picture. As always, the Devil is in the detail.
.... to be continued.