Israeli officials show unseen video from October 7 attack
CBC
Warning: This story contains distressing details.
Israeli officials invited Canadian media to a Thursday screening of some of the most sensitive footage collected from the October 7 attack on southern Israel, compiled into a 43-minute video that shows the killing or remains of 138 of the more than 1,400 Israelis killed that day.
The Israeli government has arranged private screenings of the material for domestic audiences, such as members of the Israeli Knesset, and for foreign government officials and diplomats, as well as foreign journalists. An official said the same material has been seen by some unnamed members of the Canadian government.
The screenings are part of a public diplomacy effort to demonstrate why Israeli officials say they are determined to never again permit such an attack to take place.
The death toll, like the precise number of hostages abducted into Gaza, remains in flux as Israel learns more about the fate of its missing citizens. Israeli officials say they already have confirmed that more than 300 Israeli soldiers and 1,100 civilians died over a period of about 8 hours on October 7.
The video is a compilation of Hamas cellphone, GoPro and dashcam video, as well Israeli cellphone, dashcam, home security video, CCTV and traffic camera footage.
A substantial part of the video content CBC News saw at the screening — perhaps a third — has circulated already on social media. The rest, officials said, had not been widely disseminated because victims' family members had not agreed to it, or because of Jewish traditions about respect for the dead.
A total ban on video and audio recording at the screening was part of the agreement reached between the Israel Defense Forces and victims' families about how and where the material would be used.
The footage is graphic and only a few individual faces are blurred. It includes scenes from the attack on the music festival, from kibbutzes, and from army bases.
It shows heavily-armed Hamas fighters raiding a kibbutz, shooting and tossing grenades into homes. It also shows Hamas shooting motorists in their cars.
In one case, the same shooting of civilian motorists is captured both by a camera worn by a Hamas gunman and by a dashcam within the car as it first comes under fire and then rolls to a halt against the bumper of a parked SUV. The occupants, a man and a woman, appear to be dead or unconscious when Hamas approaches the car.
Some scenes showed the desperate attempts of civilian residents of a kibbutz near the Gaza border to shelter in safe rooms. In one case, a father and his two boys aged about ten, who appear to have just woken up and are in their underwear, seek safety in what looks like a bomb shelter in the courtyard of their home.
A Hamas fighter sees the three enter the shelter and throws a grenade into the doorway. The blast appears to kill the father immediately, while leaving the two boys relatively unhurt. A gunman takes the boys back into the house, where they can be heard lamenting their father's death. A gunman enters the room and opens the family's fridge, offering the two boys some water, which they decline. He then helps himself to some Coca-Cola and leaves the room.
One of the two boys attempts to assist the other one, who says he has been blinded in one eye by a grenade fragment. After a lapse of time, with no more gunmen present, the two boys appear to escape the property. Israeli officials were unable to say if they ultimately survived.
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