Live killings, rivers of blood, dozens of charred bodies and a decapitated soldier appear in a compilation of audiovisual material, much of it unpublished, that the Israeli Army has shown to the media with the aim of publicize the horror of the massacre committed by Hamas in Israel on October 7 and prove “crimes against humanity.”

More than a hundred journalists from foreign media – among them – were summoned to a military base north of Tel Aviv to view that 43-minute and 44-second footage, which compiles images captured by the GoPro cameras that the members of Hamas had security for the massacred kibbutzim, video surveillance of roads, and videos recorded with their cell phones by victims, soldiers, and medical services personnel.

“What you see in the images They are crimes against humanity“, warned Israeli Army spokesman Admiral Daniel Hagari before the viewing. “They show that Hamas terrorists entered Israel with the sole purpose of killing civilians,” he stressed.

One of the hardest scenes to digest, and which caused a strong commotion among the reporters in the room, was the one in which he sees a father with his two children, about 12 and 10 years old, just woken up and still in their underwear. , They go to take refuge in the bunker in the courtyard of their house in one of the kibbutz closest to the Gaza Strip.when they hear gunshots and explosions.

Two heavily armed Hamas members see them enter and throw a grenade into the bunker. The father acts as a human shield to protect his children. They come out crying, a Hamas man takes them inside the house and offers them water and Coca-Cola from his own refrigerator, while the children, in a state of shock, cry and scream.

“Why am I alive? Why am I alive?”, the oldest sobs, while trying to console his brother, who says he can’t see out of an eye. The shocking sequence combines what was captured by the security cameras inside the house and those of the community, in the outside patio.

Minutes later, the mother is seen arriving with two kibbutz security guards, when they find the body destroyed by the father’s grenade at the door of the shelter. No audio, her silent cry of pain transcends the screenand immediately you see how the guards try to calm her down, cover her mouth so they can’t hear her, and take her to safety.

That sequence ends there, but they continue dozens of clips about other assaults on houses in the kibbutz adjacent to the enclaveor the massacre at the Reim electronic music festival: many hid in portable toilets or under cars, Hamas militiamen shot them mercilessly, ensuring that they did not come out alive.

“44 minutes of unspeakable horror”

The Onda Cero correspondent in Israel, Jana Berisis one of the journalists who attended the screening of the images and recounts in ‘La Brújula’ the horror and desolation she felt upon seeing them.

“It is the first time in my life that I have gone to a journalistic event with fear of how it was going to affect me,” he explains.

“I don’t know what’s worse, the pools of blood, the burned bodies, the mutilated corpses… it’s an indescribable horror,” says the journalist. “It has been 44 minutes of images that are very difficult to bear,” she adds.

Jana says that what has impacted her the most has been an audio they shared. It is “the recording of a call from a Hamas terrorist to his parents from the cell phone of a Jewish woman he had just murdered. In it he tells them to look at the photos he has just sent to their cell phones of the people he had killed.”

“I hope you are proud of me”the attacker tells his parents, who, scared and crying, ask him to come back.

Most of the images They were caught by the cameras themselves carried by the around 1,500 Hamas members who died in subsequent fighting with Israeli troops, after being inspected by the authorities.

From there the harshest passages have been extracted: in a video you can see how they murder a young woman hiding under a table begging not to kill her, or how they crush the head of a dying man with a hoe, while shouting in Arabic “Allahu Akbar” (God is great).

The Army spokesman admitted that in recent days they have faced the “dilemma” about whether to show and disseminate these imagess, but clarified that they are part of the internal process that Israel needs to “understand why it is at war.”

“It has nothing to do with the Palestinians or Islam, it’s about not allowing terror to rule,” he said of the Islamist group Hamas, which has de facto governed the Gaza Strip since 2007.

That brutal and bloody attack, on October 7, began the war between Israel and the Islamist militias of Gaza, which has claimed more than 1,400 victims in Israel -most of them civilians murdered that same day in the largest massacre in the history of Israel-, in addition to 222 kidnapped in the enclave and around a hundred missing.

The intense and indiscriminate Israeli retaliatory bombings on the Strip have caused more than 5,000 dead -at least 70% are women, children and the elderly- and more than 15,000 injured, the largest human catastrophe also experienced in the punished enclave.