Mick Hartley

David Patrikarakos at UnHerd goes to the IDF screening in Tel Aviv:

I am, I realise, watching a montage of atrocity. And it gets worse. A terrified Israeli man in his underpants, and his two young children, also in underclothes, run screaming. Thugs clamber down from a lorry and throw a grenade into the cubby hole where they have taken refuge. The father’s body falls onto the ground covered in blood. Terrorists take the two children — covered in their father’s blood — into a room. “Daddy’s dead,” one screams to his brother. “It’s not a prank. He’s really dead. I wish I was dead! I wish I was dead!” he screams. Even within the litany of horror I’ve witnessed in my career this is horrifically unsettling.

A new scene depicts a man in a football shirt lying on the ground covered in blood. He moans in pain. A terrorist picks up a hoe and starts smashing him over the head — over and over and over again. “Allahu Akbar!” he screams, over and over and over again.

A dancing woman appears on screen. She is dressed in a crop top and tiny shorts, laughing and smiling. In the next scene, revellers are crouching on the ground as terrorists steam across the field. Partygoers run screaming. People are dragged from their cars. Bloodied corpses are thrown into the dirt while Hamas cheer and whoop.

I am watching a celebration of life alongside the fetishisation of death….

The sustained sadism stops, finally. And I wander outside to drink water and decompress. We are called back into a briefing from General Mickey Edelstein from Gaza command. “They came to kill and burn civilians. Not military personnel. Civilians,” he says. “I’ve been fighting Hamas for many years, but I honestly never thought they’d be this violent.”

He continues. “We told civilians to evacuate northern Gaza. Yes. [we go in] and there are civilian casualties. But we are not looking for kids to kill. We are not looking to kill hostages because they are not walking fast enough. We do not find kids and then force them to go and ask their neighbours to come out, and then when they do kill them.”

He moves onto less emotive ground. “We have evidence of Iranian involvement,” he says. “I cannot elaborate too much, but there are trained cells within Gaza.” Written instructions were discovered on captured and killed terrorists, he adds. This may have been an orgy of sadism and bloodlust, but it was also a planned military exercise.

A question comes in about the huge security lapse that allowed all this to happen. Edelstein lapses into thought. “We failed,” he says quietly. “We failed.”

The event ends. I leave and reflect on what we have seen. Those images are but one horrific event in a broader conflict that is tragic in the truest sense of the word because there are no good options. The occupation, the suffering of Gazan civilians, the endless, endless violence. Israel is responding, because it has a duty to — just like it has a duty to safeguard the life of Gazan civilians.

But something else is clear, too. Something that the footage confirmed. What happened on 7 October had nothing to do with resistance. It had nothing to do with occupation or a one or two-state solution. It was about something far more ancient and atavistic — the desire to kill Jews wherever they are and whoever they are. And against that there can be no retreat.