Mick Hartley

The JC on historian Andrew Roberts' Parliamentary Commission report on October 7th:

The report’s author, award-winning historian Lord Roberts – who also serves as a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and Visiting Professor at the War Studies Department at King’s College, London – said part of his reason for undertaking his research was to “to chronicle the events of October 7 with clarity and meticulous, fact-checking precision, to ensure it is never forgotten” and prevent the denial of Hamas’s atrocities, which he likened to a “more modern version of Holocaust denial”.

“Our report will hopefully permit people to see such denials and justifications for what they really are: a perversion of reason and rejection of human decency. We owe it to the victims and their grieving families to set down the ghastly, unvarnished truth about the sheer barbarism that Hamas and its terrorist allies unleashed”, he wrote.

He continued: “Hamas and its allies, both in the Middle East and equally shamefully in the West, have sought to deny the atrocities, despite the ironic fact that much of the evidence for the massacres derives come from film footage from cameras carried by the terrorists themselves – though of course there is also much more from many other sources, as this report delineates.”…

The report’s findings also reiterate those by the UN’s Special Representative on Sexual Violence, Pramila Patten on allegations of Conflict Related Sexual Violence (CRSV) and says that on October 7 “members of Palestinian armed groups crossed the Israeli border and committed acts of CRSV. These include acts of rape, gang rape, forced mutilation, sexualised torture, forced nudity, and posting sexualised images of victims on social media without consent.”

Roberts said he wanted to “lay down incontrovertible proof – for now and for the years to come – that nearly 1,200 innocent people were indeed murdered by Hamas and its allies, and very often in scenes of sadistic barbarism not seen in world history since the Rape of Nanjing in 1937.”

The full report can be accessed here. Andrew Roberts writes about the report today in the Spectator.

The circumstances of all the 1,182 deaths that took place on that horrific day are documented in our report, which at times necessarily makes somewhat gruesome reading. But it reminds us of the sheer sadism, rapine and viciousness that was planned and premeditated.