Journalist recounts horrors of Oct. 7 Hamas attacks as seen via Israeli video compilation

Amid certain factions of pro-Palestinian activists, there has been an attempt to downplay – and even deny – the barbarism that was visited upon Israel by Hamas on Oct. 7, but according to those who have seen video footage compiled by the Israeli military, there is no denying the nature of the horror that took place, as Fox News reports.

Longtime Jerusalem-based journalist Ruth Marks Eglash recounted her own reactions to what she has seen in the recordings taken via the terrorists' own body cameras, traffic cameras, closed-circuit television feeds, mobile phones, and other sources, declaring conclusively, “I will be haunted forever.”

Prefacing her explanation of what she has seen, Eglash reminds the world that over 1,200 Israelis were killed on that fateful day, with at least 200 more individuals taken hostage by Hamas.

She goes on to declare the scenes contained in the aforementioned footage compilation as “the stuff of nightmares.”

“A selection of still photographs taken as forensic evidence shows unidentifiable human bodies, including babies still in their pajamas, beaten, burned and unimaginably mutilated, including evidence of gender-based crimes,” Eglarsh adds.

Particularly stunning in its brutality, she says, “is the footage taken by the terrorists themselves. Many of those who carried out the barbaric attack wore bodycams with the explict goal of documenting their atrocities, most likely as a way to further terrorize and torment the Israeli public, ISIS-style, long after the attack.”

She recounts seeing video of a group of elderly Israelis being “gunned down and mutilated on the pavement next to their minibus” and also of a “Hamas terrorit screaming 'Allahu Akhbar' as he relentlessly hacks the head off a Thai laborer with a hatchet.”

“In my screening, which was for journalists, no one walked out in the middle, but no one spoke much afterward,” Eglarsh said. “The question of how humans could do this to other human beings hung heavy in the air inside the auditorium.”

Writing for The Hill, USC Shoah Foundation emeritus executive director Stephen D. Smith offered his own personal takeaways from a screening of the aforementioned footage.

Describing himself as “a dedicated Jew, a lover of Israel, and a teacher of the Holocaust,” Smith also said that regardless of his own emotional investment in what occurred, “the only version of me that showed up to watch, was the genocide scholar in me. I wanted to know what I could verify.”

In Smith's assessment, the Hamas terrorists of Oct. 7 were well organized and were engaged in a “pre-planned and managed massacre,” but they were not especially well-trained.

Tragically, Smith confirmed his belief that civilians were the primary target of the attacks and that once murdered, many had their corpses mutilated, sometimes beyond recognition.

Bearing witness to the true horror experienced, Smith said that the Israeli victims were clearly terrified during their ordeal, which, in the minds of the attackers, was part of a righteous Islamic conquest that enjoyed social acceptability among the attackers and their families, as evidenced in the footage.

“Once seen, the images cannot be unseen,” Smith said, and that is perhaps an experience to which more of those who remain reluctant to describe these atrocities for what they truly are ought to be exposed in the very near future.