UK-Israel All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) released a 318-page report on the Palestinian Hamas massacre of Israelis on Oct. 7th and 8th to “ensure it is never forgotten.” The report was officially launched in the British parliament on Sunday.
“The purpose of commissioning our report has been to chronicle the events of 7 October with clarity and meticulous, fact-checking precision, to ensure it is never forgotten,” said Lord Andrew Roberts, an influential historian who chaired the report.
Indeed, Roberts claimed there was a “worldwide attempt to blame 7 October on its victims rather than its perpetrators.” He quoted Alan Dershowitz, who said that “Amnesty International and Harvard blamed it on Israel even before the first shot was fired in Gaza.”
He noted the book Understanding Hamas and Why That Matters co-authored by Helena Cobban, which justified the attack, claiming that “a lot of what Hamas did on 7 October was to attack military targets.”
“Our report comprehensively disproves that,” Roberts wrote. “Showing that the moment that Hamas managed to prevent the IDF from counter-attacking, it got down to what it had really set out to do all along: slaughtering Israelis. Citizens from forty-four nations were also killed and taken hostage in its bloodlust.”
While much of the evidence came from videos taken by Hamas, Roberts noted that Western media provided a platform for Hamas to deny the massacre of Israelis. Khalil al-Hayya, the most senior leader of Hamas outside Gaza, told Jeremy Bowen of the BBC that the terrorists were ordered not to harm civilians.
“The objective was the occupation soldiers who are always killing, bombing, and destroying in Gaza,” al-Hayya said. “We don’t endorse harming civilians. On the ground, there were certainly personal mistakes and actions. The fighters may have felt their lives were in danger.”
Al-Hayya claimed the terrorists “visited the houses” as guests of the Israelis.
In fact, the report documented that civilians accounted for 73% of the victims. Causes of death included shooting, burning, asphyxiation, and grenade explosions.
The attack included an unprecedented rocket barrage, which placed 75% of Israel’s population, around 7.3 million people, under threat.
In addition, the desecration of corpses was widespread, including mutilation, beheadings, and booby-trapping bodies with grenades. Dead bodies were taken as hostages.
“We’ve all seen how the fighters visited the houses,” al-Hayya continued, “They spoke to the families, they ate and drank…When they went onto some of the houses, none of the women and children they dealt with were terrified… it was not our plan to capture civilians, including women and children.”
In the interview, al-Hayya categorically denied first-hand reports of rape.
“The orders and ethics of all Palestinians and the resistance fighters were humanitarian,” he claimed. “We’re brought up according to the Islamic religion, culture and national civilisation. We protect them as we protect ourselves. Sexual, or non-sexual, assault has never been proved.”
The APPG report corroborated a previous report by the United Nations Special Representative on Sexual Violence, confirming that sexual violence occurred at multiple attack sites on October 7. Hamas and other groups committed “acts of rape, gang rape, forced mutilation, sexualized torture, forced nudity, and posting sexualized images of victims on social media without consent,” says the report.
“By total contrast, our report proves that horrific acts of rape and sexual abuse took place in contradiction to Koranic teaching, and that everything Khalil al-Hayya said was a lie, as he must have known it was,” Roberts concluded. “We have allowed no embellishment of the facts, which are painful and distressing enough as they are. We have gone out of our way not to include information that we suspect is true but cannot be double-checked. We have done this so that future generations will not be misled about the true extent and the horror of the massacre.”
Roberts compared the Oct.7 denial to the denial of the Holocaust. The report echoes the sentiments of Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower who foresaw a day when the horrors of the Holocaust might be denied. Upon liberating the Nazi death camps, Eisenhower invited the media to document the horrific scenes. He compelled Germans living in the surrounding towns and any soldier not fighting at the front to witness the atrocities for themselves.
The report included a “catalog of events” describing a detailed events timeline.
“It details precisely what happened between 6.29 a.m. when Hamas-led terrorists breached the defenses in Southern Israel, and over 48 hours later, when the last of them had retreated back into Gaza, or were captured or killed,” Roberts wrote.
The report was based on survivor testimonies, open-source evidence, and interviews with relatives of hostages and victims, as well as expert analysis from government and security officials, first responders, and medical and military professionals in Israel and the UK.
“…it reminds us of the sheer sadism, rapine, and viciousness that was planned and premeditated,” Roberts wrote, adding, “A UN report mentioned ‘fully or partially naked bodies from the waist down [that] were recovered – mostly women – with hands tied and shot multiple times, often in the head.’”
According to the report, 7,000 Palestinians participated in the massacre of 1,182 Israelis. The youngest victim was a baby shot in the womb, and the oldest was a 92-year-old Holocaust survivor killed in his safe room by a grenade.
