JERUSALEM — Over the past few weeks, I have watched from Israel as a 43-minute film containing raw footage of Hamas terrorists' Oct. 7 massacre in southern Israel makes its way around the world.
The extreme and horrified reactions in Congress, the United Nations and even in Hollywood to the film — a compilation of body cameras worn by Hamas terrorists, dashcams, traffic cameras, closed-circuit TV and the mobile phones and social media accounts of victims, soldiers and emergency medical workers — have not surprised me.
I will be haunted forever.
This is the nightmare Israelis have been living for the past seven weeks since thousands of Hamas and other Palestinian terrorists from the Gaza Strip infiltrated Israel on that fateful Saturday morning — now referred to as "Black Saturday" — attacking some 20 civilian communities, army bases and a music festival.
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More than 1,200 people were brutally murdered in the attack, and another 200-plus were taken hostage, including nearly 40 children and a dozen mothers.
Even the headiest of individuals struggle to stomach such a compilation of horror.
"We want the world to see the atrocities that Hamas did during the Oct. 7 massacre, and we urge the world not to look away," Lior Hiatt, spokesperson of Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told Fox News Digital Thursday.
"When we say that Hamas is worse than ISIS, this is exactly what we mean," he said. "It is a very difficult film to watch. It is the raw footage taken by the terrorists themselves and shows very graphic images."
Hiatt said that the film has been shown to diplomats, international organizations, influencers and decision-makers at the highest levels, shared by Israel in more than 60 of its embassies and consulates around the world.
"Not everyone can actually stay and watch the entire movie," the spokesman said. "I’ve seen people crying, I’ve seen people leaving the room and I’ve seen a lot of people shocked to see that those kinds of atrocities were committed against human beings by the monsters from Hamas."
Those who are invited to see the film are forbidden from entering with personal cameras or cellphones. According to the Israeli army, which put the footage together, this is not a film that will be released to the general public. The reason, officials say, is many of the individuals seen clearly in the film did not survive the attack, and their relatives have requested it only be shown to people who can make a real difference.
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In Congress, the footage was seen last week by an audience of about 300, reportedly including "Squad" member Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez., D-N.Y. While she's been vocal with criticism of Israel on X, formerly Twitter, and on her congressional website, she doesn't seem to have made any comment, but the reactions from other members of Congress were similar to when I saw it in Israel.
"I’ve seen decapitation and I've seen just beating and beating on both dead and alive bodies," said California Republican Rep. Darrell Issa, who spoke with Fox News Digital after watching footage. "And, quite frankly, I'm just sick to my stomach."
New York Democratic Rep. Ritchie Torres, who saw the film this week at a different screening, wrote on X, "I find myself haunted by the cries of two children witnessing their father die from an explosion after a Hamas terrorist throws a grenade inside their shelter. Suffering the savagery of Hamas feels like a fate worse than death. The fatherless child is seen crying in agony ‘Why am I still alive?’"
Indeed, that scene, captured on a family’s private webcam, is particularly upsetting, but it’s not the only section that is 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, which Fox News Digital has detailed in previous stories.
Equally horrific is the footage taken from the cellphones of victims who most likely did not survive or were taken hostage, including a group of young female soldiers sheltering in a bomb shelter seconds before a gun-wielding terrorist walks calmly inside and begins shooting. In another clip, blood-dripping partygoers from the festival are seen blown to bits by the terrorist’s grenades.
Another aspect that is perhaps most jarring, however, is the footage taken by the terrorists themselves. Many of those who carried out the barbaric attack wore bodycams with the explicit goal of documenting their atrocities, most likely as a way to further terrorize and torment the Israeli public, ISIS-style, long after the attack.
They filmed themselves hunting down civilians both in their homes and on the streets of southern Israel, in rural communal farms and in the towns of Sderot and Ofakim, which sit just a few miles from the border with Gaza.
In one particularly awful moment, a group of elderly people is gunned down and mutilated on the pavement next to their minibus. In another scene, we see a Hamas terrorist screaming "Allahu Akhbar," as he relentlessly hacks the head off a Thai laborer with a hatchet.
Also interspersed throughout the footage, we see snippets of exhilarated terrorists celebrating their heinous acts, including the joyous celebration as they dragged the decapitated bodies of Israeli soldiers and civilians through the streets of Gaza.
In my screening, which was for journalists, no one walked out in the middle, but no one spoke much afterward. The question of how humans could do this to other human beings hung heavy in the air inside the auditorium.
Maayan Hoffman, The Jerusalem Post’s deputy CEO, who was at that screening, told Fox News Digital she believed more people should see the footage.
"It is extremely important for more people to see the film because it’s difficult to really understand the barbaric behavior and the joy these terrorists had while they were hurting other people," she said.
"I’ve been to southern Israel since Oct. 7, and I have also been at the forensic labs, but this film really brings it all together," said Hoffman, also a senior correspondent for the newspaper.
"It also gives us a better understanding of what the victims and families of the hostages went through on that day."
