7 October Parliamentary Commission Report Launch
By Joshua Cass, Public Affairs Officer at the JLC
On Tuesday, I attended the launch of the ‘7 October Parliamentary Commission Report’ in the House of Lords. The Commission’s year-long investigation, chaired by Lord Roberts of Belgravia on behalf of the UK-Israel All Party Parliamentary Group, was supported by testimonies from victims’ families, academics, and military experts. Using irrefutable evidence, including footage from GoPro cameras worn by Hamas terrorists and CCTV footage, the report meticulously documents the horrific events of that day.
During the event, I was moved to hear the testimony of Ayelet Epstein, a resident of Kibbutz Kfar Aza, who lost five family members on October 7th, including her 22-year-old son Netta. In an act of unimaginable courage, Netta sacrificed himself by jumping on a grenade to save his fiancée Irene.
This report chronicles the crimes of homicide, rape, kidnapping and torture perpetrated by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad on October 7th. In doing so, it serves as a vital tool to counter the distortion and denialism propagated by those who seek to minimise Hamas’s atrocities.
We all know that on October 7th, Israelis and Jews were massacred on a horrific scale with medieval levels of violence. Yet, earlier this month, the London School of Economics, one of the most prestigious universities in the country, hosted the launch of a book entitled “Understanding Hamas and Why That Matters”, which claims that Hamas has been wrongly “vilified and demonised” since October 7th. This book claims that October 7th was supposed to be “a small-scale operation aiming to kidnap a group of soldiers, not civilians, and then take them back to Gaza Strip in a very swift operation and then do a prisoner’s swap.” The bloody pogrom that followed was “an ad-hoc decision to expand beyond what was originally planned”.
The reality, as the report proves, is starkly different. Years of planning went into the invasion, dating back to 2018. Following the attack, detailed maps of kibbutzim and hostage-taking manuals were found on the attackers, who also designed special weaponry to breach the doors of civilian saferooms.
The report also reveals the sheer scale and brutality of Hamas’s attack. The massacre of 1,182 people, including 18 British citizens, was the deadliest attack on Jewish people since the Holocaust and marks the second-highest number of British deaths from an overseas terror attack after 9/11. Approximately 7,000 terrorists took part in the large-scale, coordinated assault on Israel, with incursions by land, air and sea, in addition to an unprecedented rocket barrage that endangered 75% of Israel’s population. The methods of killing employed by Hamas included shooting, burning, asphyxiation and the use of grenades; the desecration, mutilation and beheading of corpses was widespread; and acts of sexual violence occurred across all locations during the attack.
While the victims were overwhelmingly Jewish Israelis, the attackers showed no mercy, slaughtering Israeli Arabs and Bedouins without hesitation. Indeed, the youngest victim, Naama abu Rashed, who suffered a gunshot wound while still in her mother’s womb and died just 14 hours after doctors performed an emergency delivery, was the daughter of Bedouin parents. Such deliberate and indiscriminate killings of civilians were commonplace, with civilians accounting for 73% of the victims of October 7th.
This report is an essential record of one of the most atrocious crimes in modern history. Lord Roberts, supported by Bob Blackman MP and Damien Egan MP, has produced an invaluable tool against those who minimise the truly evil character of Hamas and deny the events of October 7th. You can read the full report here.
