The home of a family in Kibbutz Be'eri in southern Israel is outfitted with standard surveillance cameras to protect against intruders. One camera shows the kitchen, another the terrace and a third the path leading to a building next door.
These cameras recorded the family father being shot by Islamist Hamas terrorists after he hid his six and eight-year-old sons.
The terrorists discover the boys, who are wearing only their underwear. The next image shows the kitchen, where one of the boys sits crying. The camera also records his words as he says to his brother in Hebrew: "Papa is dead. Papa is dead." Then he says: "Why am I still alive?" The younger of the two sits hunched over the table and says he can't see out of one eye. The terrorists have gouged it out.
Then a Hamas terrorist walks in and grabs what looks like a soft drink out of the refrigerator and drinks it. The last images show the mother breaking down after discovering her husband's dead body on the path leading off the terrace.
Victims' families' consent
In all, the sequence makes up just a few seconds of the 40-minute film that Israel's Berlin Embassy invited roughly 20 journalists to view on Thursday. According to a narrator, there are several hundred minutes of video documenting the massacre that Hamas carried out on October 7: The images were taken from surveillance cameras, victims' smartphones and social media; as well as on terrorists' dashcams, body cameras and cellphones. Some footage was recorded by Israeli security forces who were the first to arrive at various sites after the attack.
The resulting compilation of video sequences that DW saw is also being shown to journalists in Israel, New York and London, under the title: "October 7, Hamas Massacre, Collected Raw Footage."
Protecting victims' privacy
The screenings are being staged under very strict rules: No photos, no video, no audio recording allowed, per the wishes of those victims' families, who agreed to let the footage be shown.
Ron Prosor, Israel's ambassador to Germany, sits in the second row. Before the film starts he tells those present that he, too, will be seeing it for the first time. Speaking softly, Prosor says it is important to subject oneself to witnessing the horror documented in the film because "some people do not believe that it really happened." Some Israeli embassy staff are also in the room, seated behind the media representatives. They barely speak, their faces expressing utter disbelief.
Charred bodies, abused babies
Some recordings break off abruptly, as if relatives could only allow so much to be seen. The rest of the footage remains under lock and key as part of an ongoing investigation, according to Olga Poliakov, military attache at the Berlin embassy. After the screening, she confirms that Hamas terrorists at Kibbutz Be'eri had in fact stabbed out the young boy's eye. She says it remains unclear whether the mother and her two sons survived.
The footage also appears to show that the terrorists burned their victims bodies, while some images show the disfigured faces of infants. Body camera footage worn by terrorists show how they tracked down Kibbutz residents and shot them dead . The screening room is silent during the screening and stays that way until long after the film has finished. The images go far beyond what journalists who have years of experience dealing with conflict, war, death and violence are used to seeing.
Terror at the Supernova festival
The film also includes sequences from the attack on the Supernova music festival in the Negev desert. Some images were widely distributed on social media, but the added context of previously unseen footage from victims' cellphones leave an even more gruesome impression. Beyond recordings of people fleeing across fields surrounding the festival grounds, we also see sheer terror: White-clad concert-goers attempt to hide behind a wall but it is nearly impossible, as terrorists seem to be everywhere.
The well-known video of German-Israeli Shani Louk lying lifelessly in the bed of a Hamas pick-up truck as she is abducted from the festival grounds is also shown. In this particular recording one can clearly see that the young woman is bleeding heavily from a head wound. It seems unlikely anyone could live for long with such a massive injury.
Then there is another image, one that is designed to provide perspective: 138 bodies lying scattered in and around a white party tent where participants were dancing before they were massacred. One-hundred thirty-eight dead, as the words on the screen convey — "less than 10% of the more than 1,400 people that Hamas terrorists murdered on October 7."
Hamas recording: 'Mama, I killed more than 10'
And the perpetrators? The Israeli army claims to have intercepted communications in which terrorists' commanders in the Gaza Strip order them to film themselves killing Israelis. In one recording, a Hamas terrorist yells into his phone: "Mama, I killed more than 10. Mama, your boy is a hero." A reply can be heard: "Kill! Kill! Kill!"
Terrorists' cellphones also show video selfies of grinning, laughing young men — many well under 30 — as they celebrate in front of their victims corpses.
After a little less than an hour, the lights in the screening room at the Israeli Embassy in Berlin go back on. The audience sits in silence for several minutes. A question and answer session or an evening of discussion with media representatives is unthinkable. Only a handful of questions are posed.
Asked how he would interpret the body camera recordings of Hamas terrorists, Ambassador Prosor says the Islamists wanted "to show what they did." Israel has declared war on Hamas, and this is a war of images, too. The more time that passes, says Prosor, "the more these images will be forgotten."
Images like that of the six and eight-year-old boys from Kibbutz Be'eri who see their father being shot dead and ask, "Why am I still alive?"
