7 October: what happened on that day

"To date, eight official reports on the massacres of 7 October have been published by seven international organisations: the International Criminal Court, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the Dinah Project, the Association of Rape Crisis Centres and the UN (which, on its own, has produced two: that of the Independent International Commission and that of the commission led by UN Special Representative Pramila Patten)”, writes Marc Weitzmann in *Il Punto*. “Published last May, the least cited – perhaps because it is the most recent or because people believe they already know everything – is the result of two years of research carried out by the working groups of the Civil Commission on Hamas Crimes and Homicides, an independent body set up by Israeli lawyers specialising in international law, Cochav Elkayam-Levy and Merav Israeli-Amarant, in collaboration with the former Minister of Justice and former Canadian government spokesperson on human rights, Irwin Cotler. The Commission systematically examined 10,000 photographs, 1,800 hours of video footage – including material from Hamas – several hundred transcripts of testimonies, and conducted over 430 face-to-face interviews with survivors, witnesses, family members and experts. Although it remains incomplete due to the reluctance of witnesses, who are still in shock, to speak, it is the most detailed document currently available, one that allows us to understand and, to some extent, almost to sense the nature of what happened that day in southern Israel. The mutilation of the victims’ genitals, particularly those of women, was systematic. Those who were not found with objects or bullets in their vaginas were discovered with fractured pelvises, their entire genital area burnt with what the report describes as ‘an accelerant’, or even with their bodies cut in half. This is one of the two points on which the forensic pathologists continue to dwell in their testimonies. The second concerns the bullets found in the women’s eyes. As one of the female doctors questioned stated: “It appears that the mutilation of these women’s faces was one of the objectives of their murders.”

Whilst the men were humiliated, raped and, in some cases, castrated, the women’s genitals and eyes were the ‘jihadists’ main obsession. It would take a separate article to cover the hostages’ testimonies before the Commission. All of them emphasise the daily sexual assaults, often accompanied by torture suffered during their months in captivity, including at the hands of medical staff. Because in the world of 7 October, white is black and black is white – the signs of medical care and torture are reversed: Al-Shifra Hospital, the largest hospital complex in Gaza, was the scene of at least one gang rape and a particularly gruesome murder; several nurses brought the injured back to their families, where they were used for months as domestic and sexual slaves. But let us return to 7 October, when the first images began to circulate, taken from the victims’ mobile phones and the killers’ GoPro cameras. On social media, a tweet from the ‘ABIER’ account shared a photo destined to become famous: the anguished face of a young woman in the foreground, surrounded by a group of young people out in the open, running to escape the Nova music festival. The caption, in English, was intended to be mocking: ‘The “indigenous inhabitants” are fleeing their “ancestral land”’. In Paris, the image was reposted the very same day with an impulsive comment by Muzna Shihabi, wife of journalist Benjamin Barthe – then editor-in-chief of the Middle East section of the daily newspaper *Le Monde*: “October 2.0, or how the settlers are tied to this land”. “Even invoking God doesn’t work”. (Ms Shihabi is also a researcher at CERPA, an institute based in France and funded by Qatar.)

This tweet foreshadowed the outpourings of enthusiasm that would shake the world from the very next day, from Sydney in Australia to American university campuses, via Paris, London, Berlin, Madrid and so on – demonstrations analysed by Eva Illouz in her pamphlet "8 Octobre. Généalogie d’une haine vertueuse" and which perhaps constitute the most novel aspect of the event. What did the demonstrators know about what had just happened – but also: what does ‘knowing’ mean in this unprecedented context? 7 October marks a turning point in the history of propaganda. As is well known, throughout the day, Hamas broadcast the least graphic footage of the killings live on its official Telegram channels, whilst allowing its ‘fighters’ to post the most sadistic videos on unofficial or private accounts. This strategy transformed pure terror into a two-way narrative. It allowed the perpetrators of extreme violence to deny what they were doing at the very moment they were showing it, leaving it up to the public to choose their own version of events – that is, whether or not to make themselves complicit with the murderers. The question that naturally arises is therefore this: to what extent would the mass sadism perpetrated that day have been possible without the global communication campaign that followed the next day – that is, without the left-wing political parties and international media that became its more or less voluntary mouthpieces, and on whom Hamas knew it could rely? A book published this month in the United States, The Hidden Hand, by the Canadian lawyer Warren Kinsella, shows how this strategy had been prepared by Hamas well before the operation through thousands of social media accounts and the drafting of communication guidelines in various languages – with Iran and Qatar among the main funders of paid demonstrators, professional organisers and lobbyists. At Sciences Po Paris, which was to become one of the media epicentres of pro-Hamas solidarity in France, Khaled Abu-Qare, a student at Birzeit University who had enrolled at the start of the first semester of 2023, opened the branch of the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) movement three days before the massacres; the SJP’s first press release was issued on the 11th (…). On Saturday 26 September, The Times revealed that Mr X, a former bodyguard of Hamas leader Ismael Haniyeh, whose identity remains protected for legal reasons, had been granted refugee status in England, where he married and started a family. Mr X, who is currently wanted by the authorities, took advantage of his position to travel to Turkey, Qatar and Vienna in order to plan a continent-wide massacre that would have targeted several Jewish places of worship across Europe. The bloodbath planned for the second anniversary of 7 October, last October, was foiled by the German police. Whilst 11 September marked the beginning of the first quarter of this century, 7 and 8 October marked the start of the second quarter. During those days, something was set in motion that continues to this day and is shaping our future.” (Translation by Mauro Zanon)