Comment by wk_end
2 years ago
That's possible. I'm aware that Hamas filmed much of what they did, and that they committed rape and torture in addition to murder; I'm not aware of the contents of much of the footage available because I'm, frankly, too squeamish to seek it out or watch it myself. Do you think this substantively detracts from my overall point, though?
What's available that I've seen falls into several categories:
- Uniformed Gazan fighters (not just Hamas/Al-Qasam, but also PIJ's Saraya Al-Quds, PFLP and some others) breaking the fence infrastructure (cams, remote controlled sentry gun towers, fence walls, fence itself, drone footage, preparations the night before - it shows that fighters of various groups commingled quite a bit). Fighters attacking Israel's military installations (border crossings, destroying some stationary military vehicles not manned at the time, etc.)
- Gazan fighters running around, or riding on motorcycles and pickup trucks, shooting at people and vehicles from small arms, and kidnapping people. This is the bulk of actual action in available footage.
- Footage of masses going from Gaza and looting settlements in Gaza envelope.
- Some grenade throwing into enclosed spaces with people inside.
- Almost no footage of fighters fighting with Israel army's armor, almost no footage of torture.
- No footage of child killings (there's some footage where only parents were killed and children left living). Small children were ~1% of killed victims on Oct 7, so lack of footage is not surprising.
- IDF killing a group of people that was apparently surrendering.
- Videos of IDF attack helicopters shooting at crowds of people and cars.
Footage of aftermath:
- Lots of footage of dead, burned bodies, either in cars or in houses. It's not clear who these people are a lot of the time, or who caused the fire, or how they died. (Israel overcounted its casualties by ~2 hundreds, due to misidentification of burned bodies.)
- At least 7 videos of corpse abuse by Israelis in the aftermath.
Oftentimes it's clear who's doing what, whether fighters or mob. Sometimes it's not.
Lot of "barbarity" of "Hamas" as portrayed in the media or even by some politicians, is made up/overblown (oven baked babies, 40 beheaded babies, children/people collected together tied and burned alive intentionally, ...). It seems to be designed to show that Hamas is way different in humanity than IDF, or whatnot, but it just ends up throwing doubt on other eyewitness descriptions of gruesome things that may be truthful.
There's an article in Haaretz about this problem: https://archive.ph/2023.12.03-221527/https://www.haaretz.co....
I’m fairly sure there are much more video evidence of hamas evils posted by themselves. E.g. the beheading of migrant workers with shovels.