In the immediate days that followed October 7 2023 I wondered, not for the first time, what had happened to England. The gentle nation that hung its reputation on being on the winning side in a war against the most infamous barbarians of the 20th Century seemed finally to have died. It appeared reborn as gloating, ugly and yet still self-righteous, at least when viewed from the vantage point of London.
Cycling through Stratford, East London, I saw a young woman walking proudly with a giant Palestinian flag. She was alone, confident that she wasn’t in danger, yet had the air of one bravely facing down an evil oppressor. She wasn’t marching against Israel’s invasion of the Gaza Strip, it hadn’t happened yet. She was marching in light of the Gaza government’s murder of 1,182 people in Israel.
As the Israel-Hamas war intensified, a British journalist I used to know defended Hamas online, referring to its fighters as “real men”. He was “absolutely certain” that “all civilians killed on October 7th were the work of the IOF”. IOF is a derogatory term for the IDF, meaning Israeli Offensive or Occupation Forces. He added: “And there was no rape by Hamas fighters.”
Meanwhile, perfectly decent pro-Palestine supporters didn’t seem as baffled as me as to how the anti-Semitic elements among their number had gone from outing themselves as frothing racists to identifying as part of a noble resistance once Israel invaded.
It didn’t seem to matter as much as it should that some of these people hated Israel before it retaliated. Nor did it seem to matter enough that some just hated Jews. Israel’s invasion was the story now.
Previous claims of genocide, and their accuracy given evidence to the contrary, weren’t the focus. This was the real one. Finally the world would see that the anti-Israel set was right all along.
Of course, October 7 presented something of a PR problem. How could the government that filmed itself horrifying the world with its genocidal atrocities now capitalise on victimhood of the very Gazans it had endangered?
Luckily for Hamas, it got to have it both ways. It played the Jew-hating strongman to fellow Islamists while relying on foreign propagandists to deny reports from October 7 that were unpalatable to pro-Palestinians in the West. Hence the aforementioned ruling out of rape.
Among the most extreme claims was that Hamas beheaded babies. I, like many others, took this at face-value, largely because of the depravity that the fighters had voluntarily and jubilantly displayed to the world. It seemed to fit. It wouldn’t surprise me.
The reality of war, a reality rarely acknowledged by the West’s more vocal pro-Palestine elements, is that there’s a hell of a lot we can’t be sure about until proper investigation, which can take years, has taken place.
One result of such investigations was released two days ago in the form of the 7 October Parliamentary Commission Report, chaired by Lord Roberts of Belgravia. It uses archaeological finds, CCTV evidence and eyewitness testimony and was carried out between January 2024 to January 2025.
In Chapter 6.2, the report tells us that the youngest victim of the pogrom was Naama Abu, who died at 14 hours old. The second-youngest, Mila Cohen, was nine months old. Both died of gunshot wounds.
Terrorists burned a family of five, including two five-year-old twins and a two-year-old, in their Siman-Tov home.
A Hamas terrorist took the phone of a dead woman to call his father and say: “Hello Baba, I am speaking with you from Mefalsim. Open your WhatsApp, tell Wiam. Look at all the dead bodies. See how many I killed myself, Baba.
“Your son killed Jews! Here, I’m inside Mefalsim, Baba. I am speaking to you from a Jewish lady’s phone. I killed her and I killed her husband. I killed ten myself, Baba. Ten! Ten with my owns hands. Baba, open your WhatsApp and see how many I killed.”
Sexual violence is the focus of Chapter 6.6. Among the translations found in phrasebooks carried by Hamas were “take your clothes off” and “spread your legs”. The chapter features the following eyewitness reports.
A terrorist raped a woman and punished her flinches with stabs to the back. A militant raped another woman as another terrorist sliced off her breast, throwing it to others who played with it.
Eight or 10 terrorists beat and raped a single woman then laughed at her as she begged for death before shooting her in the head. Other terrorists whose desires for rape were frustrated responded to the woman’s bravery by beheading her wth a shovel.
There’s an absence from the report that might be taken as a win by the anti-Israel set. It doesn’t mention or corroborate the beheading of babies. There’s a lesson for any of us who believed that horrific claim.
But there’s a lesson there, too, for those who regularly trot out figures for the numbers of children killed by Israel in a war that, sadly, is still hot.
And if you think that it speaks to the virtue of your cause that militants you saw as acting in its name stopped short of slicing the heads off babies, I just don’t know what to say.
There are many decent British people who are pro-Palestinian and have found themselves on the same side of racists whose views they do not support. Those people wouldn’t have known all of the details outlined in this report in the immediate aftermath of October 7. But they knew enough, courtesy of Hamas’s own filming.
I beg those people to take a breath should another Jew hunt erupt in Israel. I beg them to consider whether the appropriate response is to carry a Palestinian flag through London.