A Holocaust survivor murdered at age 91 and a baby killed just 14 hours after birth are among the victims named in the U.K.’s October 7 Parliamentary Commission Report, the most detailed Western investigation to date into the Hamas-led attack on Israel.
The 318-page report, chaired by British historian and peer Lord Andrew Roberts, documents the deaths of 1,182 people in a 48-hour period and provides extensive evidence of atrocities committed against civilians.
The report describes the assault as “a meticulously planned operation designed not only to kill but to terrorize through extreme brutality, looting and humiliation.” It includes testimonies of group rapes of women and girls, some of whom were murdered, as well as evidence of sexual violence committed against corpses. It details the targeting of children, including infants shot in strollers or burned alive.
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Roberts, one of Britain’s leading historians and a member of the House of Lords, said that meeting Mandy Damari, the mother of hostage Emily Damari, “reduced me to tears.” Speaking in an interview with Fox News Digital, Lord Roberts recalled visiting Kibbutz Kfar Aza and hearing from families of victims while the fate of their loved ones was still unknown.
“At that time, of course, she didn’t know whether her 27-year-old daughter, Emily, was going to be released or not, or whether she was going to die in Gaza,” he said. “And I have a 25-year-old daughter, and so it was brought home incredibly powerfully to me.”
Despite the graphic nature of the material, Roberts emphasized that the report was deliberately limited to verified facts. “We actually made the report much less than it could have been, because we insisted on only putting things in that could be double-checked,” he said. “If we had put in things that we truly believe happened but couldn’t prove happened, we kept them out.”
When asked what motivated him to take on the project, Roberts said, “The denialism that has already cropped up,” including attempts to downplay or question the events of October 7. “It’s quite ironic that as well as celebrating and indulging in their most sort of disgusting fantasies by wearing GoPro cameras, they also seek to deny that the whole thing ever happened,” he said of Hamas.
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“October 7 denial,” as the report refers to it, emerged almost immediately after the attacks and mirrors historical patterns of atrocity denial, despite the overwhelming evidence.
“I thought it was really important to get a big, thick, well-documented, irrefutable, fully footnoted document out there that will stand the test of time,” Roberts said.
The report includes accounts of mass looting, arson and mutilation. It states that terrorists used victims’ phones to send images to their families, booby-trapped corpses with grenades, and dragged bodies through Gaza. It confirms that “acts of sexual violence” occurred “across all sites” during the attack, and references forensic findings of partially or fully naked bodies.
Roberts said the attack was “not just spontaneous — it was a premeditated bloodlust.” He compared it to historical atrocities like the Rape of Nanjing in 1937. “Once Hamas got into a bloodlust, they were going out of their way to murder and kill absolutely anybody who came anywhere near them,” he said.
Despite the horrors, Roberts said the report also includes examples of heroism. For example, of Netta Epstein — a young man who “threw himself on a grenade to save his fiancée’s life” — Roberts said such acts “stand up with the great acts of heroism of any age.”
“We have the names in it of everybody who was killed … mostly with the circumstances of their deaths as well,” Roberts added: “Speaking as a historian, there are moments when one thinks of 9/11, or Pearl Harbor, various other attacks like this. They become part of history very quickly, but the actual individuals involved tend to get forgotten.”
Asked what role democracies should play in countering denialism, Roberts answered, “The first is properly to memorialize the victims,” he said. “The second … is to see this appalling act of barbarism for what it is, which is a complete denial of democracy, a blow struck deliberately against civilization, and … the most appalling act of racism.”
“Britain should be doing everything in its power to help Israel protect itself forever against such another attack,” Roberts clarified that he was expressing a personal view: “At the moment, it seems [the British government] is not doing that at all.”
In the report’s conclusion, Roberts and his colleagues wrote: “Our report will hopefully permit people to see such denials and justifications for what they really are: a perversion of and rejection of human decency. We owe it to the victims and their grieving families to set down the ghastly unvarnished truth about the sheer barbarism that Hamas and its terrorist allies unleashed on October 7, 2023.”
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