7 October 2023: What really happened?
Israeli soldiers are seen during a large-scale raid to arrest Palestinians in the northern occupied West Bank on November 2023 (Nasser Ishtayeh/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)At dawn, on 7 October 2023, Hamas fighters blasted over 100 holes in the walls and fences that separate the Gaza Strip from Israel.
By Eugene Doyle, Reposted from Pearls and Irritations, October 06, 2025
More than 3000 fighters pour through the gaps and launch a surprise attack on nearby military bases. Some fly over the barrier on motorized para-gliders, others take to small boats to attack north of the Strip. Operation Al-Aqsa Flood is underway.
Much of what we thought we knew about the attack has turned out to be false or only partially true. We owe it to ourselves and, above all, to the Palestinian people, to understand both what really happened that day and why it happened.
7 October dawns
Thousands of Hamas Al Qassam fighters wake in the early hours to messages calling them to arms, directing them to assembly points across the Gaza Strip. For all but a few, this is unexpected. Is it just another training exercise? The Israelis apparently thought so.
6.26 am. Hamas starts to launch a massive barrage of low-yield missiles across the barrier fence.
At 6.30 am, Muhammad Deif, commander of the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s military wing, broadcasts a message. The Western media avoided sharing his words, which made clear what drove Hamas to this fateful point.
“Since the criminal occupation continues to inflict an outrageous siege on our beloved Strip, and considering the ongoing crimes against our people and nation, the occupiers’ provocations and their disregard for international laws and resolutions, as well as American and Western support given to them and international silence, we have decided to put a stop to all this with God’s help, so that the enemy can understand that no more can they sow chaos without being held to account. We announce the beginning of the ‘al-Aqsa Flood’ operation.” Muhammad Deif.
The Israelis tend to hold Palestinians in contempt as their racial inferiors. In Mohammad Deif, they massively under-estimated their enemy: his ability to master tunnels, professionalize Al-Qassam, co-ordinate a weapons manufacturing industry inside one of the most tightly sealed 3600 borders in the world, and plan a military break-out from a concentration camp that was, in terms of military-on-military, a resounding success. Well-educated and cultured (he formed a theatre group and was an amateur actor), he also came from a family that had fought the occupation from the founding of the State of Israel.
Deif made clear that he wanted the Israelis to pay a price for “the crimes committed throughout these long, wretched years”.
Morning
Hamas operatives use a variety of tools to blind the Israeli border surveillance technology and take out the autonomous guns. It takes the Israelis hours to appreciate the scale of what is underway.
Formations of Hamas fighters head straight for the headquarters of the Gaza Division at Re’im Army Base, where Brigadier General Avi Rosenfeld leads the defense. Mid-morning, an IDF officer messages through to the Kiryat bunker in Tel Aviv, where political and military leaders are gathered: “The Gaza Division has been defeated.” Panic and confusion sweep across the military, the length and breadth of the country.
Meanwhile, Hamas’s elite Nukhba fighters launch assaults on dozens of army bases and posts, most of which soon fall to the lightly armed but better-trained Palestinian fighters.
It will take three days for the Israelis to retake all the territory that falls on 7 October.
”The Zionist entity has occupied our land, driven out our people, destroyed our cities, our towns and our villages, committed hundreds of massacres against our people, killing children, women and the elderly, and buried innocent, peaceful people under the rubble of their homes, in contemptuous violation of all international norms and human rights and rejecting international laws.” Muhammad Deif, in his broadcast of October 7
Deif repeatedly references international law and its persistent violation by Israel and its Western allies as a casus belli. To well-schooled Western ears, this may seem curious – but Hamas continues to this day to call for respect for international law and says they would welcome an international commission of inquiry into the events that led to 7 October and the genocide. Western and Israeli leaders have very good reasons to want to avoid this ever happening; genocide is, after all, the crime of crimes, and we might finally hold the real terrorists to account.
Noon. A catastrophic success.
From a purely military perspective, the Hamas attack was a brilliant success. Out-soldiered and out-general-led, the Israelis were defeated and hundreds of soldiers killed, dozens taken hostage, including senior commanders.
So successful were the Al-Qassam fighters that the attack started to lose structure as the fighters operating without centralized command and control moved from completed missions onto targets of opportunity, including the kibbutzim and the Nova Music festival, which Hamas had not known about in advance, according to Israeli intelligence. Hundreds of civilians were killed by a mix of Hamas fighters, other resistance groups, random Palestinian individuals, and an unknown number by the IDF itself.
British author and expert on Palestinian resistance, Helena Cobban, called 7 October Hamas’ “catastrophic success”. It triggered the disgraceful Israeli war by tantrum, war by war crimes that we have witnessed every day since.
“The Gods of the Western world came down on them,” Cobban said. She recalled the earlier massive demonization of the PLO. ”Let’s not give in to this deliberate demonization. The genocide has to end, and the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank has to end. De-demonizing Hamas is an essential part of this,” Cobban told Nima Alkhorshid on Dialogue Works recently. I couldn’t agree more: as I wrote recently, Hamas is better than us.
Just as the US did after the Chinese and Koreans decimated the US army and drove it in shambolic disarray back over Korea’s 38th Parallel in 1951 (the US used airpower to kill three million civilians in revenge), Israel has, for the past two years, turned to the standard Western tool when faced with indigenous resistance: genocidal violence and unimaginable cruelty. They are our close friends and allies with whom our leaders tell us we share values.
“We warned the leaders of the Occupation not to persist in their crimes, and we appealed to world leaders to take action to end the occupiers’ crimes against our holy sites, our people, our detainees, and our land, and to compel the occupiers to abide by international law and resolutions. But the leaders of the occupation have not heeded us, nor have the world leaders taken action. Instead, the occupiers’ crimes have increased beyond all limits, especially in Jerusalem and the blessed al-Aqsa Mosque, the first of the two Qiblas and the third holiest site.” Muhammad Deif, in his broadcast of October 7
Mid-Morning: Non-Hamas Palestinians who crossed the border that day
To this day, “Hamas” is said by our media and leaders to have killed 1195 soldiers and civilians on the Israeli side. Attributing anything like the full body count to Hamas does not stand up to scrutiny.
In 2024, Israeli media reported that thousands of non-Hamas Gazans had crossed the security perimeter that day. The Times of Israelacknowledged that “Hitherto, figures … did not take into account Gazans who crossed the fence and participated in the atrocities but were not Hamas members.” These include thousands of fighters from other Palestinian groups who spontaneously joined the attack once news spread like wildfire through Gaza.
Footage shows fighters from Islamic Jihad, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, as well as thousands of civilians who spontaneously crossed the perimeter pursuing a wide variety of motives – a first look ever outside the concentration camp, a look at the lands stolen from them, looting, attacking Israelis, etc. Thousands of them will die on 7 October, most of them guilty of any crime more serious than petty thieving. They are never mentioned in the racist white Western media; they don’t count. Dumping everything done that day at Hamas’s door is an important part of the demonization strategy, as is the suggestion that 7 October was unique, when in fact there had been countless “October 7ths” inflicted on the Palestinians over decades, after which the West always yawned and moved on.
Afternoon: The laws of war abandoned
It is now likely that Hamas killed most of the soldiers and less than half the civilians on the Israeli side on 7 October. The Israelis definitely killed more civilians, if Palestinian civilians are included, as well as many of their own citizens. Getting to the facts and shedding the propaganda is why an international tribunal is needed. All those who committed crimes leading to and including 7 October, and the two years after, must face justice – and, yes, that includes powerful white people like our presidents and prime ministers.
One of the first images that troubled me in the days following 7 October was the shocking lines of utterly incinerated cars, many dozens, if not hundreds of them, which the reporting at the time suggested was part of the Hamas onslaught. It didn’t seem possible, and now we know what actually happened. Israeli Apache attack helicopters were ordered to obliterate any vehicles heading to Gaza, regardless of who was on board.
The 30mm Chain Gun used on the Israeli Apaches can fire 650 rounds per minute, spraying bullets the size of a hand over a wide area. Their on-board cannon and missile systems have devastating power. They opened fire at unidentified vehicles returning to Gaza; they destroyed ambulances inside Gaza and even fired on people at the Nova Festival, according to first-hand accounts of pilots and survivors, as reported in Israeli media.
IDF tanks also played a major role that day. Some of the houses at Kibbutz Be’eri were on the receiving end of heavy weapon fire, entire frontages blown out, entire structures blackened and turned into rubble by the kind of firepower that Hamas simply did not possess inside Israel. An exploding tank shell generates the kind of heat/fireball that is more than capable of incinerating whoever is near it.
According to a Times of Israel article, titled “IDF commander who oversaw Oct. 7 battle in Be’er apologizes to bereaved residents”, General Barak Hiram ordered a tank to shell a house in Kibbutz Be’er with hostages inside. It resulted in the killing of 13 Israelis, including children. Separately, tank officer Colonel Nissim Hazan fired shells into homes, later saying he did not know there were hostages inside. “We needed to shake things up that day,” he told Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
The charred bodies were immediately recruited into service by the IDF, and a willing press corps spread the lie that Hamas had burned people alive. Joe Biden lied about seeing beheaded babies, and the story went viral, despite no babies having been killed that day.
The War Zone: “In one remarkable part of the account, Lt. Col. E. describes firing upon an ambulance on the Gaza side of the border, admitting that they were not entirely sure whether the wounded person being carried was a hostage or a militant.” Either way, deliberately firing on a clearly marked ambulance is a serious war crime under the Geneva Convention.
Despite all this first-hand testimony from Israeli officers, despite the footage of Apaches in action supplied by the IDF, and despite the testimony of survivors at Nova and in the kibbutzim, the Western media continues to peddle convenient lies about Hamas. Again, the only solution is for an international war crimes tribunal to be convened to investigate crimes by all sides involved.
I’ll give the last word to Muhammad Deif, who was assassinated in 2024 and replaced by Yahya Sinwar. He makes a telling remark about the most forgotten of all the hostages.
“All the while, the occupation authorities continue to detain thousands of our heroes, and subject them to the most heinous forms of oppression, torture, and humiliation. Hundreds of detainees have spent 20 or more years in the darkness of prisons.” Muhammad Deif, commander of the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, broadcast at 6.30 am, 7 October 2023
7 October 2023: Return of the Hannibal Directive and the genocide starts now – Part 2
By noon on 7 October 2023, news of Palestinians taking hostages gripped the attention of Israel’s top military and political leadership, who are gathered in the “Pit”, the Kirya bunker in Tel Aviv.
By Eugene Doyle, Reposted from Pearls and Irritations, October 08, 2025
Intelligence chiefs had gone there around 3 am when reports came in of unusual movements by Hamas’s Al Qassam Brigades leadership. They decided not to put the IDF on high alert. Hours later, with hundreds of Israeli troops dead, battles raging over dozens of sites, and reports coming in of mass killings at the Nova Music Festival, the Israeli leaders take a momentous decision: issue the Hannibal Directive. Thousands will die in the coming hours as a result.
Noon: Return of the Hannibal Directive – kill everyone
Despite calling the Hamas fighters monsters for killing civilians, the cold reality is that the Israel Defense Force killed many more civilians that day than Hamas.
The Hannibal Directive — authorizing lethal force even if it kills their own people — was first issued in the 1980s to prevent soldiers who had been captured by the Palestinian resistance from being used as leverage to release some of the thousands of hostages held by Israel. Freeing Palestinians in Israeli captivity was one of the goals Hamas stated at the outset of Operation Al Aqsa Flood on 7 October.
Dozens of high-ranking Palestinian leaders like Marwan Barghouti, some held for decades, are high on their priority list, not least because they could be future leaders of a free Palestine. Avoiding this was Israeli doctrine. I’ve written a number of stories on this topic, including All I wanted was to bid my daughter a final farewell, which focused on Palestinian parliamentarian and hostage Khalida Jarrar, who emerged from brutal captivity in January 2025.
According to a major report on the Israeli news site Ynet by journalists Yoav Zeiton and Ronen Bergman, when footage of hostages being taken on 7 October reached the Kirya, “This is the moment when the IDF decides on a kind of return to the Hannibal order”. The command was sent “to open fire on terrorist vehicles that were racing to Gaza, even if there were concerns that they contained hostages”. The Jerusalem Post, Haaretz and other major Israeli media confirm this in interviews with political and military leaders.
As F-16 jets and Elbit Zik drones attack Gaza, destroying ambulances, civilian gatherings, and all sorts of structures, a dozen Apache attack helicopters snap into action, raining down missiles and machine gun fire along Route 232 and other roads heading towards the Gaza Strip. Vehicles, motorcycles, foot traffic, anything moving either into or out of the Strip is blown away. It is unknown how many of the occupants of vehicles heading back towards Gaza were hostages, but they likely numbered at least in the dozens.
Chris Cobb-Smith, a 20-year veteran of the British military and now a human rights investigator, analyzed Israeli video of Apache helicopters in action. Some of the footage can be seen on Al Jazeera’s blockbuster documentary, October 7. It shows a gunship strafing vehicles full of people, killing survivors as they flee.
“My concern with this footage is we cannot tell whether they’re Hamas gunmen or civilians or possibly hostages. I don’t believe the helicopter pilot or the machine gun operator would be able to tell you that,” Cobb-Smith says.
Each round of the 30mm Chain Gun is the size of your hand, and they spit out 650 rounds per minute. Miraculously, one of the hostages, though seriously wounded, survives this hail of lead and is left for dead. She is rescued and lives to tell of the shock as the Apache turns its fire on the flatbed vehicle that she and eight others had been thrown onto minutes before.
It is worth mentioning that Asa Kasher, the man who wrote the IDF’s Ethics Code, described the use of the Hannibal Directive on 7 October as “Unlawful, Unethical and Horrifying”. Our governments yawned and looked the other way.
Evening
By the time the IDF largely regains control (it will take three days in all), the world already knows Hamas has struck an unprecedented blow against the State of Israel. Hundreds of soldiers, including high-ranking officers, have been killed. Also among the dead are over a dozen Shin Bet agents, and over 100 police officers and local security. Hundreds of civilians have also been killed on the Israeli side, bringing the body count to just under 1200.
The Palestinians lose hundreds of their best fighters, and an unknown number of civilians, largely to Apache helicopters that obliterate traffic heading back to Gaza, and by the jets and drones that bomb inside the Strip itself. Many are injured on both sides. Thirty-six Israeli children are killed, mostly in the kibbutzim, by stray bullets from both Palestinian and Israeli gunfire, as well as Israeli tanks shelling houses containing both Palestinian fighters and Israelis. Dozens of foreign nationals are killed. Amongst the dead are passport holders from France, Thailand, the US, Ukraine, Russia, the UK, Nepal, Germany, and Australia.
A total of 251 hostages were taken by a variety of Palestinian groups and individuals. Hamas leadership had apparently instructed its fighters to only take military hostages, but in the chaos and violence of the day, these orders were clearly not followed. Hamas fighters were among a variety of Palestinian groups and individuals who committed serious war crimes.
Palestinian lives do ***not** matter
A large number of the Palestinians killed that day, as was evident from the footage, were civilians who crossed through the freshly-blown gaps in the perimeter to “sight-see”. If you read the Western media reports from 7 October through to the present, it is clear that Palestinian lives do not matter. They are ignored; uncounted, invisible.
For many of the dead, it was the first time they had ever stepped outside of the Strip. For others, it was their first contact with their stolen homeland in years, and they just wanted to have a look. Some were there to loot a horse, a tractor, a TV set, or whatever they could get before rushing back to the concentration camp that is Gaza. Some were resistance fighters on a mission to take the fight to the enemy. Others were Israeli hostages. The Apaches did not discriminate, despite the rules of war requiring their pilots to do so.
Midnight: the genocide starts now!
Richard Sanders, head of Al Jazeera’s investigative unit, made a telling comment a year after the attack. “Hamas and others committed very real crimes on 7 October. The oddity was that in the days that followed, the world’s media focused not on the crimes they did commit, but on crimes they did not commit.”
The motive for official Israeli and American lies about beheaded babies, systematic rape, burning piles of children, and other fictitious atrocities completely “escaped” the major media outlets that repeated them as holy scripture. My first story after 7 October, published in October 2023, was entitled 40 Beheaded Babies Survived the Hamas Attack. It debunked some of these fabrications but also looked at how “monster” propaganda has long been used to delegitimize an enemy and prepare the public for your own team to commit appalling real crimes.
No baby died on the Israeli side that day, according to official Israeli reports. Similarly, stories of systematic rape have been demolished. The first of what would be thousands of Palestinian babies really did die that day.
Dawn
Human Rights Watch and other human rights organizations have written detailed reports on the events of 7 October, and it is clear that various Palestinian groups, including individual Hamas fighters, committed serious war crimes on 7 October, most particularly at the Nova festival, where hundreds were killed.
In September 2025, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory reported that Israeli authorities and forces have committed and are continuing to commit genocide in the Gaza Strip. Genocide is the highest form of state terrorism.
If international justice is not just a tool deployed sporadically by the powerful white countries to attack Muslims, Africans, and Slavs, then all those who have credible cases to answer for war crimes in Israel and the Palestinian Territories must face international justice. It would be hypocritical and deplorable if the major criminals — Biden, Trump, Starmer, Merz, Von der Leyen, Macron, Netanyahu, and many others — were not to appear in the dock.
It is telling that Hamas has said it would welcome an international inquiry, while the powerful white Western countries and Israel would see hell freeze over before they allow their leaders to face independent judicial scrutiny. In their document Our Narrative: Operation Al Aqsa Flood, Hamas has an entire section ‘ Towards a transparent international investigation’. That really is worth pondering.
Making the Palestinians pay the price of freedom
Two years on from 7 October, the Palestinian people and their leaders continue their grim struggle for justice and freedom.
We need to de-demonize Hamas and leave it to the Palestinian people to choose their leaders. I will give the last word to Azzam Tamimi, author of the excellent book Hamas: A History from Within:
“Pinpoint for me one struggle for liberation in which there was no costly price to pay. How many millions perished in Vietnam in order for Vietnam to become free? So you see, there’s no easy way. There is no small price for freedom and for independence. And the Palestinians do understand that.”
Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region.
RELATED:
