It is the morning of Oct. 7, and the sounds of gunfire ring. A man rushes his 8- and 12-year-old sons — still in their pajamas — through a side door, and they crowd into a backyard shed. Within seconds, someone tosses in a grenade. The father leaps to absorb the blast, then crumples to the floor.
“Why am I alive?” one of the boys howls, screaming for his father in Hebrew. Stunned, he looks to his brother, who is covered in blood and appears to have lost an eye. “Itay, I think we are going to die.”
The horrific scene was among dozens compiled by the Israel Defense Forces and shown to journalists on Tuesday morning at the Israeli Consulate in San Francisco, exactly one month after Hamas’ attacks on citizens across southern Israel. The footage, pulled from the body cameras, social media accounts and mobile phones of the attackers, Israeli responders and victims themselves, was assembled to document the carnage of that day — and to reinvigorate support as outrage mounts over the death and devastation in Gaza from Israel’s retaliatory airstrikes.
“The decision to go into Gaza did not happen on its own,” said Tyler Gregory, the executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of the Bay Area. “And now that we’re three and a half weeks removed from the (Oct. 7) attacks, that’s not the footage on TV anymore. I think Israel wants to remind the world why we have to do this.”
The disturbing scenes spilled from a television in a small conference room: There were bodies torched to cinders, a set of teeth in a pile of ash. Bloodied corpses in their bedrooms, lying contorted in hallways, highways and yards. A woman’s body, naked from the waist down, charred black by fire. A young hostage clutching his arm, torn to bloody tatters, as he’s loaded into a truck. A man being struck in the neck, over and over again, with the metal edge of a garden hoe. And children — so many children — with their bodies bloated by death.
Every few…
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