Israeli authorities refuse to return massive trove of Oct 7 video. What are they hiding?

Israeli kibbutz residents wonder why the state won’t return October 7 footage it confiscated from them – including video of loved one's final moments.

By Michelle Witte

The Israeli government is still holding a massive trove of video documentation of the Oct. 7 attack captured by individuals and communities caught up in the fighting. One bereaved parent even accuses Israeli authorities of deleting a video of her son’s last moments before returning his phone to her.

According to Israel’s Channel 13, “all the cameras, memory cards and films that documented the atrocities were collected, but two and a half years later, these materials have not been returned to the communities and bereaved families who are desperate for information, and even feel that someone is hiding it from them.”

Soon after Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, special units from the IDF, the Israeli intelligence agency Shin Bet and Israel’s investigation unit Lahav 433 collected photo and video documentation of the violence, confiscating cell phones, individual cameras, kibbutz security cameras and more.

“They disconnected what was needed, took it and moved on – that was the last time we saw the materials,” said an Israeli army reservist who participated in the collection mission.

According to the head of the Kfar Aza kibbutz – the site of a number of a series of atrocity hoaxes spun out in the early days after the attack – community members cooperated with investigators at the time. Now, years after the events, these families are wondering why documentation of their loved ones’ fates has yet to be returned to them.

Even Sabine Taasa, who was made an emblem of Israeli victimhood after her husband and one of her sons were killed on Oct. 7, is now clashing with Israeli authorities over footage of that day.

Taasa’s 17-year-old son, Or, was killed on Zikim beach. According to Channel 13, Taasa says she saw a video her son filmed in the moments leading up to his death, but when authorities returned his phone to her, no such video remained. The outlet says this is not an isolated incident.

An IDF probe found that soldiers abandoned civilians hiding in a bathroom there and then left their bodies for a week.

Channel 13 reports that Israeli police claimed Lahav 433 is still investigating the events in kibbutz Kfar Aza and no indictments have yet been filed, so returning evidence at this stage could jeopardize their criminal case. Meanwhile, the IDF rejected all accusations that it is withholding documentation and says it is in the final stages of adopting policies for how this type of evidence will be returned to communities and families.

On October 7, the Israeli government issued video Hannibal Directive orders which led Apache helicopter pilots and tank gunners to take aim at Israel’s own citizens in the Gaza envelope, supposedly to prevent them from being taken hostage. Israeli Brig. Gen. Barak Hiram personally ordered a tank crew to shell a home in Kibbutz Be’eri, knowing it was filled with Israeli citizens who had been taken captive by Hamas fighters seeking to negotiate a way out of the standoff. A dozen Israelis were killed in the strike, leaving behind “a house full of corpses,” according to the lone Israeli survivor. One Israeli tank gunner from an all-female unit similarly revealed that she was ordered to shell Israeli homes without knowing who was inside. An Israeli police investigation subsequently revealed that Israeli helicopters shelled the Nova Electronic Music festival on October 7.

Given Israel’s track record of targeting its own citizens on October 7 and misleading the public about it, the Israeli state might be holding on to as much video as possible to ensure no further evidence of the Israeli army massacring its own citizens is made public.

Israel has demonstrated a keen interest in collecting documentation of the events of October 7 and controlling narratives through careful curation and dissemination. At the same time, it has refused to participate in independent, international investigations of the attack, Israel’s response, or the widely distributed and now widely debunked claims of mass sexual violence by Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups. According to the Israeli state, Israel and Israel alone is justified in and capable of conducting such probes.

However, the state has strangely neglected to launch its own comprehensive special investigation into the apparent massive intelligence failure and military debacle. In fact, the Israeli government has had to be prodded by its own high court to establish a state commission of inquiry into the events, according to reporting by the Times of Israel. The Israeli government now has until July 1 to come up with a “suitable framework” to investigate the events, following years of pressure by the families of Israelis killed that day.

With the Israeli military-intelligence apparatus refusing to return possibly hundreds of hours of footage to its owners, some Israelis who lived through the October 7 attacks are beginning to wonder if they could be hiding something.