7 October 2023
The Truth
Photos of hostages at the Nova music festival in southern Israel near the border with the Gaza Strip, where hundreds of revellers were killed or kidnapped by Hamas.
© picture alliance / ASSOCIATED PRESS | Ohad Zwigenberg"Say what is" was the great guiding principle of Rudolf Augstein, the founder of Der Spiegel and an icon of German journalism. Yet, this principle seems to have lost significance in the German media landscape. Just a few days ago, a British Parliamentary Commission Report on October 7, 2023, was published—yet it has received little attention in Germany. This report, spanning over 300 pages, was compiled by an inter-party All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) under the leadership of Lord Roberts of Belgravia.
The foreword makes the core issue unmistakably clear:
Holocaust denial took a few years to take root in pockets of society, but on October 2023, it took only hours for people to claim that the massacres in southern Israel had not taken place.
This report directly counters such falsehoods. With painstaking research, it gathers facts and photographic evidence of the massacre from a vast array of sources. The brutality is overwhelming: the report meticulously documents attacks on 30 communities—mostly kibbutzim—as well as assaults on Bedouin settlements and camps, three cities (Sderot, Netivot, and Ofakim), the Psyduck and Nova festivals, and several military installations. It lays out the objectives, strategies, weapons, and equipment used. And it details the horrors: the targeted killing of civilians, hostage-taking and hostage abuse, the abduction of corpses, rape and mutilation of women, torture, looting and destruction of property, rocket attacks on civilians, and the cynical use of social media for propaganda—among many other crimes.
Remembering October 7th
14 months ago, Hamas terrorists brutally attacked Israel on the 7th of October 2023. Ariel Segal, senior political advisor to Yair Lapid, chairman of Yesh Atid, Israel's liberal party, shares her thoughts.
The sheer weight of the evidence is staggering. Above all, it reveals that these atrocities were not random acts of violence but carefully planned and executed by Hamas, with willing support from other terror groups and even segments of the civilian population—many of whom grotesquely celebrated the horrors. The result: one of the most horrible displays of inhumanity in recorded history.
This is the truth, and it cannot be ignored—no matter how much future research may refine individual details. The British parliamentary group has performed a historic service by publishing this report. It should bring an end to debates about the fundamental facts of October 7, 2023. What remains is the moral judgment and the political consequences. Let us hope that Germany will finally take note of this report. No one should be allowed to evade the truth—not even in the age of fake news.