7 October Parliamentary Commission Report

This week the UK parliament’s All-Party Parliamentary Group on UK-Israel published a detailed report on the events of October 7^th 2023.

“Following the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023—one of the deadliest terror attacks in history—parliamentarians sought to create an independent record of the events. The assault resulted in 1,182 deaths, over 4,000 injuries, and 251 hostages taken, making it the deadliest massacre of Jewish people since the Holocaust. Among the victims were 18 UK citizens, marking the largest UK loss in a Middle Eastern terror attack.

Amid rising misinformation and efforts to distort the facts, this report provides a clear, factual, and chronological account to preserve historical accuracy. By drawing on survivor testimonies, eyewitness statements, and expert analysis, it ensures the full scale and impact of the attack are properly documented. In an era of denialism, it serves as an impartial, evidence-based record to support informed discussion and prevent the erasure of truth.”

The full report can be found here.

In the foreword to the report, the chair of the panel – Lord Roberts of Belgravia – notes a BBC interview with a Hamas leader.

“On 4 October 2024, almost a year after the attacks, Khalil Al-Hayya, the most senior leader of Hamas outside Gaza, was asked by Jeremy Bowen of the BBC in Doha, “Why did you kill so many civilians, women and children?” He replied, “We ordered our resistance fighters on 7 October not to target civilians, women and children. The objective was the occupation soldiers who are always killing, bombing and destroying in Gaza. We don’t endorse harming civilians. On the ground, there were certainly personal mistakes and actions. The fighters may have felt their lives were in danger.” In fact, Israel unilaterally withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005.

“We’ve all seen how the fighters visited the houses,” Al-Hayya continued, “they spoke to the families, they ate and drank.” Pressed on this bizarre version of events, he added, “When they went into some of the houses, none of the women and children they dealt with were terrified. Those videos were published by the Israeli occupation. They weren’t published by us.”

Asked about the taking of women and children as hostages, something even he could hardly deny, Al-Hayya claimed, “One of the goals of 7 October was to kidnap a small group of Israeli soldiers to exchange them for Palestinian prisoners. But when the [IDF] Gaza division completely collapsed in the face of the resistance fighters, we took a lot of prisoners. It was not our plan to capture civilians, including women and children.” Yet as we shall show, Hamas not only planned to take hostages, but abused them in the act.

Specifically asked by Bowen about sexual assault, Al-Hayya stated, “The orders and ethics of all Palestinians and the resistance fighters were humanitarian. We’re brought up according to the Islamic religion, culture and national civilisation. We protect them as we protect ourselves. Sexual, or non-sexual, assault has never been proven” When Bowen said that evidence of sexual assault was piling up, Al-Hayya said, “I told you the instructions were clear. There may have been abnormal acts by irresponsible people, but these are just allegations.”

By total contrast, our Report details that horrific acts of systematic rape and sexual abuse took place, in contradiction to Koranic teaching, and that everything Al-Hayya said was a lie, as he must have known it was.”

Not only must Al-Hayya have known that everything he said a year after the attacks was a lie: so must the BBC. Nevertheless, it chose to air the interview replete with falsehoods that it had requested from a terrorist organisation. As was noted here at the time:

“Despite the BBC’s claim that Jeremy Bowen ‘pressed’ the Hamas leader, al-Hayya was nevertheless given a worldwide platform from which to disseminate his terrorist organisation’s inadequately challenged propaganda and disinformation. Bowen later justified having asked Hamas for that interview by claiming that “it’s really important to talk to all sides of the story” and that doing so is part of “impartial reporting”.”

The BBC international editor’s interpretation of the amplification of a terrorist organisation’s propaganda and obvious lies as “impartial reporting” should of course be a matter of concern to anyone who believes that truth and historical accuracy matter.

PROPAGANDA, HATE SPEECH AND DISINFORMATION: THE BBC’S IDEA OF ‘A RANGE OF PERSPECTIVES’