The sheer scale of the atrocities carried out by Hamas terrorists who invaded Israel from Gaza on October 7, 2023, is all too often and all too easily passed over in the rest of the world, shrugged aside as if more than a thousand unbelievably violent deaths were of little or no consequence.

But consider this. Israel is a country of just 9million people, America one of some 333million. 

The death toll that day was the equivalent of some 44,400 Americans killed by terrorism. Or more than a dozen 9/11s. It would be the equivalent of some 8,400 British people being slaughtered and another 1,750 taken hostage.

These figures are almost too much for anyone in the West to comprehend. They were for the people of Israel too. But it happened to them anyway.

The attack from Gaza was brigade-sized, the terrorists forcing their way into Israel at 60 different points, not just by land vehicles and on foot but by boat and on hang gliders; perhaps as many as 6,000 in total.

Wherever they arrived they brought death – with rifles, grenades, incendiary weapons, rocket-propelled grenades, machine guns and more.

There were several waves, with terrorists from Hamas and Islamic Jihad coming first, then citizens of Gaza intent on joining in the looting and killing.

It would take months to identify the number of people killed that day. The final body count turned out to be just short of 1,200 people.

On 7 October 2023, Hamas terrorists killed an estimated 1,200 people as they invaded Israel from Gaza

Families were videoed as they were seized by Hamas during the terrible attack in October 2023 

The sheer scale of the atrocities carried out by Hamas terrorists who invaded Israel from Gaza on October 7, 2023, is all too often and all too easily passed over in the rest of the world, writes Douglas Murray

The victims were mainly civilians. At the Nova dance party just a couple of miles from the Gaza border, 364 young people were slaughtered as they hid or tried to flee. 

Many of them called their families – asking for help, asking for advice, or just telling their parents that they loved them – before they were mercilessly cut down.

In the age of the videophone the scale and brutality of what was happening swiftly became clear across the country and then the world.

In the coming months I would see many such videos, from relatives who showed me the last moments in the lives of their loved ones, recorded and sent just before the terrorists struck.

Many of the terrorists were also recording what was happening on their own cameras and mobile phones, filming the atrocities as they were carrying them out and then broadcasting their acts of violence with pride.

These acts included burning people alive and raping men and women. Sometimes before killing them. Sometimes after.

In a video compilation of just some of the killings that day, the murders and bodies seem to go on endlessly.

Scene after scene after scene: of terrorists using a shovel to remove the head of a young man lying on the floor, shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ with each strike; of the worst single massacre that day, when 66 young soldiers were slaughtered at a small Israeli observation base less than a kilometre from the Gaza border.

Car dashcam footage revealed that Gaza militants who attacked an all-night music festival in southern Israel shot and killed victims at point-blank range

The attack on the Supernova music festival on 9 October 2023 saw Hamas gunmen kill around 250 people

The unit was almost all female. They were trained in reconnaissance, not combat, and they were unarmed. The unit was in the immediate firing line and one of the first targets to be overwhelmed.

On video, terrified young women in various states of undress scream as the male terrorists enter. ‘You dogs, we will step on you,’ one of them says. One girl, her face streaming with blood, tries to bargain with the terrorists. ‘I have friends in Palestine,’ she says to them. ‘We will kill you all,’ he tells her.

Young women are streaming with blood lower down, the result of rape, bullets to their lower bodies, or knife cuts to their tendons to keep them from running away.

In one exchange a male terrorist points to the handcuffed girls and says: ‘Here are the Zionists. Here are the girls that can be impregnated.’

A final piece of footage shows a number of the girls limping, their hands still tied, clearly badly wounded, being bundled into a Hamas truck. 

Here was an additional horror – Israelis of all ages being taken into Gaza, on motorbikes, in pick-ups and cars, and on foot. Roughly 250 people were kidnapped that day.

One of them was an 85-year-old grandmother, a Holocaust survivor no less, taken, tortured and abused even though she was suffering from heart failure and high blood pressure and couldn’t walk. 

A video posted on social media showed her on a golf cart, with four armed terrorists around her, being paraded in the streets of Gaza as people clapped their hands, as if kidnapping a frail old lady was something to be celebrated.

IDF soldiers in the Israeli town of Ofakim on October 8 2023

Palestinians stand atop of a Israeli military vehicle after breaking down a border fence in Gaza on October 7 2023

I was at my home in New York on October 7 as the news of what was happening in Israel broke. The next day I learned there was to be a swiftly organised major demonstration in Times Square.

But it was not a protest against the horrors of the previous day, not a protest against the terrorists of Hamas. It was a protest against the state of Israel and the citizens of the world’s only Jewish state. 

Hundreds of demonstrators gathered that lunchtime – while the massacres were still going on in the south of Israel and the terrorists had still not yet been pushed back to Gaza.

Many carried banners, handed out by the organisers, that read ‘From the River to the Sea’, ‘Long Live the Intifada’, ‘Resistance Is Not Terrorism’, ‘By Any Means Necessary’. 

This last one was at a time when the world already knew that these ‘means’ included the mass sexual abuse of women and the burning alive of whole families in their homes.

This pattern of protest was repeated in cities across the West as open support for Hamas and their actions grew and grew.

In London on the night of the 7th, huge crowds gathered near the Israeli embassy, gleefully setting off flares as they celebrated the massacres. The numbers soon swelled into hundreds of thousands – all before Israel had even responded to the Hamas attacks.

Similar protests occurred across North America, on the streets and the most elite university campuses. In Canada, synagogues and Jewish shops were firebombed, Jewish schools were shot at, Jewish-owned bookshops vandalised.

Pro-Israel demonstrators protest over the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, near Downing Street in London, on October 9, 2023

A man holds a sign saying ‘Let the children go’ during a pro-Israel demonstrators protest near Downing Street in London on October 9, 2023

The Palace of Westminster, home to the Houses of Parliament and the House of Lords, illuminated in the colours of the flag of Israel on October 9, 2023

There was not a single major protest against Hamas. Not one. Those who carried out the massacre and started a war did not find themselves the object of criticism on the streets of any Western city.

On the contrary, Western media were already focusing not on what had just happened but on what Israel might do in response.

Having covered many wars as a foreign correspondent, I knew that the question ‘What will the Israelis do in retaliation?’ would soon be the main story. 

I feared – correctly, as it turned out – that a great wave of denial would sweep across the world, that what turned out to be the biggest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust would swiftly be denied, just as surely as neo-Nazis and others chose to deny the Nazi Holocaust after it had happened.

What would also be downplayed was how governments in the West had been funding the Palestinians in Gaza for years. Through UN organisations among many others, they had given billions of dollars in foreign aid direct to the government there.

This money had been used by Hamas’s leaders to either enrich themselves (the group’s leaders became billionaires) or to build the infrastructure of terror inside Gaza that allowed the group to carry out the October 7 attack, steal Israelis and hold them hostage inside Gaza. 

There would also be little recognition that Hamas deliberately placed its military infrastructure within and amid civilian buildings, including mosques, schools, homes and hospitals.

Its leadership (as intercepted messages from the leader of Hamas in Gaza have made clear) sees the loss of their own civilians as desirable, because of the advantages it can bring them in the war for international public opinion. They are sacrificed in the alarmingly successful effort to turn victims into culprits and culprits into victims.

Israeli civilians in the street following damage caused by a rocket launched into Ashkelon. Fighters were attempting to reach the city which is 12 miles from the Gaza Strip

A Palestinian child is pictured near a burning Israeli vehicle brought to Gaza by armed Hamas gunmen after they infiltrated areas of southern Israel on October 7

As somebody who cares about the one thriving democracy in the Middle East and the only Jewish state in the world, all of this was of great importance to me. 

But it matters to me also because I believe that what Israel stared into that day is a situation we might all stare into at some point. Possibly soon.

What the people of Israel were thrown into on October 7 spells out the divide between democracies and death cults. The right of Israel to fight and win the war in Gaza is vital not just for the sake of that country, but so Britain, America and every other Western country will be able to fight such a war if or when the time comes.

Yet the response here has often been one of hostility to Israel, as two survivors of the Nova party found out when they travelled to the UK to talk about their experiences as victims of terrorism. 

At Manchester Airport, they were detained by immigration authorities and interrogated as if they were the terrorists.

When asked why they were being detained, the border officials told them: ‘We need to make sure you are not going to do here what you are doing in Gaza.’

Though not Jewish, I have visited Israel many times and have friends there. As I started to grapple with the horrors that had just been inflicted on it, there was one thing in particular I just couldn’t fathom. 

From writing about and covering wars on three continents I have seen my share of violence and horrors. But there was something unusual about this atrocity.

Members of Hamas ride an Israeli military vehicle that was seized by gunmen who infiltrated areas of southern Israel, in the northern Gaza Strip October 7

An IDF reservist sits with fellow troops at kibbutz Kfar aza where dozens of civilians were killed days earlier near the border with Gaza, on October 10, 2023 in Kfar Gaza, Israel. Israel mobilised record numbers of reservists immediately after the assault

It was that the terrorists of October 7 did what they did with such relish. Not just the endless shouting of their war cries. Or the visible glee you could see in their faces and hear in their voices. It was the fact that all of this gave them such intense joy. And that they were proud of their actions.

In the midst of the attack on the kibbutz of Mefalsim – a community of just over a thousand people – a terrorist phoned his family back in Gaza.

‘Hi Dad,’ the three-minute call begins. ‘Your son killed Jews! Open my WhatsApp now and you will see how many I killed with my own hands!’

The son is exultant, boasting: ‘Dad, I’m talking to you from a Jewish woman’s phone. I killed her and her husband. I killed ten with my own hands. Put Mum on.’

He tells her: ‘Mum, your son is a hero. Kill, kill, kill.’ She replies: ‘God bless you. I wish I was with you.’

Another member of the family comes on the line and urges him to come back to Gaza. ‘What do you mean, come back?’ replies the son. ‘There is no going back. It is death or victory.’

In the days after the 7th, many people tried to make sense of facts such as these. What, if anything, could explain such hate? And what could any man or woman do against it?

My mind went back to an old friend of mine, the late George Weidenfeld, a Viennese Jew who fled the Nazis in 1938 and found refuge in England, where he became a renowned publisher.

Abandoned and torched vehicles at the site of the October 7 attack on the Supernova music festival near Kibbutz Reim in the Negev desert in southern Israel

A car destroyed in an attack by Hamas is seen in Sderot, Israel, on Saturday, October 7, 2023, amid the first strikes into Israel

The aftermath of an attack on the music festival near Re’im, southern Israel, on October 8 – a day after the massacre

He spent much of the rest of his long life trying to understand. He even published books by and about Nazis, including the memoirs of Albert Speer. 

George came to an extraordinary conclusion: ‘There are people who are worse anti-Semites than the Nazis.’ Himmler and his SS were among the most evil people in human history, yet even they sought to cover over their crimes.

Yet here in 2023, in the form of Hamas, were people who were boasting of their crimes, were proud of their crimes, and indeed wanted to broadcast their crimes for all the world to see. The burning question for me is this: what is the world to do against such cults of death, cults that threaten the future of civilisation?

For many people in the West, the answer seems to be to ignore it or to wish it away. Mass-casualty terrorist attacks have happened in recent years, from New York and Washington to London, Manchester, Paris, Nice, Berlin, and Stockholm, among others.

After 22 people, most of them young girls, were blown up by a suicide bomber at an Ariana Grande concert at Britain’s Manchester Arena in 2017, the public were urged to sing an Oasis song, Don’t Look Back In Anger.

As though, after nearly two dozen young people had their bodies blown to smithereens by a bomb packed with nails and ball bearings, the important thing was just not to be angry.

But why? If the murder of young women for the crime of being at a concert shouldn’t make you angry, then what should?

Footage appears to show Palestinians hoisting a child wielding a rifle onto their shoulders in celebration of the October 7 attack. In footage found on Twitter, a group of people were seen lifting their weapons into the air as they cheered

Palestinians inspect the damage following an Israeli airstrike on the Sousi mosque in Gaza City on October 9, 2023

Israelis in Rehovot take cover as a siren sounds warning of inbound rockets fired from Gaza on October 13

I thought about this a lot as I travelled to Israel in the aftermath of October 7 in pursuit of the truth about what happened.

In the morgues of Tel Aviv I visited the pathologists as they were trying to identify the bodies of the dead, and saw for myself the terrible destruction wrought by Hamas.

I spoke with political and military leaders to try to work out what had happened that day and what lessons could be learned.

And in the maximum-security prisons of Israel I came face-to-face with the Hamas terrorists who had carried out the massacres that day and stared into the eyes of men I recognised from the atrocity footage.

Many people in the West today are not comfortable talking in terms like good or evil. In our increasingly secular societies, they seem to think that such words are part of the past – too reductive an idea for our far more subtle and understanding times. 

We are even used to the notion that criminals in our society who do terrible things must have done them for some reason, that surely even a mass murderer can in some way be explained.

But we are missing something important. Evil does exist as a force in the world. Indeed, it is the only explanation for why certain people do certain things.

On October 7, 2023, many Israelis stared into the face of pure evil – 1,200 of them in the last moments of their lives.

People begged; people pleaded and in some cases cried for mercy. But they were murdered anyway.

Perhaps the only force in the world even greater than evil itself is the great, collected, concentrated evil that is war.

In the West we have become accustomed to living in peace, and taking it as the norm. The people of Israel have not been able to enjoy such a luxury. It is something that has been consistently forced upon them.

A year ago, Ismail Haniyeh, one of the leaders of Hamas confirmed that three of his four sons had been killed in an air strike. All four were also Hamas leaders. Their vehicle was hit at a site near Gaza City. It was reported that four of Haniyeh’s grandchildren were travelling in the same vehicle.

Haniyeh’s response to this news was caught live on camera while he was with colleagues in a luxury apartment in Qatar.

A woman holding a girl reacts after Israeli airstrikes hit the Ridwan neighborhood of Gaza City, Gaza on October 23, 2023

Israeli police officers evacuate a family from a site hit by a rocket fired from the Gaza Strip, in Ashkelon, amid Hamas’ October 7 assault on southern Israel

Members of the al-Zanati family, killed during an Israeli airstrike, are taken to a waiting vehicle to be driven to a cemetery for burial in Khan Yunis, Gaza, on October 23, 2023

To watch his reaction you might think he had just heard of a minor alteration in his schedule. He is not upset, he is not even perturbed. If anything he is joyful.

In a statement, he thanked Allah for the ‘honour’ bestowed on him for what he referred to as the ‘martyrdom of my three sons and some grandchildren’.

Perhaps it should not be surprising. This was a man who had spent his life extolling the ‘martyrdom’ of Palestinian children, once saying ‘children are tools to be used against Israel. We will sacrifice them for the political support of the world’. That is the reaction of a true fanatic. There is something completely inhuman about it.

Here in the West, we are prone to trotting out the same old banalities – that people around the world are the same everywhere and essentially want the same things; that everybody wants to just live in peace and bring up their family in safety. 

Yet some people do not. Not because they are born that way but because they have been raised that way.

How can anyone hope to overcome a movement – a people – who welcome death, who glory in death, who worship death? Is it not inevitable that against such a force, a feeble and sybaritic West cannot possibly win?

For almost a quarter of a century, I have heard the taunt of the jihadists. ‘We love death more than you love life,’ they declare. I heard it from al-Qaeda, from Hamas, from ISIS. From Europe to Afghanistan, several of my friends and colleagues had heard such war cries in their last moments.

And it had always seemed to me not just a nihilistic utterance but one that appeared almost impossible to counter.

An overturned pram on a street in Israel is pictured following Hamas’ incursion into southern Israel on October 7

Palestinians transport 85-year-old Yaffa Adar (centre) from Kibbutz Kfar Azza into the Gaza Strip on Saturday, October 7

Palestinians move a captured Israeli civilian, center, from Kibbutz Kfar Azza into the Gaza Strip on October 7

This year I finally saw an answer to it. I went into Gaza myself, taken there by the Israeli Defence Force, and saw up close its campaign to defeat Hamas and return the hostages to their homes. Of all the Israeli soldiers I met, none took delight in their task. 

They could feel victorious on occasion, proud to have completed a mission and got their unit out alive. But none took a joy or pleasure in the task they had to do. They did it not because they loved death but exactly the opposite – because they love life.

They fought for life. For the survival of their families, their nation, and their people. Even the most secular of them knew that the lifestyle most of us take for granted cannot be taken so by them.

They know they won’t have the ability to party in Tel Aviv, fall in love, grow a family, or live a meaningful life unless they are willing to fight for it.

‘Choose life’ is one of the most important commandments of the Jewish people. It is also one of the fundamental values of the West. They, and all of us, can win in spite of the enemy loving death. Because there is nothing wrong with loving life so much. It is the basis on which civilisation can win.

* Adapted from On Democracies and Death Cults by Douglas Murray (Harper-Collins, £25), to be published April 10. Copyright Douglas Murray 2025. To order a copy for £22.50 (offer valid to 12/4/25; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to www.mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.