Oct. 7 Was Worse Than a Terror Attack. It Was a Pogrom.

‘Let me know of one Palestinian in Gaza who tried to save a Jew and maybe I’ll change my mind’

By Deborah Danan, TABLET    24 January 2024

Palestinians cross the Gaza-Israel border fence in Khan Yunis, in the southern Gaza Strip, on Oct. 7, 2023/© YUSEF MOHAMMED/IMAGESLIVE VIA ZUMA PRESS WIRE

Eyal Barad was in the safe room of his home in Nir Oz for more than 12 hours on Oct. 7 while Palestinians went on a rampage of his Gaza envelope kibbutz, eventually kidnapping or murdering more than a quarter of its residents.

Every so often, Barad, 40, was forced to cover his 6-year-old daughter’s mouth with his hand to stifle her squeals. The little girl, who is autistic, thought the whole thing was a game. Most of the time, though, Barad was glued to his phone, watching the live feed of a camera he had recently installed outside his home to monitor speeding cars. Images from the feed, which I obtained, show Palestinian women and children—some appearing as young as 8 years old—taking part in the horror of that day.

Survivors’ accounts, video evidence, and the interrogation recordings of apprehended Palestinians paint a damning picture of the complicity of Gazan civilians both in the Oct. 7 attack, in which more than 1,200 people were murdered and 240 people were abducted to Gaza, and its aftermath. It is one that has sparked a debate in Israel that challenges the inclination to draw distinctions between ordinary Palestinian civilians of Gaza—often referred to in Israel as bilti me’uravim (uninvolved)—and their terror leaders. For many, Oct. 7 reeked of something that Jews have been familiar with for centuries; a phenomenon where not just a vanguard, but a society at large participates in the ritual slaughter of Jews.

Around 700 Palestinians stormed Barad’s kibbutz of Nir Oz—less than a five-minute drive from Gaza—that day, CCTV footage shows. The overwhelming majority of those, estimated by Eran Smilansky, a member of the kibbutz’s security squad, to be around 550, were civilians. They were largely unarmed and not in uniform. Some of those civilians carried out wholesale acts of terror themselves, including rape and abduction—and in some cases, the eventual sale of hostages to Hamas—while others abetted the terrorists. Others still simply took advantage of the porous border to loot Israeli homes and farms, including stealing hundreds of thousands of shekels in agricultural equipment.

Similar scenes played out in several of the more than 20 brutalized Israeli communities. In one video that has become emblematic of the debate around the “uninvolved,” an elderly Palestinian man with walking sticks is seen hobbling at an impressive clip along with the rest of the mob through the breached gate of Be’eri.

Differentiating between terrorists and civilians is tricky, particularly since Hamas terrorists often wear civilian clothing, a tactic evident in the ongoing war in Gaza. However, other indicators help make this distinction, such as the absence of weapons and the fact that many were filmed crossing the border barefoot or even on horseback. Even senior Hamas official Mousa Abu Marzouk readily admitted that Gaza civilians had taken part in the Oct. 7 atrocities.

One video shows a group of men in civilian clothing beating a soldier while a separate image shows another group of what appears to be civilian men celebrating atop the smoking husk of a burned-out tank. In the infamous 47-minute terror reel of the Oct. 7 atrocities, Palestinians in civilian clothing are seen beating elderly hostages with sticks. Another repeatedly screams “Allahu akhbar!” as he decapitates a Thai farm worker with a garden tool.

Barad’s speed camera in Nir Oz includes images of a Palestinian girl riding a stolen bike. In another, a Palestinian woman is seen pointing out Barad’s neighbor’s home to a uniformed terrorist. An image captured later shows a resident of that home being hoisted onto a motorcycle to be taken into Gaza.

But it’s the testimonies of the survivors that provide the clearest evidence that Oct. 7 was not just a terrorist attack, but a pogrom.

Batya Holin is a photographer and peace activist from Kfar Aza, which alongside Nir Oz and Be’eri, was one of the heaviest-hit communities. Holin had developed a friendship with a Gazan photographer, Mahmoud, with whom she arranged a joint exhibit last year of photos of her kibbutz and his village in the Gaza Strip. On the morning of Oct. 7, Mahmoud called and interrogated Holin, asking her how many soldiers were in her vicinity. That was when Holin realized that Mahmoud had given the photos of her village to Hamas. “Whoever says there are people there who are uninvolved, here is the proof,” she told Israel’s Channel 13 News. “They are all involved. They are all Hamas.”

Echoing Holin’s testimony, former hostage Nili Margalit said that “civilians, regular people,” abducted her to Gaza in one of the kibbutz’s golf carts. Likewise, an NBC News investigation found that Noa Argamani was likely kidnapped by a civilian mob. A video of her abduction shows her unarmed captors wearing regular clothes. Argamani may have been later handed over or sold to Hamas.

Natali Yohanan, 38, recounted hearing a Palestinian woman enter her home with two men. The woman stayed there for several hours, intermittently cooking for her male companions, watching Netflix, and ransacking her clothes. The men would occasionally try to break open the safe room door, where Yohanan, her husband, and two young children, were hiding.

“She started singing and asked them, are you hungry? Are you thirsty? She went into my fridge and heated up food,” Yohanan said. “She was very relaxed and seemed happy. She stole my credit card, my passport, and my clothes—even some of my underwear—but the clothes she didn’t want she folded and put on the bed. It was so strange.”

Then there are the Gazans who worked at the kibbutzim. Yohanan’s husband, a farmer, is one of many people in the Gaza periphery communities who hired Palestinian workers from Gaza. Like many others I spoke to, Yohanan believed that the terrorists were acting on inside knowledge obtained by those Gazan workers. Israel had gradually raised the number of work permits in the months leading up to Oct. 7 with an estimated 18,500 Gazans working in Israel before the onslaught. The thinking behind the policy was that economic incentives to the residents of the Strip would sustain the fragile peace. Hanan Dann, from Kfar Aza, told me that he was “glad that workers from Gaza were coming to Israel to have jobs and meet Israelis, to see that we’re not all devils.”

In several of the devastated communities, detailed maps were found on the bodies of dead terrorists, maps that residents say could have only been drawn up by people with intimate knowledge of the area. Gazan workers relayed an extensive range of information to Hamas that enabled the terror group to plan its attack with extraordinary meticulousness, including the identities and residences of security heads, the locations of electric boards and communications systems and how to disable them.