Voices From The Tunnels

The entrance to the London tunnels

At an unmarked location in east London, Voices From The Tunnels was a week-long event that reported the inhumanity that Hamas is wreaking upon the hostages kidnapped from Israel on October 7th last year and who continue to be held in a network of subterranean tunnels. This horror story is ongoing for the 136 remaining hostages, not forgetting the continual anguish that their loved ones are suffering. Organised by the 7/10 Human Chain Project and working closely with Israel’s Hostages And Missing Families Forum the 7/10 team have aimed for authenticity in their displays, based upon a range of sources of evidence, including from a number of the hostages that Hamas have freed in recent months. 

Entering a derelict warehouse, one is confronted with a row of hospital beds, a stark reminder that so much of the maze of Hamas’ tunnels has been constructed underneath Gaza's hospitals and other humanitarian sites such as places of worship and schools. Under the Geneva Convention such places should not be used deliberately for combat purposes, nor should civilians be used as human shields. But the world is already aware that Hamas cares little for the rules of war, with Voices From The Tunnels proving a testimony to the terrorists’ disregard for the sanctity of life. Walking past a scooter similar to that used in the witnessed-by-the-world kidnapping of Noa Argamani, one descends a damp staircase to the warehouse’s cellars...

Hospital beds above the tunnels

These cellars are no fairground attraction, the damp and crumbling rooms having been painstakingly transformed into chambers of horror. We learn of 12 year old Eitan Yahalomi, forced in his captivity to watch a looping video of the atrocities of 7/10. Of Mia Shem whose injured arm (she was shot on 7/10) was operated on in the dungeons by a vet, without anaesthetic and of the appalling degradation meted out to the old and the young. The cellar's final tableau is of the sexual violence that Hamas has inflicted on the hostages, mostly (but not exclusively) upon the young women from Israel that have been held captive. 

The scenes are horrific, but Aviv who was guiding my small party around the cellars told of even more harrowing detail. That of the women hostages released so far, three were found to be pregnant by their Hamas rapists and had been able to undergo abortions in Israeli hospitals. A number of young Israeli women remain held in the tunnels and a pervading fear (one of many) is that some of them too may be pregnant through rape and forced to take their pregnancies to full term. The barbarity of what is being perpetrated in the Hamas tunnels, like so much of the carnage of 7/10, defies comprehension.

A further sobering thought is that these tunnels, now identified by the IDF to criss-cross the length and breadth of the Gaza Strip, have cost millions of dollars to construct and be fitted out with utilities such as electricity and plumbing together with furniture. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine (UNRWA) funds, together with cash from other sources, that should have been spent on improving Gaza’s social infrastructure – schools, hospitals and the like -  has instead been diverted into building this fabric of terror.

One can only wonder to what extent UNRWA was aware of how its support was being used? In such a small enclave as the Gaza Strip, it defies belief that UNRWA was ignorant of such malevolent activity. With Hamas having vowed to repeat the pogrom of 7/10 again and again and with its founding charter calling for the eradication of Jews, it is hardly surprising that Israel is now seeking to destroy both Hamas’ fighters and its hundreds of miles of hellish tunnels and fighting capabilities.

UNRWA Update 29th January 2024

The article above  was first published on 21st January 2024. 

The news of recent days has reported that at least 10% of UNRWA employees have been found to be connected to Hamas, with a number of those having a direct involvement in the atrocities of October 7th. It is believed by many commentators that this figure of 10% is likely to be an understatement. 

Click here to read my thoughts on having seen the 45 minute film collated by the Israeli Defence Forces, collated from footage taken on 7 October 2023 by Hamas terrorists and Israelis

Oct 7 2023 - Hamas Massacre – Collated Raw Footage

“7 October 2023 - Hamas Massacre – Collated Raw Footage” is a 45-minute film prepared by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) and drawn from found-footage taken from the body cameras and mobile phones of neutralised terrorists and Hamas social media broadcasts, along with media from the security systems of Israeli citizens’ homes and even, sickeningly, from an Israeli kindergarten where acts of terror were perpetrated. Footage was also obtained from the mobile phones and dashcams of some of the victims and the cameras of the Israeli rescue services. 

Much has already been written about this film, now in its 19th iteration as the IDF collate and add more evidence to this graphic and harrowing archive of 7/10. The film itself is a work of painstaking effort and detail, documenting a fraction of the depraved crimes committed in southern Israel on that day. 

The filmmakers have strived to protect the dignity of the victims. The consent of the families of the victims has been obtained and where the faces of the dead may have been clearly identifiable, these have been blurred. As a further measure, all those who have attended the film's screenings have been required to leave their mobile phones or other recording devices, outside of the screening room. 

An early extract from the film, that evidences the IDF’s editing skill, is from footage taken from the dashcam of a victim’s car that is unwittingly approaching a group of terrorists that are clearly armed with assault rifles. The dashcam captures the terrorists taking aim at the vehicle and the car's windscreen fracturing as it is hit by bullets. The fractures increase and we then see the windscreen glass being spattered by flecks of the victim’s blood. The terror and pain that the car's driver must have experienced is left to our imagination. The film then cuts to terrorist-filmed bodycam footage of the same shooting, that shows the same car approaching the terrorists. We see them taking aim and shooting, their bullets fracturing the cars windscreen. We then see the murder of the driver. 

There are so many other episodes to this short film. This lists some of them:  

• the intercepted radio communication from a Hamas commander, instructing the terrorists to bring a victim’s corpse back with them to “let the people play with his body”

• the recorded phone call from a terrorist to his mother, screaming his exhilaration down the line at having “killed 10 Jews with his bare hands”

• not just the murders that are on film, but the desecration of the victims’ bodies. On my witnessing the decapitation of a dead Israeli soldier my most overwhelming emotion, after the revulsion, was that of thankfulness that at least the young Israeli was now free of the fear and free of the pain and humiliation that his tormentors were raining down upon his body.

• the image of a young woman’s beautifully manicured nails on her now rigid and lifeless hand, her arm unscathed while her head and torso had been charred beyond recognition.

• the burnt out line of cars attempting to have fled the Nova music festival – a scene more resemblant of a Hollywood disaster movie, than a real life rave.

• the reality that however fast a victim can run, bullets travel faster.

The overarching image of the film however is the evidenced complicity of so many civilians from Gaza. A large number of the murderers appeared to be ordinary Gazans with no uniform other than, for some, bulletproof vests. So many of them clad in tracksuit bottoms and trainers, laughing and joking amongst themselves. Ordinary blokes.

And then wilfully slaughtering both Jews and non-Jews. 

Civilians were dominant too in the clips of victims being driven in pickup trucks and jeeps through the packed streets of Gaza amidst cheering crowds who were either beating the living victims, or desecrating the bodies of the dead. To our civilised Western minds, the horrors of 7/10 defy comprehension.  

This short film documents only a small percentage of the crimes perpetrated by Hamas that day. But the IDF filmmakers who have compiled the film are talented individuals whose skills transcend those usually found in post-production suites. Clearly the IDF filmmakers have laboured over footage drawn from countless sources, to piece together such a thorough narrative. The human resilience that must have been required from the IDF editors to craft such sequences is remarkable.

7/10 came from evil, but has spawned countless acts of heroism in so many ways as individuals have responded to the day’s horrors. The film unit of the IDF are heroes too.