Urgent: Israel-Hamas Flash Report 23 OCT 2023 - 12:30 PDT - Videos and Pics from October 7 Released

Several hours ago, the Israeli government held a press conference where they showed videos and pictures taken from the GoPros, cellphones, and other electronic devices of Hamas militants that were killed during the IDF counteroffensive that started late on October 7 and continued through the 9th.

We are labeling the events of October 7 as an invasion by a militant organization because it was a brigade-size force of 4,500, according to Hamas officials, and showed significant planning, training, and coordination between ground, air, and sea assets supported by artillery, both barrel and tube. This exceeded the planning and coordination capabilities of what people would label "a terrorist group." The Taliban and Daesh/ISIS were/are unrecognized government structures at their peak, with the Taliban running Afghanistan (again) today. Hamas is the elected government that controls the Gaza Strip, with the caveat that they have refused to hold new elections for the last 17 years.

A few hours ago the photos and videos were made available to the public through an Israeli government server. This was not a hack or a leak. We had access to three photos that were released today, roughly ten days ago. Additionally, one of the videos of a dog being shot was already in circulation.

This content will be widely distributed in the coming hours and days, particularly on Twitter, also known as X, and on Telegram with looser moderation standards. Additionally, if you do your own scrolling about the Russia-Ukraine War, many Russian and Ukrainian Telegram channels will likely share some of this content. A Monday release was purposeful to maximize the impact in the news cycle. Monday press events are when you want broad coverage, and Friday is when you want the story to die.

If you still want to go there, don't read the comments. Whatever you do, don't read the comments.

Be very careful with your browsing over the next few days, and this might be a good time to have another conversation with your kids. I can't tell you how to have that conversation, but I would recommend not saying, "Don't use Twitter or Telegram" because my life experience has shown me this is the surest way to have them furiously searching on Twitter on Telegram. 

The graphic nature of the three pictures we already saw that were publicly released today exceeds anything you have seen from the Russia-Ukraine War, and today's release is worse.

Why did the Israeli government wait so long to release the content?

As noted, some of the videos and pictures were already released. If you've ever gone on vacation and recorded hours of video, how much of that content did you go back to and review and edit? Now imagine having to unlock cellphones, catalog GoPros, document their locations and which person they were found on. Then someone had to sit and review every picture, every video, every audio file, every PDF, every ebook, text history, WhatsApp, social media, etc., on all those devices and document what was on them. Then, any relevant picture and video content needed to have its metadata checked, be geolocated, and time verified.

Now think about the humanity side of this process, which is not sympathy for Hamas but a plea for empathy for the people who had to do this. Some of those GoPros and some of those phones will have pictures and videos of everyday life on them. Family and friends doing things that humanize the holder of those devices, which makes detaching yourself from "only a monster could do this," speaking from personal experience, absolutely impossible. It is shattering to see pictures or videos of someone with their wife and kids on vacation, at a bar, enjoying life, and then the next video is them committing a war crime or a terrorist attack. All of that had to happen before the content was released, and that takes time.

Additionally, there has been a sharp adjustment in the information space from the Israeli government and the IDF in the last three to four days. A good example of this was the mosque strike in Jenin. Immediately after the operation, Israel released all the information of why they targeted it, evidence that could be geolocated, and they notified civilians to stay away from the area before the strike. A proportional precision weapon was used based on direct media reports and pictures. The day after, there were only two protests in the West Bank, despite the call for a day of protest by Hamas.

The Israeli government appears to be trying harder to get things right in the information space. That does not mean we're moving them off the yellow list. Part of the delay in our assessment was the review process and trying to the best of their abilities to get things right.