UK parliament group publishes landmark report to combat Oct. 7 denial

The UK parliament’s Israel friendship group releases a 318-page report that aims to establish an incontrovertible historical record of the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led atrocities in southern Israel.

“The purpose of commissioning our report has been to chronicle the events of 7 October with clarity and meticulous, fact-checking precision, to ensure it is never forgotten,” says Lord Andrew Roberts, an influential historian who chaired the report.

The report gives a unique “catalog of events,” providing an unprecedentedly comprehensive timeline of the massacre, a source familiar with the project tells The Times of Israel. It will be officially launched in the British parliament later today, The Times of Israel has learned.

Compiled by the UK-Israel All-Party Parliamentary Group based on research that began in January 2024, the publication outlines the atrocities committed by the Hamas terror group against Israel on October 7 and 8, using survivor testimonies, open-source evidence, and interviews with relatives of hostages and victims, as well as expert analysis from government and security officials, first responders, and medical and military professionals in Israel and the UK.

The report determines that 7,000 individuals participated in the massacre, and includes information on the nature and scale of the murders, including Hamas’s youngest victim, a fetus shot in the womb, as well as its oldest victim, a 92-year-old Holocaust survivor killed in his safe room by a grenade.

The document corroborates a previous report by the United Nations Special Representative on Sexual Violence, confirming that sexual violence occurred at multiple attack sites on October 7. Hamas and other groups committed “acts of rape, gang rape, forced mutilation, sexualized torture, forced nudity, and posting sexualized images of victims on social media without consent,” says the report.

Introducing the document, Roberts likens the falsification of the events of October 7 to Holocaust denial, saying, “Hamas and its allies, both in the Middle East and equally shamefully in the West, have sought to deny the atrocities, despite the ironic fact that much of the evidence for the massacres derives come from film footage from cameras carried by the terrorists themselves.”

British historian Niall Ferguson comments on the publication, saying, “Those who wish to understand the repulsive, pathological nature of antisemitism should read the report. Those who doubt the truly evil character of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad must read it.”