…The youngest victim was 14 hours old. That was Naama Abu Rashed, a Bedouin Israeli, shot while still in her mother’s womb. The bullet went through her tiny leg. She was born gravely wounded, and later died. The oldest victim was Moshe Ridler, a 92-year-old Holocaust survivor. He perished when Hamas militants fired a rocket-propelled grenade at the safe room in which he had sought refuge from the rampage. They then shot to death his Moldovan carer, Petro Boscov. Mr Ridler, as a kid in Romania, had survived the Nazi ghetto and deportation trains, but he could not survive Hamas’s sadistic crusade.

The methods of murder included shooting, burning, asphyxiation, grenade explosions and missile attacks. Many of the victims were subjected to mutilation, sexual violence and ‘other forms of deliberate brutality’, either before or after death. A woman was raped at gunpoint. Other women were raped in their bedrooms before being murdered. Rescue forces found women’s bodies ‘stripped of their underwear’ as well as ‘signs of semen’. The part of the report where I had to take a break from reading describes the discovery of a woman’s body where there had been ‘[the] insertion of a knife into the genital area’.

The violence was ferocious. Molotov cocktails were thrown to burn people alive. A father and his baby daughter suffered savage burns when Hamas militants used a butane gas cylinder to make an inferno of their home. Dad spent 58 days in an induced coma, his daughter spent eight days. Hamas entered one home screaming ‘Yahud!’, meaning Jews. And they found Jews: a father, a mother and their four kids. Dad used a piece of furniture in a desperate effort to ward off the invaders – they shot him dead. They then shot his daughter in the face. She had ‘a hole in her cheek and she was gasping her last breaths’, her mother later recounted. Mum and the three surviving kids were taken to Gaza and forced into a ‘hole’ in the ground. Why? Because they’re Yahud.

The report is full of accounts like this, of the most bestial violence, visited with extreme prejudice on men, women, children. 7 October feels like a thing from the last century, the century of war and extermination. It was as if atavistic hatreds had leapt from the history books and imprinted themselves on our complacent era. Perhaps the report’s most valuable contribution is to make it crystal clear that this was no impulsive assault. This was not the Wretched of the Earth ‘breaking out’ of their ‘prison camp’ to wreak desperate revenge on their oppressors, as Hamas-adjacent leftists would have us believe. No, this pogrom was years in the making. It was a conscious and thoroughly organised massacre of Jews….

This, then, is what the activist class has been making excuses for. This is what they referred to as ‘resistance’. This is what they called ‘a day of celebration’. The burning to death of Jews. The rape of Jewish women. The murder of Jewish children. The assassination of a Jew who had survived the greatest crime in history. We now have all the data, all the timelines and all the information about 7 October. But we still await that moment of moral clarity when our intellectual elites finally acknowledge the gravity of this crime against Jews and humanity, and devote themselves to defending the civilisation it so gravely offends.

I have nothing to add to Brendan O’Neill’s impassioned response. Now if you can stand to do it, read all of O’Neill’s article, and then read the entire 318-page report. Then you will understand why Israel must, not just for its own survival, but for everyone who is part of our advanced, Western, still salvageable civilization, destroy Hamas — destroy it utterly.