Bearing witness to the unimaginable
(Editor’s note: This oped contains descriptions of graphic violence and depictions of anti-Semitism.) We journalists all too often find ourselves in a position where it is necessary to bear witness to the unimaginable.
One such moment happened on Friday. The Israeli Embassy in D.C. invited me and five other journalists to watch raw footage of Hamas’s surprise attack against Israel on Oct.
7 as it happened. Videos from that awful Saturday had already circulated on social media and appeared in news reports. I had seen many of them, so I did my best to brace myself for what I was about to see.
Words cannot begin to describe the horror that we saw. • Militants tried to decapitate a man with a garden hoe while he was still alive. • A home security camera system in Netiv HaAsara, a settlement that borders Beit Lahiya, a town in the northern Gaza Strip, shows a man and two of his sons running to a bomb shelter.
