For Israel, the devastating Hamas attack on October 7 was unlike any other in its scale and brutality. The task of telling the story of a day now seared into the national consciousness has fallen to a 41-year-old civilian volunteer who was moved to re-enlist in the military in the wake of the assault. Mattan Harel-Fisch is the editor responsible for the 44-minute compilation of footage from bodycams, mobile phones and other sources that has been shown to selected audiences from Tel Aviv to London and New York. And while few have seen it, the existence of the video has gone viral as reports and rumours of its content have spread, a chronicle of the dead taking on a life of its own.

“This was Israel’s 9/11 moment,” Harel-Fisch told the Financial Times from the army base in Tel Aviv where he works. But “it wasn’t captured in this one [image of a] plane blasting into a building . . . which, horrific as that is, it’s something that you grasp the enormity of. “Here it was captured by hundreds and maybe thousands of different clips . . . across a massive crime scene. I think [this makes it] harder to grasp how enormous this event was.” 

Harel-Fisch, a Tel Aviv tech entrepreneur, said the video aimed to prove to the world that the atrocities committed on October 7 did happen — dispelling the “ridiculous debate” over the idea that the attacks were staged or exaggerated — and to preserve those events for posterity. There is also another motive: justifying the ferocious Israeli campaign against Hamas. “We want the world to know [October 7] was something else,” Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, the Israeli military spokesman, said at the first screening of the video last month, which was attended by the FT and a dozen other Israel-based journalists. “We want the world to know that this is not just another round [of hostilities] between Israel and Gaza.” 

The screenings have become a vital part of Israel’s message, even as it comes under growing international pressure to agree to a ceasefire in Gaza © Maya Levin/FT More than 1,200 Israelis, including children, women and the elderly, were killed in the attack, according to Israeli authorities, in what some officials have called the deadliest day for Jewish people since the Holocaust. Some 240 people were also taken hostage. Israel responded with a massive bombardment of Gaza that has been followed by a ground invasion of the Palestinian enclave. More than 11,000 people have been killed, according to health authorities in the Hamas-ruled territory, and the UN and others have warned of an unfolding humanitarian disaster. The “video of horrors”, as it has come to be known, will probably never be made fully public due to its graphic nature and to spare the families of those involved. Instead, closed screenings have taken place — first in Israel for foreign media and diplomats, and more recently to officials and journalists in Europe, the Middle East and the US, including the White House. The more than 100 screenings so far have become a vital part of Israel’s message, even as it comes under growing international pressure to agree to a ceasefire in Gaza. 

To avoid leaks, viewers are not allowed to bring phones into the room. In Israel, Harel-Fisch physically brings his computer to the screening location; abroad, a secure link is sent to Israel’s military attaché to open on his own laptop. Some of the journalists who have seen it, including veteran war reporters, have said it was the most difficult thing they have ever watched. Others, after being told of the content, refrained from attending the screenings. Stills from the ‘video of horrors’ show the Hamas attack in Israel on October 7 © FT montage; IDF Harel-Fisch — a former director and editor of films and commercials who is also a specialist in what is known in the tech world as “user interaction and experience” — has sewn together a compilation of raw, uncensored footage from both Israeli and Hamas sources. The effect is sparse, relentless, unforgiving. There is no narrative voiceover and no sound except for what is picked up on the video recordings — gunfire and explosions, the cheers and chatter of the Hamas fighters, the pleas and anguish of the Israeli victims. “I kind of see myself as presenting to a jury,” said Harel-Fisch. Circumstances dictate that the video be “factual, and it needs to stay that way . . . very basic, in order to show that it’s not manipulated.” 

The video mostly runs chronologically through the day, and geographically through the shattered locations whose names have become infamous in Israel: Kibbutz Be'eri, the Nova music festival outside Re’im, the village of Netiv Haasara, and more. The action begins with whooping Hamas gunmen in the back of a white pick-up inside Gaza racing towards the Israeli border, filmed by one of their own GoPros. In the next scene, an Israeli dashcam mutely records gunfire raining down on a car; the driver is killed, as confirmed later by a distant highway camera. Whenever possible, Harel-Fisch said, the same incident is displayed from multiple perspectives: a Hamas gunman’s bodycam showing fighters shooting into a shelter near the Nova festival is followed by Israeli mobile phone footage taken inside the same shelter, revealing injured and panicked young people and their cries for help. Then Hamas mobile phone video shows survivors being hauled into a pick-up truck to be taken back to Gaza.

Harel-Fisch said that although he already had a vast amount of footage, more arrived daily, including from police, first responders, and family members of those caught up in the violence. “They know I’m the person,” he said. “That’s my wake-up call every morning.” Mostly, the editor said, he had been able to “disconnect” from the material and “numb” his senses: “You have to when you do this kind of work.” “But there were moments where you’re pressing play . . . and you understand you’re now watching for the first time the last moments of someone’s life . . . right at the moment they got murdered. I’ve seen them cowering away in corners, under pillows, behind cars, running away.” Harel-Fisch is constantly updating and tweaking the video. There have been, by his count, 12 versions so far. The most up-to-date included new video from a home surveillance system in Netiv Haasara. In it, a father and his two sons, still in their underwear in the early morning, flee to their backyard bomb shelter. A Hamas operative appears and throws in a grenade, after which the father is blown clean out, dead. The bloodied boys stumble out and return to the house. In the living room’s surveillance system, now with sound, one of them screams: “Daddy’s dead, it’s not a prank.” Later, a Hamas operative enters, opens the fridge and takes a drink from a bottle.

For Harel-Fisch, such harsh visual imagery — of charred bodies in mass bonfires, of babies with bullet wounds in their skulls, of an attempted beheading of a prone man with a garden hoe — is precisely the reason why he keeps at it. “The fact that people keep telling all of us [pathologists, search and rescue teams and many others] ‘we couldn’t do it’, you understand that what you’re doing is important,” he said. And what of the personal toll for Harel-Fisch? “I think our whole country will never be the same. We’re a country in need of psychological treatment after this,” he said. “It’s something that’s impacted everyone . . . I don’t think I’m any different.” Earlier, at the gate to the army base where Harel-Fisch works, a young soldier asked a visiting journalist if he was there to watch the video. The journalist had already seen it, but had the soldier? “No. And I won’t,” he replied. “I want to be able to sleep at night.”