At least a hundred House members on Tuesday morning sat for a screening of bodycam footage the Israeli Defense Forces recovered from Hamas terrorists killed or captured during the October 7th attack on southern Israel that left more than 1,400 dead and a few hundred more being held hostage in Gaza – footage so horrific that Jewish Insider’s Capitol correspondent Marc Rod reports seeing at least one member walking out in tears five minutes into the screening.
“I’m absolutely gutted. And I think seeing the video footage of people celebrating the killing of Jews shows what we’re up against. And the fact that anybody would encourage or condone what Hamas did that day. It’s outrageous,” Michigan Democrat Haley Stevens told Rod after the screening. “It’s unbelievable seeing footage like that in the year 2023, in places we’ve all been.”
Florida MAGA Congressman Byron Donalds said he felt “the same way I felt watching what occurred on social media. Israel must do everything it needs do to obliterate Hamas. Period.” California Democrat Ted Lieu told Rod simply “Never again.” Other California Democrat Sara Jacobs said “It’s obviously horrific and gruesome and it’s hard to believe that in the year 2023 things like this are still happening, but unfortunately they are.” Car thief California Republican Darrell Issa shook his head and said “I’m feeling like I felt when I went to Birkenau… It’s just war crimes. Unbelievable.”
And yeah, we saw the images of the newborns being taken out of their incubators in a maternity ward in Gaza because the IDF destroyed their power supplies and generator fuel. The cruel and depraved indifference exhibited by that and all the other collateral damage the IDF is wreaking upon people is just a different kind of savagery than the up close and personal genocidal horrors of October 7th. There is no moral justification for either atrocity. The hard truth is that the Israeli government’s malign neglect and ghettoization of Gaza wrought October 7th on innocent Israelis and October 7th brought the IDF’s reckless and destructive response on innocent Palestinians.