The current conflict was set in motion by the October 7, 2023, Islamic Iran-backed, Palestinian assault on southern Israeli villages and the Nova Music Festival, which killed about 1,200 people and carried 251 hostages into Gaza.
"Pogrom(s)" is a documentary film by Middle East Studio which explores the tragedy of October 7 in the context of traditional Muslim antisemitism and the rebirth of Jew hatred worldwide.
The images that came out of Gaza after October 7 showed undeniable destruction, displacement and human suffering. But the argument over Gaza is not simply about whether destruction occurred. It is about what those images and the statistics repeatedly attached to them actually prove.
Much of the case presented to the public for calling Israel’s war “genocide” has rested on aggregate casualty figures originating with Gaza’s Hamas-run Health Ministry, which do not distinguish civilians from combatants; claims of deliberate starvation; images of destroyed neighborhoods presented without the military circumstances surrounding individual strikes; and assertions that the scale of destruction itself demonstrates an Israeli intent to destroy the Palestinian population.
Those conclusions are far more contested than much of the reporting surrounding them has suggested.
Researcher, Salo Aizenberg, argues that this framing turns the central question of genocidal intent on its head. In his analysis, the clearest evidence of such intent in this war was displayed on October 7 itself: Hamas-led attackers deliberately murdered Jews and other civilians wherever they could reach them and stopped not because they had satisfied a limited military objective, but because Israeli forces stopped them. Aizenberg also points to statements by Hamas leaders openly celebrating the attack, threatening to repeat it and expressing the goal of killing Jews. In his formulation, the allegation of genocide against Israel has helped obscure the explicitly exterminatory intent demonstrated by Hamas. [Aizenberg]
That distinction between civilian suffering and genocidal intent is crucial. Genocide is not established merely by showing that large numbers of civilians died, that neighborhoods were destroyed or that a population endured severe hardship during a war. The accusation depends on evidence that such actions were undertaken with the specific intent to destroy a protected population, in whole or in substantial part.
The conduct of the Israeli military therefore matters as much as the resulting images. Aizenberg has pointed to an assessment by more than 75 retired senior U.S. military leaders and legal experts rejecting the contention that Israel’s conduct demonstrates genocide. Drawing on military and legal experience, they cited such measures as advance warnings, evacuation instructions, humanitarian corridors, tactical pauses, legal review of targets and cancellation of strikes when civilians were judged to be at excessive risk. Their argument is not that Palestinian civilians did not die or suffer, but that civilian casualties in combat do not - by themselves - establish either illegality or genocidal intent.
Israeli Ambassador to the United States Yechiel Leiter has similarly challenged the transformation of disputed Hamas-generated statistics, humanitarian projections and emotionally powerful imagery into assertions of genocide and deliberate starvation presented as settled fact. His argument is that casualty totals repeatedly circulated internationally do not distinguish terrorists from civilians and that claims involving food deprivation, civilian protection and Israeli targeting practices require scrutiny before they can establish deliberate exterminatory intent. [Leiter]
Other analyses have likewise challenged the process by which estimates, forecasts and claims originating with Hamas authorities, advocacy organizations or international institutions can be repeated through news reports until the original uncertainty largely disappears. A disturbing photograph may be authentic while the explanation attached to it is incomplete, disputed or false. A real civilian death does not tell us whether the person was deliberately targeted. A destroyed building does not tell us whether Hamas was operating from it. And an aggregate death toll does not reveal how many of the dead were combatants. [More analysis]
None of that requires denying Palestinian civilian suffering. Nor does it mean that every Israeli strike or wartime decision is necessarily beyond criticism. It means something more precise: suffering is evidence of the terrible consequences of war; it is not, standing alone, evidence of genocide.
And that is where Simcha Greiniman’s testimony becomes especially important.
The images from Gaza show what Palestinians experienced during the war that followed. Greiniman takes the reader back to what precipitated that war and to the intentions displayed when armed Islamist attackers entered Israeli communities and homes.
His testimony describes civilians deliberately selected, tortured, mutilated, burned and murdered — not collateral casualties produced while attacking military targets, but people who were themselves the targets.
Understanding what Israel subsequently did in Gaza does not require ignoring Palestinian suffering. But judging why Israel went to war — and evaluating accusations about the intent behind that war — cannot fairly begin with the ruins of Gaza while omitting what happened in Israel on October 7th.
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| Simcha Greiniman at disaster site |
As the years have passed, the nature of that attack has increasingly been compressed into two words: “October 7th.” Commander Simcha Greiniman’s eyewitness testimony forces attention back onto what those words meant on the ground.
Cmdr. Simcha Greiniman is a deputy commander and 32-year veteran of ZAKA, an Israeli search and rescue organization dedicated to recovering remains for proper burial.
A carpenter and father of five from Modi’in Illit, Greiniman served in the IDF search and rescue special forces for 27 years before leading ZAKA volunteer teams. During the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks, Greiniman and his team worked around the clock to recover hundreds of bodies from kibbutzim, the Supernova Music Festival, and highways, often under direct fire. He has since testified at the United Nations and before international bodies, providing firsthand accounts of the atrocities committed, including mass murders and sexual violence, to counter denial and antisemitism.
3:10–6:05 — Recovering the Victims of October 7
Speaking from his experience recovering victims from Israel’s Gaza-border communities, Greiniman describes not merely the scale of the massacre but what he says was the calculated depravity of Islamist Hamas-led Palestinian attackers.
Greiniman says he personally handled hundreds of bodies during the recovery operation and supervised the collection of remains and forensic evidence. Among the cases he describes is a woman whose body, he says, had been mutilated with nails hammered into her genitalia. Greiniman told the interviewer that he personally handled that body and directed the collection of evidence.
6:06–11:49 — Evidence of Systematic Atrocities: Mutilation, Burning and Planned Killing
His account becomes still more disturbing when he describes entering a home in Kibbutz Be’eri.
Greiniman says the smell of blood led recovery workers into a bedroom, where they found a Holocaust survivor on a hospital bed. He says the victim had been cut apart using hammers, knives, screwdrivers and other implements.
When asked directly whether the people he was describing had been mutilated after they were dead or while still alive, Greiniman answered:
“No. No, they were alive.”
He said subsequent forensic examinations also showed victims who had been burned alive, describing the position of their hands as evidence that they had tried to protect themselves from the flames.
This is what distinguishes Greiniman’s testimony from a recitation of casualty statistics.
He is describing the manner in which civilians were killed.
And, according to Greiniman, what convinced him that the atrocities were not simply isolated acts committed by individual attackers was their repetition.
“When you see it again and again and again in different places,” he said — not at only one kibbutz but at many — “it was a plan.”
Greiniman described what he believed was a pattern: when attackers had time, victims were brutalized; when they did not, they were shot, killed and burned. He said bodies were burned in homes, cars and around the Nova festival area, sometimes destroying evidence of what had been done beforehand.
Greiniman’s testimony describes something more than indiscriminate mass killing. He says the recovery scenes showed systematic atrocities by Islamist Hamas-led Palestinian attackers across multiple Israeli communities.
Documenting October 7 Before Denial Took Hold
Mr. Greiniman also describes how rapidly denial of the October 7 atrocities began to spread.
ZAKA volunteers normally do not photograph the dead. The organization’s religious and humanitarian practice emphasizes maintaining the dignity of victims and sparing their families from having gruesome photographs permanently circulated online. But as denial of the massacre spread, Greiniman says ZAKA received instructions from Israel’s Chief Rabbinate and Prime Minister’s Office to thoroughly document the recovery sites.
According to Greiniman, Israeli police eventually received more than 200,000 images from the scenes, material generally withheld from public circulation but available as evidence to appropriate officials.
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