"[I do this] To speak up for those whose voice was taken [those who were murdered] but also to those tortured, raped, wounded, held hostage, abused; to the victims' families and the massacre's survivors, who want their story and the truth out, but some of them are still too traumatized, mentally unprepared, to share these stories themselves."

"I documented the atrocities and wrote the book because already on October 7, I immediately foresaw the worldwide denial that we would face. I realized the urgency for documentation. I knew something must be created so that what happened would be commemorated for generations to come -- and so I did."

"The reason I decided to write the book in the most unfiltered, graphic and unapologetic way possible, without censoring any of the atrocities' details, as challenging as it is for the reader, was to shock the international community. To wake them up. To make them comprehend the extent of the cruelty, the evil, the inhumanity."

Alon Penzel, former IDF spokesman

 

"A lot of what Hamas was doing was recorded. So it's not like you can deny it, even though a lot of people around the world are trying to deny that this even happened."

"What we're seeing around the world, all the demonstrations, all this chanting of 'From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free', I think that people basically don't understand that means no state of Israel."

"They have no idea which river and which sea. They don't even know where we are on the globe. So a lot of people are watching TikToks of 30 seconds, and they're sure that they're experts on Israeli history."

Shelly Tal Merton, Knesset member, Yesh Atid party 

 

"The further we get from the 7th, the easier it is for people to change the narrative. If you can deny what happened on the 7th, then it's much easier to demonize and blood libel Israel."

"In Canada, many try to 'blur the lines'. Our state-funded broadcaster and mainstream media disregarding the 7th, glossing over it, to look at it like a footnote."

"[Film industry colleagues] outright minimized the rape of Israeli women, [some denying rapes occurred at all]."

Igal Hecht, October 7 documentary film The Killing Roads

 

"I actually have family members who either don't believe October 7 happened, or that it was an inside job planned by Netanyahu."

"I've met others with similar and worse beliefs. It's put a strain on my family, and I've lost friends over this."

"It's also interesting that these people refuse to watch our film."

Chris Atkins, filmmaker

Moshe Weitzman, left, one of the first EMIs to respond after the October 7 attacks, is filmed by Igal Hecht, who released his October 7 documentary The Killing Roads online for free in hopes of cutting through misinformation and denialism over the 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel. Photo by Igal Hecht

 

Knesset member Shelly Tal Meron, acting chair of the Knesset Committee on the Status of Women and Gender Equality, wrote over 100 letters to human rights organizations and women's groups in weeks after the October 7 atrocities in southern Israel, inviting them to condemn sexual assaults as a war weapon. "It's not the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. It's not right or left. It's simply the moral thing to do, to say that this is wrong. Nobody responded. Not one."

 

Former IDF spokesman Alon Penzel spoke last year at Radboud University in Nijmegen, Netherlands. His efforts led to protesters breaking windows, threatening him with violence, denying the atrocities committed by Palestinian terrorists led by Hamas, screaming "lies", insisting no women were raped on October 7, 2023.  That experience will not deter him from his goal to take speaking engagements across Canada, two years after the invasion of Israeli troops into Gaza.

 

An assistant professor of geography at Radboud university, Harry Pettit, added his own take to Penzel's initiative, posting that he was a "terrorist", on social media, and that Israel was committing a "holocaust". The school, this professor avowed, "should refuse to normalize platforming Zionists". 

 

Documentary filmmaker Igal Hecht. Photo by Igal Hecht.

 

Five months following the October 7 atrocities, Alon Penzel wrote Testimonies Without Boundaries, Israel: October 7th 2023. The publication contained fifty first-hand accounts of the horrors victims had suffered, in an effort to record the reality of what happened, against a tsunami of rejection of the reality of the situation, replacing the actual event with self-serving ideological propaganda seething with hatred of Israel and condemnation of Jews everywhere.

 

Mr. Penzel's speaking tour is organized by the group StandWithUs, through a combination of appearances before student groups at university campuses and at community events, to counter the narrative so widely accepted that characterizes the war in Gaza as a deliberate ploy to destroy Palestinian lives in a 'genocide', shredding the actual atrocities that took place in southern Israel as a figment of imaginary Israeli public relations to turn the world against Palestinians. What motivates Mr. Penzel's determination is the shock of witnessing the world public accepting Hamas's distortion of reality.

 

Shelly Tal Meron, on the other hand, has met with a level of success through a coalition along with France's minister of gender equality, to lead others around the world in acknowledgement that sexual assault is being normalized as a war weapon "not only Israeli, Yazidi women, Ukrainian women, Druze women that just suffered this in Syria and many other conflict areas". Even some countries without Israeli ties have agreed to support the committee against war rape.

 

In the near wake of the October 7 monstrosity, filmmaker Chris Atkins was contacted by a friend, human rights advocate Majed el-Shaffie, Egyptian-born, with a like intention to record the event. Majed el-Shaffie had contracted with a cameraman in Israel to initiate the documenting of the atrocities. Both Atkins and el-Shafie, Christians, agreed to partner in putting together footage and work together to document Dying to Live, screened November 2024 in Toronto. The film documents areas devastated by violence, including the Nova music festival site, using October 7 archival footage, interviewing survivors and victims' families.

 

Toronto lawyer Adam Hummel published Essays from Afar: 700 Days of the Diaspora Experience Since October 7, containing collected accounts from his Catch Substack and two years' worth of weekly commentary in his concern that scant few sources have taken the trouble to fully comprehend what precipitated the Gaza war, how it is being conducted, and the Hamas scheme to sacrifice the lives of Gazans to round out its anti-Israel propaganda fed to the West.  

"[The UN Commission of Inquiry report alleging "genocide" perpetrated by Israel is an  unfortunately misguided piece of fiction."

"I often say that if Israel wanted to kill all the Palestinians, this war would have been over on October 8, 2023."

"They do not, however, which is why 900-plus Israeli soldiers have been killed over the last two years, because Israel has gone above and beyond to protect the lives of innocent Palestinians in Gaza, who have been put in the line of fire because of their own leaders."

Adam Hummel, Toronto lawyer