NEW YORK (1010 WINS) -- It's been five weeks since Hamas' Oct. 7 terror attack in southern Israel, during which 1,400 Israelis were murdered and 240 people of several nationalities were kidnapped, with only 4 having been released by Hamas and one solider rescued by the Israel Defense Forces.
While the atrocities commited by Hamas have been reported -- beheading and setting on fire children and adults, cuttng off limbs and breasts, and rape -- some atrocities were captured on video and being shown to journalists in the U.S., and 1010 WINS/WCBS 880 reporter Mack Rosenberg was one of them.
Mack's report may be too graphic for some of our listeners. We advise discretion.
Israel subsequently responded with an air assault on the Gaza Strip, followed by a ground assault. It has enacted 4-hour humanitarian pauses to allow Gazans to travel from the north to south, which is being bombarded less. Hamas claims more than 11,000 people have been killed. The White House said it cannot that confirm that figure, saying the death toll is in the "thousands" and that the group lacks credibility. The United Nations has not confirmed that figure either.
The video was put together by the IDF and represented 45 minutes of what Israeli authorities said is cullled from thousands of hours of footage from GoPro cameras and body cameras worn by the Hamas terrorists. There's also video taken by the victims, Israeli first responders when they arrived at the bloody, death-filled scenes. There is also security video and dashcam video.
The officials say their goal in making the footage available is to show how gut-wrenching the violence was.
"The video is chronological, and you start off seeing Hamas soldiers in their pickup trucks breaking through a barrier," Rosenberg said during an appearance on Newsline on Brigitte Quinn on 1010 WINS sibling station WCBS 880. "And you really, you do get to know these operatives, these Hamas soldiers in this video. There's lots of chanting and screaming, we heard and saw that through selfie videos. They are screaming mainly, in celebration of their killings ... You see blood-soaked hallways.
Rosenberg continued, "And a Hamas soldier ambushes a car trying to get through the gates, and shoots the driver dead."
The terror continued, he added: "So they walked through the yards of these homes and they just were shooting, not necessarily at people, just indiscriminately into homes. They lit fire to items outside of homes."
Photo credit Lev Radin/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images
Continuing to recount the horror he witness, Rosenberg told Quinn, "And then we're brought to one family's home and you see this now through home security camera video, it shows a man and his two children and they're running through the house, they're screaming, they're half naked. It's the early morning, it's presumably a father and his two sons and they disappear into a safe room outside of the home, just off of the driveway area in the backyard. And the camera footage then zooms in and we see one of the Hamas operatives throw a grenade and then there's an explosion. The kids come out of the safe room, they're screaming, they go back inside, they're crying, they're screaming for their mother and they say, I think we're going to die. Their mother comes and she is with a couple of Israeli security officers and realizes that her husband had been killed in that explosion."
Rosenberg also recounted to Quinn some "chilling" moments.
"We also hear ... communications from Hamas and the one that was really chilling to me was a Hamas soldier who uses a victim's phone, someone who he's just killed and he calls his parents from that phone and he starts bragging to them about killing Jews with his bare hands as he puts it. He told his mother, 'your son is a hero!' and his parents were cheering him on, in that video."
Another disturbing remark: "There's another communication that includes a Hamas commander telling an operative to take a dead body back [to Gaza] so people can play with it."