Eyal Barad was in the safe room of his home in Nir Oz for more than 12 hours on Oct. 7 while Palestinians went on a rampage of his Gaza envelope kibbutz, eventually kidnapping or murdering more than a quarter of its residents. (...) Most of the time, though, Barad was glued to his phone, watching the live feed of a camera he had recently installed outside his home to monitor speeding cars. Images from the feed, which I obtained, show Palestinian women and children—some appearing as young as 8 years old—taking part in the horror of that day.
 
Survivors’ accounts, video evidence, and the interrogation recordings of apprehended Palestinians paint a damning picture of the complicity of Gazan civilians both in the Oct. 7 attack, in which more than 1,200 people were murdered and 240 people were abducted to Gaza, and its aftermath. It is one that has sparked a debate in Israel that challenges the inclination to draw distinctions between ordinary Palestinian civilians of Gaza—often referred to in Israel as bilti me’uravim (uninvolved)—and their terror leaders. For many, Oct. 7 reeked of something that Jews have been familiar with for centuries; a phenomenon where not just a vanguard, but a society at large participates in the ritual slaughter of Jews.
 
Around 700 Palestinians stormed Barad’s kibbutz of Nir Oz—less than a five-minute drive from Gaza—that day, CCTV footage shows. The overwhelming majority of those, estimated by Eran Smilansky, a member of the kibbutz’s security squad, to be around 550, were civilians. They were largely unarmed and not in uniform. Some of those civilians carried out wholesale acts of terror themselves, including rape and abduction—and in some cases, the eventual sale of hostages to Hamas—while others abetted the terrorists. Others still simply took advantage of the porous border to loot Israeli homes and farms, including stealing hundreds of thousands of shekels in agricultural equipment.
 
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Differentiating between terrorists and civilians is tricky, particularly since Hamas terrorists often wear civilian clothing, a tactic evident in the ongoing war in Gaza. However, other indicators help make this distinction, such as the absence of weapons and the fact that many were filmed crossing the border barefoot or even on horseback. Even senior Hamas official Mousa Abu Marzouk readily admitted that Gaza civilians had taken part in the Oct. 7 atrocities.
 
One video shows a group of men in civilian clothing beating a soldier while a separate image shows another group of what appears to be civilian men celebrating atop the smoking husk of a burned-out tank. In the infamous 47-minute terror reel of the Oct. 7 atrocities, Palestinians in civilian clothing are seen beating elderly hostages with sticks. Another repeatedly screams “Allahu akbar!” as he decapitates a Thai farm worker with a garden tool.
 
Barad’s speed camera in Nir Oz includes images of a Palestinian girl riding a stolen bike. In another, a Palestinian woman is seen pointing out Barad’s neighbor’s home to a uniformed terrorist. An image captured later shows a resident of that home being hoisted onto a motorcycle to be taken into Gaza.
 
But it’s the testimonies of the survivors that provide the clearest evidence that Oct. 7 was not just a terrorist attack, but a pogrom.
 
Batya Holin is a photographer and peace activist from Kfar Aza, which alongside Nir Oz and Be’eri, was one of the heaviest-hit communities. Holin had developed a friendship with a Gazan photographer, Mahmoud, with whom she arranged a joint exhibit last year of photos of her kibbutz and his village in the Gaza Strip. On the morning of Oct. 7, Mahmoud called and interrogated Holin, asking her how many soldiers were in her vicinity. That was when Holin realized that Mahmoud had given the photos of her village to Hamas.
 
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Echoing Holin’s testimony, former hostage Nili Margalit said that “civilians, regular people,” abducted her to Gaza in one of the kibbutz’s golf carts. Likewise, an NBC News investigation found that Noa Argamani was likely kidnapped by a civilian mob. A video of her abduction shows her unarmed captors wearing regular clothes. Argamani may have been later handed over or sold to Hamas.
 
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Then there are the Gazans who worked at the kibbutzim. Yohanan’s husband, a farmer, is one of many people in the Gaza periphery communities who hired Palestinian workers from Gaza. Like many others I spoke to, Yohanan believed that the terrorists were acting on inside knowledge obtained by those Gazan workers. Israel had gradually raised the number of work permits in the months leading up to Oct. 7 with an estimated 18,500 Gazans working in Israel before the onslaught. The thinking behind the policy was that economic incentives to the residents of the Strip would sustain the fragile peace. Hanan Dann, from Kfar Aza, told me that he was “glad that workers from Gaza were coming to Israel to have jobs and meet Israelis, to see that we’re not all devils.”
 
In several of the devastated communities, detailed maps were found on the bodies of dead terrorists, maps that residents say could have only been drawn up by people with intimate knowledge of the area. Gazan workers relayed an extensive range of information to Hamas that enabled the terror group to plan its attack with extraordinary meticulousness, including the identities and residences of security heads, the locations of electric boards and communications systems and how to disable them.
 
The workers’ betrayal left an indelible mark on the surviving kibbutzniks, leading many to reexamine previously held beliefs about their Palestinian neighbors. Nir Oz, like many of the other ravaged kibbutzim in the area, was home to scores of peace activists, many of whom volunteered for a program known as Road to Recovery, driving sick Gazans to Israeli hospitals for treatment. Many now believe that while there are Gazans who want to live in peace, they do not represent the majority; or, as one survivor summed it up to AFP, “there are more who don’t want us alive.”
 
Irit Lahav, whose parents were from Nir Oz’s founding members, described the community as a “peace lovers’” kibbutz. “It broke my heart. How can we ever get over this sense of betrayal?” Lahav, who shuttled Palestinian cancer patients several hours from the border with Gaza to their treatments in central Israel, told me. “The Palestinian public simply hates us.”
 
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IDF Sgt. Adir Tahar was murdered and decapitated during the invasion while manning a post near the Erez border crossing. His father, David, was forced to bury his son’s body without his head. An interrogation of two Palestinians by Israel’s Shin Bet security agency revealed that the remains of the head—which had been mutilated until it barely resembled a human skull—were kept in the freezer of an ice cream store in Gaza. One of the men had tried to sell the head for $10,000. The man in question was a Palestinian civilian and not a Hamas operative, Tahar told me.
 
(...)
 
In several cases, Palestinian families held hostages in their homes. Released hostage Mia Schem said she was being held by a family in Gaza. “Entire families are in the service of Hamas,” she told Channel 13. Avigail Idan, the 4-year-old Israeli American whose parents were murdered, was also held in the homes of several Palestinian families. When former hostage Russian Israeli Roni Krivoi remarkably managed to escape his captors during an Israeli air raid, he hid alone for several days before being discovered by Gaza civilians, he said, who returned him to Hamas.
 
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I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.

A Palestinian terrorist responsible for killing dozens of Israelis who was released from prison just days ago was seen in media footage at the Hamas handover of bodies of four slain hostages Thursday.
 
Mohammed Abu Warda, a former commander in Hamas’s armed wing, was serving 48 life sentences in Israel for masterminding multiple terror attacks that killed 45 people, including a 1996 bombing on a Jerusalem bus that left 24 dead.
 
He was released by Israel on February 8 along with other terror convicts as part of the ongoing hostage-ceasefire deal with the Hamas terror group.
 
According to Hebrew media, Abu Warda was the prisoner with the highest number life sentences to be released so far during the truce. He served 23 years.
 
Though he was reportedly slated to be deported to Egypt, Abu Warda was seen Thursday morning at a Khan Younis stage where the terror group held a ceremony marking the transfer of what is said were the bodies of four Israeli hostages: Shiri Bibas, her two young children Ariel and Kfir, and octogenarian peace activist Oded Lifshitz, all of whom were kidnapped alive by terrorists on October 7, 2023.

A Telegram channel claiming to represent Hamas’s so-called Tulkarem Battalion, based in the West Bank’s Tulkarem, puts out a statement that may signal the group’s responsibility for a combined bus bombing attack in Tel Aviv earlier tonight.

The statement reads: “The revenge of the martyrs will not be forgotten so long as the occupier is present on our land… This is a jihad of either victory or martyrdom.”

The IDF confirmed on Friday morning that the hostage remains released on Thursday belonged to Ariel and Kfir Bibas.
However, the third body "was not that of Shiri Bibs, and no match was found for any other abductee. It is an anonymous body without identification," the military stated.

According to the assessment of professional officials, based on the intelligence available to us and forensic findings from the identification process, Ariel and Kfir Bibas were brutally murdered by terrorists in captivity in November 2023.