New report details how special IDF unit confiscated and deleted footage from the October 7 massacre.
Israel National News
A Channel 12 report has revealed new details about the military mechanism that operated on the ground immediately after October 7th and which was tasked with collecting and confiscating all audio-visual documentation of that day’s events.
The special unit was established in 2020 as a lesson from previous operations in the Gaza Strip, and on October 7th, 2023, the unit’s soldiers, all former members of elite units who received fictitious officer ranks in order to move about freely, were deployed to the mission that was defined as ‘classified and complex.’
The unit’s mission was clear: collect every bit of footage from that day’s events before anyone else lays hands on it.
The teams worked through several different means. The soldiers broke into kibbutz offices and homes to seize DVR machines from closed-circuit television systems. In communities on the Israel side of the Gaza border and the Nova Festival site, the operatives seized dozens of memory cards from dashcams.
Additionally, they collected hundreds of mobile phones, belonging to both Nukhba terrorists and Israeli citizens, both victims and survivors.
The soldiers carried military iPhones without SIM cards and uploaded the materials to highly-secure IDF servers in real-time.
Sources in the unit recounted: ‘We promised a guy from Be’eri that we would not delete anything and that we’d return everything, but that didn’t happen. Everything was deleted. We deleted the content from the phones we returned, including videos and recordings of conversations between people from the Gaza envelope and the party.’
According to the sources, the orders came directly from the Operations Directorate, and the orders were clear: ‘Collect everything and don’t leave anything.’
While the soldiers collected materials under fire, an ‘editing operations room’ was opened on a floor that was rented out in a Tel Aviv office building where professional video editors dealt with the materials.
Some of the material was compiled into videos shown to the international audience in attempting to prove the scope of the atrocities.
According to the soldiers, a significant amount of the raw footage ‘disappeared’ into the military system and never reached the families or civilian investigation teams.