‘I Hope That I Am Not Permanently Changed’: The Atlantic’s Graeme Wood Describes Witnessing Footage of Hamas Atrocities

Dozens of foreign journalists gathered at a military base north of Tel Aviv on Monday for a screening put on by the Israel Defense Forces: 43 minutes of footage from Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, in which 1,400 people were killed and more than 200 others taken hostage.

The footage, which was aired in an effort to combat denialism about the barbaric attack, has since remained private. Out of respect for the slain victims and their loved ones, only one video clip was permitted to be shared with the public, and filming of the screening was not permitted.

Graeme Wood, a national correspondent for The Atlantic, attended the screening and wrote about his experience in an emotionally raw piece, “A Record of Pure, Predatory Sadism.” He spoke with Mediaite on Tuesday about what he witnessed, and the impact it has had on him as a journalist and as a human being.

Wood has covered terror groups like ISIS and Al-Qaeda for decades. He has watched countless videos of terrorists beheading hostages like American journalist Daniel Pearl, who was taken hostage and murdered in Pakistan in 2002.

He told Mediaite he has not seen anything quite like the footage that he was shown by the IDF this week.

“I hope that I am not permanently changed by what I saw,” Wood said. “There are consequences to seeing horrible things, to seeing the murder of innocent people, the dismemberment of innocent people, and there are certainly changes for any person who sees these things, but we’re not just any reporters,” he added, pointing out the journalists in the room are accustomed to such grisly footage.

Still, they were visibly distraught by the harrowing images of Hamas terrorists hunting, torturing, and murdering civilians — including women, children, and the elderly.

“Part of being a professional is thinking through those things in advance so that the way they affect you is not permanently damaging,” Wood said. “It will, unless you’re a sociopath, disturb your sleep, haunt you.”

Wood called the screening “an inherently surreal scene.”

“It was weird to be going to an IDF base where they’re about to show a seemingly endless succession of Jews being slaughtered,” he said.

Despite many of the journalists present being television reporters, the rules maintained that nothing could be recorded. “We had to surrender any laptops, cameras, recording devices and that’s how it all began,” Wood said.

He described the disturbing scenes that were then aired, starting with dash cam footage of a Hamas attack which was one of the videos released publicly.

One of the first things you see is a dash-cam video. You see from the perspective of Hamas, and also from the perspective of the people driving: Israeli civilians. They’re driving into an ambush. You see them trying to get away. You see the windshield splintering. They’re firing into a car with two defenseless people in it. It comes to a stop and they’re dead. You see people who are dead who seconds ago were alive and probably wondering what’s happening.

Wood described another harrowing video, this time of an Israeli man standing in his home looking through a window. He is shot to death by a Hamas fighter.

“There were many images of Hamas appearing in Israeli towns and stalking civilians walking from house to house looking for signs of life. People are hiding,” Wood said. “At one point you see an older guy through a window. They aim, they fire, and you hear that sound of someone falling over and dying.”

The videos showed a shockingly callous indifference to human life.

“You see them walking into houses and going through other people’s lives, and then looking for those owners of those lives and then ending those lives,” Wood said. “You see them standing over the bodies of people who were just killed and firing repeatedly at them.”

“If you’ve ever wondered about the color of a human brain, you will find out if you watch this movie.”

One particularly graphic scene showed Hamas fighters arguing over who got to torture a Thai worker they had shot.

“It looks like he’s shot,” Wood said of the worker. “He’s still alive. You can hear in Arabic screaming, ‘Give me the knife, give me the knife.’ It’s almost like they’re fighting over who’s the one to do whatever they’re going to do next. You wonder why kill anyone at all? Why kill someone who is a Thai worker and why once he’s been shot they still want to torture this guy?”

The Hamas fighters continued to beat the worker, before attempting to sever his head with a garden hoe. Wood said that while watching the video he was “praying for him to expire” to bring an end to the torture.

There is another scene in which Hamas fighters are going through “half-alive corpses and counting them and shooting them with AK-47s at a very leisurely pace. There’s no resistance that they’re meeting from these poor women. They’re executing them.”

Wood said the IDF also explained their reasoning for holding the screening. Major General Mickey Edelstein, who spoke to the assembled journalists, said they wanted to present an argument against the idea that there is any equivalence between the Hamas attack and Israel’s response.

Wood explained: “What he said they wanted to show was that this is what Hamas is doing. They are hunting down children. They are burning children. They’re shooting babies. They’re tying people up and burning them alive. The IDF, whatever their faults, they’re not doing that. There are babies the IDF has killed but you will not find footage of hunting those babies down in order to kill them. You’ll find them blowing up a building that has a baby in it. From that perspective of that particular officer this is a very different situation, and by seeing the raw video do you realize exactly how different it is.”

Wood said he was “nauseated” and “horrified” after watching the footage. “It’s not every day you spend 43 minutes watching people lose their lives,” he said. “You can see them in their homes doing normal things. There’s a lot of people in their pajamas who maybe had breakfast being prepared in their kitchen and then they’re hunted down and killed.”

Despite the horrors of the footage, Wood said the toll suffered by reporters is not comparable to the suffering of the people in Israel and Palestine.

“There’s lots of people in Israel and Palestine who deal with death and dismemberment and these horrible things all of the time,” he said. “I have to watch strangers being tortured and killed and that is some awful shit.”

Yet there are “lots of Israelis who, if not watch, then think about the same things being done to their loved ones,” Wood said.

“There’s parts of the world, Gaza, there are people who have to think about their loved ones being crushed by rumble, destroyed by missile strikes. They don’t choose to go into this profession. They don’t really have a way of preparing for this. On the list of people who are hurt by war, reporters are fairly low on the scale. All the wounds I have suffered psychologically have and will heal.”