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Israeli soldiers are seen as Israeli military mobility continues on the Gaza border, in Nahal Oz, Israel on December 13, 2023 [Mostafa Alkharouf/Anadolu Agency]

The Israeli army secretly seized and deleted parts of the 7 October security camera footage, according to a report published by Israel Hayom yesterday, in the latest revelation to deepen suspicion over the official Israeli account of the events of that day.

The Hebrew-language daily reported that on the evening of 9 October 2023, a classified reserve unit operating under the Israeli army’s Ground Forces Command arrived at Kibbutz Be’eri and asked members of the kibbutz’s rapid-response squad to hand over the device storing all the community’s security camera recordings. The unit commander told the exhausted residents that he needed the material “to bring the hostages home” and promised it would not be shared and would be returned in full.

No written commitment was given. By the following morning, the officer had left Be’eri with the recordings and headed to the Kirya, the Israeli army’s headquarters complex in Tel Aviv.

According to the report, the classified unit — composed of reservists drawn from elite formations including Sayeret Matkal, Shaldag, Shayetet 13 and Duvdevan, and founded around a decade ago by former officer Yoaz Hendel — “operates in the gray zones,” a reference to covert, legally ambiguous missions that fall outside the army’s regular chain of command and conventional rules of engagement.

On the morning of 7 October, the commander of the unit, identified only as “N,” activated the group on his own initiative and dispatched the teams to collect visual material from security cameras, dashcams and GoPro cameras belonging to Palestinian fighters.

OPINION: Why Israel insists on defending its lies about the October attack

Material seized from Kibbutz Be’eri’s command room was subsequently passed to the Hostages and Missing Persons Families’ Management, to the Israeli army Spokesperson’s Unit and to other unspecified bodies inside the Israeli defence establishment, Israel Hayom reported.

From there, the unit lost control of the footage. Two days after the recordings were handed over, one of the kibbutz security squad members watching television recognised the now-iconic footage of an elderly Palestinian man hobbling on crutches into a Gaza border community.

“At that moment I was seething with rage,” he told the paper. “Because I recognised that the material came from the perimeter fence camera at Be’eri — the same camera whose footage had been handed to the officer.” The footage had been broadcast without the kibbutz’s knowledge or consent.

Residents of Kibbutz Be’eri who reviewed the returned material this week told Israel Hayom that the recordings had been “tampered with” and returned with deletions. The paper noted that it was unable to independently verify the claim, but pointed out that residents’ suspicions had been reinforced by a separate investigation by Israeli journalist Gali Ginat for Uvda, the country’s leading investigative current affairs television programme, which uncovered footage from the Dor Alon petrol station near neighbouring Kfar Aza — footage that the Israeli army had previously insisted no longer existed.

READ: Israel becomes world’s most disliked country, global survey finds

“October 7 is defined by a profound crisis of trust,” one Be’eri resident told the paper. “The decisions to delete materials were made ‘under fluorescent lights’ — it’s a conscious decision, not one made in the chaos of combat. These are recordings that belong to the community, of people from the community, and you simply take them and delete them without giving them back.”

Asked why he believed portions of the footage had been deleted, the resident replied: “The day will come when an investigative commission is established here. The fewer witnesses there are, the less damage certain people in the military will sustain. I know it sounds conspiratorial, but the more I think about it, the more that is the conclusion I reach.”

The disclosure is the latest in a series of revelations that have chipped away at Israel’s official narrative of 7 October.

Israel’s most widely circulated atrocity claims have collapsed under scrutiny. The “40 beheaded babies” story, repeated by Israeli officials and amplified by US President Joe Biden in the immediate aftermath of the attack, was never substantiated and is now widely treated as propaganda.

Allegations of systematic sexual violence by Palestinian fighters, propagated by a now-discredited New York Times investigation, have similarly been undermined: Israeli prosecutors have confirmed that no rape complaints were ever filed in connection with 7 October, the Associated Press has reported that key accounts were untrue, and a UN Commission of Inquiry said it had been “unable to independently verify specific allegations” due to Israel’s obstruction of its investigations. Tel Aviv has separately blocked a UN probe into the alleged sexual violence.

Mounting evidence has also confirmed that the Israeli army itself killed an unknown number of its own citizens on 7 October through its activation of the so-called “Hannibal Directive” — a controversial standing order authorising the use of overwhelming force, including against captured Israelis, to prevent their being taken hostage.

READ: Israel has manufactured an industrial-scale version of Jim Crow rape hoaxes

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Israel’s 7 October narrative under fresh scrutiny after army accused of deleting footage