Israeli government spokesman says knowing about the atrocities still did not prepare him to see the scenes of Oct. 7th massacres.
By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News
Government spokesman Eylon Levy, who has been interviewed countless times by hostile media around the world since the war with Hamas began October 7, said that even talking “nonstop” of the atrocities Hamas committed did not prepare him for the sights he finally saw for himself at Kfar Aza on Wednesday.
Interviewed this time by Israel National News, Eylon said, “I’ve been talking non-stop on tv and radio about the atrocities of 10/7, but nothing really prepares you to visit the scene of the massacre itself.”
“Nothing can really prepare you for going up to a house and seeing that they’ve written on the door: ‘human remains on the sofa. Not ‘bodies on the sofa’ – ‘human remains on the sofa.’ And you can only imagine what happened to the poor couple inside the house that that was all that was found of them,” he said.
Seeing all the burned houses and rubble around, he noted, “There are a few pennies that drop.”
“We’ve been talking for two months about fuel inside Gaza…the international aid agencies keep warning that Gaza is going to run out of fuel in the next 24 hours…And I knew that Hamas burned people alive. I didn’t realize that they had done so with jerrycans of fuel that they had brought in from Gaza. The world presses Israel to let fuel into Gaza and they took fuel from Gaza!”
“It’s one of those realizations, you get home, you sit down, take a deep breath and say ‘Wow, I didn’t know this can still keep getting so much worse.’”
Eylon stated that “one of the constant challenges” in presenting Israel’s side to the world was “not to become mechanical” in repeating the facts of what occurred. His tour of one of the worst-hit kibbutzim on the Gaza border, where Hamas terrorists murdered between 52 and 60 residents, most of them infants and children, of the 1,200 slaughtered that day, will help him “really feel it, not only know it,” he said, and keep it “fresh” when speaking to the press.
He acknowledged that “There is no amount of evidence you can present that will make some people admit what happened because they can’t bring themselves to admit what their heroes in the Hamas death squads did on October 7.” Levy posited that they are “a small, vocal minority of deniers,” and that the main “challenge” regards the rest of the world, to explain “why they have to keep strong and not lose their nerve.”
They have to be reminded that they said on the day of the Hamas invasion, that they stand with Israel and agree that Hamas must be dismantled, he said, because some are waffling as a result of the scenes of human suffering they are seeing in Gaza “as a result of Hamas declaring this war and fighting it from inside urban [i.e., civilian] areas.”
“It’s our job,” he noted firmly, “to remind them why we are fighting and…of what they know and what they themselves have said: that this war must end with the end of Hamas. Because the consequences of inaction, the consequences of letting an army of terror get away with those barbaric atrocities, will be too much for humanity to bear.”
The spokesman, who went viral after raising his eyebrows in astonishment at a journalist who asked if Israel was exchanging three Palestinian security prisoners for each Israeli hostage Hamas agreed to release last month because Israel valued Palestinian lives less, when this was a Hamas demand, said that “no matter how silly” some press questions were, he would persevere in his task since “giving up was not an option, because we have to continue until victory.”