On 18 March 2025 a cross-party group of UK parliamentarians published the results of a deeply researched investigation into Hamas’s terror attack on Israel on 7 October 2023. Their 318-page document records, in fully referenced meticulous detail, the worst atrocity visited on the Jewish people since the Holocaust.
The investigation was commissioned by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on UK-Israel, now in its tenth year. Membership of the APPG encompasses the major political parties and spans both Houses of Parliament – the Commons and the Lords. The Group noted that on October 7 itself, while the pogrom was actually in progress and before Israel had reacted in any way, anti-Israel pro-Hamas propaganda found its way into worldwide media. Conspiracy theorists were already seeking to deny that massacres had taken place. At the same time pro-Palestinian voices were exulting in the assault as a great coup for Hamas. The sheer illogicality of celebrating events which were at the same time being denied was already in evidence, and has persisted.
Determined to thwart all efforts by anti-Israel or antisemitic sources to instigate “October 7 denial” on the lines of the ever-present Holocaust denial phenomenon, the Group set up a Parliamentary Commission, to be chaired by Lord Roberts of Belgravia – the distinguished historian Andrew Roberts. Its remit was to undertake a comprehensive examination of the October 7 Hamas-led attack on Israel.
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The Commission started its work in January 2024. Based upon its scrupulous examination of forensic evidence, the testimony of survivors and released hostages, open-source video footage, and personal observations by commission members in the places where the savagery was perpetrated, the Roberts Report was published 14 months later. It exposes, in sometimes horrific detail, the premeditated and systematic nature of the attack, disproves false narratives, and underscores the barbarity that Hamas inflicted on innocent civilians.
The report documents atrocities in forensic detail. There was widespread sexual violence. Victims were raped, gang-raped, and mutilated before being murdered. Some corpses were desecrated. There were instances of beheadings. Families were executed in their homes, burned alive in safe rooms, or blown up with grenades. At Kibbutz Be’eri, 99 civilians were slaughtered; in Kfar Aza, 62 were murdered, including babies in their parents’ arms. In fact the report devotes a separate section to each of the 30 kibbutzim targeted, and tells their individual stories in detail. That chapter of the report is followed by no less than 24 pages of closely packed references.
In addition the report deals separately with the attacks on Bedouin villages and camps and with those on the cities of Sderot, Netivot and Ofakim. The nine military facilities that were attacked also warrant a chapter of their own.
Hamas used social media as a weapon, filming their killings on body cameras and smartphones, live-streaming the massacres on Facebook, TikTok, and Telegram. They seized victims’ phones to send images of the atrocities directly to the victims’ loved ones, amplifying the psychological terror.
In overseeing the gathering of evidence and its verification, Lord Roberts was well served. In addition to his seven Commission members, he used the services of five professional historians.
When I spoke to Lord Roberts about how the report was compiled, he told me: “Everything that is in the report has been double checked.”
His team of historians were able to cross-reference everything. “Frankly,” he told me, “the report could have been much more gruesome if we had put in things that were true, but that we couldn’t double check. We wanted it to be so irrefutable and impeccable that we kept a great deal of truly horrible material out because we couldn’t double check it.”
That includes inside information about when and how Hamas planned the attack. Minutes of 10 secret meetings involving a small group of Hamas political and military leaders, held from January 2022 to August 2023, were found by the IDF in Gaza. Verified by The New York Times, they demonstrate the thinking and planning behind the attack.
I asked Lord Roberts whether the timing of the Nova music festival on the very Saturday of the Hamas attack was an appalling coincidence. Or did Hamas know there was going to be a large gathering of young Israelis on the border?
“There was so much intelligence that Hamas had about everything that was going on in southern Israel,” Lord Roberts told me, “that there is no chance of it being a coincidence. They knew there was to be a festival and that lots of young people would be going. Killing young people was a primary aim of the operation. They wanted to kill and kidnap young people and babies, and they even brought incubators across the border. Their intelligence was so detailed that for targeted houses they knew which side of the bed the husband and wife slept on.”
At the Nova music festival Hamas massacred over 370 young people, ambushing fleeing attendees with rifles and rocket propelled grenades.
Lord Roberts pointed out that it was no coincidence that the majority of the Hamas paragliders had landed close to the festival site.
I asked him whether getting so closely involved with unearthing the details of such savage and barbaric events had affected him personally. The experience that came first to his mind was his visit to the Kfar Aza kibbutz. The account of what happened in Kfar Aza on the day of the Hamas attack is on page 100 of the report, which is available in full on line.
“I was shown around by Mandy Damari,” said Lord Roberts.
Mandy’s daughter Emily was shot in the hand and injured by shrapnel in her leg before being blindfolded, bundled into a car and driven to Gaza. She was held hostage for 471 days before being released on January 19, 2025.
“Mandy showed me the safe room she spent so many hours in, and Emily’s house close by from which she was taken,” said Lord Roberts. “It was a profoundly moving experience for me because I have a daughter the same age as Emily, and I was able to imagine, if only for a moment, how I would have felt if my daughter, Cassia, had undergone the same ordeal. I shed some tears then, as well as on several other occasions. That’s only a normal human reaction.”
He went on to describe British born Mandy Damari as “the bravest woman I have ever met. She’s a tower of strength, and a wonderful woman.”
I asked Lord Roberts about whether the work of his Commission has ended with the publication of his report. He assured me that its investigation into the events of October 7 would continue.
“It’s a process,” he said. “We will get more when hostages are released, and when further evidence comes to light. Using teeth and bones they found somebody as recently as June 2024. So this is absolutely not a finished product.”
I asked if there would be a further report.
“If enough new evidence comes forward,” said Lord Roberts.
By recording in scrupulous detail Hamas’s barbarous attack of October 7, Lord Roberts and his Commission have rendered an invaluable service to the victims and survivors, to those who perished in the onslaught and their families, and to future historians. Their report is so detailed, so verified, that it will stand as a truthful and factual record of what occurred, and a perpetual refutation of any attempt to downplay or deny what actually happened on that fateful October 7, 2023.
Chat GPT informs us: “As of now, there is no publicly available information indicating that the BBC has reported on the publication of a “7 October Parliamentary Commission report.” A search of BBC News archives and other reputable sources does not yield any articles or reports specifically covering such a publication.”