At least until recently, Holocaust deniers have been shunned from polite Western society. The same cannot be said for those who downplay, equivocate, or outright deny Hamas’s slaughter of Israelis on October 7, although those massacres were better documented than any others in human history. Such voices have only grown in volume and number since.

To combat such pernicious lies, the All-Party UK-Israel Parliamentary Group, led by the eminent British historian Andrew Roberts, recently issued a comprehensive report of what happened on that terrible day. It documents, in painful detail, the massacres at each and every site in southern Israel, and identifies each of the victims. Herewith, an excerpt of the foreword to the report, penned by Lord Roberts:

Holocaust denial took a few years to take root in pockets of society, but on October 7, 2023, it took only hours for people to claim that the massacres in southern Israel had not taken place. Hamas and its allies, both in the Middle East and equally shamefully in the West, have sought to deny the atrocities, despite the ironic fact that much of the evidence for the massacres derives from film footage from cameras carried by the terrorists themselves—though of course there is also much more from many other sources, as this report delineates.

We have allowed no embellishment of the facts, which are painful and distressing enough as they are. We have gone out of our way not to include information that we suspect is true but cannot be double-checked. We have concentrated on the two days between the unleashing of the assault on the morning of October 7, 2023, and the liberation of the last of the kibbutzim, and we have documented each of nearly 1,200 deaths so that future generations will not be misled about the extent and horror of the massacre.

As a Gentile, I believe that it is vital to prevent the emergence of another, more modern version of Holocaust denial, namely October 7 denial. After the Holocaust, non-Jews like me owe the Jewish people nothing less. . . . Our report will hopefully permit people to see such denials and justifications for what they really are: a perversion of reason and rejection of human decency.

You can read the rest of Roberts’s foreword, as well as the full 312-page report, at the link below.

Addressing a recent meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Central Committee, Mahmoud Abbas criticized Hamas more sharply than he has previously (at least in public), calling them “sons of dogs.” The eighty-nine-year-old Palestinian Authority president urged the terrorist group to “stop the war of extermination in Gaza” and “hand over the American hostages.” The editors of the New York Sun comment:

Mr. Abbas has long been at odds with Hamas, which violently ousted his Fatah party from Gaza in 2007. The tone of today’s outburst, though, is new. Comparing rivals to canines, which Arabs consider dirty, is startling. Its motivation, though, was unrelated to the plight of the 59 remaining hostages, including 23 living ones. Instead, it was an attempt to use an opportune moment for reviving Abbas’s receding clout.

[W]hile Hamas’s popularity among Palestinians soared after its orgy of killing on October 7, 2023, it is now sinking. The terrorists are hoarding Gaza aid caches that Israel declines to replenish. As the war drags on, anti-Hamas protests rage across the Strip. Polls show that Hamas’s previously elevated support among West Bank Arabs is also down. Striking the iron while it’s hot, Abbas apparently longs to retake center stage. Can he?

Diminishing support for Hamas is yet to match the contempt Arabs feel toward Abbas himself. Hamas considers him irrelevant for what it calls “the resistance.”

[Meanwhile], Abbas is yet to condemn Hamas’s October 7 massacre. His recent announcement of ending alms for terror is a ruse.

Abbas, it’s worth noting, hasn’t saved all his epithets for Hamas. He also twice said of the Americans, “may their fathers be cursed.” Of course, after a long career of anti-Semitic incitement, Abbas can’t be expected to have a moral awakening. Nor is there much incentive for him to fake one. But, like the protests in Gaza, Abbas’s recent diatribe is a sign that Hamas is perceived as weak and that its stock is sinking.