October 7 and Holocaust: different numbers, same evil

“The descriptions of mothers silencing babies so they wouldn’t cry and give away their hiding place; of children torn from their parents; and of abominable murderers, who saw in the Nazis a model to emulate, and who burnt and butchered entire families, echoed the horrors among us,” said President Isaac Herzog on Israel’s 2024 Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Although the 7 October 2023 massacre and the Holocaust aren’t equitable, the depraved actions of Hamas’s terrorists cannot help but evoke memories of what Jewish people experienced under Nazi rule.

Most certainly, Hamas killing Israelis because they were Israelis has reincarnated the dark spectre of Nazis killing Jews because they were Jews.

Sadistic acts of pure evil were carried out that Shabbat two years ago. Terrorists conducted house-to-house searches for Jews to slaughter, torturing innocents before burning them alive. Young children and the elderly, the wounded and the chronically ill, were kidnapped to Gaza to be held hostage in inhumane conditions. Death squads hunted down music festival participants, killing 379, including young Israelis subjected to sexual violence and mutilation too gruesome to detail.

And terrorists laughed while committing the carnage. We know this because Hamas crafted its media strategy as carefully as it did its invasion plan.

Attackers fitted with Go-Pro cameras and Hamas-associated media personnel proudly livestreamed monstruous deeds to their supporters in Gaza and elsewhere. Israeli families were blasted with graphic videos of their loved ones being tortured and murdered via the victims’ own social media accounts.

Hamas’s glorification of the massacre was a major deviation from the Nazi blueprint for dealing with the Jews, which mandated secrecy to cover up the Final Solution.

With the exponential increase in Jew hatred and antisemitic violence across the globe following the 7 October massacre, it’s important to condemn vehemently and address effectively all forms of Holocaust denial and distortion.

Massacre denial, the direct descendant of Holocaust denial, must be stopped before it’s too late. As opposed to Holocaust denial, which took decades to spread, anti-Israel and antisemitic forces began to disseminate their lies before the blood had dried in the homes, streets, and fields of southern Israel.

There can be no excuse for denying the events of 7 October, the first mass terror event to be digitally documented in real time.

Nevertheless, overwhelming proof will never persuade Hamas’s international supporters, who knowingly trample on the truth on their quest to delegitimise and eventually eliminate Israel.

For them, no evidence will ever suffice. Not the documentation from two years ago. Not the testimony of experts and former hostages. Not even the images of starved hostages, with their horribly gaunt faces and sunken eyes.

Two years after the horrors of 7 October, the anguish of the families endures. Even United States President Donald Trump’s plan to end the war, accepted by Israel in a genuine effort to move forward, was met by Hamas with a familiar pattern of evasion, a “yes, but” wrapped in conditions.

The suffering continues, not because peace is impossible, but because Hamas refuses to choose it.

Hamas’s ongoing torture, abuse, and deliberate starvation of Israeli hostages more than echoes the Nazi treatment of Jewish civilians. The spontaneous response to their condition expressed by Israeli TV commentator Or Heller says it all: “I have pictures in my head of my two grandmothers being liberated from Auschwitz-Birkenau and Bergen-Belsen.”

Though the 7 October massacre – the deadliest attack on Jews since the fall of the Third Reich – may provide the strongest case for comparison, Hamas’s mass murder of Israeli civilians is no exception to the maxim that comparing contemporary events to the Holocaust is almost never justified.

The slaughter of 1 200 Israelis doesn’t equate to the killing of six million Jews, a third of the world’s Jewish population. Nor can a single day of atrocities compare to the Nazi’s 12-year-long persecution of Jews that culminated in a systematic genocide.

Yet while the numbers may have changed, the evil stays the same.

• Ambassador David Saranga is the director of the digital diplomacy division at the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs.