The screening at the Israeli embassy in London for British journalists was no Hollywood movie.
Even the legendary director of the Halloween Freddy Krueger films Wes Craven would have struggled to replicate the cold, callous horror of 43 minutes of gruesome collated footage of the slaughter on October 7 by Hamas.
Its reality made it all the more chilling.
To a soundtrack of Allahu Akbar (God is Great in Arabic) we watched a stream of bloodlust, murder and terror by the mostly young men sent by Hamas into Israel to commit the biggest killing of Jews in a single day since the Holocaust.
Even the dog got it. A black Labrador, first to see a murderous group of Palestinian terrorists breaking into a Kibbutz compound, walking up with its tail wagging to say hello gunned down on the path before his killers went on to murder the people living there.
A total of 138 killings and bodies were played out made up mostly from footage of Hamas terrorist body cameras, with some social media from victims at the music festival, home security cameras and car dash cams.
It bears repeating that while the Nazis tried to hide their crimes in the 1930s and 1940s, Hamas recorded them to broadcast them.
At one point a Hamas terrorist could be heard calling his parents in Gaza boasting about the deaths.
“I killed 10 Jews with my bare hands. I’m a hero, hero, hero.”
Another called with the phone of one of his female victims to celebrate his killings.
Image after terrible image followed one another of teenagers and children burnt alive, an Israeli girl bleeding from her wounds dragged by her hair screaming into the back of a Jeep where her captors awaited her.
A father desperately protecting his sons killed with a grenade while his boys fled for their lives with blood pouring out of their wounds.
The panic of the teenagers at the ill-fated music festival, desperately trying to shield themselves from their assailants.
The corpse of a Thai worker, mistaken for an Israeli Jew kicked about as another Palestinian terrorist tried to behead him with a spade.
The last vision of people driving their cars ambushed on the road as bullet after bullet was calmly shot into them.
Unlike any drama we see on television or in the cinema, the carnage was real. The bloodlust of the young men literally dancing on corpses and parading dead bodies through Gaza was no act.
They seemed to be high on drugs or the thrill they clearly felt for the massacre they had committed.
Drunk on the blood of their victims.
Such unbridled hatred released with such relish by gun toting Palestinian extremists.
We agreed not to record the film or replicate the images out of respect to the victims’ families.
However, it was a sobering thought that the 138-body count in the screening was just scraping the surface of the atrocities committed that day.
Less than 10 percent of more than 1,400 killed not to mention the hundreds more wounded and 200 kidnapped with some of the most graphic images held back.
Before the screening began, Israel’s Ambassador to the UK Tzipi Hotovely addressed the room saying that since the attacks she had been unable to sleep at night.
She defied any mother or father to view the images and not feel fear and anxiety for their children and homes.
She also laid out what Israel believes is at stake.
“I have seen the British media go back to saying ‘well this is just Israel/ Palestine again’. You are so used to reporting on it. But it is not.”
Likening it to Isis and Al Qaeda, she said: “This is a war on civilisation. It is not just about Israel anymore.”
The Ambassador spoke not just for her government but an “entire Israeli people”, even those who had sought peace and harmony with Arab communities before.
We had all accepted the invitation to go because the Israeli government wanted journalists covering this war to be clear about what had happened.
To perhaps understand the anger and horror of that October day and why Israel is going to go into Gaza to eliminate Hamas.
But, while the Israeli diplomats stayed quiet on the issue, it leaves the question about why so many on the left, in Labour and other parties, are so willing to downplay that atrocity and are now taking to the streets demanding a ceasefire.
As the Ambassador noted: “There is no negotiation with Hamas. The only thing we can negotiate is the colour of flowers on our graves.”
She pointed to the Hamas leader this week who has said they will not stop until Israel is destroyed.
The other unspoken question may be for some of the journalists in the room.
Amongst us were famous and senior correspondents from the BBC who have refused to call the October 7 attack “terrorism” or use the t-word to describe Hamas even though it is a legally proscribed organisation.
Never mind that terror attacks in London and Paris were described as such by the BBC and others.
But after seeing footage which would give most rational human beings nightmares, how can the BBC in all conscience refuse to say what this was? Not just terrorism but the very worst sort of terrorism.
