'One of the most evil crimes in history': British historian Andrew Roberts on Hamas Oct 7 massacre

"Andrew Roberts is a great historian who is always relevant to contemporary thinking and contemporary problems," the late former U.S. State Secretary Henry Kissinger once stated, according to the website of the British historian who led a team documenting the "harrowing" events of Oct. 7, 2023.

Lord Andrew Roberts is the chair of the 7th of October Parliamentary Commission Report, commissioned by the UK-Israel All Party Parliamentary Group.

Christian journalist Paul Calvert interviewed Roberts, asking him why he chose to get involved in the investigation.

"I didn’t really!" he replied. "I’m a Gentile. I’m not a politician," said the former Member of Parliament and currently unelected peer in the House of Lords.

"But when it came to being asked to do this, I accepted immediately because I’m an historian and I believe in historical truth. And the idea that in 50 or 100 years time, people might say that the massacres didn’t take place, rapes didn’t take place, torture didn’t take place..."

"I thought that the best way of dealing with that is to have a historically impeccable, intellectually robust report full of evidence from all sorts of sources that will prove for all time that yes, this monstrous event did take place."

Despite his awareness and documentation of antisemitism elsewhere, the author confessed that he had "never for a moment thought that something like October 7 would ever happen in human history again."

Several members of the investigative team spent time in Israel interviewing survivors of the Hamas attacks on Israel's southern border communities with Gaza, and there were corresponding visits to London by Israeli victims.

"We tried to set up a timeline," Roberts explained. "It was hard to do, but it’s an important thing, speaking as a historian."

"People think chronologically and so we have a minute-by-minute account of everything that happened from 6:29 a.m., when the terrorists came over the border, through to the period about 48 hours later when the last of the kibbutzim (communities) were liberated."

The second section of the report details the circumstances surrounding the deaths of nearly 1,200 people who were killed when 6,000 armed Gazans infiltrated southern Israel.

"Of course, lots of them came up to the border through the tunnels, so they couldn’t be picked up by the Israeli intelligence services," said Roberts. "It was a meticulously planned operation."

Roberts acknowledged that the report "does not make for easy reading," and said he can "totally understand why a lot of people find it a bit too gory and gruesome..."

"But the fact is that this is a book of evidence about a massacre."

The historian admitted to experiencing "a couple of hard nights actually of nightmares," explaining that having a 25-year-old daughter of his own made it easier to empathize with British-born Mandy Damari, whose daughter Emily (27) was brutally kidnapped.

During the investigation, Damari showed Roberts the safe house in Kfar Aza, where she hid for many hours, as well as the bullet-ridden apartment that Emily lived in. 

"When one has a sort of daughter of the same age as Emily, it’s impossible not to think about how you would be affected, were it to happen to you – and there are a lot of tears."

Roberts also discussed the irony of Hamas leaders and supporters trying to deny that the atrocities took place.

"Considering it’s their own evidence on their own GoPro cameras that provides part of the evidence... It shows the absurdity and the irony of the situation with regard to Hamas and its supporters in the West," he said.

"As we show in our reports, an integral part of the very detailed and deliberate planning that Hamas did, was to humiliate and rape and mutilate. And they armed themselves in the best way to ensure that."

Roberts summed up the goal of the year-long, sad and painstaking project:

"In future generations, when people come up and say, ‘Oh, it never happened...,’ they will whack this 319-page report down on the table, with all of the endless footnotes and facts, and evidence and witness statements, that shows beyond any doubt whatsoever that one of the most evil crimes against humanity did indeed take place on October 7, 2023."

Click below to listen to the full interview.