A Channel 12 report has revealed new details about the military mechanism that operated on the ground after October 7th to gain exclusive control over documentation from the massacre.
The special unit was established in 2020 as a lesson from previous operations in the Gaza Strip, and is headed by Lieutenant Colonel N. On October 7th, 2023, the unit's soldiers, all former members of elite units who received fictitious officer ranks in order to move freely, were deployed to the mission defined as "classified and complex."
The unit's mission was clear: collect every bit of footage from the massacre before anyone else lays their hands on it. The teams worked through several different means. The soldiers broke into kibbutz offices and homes to seize DVR machines from closed-circuit television systems. In the Gaza envelope communities and the Nova Festival site, the soldiers collected dozens of memory cards from dashcams. Additionally, they collected hundreds of mobile phones, belonging to both Nukhba terrorists and Israeli citizens, both the victims and the survivors. The soldiers carried military iPhones without SIM cards and uploaded the materials to an internal IDF Telegram in real-time.
Sources in the unit recounted: "We promised a guy from Be'eri that we would not delete anything and that we'd return everything, and that didn't happen. Everything was deleted. They instructed us not to do anything, and only then to return the devices. We deleted the content from some of the phones we returned, including videos and recordings of conversations between people from the Gaza envelope and the party."
According to the sources, the orders came directly from the Operations Directorate, and the orders were clear: "Collect everything and don't leave anything."
While the soldiers collected materials under fire, an "editing operations room" was opened on a floor that was rented out in a Tel Aviv office building. In the operations room, professional video editors dealt with the materials. Some of the materials were compiled into the video shown to the international audience to prove the scope of the atrocities.
According to the soldiers, a significant amount of the raw footage "disappeared" into the military system and never reached the families or civilian investigation teams.
The IDF did not comment on the report.