The Israeli army secretly seized and deleted parts of the 7 October security camera footage, according to a report published by Israel Hayom yesterday, in the latest revelation to deepen suspicion over the official Israeli account of the events of that day.
The Hebrew-language daily reported that on the evening of 9 October 2023, a classified reserve unit operating under the Israeli army’s Ground Forces Command arrived at Kibbutz Be’eri and asked members of the kibbutz’s rapid-response squad to hand over the device storing all the community’s security camera recordings. The unit commander told the exhausted residents that he needed the material “to bring the hostages home” and promised it would not be shared and would be returned in full.
No written commitment was given. By the following morning, the officer had left Be’eri with the recordings and headed to the Kirya, the Israeli army’s headquarters complex in Tel Aviv.
According to the report, the classified unit — composed of reservists drawn from elite formations including Sayeret Matkal, Shaldag, Shayetet 13 and Duvdevan, and founded around a decade ago by former officer Yoaz Hendel — “operates in the gray zones,” a reference to covert, legally ambiguous missions that fall outside the army’s regular chain of command and conventional rules of engagement.
