In April 1945, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower walked through the newly liberated Ohrdruf concentration camp, a subcamp of Buchenwald in central Germany. He went deliberately.
What he saw, he later wrote, “beggar[ed] description.” Eisenhower was already thinking beyond the horror in front of him. He wanted firsthand evidence in case people someday dismissed reports of Nazi atrocities as propaganda. He later urged journalists and members of Congress to visit the liberated camps and see the evidence themselves.
Eisenhower understood something that remains true whenever atrocity and propaganda collide: Saving the living comes first, but preserving the truth matters too.
Israel faced those obligations after Oct. 7, 2023, but not at the same moment.
On Oct. 7, there was no real dilemma. Israel’s first duty was to save its citizens. Hamas-led fighters had crossed the border, civilians were being murdered and kidnapped, and Israeli forces were struggling to regain control. Israel’s own military investigation concluded that the defense establishment had badly underestimated Hamas and failed to protect civilians.
Once the attack had been contained, however, a second obligation became urgent: establish what had happened before others established the story for Israel.
The evidence was horrific enough without embellishment. Human Rights Watch interviewed 144 people and analyzed more than 280 photographs and videos, documenting deliberate attacks on civilians, killings, hostage-taking, and other grave crimes by Hamas-led armed groups.
The abuse did not end on Oct. 7. Released hostage Guy Gilboa-Dalal has described two sexual assaults during captivity, along with beatings and death threats. Amit Soussana, another released hostage, described being sexually assaulted at gunpoint. Her account was consistent with what she told medical professionals shortly after her release.
Not every such account can be independently corroborated in every detail. The responsibility is to distinguish among what has been independently established, what survivors report, and what remains uncertain.
Truth does not need embellishment. In fact, embellishment is its enemy.
There was also reason to believe Hamas understood that Oct. 7 would be fought not only with guns and rockets, but with images.
In 2025, reporting surfaced a six-page handwritten August 2022 memo that Israeli intelligence attributes to Yahya Sinwar, then Hamas’s leader in Gaza. The memo reportedly called for fighters to create horrifying images, film their actions, and broadcast them rapidly. Its attribution has been disputed. But intercepted communications from Oct. 7 reportedly contained similar orders.
Hamas understood that imagery and propaganda were part of the weaponry.
Israel eventually assembled a 47-minute compilation of authenticated footage from Oct. 7 and showed it under controlled conditions to journalists, diplomats, and officials around the world.
Why not release the entire film publicly?
Because that posed a genuine moral problem. The people in those images were not evidence exhibits. They were human beings being murdered, kidnapped, or terrorized. Some victims’ families opposed wider release. Others wanted the world to see more.
But protecting victims from exposure and protecting the historical record from erasure are not the same thing. Israel did not have to choose between posting every uncensored horror online and keeping most of the evidence inaccessible.
That mattered because Israel had reason to expect an organized effort to shape how the war would be understood abroad. After Oct. 7, Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center documented a rapid expansion of Iranian cyberattacks and influence operations aimed at helping Hamas’s cause and weakening Israel and its allies. Microsoft found little or no evidence of prior coordination with Hamas, but the operations expanded quickly.
A 2026 Nature Communications meta-analysis of 182 studies involving 31,184 participants examined the “illusory truth effect” — the tendency to judge a statement as more truthful after encountering it repeatedly. The researchers found that a person’s first exposure could affect the strength of that effect.
Thus, the first encounter matters.
A recent controversy in Australia shows how far disputed narratives can travel.
Grace Tame is a survivor of child sexual abuse who became a prominent advocate for sexual-assault survivors and was named 2021 Australian of the Year. Yet, in March 2026, she likened reports of mass sexual assault on Oct. 7 to “propaganda” and said such reports had been “debunked”. She later apologized and said she believes Israeli and Jewish survivors and accepts credible reports of rape and gang rape.
That episode points to a larger problem: When denial and distortion are foreseeable, what does a democratic government owe the historical record?
Israel did not need to show everything. It needed to make sure that what could be proved was proved.
That could have meant preserving the complete record while releasing carefully chosen, redacted evidence; giving independent journalists, investigators, and historians access under controlled conditions; protecting victims’ identities when revealing them added nothing; and separating verified fact, firsthand testimony, and unresolved allegation.
Public verification is not the same as indiscriminate publication.
The first hours of Oct. 7 belonged to rescue, defense, and survival. What followed created another responsibility: to make sure the people murdered that day could not later be erased by doubt manufactured after their deaths.
Eisenhower understood that 81 years ago.
The dead deserve dignity. The living deserve the truth.
Arie Blitz, M.D., M.B.A., is a retired physician and independent writer in Weslaco, Texas, who writes on foreign policy, medical ethics, and public policy.