“Minor family members were forced to perform sexual acts on one another while in captivity in Gaza, men and women were subjected to gang rape on 7 October, and the genitals of several corpses were mutilated.”
This is what one can read in B.T. about the horrific testimonies from 7 October 2023 that are now documented in a new report on the crimes of the Hamas terrorists, with more than 10,000 photographs and videos, as well as 430 witness statements, across more than 200 pages.
Witnesses recount the terrorists’ laughter and joy over the atrocities they committed against innocent Israelis – men, women, the elderly and children. One man recounts that he was the terrorists’ sex doll. Another witness describes how men raped a woman against a wall, stabbed her with a knife and continued after she was dead. A third witness heard a woman cry out: “Stop, I’m going to die anyway, so just kill me.” When the men were finished, they laughed and shot her in the head. Other women were penetrated with tin cans.
If one is in doubt as to whether the Devil exists, one need only read these testimonies. Yes, atrocities have also been committed by Israelis, as in all wars. But there are particular signs surrounding the events of 7 October that point towards the real existence of the Devil, the demonic and evil.
The laughter is one of several signs.
Explainable evil and its limits
Hamas’ ideology is well documented. The conflict between Israelis and Palestinians has deep historical roots. It concerns decades of occupation, blockade, political desperation and hatred passed down through generations. No serious person dismisses these factors.
But they do not explain the laughter.
The Danish poet Søren Ulrik Thomsen has argued that most evil acts can be illuminated rationally – socially, psychologically and historically. The problem arises when all these explanations have been exhausted and something still remains. An evil that does not seek to achieve something, but seeks to achieve nothing. A destructive will that eludes every rational illumination because it is devoid of any rationale whatsoever.
That remainder is present in the testimonies from 7 October. The terrorists called home to tell what they had done. They photographed themselves together with mutilated victims. They found pride and joy in their monstrosities. Here we find ourselves in an infernal circle that requires another language.
The demonic attacks joy
The Nova Music Festival was precisely not a military target. It was not a state institution or a symbol of Israeli military power. It was a music festival. Young people dancing in the night, celebrating life in one another’s company and being happy.
C.S. Lewis wrote that the Devil hates the human as such. Joy, music, fellowship, dance. These things are in themselves a provocation against the demonic, because they reflect something that evil cannot bear the sight of. A music festival – young people open towards one another and towards life – is in that sense a theological challenge to darkness.
Kierkegaard described the demonic as an inward enclosure that actively resists the open and the joyful. The demonic hates freedom, not as an abstract concept, but in its concrete, living forms: laughter, love, fellowship. It cannot endure the sight of people happily present in life.
The terrorists chose the place where joy was greatest, and where human vulnerability was greatest. It is a classic demonic pattern: Evil seeks out that which shines.
The perverse ceremony
The report describes not only killings, but also mutilations of genitals on the living and the dead. Objects inserted into women’s genitalia. Corpses arranged, trophies photographed.
These are not acts of war in any conventional sense, but resemble something else: a satanic ritual. A diabolical sacrificial act, a celebration with an inverted sacred character, where the destruction of the human body – the image of God – is the very meaning, not an incidental side effect of combat operations.
The French anthropologist René Girard engaged deeply with the structures of collective violence, the shared destruction that binds a group together in a collective ecstasy. There is something Girardian about the Nova massacre, the abuses against captives in Gaza and the attacks on the kibbutzim.
The perpetrators celebrated precisely their outrage together. The collective exhilaration, the social bond created through the shared exercise of violence, the shared devotion to destruction. Here we are not merely dealing with a psychological breakdown, but rather with a conscious surrender to something radically Other, which we can best understand as the Devil’s temptation.
The inverted theology and free will
Dostoevsky was preoccupied with man freely choosing evil, not out of necessity, not out of desperation, but because destruction exerts an attraction in itself. In his novels, the deepest evil is not that which arises from poverty or oppression. The deepest evil is devoted evil, that which is an expression of choice.
The Hamas terrorists on 7 October had weapons, planning, coordination and time. They were not desperate men on the run. They chose the murders of innocents, and they chose with joy.
This is the deepest tragedy of freedom: that it contains the possibility of total surrender to the destructive. The German philosopher Rüdiger Safranski has written extensively about this in the book “Evil or the Drama of Freedom”.
The compulsion to explain as moral capitulation
In the period after 7 October, the reaction in large parts of the Western intellectual and political milieu has been remarkable. Not because one defended Hamas (although there exists a swamp of sympathisers within the pro-Palestinian milieus), but because the reflex was the same: contextualisation. Structural explanations. Calls to understand the causes. The occupation, the blockade, the historical injustice, the bombing.
When every atrocity must immediately have a cause that makes it understandable, when nothing is allowed to appear as absolutely evil, we lose not only a theological concept. We lose a moral faculty.
The modern, secularised West has abolished the concept of “absolute evil”. We have retained the rational explanatory model, but thrown metaphysics overboard. What remains are systems, structures and context.
The Devil’s most effective feat is, as is well known, to convince the enlightened world that he does not exist. That all evil is fundamentally a social problem that can be solved with the correct structural measures. That the laughter signifies nothing special.
It does.
The Devil exists.