Chris Cuomo, Shaken By Oct. 7 Footage, Calls For Its Public Release: ‘People Should See It’
Chris Cuomo appeared visibly shaken. Hours after watching a screening of footage from the October 7 terror attack on Israel by Hamas at the Israeli Consulate in New York, he sat for an extensive interview with Mediaite about what he saw. Israel has been screening footage of the attack in an effort to combat denialism of the atrocities committed that day.
On his NewsNation show Thursday night, Cuomo delivered a monologue on the footage, which he believes should be made public. Cuomo, who reported from Israel after the war began, told Mediaite the video has been updated as the IDF collects new material. He said he’s never witnessed atrocities like what he saw on Thursday.
On top of all the horrible things of watching people hunted and killed, if you were to send a message to Israel that was guaranteed to make them want to go to war, the message would be grab innocent children, women, families and other non-soldiers male, tie them up and burn them alive. That would be, what would understandably check every box of paranoia, outrage, fear, self-protection and that’s what [Hamas] did at large-scale. I’d seen bodies, it’s not the first time I have seen that, but to see the rope on burned small and female bodies, a lot of them, I think conveys what is fueling the Israeli sentiment of ‘never go back’.
I didn’t understand that until it was explained to me today. I always just assumed it was like us saying ‘never forget’ after 911. Powerful. They see this as a direct signal of another Holocaust. And that’s why they’re so enraged by comparisons about genocidal intent because this was absolutely, by plan, genocidal.
Cuomo also spoke about the evidence of sexual assault against women in the footage.
There were no men with huge blood stains on their crotches, not one that I have seen away, there are numerous women that have that. There were numerous bodies that were disfigured. I don’t know if that was rigor mortis, or how they’d been found, the position in which they had fallen, and the spokesperson said there is a systematic way that they rape and kill women that can include breaking their legs. And there is enough sameness to the images at what point is it no longer random? A big bloodstain on the groin and legs going in the wrong directions. All death is horrible. All killing results in the exact same net effect, right? That a life is lost, if not stolen. But the manner matters in terms of what it promotes in retaliation. And it’s just like a group of people spent time trying to figure out how to do the most damage they could, not just to these people, but to the psyche of all the Israelis.
The former CNN anchor said he believes the footage should become public.
I think people should see it. I think that it will just increase the perspective on how painful this is. That doesn’t mean that it’s not painful for people in Palestine. But you do have to remember the idea of this justification argument that this didn’t start on October 7th. It happened before. True. However, you did not have an act of warfare before October 7th the way you do now because of October 7th, and you did not give the most conservative and aggressive and arguably anti-Palestinian two- state solution government in the form of Bibi Netanyahu and his ministers the exact justification they needed. Now, I’m not saying that there’s any conspiracy or anything like that. Save that for the other outlets, but if people want to wonder why Bibi Netanyahu is still in office when this happened on his watch and all of us thought he was going to be done on October 8th it’s because of what people learned about what happened on the seventh.
Watch above.
