New details about the military apparatus that operated on the ground after October 7 to gain exclusive control over the documentary materials from the massacre.
Channel 12 revealed that this is a special unit that was established in 2020, as a lesson from previous operations in the Gaza Strip, and is headed by Lieutenant Colonel N.
On October 7, the unit's fighters - all graduates of special units who received fictitious officer ranks in order to move freely in the field - were deployed on a mission that they described as "secret and complex.".
The unit's goal was clear: to collect every shred of documentation of the massacre, before other elements got their hands on it, from all the cameras around Gaza - from cars, through residential buildings, to closed-circuit security cameras.
The teams operated in several ways. Fighters broke into kibbutz offices and residential homes to take the DVRs of the closed-circuit cameras. In the settlements of the encirclement and in the area of the 'Nova' festival, the soldiers collected dozens of memory cards from road cameras. Hundreds of mobile devices were also collected - both from the Nochba terrorists and from Israeli civilians, both dead and surviving.
The fighters were equipped with military iPhones without SIM cards, and uploaded all the materials to an internal IDF Telegram group in real time.
Sources operating within the unit told Channel 12: "We were required to collect everything from the GoPro cameras that were on the terrorists' heads. We promised Barry that we wouldn't delete anything and that we would return everything, and that didn't happen. Everything was deleted. We were ordered to do nothing, and only then return the devices. From some of the phones we returned, we deleted the content - video clips and recordings of conversations of people from the envelope and the party.".
According to the sources, the orders came directly from the Operations Division, and the directive was clear: "Collect everything and leave nothing behind.".
While the fighters were collecting materials under fire, an "editing center" was set up on a specially rented floor of an office building in Tel Aviv. There, professional video editors handled the materials. Some of the materials were edited into a horror film that was shown to international officials to prove the extent of the massacre.
A significant portion of the raw materials, according to the soldiers, "disappeared" in the military system and never reached the families or civilian investigation teams.
Channel 12 noted that many questions arise from the unit's conduct on the morning of October 7. The biggest of all is where are the materials that were not revealed to the families and the public, and why are they not being revealed?
The IDF did not respond.
