The Horror Underground

The memories of the past three years in the Middle East and West Asia are beleaguered by horrendous acts violence and brutality. Whether it was Hamas attack on innocent Israeli people at a party in 2023 or the subsequent bloody reprisal by IDF against Palestinians in Gaza, humanity suffered terrible shocks and descended to depths of hell.

Two developments of the recent past in Israel however bring redemption. They reinforce my faith in the democratic institutions in that region. One was when the Israeli Supreme Court condemned actions by IDF and settlers against Palestinians in Gaza and West Bank inhuman and brutal. The second was the report of the Civil Commission which thoroughly investigated the attack by Hamas in October 2023.

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When Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, Prime Minister Narendra Modi condemned the terror immediately and unambiguously, expressed solidarity with the victims, and has since consistently pleaded for the protection of civilian lives and a return to peace and dialogue. When India was struck at Pahalgam this April, Israel was among the first nations in the world to condemn the attack, with no hedging and no delay. Each response arrived with the speed of recognition, the recognition of a country that has learned from its own accumulated grief exactly what this kind of violence is and what it is designed to produce.

There is a question that every country faces in the aftermath of a terrorist attack, one that is harder than it appears: why document? Why assemble the evidence, compile the testimonies, present the dossiers, and show the world the full picture of what was done? India grappled with this after the Mumbai attacks of November 2008. The answer we arrived at was that documentation is not merely a legal obligation. It is a moral one. To document is to insist that what happened was real, that the victims were real, that the perpetrators are identifiable, and that the world cannot claim ignorance as an excuse for inaction. India built what remains the most meticulously evidenced account of a terrorist attack in our history: intercepted communications, forensic trails, survivor testimonies, the chargesheet against Ajmal Kasab, detailed dossiers presented to Pakistan and to the international community. We showed the world.

It is against that background that ‘Silenced No More’, the report of the Civil Commission on October 7th Crimes by Hamas Against Women and Children released this month after two years of independent investigation, merits India’s most serious attention. It establishes through an evidentiary record of historic proportions that the violence of October 7 was not the disorder of war but a deliberate, repeated operational method designed with a purpose beyond the killing. I will not detail its findings at length here. What India needs to take from it is not the catalogue of horror but the architecture it reveals: a transferable doctrine of atrocity, and a model of documentation built not merely to record but to compel.

The primary objective of that doctrine is not the body count. It is the permanent alteration of a nation’s psyche. When civilians are struck in their most unguarded moments, at a music festival, a holiday meadow, a morning at home, the message to everyone who was not there is that no ordinary moment is safe, that joy is a provocation, that the freedom to exist in public without fear has been conditionally revoked. The fear then travels further and faster than any weapon. Communities shrink inward. Families make unconscious calculations about which freedoms remain available. The terrorist does not need to be everywhere. The psychic damage radiates from each attack and compounds with every one that follows, quietly narrowing the radius of free life. Israel has lived with this for decades and built institutions specifically to resist it. That knowledge is something India must now actively seek to learn.

The Civil Commission’s investigation addresses several issues: how must documentation be designed if it is to produce accountability rather than simply record atrocity? The report is independent, survivor-centred, and simultaneously addressed to international courts, prosecutorial bodies, diplomatic forums, civil society, and the historical record. It is public, geolocation-verified, and archived to internationally recognised evidentiary standards. It is a powerful document and presents cross-border terror going forward, before courts, before international bodies, and before the world.

Findings of the report lead to conclusions of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocidal acts under existing international law, and identify the urgent need for gender-competent prosecutorial frameworks for conflict-related sexual violence. These are obligations that flow from instruments India helped shape, including the Rome Statute and UN frameworks on sexual violence in conflict. Our National Commission for Women, bar associations, international law faculties, and human rights bodies all have standing to engage formally with what this report has established. That engagement need not be a political statement on every dimension of the Gaza conflict, which India has navigated with its characteristic strategic autonomy and principled insistence on civilian protection. It is the discharge of a legal and moral responsibility that India has long claimed the standing to exercise.

Prime Minister Modi’s immediate condemnation of October 7 and Israel’s immediate condemnation of Pahalgam are not gestures. They are statements of a shared understanding: that this violence follows the same doctrine whether it surfaces in the Negev or in Pahalgam or Mumbai or Delhi, that it must be named without equivocation, documented without compromise, and held to account without exception. India knows from 26/11 what it costs when documentation outpaces accountability. ‘Silenced No More’ offers a moral pathway for closing that gap. Using it is not solidarity with one side of a conflict. It is fidelity to the principle that atrocity, documented rigorously and named clearly, must eventually be answered for.

I do hope that the Commission will continue its good work. As the war against terror has revealed, the end of terror is not terror. There has to be a political process which needs sincerity and integrity on both sides. Israeli leadership has shown great sagacity in the past. I look forward to the return of those calm and wise minds, hopefully with the gentle nudge of the commission.

Suresh Goel is a former Secretary, Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India and Director General, Indian Council of Cultural Relations