UK report reveals: The youngest victim of October 7th was a 14-hour-old baby girl

A staggering 318-page report submitted to the British Parliament this week offers an unflinching account of Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, pinpointing a 14-hour-old baby girl, Naama Abu Rashid, as the youngest of 1,182 killed in a meticulously orchestrated massacre. Assembled by the cross-party British-Israel Parliamentary Group, the document lays bare five years of planning by roughly 7,000 terrorists—including Hamas’s elite Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades—who stormed 55 locations in southern Israel, leaving over 4,000 wounded and 251 abducted.

With a death toll equating to one in every 10,000 Israelis, the report deems it the deadliest per-capita terrorist attack in history and the largest single-day slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, shattering Hamas’s claims of restraint with a torrent of evidence.

Naama Abu Rashid’s brief life encapsulates the brutality. Born to Bedouin-Israeli parents in Arara, she was hit by Hamas bullets while still in her mother’s womb as the family fled toward Soroka Hospital in Be’er Sheva. Her mother, also named Naama, roused her husband at dawn amid labor pains, only to face a nightmare at Magen Junction: a machine gunner, concealed under a tarp on a truck, unleashed a hail of fire after they flashed their lights for help. Bleeding from her stomach and forced to stop again to swap a shot-out tire, the couple endured a second assault before an ambulance reached them. Delivered alive with a leg wound, baby Naama died at 10:00 PM—14 hours old—edging out nine-month-old Mila Cohen, shot in her mother’s arms in Be’eri, as the attack’s youngest victim.

Historian Lord Andrew Roberts, who chaired the inquiry, anchors the report with firsthand testimonies from all 32 targeted communities, exposing a catalog of horrors: executions by gunfire, strangulation, and burning; grenade detonations; and missile barrages.

Beyond killing, the terrorists inflicted widespread sexual violence—survivor Amit Soussana detailed her assault in a 2024 UN testimony—and desecrated bodies with beheadings and dismemberments, some rigged with grenades. Captured on GoPro cameras and flaunted on social media, the violence included unarmed Gazans beating freed hostage Yarden Bibas as he was dragged from Nir Oz.

The hostages’ fate deepens the tragedy: 210 taken alive, 41 as corpses, enduring relentless abuse in Gaza—sunlight deprivation, starvation, shackling, and sexual torment, per medical assessments of the 105 released. The report’s forensic rigor falters only where evidence was lost—combat zones and untrained responders hampered rape documentation—but its scope is unrelenting. It names 18 British victims, the deadliest Middle East terror toll for the UK, including Rotem Calderon, a 66-year-old dual citizen from Kibbutz Be’eri whose body lay unidentified for two weeks, her father a British émigré PE teacher. Two Britons were abducted; one died in captivity, the other freed after nearly 500 days.

Roberts frames the report as a bulwark against denialism, likening it to Holocaust revisionism that surfaced within hours online. Hamas leader Khalil al-Hayya’s 2024 BBC claim—“We ordered no harm to civilians; our ethics are Islamic”—crumbles against footage of child abductions and incubator thefts. Historians Niall Ferguson and Simon Sebag Montefiore laud it as “irrefutable” and “essential,” while UK Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch, moved by survivors’ tales of stolen children and raped girls, calls it a vital corrective to distortions.

For a global audience, this isn’t just history—it’s a stark lens on a day that killed at a scale unseen since 1937’s Rape of Nanking, with 59 hostages still in limbo as proof of its enduring cost.

Maariv contributed to this article.