Our October 7 report confronts the instant atrocity denial that erupted

This has only been followed by a string of other failures, from the recent decision to suspend some arms sales to Israel, to the complete lack of support over attacks on Israeli companies — let alone individuals — and the latest remarks by Foreign Secretary David Lammy about Israel breaching international law. I noticed in the House of Lords last week that Lord Collins of Highbury did not repeat Lammy’s accusation.

Our government never exerted the kind of pressure on Hamas that would have been necessary to help secure the speedy release of British-Israeli hostage Emily Damari. She was shot in the hand and dragged from her home in southern Israel on October 7. She lost two fingers and was not given the correct medical treatment during her 471 days in captivity.

To make matters worse, we have the British Ambassador to Jerusalem, Simon Walters, saying how he had grown up in Northern Ireland and now it is time for peace, as though the Troubles are any kind of indication about what’s going on in Israel. The IRA, loathsome, appalling and dreadful though it was, never murdered 1,182 civilians on one single day. It did occasionally torture, but it did not do anything like the things that were seen on October 7. Moreover, the IRA never sought the total destruction of Great Britain the way Hamas openly seeks the annihilation of Israel. The Troubles were fundamentally a dispute over borders, not existence.

There were 1,182 people killed on October 7 from a country that is eight times smaller than Britain. If our country had seen 10,000 of its own killed — which is the equivalent in terms of per capita of population — there is nothing that any British Prime Minister would not do to punish those responsible. We would be outraged if another country refused to sell us arms on the baseless accusation they might be used for inhuman purposes.

I think it is a testimony to the Israelis that although obviously they are angry, they are not unbelievably bitter and resentful towards Britain. And despite widespread disinformation about alleged war crimes, real military experts who have investigated the IDF’s conduct on the ground have testified that the Israeli army has upheld international law.

Hamas has made clear on several occasions, including by telling Emily herself, that the terror group is going to undertake another attack like the one on October 7 as soon as it is militarily capable. The duty of the British government is thus to help Israel ensure that this cannot happen.

The only way of doing that is by annihilating Hamas in Gaza and the way to do that, as we are not going to be putting any of our troops on the ground, is to let the Israelis get on with it and do what they need to do. For us to stand finger-wagging on the sidelines with a morally superior air, bleating on about international human rights, is disgraceful.

Emily was kept in a United Nations Relief and Works Agency (Unrwa) safe house during her captivity, where she was given a single bottle of out-of-date iodine to treat her wounds. The more we hear from hostages such as Emily about the involvement of Unrwa, the more it becomes apparent that the government’s decision to fund Unrwa again was a mistake. The UK’s funding for Unrwa was paused in light of allegations by Israel that 12 staff were involved in the October 7 attack against Israel. But the reforms Unrwa proposed are hardly far-reaching enough to justify renewed funding as we continuously hear about more its involvement with Hamas.

When I visited Mandy Damari in Kibbutz Kfar Azar in May, she wore a T-shirt with a photo of Emily, where she had crossed out the number 27 and written 28, because Emily’s birthday had passed while she was still in captivity. I thought of my own daughter, Cassia, who is 25 years old, and burst into tears. Mandy is the bravest woman I’ve ever met. She showed me the safe room that she had to spend 20 hours in when the terrorists stormed the kibbutz and from where Emily was taken, with bullet holes all over the place. The whole thing was a completely emotionally overpowering experience.

In Britain, we need to root out the hatred against Israel that is being spawned in our universities. The “tentifadas” we have seen at various campuses, including at Oxford and Cambridge, need to be cleared out because of the way their inhabitants intimidate Jewish students.

We should be looking to America for inspiration, where, as a result of pressure from the Trump administration, Columbia University has finally begun expelling anti-Israel student activists for the disruption they have caused. It is not up to the police and it is not up to the local authorities – it us up to British universities themselves to show a bit of gumption. Our report on the horror of October 7 is urgent, because denialism about the atrocities kicked off immediately.

Since the beginning, people have denied that Hamas terrorists committed sexual violence, despite a UN report confirming evidence of gang rape, sexualised torture and mutilation during the onslaught.

Our 319-page document sets out all the facts about the monstrous atrocities committed on 32 civilian communities, using irrefutable, fully footnoted sources, including testimonies from survivors, first responders’ reports, as well as photo and video evidence. In the future, when historians are looking at the events of October 7, our report will destroy denialist claims.

Our opponents are caught between wanting to deny October 7 really happened and celebrating the fact that it did happen. But you cannot do both: it is intellectually impossible to be able to celebrate something that you deny.

Of course, pro-Gaza activists were planning their first march through London as the massacres were still taking place. The Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) asked the police at 2.50pm Israel-time if they could protest, even as the murders were still going on. That was three weeks before the Israelis even went into Gaza. Activists were essentially ready to celebrate the attack, with their “From the river to the sea” chants and their T-shirts soon afterwards bearing stickers of paragliders, which some Hamas terrorists used to invade Israel.

In this document, we mention the names of all the 1,182 murdered people. Individuals can be forgotten in these atrocities and so one of the things that I am very proud of is the way in which the report names every single person and the circumstances of their death. It is a mere pamphlet compared to Yad Vashem’s Book of Names, but there is an element of In Memoriam about the report, where each of the 18 British victims has a special section dedicated to their memory. The idea is that their names, their personalities and their stories should not be lost to history, so a sense of them will still be attainable to historians in one hundred years’ time.

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Lord Roberts is a historian who chaired the 7 October Parliamentary Commission Report