Television news anchor Chris Cuomo poses as he arrives at the WarnerMedia Upfront event in New York City, New York, US, May 15, 2019. Photo: REUTERS/Mike Segar

NewsNation television anchor Chris Cuomo on Thursday shared his thoughts on seeing the uncensored footage provided by Israel that documents what he described during his show as the “genocidal” massacre carried out by Hamas terrorists in the Jewish state on Oct. 7.

The host of the CUOMO show and some of his team members were invited to watch a private screening of the 47-minute film showing some of the atrocities when Hamas terrorists invaded southern Israel, murdered 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and kidnapped 240 others two months ago. The Algemeiner attended a screening in November along with other journalists and diplomats.

Cuomo said he saw members of Hamas who “enjoyed mutilating” their victims “and went back and celebrated in the streets [of Gaza] with heads and bloody corpses as trophies,” arguing that proved the Palestinian terrorist group does not “want peace; they want to kill and burn the Jews.”

“This was absolute genocide. That is a word that people are misapplying, and this is where it does apply,” he insisted. “The 47 minutes show a small fraction of the dead, but it is overwhelming that Hamas wanted war. This was not the irrepressible angst of the desperate who want freedom, who want better, nor certainly want anything approximating peace. They wanted the Jews to know that they want them to burn — again.”

“I now understand better what is fueling Israel,” he added. “This is not tit-for-tat. They are fueled by the deepest fears of genocide because those fears are real.”

Cuomo compared the Hamas onslaught on Oct. 7 to the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks in the US perpetrated by al Qaeda. He went on to argue that Hamas’ actions were “reminders of a Holocaust, the obvious desire to see as many Jews utterly destroyed as possible.”

“The method was not madness — they were sane but just evil. But the method was a message,” he said about the terrorists behind 9/11. “Their unholy efforts triggered what America feared most: Terrorists robbing us of who and what we are about at home. And so, they got what they asked for — the wrath of a people united in common fear and concern that it is us or it is them. Existential.”

Connecting 9/11 and its aftermath to the Oct. 7 attacks and Israel’s ongoing military campaign against Hamas in Gaza, Cuomo said: “If an enemy wanted to make sure that Israel would come for them, the message would be to take children, women, innocents, and more, tie them up and burn them alive. Just like the Holocaust. The ultimate fear of what the world can bring the Jews’ way when a decision is made that Jews are less than human and treated that way in words and deeds.”

“I now know that is exactly the message Hamas sent, on purpose, at scale. I was not aware of that before. How intentional the effort was,” he added. “They did it methodically. You hear it in the voices, the commands, the ease, the excitement of finding and mutilating victims. Merely murdering innocents was the least of it … It was death in your face, hands on, and personal.”

Cuomo concluded by saying that while he does not want to “erase or in any way mitigate” the death toll of Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip amid the ongoing Israel-Hamas war, “after seeing the video … I’m telling you, Israel is doing far less than it could.”

“It is easy to say stop, [but] it is very hard to say how. Why?” he asked. “How do you ask Israel to risk being vulnerable to those who do not honor agreements and have made it very clear they don’t want peace. They want to burn and kill the Jews.”

Today I was among the journalists who have attended a private screening of the raw footage of October 7th and I want to express to you what I saw since it’s not been made public. It’s been a very heavy day. A decision was made that Jews are less than human, and treated that way… pic.twitter.com/b455joHQxs

— Christopher C. Cuomo (@ChrisCuomo) December 15, 2023