I was among a group of journalists invited to a showing of a 43-minute video documenting the violence inflicted by Hamas terrorists on the people of southern Israel on October 7.

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By the end of the film — using footage taken from the killers’ GoPro cameras, dash-cams, mobiles of victims and home security cameras — our gathering of ashen-faced writers had seen 138 corpses.

But that represented less than ten per cent of the total of more than 1,400 victims — while 240 were also kidnapped.

In perhaps the most harrowing scene, a dad and his two sons — around nine and 11 — try to flee to safety in another kibbutz.

All in boxer shorts, they appeared to have been woken by the attack on a Saturday morning during a Jewish holiday.

The father carried his younger son, while the other ran to a shower block.

They were pursued by two terrorists, with one hurling a smoke grenade before killing the dad.

As a father of two, I will struggle to forget the unimaginable scene of his two sons cowering in terror. One wailed: “Why am I still alive?”

We saw victims slain in a kindergarten and charred corpses of more than a dozen babies.

One young boy lay dead in Mickey Mouse pyjamas while a girl, whose face had been caved in, was in a Tupac T-shirt.

One kibbutz victim was a Thai foreign worker in a football shirt.

A group of terrorists recorded the barbaric scenes as they hacked his head with a spade.

The striking thing was the joy of the Hamas attackers — and their obvious pride in what they had done.

An Israeli source said many appear to have been using drugs and a mound of what looked like cocaine was found on one Toyota truck.

Israel’s UK ambassador Tzipi Hotovely said: “It is our duty to show this to the world.

“The only way to negotiate with Hamas is about the colour of the flowers on your grave — and we will not do that.”