October 7th, Lord Roberts and the Most Important Report of the Year

We have not made our way through the first quarter of 2025, but I have already decided to call it: The best government report that will be published this year is the “7 October Parliamentary Commission Report,” assembled by an “all party” panel of the British parliament, led by Lord Andrew Roberts.

Roberts and his team of researchers have crafted a genuinely remarkable work. It is remarkable because Roberts’ detailed accounting of the run up to the attacks on October 7, and the forty-eight hour killing spree that followed, bears so little resemblance to other government reports. Roberts’ account of those events is readable, rigorously sourced, scrupulously fair, and absolutely unambiguous as to its findings. It is like no other government publication.

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Key to the report’s rigor and readability is that Lord Andrew Roberts is one of Britain’s most-acclaimed and widely-read historians. And, in this instance, he did double duty as both the Chairman of the Commission and as one of the report’s researchers “in the field.” Frankly, I can’t think of another example where the senior official sitting at the helm of a blue ribbon panel also had the skills to lift the underlying research up to the standards of peer-reviewed literature. But Lord Roberts can … and he did.

The results are an indispensable public service. For those readers who want to have a deep, granular understanding of what happened on October 7, and how it unfolded minute-by-minute, this is the work for you. And it’s completely free. It deserves reading by everyone who hates relying upon television pundits, tweets on X, or TikTok videos for their understanding of important events. Lord Roberts charts us a path away from all of that.

Consider the Commission’s description of its meticulous, fact-driven methods in order to report the truth … and nothing but the truth:

[T]he report uses evidence-based analysis to corroborate information from narrative accounts by assessing geolocated data, field research, and other material. This approach enabled an in-depth examination of a specific event’s impact across multiple locations, including a diverse range of data sources and accounting for the subject’s sensitive and sociopolitical context-dependent nature. The design also ensured flexibility in integrating data sources to build an accurate picture of 7 October.

In its work, accuracy was key. If a particular account of events could not be independently verified by resort other sources, the researchers excluded it from the report. As the report explains: “[T]he research team cross-verified information with primary evidence, and if issues with verification arose, testimony was not included.”  This is a high standard, and for us readers, it’s the right standard.

Likewise important, Lord Roberts brought his skills as the author of popular European histories to the telling of this contemporary tale. Gone are the oblique imprecisions that we might expect from a panel of government officials. This Report cuts directly to the chase, and at points in the storyline, it reads like a spy thriller.

And as readers make their way through the report, they will learn a lot that has not been widely publicized before; such as: Hamas’s planning for this attack was underway for seven years before October 7; and that the supply lines for the sophisticated weaponry used by Hamas during the attacks do not just run back to Teheran, but also to Moscow, and Beijing, and Pyongyang. The October 7 horror story has profound implications for the safety of the entire Western World.

In this respect, Lord Roberts’ shining a light into the darkest places on Earth recalls Eisenhower’s steely determination and foresightedness following the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps.

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General Eisenhower insisted that teams of journalists join him when touring the camps, to bear witness, and to prevent the horrors from later being air-brushed or memory-holed away. So too, the historian Roberts offers this account of the savagery and barbarism on October 7 as an antiseptic to later lies. He describes the panel’s efforts in this way:

Our Report will hopefully permit people to see such denials and justifications for what they really are: a perversion of reason and rejection of human decency. We owe it to the victims and their grieving families to set down the ghastly, unvarnished truth about the sheer barbarism that Hamas and its terrorist allies unleashed on 7 October 2023.

In laying bare the unvarnished truth, the Report is a job well done. And for those of us who share Roberts’ grief for the victims and their families, we owe it to them to circulate this account widely.