The Gaza Celebrations on October 7: What the Record Shows

Crowds welcomed returning terrorists as the Hamas massacre unfolded. Reports from the day and later testimony document the scenes.

Palestinians were filmed cheering returning terrorists and captured Israeli vehicles in Gaza on October 7, 2023, while Hamas and other terrorist groups were attacking communities in southern Israel. In Khan Younis, crowds ran behind a vehicle carrying terrorists. Other footage showed crowds alongside an abducted woman and men cheering around a dead Israeli soldier.

Three years later, those images remain part of the history of an attack that killed about 1,200 people and saw 251 abducted. The following video, circulated online, shows a crowd celebrating in Gaza.

What cameras recorded

Footage from Khan Younis on October 7 showed Hamas terrorists riding a vehicle described as captured Israeli military equipment, with people chanting and running behind it. Separate scenes near the border showed people posing on a tank and cheering around the body of a man described as an Israeli soldier.

The footage the IDF presented to foreign correspondents on October 16 included scenes inside Gaza. In one, a bloodied young woman was moved between parts of a vehicle before being driven away as a crowd followed. Another showed cheering around a soldier’s body. These were scenes of abduction and abuse, not just celebrations of a breached border.

Sweets, gunfire and victory messages

Celebrations also appeared in parts of Judea and Samaria. Broadcast footage from that day showed sweets being distributed in Nablus and celebratory gunfire in Jenin, and photographs captured celebrations in Nablus on October 7.

Within hours of the assault, sweets were being handed out in southern Lebanon and Beirut. A photograph from the Beddawi refugee camp showed a member of Islamic Jihad’s Al Quds Brigades distributing candy. In Berlin, the Samidoun network posted photographs of activists handing out sweets to celebrate the attack.

The message from Hamas’ leadership was explicit. Footage showed Ismail Haniyeh and other leaders watching the attack on television in Qatar, celebrating the seizure of an IDF vehicle and offering a prayer of thanks for what Haniyeh presented as a victory.

What Palestinian polling measured

The Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research surveyed 1,231 adults between November 22 and December 2, 2023. Asked whether Hamas’ decision to launch the attack was correct, 72% said yes: 57% in Gaza and 82% in Judea and Samaria. In Gaza, 37% said it was wrong.

The wording matters. The center cautioned that backing the decision did not necessarily mean approving every act committed during the attack. Some 85% said they had not seen videos of atrocities against Israeli civilians, and many denied that Hamas had committed them at all, even as a majority rejected the killing of civilians in their homes.

In Gaza, the pollsters reached people during the November truce, some of them displaced and living in shelters, which makes the results a rare glimpse of opinion inside the territory in the middle of the war.

Support fell over the following year. When the center asked the same question in September 2024, 54% still backed the decision: 39% in Gaza and 64% in Judea and Samaria.

A father’s view of the crowd

For Nissim Louk, the images carried an immediate, personal meaning. In a February 2025 interview, he recalled seeing his daughter Shani in a pickup entering Gaza, surrounded by cheering people. The family initially could not tell whether she was alive.

Her body was recovered by Israeli forces in May 2024. Her father’s account explains the particular anguish of those images: a family trying to establish its daughter’s fate while the crowd around her celebrated.