Shlomo Kashani · Documentary book
A documentary reconstruction of the attack, the hostage system and the struggle over the evidentiary record.
The book treats October 7 not as a sequence of isolated scenes but as one connected problem of event, captivity, evidence and denial. Claims are tested across witness, documentary and institutional sources so that the reader can inspect the method as well as the conclusion.
Why this book
When I began this book, I imagined an art book. Image, colour and memory seemed capable of carrying what I wanted to say about October 7. Reading testimony changed the project.
Names, times, places and source conditions kept interrupting the visual sequence. An image could convey loss, but it could not by itself establish who made it, when it was made, what happened outside its frame, or how later reports had used it. I found myself building a documentary record instead.
The book reconstructs the initial attack, the captivity that followed, later testimony and the institutional reception of the evidence as one contested historical record. It preserves the different standards governing documentary reconstruction, interpretation, legal analysis and moral judgement rather than allowing one form of claim to borrow certainty from another.
A damaged archive is not an empty archive.
Victims were murdered, scenes were burned or moved, locations remained dangerous, and some testimony emerged only after release from captivity. The surviving record is therefore tested through convergence across witness accounts, responder observations, visual material, forensic evidence, released-hostage testimony and institutional investigations.
The book’s intervention
No single existing mandate requires the archives of attack, captivity, law, institutional response and public language to be joined. This book brings them into one sequence while keeping their evidentiary functions distinct.
The architecture of the attack, sexual violence and the evidentiary archive produced during the assault.
The hostage system, the architecture of concealment, negotiation and testimony after captivity.
Evidence chains, comparison, institutional response and the procedural operation of denial.
Governing method
The book makes the path from source to statement visible. Confidence is matched to provenance, independence, scope and the kind of claim being made.
Each proposition is placed at the date and location its sources support. Later conduct does not erase the attack, and the urgency of the attack does not decide unrelated later claims.
A witness, recording, official record or physical observation is an origin. Repetition may authenticate or synthesize that origin, but it does not create a second observation.
A clip, witness or report is asked to bear only the load it can support. Documentary, interpretive, legal and comparative claims remain explicitly distinct.
Early errors, changed figures, later releases and new decisions remain visible. Corrections preserve sequence instead of silently replacing the historical record.
It does not offer a legal verdict, a clinical diagnosis, or a claim that every detail is settled. It offers an evidence-centred method for reading a fast, violent event whose own conditions damaged conventional proof and whose public record was assembled under political pressure.
Contents
The book moves from reconstruction, through captivity, to the problems of interpretation and judgement raised by the assembled evidence.
Forthcoming 2026
Pre-ordering, final specifications and publication information will be added when production is confirmed.