BRAVO Two Zero hero Chris Ryan witnessed some truly horrific sights in over a decade of service with the SAS.
But nothing in his elite military career prepared him for the brutality of the atrocities carried out by Hamas terrorists a year ago today.
Last month, Chris, 63, spent a week as part of a team of military experts from Europe, the US and Australia on a fact-finding visit to investigate the Israeli Defence Force’s war against Hamas, whose fighters captured 250 hostages on October 7, 2023.
The ex-staff sergeant with 22 SAS also saw first-hand some of the 300-miles of booby-trapped tunnels under Gaza.
Here, he tells why the IDF must drive out Hamas and Hezbollah before peace can return to the region.
Stretching over an hour long, a video showing just some of the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7 - taken from security cameras and phones - was harrowing.
I've never seen anything like it, the barbaric nature of the attack was shocking. Nobody was spared, whether it be babies to grandparents and even animals.
In the room while it was playing, the silence was deafening.
I looked around and my eye caught one very high-ranking officer who fought in most, if not all, of the recent conflicts. He seemed to age during that hour - we all did.
We left that room and got on the bus, nobody was speaking. We were taken to the scenes of the atrocities – including an Israeli military installation where on the video we had watched female Israeli reservists being gunned down at close range by smiling terrorists.
Some had locked themselves in the control room, so Hamas set fire to it and burned them to death.
There was footage of some of the other girls who were captured. In one particular scene a Hamas terrorist lined the girls up and then he just shot one of them out of nowhere. It is awful.
We were standing in the room where this had happened. I just couldn't get it out of my head.
It makes me angry that there are people, maybe bots or just idiots, who are saying attacks were staged. The world has become desensitised to murder.
The Israelis also recorded everything on the airwaves during the attack. There was a lot of confusion.
Hamas leaders who were orchestrating the attacks were saying ‘cut the heads off, behead them and give the heads to the people to play with’. To bring dead bodies back and hang them from the corner of a certain square.
This level of depravity that was going on - the hatred and the sadistic delight - was what I found most shocking.
Amid mortar and small-arms fire, our hosts, the Military Expert Panel and ELNET, took us into the Gaza tunnel network.
I was actually surprised at the extent of it. When you look at a London underground map you think it is complicated. Well times that by a thousand.
That's the extent of the tunnels, certainly in excess of 300 miles. They range from some that you can drive a small truck through, to others that are about two foot by five foot for personnel to run through.
Within the tunnel systems there were holding areas for their fighters where they had toilets and showers. They'd even put Astroturf down on the floor where they were laying.
Then there were the more sinister rooms, used as jail cells, which had bars at the entrance as you would see in a prison.
As an SAS soldier I spent quite a fair amount of time on our anti-terrorist team, studying operations like house assaults.
It occurred to me that this is tunnel warfare that we haven't seen since Vietnam or the Second World War.
There is a difference now, though, and that is you've got a city above you.
The troops are clearing houses and buildings where nearly every single one is booby trapped, an IED waiting for the Israeli troops to go through.
They have to clear those first, which of course slows everything down and allows the enemy to pop up elsewhere.
The tunnels would be like fighting down a pit, in very confined spaces, extremely claustrophobic.
So, you have to have a certain type of soldier who can deal with the psychological problems of fighting in an environment where it's pitch black.
You're walking around with night sights. Then when you do get a contact in the tunnels, you're in a straight line directly facing the enemy and there's nowhere to take cover.
It is hard to explain and its portrayal on various news outlets does not appreciate the complexity.
We saw on video that some of the tunnel shafts connected to children’s bedrooms, with pictures of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck painted on pink walls
Chris Ryan
The Israelis soon realised that they couldn't clear the surface without clearing the tunnels at the same time.
As they were coming in to clear the buildings, fighters or terrorists were popping up from hatches, engaging the troops, ambushing them and then disappearing back down into the tunnels.
Every mosque, every school, every hospital, every government building has a hatchway into a tunnel system.
We saw on video that some of the tunnel shafts connected to children’s bedrooms, with pictures of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck painted on pink walls. The grotesque contrast of a kid’s bedroom as the doorway to terrorist infrastructure, designed only to cause death, is almost incomprehensibly jarring.
An Israeli officer told me of one part of a tunnel system where they went in and they found a steel door and it was locked.
Above their heads was a massive remote IED waiting to go off and so they backed off and it was cleared.
They knew there was a guy on the other side of that door waiting for somebody to try and break through and then he would have blown it.
That was an eye-opener and then it answered quite a lot of questions in terms of the tactics they are forced to use.
When you look at footage sometimes you can be horrified at seeing so much destruction.
But the destruction is because all the buildings were rigged to blow so they have to make these safe, keeping the civilian population away.
This war is going to continue and we must continue to support Israel.
We made the mistake of not doing enough when Hamas took over Palestine and Hezbollah took Lebanon.
We let Iran, the fox, into the chicken coup and this was the result. The world knows it is Iran pulling the strings, the UN focus should be on Iran and its use of proxies to destabilise the Middle East.
If they can be defeated then hopefully we'll finally see peace and the Palestinians can vote in a government that actually pays attention to civilian needs without being threatened by the fanatical Hamas regime, which is only interested in murderous terror.
EXCLUSIVE By Grace Macaskill
TRAPPED in a tiny roadside bunker with 28 people cowering behind him, courageous Aner Shapira knew they could have just moments to live.
As murderous terrorists threw one grenade into the shelter after another, Aner picked each one up and tossed them back outside.
It was an incredible act of selfless bravery that bought petrified Israelis 44 minutes of hope during the Hamas attacks on October 7 last year.
But it was only a matter of time.
As the Hamas killers threw an eighth grenade into the tiny shelter, 22-year-old British-Israeli Aner tried the same thing again but took the full force of the blast.
Hamas shooters then sprayed their guns into the bunker before kidnapping four people and taking them across the border to Gaza.
Just seven of the 29 young people inside- who had fled the Nova Festival - made it home.
An astonishing picture shows Aner, an off-duty IDF soldier dressed in a T-shirt, shorts and flip flops, standing near the shelter entrance as he desperately tries to protect those inside.
In an exclusive interview with The Sun, his dad Moshe today tells of his pride and pain saying: “We spoke to the survivors and they say Aner was not afraid.
“We asked them because we needed to know if he was afraid. There’s all this slaughter and butchery and we didn’t want him to be frightened.
“We understood that he was in the middle of a battle, that he lost his life. Only for a second he understood that he was going to die, but until the last moment he really believed that he’d succeed in saving the lives of people in the shelter.”
Aner, whose mum Shira, 49, is from Oxford, was among the hundreds of young people at the Nova musical festival when Hamas terrorists stormed the border three miles away.
He made it to a roadside shelter where he took cover and was soon joined by other concert-goers who had fled across fields and roads as they were fired upon.
More than 1,200 people died on October 7 at the festival, in kibbutz and military bases in what became the deadliest attack on the Jews since the Holocaust.
In the chaotic aftermath of the horror, his parents had no idea whether Aner was alive or dead.
Architect Moshe, 53, said: “We called Aner but there was no answer. We called the centre where many survivors had been taken and they said there was nobody by the name of Shapira there.
“We have a big family and we were searching hospitals because many of the injured had still not been identified.
“We had the location of his phone but it was a military zone so people connected to the Army went to search, but didn’t find anything because all the bodies had been taken from there to an army base in the centre of Israel.
“On Monday, two days after the attacks, we suddenly got a call from a young girl who said she was with Aner in the shelter. She said she was alive due to his actions.”
The news devastated Moshe and Shira, who was too upset to speak to us, but the couple have had to be strong for Aner’s six siblings, aged eight to 22.
Moshe said: “We can’t let our family collapse.”
Among those kidnapped from the shelter was Aner’s best friend, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, whose arm was blown off in the attack.
Traumatic footage from that day shows him being dragged on to the back of a pickup truck by terrorists, bone exposed from his amputation.
Hersh, 23, reportedly managed to fashion himself a tourniquet from material for his injury, but was taken hostage to Gaza where he was found dead in a tunnel in Rafah in August this year.
The friend’s stories are included in a BBC documentary called Surviving October 7: We Will Dance Again which features footage from the day of the attacks.
Moshe says he is not surprised by his son’s astonishing actions because he grew up with a “sense of humanity.”
He said: “What was so special about Aner is that, ever since he was a small child, he always had a strong ideology that everyone was equal.
“He always stood for the ones who suffered.. When he was a teenager he used to walk to downtown Jerusalem with friends and if the police stopped an illegal immigrant, for example he would stand in front of them and ask, ‘why do you ask them questions? Is it because he is black?, What’s the reason?’
“He would stand and oppose wrongdoing. I believe there was an anarchist in there, in a positive way.
“Most people would be afraid to touch a grenade and Aner was unarmed and, having been at the party, was wearing sandals and a T-shirt. He had gone to a party to celebrate - at a place where the slogan was love and peace.”
Surviving October 7th: We Will Dance Again is on BBC iPlayer
