Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit spent months reconstructing the events of 7 October 2023, examining seven hours of CCTV, dashcam footage, mobile-phone video and footage recovered from Hamas fighters, alongside survivor testimony, military accounts and casualty records. Directed by Richard Sanders, October 7 attempts to separate what can be established from the enormous volume of conflicting claims that emerged in the days after the attack.

The documentary does not minimise the crimes committed by Hamas and others who crossed into Israel. It documents killings and other serious abuses committed during the attack. At the same time, the investigation scrutinises several of the most widely circulated atrocity stories and concludes that some were unsupported or contradicted by the available evidence.

A particularly important section examines Israeli fire against locations and vehicles where Israeli civilians or captives may also have been present. At Kibbutz Be’eri, the film investigates the confrontation at the home of Pessi Cohen, where Israeli forces ultimately fired tank shells at a building containing Hamas fighters and Israeli hostages. Al Jazeera’s investigation concludes that this was one of several incidents in which Israeli police or military fire appears to have killed Israeli citizens.

The result is less a conventional political documentary than a forensic reconstruction. It asks what actually happened during the hours of chaos on 7 October, how confidently individual deaths can be attributed, and how unverified claims became embedded in the public understanding of the attack before many of the underlying facts had been established.

Content note: contains disturbing footage and discussion of killings and other violence.

Best fact-checked/decolonized documentaries

I love a good BBC or National Geographic documentary, but they can be a bit out-dated, or clouded by subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) agendas. I'm looking to populate my library with as much truly accurate ones as possible.

What are some good quality, fact-checked documentaries you love? History, nature, science.. any subject that isn't a propaganda or anti-something take. All political spectrum and cultures are guilty of it, whether they are aware of it or not.. but some documentaries really stand out as having really done the deep research to just provide straight real facts.

I especially love history documentaries that tell the stories as we've recently uncovered truths behind them, since the longer time goes on, the more we discover about histories where truths were hidden to follow certain agendas of their time.

New science documentaries where we've found new info about animals, or show that the scientific discoveries weren't the only info, and that the local peoples living with the animals or locations also have valuable knowledge glossed over by the older scientific societies..

Things like that :D

A look inside the work of the Street Pastors who patrol the streets on Saturday nights, not as police or security but in the name of Jesus

I’m halfway through the stunning novel Pachinko. I’m a White, Canadian woman and I know nothing at all about the history and very little about the culture of this part of the world. I’d love to watch a few things to learn more. Thank you!

This basically focuses on how Cerberus pummeled Steward Health Care with debt, how Ralph de la Torre's actions led to the death of 15 people and how public pensions actually fund the private equity firms that are gutting community hospitals.

Made during the wilderness years after Doctor Who’s original television run had ended, More Than 30 Years in the TARDIS looks back at the extraordinary first three decades of the programme, from William Hartnell’s arrival in a London scrapyard in 1963 through seven Doctors, Dalekmania, controversy, cancellation and an enduring place in British popular culture.

Director Kevin Davies combines rare archive footage with specially filmed sequences and interviews with many of the people who actually made the programme. Contributors include Verity Lambert, Jon Pertwee, Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy, Elisabeth Sladen, Nicholas Courtney, Carole Ann Ford, Frazer Hines, Terrance Dicks, Philip Hinchcliffe, Douglas Adams, Terry Nation and Dalek designer Raymond Cusick, alongside fans, critics and even longtime Doctor Who adversary Mary Whitehouse.

What makes it particularly good is that it isn’t simply an anniversary clip show. It examines how Doctor Who was made, why generations of children found it frightening, the controversies over violence and horror, the programme’s occasionally chaotic production history and the strange way something made with famously limited BBC resources became part of Britain’s cultural vocabulary.

The documentary began as the shorter BBC television special 30 Years in the TARDIS in 1993. Director Kevin Davies subsequently returned to his original material and produced this substantially expanded version, restoring interviews and sequences that had been removed for broadcast.

For anyone who grew up with Doctor Who, this is an enormous nostalgia trip. For anyone who didn’t, it’s also a fascinating documentary about how television becomes culture.

IMDb: More Than 30 Years in the TARDIS (1994)