Psychopaths have no sense of empathy. To sell a war to normal, decent, functioning human beings, requires you to bypass their empathy, null it, or switch it off altogether. And the easiest way to do that is to convince them that the target of the war you wish to wage is evil. Not just bad but utterly beyond the pale Satanic; capable of unimaginable acts of sadistic cruelty against the most vulnerable, especially women and children. If you can do that then you’ve got an easy sell. Under those circumstances, the elimination of such evil seems justified. Righteous even. And it works every time.
In 1990 a horrific story hit the headlines: soldiers from Sadam Hussien’s army had entered the childrens’ ward of a Kuwaiti hospital and ripped tiny babies from their life preserving incubators, dumping them onto the floor to die a cold and lonely death. Testimony detailing the atrocity was given in front of Congress by a young fifteen-year-old Kuwaiti girl, Nayirah, who described the horror she saw. The story marked a turning point in public support for the war. The invasion of Iraq was launched three months later. But it was only after the war that the truth came out: it had all been a lie, part of a contrived propaganda campaign to sell the conflict to a reluctant US public. The young Kuwait girl was revealed as none other than the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the US, who had been trained in acting by the PR firm Hill and Knowlton, so as to give a more convincing performance in front of Congress. George H.W. Bush cited the lie often in the run up to the invasion and the war was successfully sold.[1]
In 2011 another horrific story broke: Libyan soldiers in Colonel Gaddafi’s army had been supplied with Viagra to assist them in using systematic rape as a weapon of war against women in rebel held areas. NATO’s utter destruction of Libya followed, along with Gaddafi’s own murder via rape with a bayonet, of which Hillary Clinton gleefully quipped, “We came, we saw, he died!” But just like the canard of babies thrown out of incubators, this too turned out to be baseless propaganda, with US military and intelligence officials subsequently admitting as much, and a UN investigator describing the claim as “massive hysteria,”[2] arguing that no proof existed to back up the allegation. But it served as a handy demonisation of Gaddafi’s forces and Libya now lies in ruin.
If there’s a lesson to be learned here, it’s never accept at face value a pronouncement about an atrocity carried out by an officially designated enemy. Scrutinise everything. Because the fighting to control the narrative is often as crucial as that on the battlefield. And when you scrutinise the events of Oct 7, the media narrative of that day falls apart like cheap particle board furniture left out in the rain.
40 BEHEADED BABIES
“40 BABIES MURDERED BY HAMAS,” screamed the headline of UK newspaper Metro. “HORROR AT ‘PURE EVIL BEHEADING OF BABIES,’” yelled the Daily Express. “‘This was a holocaust pure and simple’: Babies beheaded. 40 children shot dead in a single settlement. Families burnt alive,” asserted the Daily Mail. “Hamas ‘cut the throats of babies’ in massacre,” announced The Times.
The unsourced story spread like wildfire across Israeli, British, and US media, generating a visceral emotional response and setting the tone of early reporting: Hamas had carried out an unspeakable evil almost beyond comprehension. Netanyahu’s spokesperson, Tal Heinrich, seized upon and echoed the claims, stating that babies and toddlers had been found with their “heads decapitated.”[3] When addressing US Jewish organisations at the White House, President Biden reinforced and amplified the story, claiming to have seen photos of the beheaded Israeli children, stating, “I’ve been doing this a long time. I never really thought that I would see, have confirmed pictures of terrorists beheading children.”
But all was not as it seemed. The dubious allegation can be traced back to the claims of just one individual, a radical settler leader with a history of making genocidal threats against Palestinians. There is no physical or other evidence to support the claim. No decapitated babies’ bodies. No photos of decapitated babies. No video footage of decapitated babies. Nothing. As revealed by investigative journalism website The Grayzone, the single source was David Ben Zion, a leader of settler organisation, the Shomron Regional Council, comprising 25 illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank.[4] In a now deleted tweet from February, 2023 (so long before Oct 7), Ben Zion wrote that, “The [Palestinian] village of Huwara should be wiped out today” and that “there is no room for mercy.”[5] Israeli settlers attacked the village, burning home after home and assaulting Palestinian residents, leading Hamas to describe it as a “declaration of war.” Ben Zion had previously called for the “deportation of the [Palestinian] masses.” And wrote of the Palestinians, “We can’t change their barbaric DNA.”
The claims of beheaded babies were first reported by Israeli state sponsored i24 News when Ben Zion spoke to their reporter, Nicole Zedek, who took part in a press tour organised by the Israeli military of the Kfar Aza kibbutz on the Gaza border to show the devastation there after the Hamas attack. In the interview, Ben Zion states, “We walked door to door, we killed a lot of terrorists. They are very bad. They cut heads of children, they cut heads of women. But we are stronger than them,” adding, “We know that they are animals but we found that they don’t have any heart.” In a separate piece to camera, i24 reporter Zedek states, “About 40 babies were taken out on gurneys… Cribs overturned, strollers left behind, doors left wide open,” adding somberly, “So, for the soldiers here it’s a very, very difficult scene for them as well.”[6] Or so you’d think. However, footage personally posted to Facebook by David Ben Zion, shows him in his IDF uniform in the hours following his interview grinning repeatedly like a Cheshire Cat at the supposed location of his gruesome discovery.[7]
Nicole Zedek’s unverified report went viral, gaining tens of millions of views and was quickly parroted by much of the world’s media as if factual reality. The story caused instant revulsion, producing a Pavlovian like response that demonised the Palestinians, serving as a powerful justification for their slaughter in Gaza. Soon reporters, officials and even the IDF itself backtracked from their original statements, but the damage was done, with their clarifications garnering nowhere near the attention their initial pronouncements had.
After her initial report, Zedek issued a less categorical version of events, stating, “Soldiers told me they believe 40 babies/children were killed. The exact death toll is still unknown as the military continues to go house to house and find more Israeli casualties”[8] [my emphasis].
Others followed suit. Correspondent for the Independent, Bel Trew, who had also been on the official military tour of Kfar Aza kibbutz and was the second journalist to report the story, wrote on X, “I just wanted to clarify that I did not tweet 40 babies had been beheaded. I tweeted that foreign media had been told women and children had been decapitated but we had not been shown bodies… I realised the way my tweet was written was too short to explain the full context, so deleted it.”[9]
Others on the same military tour distanced themselves from the i24 and Independent reports, with Israeli journalist, Oren Ziv, posting on X, “During the tour we didn’t see any evidence of this, and the army spokesperson or commanders also didn’t mention any such incident,” adding, “Soldiers I spoke with in Kfar Aza yesterday didn’t mention ‘beheaded babies.’ The army’s spokesperson stated: ‘We can not confirm at this point.’”
Biden’s lies were similarly reinterpreted by The White House with a new clarifying spin.
“A White House spokesperson later clarified that US officials and the president have not seen pictures or confirmed such reports independently,” reported The Washington Post. “The president based his comments about the alleged atrocities on the claims from Netanyahu’s spokesman and media reports from Israel, according to the White House.”
Despite initially confirming the report, the IDF also quickly revised their position, stating of the beheaded babies report, “We have seen the news, but we do not have any details or confirmation about that.”[10]
CNN likewise backtracked, with their reporter Sara Sidner writing on X, “Yesterday the Israeli Prime Minister’s office said that it had confirmed Hamas beheaded babies and children while we were live on air. The Israeli government now says today it CANNOT confirm babies were beheaded. I needed to be more careful with my words and I am sorry.”[11]
It all followed a familiar pattern: make an outrageous claim about an atrocity, watch it spread uncontrolled across the media, use the instant outrage incited by it as justification to go to war against the accused, quietly retract the claim which largely goes unnoticed, rinse and repeat.
SYSTEMIC RAPE
Next in notoriety to the claims that babies were beheaded by Hamas on Oct 7, is that systemic rape of Israeli women and girls was also carried out by Hamas. And rape of the most horrifying nature: women raped with such ferocity that their pelvis’s shattered, children and pensioners raped, gang rape followed by the murder of the victim then the continued rape of their corpse, of knives inserted into genitalia, and of mutilation, of breasts cut off and thrown down the street. And that much of it had been filmed by Hamas for posterity.
Such appalling horror stories were not just pushed by Western media but endorsed by Western politicians. Member of the British Parliament, David Lammy, claimed on UK Sky News that there were “babies raped” by Hamas on Oct 7. He offered no evidence and his claim went unchallenged by the show’s hosts.
German leader, Olaf Scholz, claimed that, “The Hamas terrorists recorded all this so that their perfidy, their murders, their rapes can be seen in the videos by the whole world.”
German Foreign Minister, Annalena Baerbock, claimed that during a visit to Israel she had been “shown the film, which was not recorded by me or the Israeli government but by Hamas fighters with their, what are they called, GoPro cameras on their helmets.”
“And do you know what I saw there? It was the worst thing you can imagine,” stated Baerbock. “I watched it because I wanted to know, because I wanted to know what happened there. And to see a woman being raped on camera.”
The European Union’s notoriously pro-Israel “anti-Semitism coordinator,” Katharina von Schnurbein, came out with a similar story, “Today’s video of brutalised and raped Israeli women of 7 Oct is horrific.”
Many took these claims of rape videos at face value, but they simply do not exist. According to Israeli government sources and a UN team that poured over all video and photographic material provided by the Israeli government or available from open sources, no video of any rape exists.[12]
The UN Secretary General’s Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict, Pramila Patten, who led a fact-finding team to Israel, concluded in her report that, “in the medicolegal assessment of available photos and videos, no tangible indications of rape could be identified” within the material supplied by the Israeli authorities. And that “no digital evidence specifically depicting acts of sexual violence was found in open sources.”[13]
Israel’s most famous newspaper Haaretz reported the same. “From inquiries put to three bodies in the defense establishment by Haaretz, it emerges that the intelligence material collected by the police and the intelligence bodies, including footage from terrorists’ body cameras, does not contain visual documentation of any acts of rape themselves.”[14]
So what evidence is there that systemic rape occurred on Oct 7? Despite no shortage of vile claims, there is, in fact, no credible evidence that a single rape occurred on Oct 7. Not one. Never mind evidence of a pre-planned campaign of systemic sexual violence against Israeli women. No victims have been publicly identified – either alive or dead – there is no video, photographic or forensic evidence and no credible eyewitnesses.
And just like The Grayzone reporting that revealed the claims of beheaded babies originally emanating from one highly dubious character, so too have they revealed that much of the claims of systemic rape have been amplified and pushed by another dubious individual.[15]
Meet Israeli lawyer Cochav Elkayam-Levy, the prime go-to source for western media pundits echoing the Hamas rape story, a person who had previously worked for the Israeli government’s Attorney General’s Office,[16] and founder of the so-called Civil Commission on October 7th Crimes by Hamas against Women and Children. Given that the Oxford dictionary definition of a “commission” is “a group of people entrusted by a government or other official body with authority to do something,” you might imagine that Elkayam-Levy is part of an officially sanctioned Israeli governmental fact-finding group. And yet, as reported by Israel’s largest newspaper, YNet, her “commission” consists of – her. “In the beginning she was really very active, which was very nice,” an Israeli governmental source told YNet. “Then it started calling itself a civilian commission. People got confused, members of Congress turned to people who work with Israel and asked what it is – ‘Israel built a commission?’ It’s a confusing name. And to the question of whether there is such a thing at all? Is there such a body? The answer is – no. It is the body. She is the civil commission.”
In the same YNet piece, the Israeli newspaper accused Elkayam-Levy of scamming donors to her institute and of spreading misinformation – a fake Hamas atrocity tale originating from a confirmed fraudster. “The story about the pregnant woman who had her stomach cut open – a story that was proven to be untrue, and she spread it in the international press,” an Israeli official complained to YNet. “It’s no joke. Little by little, professionals began to distance themselves from her because she is unreliable.”[17] Such unreliability was highlighted by The Grayzone exposé of Elkayam-Levy that revealed her trying to pass off images of Kurdish fighters killed in combat as “Jewish Israeli women who had been killed and raped by Hamas militants at the Nova Electronic Music Festival on October 7.”[18]
Despite YNet quoting Israeli governmental sources describing her research as “unreliable” and that “her methodology was neither good nor accurate,” what Elkayam-Levy is undoubtedly reliable and good at, is securing donations, having raised millions of dollars through her institute.
“If the government sources who spoke to YNet are to be believed,” reported The Grayzone, “she conned wealthy American Jewish donors like Rahm Emanuel, currently the Biden administration’s ambassador to Japan, and channeled the money into her personal bank account.” According to YNet, in order to set up her, “Civil Commission,” Elkayam-Levy appealed for $8 million with $1.5 million earmarked for “management and administration.” And yet despite promising to produce an “atrocity report” giving clear evidence of systemic rape by Hamas on Oct 7, no such report has yet to materialise.
What has materialised is a report from the UN. Despite Israeli and Western media spinning Pramila Pattern’s final UN report as confirmation that sexual violence occurred on Oct 7, it actually contains zero evidence of any sexual assault or rape. Not only did the authors of the report fail to locate a single victim but they criticized Israel for its “inaccurate forensic interpretations” and even suggested Israeli officials had staged the scene of a rape.[19]
One of the UN officials on the team, Chloe Baszanger-Marnay, told reporters, “On [Kibbutz] Be’eri, just to clarify, what we found was that there were two allegations we looked into that were unfounded. And they’re very well described in the reports and you’ll recognise them because they were highly publicised in the press. The rest, we could not verify. So… no, we could not verify any sexual violence in Be’eri at this point.” Her colleague Pattern then added, “There was an allegation that there were objects like knives that were inserted into the genitalia of a woman… the team reviewed the photos and we did not find anything like that.”
As highlighted by The Grayzone, many legacy media outlets employed a “few clever tweaks of language” to spin the conclusions of the report. “The Associated Press, for example, repackaged claims of rape at Kibbutz Be’eri – which the UN report dismissed as ‘unfounded’ – as ‘allegations of rape that could not yet be verified.’”
The New York Times joined the creative writing class, claiming in their headline that the UN report discovered “Evidence of Sexual Assault in Hamas-Led Attack on Israel,” only for them to hastily amend their headline after social media posts from editor in chief of The Grayzone, Max Blumenthal, called out their misinformation. Their quietly edited, watered down, headline subsequently read, “UN Team Finds Grounds to Support Reports of Sexual Violence in Hamas Attack.”
Despite comments from the head of the UN team revealing that her trip to Israel had come about through “pressure” from a public relations campaign by Israeli governmental linked lobby groups, her report did not directly implicate Hamas in any sex crimes, let alone the systemic campaign of rape by Hamas that much of the legacy media has pushed, and concluded there was only “reasonable grounds” to believe Israel’s claims.
Not that you’d get that impression from reading The New York Times. It is perhaps The New York Times more than any other publication that has pushed the Hamas rape hoax, most notably in their December 28 article, “Screams Without Words: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct 7.” One story that features heavily in the article, is that of Gal Abdush, the so called “girl in the black dress,” whose death the article highlights in an effort to validate allegations of systemic rape by Hamas on Oct 7. However, family members of Gal Abdush have not only flat-out denied that she was raped, but have criticised The New York Times for manipulating them. Gal’s sister, Miral Alter, has stated that “she was not raped” and drawn attention to Gal’s last message to her family being just four minutes before her reported time of death. “How in 4 minutes [were] they also raped and burned [?]”[20] Gal’s brother-in-law has also refuted that she was rape and stated that “the media invented it.”[21]
In The New York Times article, a person described as “Sapir” is presented as “one of the Israeli police’s key witnesses.” However, when scrutinised, central claims of this supposed key witness are demonstrably false, undermining the validity of her testimony as a whole. In the Times article it states, “she saw three other women raped and terrorists carrying the severed heads of three more women.” And yet, there are no records, autopsy reports or forensic evidence of any women being beheaded on October 7.
The aforementioned “cleaver tweaks of language” are also evident in The New York Times piece which attempts to bolster its claims that Hamas committed sexual violence by stating, “The Israeli authorities have no shortage of video evidence from the Oct. 7 attacks.” Well, yes, evidence from the attacks, but not rape, which of course they don’t actually mention despite a heavy implication. Another example being, “Mr. Fintzy said Israeli security forces were still finding imagery that shows women were brutalized.” Again, a strong dose of inuendo, but what specifically does the nonspecific “brutalized” mean? It can mean anything, and that’s the whole point of using it.
Since the publication of The New York Times piece, the paper has fired one of the article’s authors, Anat Schwartz, a former Israeli Air Force Intelligence officer no less,[22] for liking a Twitter post saying that Israel needed to turn Gaza “into a slaughterhouse.”[23] – just the sort of impartial person you want to work on such a piece, if your aim is to push atrocity propaganda that is. Imagine the outcry if the Times brought a former Hamas Intelligence officer on board to lend a hand who had previously liked a post about turning Tel Aviv into a slaughterhouse. Despite Schwartz having no previous journalistic experience, she was, for some inexplicable reason, assigned to work on the high profile sensitive story, along with her nephew Adam Sella and journalist Jeremy Gettleman.
In a podcast interview conducted in Hebrew with Israeli Channel 12, Schwartz explained some of her methodology. The Intercept translated the interview and reported that in it “Schwartz details her extensive efforts to get confirmation from Israeli hospitals, rape crisis centers, trauma recovery facilities, and sex assault hotlines in Israel, as well as her inability to get a single confirmation from any of them. ‘She was told there had been no complaints made of sexual assaults,’ the Times spokesperson acknowledged after The Intercept brought the Channel 12 podcast episode to the paper’s attention.” Responding to questions raised about the podcast, The Intercept reported that “a spokesperson for the New York Times walked back the blockbuster article’s framing that evidence shows Hamas had weaponized sexual violence to a softer claim that ‘there may have been systematic use of sexual assault.’” In the same Intercept piece, they reveal that The New York Time’s flagship podcast “The Daily” attempted to turn the article into an episode “but it didn’t manage to get through a fact check.”[24]
During Schwartz’s Channel 12 interview, she explains that her research for the story included watching interviews with Shari Mendes, an architect from New Jersey now living in Israel, who as part of the Israeli Defense Force’s rabbinical unit was deployed to a morgue to prepare womens’ bodies for burial. Here Shari Mendes claims to have personally seen widespread evidence of rape: “Pelvises were broken, and it probably takes a lot to break a pelvis … and this was also among grandmothers down to small children. This is not just something we saw on the internet, we saw these bodies with our own eyes,” she states in one interview. And to the Daily Mail she claimed that, “A baby was cut out of a pregnant woman and beheaded and then the mother was beheaded.” As the authors of The Intercept article explained in an interview with Democracy Now, “This is entirely false. We’ve gone through all of the official records that Israel has put out on people who died that day. There was no pregnant woman killed that day. That’s been thoroughly debunked.”[25] And yet, in the Channel 12 interview, Schwartz explains that it was seeing the interviews with Mendes that further buttressed her conviction that the Hamas rape story was true. “I’m like – wow, what is this?” she recalled. “And it feels to me like it’s starting to approach a plurality, even if you don’t know which numbers to put on it yet.”[26]
How about a big fat zero?
But perhaps most telling of all is that Anat Schwartz liked a post that talks about establishing a narrative that ‘Hamas is ISIS’ for the purpose of scaring Westerners.[27]
PEOPLE BURNT ALIVE
Along with false claims of beheaded babies, systematic rape and rampant mutilation, the other frequently repeated atrocity allegation against Hamas is that on Oct 7 they burnt people alive, even putting a baby in an oven. According to official Israeli reports there was one baby, 10-month-old Mila Cohen, who was killed on Oct 7 after a bullet was fired through a door. She was neither burnt nor beheaded and it is unknown who fired the bullet and under what circumstances. Despite these official reports rubbishing the baby in an oven story – as well as any other ludicrously graphic baby death scenario like the row of babies hanging from a washing line – the falsehood still persists. (The Israeli interviewer of the IDF solider who claimed to have seen babies hanging from a washing line has since deleted the story, labelled it as fake and said that the IDF tricked him into doing it.)[28]
“These bastards put these babies in an oven and put on the oven, we found the kid a few hours later,” stated Eli Beer, director of volunteer first responder group United Hatzalah to a group of wealthy attendees of the Republican Jewish Coalition summit in Las Vegas. Ignoring the fact that Beer says “babies” plural and then in the same utterance contradicts himself by saying “kid” singular, Mila Cohen was the only baby death on Oct 7, and so the story is demonstrably false. And yet despite this fact, the easily debunkable story was quickly echoed and amplified around the world.
“EVIL UNLEASHED Hamas ‘b******s’ roasted babies alive in ovens during massacre, medics reveal as scale of terrorist depravity laid bare,” yelled UK newspaper The Sun. “Hamas killers ‘roasted babies in an oven’ during October 7 attack, Israeli first responder claims,” shouted the Mail Online. ‘Hamas roasted babies in ovens’, says Israeli emergency services worker who saw aftermath of massacre. announced London based LBC.
“They BAKED A JEWISH BABY ALIVE in an oven,” tweeted Jewish News Service editor Caroline Glick on Twitter. “They murdered his father. They gang raped his mother, over and over and laughed all along. While they baked her baby alive in the oven. The Palestinians support Hamas. They LOVE Hamas. NO RESUPPLY. NO CONCESSIONS. NO MERCY.”
Reaching for the caps lock key too, editor of Commentary Magazine, John Podhoretz, wrote on Twitter, “THEY BAKED A BABY IN AN OVEN. Say ceasefire one more time you fucking baby-murdering-loving ghouls.”
However, Israeli reporter Chaim Levinson, a writer for liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz, was more skeptical, “Like any good Jew who sees the rich, [Beer] thought about the money and told a story that did not exist…about a baby in an oven.”[29]
A variation on this atrocity theme was delivered by rival ultra-orthodox group ZAKA, a volunteer organisation charged with collecting bodies, whose regional head, Yossi Landau, told a Sky News reporter of a scene he claims to have witnessed at Kibbutz Be’eri: “And we’re talking children, two piles of ten children each, were tied to the back [and] burnt to death.” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu repeated this account on the telephone, telling President Biden: “They took dozens of children, bound them up, burnt them and executed them.”[30]
Once again, official Israeli death figures easily debunk this. As journalist Max Blumenthal has commented of Yossi Landau’s claim: “Yet this was an absolute impossibility, as a total of 13 children were killed during the October 7 attack – and the most found in a single location was 3. And as The Grayzone previously revealed, the largest pile of burned Israeli bodies in Kibbutz Beeri were scorched after the Israeli military decided to deliberately shell a home filled with 13 Israeli captives.”[31]
When challenged by Richard Sanders for Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit about the discrepancy between the official death figures and Yossi Landua’s claims of two piles of 10 dead children at a specific house – the list of dead at Be’eri records that two twelve-year-old twins were killed after army and police raided the house – Landau himself conceded that what he claimed was inaccurate: “When you look at them and they’re burned you don’t know exactly the ages. So you’re talking about 18-year-old, 20 years old … you just don’t look on the spot … to see the ages or something like that.”
Although other journalists who’ve interviewed Landau have thrown soft ball questions his way and treated him with a nauseating deference – with Fox News reporter John Roberts even concluding his piece with Landua by tenderly touching his shoulder and fawning “it’s God’s work that you’re doing” – Richard Sanders had Landau flustered and on the back foot just by highlighting some of the obvious inconsistences in his testimony and not taking his assertions at face value.
In the highly watchable and revealing interview, Landau is asked about his claim of seeing a pregnant woman at Kibbutz Be’eri with her stomach cut open and the fetus removed and stabbed to death – a story dismissed by a spokesperson from Kibbutz Be’eri who stated: “The story of the pregnant woman reported by Zaka is not relevant to Be’eri,” and also refuted by official Israeli death reports that list no pregnant women dying at Be’eri. In the video, Landua attempts to support his claim by offering to show Richard Sanders a photo.
“If you want to see the picture, I have the picture,” he says.
Richard Sanders agrees to see it, at which point Landua refuses to show “the picture” on camera, but will show him personally.
“This is the baby. This is it,” he states categorically, zooming in on his phone for Sanders.
“I’m sorry to be graphic here but I can’t see a baby,” replies Sanders.
“You can’t see the baby because, but this is the picture of err, err the mother, for sure, you know, we didn’t think when we’re over there, we didn’t think that err, to camera everything. We didn’t have that, this wasn’t in our…” and then he just trails off, sits down and looks worried at the contradictory mess he’s just issued forth from his mouth.
According to Richard Sanders, the image showed “an unidentifiable piece of charred flesh.”
When Yossi Landau was asked in a separate interview what he would say to people “who question” or “play down” his version of what took place on Oct 7, he responded “I wouldn’t say anything… he should be killed.”
This would have to include journalists for Israeli newspaper Haaretz who concluded that Landua’s pregnant woman and baby story “simply didn’t happen.”[32]
Not surprisingly, The New York Times had no problem relying on Yossi Landau as one of the key sources for their discredited Screams Without Words article. In this Landau contradicts himself again. Despite offering to show Richard Sanders pictures and then showing him an ambiguous unidentifiable image that in no way matched his own description of it, he told The New York Times that he “did not take pictures because we are not allowed to take pictures.”
And yet, the hideous pictures Yossi Landau has conjured of what happened on Oct 7 have been lapped up and parroted far and wide by Western press and politicians, with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken repeating another of Yossi Landau and ZAKA’s false atrocity claims, telling a senate hearing on October 31 that “A young boy and girl, 6 and 8 years old, and their parents around the breakfast table. The father’s eye gouged out in front of his kids. The mother’s breast cut off, the girl’s foot amputated, the boy’s fingers cut off before they were executed. And then their executioner sat down and had a meal.”
There are no records of children dying in circumstances remotely like those described by Blinken, the source for which is Landau and ZAKA.
So who are ZAKA? When you hear they’re a religious volunteer group collecting bodies, you might imagine an apolitical collection of altruistic volunteers performing a vital civil task for bereaved family members of the dead. But as reported by investigative collective Mondoweiss: “The organization [ZAKA] was founded in the late 1990s by Yehuda Meshi-Zahav. Meshi-Zahav was previously the leader of ‘Keshet’ an ultra-Orthodox Jewish terrorist group that targeted forensic pathologists and used explosives against shops selling ‘secular newspapers.’ Meshi-Zahav led ZAKA until 2021, when he attempted suicide after shocking revelations of dozens of rapes and sexual assault cases committed by him. Since its inception, the organization – described as a ‘militia’ by the highly esteemed Israeli journalist Yigal Sarna – has been subject to incessant criticism, investigations, and demands to dismantle it.”[33]
And so, it should come as no surprise that Benjamin Netanyahu personally met with ZAKA volunteers after Oct 7 and passed on his thanks to them for talking to the press. “We need to buy time,” he told them, “which we gain by turning the world leaders and to public opinion. You have an important role in influencing public opinion, which also influences leaders.”[34]
But even if ZAKA’s claims of scores of children being tied up and burnt alive have been thoroughly debunked, along with Eli Beer’s claims of babies burnt in ovens, what of the images and videos of melted cars and burnt bodies plastered across the media after Oct 7?
That a large quantity of burnt cars and charred bodies exists following Oct 7 there is no doubt. But how did they come to be burnt in the first place? The official Israeli narrative is that Hamas committed a Nazi-like atrocity and burnt people alive. However, during an interview with Mehdi Hasan, Israeli spokesman, Mark Regev, let slip something rather different.
In an attempt to score the point that unlike Hamas, Israel can be trusted when it makes a mistake, because it comes clean and admits it, Regev stated: “We originally said, in the atrocious Hamas attack upon our people on October 7th, we had the number at 1,400 casualties and now we’ve revised that down to 1,200 because we understood that we’d overestimated, we made a mistake. There were actually bodies that were so badly burnt we thought they were ours, in the end apparently they were Hamas terrorists.”[35]
Intriguing - 200 bodies burnt to such an extent that Israel thought they were their own civilians.
Unless Hamas fighters decided to commit mass suicide at multiple locations by setting themselves on fire, this doesn’t make sense. At least for the official narrative anyway. Which begs the question: who burnt them?
The evidence points to Israel.
As has been extensively reported by the Electronic Intifada and The Grayzone, and recently taken up by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, ABC, a military doctrine known as the Hannibal Directive was employed by Israeli forces on Oct 7, whereby Israel deliberately kills its own citizens to prevent them from being taken hostage. (The Hannibal Directive gets its name from a Carthaginian general who rather than being taken prisoner by the Romans decided to kill himself by taking poison.)
With over 10,000 Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli dungeons, including 3000 who have not been to trial or charged with a crime, as well as approximately 200 children, any hostage taking by Hamas gains them huge political leverage to force a prisoner swap and get them home. The secret doctrine came into being following a huge backlash to a prisoner swap deal in 1986 that saw 1150 Palestinian prisoners swapped for three captured Israeli soldiers. The Hannibal Directive was conceived to thwart future abductions. In 2003 it was applied when another three Israeli soldiers were captured and brought into Lebanon, but this time IDF helicopters indiscriminately attacked 26 vehicles in the vicinity guaranteeing the death of the captured soldiers. In 2014 it was used again, this time in Rafah in Gaza, when an Israeli officer was captured. The Israeli military responded by offloading over 2000 bombs, shells and missiles to kill their own solider, along with 100 Palestinian civilians.
But the scale of the Hannibal Directive on Oct 7 eclipsed anything previously seen. During a podcast with Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Israeli Air Force Colonel Nof Erez admitted its implementation and scope: “The Hannibal directive was apparently applied at a certain stage, because at the moment they understand there is a kidnapping, they immediately say, ‘Guys this is Hannibal.’ But the Hannibal we trained for all of the last twenty years, is for a vehicle we know at what point of the fence it enters, on what side it drives, and maybe even on which road it drives. This was a mass Hannibal. It was tons and tons of openings in the fence, and thousands of people in every type of vehicle, some with hostages and some without.”[36]
In Israel’s Yedioth Ahronot newspaper, pilots of the Israeli Air Force described the firing of “tremendous” quantities of ammunition at anyone attempting to cross the border between Israel and Gaza. “Twenty-eight fighter helicopters shot over the course of the day all of the ammunition in their bellies, in renewed runs to rearm. We are talking about hundreds of 30-millimetre cannon mortars and Hellfire missiles,” stated reporter Yoav Zeitoun.[37]
And when you look at the pictures and video of scores and scores of burnt and melted vehicles, it becomes obvious that it would have been utterly impossible for Hamas to have caused such overwhelming destruction with AK47 sidearms and homemade rockets. Rather tellingly, if you compare images of burnt-out melted cars released by Israel after Oct 7 (top right hand image and larger image below), with images of a confirmed Israeli airstrike on a family car in Lebanon on November 6, 2023, (top left hand image) the damage looks practically identical. In the Lebanon attack the only passengers of the car were three girls, aged 10, 12 and 14, their grandmother and their mother. All died except the mother. And just like the images of burnt bodies in cars that Israel displayed to the media after Oct 7, so too were the bodies of the girls and their grandmother horrifically burnt from the Israeli airstrike, with the head of Salah Ghandour Hospital, Mohammad Suleiman, describing their bodies as “completely burned.”[38]
Reporting on the Hannibal Directive, mainstream Israeli media outlet YNet stated, “In the week after [October 7], soldiers of elite units, at the initiative of the Southern Command, checked about 70 vehicles that remained in the area between the Otaf settlements and the Gaza strip. These are vehicles that did not reach Gaza, because on the way they were shot by a combat helicopter, an anti-tank missile or a tank, and at least in some cases everyone in the vehicle was killed.”
And the Hannibal Directive wasn’t just applied against vehicles, with properties where Israelis were held hostage also shelled. In a Haaretz article, a resident of Kibbutz Be’eri is quoted saying “the commanders in the field made difficult decisions – including shelling houses with all their occupants.”[39]
The UN also confirmed Israel’s use of the Hannibal Directive on Oct 7, in a recent publication for the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry they stated that “The Commission is aware of allegations that Israeli Special Forces used the ‘Hannibal Directive’ to prevent the capture of Israeli civilians and their transfer to Gaza, even at the cost of killing them… The Commission documented one statement by an ISF tank crew, confirming that the crew had applied the Hannibal Directive.”[40]
Just like the photos of melted and burnt cars, when you examine the scale of catastrophic structural damage to properties on Oct 7, it becomes clear it has been caused by something other than hand held firearms and RPG’s. Namely, heavy weapons systems: missiles, tank shells, heavy artillery etc.
With the Hannibal Directive’s implementation confirmed by multiple Israeli sources, it is certain that many of the Israeli dead, if not most, were slaughtered by Israel itself.
EVERY ACCUSATION IS A CONFESSION
Given that Israel has propagated a litany of false atrocity propaganda about Oct 7 to justify its slaughter in Gaza, it is a sick and evil irony that much of what Israel has falsely accused Hamas of, they are themselves guilty, and demonstrably and unequivocally so.
Baby after baby, toddler after toddler, child after child has been beheaded in Gaza by Israeli high explosives. The images are all over X and Telegram for those with the stomach to view them. Limp decapitated little bodies, often held up by family members in utter anguish, imploring the world to look, really look, at what Israel has done to their beloved son or daughter, niece or nephew, grandson or granddaughter.
Countless Palestinians have been and continue to be burnt alive in Gaza, killed in the most painful and horrific manner imaginable, incinerated by Israeli weapons of war. In one video I watched a Palestinian woman scream hysterically as her daughter burns alive in front of her inside a building for displaced civilians. Even the false Israeli claim of babies being burnt in ovens is itself a story stolen from their own ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948, when Israelis are said to have thrown a Palestinian boy in an oven. (See video testimony at 23:58 mins in: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bwy-Rf15UIs )
And mass systemic rape of Palestinian prisoners by Israeli forces has also occurred. Unlike Israeli claims of rape on Oct 7 for which there is not a single identified victim, nor any credible eyewitnesses, forensic evidence or firsthand testimony, there is an overwhelming amount of evidence of rape and sexual abuse of Palestinian prisoners by Israeli forces as documented by Israeli Human Rights organisation B’Tselem in their report titled Welcome to Hell.[41]
In one recent case, 10 Israeli soldiers were caught on CCTV gang raping a Palestinian prisoner, sodomizing him with metal objects that according to Israeli newspaper Haaretz caused “a ruptured bowel, a severe injury to his anus, lung damage and broken rib.”[42] The Times of Isreal reported that the doctor who treated the prisoner “confirmed that something round had been inserted deep into the detainee’s rectum.”[43] After the doctor blew the whistle – amid much criticism in Israeli society for doing so – the Israeli soldiers were arrested, leading to the so called “right to rape” riots[44] that broke out at Beit Lid military base where the soldiers were being held. Politicians and members of the public literally rallied in defense of the soldiers’ actions – defending their right to rape Palestinians – and invaded the detention facility to free the soldiers.
In the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, Hanoch Milwidsky a member of Netanyahu’s Likud party was asked of the rape: “To insert a stick in a person’s rectum, is that legitimate?”
“Shut up! Yes, if he’s Hamas militant everything is legitimate to do. Everything!” yelled Milwidsky.[45]
Israeli Energy Minister Eli Cohen also threw his support behind the soldiers, describing them as doing “holy work” and commenting that, “We should all embrace them and salute them, certainly not interrogate them and humiliate them.”[46]
And Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said of the soldiers: “Take your hands off our reservists, like it is in the prison service so it is in the IDF, our fighters deserve full support.”[47]
One of the rape suspects later appeared on Israeli television to defend his actions. And then, astonishingly, Israeli breakfast TV hosted a panel debate where pundits discussed whether sodomizing Palestinian prisoners was right or not. “Soldiers are suspected of raping a shackled prisoner, this doesn’t concern you?” one TV pundit asked another. “I don’t give a rat’s arse what they do to that Hamas man,” was the reply. “The only problem I see, is that it’s not state policy to abuse detainees. Firstly, they deserve it and it’s a great form of revenge; secondly, maybe it will act as a deterrent.”[48]
And there you have it. The normalisation of the unthinkable. Nestled in amongst the standard fare of lifestyle, human interest and entertainment stories, was a cozy Breakfast TV chitchat on if it’s okay to rape Palestinian prisoners or not. If that isn’t a sure sign of a profoundly sick society, then I don’t know what is. And it all stems from the same thing: not merely a belief that the blood of an Israeli is more valuable than that of a Palestinian, but that a Palestinian’s blood is practically worthless.
As British journalist Peter Oborne commented: “Imagine the reaction if this was emerging about Putin treating Ukrainian prisoners [in this way] you can imagine the frenzy of outrage. You don’t get it when it’s committed by our ally Israel and I think that shows that we have done the same as the Israelis, we cannot see Palestinians as human beings.”
The fake atrocity propaganda contrived by Israel, and disseminated by ‘presstitute’ Western media journalists, has utterly dehumanised Palestinian society to such an extent that crimes Hamas was falsely accused of are now openly perpetrated by Israel against Palestinians, and yet the response to their screams is tumbleweed and crickets from Western politicians and media.
The blood of Palestinians drips from their hands just as it does Netanyahu’s.
May God not have mercy upon their souls.
Babies. Babies. Babies.
Burned.
Beheaded.
Hanged from a line.
Raped you say? My God, what a crime.
Monsters. Animals. Savages. Beasts.
How do we stop them?
How will it cease?
By killing their babies, that’s the best way.
Where are they hiding? Where do they stay?
In Gaza. Let’s go, come follow me.
Let’s burn them.
Behead them.
Kill them all as they flee.
References:
1. www.democracynow.org/2018/12/5/how_false_testimony_and_a_massive
See also book Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the 1991 Gulf War, by John R Macarthur.
2. www.sbs.com.au/news/article/libya-rape-claims-hysteria/ng6kjxnsw
3. www.lbc.co.uk/news/kfar-azza-hamas-attack-babies-children/
See also:
www.cnn.com/middleeast/live-news/israel-hamas-war-gaza-10-11-23#h_a63b0fd57f2df717147ea8e26a2f758c
4. https://thegrayzone.com/2023/10/11/beheaded-israeli-babies-settler-wipe-out-palestinian/
5. Ibid
See also: www.inn.co.il/news/593660
6. https://x.com/HenMazzig/status/1711732906412884432
7. www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=pfbid0sKDib2foSXQ7burnK8mu1m7Pdi5fZVDVi3hLGGBjx47rgjbcvsZhBhGzhbVEDgeml&id=100000129321380
8. https://x.com/Nicole_Zedek/status/1711721433968111855?lang=en
9. https://x.com/Beltrew/status/1712023042560291083?lang=en
10. www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/israeli-army-says-it-does-not-have-confirmation-about-allegations-that-hamas-beheaded-babies-/3014787
11. https://x.com/sarasidnerCNN/status/1712415116363169884?lang=en
12. https://thegrayzone.com/2024/03/07/media-concocts-un-hamas-rape-report/
13. Ibid
14. www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-04-18/ty-article-magazine/witnesses-confessions-naked-dead-bodies-all-the-evidence-of-hamas-rape-on-oct-7/0000018e-f114-d92e-abfe-f77f7e3f0000
15. https://thegrayzone.com/2024/03/25/israeli-propagandist-hamas-grifter-fraud/
16. https://mondoweiss.net/2023/12/how-human-rights-organizations-are-aiding-the-israeli-assault-on-gaza/
17. www.ynet.co.il/news/article/skt8j03rt
18. https://x.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/1724688009293873502
19. https://thegrayzone.com/2024/03/07/media-concocts-un-hamas-rape-report/
20. https://x.com/ShaykhSulaiman/status/1742191943243764084?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1742191943243764084%7Ctwgr%5Eaf16932024db83dc75129738074648b128b2439c%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fthegrayzone.com%2F2024%2F01%2F10%2Fquestions-nyt-hamas-rape-report%2F
21. https://13tv.co.il/item/documentary/worth-a-story/usmj7-903873429/
22. https://theintercept.com/2024/02/28/new-york-times-anat-schwartz-october-7/
23. Ibid
24. Ibid
25. www.democracynow.org/2024/3/1/nyt_anat_schwartz
26. https://theintercept.com/2024/02/28/new-york-times-anat-schwartz-october-7/
27. https://x.com/jeremyscahill/status/1763164895317528715
28. https://x.com/muhammadshehad2/status/1729933220538429449?s=20
29. https://x.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/1719122032309293302
30. www.ajiunit.com/investigation/october-7/
31. https://thegrayzone.com/2023/12/06/scandal-israeli-october-7-fabrications/
32.www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-01-31/ty-article-magazine/.premium/death-and-donations-did-the-volunteer-group-handling-the-october-7-dead-exploit-its-role/0000018d-5a73-d997-adff-df7bdb670000
See also: https://theintercept.com/2024/02/27/zaka-october-7-israel-hamas-new-york-times/
33. https://mondoweiss.net/2023/12/zaka-is-not-a-trustworthy-source-for-allegations-of-sexual-violence-on-october-7/
See also: https://theintercept.com/2024/02/27/zaka-october-7-israel-hamas-new-york-times/
34. www.ajiunit.com/investigation/october-7/
35. Ibid
36.www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-07-07/ty-article-magazine/.premium/idf-ordered-hannibal-directive-on-october-7-to-prevent-hamas-taking-soldiers-captive/00000190-89a2-d776-a3b1-fdbe45520000?dicbo=v2-9qFZpWP&utm_source=traffic.outbrain.com&utm_medium=referrer&utm_campaign=outbrain_organic
37. www.ynet.co.il/news/article/b111niukzt
See also: www.abc.net.au/news/2024-09-07/israel-hannibal-directive-kidnap-hamas-gaza-hostages-idf/104224430
38. www.hrw.org/news/2023/11/14/lebanon-israeli-strike-apparent-war-crime
39. www.haaretz.co.il/news/politics/2023-10-20/ty-article-magazine/.premium/0000018b-499a-dc3c-a5df-ddbaab290000
See also:
https://thegrayzone.com/2023/10/27/israels-military-shelled-burning-tanks-helicopters/
40. www.un.org/unispal/document/coi-report-a-hrc-56-26-27may24/
41. www.btselem.org/publications/202408_welcome_to_hell
42.www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-07-30/ty-article/.premium/doctor-who-saw-abused-gazan-detainee-i-couldnt-believe-an-israeli-jailer-could-do-this/00000191-0436-df85-a399-ed36f4800000
43. www.timesofisrael.com/doctor-who-reported-abuse-of-palestinian-detainee-i-blamed-fellow-prisoners/
44. www.aljazeera.com/program/newsfeed/2024/8/13/israeli-protesters-rally-for-the-right-to-rape-prisoners
45. https://x.com/OborneTweets/status/1832109139864228323
See also: www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/8/9/everything-is-legitimate-israeli-leaders-defend-soldiers-accused-of-rape
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid.
48. Ibid.