Hamas Attack October 7, 2023 – Israel Involvement (also see Israel Lies About October 7th)
Updated 2024-02-27
See also Beheaded Children, Hamas Brutalized Women?
*2024-03-20 What REALLY Happened on October 7th? | Al Jazeera Filmmaker Richard Sanders Richard Sanders is an award winning journalist and film director with over 25 years experience. He was Senior Producer on Al Jazeera’s The Labour Files, and his latest film with Al Jazeera’s Investigation Unit, October 7, has just been released. Al Jazeera says, “the I-Unit reveals widespread human rights abuses by Hamas fighters and others who followed them through the fence from Gaza into Israel.”
But the investigations also finds that “many of the worst stories that came out in the days following the attack were false. This was especially true of atrocities that were used repeatedly by politicians in Israel and the West to justify the ferocity of the bombardment of the Gaza Strip, such as the mass killing of babies and allegations of widespread and systematic rape.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIqzVIbQBoQ
*2024-03-20 October 7th: The Whole Story Finally Revealed These two people seem to believe some Irael accounts while they acknowledge many of the serious stories are clearly faked. Why do they believe any of the Irael stories? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfzw-sBVP2E
*2024-03-20 October 7 | Al Jazeera Investigations Hamas’s incursion into Israel on October 7 transformed the politics of the Middle East. Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit (I-Unit) has carried out a forensic analysis of the events of that day – examining seven hours of footage from CCTV, dashcams, personal phones and headcams of dead Hamas fighters, and drawing up a comprehensive list of those killed. In October 7, the I-Unit reveals widespread human rights abuses by Hamas fighters and others who followed them through the fence from Gaza into Israel.
But the investigation also found that many of the worst stories that came out in the days following the attack were false. This was especially true of atrocities that were used repeatedly by politicians in Israel and the West to justify the ferocity of the bombardment of the Gaza Strip, such as the mass killing of babies and allegations of widespread and systematic rape. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0atzea-mPY
2024-03-18 Israel’s Right-Wing Wants All the Palestinian Land—and This Explains Its State Terrorism A November 22, 2023, article in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz headline reads, “Netanyahu Ignored All the Warnings and Looming Threats. He’s Primarily Responsible for the Calamity. Instead of dealing with the clear warnings he was given, the Israeli prime minister focused on crushing democracy, establishing his status as the supreme ruler and transferring resources to the ultra-Orthodox and the settlements
The article notes, “There’s no better proof of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s responsibility for the disaster suffered by Israel on October 7 than the letters of warning sent to him by the head of the Military Intelligence research division, Brig. Gen. Amit Saar, in March and July.”
The Israeli government’s “solution” to the Palestinian problem – eviction or destruction and colonization of what’s left of Palestinian land – did not begin after the October 7th Hamas raid. For many decades Israeli politicians have been working toward the goal of establishing what they call “Eretz Israel” or “The Greater Land of Israel” – a greater Israel composed of all of the Palestine mandate “from the Sea to the River Jordan” (their words). After the partition of Palestine under UN auspices in 1948, Israel has expanded its territory, by military and non-military means, and now comprises 78% of what was once Palestine, plus Syria’s Golan Heights. https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/israel-state-terrorism-gaza
2024-03-16 New revelations on Israel’s killing of its own citizens on 7 October | Ali Abunimah & Asa Winstanley Nora Barrows-Friedman, Asa Winstanley, Ali Abunimah and Jon Elmer of The Electronic Intifada were joined by Walaa Sabah, a journalist from Gaza now based in the UK; Huda Ammori, an activist with Palestine Action, on the day 159 livestream. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWx8QbLI5vA
2024-02-27 REVEALED: NYT Writer Outed As IDF PROPAGANDIST Krystal and Saagar discuss a NYT writer on a debunked Oct 7th article being outed as an IDF propagandist. Stories about beheaded babies and rapes were propaganda lies by IDF fake reporters promoted by NY Times. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WMgoEwTbjY
2024-02-26 Examining Israeli Allegations of Atrocities by Resistance in Operation al-Aqsa Flood Israeli allegations against Palestinian resistance forces and GS residents involved in Operation al-Aqsa Flood on 7/10/2023, were diverse. These claims, orchestrated by organized entities within Israel’s government, aimed to justify its assault on GS and globally vilify Palestinian resistance, despite lacking validity.
Israel disseminated false and fabricated information through sympathetic journalists, accounts and websites to garner global public opinion support for its GS war. This article will address some of these allegations and present evidence to debunk them.
Israeli forces’ use of brutal methods in killing people at the time, to the extent that they did not distinguish between Jewish and Palestinian casualties in their tallies due to body charring. This proves that Israeli airstrikes and artillery shelling killed “civilian” Israelis, as the Qassam Brigades do not possess weapons capable of killing and burning such numbers. As it seems, the majority of civilians killed on that day can be attributed to the implementation of the Israeli military leadership’s Hannibal Directive. This directive operates on the principle of “a dead soldier is better than a kidnapped one,” believing that the abduction of soldiers imposes an exceedingly high cost on Israel, which it must pay to secure their release.
An investigative report published on Ynet website, on 12/1/2024 revealed that the Israeli military high command ordered all units on 7/10/2023 to prevent the abduction of Israeli citizens “at all costs,” “even if this means risking or harming the lives of civilians in the area, including the abductees themselves.” The report disclosed that about 70 vehicles driven by Palestinians returning to GS “were shot by a combat helicopter, an anti-tank missile or a tank,” many of which contained Israeli captives.
The New York Times newspaper extensively detailed, in an investigative report, the deaths of 12 Israeli settlers, when Brig. Gen. Barak Hiram, overseeing the Israeli operations aimed at reclaiming the Be’eri settlement and its vicinity, instructed the tank commander, “Break in, even if it means civilian casualties,” thus urging Israeli forces to overpower the Palestinian militants who held 14 captives in one of the houses. Israeli Channel 12 broadcasted footage captured by a military helicopter showing an Israeli tank firing at a civilian house in the Be’eri settlement.
Furthermore, at the site of one of the clashes on October 7 at Kibbutz Kfar Aza, Col. Golan Vach, the commander of an Israeli search and rescue team, told the press that in one destroyed house, they discovered 15 people dead, including 8 infants, but also admitted, “The destruction is a result of the attack by our tanks. Since these houses were seized by Hamas, we had to reclaim the entire settlement. It wouldn’t have been possible without tanks.” Additionally, during a Channel 12 interview on 24/11/2023, young, inexperienced female tank operators, aged around 20 years old, who were directed to enter the Holit settlement, confessed that they were instructed to fire regardless of the circumstances.
Multiple survivors have provided accounts confirming the sighting of Israeli helicopters and tanks firing at the settlements. These include the testimony of Erez Tidhar, a military veteran who was on October 7 as a rescue and evacuation volunteer for the Eitam unit, as well as the statement of a former Israeli captive Doron Katz-Asher, released during an exchange operation. Katz-Asher recounted the Israeli army’s firing at the tractor transporting her to GS, killing her mother and leaving her and her daughter wounded.
Yasmin Porat, one of only two survivors of the Israeli attack on a house in the Be’eri settlement testified to Israeli State Radio Kan that Palestinian resistance members treated them “very humanely.” However, the Israeli army, ordered by Barak Hiram, ended the confrontation by deliberately shelling the entire house, despite the captives still being inside. Porat reported that among the casualties was 12-year-old Liel Hatsroni, whose image Israeli officials later used in propaganda, falsely claiming that she was burned alive by Hamas. Former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett also alleged that “She was murdered just because she’s Jewish.”
Reports by The Electronic Intifada website confirm that a significant number of Israeli civilians killed on 7/10/2023 were victims of Israeli attacks rather than Palestinian actions. By the end of that day, Israeli drone squadron 161 alone “performed no fewer than 110 attacks on some 1,000 targets, most of which were inside Israel,” following an initial assault, in the first four hours, in which “helicopters and fighter craft attacked about 300 targets, most in Israeli territory.”
On 15/10/2023, Ynet reported that “28 combat helicopters fired over the course of a day,” with Apache pilots skipping “all the restrictions.” “A large part of the fire direction and receiving the targets from the forces fighting in the field reached the pilots through phone calls or sending pictures on WhatsApp,” leading to the launch of hundreds of 30mm cannon shells as well as Hellfire missiles.
In an article published by Haaretz newspaper on 18/11/2023, and according to Israeli police, 364 people were killed at the Nova festival out of 4,400 were present at the event. The investigation revealed that an Israeli combat helicopter arrived at the scene and fired at resistance forces, also hitting some of the revelers who were there. The Israeli security establishment assessed that Palestinian resistance forces did not know in advance about the festival. https://www.globalresearch.ca/examining-israeli-allegations-atrocities-resistance-operation-al-aqsa-flood/5850689
2024-02-04 ZAKA’s World – How an Israeli Organization Used October 7 to Tell Lies and Make Money Composed mainly of volunteers, ZAKA is a non-governmental ultra-Orthodox organization “with sole responsibility in Israel for dealing with incidents of unnatural death,” according to its website. Its task is to collect bodies and body parts, including blood, so that it can be buried in accordance with Jewish religious law. An investigation by the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, however, has raised several questions about procedures during the retrieval of the bodies.
The paper says “it is based on the accounts of military personnel present at the body retrievals and the Shura military base (which was made a body identification center), as well as volunteers from ZAKA and other rescue organizations who worked in the broader communities.” It raised concerns that “in the first and critical days after October 7”, the Israeli military decided to forgo the deployment of hundreds of soldiers specifically trained in the identification and collection of human remains in mass casualty incidents. “Instead, the Home Front Command chose to use ZAKA, a private organization, alongside soldiers in the Military Rabbinate’s search unit” for the south, the paper said.
In the meantime, Haaretz says ZAKA volunteers worked at the sites from morning to night. However, “as part of the effort to get media exposure, ZAKA spread accounts of atrocities that never happened, released sensitive and graphic photos, and acted unprofessionally on the ground,” the report states. On November 23, 2023, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly met with the organization’s teams. He is reported as having said “You have an important role in influencing public opinion, which also influences leaders. We are in a war; it will continue. The war is not only to take care of the 1,400 people…but also to give us the maneuvering room.” In December 2022, Haaretz reported that ZAKA had inflated its stated number of volunteers for years in order to receive more funding. Haaretz reports that before October 7, the organization faced insolvency. “In the time since, says a source at ZAKA, they have raised over 50 million shekels ($13.7 million),” the report adds.
In what the Haaretz article subtitles ‘Tales of Imagination’, it reports that a ZAKA volunteer “tearfully” recounted on social media that “We saw a woman, around 30 years old, (and) she was lying on the floor in a large puddle of blood, facing the ground.” The volunteer continued, “We turned her over in order to place her into the bag.” “She was pregnant …Her stomach was swollen, and the baby was still attached by the umbilical cord when it was stabbed, and she was shot in the back of the head. I don’t know if she suffered and saw her baby murdered or not.” The incident, which the volunteer alleged occurred in Be’eri, “simply didn’t happen, and was one of several stories that have been circulated without any basis.” “There is no evidence for this incident, and no one in the kibbutz has heard of this woman. A ZAKA senior official admitted in a conversation with Haaretz that the organization knows the incident didn’t occur,” the Haaretz report states.
The article goes on to say that in another video, the same volunteer weepingly describes “how he found the burnt and mutilated bodies of 20 children in one of the kibbutzim.” He told Haaretz that this was behind the dining hall in Kfar Azza, while in another instance, he said it was in Be’eri. However, reports Haaretz, two adolescents, aged 14 and 16, were killed in Kfar Azza. Ten children were killed in Be’eri, but at least some were known to have been with a parent and were killed in their homes, the report adds. Haaretz reports that the organization “has been accused of spreading false information before.”
“Not only do these men lack the professional qualifications to make such assessments (they are not medical experts), but their testimonies also lack details: no age, no location, and no time,” Mondoweiss stressed. The report continues that “Details and/or evidence have not even been given to journalists who have asked to see them while reporting on these testimonies. This means that it is impossible to either confirm or debunk them.” https://fgww.palestinechronicle.com/zakas-world-how-an-israeli-organization-used-october-7-to-tell-lies-and-make-money/
2024-01-17 Briahna Joy Gray: Is Israel KILLING HOSTAGES? Inside the IDF’s Reported Oct 7 ‘Hannibal Directive’ (IDF Oct 7 attack 1:45 &5:45) Briahna Joy Gray delivers a radar surrounding media coverage of the Israel-Hamas War. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziC95CJ8lU0
2023-12-23 Man whose parents were killed on Oct. 7 calls for peace in Gaza [MEK Note: Maoz may not realize it now, but his family and home were deliberately hit by Israeli tank fire under Israeli’s Hannibal Policy]
As the war between Israel and Hamas rages, the word “peace” may feel like an unreachable goal. For Maoz Inon, it’s the only thing to hope for. Inon’s mother and father were both murdered by Hamas militants on Oct. 7, along with hundreds of other Israelis. His mother, Bilha, was 76, and his father, Yacovi, was 78. Both were still “in the prime of their life,” Inon said, practicing Pilates and yoga and participating in their kibbutz.
But on Oct. 7, their home was burned to ashes. Security officers said two bodies were found inside. After receiving the news, Inon entered a seven-day period of mourning in the Jewish tradition of sitting shiva. After that, though, Inon says he “woke up.” https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/man-whose-parents-were-killed-on-oct-7-calls-for-peace-in-gaza/ar-AA1lWGzU
2023-12-15 Why is the media ignoring evidence of Israel’s own actions on 7 October? Barely a day has passed since the 7 October attack by Hamas when the western media has not revisited those events, often to reveal what it claims are new details of astonishing atrocities carried out by the Palestinian group. These disclosures have served to sustain public indignation in the West and kept Palestinian solidarity activists on the back foot. In turn, the outrage has smoothed Israel’s path as it has levelled vast swaths of Gaza; killed more than 18,700 Palestinians, most of them women and children; and denied the enclave’s population of 2.3 million access to food, water and fuel. Critically, it has also made it far easier for western governments to throw their weight behind Israel – and arm it – even as Israeli leaders have repeatedly engaged in genocidal talk and carried out ethnic cleansing operations.
Many of the claims about 7 October have been shocking beyond belief, such as stories that Hamas beheaded 40 babies, baked another in an oven, carried out mass, systematic rapes, and cut a fetus from its mother’s womb. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken even described in graphic detail – and wholly falsely – a Hamas attack on an Israeli family: “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.”
Efforts by the United Nations to investigate these claims are being obstructed by Israel. Nonetheless, once more, coverage of the growing devastation in Gaza was sidelined. Media readiness to re-examine 7 October long after those events took place has operated within strict limits, however. Only claims that support Israel’s narrative about what happened that day are being aired. A growing body of evidence suggesting a far more complex reality, one that paints Israel’s own actions in a far more troubling light, is being ignored or suppressed.
Unknown to most western audiences, there has been a steady trickle of evidence from Israeli sources over the past two months implicating Israel’s own military in at least some of the killings attributed to Hamas. This week the Israeli military finally conceded that it had killed Israelis on October 7 in incidents of an “immense and complex quantity”. Given this, it added with transparent non-logic: “It would not be morally sound to investigate these incidents.” How is it possible, given their continuing interest in scrutinizing the events of 7 October, that none of the western media has picked up on any of this distressing evidence, let alone investigated it?
Israel’s official story, echoed by the western media, is that Hamas had long planned a crazed, barbaric rampage through communities in Israel – driven by a mix of primitive, religious bloodlust and Jew hatred. The group’s chance to realize this goal came on 7 October, according to the Israeli narrative, when Israel let down its guard momentarily and Hamas broke through the hi-tech fence meant to keep it and Gaza’s other 2.3 million inhabitants permanently imprisoned.
Admittedly, the claim about 40 beheaded babies has been quietly shelved, because there is precisely zero evidence for it. According to Israel’s own published figures, only two infants died that day. Nonetheless, the media rarely challenge Israeli spokespeople, or western politicians, when they make this long-discredited allegation. But many of these other allegations are no less evidence-free and need scrutiny too. Although they are rarely given a voice, Palestinians have their own, alternative narrative of what happened that day – and parts of it are being bolstered by accounts from Israeli sources. (See Part 2 below) https://jonathancook.substack.com/p/why-is-the-media-ignoring-evidence
2023-12-15 Why is the media ignoring evidence of Israel’s own actions on 7 October? (Part 2) Although they are rarely given a voice, Palestinians have their own, alternative narrative of what happened that day – and parts of it are being bolstered by accounts from Israeli sources.
Challenge to official story
In this telling, Hamas long trained for its breakout, and with a strategic aim in mind. The goal was to launch a commando-style assault on four military bases surrounding Gaza to kill or take hostage as many Israeli soldiers as possible, and a similar assault on local Israeli communities to seize civilian hostages. The aim, according to this narrative, was to trade the hostages for Palestinian prisoners, thousands of whom are in Israeli jails, including women and children, often held without a military trial or even charges. To the Palestinian public, these prisoners are no less hostages than the Israelis held in Gaza.
Hamas stormed military bases and the Israeli communities of Be’eri and Kfar Azza. That is why about a third of the 1,200 Israelis killed that day were soldiers, police or armed guards – and why many of the 240 hostages were serving in the Israeli military too. According to most accounts, even Israeli ones, Hamas accidentally stumbled on to the Nova music festival, which had been relocated to an area close to the fence with Gaza. There were unexpected clashes with security guards, while the attack on festivalgoers turned especially chaotic and gruesome.
[MEK Note: Who relocated the festival to its location near the Gaza border? Who had the Friday Music Festival extended overnight into Saturday that led to the deaths of hundreds? Who sent many of the IDF solders on the Gaza border to the West Bank that fateful day despite the festival?]
So why did Hamas depart from its plan by killing so many civilians? And why did it do so in such a savage, gratuitous and time-consuming fashion that involved burning Israelis alive, using its firepower to blast their homes into ruins, and setting fire to hundreds of cars on the highway near the music festival? What did Hamas have to gain from expending so much energy and ammunition on horror-show theatrics rather than its plan to seize hostages?
But for those whose minds are less bent by racist assumptions, an alternative picture of events has been steadily cohering, prompted by the testimonies of Israeli survivors and officials, as well as reporting from the Israeli media. Much of the evidence has been collected by the independent journalist Max Blumenthal and the Electronic Intifada website. Because they contradict Israel’s official story, these testimonies have been studiously ignored by the western media.
In an interview on MSNBC on 16 November, Regev noted that Israel had reduced the official death toll by 200 after its investigations had shown that the charred remains it had counted included not just Israelis but Hamas fighters too. The fighters, burned alive, had been too disfigured to easily identify. Regev told MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan: “There were actually bodies that were so badly burned we thought they were ours. In the end, apparently, they were Hamas terrorists.” There was an obvious problem with Regev’s disclosure that went unchallenged by the MSNBC interviewer, and has been ignored by the media since. How did so many Hamas fighters end up burned – and in exactly the same locations as Israelis, meaning their remains could not be identified separately for many weeks? There is a likely explanation, confirmed by an Israeli survivor of the 7 October events, as well as by a security guard, and a variety of military personnel. But these accounts starkly undermine the official narrative.
Yasmin Porat, who fled the Nova festival and ended up hiding in Be’eri, was one of the few to survive that day. Her partner, Tal Katz, was killed. Hamas fighters in Be’eri barricaded themselves into a house with a group of a dozen or so Israeli hostages . The Israeli military, however, was in no mood for bargaining. Porat escaped only because one of the Hamas fighters vacated the house early on, using her as a human shield, before giving himself up. Porat describes Israeli soldiers engaging in a four-hour firefight with the Hamas gunmen, despite the presence of Israeli civilians. But not all of the hostages were killed in the crossfire. Israel ended the clash with an Israeli tank firing two shells into the house. The only other survivor, Hadas Dagan, who was lying face down on the lawn in front of the house during the firefight, reported to Porat what happened after the two shells hit the house. Dagan saw both of their partners lying near her, killed by shrapnel from the explosions. A 12-year-old girl, Liel Hatsroni, who had been screaming inside the house throughout the firefight, also fell silent. Notably, Liel Hatsroni’s charred remains have been one of the emotive pieces of evidence cited by Israel for accusing Hamas of killing and burning Israelis. Israeli news website Ynet stated that Hamas fighters “murdered them all. Afterwards, they set the house alight”.
The security coordinator at Be’eri, Tuval Escapa, effectively confirmed Porat’s account to the Haaretz newspaper. He said: “Commanders in the field made difficult decisions – including shelling houses on their occupants in order to eliminate the terrorists along with the hostages.”
The burnt-out cars at the Nova festival and their occupants appear to have suffered a similar fate. Worried that Hamas gunmen were fleeing the area with hostages in cars, it seems, helicopter pilots were told to open fire, incinerating the cars and all the occupants. Haaretz has reported that police investigators concluded that “an IDF combat helicopter that arrived at the scene and fired at terrorists there apparently also hit some festival participants”. In a video released by the Israeli military, Apache helicopters are shown randomly firing missiles at cars leaving the area, presumably on the assumption that they contained Hamas fighters trying to smuggle hostages back into Gaza.
The Ynet news website cited an Israeli air force assessment of its two dozen attack helicopters in the skies above the Nova festival: “It was very difficult to distinguish between terrorists and [Israeli] soldiers or civilians.” Nonetheless, pilots were instructed “to shoot at everything they see in the area of the fence” with Gaza. “Only at a certain point did the pilots begin to slow their attacks and carefully choose the targets,” the outlet reported. Another Israeli publication, Mako, noted that “there was almost no intelligence to assist in making fateful decisions”, adding that the pilots “emptied the ‘belly of the helicopter’ in minutes, flew to re-arm and returned to the air, again and again”.
What seems certain from this growing body of evidence – and from the trail of visual clues – is that on 7 October many Israeli civilians were killed either in the crossfire of gun battles between Israel and Hamas or by Israeli military directives to stop Hamas fighters returning to Gaza and taking hostages with them. Remember, Israel and its supporters have sought to compare the Hamas attack on 7 October with the Nazi Holocaust. They have concocted grotesque fables to present Palestinians as bloodthirsty savages deserving of any fate that befalls them. And those fables have served as the basis for western indulgence and sympathy for Israel as it has carried out ethnic cleansing and genocide in Gaza. https://jonathancook.substack.com/p/why-is-the-media-ignoring-evidence
2023-12-05 We blew up Israeli houses on 7 October, says Israeli colonel An air force colonel has said that Israeli airstrikes may have intentionally killed Israeli captives rather than let them be taken to Gaza. Speaking in Hebrew about the airstrikes, Colonel Nof Erez told a Haaretz podcast in November, that “the Hannibal Directive was apparently applied” and that 7 October “was a mass Hannibal.”
After weeks of claiming that 1,400 “civilians” were killed that day, Israel last month revised its death toll down to about 900 civilians plus around 300 soldiers and police. An official Israeli account posting to X (formerly Twitter) on Saturday appeared to lower the death toll even further to “over 1,000.”
Its aim was to stop resistance fighters from capturing Israelis who could be used to negotiate prisoner swaps. In 2011, Israel released 1,027 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for a single captured soldier who had been held in Gaza for five years.
Colonel Erez’s interview with Haaretz painted a picture of a chaotically indiscriminate Israeli response to the Palestinian military assault on 7 October. Erez told the podcast there had been “tons of openings in the fence” with Gaza and that “thousands of people in every type of vehicle, some with hostages and some without” were moving back and forth between Gaza and the Israeli settlements and that “it was an impossible mission” for the aircrews to distinguish between Palestinian fighters and Israeli detainees.
Asked by Haaretz interviewer Lior Kodner about “rumors that the army exploded all kinds of houses inside the settlements” and about the Hannibal Directive, Erez confirmed that the air force did indeed “explode houses” but insisted they never did so “without permission.”
But the Palestinian military assault that morning was so successful that it may have been impossible to obtain permission from senior officers. Dozens of Israeli army bases and outposts were completely overrun by Hamas and other armed factions on 7 October. They deliberately targeted the Israeli army’s communications infrastructure across the whole region. Israel’s regional military command and control was rapidly eliminated. “There was no division command” left at that stage, Erez confirmed. It had been destroyed almost immediately by the Palestinian resistance assault that began at 6:30 am. There was no command and control left in the region until later in the day, he said. https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/asa-winstanley/we-blew-israeli-houses-7-october-says-israeli-colonel
2023-11-27 Israeli tank gunner reveals orders to fire indiscriminately into kibbutz — report New disclosures add to the growing body of evidence indicating many Israelis who died on October 7 were killed by the Israeli military. Meanwhile, the Israeli government has muzzled captives freed from Gaza to prevent further damage to the official narrative.
Firsthand testimony by admittedly inexperienced Israeli tank operators reveals orders to open fire upon Israeli communities when Palestinian militants breached the fences encircling Gaza on October 7. A glowing profile of an all-female tank company by Israel’s N12 News network contains admissions by the 20-year-old captain — identified only as ‘Karni’ — that she was ordered by a “panicked” soldier to open fire on homes in the Holit kibbutz whether they contained civilians or not. Ten Israelis were killed in Holit on October 7; no children were among the dead. https://thegrayzone.com/2023/11/27/israeli-tank-orders-fire-kibbutz/
2023-11-25 Israeli teen ”burned completely” by Israeli tank fire at kibbutz https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjC0_swYbT4
2023-11-25 Israeli October 7 posterchild was killed by Israeli tank, eyewitnesses reveal Eyewitnesses to the October 7 hostage standoff in Kibbutz Be’eri have exposed Israel for misleading the world about the killings of 12-year-old Liel Hetzroni, her family and her neighbors.
In a desperate bid for international sympathy, the Israeli government has sought to stir outrage over the killing of a 12-year-old girl during the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on October 7. “This little girl’s body was burned so badly that it took forensic archeologists more than six weeks to identify her,” the Israeli Foreign Ministry declared on its official Twitter/X account. “All that remains of 12 year old Liel Hetzroni is ash and bone fragments. May her memory be a blessing.”
Liel Hetzroni was among the noncombatants killed in Kibbutz Be’eri when the small southern Israeli community was momentarily taken over by Hamas militants seeking captives to spur a prisoner exchange. During the standoff that ensued, she was killed instantly alongside twin brother, great-aunt and several other residents of Be’eri.
However, the 12-year-old Hetzroni was not slain by Hamas. According to new testimony by an Israeli eyewitness to the girl’s death, she was killed by an Israeli tank shell alongside several neighbors.
The revelation of Hetzroni’s friendly fire death came as reporting by the Israeli paper Haaretz confirmed a viral Grayzone investigation which highlighted disclosures by Israeli helicopter pilots and security officials of friendly fire orders throughout the fateful day. https://thegrayzone.com/2023/11/25/israels-october-7-propaganda-tank-eyewitnesses/
2023-11-19 Israeli helicopter shot civilians at 7 October rave, police find The site of the Supernova rave near Kibbutz Re’im. An Israeli police investigation has acknowledged that an undisclosed number of the 364 civilians Israeli authorities say died there on 7 October were shot by an Israeli combat helicopter. Ziv KorenPolaris
An Israeli military helicopter shot civilians at the Supernova rave where Israel says 364 people were killed on 7 October. Israeli investigators have concluded that Hamas fighters who crossed the boundary from Gaza that day had no prior knowledge of the music festival held near Kibbutz Re’im, an Israeli colonial settlement a few kilometers east of Gaza, the Tel Aviv newspaper Haaretz reported on Saturday. “According to a police source, the investigation also shows that an IDF combat helicopter that arrived to the scene and fired at terrorists there apparently also hit some festival participants,” Haaretz states. It does not indicate how many of the festival goers were killed or injured by the helicopter.
The police investigation reported by Haaretz appears to be the first direct Israeli official acknowledgment that Israeli forces killed some of their own civilians on and after 7 October. But in recent weeks evidence has been mounting that this is exactly what happened.
There is the key testimony of Yasmin Porat, an Israeli woman who survived a massacre by Israeli forces at Kibbutz Be’eri. According to her account, many Israeli civilians were killed when Israeli forces opened fire with heavy weapons including tank shells at the small kibbutz house they were held by Palestinian fighters. Up to that point, Porat told Israel’s official broadcaster Kan, the Palestinian fighters had treated the Israeli civilians “humanely.”
And the Israeli air force has admitted that it sent up more than two dozen attack helicopters which fired huge amounts of heavy cannon shells and American-made Hellfire missiles on 7 October, even though in many cases the pilots could not tell Palestinians apart from Israeli civilians. “The frequency of fire at the thousands of terrorists was enormous at the start, and only at a certain point did the pilots begin to slow their attacks and carefully choose the targets,” Israel’s Ynet reported last month, citing an Israeli air force investigation. “Shoot at everything,” one squadron leader reportedly told his men.
Video released by the Israeli military shows helicopters targeting what appear to be civilian cars haphazardly – although at the time the video was released the army claimed it showed its aircraft shooting at “terrorists.” And on Thursday, Israeli government spokesperson Mark Regev admitted – perhaps unintentionally – in an MSNBC interview that on 7 October Israeli forces burned to death hundreds of people in indiscriminate fire that did not distinguish Palestinian fighters from Israeli civilians.
Israel has never explained how Palestinian fighters armed only with light weapons could have caused the massive devastation seen in some settlements where houses were reduced to rubble, or burned hundreds of people to death beyond recognition. These are, however, capabilities possessed and used by the Israeli forces who responded to the Hamas assault. Ever since 7 October, there has been a growing body of evidence that a significant number of Israelis were killed by their own forces, both from the ground and the air. Hamas has not denied that Israeli civilians were killed on 7 October, but it has denied that its fighters set out to kill civilians. Determining who was responsible for the deaths would require a thorough, independent investigation which neither Israel’s international backers, nor the United Nations, has called for. https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/israeli-helicopter-shot-civilians-7-october-rave-police-find
2023-11-19 Israel admits it killed its own at Nova music festival A police investigation shows Israeli Apache helicopters opened fire on attendees of the Nova music festival during the 7 October Hamas attack. According to a police source, an investigation into the incident showed that an Israeli combat helicopter that arrived at the scene from the Ramat David base fired at Hamas fighters and other Palestinians who crossed through the border fence from Gaza into Israel, but also fired on some of the Israelis attending the music festival. According to the police, 364 people were killed there.
The Israeli military and rescue services previously claimed that 260 Israelis were killed at the festival, all by Hamas and Palestinians in a deliberate massacre. But this is the first acknowledgement that Israeli forces killed some of their own.
Previous reports in Israeli media revealed that Israeli forces killed Israeli civilians in Be’eri, a settlement also near the Gaza border. In that case, Hamas fighters were holding Israelis captive in homes. When the Israeli military arrived, it opened fire, including by firing tank shells, killing both Israeli captives and Hamas fighters.
Three of those killed in Be’eri by Israeli tank fire were 12-year-old Liel Hezroni, her brother Yanai, and their aunt Ayla. Israeli broadcaster Kan reported that Liel’s relatives held a farewell ceremony for her, rather than a burial ceremony, because her body could not be recovered from the house that collapsed on her and other Hamas captives after an Israeli tank fired two shells into it.
A similar instance occurred in Sderot, where Hamas fighters had taken over the local police station. Both the Hamas fighters and prisoners were killed when the Israeli army fired tank shells at the police station, killing everyone. Israeli forces then bulldozed the station.
It is therefore unclear how many of the Israelis who died on 7 October were killed by Hamas, whose fighters were seeking to take as many Israelis, both soldiers and civilians, captive back to Gaza as possible, and how many were killed by Israeli forces refusing to negotiate for the captives’ release. https://thecradle.co/articles-id/13111?
2023-11-19 IDF lookouts said they saw unusual activity along the Gaza border before the October 7 attack, but their commanders told them to stop bothering them, report says IDF lookouts expressed concern about activity along the Gaza boarder long before the October 7 terrorist attacks, according to reports. The lookouts were telling their commanders they were witnessing unusual activity along the border for months, but they were ignored, told to stop bothering them, and even threatened, The Jerusalem Post reported via Israeli news station N12. Some of the activity the lookouts witnessed included unusual training protocols and more people lingering near the fence, per the outlet. https://www.businessinsider.com/idf-lookouts-warned-commanders-about-hamas-threatened-with-court-martial-2023-11
2023-11-17 What really happened in Israel on Oct. 7? w/Max Blumenthal | The Chris Hedges Report For all the sensationalism surrounding the events of Oct. 7, when Hamas broke through the Gaza fence and seized territory in the Gaza Envelope as part of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, there is still much that we do not know. The official Israeli death toll from the attack is estimated at 1,200 civilians, revised from an initial estimate of 1,400. Among this figure are several hundred civilians, which Israel says were killed by Hamas militants. Other testimony from survivors of Oct. 7 suggests an alternative explanation—that in its fervor to defeat Hamas, Israeli commanders may have willingly targeted and sacrificed Israeli soldiers and civilians in the crossfire. Max Blumenthal of The Grayzone joins The Chris Hedges Report for an in-depth look. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0gECjlpXF8&t=398s
2023-10-27 October 7 testimonies reveal Israel’s military ‘shelling’ Israeli citizens with tanks, missiles Israel’s military received orders to shell Israeli homes and even their own bases as they were overwhelmed by Hamas militants on October 7. How many Israeli citizens said to have been “burned alive” were actually killed by friendly fire? Several new testimonies by Israeli witnesses to the October 7 Hamas surprise attack on southern Israel adds to growing evidence that the Israeli military killed its own citizens as they fought to neutralize Palestinian gunmen.
Tuval Escapa, a member of the security team for Kibbutz Be’eri, set up a hotline to coordinate between kibbutz residents and the Israeli army. He told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that as desperation began to set in, “the commanders in the field made difficult decisions – including shelling houses on their occupants in order to eliminate the terrorists along with the hostages.”
A separate report published in Haaretz noted that the Israeli military was “compelled to request an aerial strike” against its own facility inside the Erez Crossing to Gaza “in order to repulse the terrorists” who had seized control. That base was filled with Israeli Civil Administration officers and soldiers at the time.
An Israeli woman named Yasmin Porat confirmed in an interview with Israel Radio that the military “undoubtedly” killed numerous Israeli noncombatants during gun battles with Hamas militants on October 7. “They eliminated everyone, including the hostages,” she stated, referring to Israeli special forces.
These reports indicate that orders came down from the military’s high command to attack homes and other areas inside Israel, even at the cost of many Israeli lives. https://thegrayzone.com/2023/10/27/israels-military-shelled-burning-tanks-helicopters/
2023-10-12 Biden lied about seeing photos of beheaded Israeli children The White House confirmed on Wednesday evening that President Joe Biden’s claim that he had seen photos of Israeli children beheaded by Hamas fighters is false. “I’ve been doing this a long time. I never really thought that I would see, have confirmed pictures of terrorists beheading children,” Biden said to leaders of US Jewish organizations at the White House on Wednesday evening. The president was echoing lurid claims by the Israeli government that women and children had been beheaded by Hamas fighters who took over an Israeli settlement across the boundary from Gaza in recent days. But the administration quickly backtracked on the president’s seeming confirmation of a story Israel has been using to justify its ongoing mass slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza. “A White House spokesperson later clarified that US officials and the president have not seen pictures or confirmed such reports independently,” The Washington Post reported. “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.” https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/biden-lied-about-seeing-photos-beheaded-israeli-children, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/12/white-house-walks-back-bidens-claim-he-saw-children-beheaded-by-hamas
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