By Robert Inlakesh
The Al-Aqsa Flood Operation on October. (Photo: video grab, via Israeli army)
One may ask why Israel, along with its paid agents in the corporate media and Western governments, continues to mention debunked October 7 hoaxes when discussing the war in Gaza.
It has now been two years since the Gaza genocide, during which Israel is estimated to have wiped out anywhere between 67,000 and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. Despite the world watching this live-streamed genocide, day in and day out, Gaza Holocaust Deniers and sympathizers continue to hide behind ‘October 7’ propaganda to justify the slaughter.
From beheaded babies to a systematic mass rape campaign and everything in between, the lies espoused by genocide apologists have been numerous. What is even more shameless is that new lies continue to be created, seemingly every few months.
It must be understood that anyone peddling atrocity propaganda, regarding what happened on October 7, 2023, is working to provide justifications for committing genocide and ethnic cleansing against the people of Gaza. In fact, the October 7 hoaxes are themselves inherently racist and play on orientalist myths about Arabs, similar to how indigenous peoples in North America, Australia, and elsewhere were portrayed as “savages” to justify their displacement and erasure.
Beheaded Babies
On October 10, 2024, an Israeli reporter for I24 News, Nicole Zedek, reported live from Kibbutz Kafr Azza that soldiers informed her of 40 beheaded babies. It wasn’t long until major broadcast media outlets and newspapers were running headlines about the alleged “40 beheaded babies”. In the United Kingdom, many major national newspapers even published the claim on their front page, with frightening messaging.
Fox News went on to promote the story, as CNN even claimed live on air to have “confirmed” the story, before walking it back. British media outlets like The Times, Metro, Daily Express, The Scotsman, the Financial Times, and many others, also presented it as fact.
As it turned out, there were never “40 beheaded babies”, in fact, not a single Israeli baby was beheaded by any Palestinian. The Grayzone had at the time tracked this claim back to the soldier who informed I24 News of the story, naming the originator of the hoax as David Ben-Zion, a fanatical illegal settlement movement leader.
The Western corporate media were up in arms about beheaded Israeli babies, yet countless Palestinian babies have since been beheaded in Gaza, none of them making it into the headlines. No emotional diatribes on broadcast media, tears from presenters, or even dramatic moments of confirmation, their names didn’t even get a mention.
Since the hoax was debunked, this has been perhaps the most taboo propaganda claim to repeat, yet that hasn’t stopped other lies about babies being spread by Western politicians, TV show hosts, and Israelis themselves.
These lies were spread by Israeli soldiers and rescue teams like the infamous ZAKA organization, including claims about babies being strung up on clothing lines, baked in ovens and burned alive, even that a fetus was cut out of a woman’s womb. Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu also repeated the lie that Hamas “burned babies alive” during his July 2024 address to Congress, where he received a record number of standing ovations from an audience of AIPAC-paid politicians.
In reality, only one Israeli baby was killed on October 7, amidst Hamas-Israeli crossfire. Although this is now a well-established fact, countless lies about the deaths of babies are still being spread every day. Take, for example, the Democratic Party’s former Presidential candidate, Pete Buttigieg, who recently claimed that Hamas had put babies in ovens, a claim that went unchallenged when he made it.
Kill The Savages
One may ask why Israel, along with its paid agents in the corporate media and Western governments, continues to mention debunked October 7 hoaxes when discussing the war in Gaza. This is because the truth of what actually happened that day reflects a totally different event than the one that Israel needed to invent to justify their ongoing genocide.
Make no mistake, October 7 did indeed leave an irreparable scar on Israel and did represent an enormous blow in every sense of the word. Yet, the Israelis couldn’t simply tell the truth about what happened that day, because if they were ever to be honest about it, they would no longer have even the slightest justification for what they are doing today.
See, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has publicly labeled the people of Gaza as Amalekites; in other words, he views them as a group of people that must be exterminated down to the last living child. In order for the world to accept this position, it requires a different kind of approach than the one taken with Netanyahu’s domestic audience, who already saw the Palestinians as “human animals”.
This is where the hoaxes and enormous exaggerations come in. In the minds of Israeli leaders, they seek to convince people of their racist views; therefore, October 7 has to be transformed into a mythical event that barely even resembles reality.
In order to effectively pull off such a strategy, Hamas must be turned into the most irrational, indefensible and abhorrent group in the world, one with which there is only black and white. Any attempt to explain their actions objectively will be drowned out by outrage and subjected to censorship.
Very few spaces in Western mainstream media exist where an authentic pro-Palestinian view is heard, let alone from Palestinians themselves, who represent the consensus amongst their own people. Even in the limited places Palestinians are heard out, they are still limited to carefully crafted confines for the conversations they partake in, such as is the case on shows hosted by the likes of Piers Morgan.
This only works with the corporate media’s lies about beheaded babies, Netanyahu’s lies about two ginger-haired children who hid in an attic, and former President Joe Biden’s lie that “I never really thought that I would see and have confirmed pictures of terrorists beheading children”. Or, the claim that Hamas members are mass rapists, a group of bloodthirsty savages who are obsessed with the pure innocence of Jewish women.
This is where the likes of billionaire Sheryl Sandberg come in, with her propaganda film promoting this narrative about a so-called premeditated mass rape campaign coordinated by Hamas on October 7. Sandberg’s film, ‘Screams Before Silence’, used interrogation videos recorded by the Shin Bet. All serious investigations and reports have discarded these taped “confessions”, due to them being obtained under torture, while some have disputed that the people in the videos are even Hamas members at all.
The largest so-called investigation into the mass rapes story was conducted by the New York Times, which ended up turning into a major scandal. The family of an Israeli woman, whom the NYT tried to present as their primary rape victim case, came forward and denied the allegations made.
There was also a campaign, promoted by the likes of Hillary Clinton, which claimed to be standing up for alleged Israeli rape victims and used the rhetoric of “believe Israeli women”. An Israeli lawyer, Cochav Elkayam-Levy, then established what she was calling a “civilian commission” to investigate the Hamas rape campaign.
While Haaretz News and the Western corporate media presented Elkayam-Levy as a heroin of truth, fighting for the alleged victims, she was later exposed for sharing countless fake rape stories, all while soliciting millions of dollars for a commission, of which she was the only member. Eventually, Israeli government officials distanced themselves from her, before the Israeli media went after her for her alleged corruption and the entire initiative collapsed.
Perhaps the most misrepresented and misquoted report of all was the UN’s fact-collecting mission report. UN Special Representative, Pramila Patten, led an eight-day mission at the request of Israel, to gather evidence of sexual violence allegedly committed on October 7.
The nine UN experts who traveled to Israel for the report were not given an investigative mandate, yet they still managed to stumble upon some truly damning findings. Two specific cases that were presented by Israel as evidence of rape were revealed to be “unfounded”. In one of those cases, it was revealed that an Israeli bomb squad had altered a crime scene and “moved” the bodies to make it seem as if the mother was separated from her family and had her pants pulled down.
The report itself did state that there was evidence for various conflict-related acts of sexual violence, yet it did not offer any conclusions, citing its lack of an investigative mandate. This didn’t stop Israeli propagandists from holding the report up as “proof” of their claims, selectively quoting it and drawing drastic conclusions from what was noted as evidence. Israel is yet to allow an investigative inquiry into the issue.
After two years, there is still no forensic evidence, documented intent, identified victims, or credible witnesses supporting the claims of a mass rape campaign. Not only is there nothing to substantiate the mass rape campaign hoax, but there is still no proof that a Hamas fighter raped a single Israeli. Anyone saying otherwise is either misinformed or lying.
This does not stop Israelis from continuing to espouse their nonsense, however, as we still hear claims – often unchallenged when made – on corporate broadcast media about outlandish stories involving Hamas militants slicing off and juggling the private parts of Jewish women. Some pro-Israeli podcasters and media pundits even still claim with a straight face that there are videos of such horrendous crimes, which there most certainly is not.
Even the death toll from October 7 is still being lied about on a frequent basis, which also requires further analysis.
Originally, Israel claimed that the death toll was around 1,400 Israelis killed, which was eventually reduced to 1,200. This is the statistic that is still cited regularly as the death toll, which is also incorrect. The official death toll, as per Israel’s own numbers, is 1,139. So, if you are going to round this number, it would round down to 1,100. Math doesn’t suddenly change because the victims are Israeli.
Of that total, there were 695 Israeli civilians killed, along with 373 Israeli combatants, in addition to 71 foreigners. Meanwhile, the Palestinian death toll inside Gaza that day was recorded at 413 (the majority of whom were civilians), while Israel claims to have killed some 1,609 militants that were part of the attack.
Another thing to point out here is that Israel had triggered its infamous Hannibal directive that day, something that the Israeli army has since publicly admitted. Yet, Israel has refused to release an honest assessment of how many Israeli non-combatants they killed that day.
Some commentators have provided estimates that Israel may have even killed the majority of the 1,139 that day, while others claimed half. Yet an honest assessment is to say that, without any solid evidence, such allegations are completely unsubstantiated. We simply do not know how many Israelis were killed by the Hannibal directive.
This is where a more in-depth investigation into the events of that day is needed. The authorities in Tel Aviv will not allow it, even going as far as hiding the evidence, so the full truth may indeed take much longer to surface.
Simple explanations for what happened are often weaponized for a variety of different agendas, the most powerful of which is the Israeli justification for their genocide. Yet, the idea that Israel didn’t respond for at least 6 hours to the attack is flat out false, although they were evidently flustered and incapable of mustering a sufficient response to the enormity of the attack they faced.
The reason why the Israelis themselves chose not to come out against this narrative forcefully was that their own drones, attack helicopters, tanks, and soldiers were engaging in indiscriminate fire amongst their own civilians and forces, including around the Nova music festival area. In some cases, they even bombed their own captives as they were being seized and transported to Gaza.
Another major point here is that Hamas was not the only group involved in the attack, which also makes the attribution of all Israeli civilian deaths to them a fallacy. Some dozen Palestinian armed groups, some of which hold more radical beliefs or are less well coordinated than Hamas, joined the fight. Even civilians and militants who were not from armed groups, crossed over the separation fence.
Even when it came to the seizure of captives, the armed group known as the Mujahideen Brigades was responsible for the capture of the Bibas family, for example, including a baby. They were later targeted by an Israeli airstrike and killed. There are also cases where Israelis were freed by Hamas fighters, as they were being kidnapped into Gaza, such as what happened with an Israeli woman and her child.
What was clearly intended as a military operation, designed to deal a major blow to the Israeli Army’s Southern Command and to seize captives in order to exchange them for Palestinian prisoners, turned into an enormously chaotic event. This occurred due to the unexpected weakness and underpreparedness of the Israeli military.
As per the admissions of Hamas officials, the operation was not expected to be as successful as it proved to be and it appears as if this led to the rather complex and bloody picture that unfolded on that day.
What there is conclusive evidence for is the gunning down and throwing of grenades into areas packed with unarmed Israelis, which by any standard are considered war crimes. But these facts are never how the attack is depicted, nor is there ever any mention of a clearly well-organized assault on the Israeli army that day, which proved extremely militarily effective.
If the facts are laid bare, the October 7 attack, dubbed Operation Al-Aqsa Flood by Hamas and the Palestinian Joint Room of Resistance Factions, pales in comparison to Israel’s long history of massacres against the people of Gaza. It was unprecedented for Israel, but not for the Palestinians.
Understanding the context behind what led up to the attack, the years of terror bombings and mass slaughter, land theft, provocations at Holy Sites, settlement expansion, apartheid conditions and much more, also helps explain why Palestinian gunmen were able to commit what they did that day.
When you also understand the military successes, it opens your eyes to why the attack was also widely celebrated amongst Palestinians. There is certainly something to say about power in the images of Palestinians pulling bloodied Israeli soldiers out of their tanks, while breaking through the illegal separation barrier.
When the people saw those videos and photos, they believed for just one moment that maybe freedom was attainable, that the military struggle could grant them their right of return to the lands Israel stole from them in 1948. They weren’t celebrating because they were “savages”, they cheered on a group of fighters breaking out of a concentration camp and dealing a blow to their occupiers.
In his recent UN General Assembly speech, Benjamin Netanyahu asserted that 90% of Palestinians across the occupied territories celebrated the October 7, 2023, attack as a means of justifying Israel’s policies of oppression against them. In order to make a Western audience agree with him that Palestinians are beasts who deserve to suffer and be under their boot, he needs you to believe his lies about not only October 7, but also about why the attack happened to begin with.
Even if you were to believe all of Israel’s lies about it, when people say “what about October 7” today, the valid response is simply to respond by saying “exactly, what about October 7?”.
Even if Hamas was responsible for every civilian death, the Hannibal Directive was never triggered, 40 babies were beheaded and there was a mass rape campaign, how on earth does such brutality justify two years of genocide? How does that justify starving the population of Gaza? How does that justify land grabs and the slaughter of civilians in the West Bank? There is no excuse for genocide.
The only reason someone even brings up October 7 as a means of arguing in favor of Israel’s actions is that they are a racist who believes that Jewish Israeli lives matter infinitely more than the lives of Palestinians. It happened two years ago. Every day since then, Israel has slaughtered civilians across Gaza, and at this point, Hamas has killed more Israeli soldiers than it has civilians.
(The Palestine Chronicle)
– Robert Inlakesh is a journalist, writer, and documentary filmmaker. He focuses on the Middle East, specializing in Palestine. He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
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