Israel's Lies About October 7 Attack Adding Up
Condemning the attack is not possible without knowing its crimes, but Israel has obscured its actual war crimes with a deluge of lies, highlighting the need for an international investigation.
The more we learn of the recent attack on Israel, the more horror is turning to skepticism.
It is now clear that the 40 beheaded babies, the children placed in ovens, the fetus cut out of a womb, the people buried alive, and the women raped among the dead were all fabrications. Most of these stories were never published by reputable news sites, and those that were have been retracted. However, we were also lied to about the attacks on children and the elderly more generally, and that cuts to the core of the lasting impressions of the attack. I recently reviewed every single photo of the 1,155 people they could identify who were killed in the attack, along with their age and place of death, as listed by Israel’s oldest newspaper, Haaretz. But, astonishingly, the list didn’t include a single infant and just a dozen children under 18. The overwhelming majority were age 20 to 55, with about half of those being military personnel.
In this light, the idea that Hammas was carrying out a genocidal attack in which they aimed to kill as many civilians as possible appears ludicrous, for if that was their intention they would have targeted more vulnerable populations, as Israel commonly argues. It also suggests that the documents Israel says they found on fallen fighters with plans to target schools are forgeries, which should not surprise us given how much else they have lied about. My demographic tally is not rigorous, and the United Nations figures for child deaths inexplicably include 15 more than those of Haaretz. So, I invite you to review the document listed in the comments below. But I would estimate that about half the people in the photos I reviewed were listed as military personnel. And a substantial number of the rest are likely have been members of the police or security services, with a good quarter looking tougher and better built than those listed as career military personnel.
Israel’s recent revision of the death count from 1,400 to 1,200, and Haaretz’s inability to verify more than 1,165 of the fallen, highlights the fact that Israel lied about the death count, and is still likely overestimating it. Yet, it should have been obvious that they were inflating it. The nonprofit collecting the bodies that provided the figures had last made the news when they inflated their number of volunteers fourfold in order to win more funding, and the last time before that was when their founder had killed himself after being accused of molesting several children. It was clearly not a reliable source, but it was the primary source cited by most news sites.
No developed state uses hundred person increments to estimate such low death counts. Yet, Israel kept adding a hundred people here, and a hundred people there, to their death count for weeks, and they continue with the hundred person increment estimates a month and a half later. In reviewing the photos, it is easy to feel for the victims, including the officers, whatever the cruelties of the occupation. They are human beings, who should be honored for the way they loved and dreamed. Hence, it is astonishing that Israel would continue to count them as a mass, as if estimating the warm bodies at a million person march.
The lack of value placed on the lives of their citizens is evident in the way they are carpet bombing the hostages, starving them of food, and depriving them of water, along with everyone else in Ghaza. Israel’s secretive Hannibal Directive has variously stated that in the event of a hostage crisis, the hostages should be killed along with their captors in order to discourage hostage taking, along with the subsequent hostage exchanges that would follow. So, it should not be surprising that the sole surviving adult of the Kibbutz Be’eri massacre in which 112 people were killed, has stated unambiguously that it was the Israeli Defense Forces who slaughtered her fellow community members, including her partner, along with Hammas.
Her testimony, is consistent with the state of ruin in which the houses were left in many communities, for the homemade handheld grenade launchers that we have all seen on the fighters entering Israel could not have done that kind of damage. The dangers of Hamas rockets have long been exaggerated, with few deaths occurring in most years in spite of thousands being fired, and they have often been described as “glorified bottle rockets,” as a socialist Israeli politician skeptical of their threat once described them to me personally. But if Hammas lacked the firepower to collapse buildings, it begs the question of how many civilian deaths were the result of IDF shelling and how many were people caught in the crossfire. It also should lead us to look further into the results of an Israeli police investigation, first reported in Haaretz, which found that Israeli forces likely killed many of the people attending the Nova Music Festival.
All of this should lead in turn to a reevaluation of Hammas’ intentions.
It should now be clear why my own personal condemnations of Hammas in the days following the attack were not stronger. Hammas committed a war crime in taking hostages, and several videos suggest that they shot and killed civilians, which would also constitute war crimes. It might also be argued on firm ground that, whatever their political intentions, their attack was reckless with the lives of people living in Ghaza. But the severity of their crimes has been far less clear in the absence of better military-to-civilian death ratios and age related demographics. In the absence of major media outlets willing to question Israel’s assertions, and in an environment in which anyone who questioned them risked losing their jobs, it was simply impossible to say much about the nature of the killings.
Hence, far from being responsible and humane, most of the “horror” over Hammas “atrocities” that have prefaced criticisms of Israel has actually contributed to the very hysteria that is fueling the genocide. For once we adopt a skeptical stance toward Israel’s assertions, and recognize that it has been willing to place the hostages at grave risk in Ghaza, the facts on the ground begin to appear far more ambiguous.
Of course, war crimes deserve to be condemned, but just as retribution must be proportionate, the condemnations of war crimes must be proportionate to their severity. For when the condemnations are disproportionate, they contribute to disproportionate military responses. In this way, equating these crimes with the genocide that would follow continues to help justify has extermination of children in the minds of those who hold the people of Ghaza responsible for the crimes of Hammas. Meanwhile, Israel’s critics have all too often exaggerated the severity of the attack in order to protect their own reputations, and that too has contributed to a hysteria over Hammas that is disproportionate to their aims and strength.
In this way, many of Israel’s strongest critics helped foster the narrative that led to genocide.
The failure to place Israel’s stories about the attack within the context of their ongoing lies about Hammas was all the more egregious. Israel’s primary justification for bombing civilian targets is that Hammas uses innocent Palestinians as human shields. But instead of citing the findings of human rights groups like Amnesty International, which have researched the question after every major conflict and found little evidence for it, most major media outlets have been content to cite Israeli sources, which have repeatedly lied about Hammas.
Israel would go from claiming that stray Islamic Jihad rockets were hitting hospitals, to claiming Hammas had tunnels under them after those claims were debunked. They would go from claiming they had command centers within them, to shooting at children trying to escape the heavily shelled hospitals that they had surrounded with tanks. Israel lies so much that it makes Putin and Trump look like honest brokers. Hence, relying on them for information about the nature of the attack was bound to embarrass the arbiters of public opinion, as it would the Biden administration, which had to retract his claim about infants with their throats slit.
Hammas officials have variously stated their aim of the attack as demonstrating that Israel will pay a price for its abuse of Palestinians, over 200 of which had already been killed that year, and as gathering hostages to be traded in a exchange for Palestinian prisoners, who are typically tortured and held without trial, sometimes for decades on end. Many have speculated that they aimed to destroy Israel’s peace deal with Saudi Arabia, which would have placed the fate of Palestinians in the hands of a likely sociopathic Mohammad Bin Salman.
Ben Hubbard from the New York Times spent the month after the attack interviewing Hamas officials and concluded that they launched the attack because the world had forgotten about Palestine, Ghaza was becoming increasingly uninhabitable, and provoking a major response from Israel might provide an opening to a negotiated settlement on a Palestinian state. But perhaps they were just doing what Zionist terrorists did in British Mandate Palestine prior to the founding of Israel by striking at civilian British targets, which is to say showing them that the occupation will never make Israel secure.
After having spent their lives in a concentration camp that the United Nations deemed “uninhabitable,” it is easy to understand the desperation, whatever we might say about the prudence and morality of their plans. And whatever you think of these aims, they are surely not exterminationist, and they may turn out to have had nothing to do with killing innocent civilians at all. It is yet another reason why we should be calling for an international investigation into all war crimes committed on both sides with prosecutions to follow at the Hague.
But such civilized solutions are generally considered outside the realm of possibility when it comes to Israel.
~ Theo Horesh, author of The Holocausts We All Deny
“After having spent their lives in a concentration camp that the United Nations deemed “uninhabitable,” it is easy to understand the desperation, whatever we might say about the prudence and morality of their plans.”
They spent their lives in a self-governed “concentration camp” financed by a billion dollars a year from Qatar because Hamas refuses to accept that Israel has a right to coexist in the region and continually launched missiles and terrorist attacks against Israel. I would contend that there was “desperation” on both sides and even with the Palestinian Authority government attempting to work out a two-state solution with the Israelis. Sadly, their isolation was self-inflicted and unnecessary.
As for the “morality” of their plans, gleefully killing unarmed civilians is certainly immoral. Then scurrying back into tunnels using unarmed Gazans as human shields as they fired more rockets to provoke a response and turned fellow citizens into “collateral damage” for their “cause” is inhumane and indefensible. There were many other options than this obscene blood bath and to condone such actions also is indefensible.
"Hamas also achieves practical and propagandistic goals by putting Palestinians in harm’s way. More civilians in combat zones mean more human shields for its forces. More dead and wounded Palestinians mean more sympathy for its side and more condemnation of Israel.
That’s why Hamas turned Gaza’s central hospital into its headquarters during the 2014 conflict. It’s why it stored rockets in schools. It’s why it has used mosques to store guns. It’s why it fires rockets from Gaza’s densely populated areas. It does all this knowing that Israel, which has agreed to abide by the laws of war, tries to avoid hitting those targets — and, when it does hit them, that it will result in accusations of war crimes and diplomatic demands for restraint. Either way, Hamas gains an edge."
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/15/opinion/columnists/hamas-war-israel-gaza.html