Lies and Truths Surrounding October 7th, 2023

Last update: August 20, 2024

The Lies

Israeli officials made claims of horrific atrocies allegedly committed by Hamas members on October 7, 2023. These claims were then repeated by journalists, and even President Biden without evidence. Since then, most have proven to be false.

Beheaded Babies

On October 10, 2023, i24 reporter Nicole Zedeck said an IDF commander told her that 40 Israeli babies were found beheaded in Kfar Aza. The same day, IDF spokesperson, Major Nir Dinar, told Business Insider a similar tale. The claim was repeated widely across Israeli and Western media and even confirmed by a reporter and an IDF officer who had supposedly seen evidence of the massacre.

In order to justify Israel's subsequent destruction and genocide of Gaza, the claim was even repeated by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Joe Biden, who stated they had both personally seen photographic evidence of beheaded children.

These were all lies. No evidence was ever provided to support the claim. Later, when Israel released its findings, it was revealed that the youngest person to be killed in Kfar Aza was 14 years old, and across the entirety of the October 7th attacks, only one baby and one toddler were killed in Kibbutz Be'iri; neither were beheaded.

Bound and Burned, etc.

Eli Beer, President of United Hatzala, said "We saw a little baby in an oven. They put them in, these bastards put these babies in an oven and put on the oven. We found the baby a few hours later." Despite a complete lack of actual evidence for the claim, it was repeated multiple times by Western media. Months later, Beer's organization acknowledged that the story was untrue.

Israeli journalist Ishay Coen posted an interview with Israeli Lt. Col. Yaron Buskila, in which the officer claimed Hamas had hung dead Israeli babies on a clothesline in a row during the October 7th attack. The video was reposted on X by many pro-Israel accounts before the original was taken down and Coen tried to distance himself from the claim. Israel has never officially admitted the claim is false, instead saying that the "details are unclear," but the official reports of only one baby and one toddler killed in the October 7th attacks seem to contradict this claim.

Many other false claims were made and later proven false. In a phone call to President Biden, Benjamin Netanyahu spoke about dozens of children who were allegedly bound together, burned, and summarily executed. According to Haaretz, there is no available evidence to suggest any such killings occurred. A number of other false claims came from Yosi Landau, a volunteer with the ultra-Orthodox search and rescue group Zaka. Landau's tall tales included "piles of 10 children each" tied up in bed and burned; a pregnant mother with her stomach "butchered open" with her baby, still attached to the ambilical cord, stabbed; and a situation in which Hamas fighters allegedly dismembered and killed a family of four, and then sat at the victims' kitchen table and enjoyed a meal. Landau also reportedly promoted the '40 beheaded babies' story as well as the false allegations of mass rape by Hamas members.

Landau eventually admitted that he lied, as no evidence ever materialized to support his outrageous claims. But that didn't stop news organizations such as Reuters, CNN, The New York Times, BBC, The Guardian, NBC News, Politico, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and many others from publishing his claims – justifying Israel's heavy-handed response in the minds of many readers. And when retractions are made, they never spread with the same fervor as the false claims themselves.

Mass Rapes

On January 18, 2024, The Guardian ran a story alleging the "systematic use of rape and sexual violence by Hamas in 7 October attacks." The article is full of eyewitness accounts of horrible atrocities supposedly committed against Israeli women. Meni Binyamin, the head of the International Crime Investigations Unit of the Israeli police, said that “dozens” of women and some men were raped by Hamas militants on Oct. 7.

However, a special UN investigation which examined 5,000 photographs and 50 hours of footage from bodycams, dashcams, cellphones, CCTV, and traffic cameras didn't yield one single image of sexual violence. Additionally, the report states that the investigation could not locate any forensic evidence of sexual violence and the investigators were unable to meet with a single survivor of sexual violence on October 7th.

Further Reading

The Truths

The narrative painted by Israeli and Western media and government officials is quite different from reality. In addition to the claims of attrocities mentioned above being proven false, Israel actually committed a number of its own attrocities, for which there is ample evidence.

Israeli Friendly Fire

Many of the Israeli deaths on October 7, 2023, which were initially blamed on Hamas, turned out to have been caused by Israeli forces. As this information came to light, many suspected the deaths were accidental, attributing them to inexperienced personel and the "fog of war." However, it was eventually discovered that, under what is known as the Hannibal Directive, many Israelis may were killed intentionally by agents of their own government in order to prevent them from being taken hostage by Hamas fighters.

When the Israeli newspaper Haaretz confirmed this information, Western media outlets like CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, BBC, Reuters, AP, the Wall Street Journal, NBC News, and others chose to ignore the story.

Starvation and Famine

Living conditions in Gaza before October 7, 2023 were far from ideal. The enclave has often been referred to as "the world's largest open-air prison." The people of Gaza have lived under a brutal blockade since 2007. But the policies put in place by Israel after the October 7th attacks have made the area unlivable. The Health Ministry in Gaza has reportedly detected a polio infection in Gaza, the first case in 25 years, attributing it to open sewage in the streets, shortages of medical supplies, and lack of personal hygiene products due to the Israeli blockade.

The UN has declared that famine has spread throughout the Gaza strip and now children are dying from hunger and malnutrition at an unprecedented rate. The international community has attempted to deliver food to this starving population, but these convoys are often blocked by Israel, and in one case even directly attacked by Israeli naval fire. Additionally, some food trucks which have been allowed to enter Gaza have been blocked by mobs of Israeli settlers. These crowds have even slashed the trucks' tires and destroyed boxes of food bound for Gaza.

Torture

Palestinian hostages and prisoners in Israeli custody have often reported torture and various forms of physical and mental abuse at the hands of their captors. Like most human rights violations Israel has inflicted upon the Palestinian people, this is nothing new. At the time of this writing, a search of the word "torture" on IsraelPalestineNews.org turns up 57 pages of results.

As Palestinian civil society organizations such as Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association, the Palestinian Prisoners’ Club, and others have extensively documented, prisoners are being viciously beaten and abused multiple times a day, caged in cells “not fit for human life,” kept blindfolded with their hands bound with plastic ties, isolated from the outside world, stripped of their clothing, collectively punished through starvation, attacked by dogs, sexually assaulted, and psychologically tortured. At least thirteen Palestinians have been martyred in prison since October 7 as a result of torture and being denied proper medical care. Countless more have been discovered in mass graves with clear evidence of having undergone torture, executions, and other crimes against humanity.

Sexual Assault of Prisoners

Israel's track record of sexually abusing Palestinian prisoners goes all the way back to the Nakba in 1948. Over the years, there have been countless allegations of rape and sexual assault at the hands of Israeli forces. In the weeks and months following October 7, 2023, Palestinians have reported numerous horrific accounts of torture and rape by their oppressors.

A special State Department panel told Secretary of State Antony Blinken that the U.S. should restrict arms sales to Israeli military units that have been credibly accused of human rights abuses. He has not taken any action.

Further Reading