Gareth Porter reviews the Netanyahu government’s process of planting stories of nonexistent atrocities by Hamas on Oct. 7 with credulous foreign-news outlets and the Biden administration.
Kibbutz Be’eri four days after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas offensive. (Kobi Gideon / Government Press Office of Israel, CC BY-SA 3.0)
By Gareth Porter
Special to Consortium News
In the days after Hamas entered Israeli kibbutzim near Gaza on Oct. 7, foreign press accounts of what happened have broadly reflected the Israeli interpretation of events of the deliberate slaughter and dismemberment of innocent civilians by Hamas fighters.
Those stories were blood-curdling in the extreme: Babies beheaded. People dismembered and deliberately burned to death. And the total of innocent civilians murdered in cold blood were said to be as high as 1,400.
The Israelis quickly recycled parallels between Hamas and the Islamic State, with its glorification of killing innocents.
But a reconstruction of how that story line emerged as the dominant theme in early press coverage shows that it was deliberately created by a decision by top Israeli officials, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It was done by inventing stories about nonexistent atrocities and planting them with credulous U.S. news outlets.
Origins of the Hamas Atrocity Stories
Kibbutz Kfar Aza and Gaza on the horizon, 2019. (max nathans, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
The documentary evidence now available shows that the stories about Hamas atrocities committed in the Kfar Aza Kibbutz and elsewhere were politically motivated fabrications. And how and why those atrocity stories became the dominant political reality within days of the offensive is an important political question bearing on the wider Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The first explanation for those stories is that they came from Israeli private “first responder” organizations with an obvious self-interest in peddling such a line: they were competing with one another to generate the biggest donations, as reported by Max Blumenthal at The Grayzone.
But the real source of those Hamas atrocity stories from Kfar Aza was the Netanyahu government itself, and it is now clear that the objective was to ensure that the Biden administration would go along with the plan to reduce all of Gaza to a pile of rubble.
In an address to the nation on Oct. 9 Netanyahu invoked a long-time basic Israeli propaganda line: Hamas is ISIS. “We have always known what Hamas is,” he declared. “Now the whole world knows Hamas is ISIS.”
When he spoke to the nation the day after the Hamas offensive, of course, the rest of the world had no such idea. That is why Netanyahu ordered a special project of hasbara — the Israeli term for propaganda to reshape public opinion abroad — to ensure that both the U.S. public and the Biden administration fully supported the Israeli position on Hamas’ attack.
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The first part of that program was to have a senior IDF commander pass information to the news media, who were allowed to enter Kfar Aza Kibbutz on the morning of Oct. 10, while ensuring that a senior IDF commander would be on hand to speak to the press about Hamas atrocities in the kibbutz.
Thus Maj. Gen. Itai Veruv, commander of the Israel Defense Forces Depth Corps, told CNN correspondent Nic Robertson that women, children, toddlers and the elderly had been “brutally butchered in an ISIS way of action.”
A later CNN story quoted Gen. Veruv as saying,
“I saw hundreds of terrorists in full armor, full gear, with all the equipment and all the ability to make a massacre, go from apartment to apartment, from room to room and kill babies, mothers, fathers in their bedrooms.”
Veruv in 2021. (IDF Spokesperson’s Unit, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)
Veruv had not seen anything of the sort himself, but it was emblematic of the IDF manipulation of the Western press on the issue. When Business Insider contacted the IDF from New York about the story, spokesperson Major Nir Dinar claimed that its soldiers had found the decapitated corpses of babies at Kfar Aza.
But when the Turkish Anadolu Agency and The Intercept sought confirmation of the claim of beheaded babies from the IDF on Oct. 10 and 12, respectively, the IDF couldn’t back up the statement by Veruv.
Anadolu reported in a post on “X” that the IDF had “no information” confirming the allegations of beheaded babies.
Fake News Dominates Mainstream Media: Israeli Army Admits No Evidence of Hamas Beheading Babies
The Israeli army has no information confirming allegations that "Hamas beheaded babies," Israeli army spokesperson unit told Anadolu.
It was alleged that Hamas' armed wing, the… pic.twitter.com/HVPc0cAcgp
— Islam Channel (@Islamchannel) October 12, 2023
And the IDF spokesperson told The Intercept that the military had not been able to independently confirm the claim.
Despite the absence of actual evidence for that propaganda claim, a cascade of such stories were aired by major U.S. television networks and the BBC. It was a major triumph of deliberate Israeli deception by manipulating broadcast media eager for Hamas atrocity stories.
The second part of the Netanyahu plan — ensuring the full political support of U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and Biden for the utter destruction of the urban society of Gaza — was easy as well.
Blinken was already fully committed to the Zionist cause. When he arrived in Jerusalem, he invoked his Jewish ancestry and likened the Hamas attacks to those of the Nazis against Jews.
And he endorsed the Israeli claim of “babies slaughtered, bodies desecrated, young people burned alive, women raped, parents executed in front of their children, children in front of their parents.”
Behind IDF’s ‘Preliminary Estimate’ of Civilians Killed
IDF headquarters in Tel Aviv. (Justin LaBerge, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)
On Oct. 14, the IDF put out a “preliminary estimate” of 1,400 innocent civilians killed by Hamas in the attack, a figure that stood until Nov. 10, when the Israeli Foreign Ministry reduced the estimate of civilians “murdered in cold blood” to 1,200.
However, that figure, too, was shown to be seriously misleading when IsraeI’s Social Security Administration in mid-December released a complete list of those killed in the attack, with the circumstances of death of each.
That official document showed that 695 of the deaths were Israeli civilians, 373 were Israeli security forces, and 71 were foreigners, for a total of 1,139 victims.
Hamas gunmen certainly did fire indiscriminately during the rampage, and they caused a large number of civilian deaths when their plan for taking hostages quickly went awry, because people refused to come out of their houses.
To force the occupants to jump out through open windows, some Hamas gunmen set fire to the houses, but some families never made it and were burned to death.
Hamas operatives were not the only ones to destroy houses and kill those inside it, however.
In the two communities where the largest number of civilians said to have been killed — Kfar Aza, where total civilian deaths was variously estimated at between 38 and 46; and Be’eri, where it was estimated at 112, numerous civilian deaths from tank and/or helicopter fire — including the deaths of a number of those who were being held as hostages — have been well documented.
The IDF commanding officer who unleashed violence on Be’eri spun an elaborate lie to cover up the actual circumstances in which many houses were destroyed by Israeli tank fire or by rockets from helicopters.
In a report in the Hebrew edition of Haaretz, the deputy commander of an IDF armored reserve battalion, Brig. Gen Barak Hiram, described how his tank unit “fought…from house to house, with tanks” in Be’eri, adding, “We had no choice.”
Israeli Brigadier General Barak Hiram acknowledges that on October 7, he gave the order for Israeli tanks to open fire on homes that held Israeli captives. pic.twitter.com/zRan4V9j6v
— MintPress News (@MintPressNews) December 26, 2023
In another interview, this time in The New York Times, Hiram also presented a completely falsified and self-serving account of his handling of the situation he encountered at one house where Hamas gunmen held 14 hostages.
He claimed that one hostage, Yasmin Porat, had managed to escape, and that the gunmen inside then fired two RPG rounds at IDF troops outside the house they were occupying. In fact, however, the Hamas group’s leader had decided to surrender and contacted the police by phone.
He gave himself up along with Porat, according to her account, leaving the other Hamas gunmen to fend for themselves. But Gen. Hiram immediately demanded that the house be taken by force “even at the cost of civilian casualties,” with the result that all 13 remaining hostages but one were killed.
In a radio interview on “This Morning Show” hosted by Aryeh Golan, Yasmin Porat, an Israeli survivor from the recent attack on Kibbutz Be’eri near the Gaza boundary, says Israeli forces killed their own civilians while combating Palestinian fighters pic.twitter.com/2pAOeTuS4e
— Middle East Eye (@MiddleEastEye) October 16, 2023
In Kfar Aza, which had more than 49 civilian deaths, a parallel process unfolded, as Lt. Col. Golan Vach similarly ordered a tank attack on houses that Hamas had taken over and in which 19 Israeli hostages were being held.
Both decisions reflected the explicit implementation of the IDF’s “Hannibal Protocol,” under which it is required to kill Israeli hostages to ensure that they could not be exploited by Israel’s enemy — even though that requirement was supposedly canceled by the IDF in 2016.
Most of the civilian deaths appear to have taken place at or near the grounds of the early morning music festival, where 260 bodies were found.
Hamas operatives sought to take people hostage as they fled from the grounds, but many of the victims were killed by firing from helicopters from troops who were unable to distinguish Hamas operatives from revelers.
No one knows how many were killed by each side but the 28 Israeli helicopters were firing rounds of 30-millimeter cannon mortars, without any intelligence to guide their shooting, certainly took a share of the human toll, especially in the chaotic scene during the flight from the rave that morning, according to Electronic Intifada.
In light of the new evidence, the number of innocent civilians killed by Hamas was clearly significantly less than the 695 civilian victims identified by the Israeli Social Security Administration and a fraction of the 1,200 civilians the Netanyahu government has claimed, because the IDF itself was responsible for a significant proportion of the deaths of innocent civilians.
It is also clear, however, that the Hamas offensive was poorly conceived and badly executed. And most importantly, it handed Netanyahu and the whole extremist Israeli socio-political system a golden opportunity to pursue their genocidal plans in Gaza.
Within 24 hours of Hamas’ operation, that Israeli genocide plan had already gone into operation with its campaign of phony atrocity stories. And nearly three months later, little or nothing has been done to stop its murderous progress toward its genocidal goal.
CORRECTION: The revised figure for innocent civilian deaths from the Israeli social security administration, which was incorrectly reported in the article as originally published, has been corrected in the two relevant paragraphs.
Gareth Porter is an award-winning journalist and author of several books on Vietnam and the controversy over Iran’s nuclear program. He is currently finishing a book on the Cold War as a deception.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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One thing about this current bunch of fascists, they lack originality. Apparently they can’t even get a good writer to work for them.
Lets see if this sounds familiar ….
America launched a racist war upon Japan with cries of “They surprised us at Pearl Harbor”. The ‘surprise’ was that the Japanese typists were too slow, and the careful plan where the Japanese were going to declare war and then attack half an hour later was too cute, and it went the other way around Japanese diplomats delivering a declaration of war half an hour after the bombing began.
America used this as justification for a racist war against sub-humans. ‘Monkeys’ were the usual reference. This war saw horrors like an American GI deciding that a Japanese skull was a suitable gift for his fiance back home …. and they made the cover of Life Magazine as the sorts of Americans we should be proud of. Remember Pearl Harbor. That continued all the way on to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, hundreds of thousands of civilian lives, slow deaths of cancer and leukemia, all justified by ‘Remember Pearl Harbor’
And of course, 9-11 as justification of the deaths of millions, torture and Gitmo and more is also well known. Even for fascists, this current bunch lacks originality. They keep recycling the same old scripts.
I think fascists, by nature, lack originality. Character flaws have to run pretty deep for a human to be a fascist. A fascist negates humanity and is happy to produce fear. They are bald-faced liars and greedy for control of others. The fascist cannot be existentially human, or “original,” because that requires the exercise of too much “freedom” —the very thing they fear the most. Since they can’t handle their insecurities from within, with self-control, they look to control others. It’s fucked up.
Credulous? There’s enough evidence here to use the more accurate “complicit”
Disgusting. There is no ‘evidence’ for any of these blood libels against the heroes of the Palestinian resistance. Hamas has never commited any war crimes, neither on October 7 nor at any other time.
Like the ancient crusades, the truth will never be told and whenever it is, it is usually too late for the public — and pretend intellectuals and historians — to be convinced.
I’m not convinced that the word credulous describes the US corporate press. Credulous implies an innocence that I seriously doubt exists here. When Scott Ritter recalls his experience working for the corporate press, he describes multiple people from AIPAC approaching him within these press organizations to come work for AIPAC. I think we are talking about an infestation of pro-Israel government people working inside and controlling the corporate-press narrative, not a press duped by Israeli government lies. There is intent on to deceive our country.
Mike , please do not let my attempt to add to your discussion here, upset you. It is not my intent at all. Please read comment to the end.
I commend you on your sharp perception of truth and your strong rebuke of the US corporate press, but let us not give these people any quarter here. They deserve none. I believe your true intention is to condemn this behavior not make an excuse for it. Feigning innocence or ignorance is no excuse for lying and spreading U.S. government propaganda as done by these individuals who all make exorbitant sums of money to be the “Rock Stars” of a business that sells garbage to the consumer.
Bravo Sir!
The term used above in the “credulous” in the is derived from credulity, defined as readiness or willingness to believe on slight or uncertain evidence. Saying “credulous implies an innocence” could be construed as a excuse for the obvious self-implication of this group of ne’er-do-wells posing as true journalists. I don’t think your intent was to excuse their behavior at all.
Your effort is revelation of the truth. These, MSM talking heads are not innocent or ignorant of the facts here. They are neither ignorant or innocent and have no excuses for their transgressions. They have prostituted their trade to the highest bidder in an effort to enrich themselves and serve devious masters. They commit fraud on the public in doing so.
The lame brained public could be construed as being innocent, maybe and ignorant for sure. I give them no quarter either, time to lead, follow or get the hell out of the way! No mercy for those who knowingly lie to the public, while pretending to be wholesome reporters of facts.
Shame on them for being educated and assuming the role of the cretin.
Last but not least, you write, “I think we are talking about an infestation of pro-Israel government people working inside and controlling the corporate-press narrative, not a press duped by Israeli government lies. There is intent on to deceive our country.” Note: “they are intent on deceiving our country.” You better believe they are and they have been doing so since around 1947.
Scott Ritter is dead on track and reveals the AIPAC modes operandi, the chosen method of operation.
You have damned good reason “to think we are talking about an infestation pf pro-Israel government people . . .”
You have the situation pegged. Don’t take my word for it see the following.
I strongly urge you to go to the hXXps://www.israellobby.org
We owe it to each other, all of us involved here to educate the other person to sources and methods to fight this threat from with in.
A threat that found favor with the Zionist movement in this country. It should go without saying that a large number of Israelis condemn the Zionist objectives and fear for their country. This is crucially important to remember.
The right wing leadership of Israel runs and apartheid police state using the iron fist of authority and they have been influencing U.S. decision makers from a vastly wealthy AIPAC lobby that has surreptitiously , i.e. done, made or acquired by stealth – clandestinely, gaining Undue Influence and access to the government of the United States.
This is my story, opinion and true belief.
We all need to be very strong.
Thanks CN
No surprises here, the only thing new to see is is Israeli leadership does not mind at all that the entire world has been given an opportunity to see for themselves exactly how sick in the head these individuals are.
I figure nothing works better for their opposition that “Bennie the Blade” Nuttuyahoo proving this about himself and his acotlytes on the world wide internet.
For those who truly care about universal and equal justice for all, reflect deeply on the disgrace American law and mainstream journalism have become, and thereby contributed to this disgrace today, when reading this superlative, one-of-kind article/indictment, by Stanley L. Cohen Lawyer and Activist NYC, appearing in Counterpunch online Magazine, Jan. 5th.
hxxps://www.counterpunch.org/2024/01/05/guilty-as-charged/
“Credulous” news outlets?
More like willing accomplices. Reporters and editors who, confronted with an obvious set of lies, avert their gaze from the facts to keep it squarely focused on their careers.
Whatever the eventual count and distribution of atrocities here, a morbid and unhinged Israeli hasbara on Oct 7 has whipped up the dogs of war to a hideous outcome. This absolutely cannot be denied. Cruelty is operative–yet rationalized as “not our fault.”
Juxtaposition of the kibbutz and Gaza as in the first photograph is major evidence in support of Tareq Baconi”s companion piece at CN, “Al Aqsa Flood and End of the Partition.”
Regard that image closely for a moment. Then to his:
“To limit the blood that will be spilled as Israel’s system of apartheid is challenged, the international community, particularly the West, must first reckon with the fact that it has enabled an ethnonationalist political system that has eviscerated Palestinian rights and lives.”
This is the KEY reality. At some point it must sink in.
This is an excellent dissection of events of October 7 by Gareth Porter. It would be much appreciated if he does another such piece on the claims that Hamas fighters raped Israeli women. The “Grayzone” believes that the claims are fabrications, but not many other commentators have weighed in on the subject. In the “Me Too” era, denials of rape are highly fraught.
Fair enough, Rob. I’m caught between feelign an obligation to shed light on the lies of the Israelis about Hamas, on one hand, and the need to cover adequately the ever-mounting evidence of the carefully-calcualted genocide on the other. That has to weigh heavily in my judgment, because of they are killing so many every day. The other consideration is that Max has already addressed the rape issue.. But I will seriously consider taking it on next as well.
Of course ISIS and Hamas are comparable—just not in the way Netanyahu would have us believe. Both were supported by intelligence agencies and state apparatus. The U.S. government and the state of Israel brought 21st century barbarism to new levels via terrorism against the civilian population of Syria. ( It’s not a new playbook—ask many of our neighbors to the South).
Props eventually become expendable and Raqqa & Mosul become examples.
It should be considered that nine-eleven and ten-seven share particular comparisons—especially with regard to planning and the resulting “policies” moving forward.
It takes a long time before the truth gets out. When the false story about Iraqi soldiers emptying incubator babies from Kuwait hospitals, leaving 312 babies to die “on the cold floor,” was circulated in December 19, 1990, Amnesty International was cited as its source. The story was used to generate support for George H.W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq shortly afterwards. Months later the truth came out that Amnesty had been duped, but the objective of the falsehood was achieved.
In the current situation regarding Hamas and Israeli defense forces, we have to go back and find who the sources were for particular claims. What was fabricated and what was not. If what Gareth Porter writes is true, not all the narratives unfavorable to Israel are correct – for example, that Israeli forces were idle and allowed the butchery to take place, deliberately setting the stage (along with the fabricated stories mentioned by Porter) for acceptance of the bombings of Gaza.
Once truth is sacrificed to political objectives, it becomes hard to rescue it. Everything has to be weighed in the light of whose interest is furthered by what is said, what credibility a purveyor of news has, what their sources were, etc.
“… not all the narratives unfavorable to Israel are correct – for example, that Israeli forces were idle and allowed the butchery to take place, deliberately setting the stage…”
To me, this is the aspect of Oct 7 that needs to be explored. While “setting the stage” was probably not deliberate, Israeli forces clearly took their time to do ANYTHING about the incursion. Why? My personal conjecture is that most of the troops that could stop Hamas were sent from their barracks near Gaza to West Bank. There pogroms following Al-Aqsa provocation were in full swing, and it is IDF practice, especially under the current government, to use the military to protect rioting settlers, squash any resistance etc.
And one can ask: why watch towers lining the Gaza border were not manned? And when the empty towers have fallen to FVP explosives, how long did it take for IDF command to realize that? Apparently, IDF got to locations controlled by Hamas after 9 hours … Most people have a preconception if IDF being a capable force, and thus they easily give credence to claims that this ineptitude was a part of an evil plan.
OTH, while ineptitude is a possible explanation, weird sinister stuff does happen. I did not expect Merkel and Sarkozy proudly claiming that Minsk agreements were a ruse to give Ukraine time to prepare for the “unprovoked war”.
The International Court of Justice (“World Court”) will hold hearings next week on South Africa’s request for provisional measures to order Israel to cease its genocide in Gaza. This may be the most important case I’ve encountered in several decades of litigation and legal study. The hearing will happen on two days, Thursday and Friday of next week.
The hearings will be streamed live and on demand (VOD) in the two official languages of the Court, English and French, on the Court’s website and on UN Web TV. See this page for links: hXXps://www.icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/case-related/192/192-20240103-pre-01-00-en.pdf
Schedule for the hearings
Thursday 11 January 2024 10 a.m.-12 noon.: Oral argument (South Africa)
Friday 12 January 2024 10 a.m.-12 noon.: Oral argument (Israel)
I presume those times are Brussels times. Presumably the video of the hearings will also be available afterward.
Distinguished international lawyer Francis Boyle, on Democracy Now!, predicted that the court will issue an injunction against Israel about a week after the hearing. hXXps://www.democracynow.org/2024/1/2/south_africa_israel_genocide_icj
News reports say that Benjamin Netanyahu has requested Alan Dershowitz of Harvard fame to represent Israel. Dershowitz is a long-time advocate for Zionism who specializes in inserting his foot in his mouth.
The South African application to the international Court of Justice is 84 pages long, roughly half of them taken up by footnoted citations to published evidence.
It tells a story of unimaginable cruelty and cataclysmic horror. If you read it, you’ll come away without a drop of sympathy for the Israelis and a deep sympathy for the Gazans unless you are a died-in-the-wool Zionist.
It’s here: hXXps://www.icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/case-related/192/192-20231228-app-01-00-en.pdf
I ask as a lay person: What will be the real world consequences of the Court’s decision, if Israel and the United States choose to reject it, as they almost certainly will?
As usual Paul great comment and thanks for the heads up.
I am not so sure about Gareth Porter’s claim that “the Hamas offensive was poorly conceived and badly executed” as others have described it as militarily brilliant, fruit of two years of planning, and quite successful in achieving its war aims. The confusion arises because when the Gaza fence went down, Gazans of all kinds ‘escaped’ their confinement. Among these were other militants who expressed their years of humiliation and distress by revenge killings and uncoordinated hostage taking, men who lacked discipline (these could have included some Hamas).
In the photo, we can observe how close to Gaza lies the kibbutz. Music from the Rave could be heard inside Gaza. Imagine the rage of a young Palestinian who had spent his entire life as a prisoner who looked upon the kibbutz as the site of his grandfather’s village, a place where his people had been forcibly evicted. It would take more discipline than most people possess to remain equanimous.
Thank you. I wondered about that, too. Scott Ritter is one of those who described the Hamas attack as militarily brilliant, and he is usually correct on military matters.
very important points to make!
Lying birds of the same feather flock together…And most of the ‘civilized’ West lacks the BALLS to stand up to these two murderers – guilty by association.
We live in a world in which 90% of people initially believe storylines as preposterous as the Ghost of Kiev shooting down 6 Russian aircraft in the first 2 days of war. The equally false story of the Valiant 8 Dead Heroes of Snake Island followed. My instincts at this point are to assume that all war related stories coming out of Kiev, Washington DC, , and Israel are false. I try to fill in the truth over the next several weeks. Furthermore, I see zero difference between Biden spokesman Retired Admiral Kirby and Bagdad Bob.
Yeah, like I said early on – this whole debacle was probably perpetrated by Israel and the US. We will probably never know the whole truth – ever…
Look at what was happening at the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem before Oct. 7th. This has long been regarded as one of the flashpoints in the world. It is one of the most sacred sites in Islam, and the site of King Soloman’s Temple. Since the 67 War and the illegal occupation of that portion of Jerusalem by the Israelis, there has been a deal. Prayers continued as normal in the mosque, and the Israelis could use the rest of the grounds including the Western Wall.
A couple of years ago, there was a round of missile fire and bombings, and it was set off by the Israeli invasions of the mosque so they could conduct their prayers there. That only ended in a cease-fire, not any sort of deal or agreement, thus both sides would have been preparing for the next round.
In the days before Oct. 7, there were more of the invasions into the mosque. These were large crowds of nearly 1000 people, protected by an also large police detachment in para-military gear. They went into the mosque, evicted the people trying to pray there, and held their own ceremonies. And just in case this was not provocation enough, they did it again the next day.
Surprisingly, the same acts that had started the last round of fighting, started this round as well. Surprise, Surprise, Surprise. Not surprisingly, barging into someone else’ place of worship and holding your own ceremonies there tends to lead to a fight.
The blind could see this one coming. The deaf could hear the thunder of the war drums.
It does help to read the ‘news’ from outside America. These days, with translation plugins, anyone can read almost any news site in the world.