The October 7, 2023 Hamas Attacks: Atrocities or Atrocity Propaganda?

 

By David Starr

 

The Israeli government, media and military have used shrill accusations against Hamas for committing atrocities in its October 7 attacks. The accusations are strictly B/W, with Hamas killing civilians, decapitating babies’ heads and using rape as a weapon. While it’s true that Hamas didn’t go into southern Israel with any peace offerings, and the attacks were tragic, Israel makes claims that are at the least, questionable. At the most, lies and half-truths.

 

Writing for The Times of Israel, Gianluka Pacchiani’s article comes off sounding like Israel’s accusations. Pacchiani implies that a Palestinian diplomat is in denial or being deceptive when claiming that no Israeli civilians were killed in the attacks, with the diplomat “dismissing the overwhelming evidence that Hamas’s slaughter of 1,200 in southern Israel included indiscriminate massacres and sexual violence.” Overwhelming evidence. This has been said before by pro-Israel supporters.

 

Pacchiani probably gets it right when asserting that most Palestinians accepted the claim that Hamas did not commit atrocities, “over 90 percent of” them.  This according to a poll conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research. Pacchiani’s main focus is on the influence TV news has in leading the public, in this case Palestinians, to draw false conclusions. One way is to omit information in the Arab media. Pacchiani goes further and writes that there is “incontrovertible evidence” of Hamas atrocities.

 

However, writing in Mondoweiss, the Nick Burbank collective states that evidence from Israel about atrocities is not exactly overwhelming. There are ‘major discrepancies.’” Burbank writes that “…several horrifying stories first responders and [Israeli Defense Force or IDF] members initially told reporters do not reflect actual people or deaths. The IDF itself has said that it cannot confirm some of its own reporting.” So, it’s not as B/W as Pacchiani makes it out to be.

 

In an ironic twist, Pacchiani’s writing of Palestinians being influenced by Arab media has happened in Israeli media. Israelis who initially protested Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, then condemned Palestinians for being “irredeemable.” Burbank asserts that “many of the stories used to justify ongoing violence in Gaza are just that: stories.” 

 

Burbank is a pseudonym for a research group that produced Oct7FactCheck.com, which investigated these stories. The collective is made up of “an Ivy League law student, a policy graduate student, two intelligence analysts, a U.S. armed services veteran, and a tech entrepreneur.” It first identified where a claim is given, who promoted it, and if concluding evidence showed that the claim was false. There were 12 claims which the research group made conclusions on, and an accusation of weaponized rape perpetrated by Hamas which was published in the New York Times. But the NYT has been reinvestigating the accusation.

 

According to Burbank, “There were no babies hung on clotheslines. There were no babies beheaded, no pregnant women with their stomachs cut open.” Further, Burbank writes that a Guardian article that published this accusation had the same, exact wording as an article published in December 2023 in another publication. And that publication was the New York Times. The NYT, however, got “pushback” from one of the “victims” who said that weaponized rape was not used against her. The family of the “victim” had their say in the NYT.

 

Pacchiani quotes a source who made only an assumption of what happened, without providing evidence. The quote came from Michael Milshstein, who is the head of the Forum for Palestinians Studies at the Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University. It was regarding film footage Hamas made showing the attacks. “Hamas filmed everything, and the videos were widely circulated. I say this with caution, but I think everyone knows what happened.”

 

Pacchiani claims that the “Footage of the savagery against civilians, which has been broadcast elsewhere, has largely been absent in the Arab media.” He adds, “that civilians were brutally targeted for slaughter, to say nothing of the evidence of mutilation, rape and other atrocities.” What is not mentioned is that 55% of those killed were military personnel. Still, 45% of civilians killed is of course tragic. Pacchiani, however, makes bold assertions as is typical of the Western and Israeli media and governments.

 

Burbank, meanwhile, asserts the following: 

 

“Over the last four months, claims about October 7 have influenced the public narrative. Stories of atrocity, sometimes cobbled together from unreliable witnesses, sometimes fabricated entirely, have made their way to heads of state and been used to justify Israel’s military violence.”

 

Burbank further asserts, “As a result, 85% of Gaza is displaced. More than 26,000 Palestinians, including over 10,000 children, have been killed, and nearly as three as many people have been injured. 70% of Gazan homes are flattened. Over 100 journalists have been killed. Every university in Gaza is now destroyed.”

 

One policy the IDF has been using is called the “Hannibal Directive.” It’s an order where soldiers attempt to prevent a hostage situation but to the point where even the hostages are killed, if necessary. Burbank gives an example, writing that in Be’eri, “a kibbutz,” the IDF killed about 13 hostages, firing two tank shells into a house where militants and hostages were present. The IDF knew that hostages were in there; and the shelling occurred while there were hostage negotiations going on.

 

Pacchiani and others in the Western and Israeli media have called or implied that Hamas is a terrorist group. But what is Hamas? Al Jazeera published a guide on who or what Hamas is. The name Hamas stands for the Islamic Resistance Movement, which has politically been in power in Gaza since 2007. 

 

According to Al Jazeera, “The Hamas movement was founded in Gaza in 1987…shortly after the first Intifada, an uprising against Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories.” One positive thing Hamas has done is offer “social welfare programs to Palestinian victims of the Israeli occupation.” 

 

Hamas does not recognize Israel as a country but supports a Palestinian nation based on the 1967 borders that were intact before the Six Day War between Israel and Arab countries. 

 

“Hamas violently opposes the Oslo peace accords negotiated by Israel and the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization] in the mid-1990s.” And Hamas is committed to establishing a nation within its own borders. To achieve this, it has conducted “attacks on Israeli soldiers, settlers and civilians both in the occupied Palestinian territories and in Israel.”

 

Because of its utilization of armed struggle, “the group as a whole or in some instances its military wing is designated as a ‘terrorist’ organization by Israel, the United States, European Union, Canada, Egypt and Japan.” Thus, Hamas is condemned for using violence, but Israel’s response to the October 7 attacks has been far worse. Comparing 1,200 Israelis killed as opposed to about 26,000 Palestinians killed makes this obvious.

 

While Hamas may be religiously fanatical, so is Israel’s right-wing government. But the latter’s accusations have been more Orwellian and hypocritical. Nevertheless, religious fanaticism has been used as a weapon to further fuel violence in the Israel-Palestine conflict.