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March 12th, 2024 
Awake Goy 
First published by The Electronic Intifada, 11 March.
A new documentary by Al Jazeera’s investigative unit has found that many of the most horrific Israeli stories about the Palestinian military assault that began on 7 October were untrue.
“Misinformation has been used, and sometimes deliberate disinformation has been used by official spokespersons,” says one commentator quoted in the documentary, October 7.
The film was viewed by The Electronic Intifada ahead of its first broadcast this week. The video containing the full Al Jazeera documentary will be added to this page as soon as it becomes available on YouTube.
Although not the comprehensive investigation by international experts that many have called for, the documentary does confirm much of the reporting done about 7 October by a small group of independent journalists, who have debunked Israeli atrocity propaganda, at the cost of being smeared and attacked by corporate media.
The Electronic Intifada, The Grayzone, Mondoweiss and The Cradle have all found that many – if not most – of the 1,154 Israelis the government claims were killed by Palestinians were actually killed by Israel itself.
The documentary confirms The Electronic Intifada’s report from January that at midday on 7 October the Israeli army invoked the Hannibal Directive.
As explained in the documentary by Israeli historian Uri Bar-Joseph, “The Hannibal Directive is an informal protocol that says, we prefer that the soldier be killed than taken alive.”
As The Electronic Intifada reported in December, one Israeli air force colonel even described 7 October as a “mass Hannibal.” In its reactivated form, the doctrine seems to have been extended from soldiers to any Israelis, including civilians.
Al Jazeera’s investigative unit carried out a forensic analysis, examining seven hours of footage, much of it taken from the head cameras of dead Hamas fighters. It reviewed the testimonies of hundreds of survivors and compiled a comprehensive list of victims.
The investigation concludes that at least 27 of the Israeli prisoners in Palestinian captivity “died somewhere between their home and the Gaza fence in circumstances that have not been explained.”
It also finds that at least another 18 of the 782 Israeli and foreign civilians Israel says were killed in the assault were killed by Israeli ground troops.
While not reaching a definitive conclusion as to how many of the dead civilians were killed by Israel itself, it does say that, “A number of other bodies” that were recovered from beneath rubble were of those “who died in circumstances that are unclear.”
It does also mention the Israeli press reporting – as revealed in English by The Electronic Intifada in January– that 70 vehicles driven by Palestinian fighters returning to Gaza were blown up by Israeli helicopter gunships, drones or tanks.
These numbers should therefore be taken as a bare minimum in the absence of a comprehensive, credible and independent investigation of the events of 7 October.
It is likely given the documented use by Israel of heavy weapons such as tanks and combat helicopters on a large scale that the number of Israelis killed by their own forces is much higher.
Israel has however refused to allow an independent United Nations team to enter the country to carry out just such an investigation.
The investigative unit also collected footage from the kibbutzim – the Israeli settlements close to the boundary with Gaza that were assaulted by Hamas starting on 7 October.
The footage was of both the assault on the settlements as well as of the aftermath, as widely reported by the Israeli and international media.
Al Jazeera showed this footage to a military expert, former British artillery officer Chris Cobb-Smith.
Cobb-Smith concluded that much of the damage could not have been done by Hamas.
“All the footage I’ve seen of the Hamas assault across the border across the fence into the [kibbutzim], they’re pretty much only armed with light weapons,” he says in the documentary. “Rocket propelled grenades and personal sidearms.”
Shown footage from Kibbutz Be’eri and Kibbutz Kfar Azza, he said that such “catastrophic structural damage” was “clearly not caused by a structural collapse from a fire” and would have been “caused by some sort of heavy weapons system during combat. This catastrophic structural damage to many of these buildings, this can only have happened by heavy weapon systems being used against the kibbutz itself.”
Shown images of two holes in the wall of a kibbutz house, “I would say probably by some sort of heavy weapon fired against the house, most probably a tank,” he explained that “there’s no way an RPG would make that sort of damage.”
The documentary also supports some of The Electronic Intifada’s debunking of the Israeli government’s discredited “mass rape” atrocity propganda.
It notes that the recent UN report on the issue stated that the visual evidence it gathered provided “no tangible indications of rape” and says that this was “a conclusion supported by the [Al Jazeera Investigative] Unit’s own analysis of footage and photographs.”
The report, led by Pramila Patten, helped Israel and The New York Times launder its atrocity propaganda through the UN system.
But contrary to much media spin, the Patten report further exposes the claims of systematic sexual violence as a fraud.
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