Israel is intent on wiping the Palestinians and Gaza from the face of the earth, US indie investigative site The Grayzone claims in its latest documentary.
Fronted by the online site’s editor-in-chief, Max Blumenthal, Atrocity Inc: How Israel Sells its Destruction of Gaza lifts the lid on the sustained campaign of lies Israel has used to justify the wholescale destruction of Gaza and slaughter of 42,000-and-counting Palestinians (and now Lebanese too) since the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023.
Taking aim early
Blumenthal, an award-winning journalist and author, takes aim at the early, shocking claims that 40 babies were decapitated by Hamas fighters on 7 October. The story emerged within days of the attacks and made headlines around the world, with U.S. President Joe Biden even claiming to have seen photographic evidence of the atrocities.
The story helped fuel global disgust at Hamas – designated a terrorist organisation by a number of Western governments – and moral support for Israel internationally. Initially based upon the word of one Israeli Defence Force commander, later revealed to a leading figure in the extremist Israeli settler movement, there was one problem with the story: it simply was not true.
As Blumenthal demonstrates, having been amplified by what he calls the complicit mainstream international legacy press, only one baby was killed during that attacks, which killed around 1200 people (nearly half of which were Israeli military kibbutz guards), and that child was the victim of a gun-shot wound, not decapitation.
there was one problem with the story: it simply was not true.
A new story
When Israeli media outlets began to unpick the truth, the Israeli government ditched the story – although the images of Hamas fighters as «non-human savages» had already been embedded in the mainstream media. Soon, it had another story – again initially advanced by questionable sources from Israeli groups, including search and rescue organisation ZAKA and emergency medical outfit United Hatzalah, that rape and sexual violence were widespread during the attack. Western media and new channels unquestionably amplified stories of women being found with their breasts cut off and genitals desecrated. One key figure behind the claims even told reporters he has «used [his] imagination» to build a picture of what had happened in scenes he claimed to have witnessed.
Although there were verifiable accounts of sexual violence used by Hamas fighters on 7 October, the claims of widespread and systematic sexual violence simply did not hold up: they were even debunked by the family of one young woman killed during the attack, who said there was simply no sign on her body that she had been raped and burned, as some had claimed.
Blumenthal explicitly questions why the highly-trained fighters for Hamas, an armed group founded to fight against the decades of oppression and de facto forced mass imprisonment of Palestinians in Gaza, would allow themselves to be distracted from their primary aim: to kill what they see as the Israeli oppressors and seize hostages to use to gain concessions from the Israeli government.
Again, although subsequently largely debunked, the Israeli propaganda operation was effective in creating the impression that Hamas and all Palestinians, by extension, are animals intent only on savagery.
Israel did all it could to kick back as the facts began to emerge that systematic sexual violence was not a key aim of the Hamas attack, including releasing video of interrogations of Hamas prisoners, where they admitted rape. Although the videos flout Geneva Convention rules on the treatment of prisoners of war, that has not stopped powerful voices relying upon them to support Israel’s dubious propaganda claims: tech entrepreneur Sheryl Sandberg’s documentary Screams Before Silence relies upon the questionable videos as evidence in a film that takes its title from a New York Times report on the rapes and sexual violence of October 7, that has been comprehensively debunked.
Hannibal Directive
Blumenthal also shows how the Hannibal Directive – a secret Israeli policy of indiscriminately killing terrorists and their victims (i.e. Israeli citizens) to prevent members of the defence forces from being taken hostage, may have been deployed during the 7 October attack, raising the question of whether numbers of the dead were actually killed by the IDF itself. When Israeli helicopters were sent to attack Hamas at the scene of the Israeli rave, where many young people were killed or taken hostage, they were ordered to fire at any vehicles they believed contained Hamas fighters. It was impossible to know, so all vehicles fleeing the scene were fired on.
As Israel’s war against Hamas, its war against the Palestinians, spirals out of control a year after the 7 October attack, Blumenthal’s thesis that Israel is intent on ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and that whatever the Israelis accuse the other side of doing actually is a confession of what Israel itself is doing, becomes ever clearer.
