In Part 1 we looked at the official account of the October 7th Hamas Attack. In Part 2 we examined the official narrative claiming the attack came as a complete surprise to the Israeli authorities who, as a result, were not prepared to defend the people living, working and partying on the Israeli side of the “Iron Wall.”
In Part 1 we remarked on Hamas’ incredible military feat. Hamas—primarily the Hamas’ al-Qassam Brigades and its elite Nukhba Squads, plus a contingent of Islamic Jihad’s al-Quds Brigades—breached the Iron Wall in 29 locations simultaneously. They took out all the automated defences and vital observation and early warning systems, and then proceeded to overrun and hold key military installations. Hamas took the Erez Crossing, the Nahal Oz military base, the Sufa outpost, and the IDF bases close to the Be’eri and Kerem Shalom kibbutzim. The most strategically important base they held was the Re’im military base—home to the primary Israeli defensive force in the region, the IDF Gaza Division.
As we noted in Part 2, even Hamas was supposedly “surprised” by the relative ease with which it took and held these crucial Israeli military positions. There are three stories that have been offered to allegedly account for this.
- Hamas was supposedly able to conduct extensive reconnaissance and thoroughly prepared for their operation without any interference from either Israeli intelligence or the Israeli military.
- Israeli intelligence “failed” so comprehensively—for more than two years—that Israeli officials had no idea what Hamas was planning, were taken by complete surprise and were thus unprepared to defend the southern Gaza border region.
- With the Iron Wall in place, Israeli planners believed Hamas was contained and therefore redeployed the vast bulk of assets defending the southern border region to the West Bank, thereby leaving communities close to Gaza undefended by any significant IDF presence.
A Very Dubious Narrative
We have already discussed why the contention that Israeli intelligence “failed,” to the extent suggested, is preposterous. Indeed, so extensive was the relevant intelligence that the Israeli authorities were known to have had in their possession that the offered official explanation of “failure,” to account for Israeli inaction, is not tenable.
What the evidence shows is not that the intelligence wasn’t gathered or that the alarm was’t raised, but that senior officials ignored it. It is not unreasonable to speculate that this was a deliberate decision. Logically, this can only have been taken at the highest level. Further evidence strengthens that contention.
Following the Hamas Attack, the Doha Institute Unit of State & Political Systems Studies trotted out the official line of Israeli intelligence “failures,” stating in their report:
The [Israeli] Military Intelligence Directorate (Aman) and the Israeli Security Agency (Shin Bet) failed to anticipate or even obtain any intelligence about the operation.
Saying Israeli officials didn’t “obtain any intelligence about the operation” was false (see Part 2) and did not constitute any kind of “analysis.” The Doha Institute was clearly peddling an agreed propaganda line. It continued:
The second major failure is represented in the wall that Israel built around Gaza. [. . .] The Israelis had comfortably assumed it would be enough to prevent Palestinian fighters from penetrating the occupied land, but they were able to cross through it in large numbers and reach more than 20 locations.
The notion that the Israeli government believed the “Iron Wall” would contain Hamas is the central pillar of the “failure” propaganda narrative. Numerous media outlets have pushed the idea that Israeli intelligence and defence strategists thought the Iron Wall would protect Israel “from an army of terrorists.”
The so-called Iron Wall was not designed to defend Israel against a large-scale assault. It was designed to pen Palestinians inside Gaza and as an early warning system to give the IDF an opportunity to respond should an attack occur.
In 2018, Saar Koursh, CEO of Magal Security Systems, which built the Iron Wall, told journalists that it would take only about thirty seconds to cross the barrier if it was attacked in sufficient numbers. He said the purpose of the Iron Wall “fence” was “to give real-time indication if somebody was trying to cross the border.”
To contend, as the propagandist do, that the entire Israeli intelligence and defence community thought the Iron Wall fence was a fortified barrier capable of stopping a mass assault—when the people who built it openly said it wasn’t—is so silly it beggars belief that anyone ever falls for this pabulum. Nonetheless, it is by claiming that the Israeli government seriously believed the Iron Wall would stop Hamas that all the other absurd “failures”—such as ignoring all intelligence and scaling back defences—are supposedly explained.
Following the initial breech of the Iron Wall, the Israeli response was purportedly stymied because Hamas took out all of the early warning and communication systems. Apparently, Israeli commanders only slowly came to realise the scale of the Hamas Attack. But even when they did, the response was just as bungled as all the other “failures.” Haaratz reported:
[T]he IDF began to send a stream of battalions and elite units to help locate and kill the terrorists, but did not prepare appropriately in terms of troop transport. Despite thousands of regular and reserve forces being summoned urgently, the military didn’t prepare with organized buses to take the soldiers to the gathering points. Thus, for long hours, troops awaited rides to take them to the Gaza Perimeter and their units. In most cases they had to use the help of family or friends in order to make it.
But the Southern Command, overseeing the regional defences near the Gaza border, had prepared appropriately—extensively in fact. In December 2021 it mobilised more than 3,500 IDF reservists to join a large-scale rapid deployment of IDF forces in the region.
Following successful completion of the combat drill, IDF Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Aviv Kochavi said how impressed he was by the results. He added that the exercise demonstrated the IDF’s “capabilities and high competence in transporting forces and weapons, [and of] deploying the logistics network and providing combat equipment.”
In December 2022, a software glitch in the IDF mobilisations alert system accidentally called tens of thousands of IDF reservists to duty in the middle of the night. Yet, when Hamas Attacked on October 7th, we are expected to believe that none of these systems worked for most of the day and no one in command had a clear picture of what was happening. Did every Israeli satellite and surveillance drone simultaneously fail? Did Hamas not only take out all communications on the “Iron Wall” but every telecom-network in Israel too?
On October 8th—the day after the Hamas Attack—the Israeli government sent threatening text messages to thousands of Palestinians living in Gaza. The idea that Israeli-to-Israeli communication systems failed almost completely for hours on October 7th yet, by October 8th, Israel retained the capability to communicate en masse with Palestinians is very difficult to accept.
Equally, all the preparedness training exercises conducted by Southern Command prior to the Hamas Attack proved a waste of time. When an IDF logistical response was actually needed, the IDF could not even lay on a few buses. Or so we are supposed to believe.
The propaganda narratives associated with any event—because they are made up—shift over time. When, in February 2025, the IDF published its report on the numerous simultaneous Israeli “failures,” international media outlets, such as the UK Daily Telegraph—whose MI6 operatives brought us the Iraqi WMD propaganda lie—provided us with their very trustworthy reports of the IDF’s official truth. The fact that many aspects of the IDF’s inquiry findings were largely unrecognisable from the accounts originally given wasn’t mentioned.
By February 2025, Hamas were said to have been planning for seven years and the numbers involved had increase to more than 5,000 “terrorists.” IDF forces from Southern Command bad been moved to the Lebanese border, rather than the West Bank as originally reported. Despite the changes to the story, some consistencies remained. Israeli strategists were “comprehensively duped” and wrongly imagined the Iron Wall would keep Israeli settler communities “safe.” These false assumptions led commanders to leave just “four battalions” defending the entire border which explains why “the IDF’s Gaza division was ‘overwhelmed’ for much of the day.”
Frankly, the IDF’s apparent willingness to conduct any kind of inquiry is surprising. When, in the immediate aftermath of the Hamas Attack, IDF operatives—including relatively senior IDF officers—tried to access standard recordings of IDF communications to ascertain what might have gone wrong, they found their normal security clearance had been rescinded and they couldn’t do their jobs.
Noting that the “recordings are vital, as they provide a comprehensive account of what transpired,” IDF sources told the Jerusalem Post:
Some of the recordings have either disappeared or were simply downloaded from the network and relocated under the directives of commanding officers. Consequently, we are unable to access them. [. . .] It seems that someone made a deliberate choice to either transfer or delete these recordings to ensure that no one could listen to them.
IDF command cleared up any misunderstanding by posting on social media that the recordings were “preserved and accessible to the relevant parties” but that both video and audio recordings had been “blocked to those who are not required to deal with them.” Hitherto, the IDF soldiers who initially tried to access the recording had been “required” to conduct that analysis, only to find they were no longer the “relevant parties.”
Evidently, senior Israeli officials did not want to investigate anything nor try to identify any “failures” at the time. Though they subsequently changed their minds and published their inquiry report more than a year later.
The Questionable Attribution of Fatalities
To bolster the Israeli official narrative about everything that happened on October 7th 2023, Israeli officials showed previously “unseen” footage to selected journalists. The videos reportedly included images of burned civilian corpses and the IDF Media team asserted that Hamas “terrorists” had raped, tortured and incinerated victims.
While most Western legacy media journalists dutifully reported what they thought they had seen, some expressed reservations. Nicolas Coadou, a French journalist for BFN TV, was aware that the IDF had carefully edited the footage to show only “what they [the IDF] want to show.”
While we cannot know precisely what was revealed to Coadou and other journalists, he was right to be skeptical. Matt Guertin has produced convincing video analysis that show much of the footage circulating in the first few days following the Hamas Attack—especially that shown on various news channels around the world—was manipulated using AI.
That said, Hamas also posted its own videos showing graphic images of both Israeli military and civilian dead. Clearly, not all the footage was faked.
The deputy head of Hamas’ political bureau, Saleh al-Aruri, said that the al-Qassam brigades did not target civilians and acted in accordance with international law. But Hamas’ own filming and its admitted history of targeting Israeli civilians indicates many involved in the Hamas Attack—though possibly not members of the al-Qassam brigades—were acting without any such restraint. The suggestion made by some commentators that Hamas conducted an entirely professional military operation and did not stray into killing innocent Israeli civilians is just as ridiculous and egregious as Israeli propaganda.
The considerable evidence of charred remains does, however, require further explanation. Hamas Brigades and its allies certainly formed a well–armed force. Nevertheless, video evidence only shows Hamas forces using small arms—automatic weapons and hand grenades and RPGs—they didn’t appear to have much in terms of heavy weaponry.
The IDF initially said the heaviest weapon Hamas used consisted of rocket propelled grenades (RPGs), Shawaz anti-tank missiles, and there were some reports of them using kornet anti-tanks missiles. The use of thermobaric grenades during the Hamas Attack supposedly accounts for the charred remains.
Hamas is not known to have any significant artillery and the IDF’s own reports at the time suggest Hamas came prepared to fight Israeli armour rather than blow up buildings. Yet, at places like Kibbutz Nir Oz, there was an enormous amount of damage to buildings, to the extent that some had been blown to pieces or completely incinerated. This is possibly consistent with very heavy rocket fire or the liberal use of explosives, or perhaps thermobaric hand grenades by Hamas, but it is also consistent with artillery shelling or the use of missiles.
There is photographic and video evidence from Kfar Aza showing the clear signs of concentrated small arms fire. Yet media reports also show completely destroyed dwellings that appear to have been shelled. There is considerable reason to suspect that this was caused by Israeli forces rather than Hamas alone.
Only two people reportedly survived the massacre at Kibbutz Be’eri. A Kibbutzim security team member named Tuval Escapa, coordinated communication with the IDF when they arrived. He told journalists:
[T]he [IDF] commanders in the field made difficult decisions — including shelling houses on their occupants in order to eliminate the terrorists without knowing whether the Israelis [hostages] in those buildings were alive or dead.
On 15th October, Israeli state-owned radio broadcaster Kan 11 aired an interview with one of the Kibbutz Be’eri survivors—Yasmin Porat. Her account, like Escapa’s, casts significant doubt on who was responsible for most of the deaths. Porat said Israeli civilians were killed by Israeli forces. In her words: “[T]hey [the IDF] fired on everyone there, including the hostages.”
In a longer interview with Kan 11 radio, given on 15th November, Porat’s account remained consistent and she added further detail:
For three hours I am at a very intense battle, but now I am on the side of the supposed good guys. [. . .] At a certain point a tank arrives at the house. I think it was about 19:00hrs or 19:30. [. . .] I think to myself why are they shooting tank shells at the house [Kibbutzim]. The girl [12-year-old Liel Hatsroni] did not stop screaming all those hours [but] when those two shells hit she stopped screaming. [. . .] That is pretty much when everyone died. [. . .] I estimate, based on what happened in other houses, she [Liel Hatsroni] apparently burnt completely. [. . .] The house [Kibbutz] is burned full of people.
As we reported in Part 1, the official Israeli fatality count from the Hamas Attack is 1,195. This figure represents a significant reduction from the 1,400 first reported. Clarifying Israel’s official position, in November 2023, Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev said:
We originally [. . .] had the number at 1,400 casualties and now we’ve revised that down to 1,200 because we understood that we’d overestimated, we made a mistake. There were actually bodies that were so badly burnt we thought they were ours, in the end apparently they were Hamas terrorists.
Unless Hamas “terrorists” were killing each other, more than 14% of all casualties—initially reported as Hamas’ victims—were incinerated by Israeli forces. Yet the official Israeli account maintains that all other incinerated corpses—shown to the world’s media—were burned beyond recognition by Hamas.
As we also noted in Part 1, the IDF stated there were an “immense” quantity of so-called “friendly fire” incidents yet, to date, there has been no meaningful investigation of any of them. What has been presented instead are shifting narratives and what appear to be IDF cover-ups.
Other than the attack on the Re’im (Nova) music festival, the destruction of vehicles and the murder of civilians, many of them fleeing the festival, along Route 232 was a cornerstone of the official Israeli narrative. Israeli reports said “dozens of cars were parked in rows, some of them burnt husks containing charred bodies of young festival-goers who were shot and burned alive.” Matt Guertin’s AI manipulation evidence (referenced above) brings much of the Route 232 footage into question. We might also wonder why people fleeing “terrorists” would have “parked in rows.”
Again, the observed destruction along Route 232 is also consistent with heavy bombardment, a capability Hamas did not possess. Given that Southern Command ground-forces were so thinly spread, the first Israeli response came from IDF ground attack helicopters which were dispatched to shoot the “terrorists.”
According to a Ynet report published on 15th October, IDF officials indicated:
[The] pilots realized that there was tremendous difficulty in distinguishing [. . .] who was a terrorist and who was a soldier or civilian, [so] a decision was made that the first task of the combat helicopters [. . .] was to stop the flow of terrorists[. . . .] 28 combat helicopters fired all the ammunition in their bellies throughout the fighting day. [There were] hundreds of 30mm cannon shells (the effect of a spray grenade for each shell) as well as Hellfire missiles. The rate of fire against the thousands of terrorists was tremendous at first, and only at a certain point did the pilots begin to slow down the attacks and carefully select the target[.]
In its totality, the evidence clearly suggests that there genuinely were an “immense” number of Israeli’s killed by their own forces. As in the Ynet report (above), this was typically attributed to “the fog of war.”
That said, only an idiot would discount the propaganda value to the Israeli state of a high civilian body-count. The evidence strongly indicates that, at the very least, the Hamas Attack was allowed to proceed by wilfully ignoring all the warnings and reducing defences to virtually a symbolic gesture. This indicates that the Hamas Attack constituted a “Let It Happen On Purpose” (LIHOP) false flag terror attack orchestrated by the Israeli government or elements within the Israeli government.
Events at the Re’im (Nova) music festival, coupled with the large number of casualties evidently attributable to Israeli “friendly-fire,” further suggests that this LIHOP false flag became, at points, a “Make It Happen On Purpose” (MIHOP) Israeli false flag.
The Nonsensical Re’im Festival Narrative
The attack on the Re’im music festival was the centerpiece of the official Israeli narrative about the Hamas Attack. The murder of 344 civilians and 34 security personnel represented the single greatest loss of life at any one location. The indiscriminate killing of many young people reportedly exemplified the barbarity of the attack. Again, Matt Guertin has provided clear evidence of manipulated festival video footage reported by the world’s media after the event.
But this post-massacre propaganda effort is far from the only reason to question the official Israeli account. We have been told a story which, when examined, makes no sense.
The Re’im military base was obviously and understandably a key Hamas objective. It housed the region HQ of the HaKirya (Israeli counterpart to the US Pentagon), it was the place from which all regional defences were coordinated, and it was the Gaza Division’s base. We are told that around 120 al-Qassam Brigade Nukhba special forces troops attacked the Re’im base prior to 07:30 on 7th October 2023.
According to the IDF, Hamas stumbled upon the music festival by chance. But, as we discussed in Part 2, the IDF also says that Hamas conducted extensive drone surveillance of the Re’im base in the days leading up to the attack. Somehow, Hamas didn’t spot the massive rave just a couple of kilometers north of the base they were allegedly surveilling from the air.
One of the primary reason the IDF initially gave for concluding that Hamas didn’t know the festival was a potential target was that the first terrorists approached the festival along Route 232 and not across the open land from the Gaza border. According to the IDF investigation, Hamas was heading to Netivot but made a wrong turn at Shokeda Junction and ended up at the festival site. The official account, then, is that the first Hamas attackers arrived at the festival, because they were lost, along Route 232 from the north.
The BBC was among many media outlets to report that Hamas gunmen were shooting at vehicles and attacking civilians at 07.39 and 07:56 hrs, between 1.5km – 2.5km south of the festival. But these are not, apparently, the Hamas terrorists who first attacked the festival site.
Reportedly, the revellers started running from the festival by fleeing eastward, across Route 232, as soon as rocket sirens were sounded at approximately 07:00hrs. These people were running away from the festival car park, so its seems unlikely any of them drove their cars to escape either northbound or southbound along Route 232.
Hamas fighters arriving from the north were said to have engaged with armed Israeli police on Route 232 at 08:30, on the northern edge of the festival site. Therefore—if the official IDF account is true—the first Hamas fighters to reach the festival can’t have gained access much before 08:30. This means they arrived more than an hour after people started fleeing the festival.
The Hamas “terrorists” approaching the festival from the south were moving away from the Re’im military base. They can’t have known about the festival because their comrades in the north hadn’t “stumbled across it” yet.
As part of it’s inquiry into the failures, the Jerusalem Post reported that the IDF judged the Re’im base to have been practically defeated as early a 07:00. Apparently, for some totally inexplicable reason, no one at the Re’im base bothered to tell anyone else about the loss until 09:47.
This means those Hamas fighters moving northward along Route 232 were not needed to secure the Re’im base as early as 07.39. No target can have been more crucial to Hamas than the base. Seemingly, it fell into Hamas hands without any resistance whatsoever, despite reports of the so-called “battle of Re’im.” Equally, as Hamas didn’t know about the festival, it wasn’t a target at all.
What followed was the most incredible ad hoc military operation ever conducted by anyone. If the official Israeli account is to be believed.
The Washington Post reported systematic killing by Hamas when its units overran the entire festival area and opened fire into the crowd—though the partygoers had largely disbursed following an air raid siren at least an hour earlier. Hamas grabbed as many hostages as possible, blocked roads, ambushed escaping cars and launched multiple search and destroy missions. According to the Post, Hamas was hunting for the festival-goers who were scattered across a wide area and ended up killing more than 350 people—civilians, security and police—with small arms and grenades.
This was a remarkable feat of spontaneous military organisation. The official Israeli account also has it that Hamas was focused on attacking static Kibbutzim and a crucial military bases. Hamas had not planned to chase thousands of people fleeing a party in all directions across the countryside. Yet Hamas managed, not only to achieve its main objectives—taking the region’s kibbutzes and the Re’im base—but also to defeat armed units it didn’t know existed—armed police at the festival—and orchestrate a highly complex, multi-faceted mobile operation that involved attacking an enormous number of scattered, moving targets it wasn’t expecting to encounter.
Though quite astounding, perhaps this merely indicates Hamas’ ability to adapt, but the questionable anomalies keep piling up. A former IDF soldier and surviving eyewitness from the festival told reporters:
We drove into the field and tried to hide from them [Hamas] [. . .] Afterwards we got a bit deeper into the fields and then they started firing sniper rifles on us from different places and also heavy artillery.
Whose heavy artillery? Where was Hamas firing heavy artillery from if the heaviest weapons in its possession were Shawaz anti-tank missiles?
Another survivor Raziel Tamir, gave a quite extraordinary eyewitness account:
Hamas terrorists were masquerading as IDF rescue forces, during the bloodbath, tricking Israelis into thinking they were running toward their saviours only to be gunned down instead.
If Hamas fighters knew nothing about the festival until they stumbled upon it, how did they have the foresight to bring Israeli disguises with them to the massacre? Of course, this is just one eyewitness testimony but there are further reason to believe that Tamir saw people who looked like IDF troops killing civilians.
Early reports said Hamas fighters disguised themselves as the IDF. Raziel Tamir wasn’t the only eyewitness to have seen people who looked like IDF soldiers that were seemingly joining in the Hamas attack. The IDF’s own public relations team reported that troops that looked like IDF were engaged is gun battles with other, presumably real IDF units. Like so many other contemporaneous reports, these accounts have now been memory-holed.
Article 37 of the Geneva Convention makes it a war crime for Hamas, if they did, to have disguised themselves in this manner. While the problem for the Israeli government in making this charge is that it would have to treat Hamas as an enemy combatant, rather than a proscribed terrorist group, nonetheless, you would have expected the IDF’s public relations team to have made a great deal out of this apparent deception. Yet, other than those initial October 7th reports of people wearing IDF uniforms killing civilians—and the IDF seemingly fighting the IDF—there has been no further discussion on the subject.
Neither the IDF’s own investigation nor the United Nation’s subsequent June 2024 investigative report into the October 7th attack makes any mention of Hamas dressing up as the IDF. Though the UN does note:
The Commission documented strong indications that the ‘Hannibal Directive’ was used in several instances on 7 October, harming Israelis at the same time as striking Palestinian militants.
We know from the IDF’s inquiry report that a mass “Hannibal protocol” was in effect and there were an “immense” amount of Israeli civilian deaths at the hands if Israeli forces. Civilians, police officers and IDF personnel alike were said to have been killed in the confusing “fog of war.”
While it seems utterly unbelievable, there is quite clearly evidence to suggest that this accidental slaughter could be attributable, not just to Israeli helicopter gunships and tanks, but to IDF units at the Re’im festival and elsewhere. If so, was this merely the result of panic? Certainly, Raziel Tamir’s eyewitness accounts suggests not.
IDF Extremists
Israeli propaganda at the time of the Hamas Attack, and in the days that followed, was often so extreme it was almost immediately identifiable as propaganda by anyone with even a passing interested the subject. Israeli i24 News “journalist” Nicole Zedeck was the first to claim that Hamas had chopped children’s and babies’ heads off at the Kfar Aza Kibbutz. Many other propaganda outlets, like CNN and the BBC, repeated this bilge without question, but it was the fact that US President Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu quickly spread the same dross that gives us an insight into how atrocity propaganda is supposed to work.
It was later admitted that 10-month-old Mila Cohen was the only baby known to have been killed during the Hamas attack. Sadly, Mila died at Kibbutz Be’eri and it is entirely possible, if not likely, that she too was killed by the IDF (see above).
Zedeck got her initial beheading propaganda from a Deputy Commander in IDF Unit 71 called David Ben Zion. Unit 71 was among the first IDF units to arrive at the Kfar Aza Kibbutz. In addition to serving in Unit 71, Ben Zion was the leader of the Shomron Regional Council of 35 illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
The Council and Ben Zion were implicated in an attack on the Palestinian town of Huwara in February 2023. On that occasion, the murder of one Palestinian reportedly made the total of 65 murdered Palestinians, including 13 children, killed by the Israeli security forces and illegal settlers in the first two months of 2023. Prior to the killing and house burning, Ben Zion posted on social media that “the village of Huwara should be erased today. [. . .] There is no room for mercy.”
Ben Zion received direct political support for his actions from powerful ultra-Zionist leaders in the Knesset, including from Itamar Ben-Gvir and rival fascist leader Bezalel Yoel Smotrich. Smotrich said the Israeli state should “wipe out” the 7,000 Palestinian residents of Huwara and not simply leave that task to “civilians,” such as Ben Zion. Safe to say, David Ben Zion is a prominent ultra-Zionist extremist who is networked with the ultra-Zionist movement that extends across Israel.
These people are not averse to killing children to achieve their political objectives. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that some of the IDF units operating that day, perhaps especially those first on the scene, contained a number of ultra-Zionist extremists willing to kill indiscriminately to maximise civilian casualties for propaganda purposes.
Only a full, independent investigations can answer the questions raised in these three articles. Unfortunately, very few are even willing to ask the questions.
Read the full article here