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April 24, 2024 - Jim Fetzer
22:54
"October 7 The Lies" by Richard Sanders and Al Jazeera Investigations
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Time Text
*music*
In the days following October 7, journalists are shown around the Kibbutzim by the Israeli army.
*music* This is something that monsters do, not humans.
Hamas fighters and others committed crimes on October 7.
The Israeli media, however, focuses not on the crimes they committed, but on crimes they did not.
I'm talking to some of the soldiers and they say what they've witnessed as they've been walking through these different houses, these different communities, babies, their heads cut off.
That's what they said.
No one could expect that it would be like this, the horrors that I'm hearing from these soldiers.
As I mentioned earlier, about 40 babies at least were taken out on gurneys.
The I-Unit's list of the dead shows no babies were killed in Kfar Azar, the kibbutz this report came from.
The story was nevertheless picked up by international media and repeated by President Biden.
I've been doing this a long time.
I never really thought that I would see and have confirmed pictures of terrorists beheading children.
The White House later clarifies that actually, the President had not seen pictures of beheaded children.
A senior Israeli military officer later speaks to journalists in front of a burnt-out house in Kibbutz Beri.
It's the house where 12 hostages appear to have been killed during the assault by the Israeli police and army.
Inside this house were another 15 burned people.
Among them, eight babies.
In this corner.
They were concentrated them, and they killed them, and they burned them.
Did you see?
I evacuated.
The list of the dead shows that there were no babies in the house.
And Colonel Vach does not tell journalists that the casualties are almost certainly caused by Israeli forces.
Two days later, the regional head of Zaka, a voluntary organization charged with collecting bodies, gives a different account to Sky News of what happened at the same house.
Any talking children, two piles of ten children each, were tied to the back, Burned to death.
This is something behind this is next level.
And I mean, it's actually indescribable.
It's indescribable.
It's indescribable and I won't describe everything that I saw.
This account is repeated by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a conversation with President Biden.
They took dozens of children, bound them up, burned them, and executed them.
The list of the dead shows two 12-year-old twins are killed when police and army stormed the house in Berri.
But there are no other children.
It was an interview we did with Sky Television from Britain.
Two piles, we found them in Bury.
Two piles of ten children each were tied back to back and burned to death.
Now again, if we look at the death figures at Bury, there are only ten children that died at Bury.
Well, not children, but it's 18-year-old.
So, all together, when you look at them and they're burned, you don't know exactly the ages.
So, you're talking about 18-year-old, 20-years-old, and you can't, you can't, you just don't look on the spot identification to see the ages or something like that.
It is not the only questionable story that Yossi Landau tells about kibbutz Berri.
We go further.
Then we see a woman.
She was lying on the floor, a puddle of blood, a big puddle of blood.
She was a pregnant woman.
Her stomach was butchered open. - The baby that was connected to the cord was stabbed.
And she was shot in the back.
Kibbutz Berri has denied this account.
The story of the pregnant woman reported by Zaka is not relevant to Berri.
Yossi Landau insists he witnessed this scene at Berri.
If you want to see the picture, I have the picture of it.
Are you able to share the photographic evidence with us?
Yes, to show you.
Yes.
Where's my phone?
Oh, I'm sorry.
I will not put it in front of the camera.
No, no, that's fine.
I'll come and look.
This is the knife they used.
Over here was the woman.
But that's the imagery after the bodies had been cleared away.
Yes.
This is the baby.
This is it.
I'm sorry to be graphic here, but I can't see a baby here.
You can't see the baby because... But this is the picture of the mother.
For sure, you know, we didn't think when we were over there, we didn't think to camera everything.
We didn't have that.
This wasn't an hour.
The photo shows an unidentifiable piece of charred flesh.
The list of the dead contains no victim that fits Yossi Landau's description.
On October 7th, two babies die.
One is killed when a bullet is fired through a door.
The other dies following an emergency caesarean after the mother is shot.
Neither is burned or beheaded.
You being someone who, with your own hands, with your own eyes, with your nose, you smelled this.
What would you say to that person who was downplaying what took place here?
I wouldn't say anything.
I would ask, please give me, he should be together with the Hamas terrorists and he should be killed.
Because he's a part of it.
Visiting celebrities continue to be shown babies' cribs, and the world continues to be told stories about murdered babies.
When you're taking babies, cutting them and tying them together and burning them to death, you're treating them less than an animal.
1,300 people dead.
Murdered babies.
These bastards put these babies in an oven and put on the oven.
We found the kid a few hours later.
U.S.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken describes the fate of two small children.
A family of four, a young boy and girl, six and eight years old, and their parents around the breakfast table.
The father has eye gouged out in front of his kids.
The mother's breast cut off.
The girl's foot amputated.
The boy's fingers cut off before they were executed.
And then their executioner sat down and had a meal.
That's what this society is dealing with.
This story also comes from Yossi Landau and Zaka.
An analysis of the evidence suggests that it is also untrue.
Of the 782 unarmed victims of October 7, 36 are children, 13 under the age of 12.
None died in the circumstances described by Anthony Blinken.
Media analyst Mark Owen-Jones tracks the spread of such stories on the internet.
He believes they serve a purpose.
So how, as Israel, do you create that balance in sort of saying, well, what we're doing is morally right, even though we're killing way more people?
Well, you have to emphasize the brutality, because you can't say, well, we've killed less than Hamas.
So how do you do it?
Well, you try to make the significance of those individual deaths even more disgusting and objectionable.
If you can activate people's sense of disgust, I think they're more likely to support, for example, dire retribution against Palestinians.
In December, Benjamin Netanyahu meets with Zaka volunteers and thanks them for speaking to the world's press.
But we need to make time.
We use time for the rights of the owners and the owners.
There is a very important issue for the owners who are responsible for the owners.
It's not just stories of murdered babies and children that are open to question.
Israel's head of forensics describes to Sky News the state of adult corpses he's examined.
So many bodies were shot, but before they were shot, they were cuffed.
So it's execution style.
You can see stab wounds here, at the back and on the head.
And if you do CT, you can see that the pelvis is shattered.
These are bullets inside.
So he was shot, he was stabbed, he was burned, and then he was run over.
The Israelis say they recovered numerous bodies mutilated by Hamas fighters and others.
But the evidence suggests some, at least, may not be Israelis.
In the aftermath of October 7, large numbers of videos of the abuse and mutilation of Palestinian corpses are posted online.
Amid, this is how you feel.
This is how you feel, Amid.
Come on.
The Israeli government later admits that 200 of the bodies initially identified as Israelis were in fact Palestinians.
We originally said in the atrocious Hamas attack on our people, on October 7th, we had the number at 1,400 casualties.
And now we've revised that down to 1,200 because we understood that we had 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.
There's a lot of evidence out there that's been produced by the Israelis, which is either contradictory or potentially self-harming.
If people were saying, oh, actually, we went through the different bodies and we realized some of the burned bodies were actually Palestinians and they weren't our civilians, that begs the question, why were they burned and who burned them?
How were they mutilated and who mutilated them?
a proper forensic investigation would have to have to clarify who killed them and how they were killed Israel also alleges that Hamas is guilty of widespread and systematic rape rape The Israeli government has published a video attacking the UN and other global institutions for what it claims is inaction and indifference to the plight of Israeli women.
I'd like to report a crime.
Yes?
I was raped.
So sorry, um... We're here to help.
Tell us what happened.
I was at a music festival.
We heard gunfire and everyone was running.
I started running and then he grabbed me.
He yelled something in Arabic and then he ripped my... Listen, sorry to interrupt you.
You said he was yelling in Arabic?
Yes.
Madeline Rees is head of an international women's rights organization.
Don't take it personally.
Management decided that all violence against Israelis is legitimate resistance.
So sorry.
It's a very cheap shot.
Immediately upon the horrific attacks on October the 7th, there was a response from the UN, from the Commission of Inquiry, which already exists to look into atrocities in the region, to say, we want to come and investigate.
We are ready, we're willing, we're able to come and investigate.
And that was blocked.
That was blocked.
And that's been blocked by Israel.
Hamas denies that rapes occurred on October 7.
In no case there was a proof that there was a rape.
In no one case.
But I am sure, based on our culture, based on our beliefs, that this cannot happen, impossible to happen.
But there are those who say they witnessed women being raped.
One is a survivor from the music festival who says he saw a group of Palestinian civilians surrounding a woman.
The Israeli police presents an anonymous witness who described a separate rape also at the music festival.
Yes.
The Israeli police presents an anonymous witness who described a separate rape also at the music festival.
In another interview, this witness says she saw a total of five women raped and gunmen walking around with the severed heads of three women.
But no forensic evidence of sexual violence has been produced.
A website created by the Israeli government to document atrocities on October 7 contains just one video indicative of rape.
It features the body of a young woman lying by a roadside 14 kilometers north of the site of the music festival.
She is wearing no underwear.
In December, this story formed the centerpiece of a New York Times investigation.
But the report was undermined when the woman's sister posted on Instagram that it was untrue.
Yes, they raped.
But in the case of my sister, no.
The family denied that she'd been raped.
They said it would have been really difficult for her to have been raped because she was in contact with them during Hamas' attack, and that her last correspondence with them was probably about four minutes before she was reportedly killed, right?
And so they sort of say, how could she have been, you know, shot, burnt, and raped within the space of four minutes?
It didn't make sense.
One of the three authors of the report, Anat Schwartz, is a former Israeli intelligence official with little journalistic experience.
She has previously liked genocidal social media posts calling for Gaza to be turned into a slaughterhouse.
I believe that there was rape.
In every conflict, whenever there are men with guns intent on perpetrating violence, it is highly unlikely there will not be sexual violence.
But nothing that I've seen put forward so far suggests that it was widespread and systematic.
It's a very high bar to actually reach.
To show that it was widespread and systematic, there would have been a lot more evidence than has come to light to date, and a lot more corroborative evidence than what has been put out there.
Five months after October 7, a report by the UN Special Representative on sexual violence in conflict concluded there were reasonable ground to believe that conflict-related sexual violence occurred.
The author stressed her report was not investigative.
She urged the Israelis to permit a fully-fledged investigative process and to grant, without further delay, access to the International Commission of Inquiry, which is mandated to investigate human rights abuses in Israel and the occupied territories.
studies.
Israel still refuses to do so.
The UN report relied largely on Israeli officials and first responders.
It stated the visual evidence provided no tangible indications of rape.
A conclusion supported by the eye unit's own analysis of footage and photographs.
In January, the Israeli police said they were struggling to match witness accounts with known victims.
The policewoman leading the inquiry told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
At this stage, I have no specific bodies.
Without any credible investigation, an independent, credible investigation, I don't think we can possibly say that it was widespread and systematic.
Essentially what we've got is a state has instrumentalized the horrific attacks on women in order, we believe, to justify an attack on Gaza, of which the majority suffering are other women.
In response to the events of October 7, Israel launches a bombardment of the Gaza Strip.
The Gaza Strip is a bombardment of the Gaza Strip.
On October the 7th, the first thing I remember is that I was terrified.
I was terrified because I know the Israeli response to that.
Whenever an Israeli man killed, they're going to kill 100 or 200 Palestinians.
So when I heard that the number of Israeli killed is over a thousand people, I knew that Israel will respond in a barbaric way.
1,154 people were killed on October 7.
After five months of bombardment, around 31,000 are confirmed killed in Gaza.
27% are adult men, 29% adult women, and 44% children.
There are many hundreds of babies among the dead.
dead.
The destruction of health services in Gaza means many of the dead are uncounted and the real death toll is likely to be far higher.
Repeatedly, accounts of rape and the murder of babies by Hamas have been used to justify Israel's actions.
I hear the calls for a ceasefire.
Tell me, what is a proportional response for killing of babies?
For rape women and burn them?
For beheading of a child?
The proportional response to October 7th massacre is a total destruction.
A total destruction to the last one of the Hamas.
Killing, slaughtering women, children, babies, rapes, beheading.
We're going to wipe them off the map, wipe them off the face of the earth.
This wasn't just rape.
This was flat out torture.
I don't think there's any way Israel can be expected to coexist or find some diplomatic off-ramp with these savages.
First thing I said to Netanyahu when this happened was finish them.
Finish them.
Don't ever forget what happened.
Sexual violence and other forms of violence are being weaponized to dehumanize an enemy And dehumanization is important in conflict.
Why?
Because dehumanization lowers the threshold by which you will willingly agree to attack or harm another group of people.
And how do you do that?
Well, you see them as subhuman.
More than 70% of those who've died have been women and children.
70%.
And we know more than 160 women a day have to give birth without adequate medical protection at all.
Caesareans without any sort of anesthetic.
It's absolutely barbarous.
It was October 22nd and my family were sleeping in their home.
There was my father.
There was my older brother, his wife, and his three children.
There was also my younger brother.
And there were my older sister, Wala, and four of her children.
And there was my sister, Ala, and her children.
And there was my sister, Aya, and her three children.
And they were sleeping at 5 a.m.
in the morning when Israel bombed my home.
Nine, they were killed.
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