Above photo: Palestinian prisoner who was tortured by Israelis. EuroMed Monitor.
The Israeli crimes perpetrated AFTER October 7th 2023 represent the reason why the October 7th events unfolded.
You read that correctly, but I’ll say it again: the Israeli crimes perpetrated AFTER October 7th are why the heroic Palestinian resistance (i.e. Hamas) attacked the Nazi Zionist apartheid terrorist entity to begin with.
But what happened on October 7th?
This is something that’s been discussed extensively; discussed honestly only in rare cases, but distorted, misinterpreted and lied about the vast majority of the time.
This is because the doctrine/policy of (pro-)Israeli propagandists and their allies – the prostitutes of propaganda- such as CNN, the BBC, Fox News, Talk TV and countless others, conforms to the Nazi practices of Hitler and his minister Joseph Goebbels.
Specifically, Hitler stated that the broad masses “are more easily conquered by a big lie than a small one.” (Mein Kampf, 1925). Coupled with this, the propaganda strategy of Goebbels focused on emotional resonance -not logic or facts- accompanied by repetition.
Stated differently, the approach is to firstly appeal to people’s emotions, such that emotion takes precedence over logic, and then secondly, to constantly repeat lies, particularly the big ones.
Zionists took this strategy on October 7th and afterwards to a whole new level: “40 beheaded babies”, “babies in ovens”, “mass systematic rapes by Hamas fighters”, etc.. followed by “Hamas military command and control centers underneath hospitals” (which of course were never found) and much more.
Countless journalists have shown that all these big lies -to quote Hitler again- were exactly that.
Yet it was precisely because Zionist propagandists and their allies appealed to emotions and not facts, that they kept repeating these fabrications, even after it became abundantly clear that these were all false.
It is worth mentioning a couple of points here. First, every accusation that the Israelis hurled against Hamas was a confession; a crime that the Israelis themselves perpetrated against the Palestinians: Palestinian babies were beheaded time and again by Israeli missiles, to cite just one example, along with other babies and children with their limbs blown off.
Babies, the elderly, and everyone in between were burnt alive countless times -not in ovens- in their tents, while sexual assaults were perpetrated en-masse by the Israeli terrorist forces in this genocide, continuing an Israeli criminal policy that extends back decades (i.e. rapes during the massacres of Safsaf and Al-Dawayima of 1948, to name a couple).
Second, the conduct of the Hamas fighters themselves -along with the other resistance factions who captured Israelis on October 7th– refutes the deceptions of the (pro-)Israeli propagandists both during the attack and afterwards.
The allegation of systematic widespread rapes was regurgitated endlessly by genocidal Zionist apologists (such as Piers Morgan), without a shred of evidence.
However, not a single Israeli captive released by Hamas reported any sexual assault whatsoever. (Contrast this with the sexual abuse by Israeli security officers of illegally detained Palestinian children in Israeli prisons).
To the contrary, two released captives, Chen Goldstein-Almog and her daughter Agam, stated that their Hamas captors would not even touch them.
Thus, how does one reconcile the fact that these highly-disciplined religious fighters wouldn’t lay a hand on their Israeli captives when they had full control over them and the ability to do so, with the Israeli claim that these same Hamas fighters committed systematic widespread rapes on October 7th?!
You don’t reconcile the two, because you cannot, because these so-called rapes never happened.
This big lie is a tangible example of the aforementioned propaganda tactic: having emotion take precedence over logic, and then repeating the lie endlessly.
This tactic of repeating falsehoods is based on a psychological principle called the illusory truth effect; the more you hear something, the more likely you are to believe it – even if it’s false.
Not surprisingly, the aforementioned is consistent with the findings of the UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory on the events of October 7th. The commission noted “the absence of forensic evidence of sexual crimes committed on 7 October.” (Report A/HRC/56/CRP.3, June 10, 2024)
On the other hand, the commission has concluded that “Israel has systematically used sexual, reproductive and other forms of gender-based violence since 7 October 2023”, adding that “Israeli detention is characterized by widespread and systematic abuse and sexual and gender-based violence” and that such violence “is increasingly used as a method of war by Israel to destabilize, dominate, oppress and destroy the Palestinian people”. (Report A/HRC/58/CRP.6, March 13, 2025). [Remember above, every accusation is a confession, sometimes extending back to crimes also committed decades ago.]
This leads us to perhaps the most interesting point of this article.
Israel claimed, and continues to claim, that it was a victim on October 7th. Pro-Israeli apologists have endlessly parroted this, with all the lies mentioned above and many more.
And yet despite this, according to the commission, “Israel is obstructing its investigations into events on and since 7 October 2023, both in Israel and in the Occupied Palestinian Territory”, adding that “Israeli officials have publicly announced on several occasions Israel’s refusal to cooperate with the Commission’s investigation into acts committed by Hamas.”
Further, the same report stated that Israeli officials not only refused to cooperate with the Commission’s investigation but also reportedly barred medical professionals and others from being in contact with the Commission (Article 9), adding that the commission “was not able to visit the sites of the violations as the Israeli Government has prevented it accessing Israel”.
Why? Or rather, why not?
If Israel is alleging to be the victim of horrific crimes perpetrated by Hamas, wouldn’t Israel want to expose these crimes to the world, to show how terrible Hamas (supposedly) is, so it can be held accountable and punished? Unless….something else is at play here. Again, let us compare this with the position of Hamas.
Hamas issued a document on January 21, 2024, titled “Our Narrative—Operation Al-Aqsa Flood” which provides Hamas’s justification and perspective on the October 7, 2023, attack.
In its third section, titled “Towards a transparent international investigation”, and in the original Arabic version, the movement calls on countries “to announce their support for the course taken by the ICC to investigate all crimes perpetrated in occupied Palestine”.
In the document, Hamas also states “we still urge the ICC Prosecutor and his team to immediately and urgently come to occupied Palestine to look into all crimes and violations”.
This is worth pondering. It is a well-documented pattern of behavior for Israel to refuse to cooperate with, or deny entry to, numerous international fact-finding missions and committees.
These include the Goldstone mission (to investigate Israel’s violations of international law during the 2008-2009 Gaza War (Operation Cast Lead)), the UN Human Rights Council mission to investigate Israel’s illegal attack on the Freedom Flotilla in international waters (2010) and the 2014 Gaza Conflict Commission of Inquiry, as Israel knew that its crimes would be (further) exposed.
Yet now, and although Hamas undertook its right (in accordance with international law) to armed resistance, and although Israel accuses Hamas of being the aggressor, demonizing it and propagandizing itself as being the victim, it is Hamas -not Israel- that is willing to cooperate with international legal bodies. Indeed, when you are on the right side of justice and history, you are not afraid of the truth.
With the Israeli authorities concealing the evidence of what happened on October 7th and their refusal to cooperate with the international commission, a full, transparent and accurate investigation of that day may never be possible. Yet there are indicators.
For example, in an interview by Mehdi Hasan, Israeli official Mark Regev stated that they revised down the number of Israeli dead from 1400 to 1200 because there were “bodies that were so badly burnt we thought they were ours; in the end apparently, they were Hamas.”
So if the Hamas fighters were killed side-by-side the Israelis, how many Israelis did the Israeli army kill? Even if one assumes that each fully-armed highly-trained elite Hamas fighter was guarding only three Israelis around him for example, that is 600 dead Israelis right there that would have been killed by the Israeli army’s missiles and tank shells.
Is it any wonder then that the Israeli authorities prevented the commission from conducting an investigation, especially after it activated the Hannibal Directive on October 7th?
What is sure though, is that Israel has now failed in its biggest lie: that the entirety of history began on October 7th, 2023. A parallel to this can be drawn from the past, where the propagandist criminal attempts to set the starting point in time to wherever he/she sees fit.
A case in point is Kristallnacht, which was a Nazi state-sponsored pogrom. The Nazis explicitly framed the assassination of German diplomat Ernst vom Rath by Jewish teenager Herschel Grynszpan as Jews being the aggressors and attacking Germany first, despite years of oppression and persecution of Jews prior thereto, while demonizing them at the same time.
They used the assassination as a pretext for their pogrom and later crimes, which they went on to portray as self-defense.
Sound familiar? For decades, Palestinians have been suffering from ethnic cleansing, massacres, displacement, economic strangulation, military occupation inclusive of home demolitions, denial of freedoms, arbitrary arrests, daily killings, curfews and more. Ironically, the mere existence of the people in Gaza, 70% or more of whom are Palestinian refugees who were ethnically cleansed from their homes in Palestine, is perhaps the largest testament to when the Palestinian tragedy really began.
Throughout this time, the Palestinians have attempted to reclaim their human rights, return to their homes from exile, and liberate themselves and their lands.
They have done so through peaceful protests (such as the Great March of Return in Gaza and weekly marches in villages in the West Bank), popular uprisings, civil disobedience, boycotts, political means, negotiations and armed resistance. Yet they were forsaken by the world and betrayed by their own so-called leadership. This is why we stated at the beginning that the Israeli crimes AFTER October 7th were the reason for the October 7th attacks: they were always there being perpetrated, but the world just wasn’t seeing it or was actively ignoring the cries of the Palestinians. It is now allowing the genocide to continue.
What would you do if you were a Palestinian?
Rifat Audeh is a Palestinian-Canadian human rights activist, an award-winning filmmaker, and a freelance journalist. He is a survivor of the 2010 Freedom Flotilla, which attempted to break the blockade of Gaza.
