Israel – a country politically caught between the founding myth of its declaration of independence, the Zionist agenda and realities that cannot be dispelled.
Introduction
The events surrounding Gaza and the West Bank cannot be understood without a knowledge of history.
In our five-part series on the history of Israel, we discussed the causes of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians over a period of more than 100 years. We refer you to part 5 of our series, which not only contains many links to the entire series, but also summarizes the facts in the conclusion.
In our opinion, only facts can be the basis for getting closer to the truth.
The public media and the large private media companies in the West are committed to an opinion oligarchy. This makes neutral reporting on the subject of Israel impossible. We referred to this problem in the article “German State Television, of all places, has published a glossary to justify genocide. Dr. Goebbels would be proud if he was still in charge,” which uses an internal ARD glossary specifically on Middle East reporting to reveal the mechanisms by which balanced information – as required by the Interstate Broadcasting Treaty – is deliberately made impossible.
The internal glossary contains (on page 38 f.) a list of experts to be consulted by the exponents of the television stations concerned – these are not suggestions. The addressees of the glossary are obliged to consult only these experts.
“Israel is a state at a crossroads.”
Experts from state-affiliated think tanks such as the “Stiftung Wissenschaft & Politik” (SWP) or the Bundeswehr Command and Staff College “Defense & Strategic Studies of the Bundeswehr” (German military) present the views of their clients. This necessarily has nothing to do with an independent point of view.
A look at the list of third-party funders of one of these organizations – the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP) – helps with orientation.
The statements of the opinion-forming media in the West should therefore be treated with the utmost caution.
We have spent a lot of time trying to gather the facts about October 7. During our work we were more than astonished that most of the Western media knew the “facts” practically within hours and still cling to them unalterably today, even though they are being overtaken left and right by reality.
In the following, we look at the events of October 7, 2023. Everything that has happened since that day in Israel, the Gaza Strip and also the West Bank confirms our previous analysis.
October 7, 2023 – Israeli-Western representation
Before the facts could be discussed by independent sources, the Israelis told the world what was happening and how these “facts” should be assessed. The Western media followed suit, dutifully neglecting their duty of diligence, and Western governments followed suit in pursuit of their political agendas.
On October 7, 2023, a few thousand Hamas terrorists attacked peaceful Israel, murdering civilians, raping women and beheading countless babies, destroying Israeli settlements with arson and taking hostages – all on a high Jewish holiday, Simchat Torah.
This account does not stand up to fact-based scrutiny. In our analysis below, we use Israeli and American sources wherever possible.
Independent American media and Haaretz paint a different picture
Sequence of military actions
The American journalist Max Blumenthal was one of the first to report on this on his blog “The Grayzone“.
He and others relied on statements made by witnesses to the Israeli media, but also on a meticulous investigation of the smallest details. The facts they found were so profound that even the Israeli media now refer to them.
In the early hours of October 7, 2023, the Erez Crossing border checkpoint was overrun by Hamas. The Israeli military stationed there retreated to a bunker and gave the order to bomb the checkpoint from there. This was then carried out by Israeli combat helicopters with Hellfire missiles.
The Israeli army, the IDF, was therefore immediately informed and reacted quickly. In addition to the aforementioned attack helicopters, armored units were alerted and also intervened very quickly.
According to Israeli information, the attack helicopters were alerted at 6 a.m.; they were in action until 12 noon. The Hamas fighters withdrew from Israel in an organized manner by 10:30 a.m. – also according to Israeli information.
Source: Wikipedia Erez Crossing
The Hamas attack was organized, effective and targeted. Such a precise action can only be carried out by a very well-trained military.
One of the targets was Kibbutz Beeri, located in the immediate vicinity of the border with Gaza. It was only during the attack itself that the Hamas fighters found out about the Nova Rave music festival taking place nearby.
Based on the course of events and the events that followed, it can be assumed that Hamas’ aim was to take as many hostages as possible, especially military personnel, in order to later exchange them for as many of the thousands of Palestinians being held in Israeli prisons without charge or trial as possible.
The Hamas fighters apparently carried out targeted missions where they could quickly capture as many hostages as possible – military facilities, civilian facilities, houses.
Western horror stories disproved
In contrast to what was actually happening, all Western media and Western governments almost immediately spread information about Palestinians shooting around blindly in a murderous frenzy, whose sole aim was to kill as many Israelis as possible in the most barbaric way possible. The unbelievable climax of this was the story of the 40 beheaded Israeli babies. Even President Biden felt it necessary to claim to have seen photographic evidence of this. A story that has since been tacitly dismissed under the pressure of the facts of what actually happened. The “information” about mass rape, which has become part of the standard Western journalistic repertoire, could not be missing either.
The IDF’s operational doctrine – Hannibal
The Israeli military acted according to its operational doctrine – the Hannibal Directive.
In 1986, the Israeli military issued this so-called Hannibal Directive. It was the direct result of the hostage-taking of two Israeli soldiers in Lebanon. In 2003, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported on its content in abstract form for the first time.
The directive can be briefly described as follows:
The maximum use of military force – including against civilians if necessary – is intended to prevent Israelis – meaning both soldiers and civilians – from falling into the hands of the enemy, thus preventing them from being able to use the hostages to free their own forces.
The directive has been used repeatedly in combat operations. It is said to have been repealed in 2016.
The events surrounding Beeri and Nova Rave show that it is still in force.
This doctrine requires the maximum use of military force against the hostage-takers but also, and this is important to understand, against the hostages themselves after Israeli soldiers – but explicitly also civilians – have been taken hostage.
“What we saw here was a mass Hannibal.”
Israeli Air Force Colonel Nof Erez to Haaretz
The result of following the Hannibal directive on October 7, 2023 was predictable:
The IDF literally shot at everything and everyone, both in Kibbutz Beeri and at the Nova Rave music festival: Hamas fighters, hostages, civilians, houses, vehicles. This was confirmed by Israeli witnesses who fled from the festival to a house in the kibbutz.
In the meantime, there are also witnesses from a rather unexpected quarter. In an interview with Haaretz, Israeli Air Force Colonel Nof Erez stated that Israeli forces had attacked Palestinian and Israeli civilians in accordance with the Hannibal Doctrine. He concluded: “What we saw here was a mass Hannibal.”
The damage to houses and vehicles and the fatal and non-fatal injuries inflicted on the victims correspond to those caused by tank shells and Hellfire missiles, the typical armament of Israeli Apache attack helicopters, and are comparable to the destruction in Gaza. The above-mentioned American journalist Max Blumenthal compared the damage to vehicles with that from the first Iraq war. At the time, the US army admitted that this damage was caused by the use of Hellfire missiles.
One of the many houses in Kibbutz Beeri that was apparently shelled with heavy weapons.
Source: The Grayzone
It is impossible that Hamas fighters could have caused this destruction, as they only had light weapons at their disposal. In addition, those who want hostages do not murder blindly, because hostages are only useful if they are alive.
The exact number of hostages taken by Hamas is not known. Estimates put the figure at around 250. Of these, around 50 were released through the mediation of Qatar in exchange for 39 Palestinians held in Israeli prisons.
Negotiations for the release of hostages were led by Saleh Arouri of Hamas. On January 2, Israel killed this leading Hamas official Saleh Arouri in Beirut in a targeted attack.
Source: defensenews-alert.blogspot.com
The murder of the Palestinian negotiator, which Israel itself admitted, contradicts the concern for the hostages that Netanyahu has repeatedly expressed publicly and will not contribute to a solution. On the contrary. Israel has thus proven that it does not care about the fate of the Israeli hostages.
The actual victim tally from October 7, 2023 according to Haaretz
The official government and media reporting that began on the same day spoke of unbelievable atrocities committed exclusively by Hamas and other Palestinian fighters. There was talk of thousands of Israeli victims. It still sounds like this on ntv on November 3:
“Hamas launched a large-scale attack on Israel on October 7, in which, according to Israeli figures, around 1,400 people were killed, most of them civilians.” – NTV, 3. November 2024
On December 26, 2023, a Thai blog published concrete casualty figures with reference to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. In many, almost all respects, these figures contradict the official Israeli publications. However, they prove in their own way that the Israeli army and the military arm of Hamas are not facing desperados, but a tightly organized military unit.
According to Haaretz, the confirmed total number of victims of October 7 is 900. This includes 508 Israeli soldiers, 219 of them women and 289 men, i.e. far more than half.
Among the civilian victims in the kibbutzes, many show signs that clearly indicate tank fire. In other words, the Israeli army fired on Israeli civilians with tanks.
No evidence could be found that Hamas fighters burned Israelis or beheaded babies.
Haaretz also found the following: the number of civilians killed by Hamas is less than 100. The fact that most of those shot were settlers who were armed at the time once again makes the above-mentioned Western “reporting” look like what it is: propaganda in the name of an apparently pre-defined political goal.
Another fact is thought-provoking and shows where moral indoctrination and permanent dehumanization of the enemy lead people:
While the Israeli dead soldiers were treated with respect and brought to mortuaries according to the guidelines, there are allegations that bodies of Hamas fighters were desecrated.
Overall, the data published by Haaretz proves a stark contrast between the official Israeli narrative and the reality of events, which cannot be a coincidence.
Interim result
The facts show that the Israeli portrayal of bloodthirsty terror units that indiscriminately ravaged the Israeli population, slaughtered defenceless civilians, raped women and beheaded babies, which was uncritically adopted by the Western media, in no way stands up to scrutiny.
The above figures speak for themselves.
Assessment of the events surrounding October 7
Resistance against the occupying power
Answering the question of whether October 7 could have been prevented involves an almost incalculable number of “ifs” and “buts”.
Nothing happens by chance in politics. It is therefore legitimate to reflect on why Hamas did what it did and why Israel reacted as it did and not otherwise.
The reasons for resistance by an occupied population, an occupied country, are obvious. And the political mindset underlying Israel’s reaction is also becoming clearer with each passing day.
From the River to the Sea
It is obvious that Israel is exploiting the events surrounding October 7, 2023 to bring the Zionist founding project of this state to a final conclusion: A Greater Israel “From the river to the sea”. Depending on the interpretation, the river could be the Jordan or the Euphrates.
We covered this major Zionist project in detail in Part 3 of our series “Greater Israel – not a conspiracy theory“.
Prime Minister Netanyahu is no longer hiding the true aims of Israeli policy. What was repeatedly denied in the past is now being presented as a state goal. In a statement on January 18, 2024, he said the following:
“In future, the state of Israel must control the entire area from the river to the sea.”
PRIME MINISTER NETANYAHU, JANUARY 18, 2024
The head of Israel’s government is thus officially confirming that Greater Israel is not a demand by a few extremists and is not a conspiracy theory. Rather, Greater Israel represents the official government policy of the Zionist state of Israel.
These few words from the Israeli Prime Minister explain the entire history of the current Gaza conflict.
Once again, we refer you to part 3 of our Israel series: the first Israeli head of government, Ben Gurion, wrote in a diary entry in 1948:
“We must do everything we can to ensure that they [the Palestinians] never come back. …
The old will die, the young will be forgotten” – Quoted in “Nakba – the open wound. The expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948 and its consequences” (German language version). By Marlène Schnieper, ISBN 978-3-85869-444-7
Goal to destroy Gaza
This statement explains why the Israeli government, as the occupying power, has refused any contact with the administration in Gaza for over two years, why all infrastructure in the illegally occupied areas of the Gaza Strip is being destroyed by Israel, who benefits from the impossibility of any civilian life in Gaza, why even civilian aid deliveries, and even the delivery of anaesthetics, are being prevented by Israel with all its might. There is a video on the Internet showing how a surgeon in Gaza had to amputate his own daughter’s leg without anesthesia. We refrain from publishing this horror.
Such an act is not without precedent in history. But Israel cannot hide behind history. It must bear this burden alone.
October 7 a consequence of the occupation policy
The 900 people killed on October 7, 2023 and the many others who lost their lives in the declared and undeclared wars and armed conflicts over Palestine and Israel would not have had to die if the resolutions of the UN General Assembly and the UN Security Council on the Middle East conflict had been implemented in letter and spirit by all parties involved, starting with Resolution 181 of November 1947.
This includes the responsibility of the individual UN members and especially the powers in the UN Security Council to do what they can to force the states, groups and organizations concerned to implement the resolutions, using all the means at their disposal.
October 7 did not turn out the way the Western media is reporting. It was indeed a terrible day for the victims, but not a terrorist attack as claimed, but a military operation by Hamas, which was successful and was subsequently used by Israel as an opportunity to move closer to its goal of murdering or expelling the Palestinians in Gaza.
Since Prime Minister Netanyahu’s speech, doubts have also been dispelled as to whether Israel is single-mindedly pursuing its “Greater Israel” project. We now know with certainty that this is not a conspiracy theory, but a reality. We came to the same conclusion in our series based on historical sources, but now we no longer need to consult diary entries, we can simply listen to the Israeli Prime Minister.
From Israel’s perspective, October 7 not only sealed the fate of the Palestinians, but turned the entire Middle East into a flaming hot spot.
It seems that the USA and Israel could very well lose control and a humanitarian catastrophe could turn into a veritable regional war – we will stay on the case.
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This article by Dr. Peter Hanseler was co-authored by René Zittlau, a German citizen and linguist born in 1960, who specializes in Russian, Czech and Slovak as well as the culture and history of Eastern European countries, which gives him an independent view of the political and economic development in the respective countries, which he also knows through visits and longer stays. He first worked for the intelligence services and then in the private sector. After training as an SAP consultant, he worked as a managing director for companies in various sectors, primarily in Central and Eastern Europe.