Documenting Two Years Of Manufacturing Consent For The Genocide In Gaza.

Documenting Two Years Of Lies Used To Justify The Genocide In Gaza.

Today marks the two-year anniversary of the Hamas breakout from Gaza into Israel on October 7th of 2023, and two years of endless lies about the context surrounding it and what actually happened, in order to paint an atrocity propaganda narrative used to justify the ensuing genocide and ethnic cleansing of Gaza.

In this article, I will document the endless slew of lies told about October 7th, which have been used to justify the mass slaughter of Gaza’s civilians.

The Context Left Out Of The Mainstream Narrative.

The official narrative around October 7th claims that Israel was just minding their own business and Hamas attacked it for no reason.

In reality, the Hamas breakout from Gaza was a response to years of Israeli provocations against Gaza, all of which guaranteed an eventual response from Palestinian resistance.

While Israel officially withdrew Jewish settlements from Gaza in 2005, the actual intention behind this policy was to divide Gaza and the West Bank and prevent the creation of a Palestinian state, or the return of Palestinian refugees ethnically cleansed by Zionists during the Nakba.

Dov Weisglass, who at the time was a senior adviser to then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon bragged that, “The disengagement is actually formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary, so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians”, adding that, “you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem”.

When Hamas and Fatah were fighting for power in Gaza, the head of Israeli military intelligence, Amos Yadlin, admitted that Israel, “would be happy for Hamas to take power in the Gaza Strip” because then, “the IDF could then deal with Gaza as a hostile state”.

Treating Gaza like a “hostile state” meant placing a brutal blockade on Gaza, which Israel did in 2007.

The aforementioned Dov Weisglass admitted that the intention behind the blockade was to “put the Palestinians on a diet”.

As documented by the Institute for Middle East Understanding, the effects of this blockade in 2014 included :

-More than 70% of the population of Gaza received humanitarian aid.

-The official unemployment figure as of the first quarter of 2014 was 40.8%, compared to 18.7% in 2000.

-From January to June, Israel allowed an average of 17 truckloads of exported goods to leave Gaza each month, less than 2% of what existed monthly before 2007.

-Israel prevents access to a “buffer zone” beginning 300 meters (328 yards) from the boundary line between Israel and Gaza, denying Palestinian farmers access large parts of Gaza’s already scarce arable land.

-As of July 6, 2014, Israel limited fishing in Gaza’s territorial waters to just three nautical miles off the coast, barring Palestinian fishermen from reaching fertile fishing grounds further out

-10% of children under five experienced stunted growth due to prolonged malnutrition due to the blockade and siege.

-58.6% of Gaza’s schoolchildren were anemic, as were more than 68% of children aged nine to 12 months and nearly 37% of pregnant women.

-According to UNICEF, more than 90% of the water from Gaza’s only aquifer is unsafe for human consumption due to pollution, while repairs to Gaza’s sewage and water infrastructure cannot be carried out because of Israeli restrictions on the entry of building materials and equipment.

-Gaza suffered from severe shortages of electricity due to Israeli restrictions on imports of equipment needed to replace and repair the electrical infrastructure

Even the former UK Prime Minister, David Cameron, admitted that Israel’s blockade turned Gaza into “an open-air prison” and “a prison camp”.

Along with this, Israel routinely deployed the “Dahiya Doctrine” against Palestinians in Gaza to prevent resistance to the blockade, an Israeli military doctrine that called for “massive, disproportionate force” and “the deliberate targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure”.

This included Israel’s “Operation Cast Lead” assault on Gaza in 2008, where the IDF killed 1,400 Palestinians in Gaza, the majority of whom were civilians, and 300 of whom were children. The UN described the operation as, “a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorise a civilian population.”

This also included “Operation Protective Edge” in 2014, the IDF’s assault on Gaza, where they slaughtered 1,500 Palestinians in Gaza, including 500 children, along with bombing Gaza’s only power plant, causing a severe electricity shortage.

While slaughtering civilians in Gaza to prevent resistance to the blockade, Israel intentionally sabotaged peace agreements in order to justify its continuation.

The U.S. government-connected private intelligence firm Stratfor noted in 2010 that “While Israel has agreed to engage in negotiations with the Palestinians, it seeks to force the failure of these negotiations by making unrealistic demands and then blame that failure on the Palestinians’ unwillingness to meet those demands. This tactic - demonstrated by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s insistence on direct talks without preconditions - enables Israel to appease U.S. and international pressure while showing the world that Israel’s attempts at peace are being sabotaged by Palestinian intransigence,” adding that this would “relinquish all Israeli responsibility for the coastal enclave - including lifting the naval blockade on the territory”.

The final nail in the coffin came in 2018, when Palestinians in Gaza peacefully protested against the Israeli blockade in the “Great March of Return” protests, and the IDF responded by massacring them.

The United Nations fact-finding mission on the massacre documented that Israel killed 183 and wounded 6106 peaceful protestors with the use of live ammunition.

The fact-finding mission documented that, “Victims who were hundreds of metres away from the Israeli forces and visibly engaged in civilian activities were shot, as shown by eyewitness accounts, video footage, and medical records. Journalists and medical personnel who were clearly marked as such were shot, as were children, women, and persons with disabilities”.

As writer Nathan J. Robinson noted, “the Great March of Return was important in convincing many Palestinians that nonviolent resistance was simply suicidal”.

Following this, Israel and the Trump administration, using Jared Kushner as their intermediary, came up with the “Abraham Accords”, a plan to get Arab States to normalize relations with Israel without any concessions for the Palestinians.

Previously, all 22 member states of the Arab League agreed to full normalization with Israel, if Israel in return agreed to the “full Israeli withdrawal from all the territories occupied since 1967, an achievement of a just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem and the acceptance of the establishment of a sovereign independent Palestinian state on the Palestinian territories occupied since June 4, 1967 in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with East Jerusalem as its capital”, a proposal Israel repeatedly rejected.

Through the Abram Accords, Israel normalized relations with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco, without any concession to Palestinians, having the desired effect of “sidelining the Palestinians yet again”, as The New Yorker’s David Remnick noted.

Mother Jones noted that the Abraham Accords, “essentially kicked the Palestinians and their grievances (the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, its apartheid policies, and its blockade of Gaza, which turned the strip, according to Human Rights Watch, into an ‘open-air prison’) to the curb”.

With the hopes of Saudi Arabia joining in on the Abraham Accords, Israel hoped the Arab states would fully abandon the Palestinians, paving the way for annexation of Gaza and the West Bank.

As journalist Jeremy Scahill reported, “Just two weeks before the October 7 attacks, the Israeli leader (Benjamin Netanyahu) delivered a speech at the UN General Assembly in New York, brandishing a map of what he promised could be the ‘New Middle East.’ It depicted a state of Israel that stretched continuously from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Gaza and the West Bank, as Palestinian lands, were erased”, adding that, “during that speech, Netanyahu portrayed the full normalization of relations with Saudi Arabia as the linchpin of his vision for this ‘new’ reality”.

As Scahill noted, “Hamas monitored these developments carefully and saw the U.S. moves toward circumventing a Palestinian resolution in its normalization campaign as an existential threat”.

Furthermore, as journalist Max Blumenthal reported, the Israeli army’s former head of military intelligence, Aharon Haliva stated that, “After the holidays [in the Fall of 2022], we were opening a joint reorganization with [Israel’s General Security Services] Shin Bet to collect intelligence on [Al-Qassam Chief of Staff Mohammed] Deif and [Hamas Secretary General Yahya] Sinwar in order to kill them, because every time we prepared a plan, they moved, and you have to re-collect on them.”

As Blumenthal noted, “In other words, Israel was planning to violate its ceasefire with Hamas and launch a major decapitation strike against its leading figures, much like the one it deployed against Iran’s military leadership this June 13, when it assassinated 8 major IRGC officials without provocation. The killings would have touched off a major war, but unlike after October 7, Hamas would have been left without any negotiating leverage, as it would have had no Israeli captives in its possession when hostilities began,” adding that “When seen in this light, Al Aqsa Flood was a preemptive strike”.

Israel Apparently Allowed October 7th to Happen.

Recently, testimony and reporting have strongly suggested that Israel allowed the October 7th breakout to occur, likely to justify their already designed plan to ethnically cleanse and annex Gaza and then the West Bank.

As Israel’s Channel 7 reported, Shalom Shitrit and an IDF guard outside of the Gaza border testified that at 5 am on October 7th, “an order was given that there would be no patrols in the fence until 9 a.m.” despite the fact that, “there are no mornings in which there are no patrols on the fence, because you are in an operational battalion and that is part of the matter”.

Another investigation in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that Lieutenant Colonel Haim Cohen, the IDF commander who approved the Nova music festival in Israel, outside of the Gaza border received intelligence that Hamas was about to breakout of Gaza and “arrived at the Nova site about an hour before the Hamas attack, saw thousands of party-goers with minimal police presence, but did not consider dispersing the festival”.

The IDF Killed Many Israelis To Prevent Them From Being Taken Hostage.

Along with this, Israel issued the “Hannibal directive” on October 7th- the Israeli military doctrine that calls to kill any Israelis who may be taken hostage to prevent a hostage exchange- killing many and possibly a majority of Israelis killed that day.

As the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported, Israel ordered the Hannibal directive at least three locations: the Erez border crossing, the Re’im army base, and the Nahal Oz outpost.

Along with this, the paper reported that the order was given to “turn the area around the border fence into a killing zone” and that “not a single vehicle can return to Gaza”, including those containing Israeli hostages.

Speaking about the Israeli response on October 7th, Australia’s ABC News quoted the Israeli Air Force Colonel Nof Erez saying, “This was a mass Hannibal. It was tons and tons of openings in the fence, and thousands of people in every type of vehicle, some with hostages and some without”.

ABC noted that:

Air force pilots described to Yedioth Ahronot newspaper the firing of “tremendous” amounts of ammunition on October 7 at people attempting to cross the border between Gaza and Israel.

“Twenty-eight fighter helicopters shot over the course of the day all of the ammunition in their bellies, in renewed runs to rearm. We are talking about hundreds of 30-millimetre cannon mortars and Hellfire missiles,” reporter Yoav Zeitoun said.

“The frequency of fire at the thousands of terrorists was enormous at the start, and only at a certain point did the pilots begin to slow their attacks and carefully choose the targets.”

Yoav Gallant, who at the time was Israel’s defense minister, was asked by Israeli reporters if he ordered “the Hannibal Directive to shoot and kill when there is a vehicle containing Israeli hostages”, to which he replied, “I think that tactically in various places it was given”.

Fabricated Atrocity Propaganda.

Along with the fact that Israel clearly provoked the October 7th breakout, seemingly allowed it to happen, and killed many of their own people to prevent them from becoming hostages, many of the most often repeated claims about what Hamas did on October 7th were fabricated by Israel in order to justify the mass slaughter in Gaza.

Bituah Leumi, Israel’s social security agency, recorded that one baby was tragically killed during October 7th, the 10-month-old Mila Cohen, who was caught between gunfire at the Kibbutz Beeri.

But Israel expanded on this, creating endless stories of Hamas killing babies that never happened.

Some of these claims include fabricated claims about Hamas beheading 40 babies, burning babies alive, and, most absurdly, baking a baby in an oven and ripping an unborn fetus out of its mother’s womb and killing it.

Benjamin Netanyahu has fabricated an endless slew of false claims about Hamas killing babies, including falsely claiming in his 2024 speech to Congress that Hamas killed two babies hidden in an attic, and most recently at the UN, fabricating new claims that Hamas “burned babies, alive” and “burned babies alive in front of their parents”.

The most extensive atrocity propaganda Hoax around October 7th is the claim that Hamas committed “mass rape”, which has been endlessly repeated by Israel and the mainstream Western media.

A look at the evidence, however, shows that there is no evidence that Hamas committed any rape at all on October 7th.

No forensic evidence of rape was ever found on any of the bodies recovered on October 7th. As Haaretz reported, “at Shura Base, to which most of the bodies were taken for purposes of identification, there were five forensic pathologists at work. In that capacity, they also examined bodies that arrived completely or partially naked in order to examine the possibility of rape. According to a source knowledgeable about the details, there were no signs on any of those bodies attesting to sexual relations having taken place or of mutilation of genitalia”.

The United Nations looked at every available video and photograph from October 7th and found no evidence of rape occurring, noting, “The mission team, specifically the forensic pathologist and the digital analyst, reviewed over 5,000 photos, around 50 hours, and several audio files of footage of the attacks” and concluding that “In the medicolegal assessment of available photos and videos, no tangible indications of rape could be identified”.

The United Nations Human Rights Council inquiry into allegations of mass rape on October 7th concluded that they found no evidence of rape occurring on October 7th and found evidence that many of the Israeli claims were fabricated, concluding that, “the Commission has reviewed testimonies obtained by journalists and the Israeli police concerning rape but has not been able to independently verify such allegations, due to a lack of access to victims, witnesses and crime sites and the obstruction of its investigations by the Israeli authorities. The Commission was unable to review the unedited version of such testimonies. For the same reasons, the Commission was also unable to verify reports of sexualized torture and genital mutilation. Additionally, the Commission found some specific allegations to be false, inaccurate, or contradictory with other evidence or statements and discounted these from its assessment”.

Moran Gez, the main Israeli prosecutor focusing on October 7th, even admitted that there is no victim testimony of rape occurring on October 7th, saying that “in the end, we don’t have any complainants” of rape and that “we contacted women’s rights organizations and asked for cooperation. We were told that they simply hadn’t been contacted” admitting that the Israeli claims of mass rape, “will not be able to meet the threshold of proof in court”.

The entire fabricated claim of rape occurring on October 7th comes from second-hand witnesses who have all been discredited.

Early reports of rape came from Zaka, an ultra-religious group with no forensic experience, which, as The Times of London noted, fabricated “the now debunked story of the pregnant woman and her slaughtered foetus” and that “one Zaka figure claimed to have found a baby baked alive in an oven”, which has also since been debunked.

Chaim Otmazgin, one of the commanders in Zaka, even admitted to fabricating claims of rape occurring on October 7th.

Another key second-hand witness was Rami Davidian, whom the Israeli investigative journalist Raviv Drucker exposed for telling “stories made up from beginning to end” and “hair-raising stories that never, ever occurred”.

Israel put out videos of supposed “confessions” from Hamas members to committing rape, but the UN Human Rights Council concluded that the “confessions” were extracted under torture and put out for propaganda purposes, writing, “The Commission reviewed several videos where detainees were interrogated by members of the ISF, while placed in an extremely vulnerable position, completely subjugated, when confessing to witnessing or committing rape and other serious crimes. The names and faces of the detainees were also exposed. The Commission considers the distribution of such videos, purely for propaganda purposes, to be a violation of due process and fair trial guarantees. In view of the apparent coercive circumstances of the confessions appearing in the videos, the Commission does not accept such confessions as proof of the crimes confessed.”

The main image used by Israel to claim mass rape occurred was an image of the Israeli hostage Na’ama Levy with blood on her pants.

Levy, who has since been released, recently explained the context behind the image, saying she was “dragged from a black Jeep, wounded,” and “bleeding,” and not once mentioning rape or sexual assault of any kind.

All of this context has been completely left out of the mainstream narrative on October 7th in order to create atrocity propaganda used to justify the now two-year-long Holocaust in Gaza.

---

Note to readers: The Dissident is a reader-supported outlet. If you liked this article, consider becoming a paid subscriber.