Some of the first images to appear following the Al Qassem brigades’ October 7th invasion of ‘Israel’ showed dozens of destroyed vehicles around the site of the Nova Sukkot festival, without any explanation of why they were crashed and abandoned or who was in them. Later these cars were collected together as seen above in a sort of makeshift cemetery. We were told, repeatedly, that Hamas militants had invaded the festival and had killed 260 of the young revellers, while taking others back to Gaza as hostages. A short and widely shown video showed scenes from the dance party followed by people running to escape in their cars. Some photos of young women being taken captive show them still wearing skimpy clothing in the early morning. The reported late change of venue to a place closer to the Gaza fence may well have been intended as a provocation against the ‘socially conservative’ Islamic community, given the all night party started on a Friday.
The same video clip – one that was shown just three days later but remains the only record of the event, and still included in reports on it, shows people running and getting into cars in panic, but little else. A few photos of militants seizing hostages or bringing them back to Gaza are also very limited. Of relevance perhaps is the generally similar appearance of these vehicles to those in the leading photo above, suggesting that most of the destroyed vehicles evidently belonged to the festival goers and were presumably being driven by them.
In the video clip below this footage is included, with a description of the event from a young guy who was taken hostage by Hamas, and released back in November, interviewed in mid-March by the BBC to talk about his ongoing trauma, which included going without water for 14 hours while in captivity.
What exactly transpired to go from the scene above to that below is the subject of necessary speculation – for those of us who don’t know. There is an excellent discussion – on video and transcript – of the whole event from Chris Hedges and Ali Abunimah here.
For comparison, below is an illustration of a car carrying a family in South Lebanon that was hit by a missile fired from an Israeli drone in a punitive strike rather than as an assassination. In similar cases where for instance journalists or ambulance workers are targeted by Israeli missiles, the damage to the vehicle usually more resembles that above, and is also compounded by the fire which usually engulfs it after the strike. That many of the victims killed in their vehicles on October 7th were also incinerated points to the 'hell-fire' missile being responsible. It's not hard to conclude from the nature of the damage to these vehicles that they were hit by heavy weaponry of a type the mobile militants from Gaza didn't have - Kalashinkovs, grenades and RPGs could not have this effect. In addition some of the vehicles in the main photo appear to have been run over by tanks.
In the few days that followed, the media was distracted and diverted from that scene to those around the Kibbutzim, and the absolute hysteria in Israel over the shocking "terrorist attack", which we were told no-one had seem coming. Except of course those in Gaza who planned "Al Aqsa Flood" and those in Tel Aviv who planned to exploit this repetition of the Arab Armies' great victory over Israel 50 years earlier by turning it back on the Palestinians. This they did with outstanding success using their greatest talent - spinning tales and pressing emotional buttons - while avoiding their greatest weakness - a physical confrontation. It was only after dropping thousands of tonnes of bombs on Northern Gaza that a ground invasion was deemed possible, and even then the IOF conscripts came up against stiff and heroic resistance which caused significant casualties. As this brutal war has gone on, and the deaths of innocent people in Gaza reached astronomical levels - some recent observers suggest at least 100,000 so far have been killed - it has become more necessary than ever to examine the pretext on which such slaughter may be justified, or at least understood. While it in no way justifies the ruthless and calculated targeting of civilians in Gaza and attempts to destroy their last vestiges of 'civilisation', there is a balance made across all Western media in the endless citing of the '1200 killed by Hamas on October 7th' - alongside the constantly increasing death and injury toll of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank., of whom the current number is at least 32,000 killed and twice that number seriously injured. Up to 10,000 people are also buried under rubble, with no means to rescue them or retrieve them for a decent burial. The notable discrepancy between these two death tolls is that Israel's remains unchanged at 1,159, while Palestinians continue to be killed by Israeli bombs, shells, snipers, disease and hunger in increasing numbers every day. It is necessary to highlight this fact as Israel constantly cites the need for "self-defence" as justification for its killing spree in Gaza and the West Bank, yet no Israelis are being killed by Hamas militants inside 'Israel'. Even the most extreme Israeli nationalist could hardly claim that Israeli soldiers invading Hamas territory are not 'fair game' in the war, particularly considering the imbalance in arms and killing machinery. Israel's excuse however is that if it doesn't exterminate Hamas then their soldiers will go on to launch further murderous attacks on Israeli citizens to the point of 'genocide' and a second Holocaust against the Jews. Such a bogus claim is hard to counter when it is so patently false and ridiculous - it would take another hundred October 7ths to match the number of people killed in Gaza already. But no Western media challenges Israel's monstrous assertion, nor the false claim that Hamas wants to 'exterminate the Jews'. If there are now millions of people who think such a thing would not be a bad idea then the fault lies entirely with the Zionist state for confounding Judaism and Zionism. So it has been urgent to distribute information about what really took place on October 7th, as revealed within weeks by Electronic Intifada and the Grayzone, and in many collected snippets of information from social media and inside sources. Some of these have even emerged from Israeli enquiries and been screened on Israeli TV - though all under the cover of the 'Intelligence failure' of authorities or 'communication failure' following the surprise attack. Through all this time however, one thing has been missing - visual evidence to accompany reports from the pilots of helicopter gunships, scrambled to target the militant invaders before they could return to Gaza with their hostages. There was not even an indication that such visual evidence existed, though that may be because of a lack of interest in seeing what might be an embarrassment for Israel. It was something of a surprise then to discover such video included in Al Jazeera's new investigative report, and learn that there is apparently a whole lot more of it - according to the discussion in this report. It refers to a longer documentary, yet to be broadcast. Below is the first couple of minutes, including the video clips of vehicles and people being targeted and destroyed in the missile and gunfire blitz. Note also particularly the mention of 'at least 70 vehicles being destroyed'.
The following section of Al Jazeera's preliminary report looks at the Israeli army's targeting and killing of people in the houses in the Kibbutz, where it appears that the intent was simply to kill everyone. The only witness testimony of what happened there came from survivors, including a woman who was assisted out with a Hamas fighter who surrendered to the Israeli military, using her as a shield but also saving her life while sacrificing his own. While the film may not contend this - and it is far from taking the side of Hamas in the conflict - it would appear that Israel's intent was to kill everyone so that there would be no witnesses to reveal the truth. The use of religious extremist organisation Zaka to conduct the 'forensic' examination and collection of remains also stinks of a cover-up, and one that enabled the manufacture of completely false narratives about Hamas' intentions and behaviour. These have played an equal part to the claims of how many were killed in creating a justification for the limitless and collective punishment of the Palestinian population in Gaza and in the occupied West Bank.
The true nature of the kibbutzes invaded by Hamas, as reinforced military outposts inhabited by Zionist settlers, was inadvertently revealed in a fleeting glimpse of a container belonging to the Jewish National Fund, as seen in this frame from a Hamas video. The JNF is both a prime sponsor of Israel’s aggressive occupation of Palestine, and a recipient of donations and ‘aid’ from organisations and governments around the world.
And so to the question of "Collateral Genocide", as I've chosen to call this story, as what is striking about the helicopter gunship footage shown - and shown on Israeli TV - is its uncanny resemblance to the most famous example of such footage - that taken from a US chopper in Baghdad in July 2007 which was discovered in the Wikileaks files and caused such a scandal. Its power to do so is undiminished, as noted by the Reuters chief of bureau at the time, Dean Yates. Two Reuters journalists were killed by the trigger happy and careless US chopper crew. The parallel may have been less obvious were it not for an odd coincidence - that Al Jazeera's documentary was released at the same time as the first screening of "The Trust Fall" - a documentary following the story and persecution of Julian Assange, whose fate currently hangs in the balance, somewhere between the Tower of London and Guantanamo Bay. The film includes the whole of Wikileaks' film "Collateral Murder", which records and annotates the targeting and killing of a group of men, wrongly identified by US soldiers as 'militants with weapons' - when they included the two Reuters journalists carrying cameras with telephoto lenses. In editing this clip to post here, it was necessary to endure the sound of the machine gun fire that precedes its lethal effect on the 'targets' - a sound that can never be forgotten; hearing it in Al Jazeera's report was consequently something of a revelation. We might remember however that every day there are drone 'pilots' somewhere in a bunker in Tel Aviv or Washington or Berlin or London monitoring vehicles and individual targets in Gaza and picking them off with missile strikes at will, using technology developed by Israel forty years ago to identify and track individuals. This ability gives them no excuse for the mass slaughter of hundreds of innocents with 2000 lb bombs, purportedly targeting some 'high-value' Hamas operative. This reveals that the innocents are the target.
DM 18 March 2024