The denial and disinformation facing October 7 survivors

Not long after the war began, three women went to their local member of parliament to register their dismay about Gaza. The women were aged in their late 20s or early 30s. One was a lawyer, another worked for a design firm. One wore a keffiyeh draped around her shoulders.

The federal MP, who asked not to be identified for fear of inciting anti-Israel protesters to target his electorate office and staff, offered a considered response. He, too, was appalled at the deaths of innocent Palestinians and acknowledged the terrible history of oppression of people who live on the Gaza Strip. He also condemned the atrocities of October 7.

It is here that the woman wearing the keffiyeh interjected. “That never happened,” she said. “The 7th of October never happened. It is fake news.”

This flat denial of murder, rape, and mutilation of Jewish and Arab Israelis, a daylight carnage captured on hundreds of security cameras, dash cameras, mobile phones and body cameras worn by the killers, left the MP flummoxed. “That was in November,” he says. “Already, the disinformation campaign had done its work.”

Nimrod Palmach, an Israel Defence Forces reservist and among the first Israeli soldiers to arrive at Kibbutz Be’eri where Hamas and other Palestinian militants killed nearly one in 10 residents, is disgusted but not surprised at the virulence of October 7 denial.

Palmach saw things that day he will never forget. People shot in the head. Bodies of dead women, stripped half naked. Burnt corpses. “I felt like I was in zombie land,” he says.

He remembers a moment late in the day, as the kibbutz was wreathed in smoke and he was lying in the scrub pinned down by Palestinian gunmen who’d taken control of a farm building. It occurred to him then that even if he survived to bear witness, some people would never believe him.

“I was shooting with one hand with a machine gun, and with the other hand, I am holding my phone to take photos and to document,” he tells this masthead from Tel Aviv.

“We are the only country in the world that has to go through a massacre like this, an act of barbarism like this, and people will not believe us, will want to see proof, will blame us for manipulating the truth.”

Stephen Smith, a Los Angeles-based genocide scholar, says that October 7 denial, like Holocaust denial, is a spectrum of disinformation. “There is flat-out denial, which is hard to justify because Hamas filmed themselves with their bodycams,” he says. “It’s also minimisation and marginalisation of the significance of the event. It is making the public doubt the veracity of what occurred on that day.”

Reasonable attempts to confirm facts about October 7 are not denial, Smith says. Rather, it is the attempt to obscure, distort and misrepresent the deadliest day in Israel’s history.

In Australia, this can be seen in avowed feminists refusing to accept that Jewish women were raped on October 7; a respected journalist promoting conspiracy theories about Benjamin Netanyahu’s government sacrificing its own citizens to secure a pretext to invade Gaza; a prominent Palestinian activist telling shoppers they have been lied to about October 7; and a vandal on Melbourne’s Inkerman Street scrawling the word “fake” across the image of Ariel Bibas, a four-year-old boy abducted by Hamas from a kibbutz.

Sara Aniano, a disinformation analyst with the New York-based Anti-Defamation League’s Centre on Extremism, says the prevalence of October 7 denial, although difficult to quantify, is disturbing.

“I have seen super progressive, left-wing influencers promote the same narrative as neo-Nazis,” she says. “We have seen state-sponsored media from Iran and Russia sowing division. It has been a mix of orchestrated, highly co-ordinated and more organic campaigns.”

Danny Ben-Moshe, a Walkley Award-winning, Melbourne film-maker and Holocaust researcher who travelled to Israel to help document the stories of Palmach and other October 7 survivors, is struck by the parallels between arguments used to deny the Holocaust and those now being employed to downplay the truth about what Hamas did nine months ago. The difference is the speed with which October 7 denial set in.

“It took about 20 years for Holocaust denial to gain momentum. It took a matter of days for October 7 denial to take root,” he says.

Smith is a former executive director of the University of Southern California’s Shoah Foundation, an organisation founded by Hollywood director Steven Spielberg to record and preserve the testimonies of Holocaust survivors. He worked with Palmach and Ben-Moshe on Be the Witness, a sequence of short, virtual-reality films that tell the story of October 7 through the eyes of five survivors.

The project is funded by Israel-Is, a non-government organisation, at which Palmach, a 39-year-old father of two who describes himself as a social entrepreneur, is the chief executive.

Smith has interviewed Holocaust survivors and travelled to Bangladesh to document harrowing accounts of the persecuted Rohingya people fleeing Myanmar. He says of the intensity of atrocity recorded on October 7: “I don’t even have a word for it. There was nothing off limits.”

Smith says confronting the truth of October 7 does not preclude critical examination of Israel’s conduct in a war that has killed an estimated 38,000 Palestinians.

An Independent International Commission of Inquiry established by the United Nations Human Rights Council, in its first detailed findings on the conflict published last month, concluded that Israel’s security forces deliberately attacked civilians, including children, forced the displacement of 1.7 million Palestinians, degraded civilians, sexually humiliated women and used starvation as a method of war. Any of these, if proven by a court, would constitute war crimes.

By the same token, Smith says denying the nature of the October 7 attacks is to deny survivors the only meaningful justice they are likely to receive – acceptance of their stories.

“I am not saying lower your critical faculties and take everything at face value,” he tells this masthead during a recent trip to Sydney and Melbourne. “But when an event like this takes place, when there is clear evidence of atrocities, diminishing that event is a terrible attack on individuals who are traumatised and struggling to present the truth of that day because they are having to push up against a barrage of disbelief or misinformation.

“I am not just telling their story so people can know what happened, I am telling their story because within days of this atrocity, the memory of that is already under assault.”

There are well-documented examples, particularly in the chaotic days following the Hamas attacks, where either false or unsubstantiated allegations of atrocities were made. The most notorious was the reported discovery of 40 decapitated babies in Kibbutz Kfar Aza, an unverified claim first made by an Israeli television reporter after foreign journalists were taken to view the kibbutz. This horrific tale, now discredited, was repeated by an Israeli government spokesman and US President Joe Biden. A separate claim by a member of Hatzalah, an Israeli volunteer emergency service, about a baby being burnt to death in an oven, was never substantiated.

What did happen on October 7 at Kibbutz Be’eri and other sites in southern Israel is dispassionately laid out in a report published by the same commission of inquiry that delivered damning findings on Israel’s conduct in the war.

Just before 7am, two Hamas militants ambushed a car stopped at the kibbutz security gate and executed the three occupants. A short time later, a convoy of about 60 fighters entered the kibbutz riding on motorbikes and on the back of pick-up trucks. Once inside, they went from house to house, killing whoever they found.

That Saturday morning, they found mostly women, children and the elderly. They shot dead their youngest victim, nine-month-old Mila Cohen, in the arms of her mother. They killed four members of the same family – a mother, father and two teenage sons – while two younger children, aged 11 and 8, survived by hiding beneath the bodies of their dead family. They murdered 105 Be’eri residents and abducted a further 30.

The killers included members of Hamas’ military brigades and other armed Palestinian groups. According to the commission of inquiry, they set houses on fire when people were still inside, burnt, mutilated and decapitated bodies, stripped victims naked and used accelerants to set fire to their genitals. They stood over the bodies of their victims and posed for photographs. The commission concluded that women were sexually assaulted at multiple sites.

Despite the documented and recorded evidence of what took place in southern Israel nine months ago, the Anti-Defamation League – a Jewish organisation established more than a century ago to combat antisemitism and other forms of extremism – has traced the first seeds of disinformation about October 7 to within hours of the attack.

White supremacist influencer Nicholas Fuentes, posting to his Telegram channel as news of the tragedy was still breaking, questioned whether Israel’s intelligence and national security agencies had really been caught napping or something more sinister was at play.

“I think this is a little suspicious in light of how the Likud government will benefit politically from this crisis,” he wrote.

Mary Kostakidis, a former SBS newsreader and trusted face of public broadcasting, shared this conspiracy theory with her more than 28,000 followers on X. “The suggestion Israel knew but allowed it to go ahead in order to provide a reason to obliterate Gaza and an impetus for war with Iran can’t be dismissed out of hand,” she wrote on October 10.

She later raised the theory that the Israel Defence Forces, rather than Hamas, were responsible for much of the carnage on October 7. “How much of it was caused by Israel’s indiscriminate attack that killed its own citizens,” she posted.

As the conflict escalated and civilian deaths in Gaza climbed, pro-Palestinian activists dismissed evidence of rape and other sexual abuses by Hamas militants. Randa Abdel-Fattah, a Palestinian author, academic and human rights advocate, wrote in a blog published by the Beirut-based Institute of Palestinian Studies that claims of systematic sexual violence, including the findings of a detailed New York Times investigation, republished by this masthead, had been “thoroughly and compellingly discredited”.

Abdel-Fattah based this claim on material published by The Grayzone – a far-left website that supports the Putin and Assad regimes and denies the Bucha massacre in Ukraine – along with content on Chicago-based website The Electronic Intifada, and Mena, an Egyptian feminist initiative that rejected the New York Times report two days after it was published. In the blog, Abdel-Fattah argues that anyone who accepts that Hamas militants raped Israeli women is promoting “rape atrocity propaganda” and consenting to the genocide of Palestinian people.

Posting on Instagram, Abdel-Fattah demanded “a healthy cynicism of the allegations made by genocide-cheering propagandists”. She was backed by former ABC broadcaster Antoinette Lattouf, who described her post as “super important”, and feminist activist Clementine Ford.

“Thank you for articulating this,” Ford wrote. “It is monstrous to suggest that demanding critical analysis of unproved rape claims used to justify a genocide is somehow endorsing those claims.”

Former Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters, during a heated television exchange with journalist Piers Morgan this week, accused Israelis of telling “disgusting, filthy lies” about October 7 and declared there was no evidence that women were raped.

In response to questions from this masthead, Abdel-Fattah dismissed this story as “yet another example of how mainstream media perpetuates anti-Palestinian racism and launders Israeli propaganda and lies”.

Kostakidis did not resile from her public comments. “The Zionist lobby won’t intimidate those of us on the right side of history into silence,” she said. Kostakidis said her scepticism towards October 7 rape claims was based on consideration of “many independent sources of journalism” and that she didn’t believe Hamas militants would have diverted from their primary mission of taking hostages to rape women.

The Anti-Defamation League cites Maram Susli, a Perth-based Syrian immigrant with more than 400,000 followers on X, as a prominent source of “false narratives” about October 7. Under the pseudonym Syrian Girl, she has posted conspiracy theories including that an Israel attack helicopter gunned down young Israelis fleeing the Nova dance festival and that Shani Louk, a German-Israeli woman murdered by Hamas militants and paraded through Gaza on the back of a pick-up truck, was captured alive and given medical treatment.

Like most conspiracy theories, the claim that the Israel Defence Forces were responsible for most of the Israeli civilian deaths on October 7 carries a kernel of fact.

Within the IDF, there is a provision known as the Hannibal Directive – an operating principle that prioritises preventing the abduction of military personnel soldiers above their personal safety. The United Nations commission of inquiry found that the Hannibal Directive was employed in several instances on October 7 and that Israeli civilians were killed by their own troops. One of the most tragic episodes occurred at Kibbutz Be’eri, where tank shells were fired at a house where Hamas was holding hostages.

The story promoted by Susli and other October 7 deniers was deliberately false. The footage of the helicopter attack, released by the IDF, is from October 8 and shows an Israeli operation against Hamas targets in Gaza. The United States-based FactCheck.org identified notorious conspiracy theorist Stew Peters as the original author of the misinformation.

The Anti-Defamation League’s Sara Aniano says conspiracy theories like these provide a gateway to darker antisemitism. “This was not a nuanced view of whether or not airstrikes have inadvertently hit civilians,” she says. “This specific claim was simply false but it was used and continues to be used as a narrative which drives other October 7 denial theories.

“It is one ingredient in a bigger narrative that people pull from, over and over again, to say that if Israel or the Jews are lying about this, what else are they lying about?”

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