What About October 7?

Two years have passed since Hamas broke out of the Gaza concentration camp to launch a devastating attack against Israel, which immediately responded with wholesale massacre of the Gazan population, eventually culminating in a policy of massive bombardment and deliberate starvation of close to two million people.

We still lack a complete account of what happened that day, but we do know that much of what Israel initially claimed, and was uncritically passed on as news by a complicit media, was not, in fact, true.  For example, Hamas terrorists were said to have decapitated children and babies, baked babies in ovens, and engaged in mass rape. These are common enough charges in situations of great political violence, but typically hysterical exaggerations or propaganda falsehoods, which is all the more reason why the allegedly fact-driven mass media should have been prepared to regard them with skepticism. This they did not do, however, and even after the charges were revealed to be Israeli propaganda they were never reported as such.

Hamas, for its part, defended the October 7 attack as an act of war directed against Israeli military targets, which included intense rocket bombardment of a diverse set of targets, and which directly led to enormous fatalities on the Islamic organization's part - 1609 combatant deaths. Israel had been caught completely off guard and responded in confusion with massive firepower. Hamas maintains that many of the Israeli dead were actually killed by crossfire, as was the case at the music festival at Reim, where Israeli helicopters firing at Hamas combatants killed party-goers, according to a Haaretz investigation. Also, some of the reported "civilian" deaths were actually of armed Israeli settlers resisting the attack. The point about the settlers raises the question of exactly how many "civilians" there can reasonably be said to be in Israel, a heavily militarized society where the vast majority of Jews are past, present, or future soldiers.

Also relevant is the fact that in its July 7 edition of 2024 Haaretz reported that during the October 7 attack Tel Aviv put its Hannibal Directive into practice, which calls for Israel to kill its own soldiers and civilians if and when they are in imminent danger of being captured by enemy forces (to prevent their being used as bargaining chips). This would have been the case in several barracks that Hamas combatants had infiltrated, suggesting that an undetermined number of Israeli dead were killed by their fellow Israelis.

Furthermore, it's truly odd that the Netanyahu government did nothing to prevent the attack, though Israeli intelligence services had been forewarned it was coming. Worse, soldier testimonies contend that Israeli security routines at the Gaza border were ordered suspended in the hours preceding the attack. Why?

In short, there is still a lot unknown about exactly what happened on October 7, 2023. But what we do know is that Israel's history of dispossession, occupation, repression, and assassination was the relevant context for interpreting the events of that tragic day. As Ralph Nader noted forty days after the attack: 

 

"You want to know what happened on October 7 that doesn't appear in the press? Here's what happened, according to Israeli sources. It was a one-time raid, by several thousand Hamas fighters, chosen at a relatively young age, because they've lost their sisters or their brothers or mothers or cousins or fathers in prior Israeli wars against them. So they chose them because they were motivated that way - for revenge. Number two, they were unemployed, and felt hopeless, they had no will to live anymore, and in that (Palestinian) culture when you're unemployed you're going to have a hard time getting married and raising a family, so they sent them over there. Hamas and others are probably stunned that they even got so far. And it was a homicide-suicide mission. They knew they were going to die, and so they started shooting anything they saw, whether it was soldiers, a party going on, civilians in their homes, until they were wiped out. Some of them got back with hostages, and, of course, there are seven thousand hostages in Israeli prisons (now 11,000 - ed.), the Palestinians, because they are abducted in order to extract information from their relatives in Gaza and the West Bank, that's an old practice, and they control extended families that way . . ." 

 

The facts of October 7 demand a far more objective accounting than we are given in the endlessly-told, but quite fanciful tale of wild-eyed Islamic terrorists endlessly indulging congenital bloodlust against tiny, innocent Israel.

Sources:

"Qué ocurrió el 7 de octubre de 2023?" (What Happened on October 7, 2023?) La Jornada (Spanish), October 8, 2025 

Ralph Nader interviewed by Briahna Joy Gray on her Bad Faith podcast, November 16, 2023