What Really Happened on October 7, 2023?
Netanyahu Continues to Block a National Commission of Inquiry in Spite of the Unfolding Scandal of the IDF Spotters, Both Dead and Alive
Alison Kaplan Sommer writes in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz,
Benjamin Netanyahu has done everything in his power to avoid what every responsible Israeli political and military leader (and the vast majority of the Israeli public, according to multiple polls), has demanded: a full and complete official government investigation of the intelligence, operational and leadership failures that took place omOctober 7, 2023.
Thus, Netanyahu has been free to weave his own narrative, in which all mistakes and missteps can be attributed to the Israel Defense Forces – and none to the government responsible for proper oversight of the military, which he has led for years.
So it is disappointing – but hardly surprising – that once again, Netanyahu fended off a push for a national commission of inquiry into the October 7 failures, again claiming that "first, I want to beat Hamas" – without, of course, defining exactly what that means.
How much longer can Benjamin Netanyahu deny and discount the mountain of evidence indicating that he and some of the other top officials in Israel were well aware before the event, of what was about to transpire on October 7, 2023? On October 7 members of the military wing of Hamas broke though the Gaza fence at several locations with the objective of seizing Israeli hostages.
Not only was Netanyahu well aware of what was coming on October 7. The Israeli Prime Minister probably took part in clearing the way for the apprehension of Israeli hostages by Hamas. It is well known in informed circles in Israel that Netanyahu had a close “symbiotic relationships” with some Hamas members throughout much of his political career. On October 7 Netanyahu helped Hamas fulfill its plans by holding back the IDF from responding militarily in the initial crucial hours after the Palestinians’ breakout from their Gaza prison enclave.
This well-chronicled interpretation runs against that of the powerful coalition that continues to back, support, and regularly misrepresent the US-Israeli genocide that began immediately following the events of October 7. This genocide is being concurrently denied and rationalized politically on the basis of a complex weave of intertwined deceptions.
These deceptions continue to be exposed by researchers whose quest is to establish the truth of October 7. Our quest is founded in identifying and analyzing the evidentiary bases of demonstrable proofs. Certainly that commitment to addressing the implications of the existing evidence concerning what really happened on October 7, is evidenced in the reporting of Alison Kaplan Sommer in Haaretz.
The Haaretz reporter is far from alone in Israel in underlining the travesty of the Netanyahu government’s determination to block anything resembling a National Commission of Inquiry to study how the events of October 7 came to happen.
The failure of the domestic apparatus in Israel to identify facts from fiction in this unprecedented crisis in Israel’s national existence, is mirrored by similar political blocks at the international level. Huge political interferences are being placed in the way of the work of the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court in their investigations of the most intensively chronicled and publicized War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity of the twenty-first century.
One of the most explosive revelations gradually making its way forward in all the news about mass murders, fragile cease fires and such in the course of Israel’s ongoing quest to extinguish Palestine, concerns the life and deaths of an all-female branch of the Israeli Defence Force. The IDF soldiers near the centre of contentions concerning disagreements about the genesis of October 7, are known as spotters. Before October 7 the job of the spotters was to monitor many video cameras all set up to monitor the terrain as well as the activities that took place in the region of the Gaza fence.
Over the course of many months leading up to October 7, the spotters viewed and reported on Hamas members openly conducting elaborate training exercises that foreshadowed very clearly the invasive military event being prepared by Hamas fighters. Individually and collectively the spotters could clearly see that Hamas were getting ready to undertake some sort of well organized attack on Israeli communities and military bases outside the Gaza fence.
The young spotter soldiers, 15 of whom were killed on October 7, wrote extensive reports about what they observed and also what they expected would happen. Many of them, including those that were about to lose their own lives in the aggression-in-the-making they witnessed day after day, month after month, also described what they were seeing to their families. Haaretz has reported in their stories carefully and insistently.
In spite of the explosive information they were organizing and conveying, the spotters received no questions or acknowledgments from Israeli officials up and down the military and intelligence chains of command. Why were they ignored out of laziness, chauvinism, or careful design? Was it because older men refused to take seriously the observations of younger women, as is often reported? Or was something more insidious taking place inside the Israeli power structure?
Here is how Alison Kaplan Sommer introduces the spotters as well as Netanyahu’s claim he knew nothing of their observations about Hamas’s preparations for the October 7 event.
The vote came a day after reports that Netanyahu claimed he was "stunned" by accounts from bereaved family members that their relatives – women IDF soldiers surveying the Gaza border – had warned repeatedly of a Hamas invasion and were ignored. The parents, like the rest of the country, urged their leader that a full and complete investigation take place now – and not in another 20 years. One parent confronted Netanyahu on his avoidance, saying: "You're the head. You are responsible. You command the army. You command the defense minister. The responsibility is on you. Accept responsibility."
In the current ongoing exchange of Palestinian prisoners for Israeli hostages initiated in unison with Donald Trump’s inauguration as US President, 5 of the 7 spotters abducted by Hamas have been returned to their families in Israel. They are Liri Albag, Naama Levy, Daniella Gilboa, Karina Ariev and Agam Berger.
As noted, 15 of the spotters were killed in their work station, the Nahal Oz military base outside the Gaza Fence. Their easy capture along with other IDF members by the military wing of Hamas on the morning of October 7, remains controversial. They can be seen as victims of the very event the spotters warned but without avail. This circumstance alone should justify the National Commission of Inquiry which Netanyahu has every reason to fear if it was to take place. For a variety of reasons, Netanyahu is a key suspect in some of the still-unsolved mysteries of October 7.
Amit Yerushalmi is one of the living spotters who monitored the build up to October 7. Her military service came to an end just before October7. She gave testimony before an an Inquiry panel set up by the bereaved families who lost relatives in the fiasco of October 7.
Bar Peleg’s account of the rich evidence she provides deserves the long citation below
“ She said she witnessed training exercises involving vans that later served Hamas in the attack on the southern communities that border the Strip: "By my last count, three times a day there was actually a convoy of vans traveling from [across the border from] Netiv Ha'asara to Kerem Shalom, about 30 vans carrying armed terrorists with cameras, Hamas and Palestinian flags, from the northern sector to the southern sector, driving 300 meters [around 325 yards] from the fence, stopping at every position."
In her testimony before the committee that was established by the bereaved families of victims of the massacre, Yerushalmi said: "I saw training sessions, sometimes it was once or twice a month. [Later] it started to be once a week, and slowly but surely even several times a week, and even several times a day … We reported everything, detailing what time [the Hamas fighter] reached the position, when he emerged from it, what he did. We sat there for two years, and we were sure that [the spotters’ commanders] were listening to us and doing something with our information. In light of the outcome, I realize that they didn't do anything with it."
"I think that only after October 7 we discovered how much they weren't listening to us. During our service, we were all sure that they were doing something with what we were saying," Yerushalmi said.
She also said that they had no instructions as to what to do in case of an incursion. "We were supposed to continue sitting in front of the screen in the war room," she said.
In November, Haaretz published testimonies of spotters who said they reported unusual activity on the border in the months and weeks before the war, but to no avail.”
Context and Background: What Is at Stake?
I think Benjamin Netanyahu protests much too loudly in trying to block every effort to initiate in Israel a credible National Commission of Inquiry into the genesis of the events that transpired on October 7, 2023.
Since October 7 Israel’s level of lunacy has been much amplified, a condition that will continue as long as the people and government of the Jewish State evade a proper investigation into the genesis of the October 7 debacle. In fact the people of the world also need to know what really happened to spark the most ruthless, public, and many-faceted genocide of the twenty-first century.
This event began when more than a thousand Palestinians escaped their Gaza prison confinement with the primary goal of seizing Israeli hostages to use as bargaining chips for negotiations with the Israeli government. The sporadic negotiations have been accompanied by temporarily-halted high-tech genocidal assault as well as guerrilla warfare in a contained urban setting.
Having access to “the facts” of what genuinely happened on October 7 is an inescapable element in moving from the realm of irrational hysteria towards more sane reckoning with the realm of reality. Who suffers most from the obfuscation of the facts? Who tries to benefit by putting a litany of lies in the forefront?
For starters, let’s assess the impact of keeping the truth away from the Jewish citizens still struggling with the monumental failures on the part of Israel’s government to protect them. For many Jewish Israelis, the misrepresentations play on their ongoing frustrations concerning the monumental failures on the part of Israel’s government. Israel’s Armed Forces, its legendary intelligence branches as well its Prime Minister and cabinet let them down at a moment of great need.
These agencies and individuals failed to protect Israeli citizens from the attacks by those who had broken through the heavily-monitored walls and fences of the Gaza open air prison to inflict some violence and pent up anger on the regular citizens of the occupying nation.
From the perspective of the aggressors in this case who turned the tables on the IDF, the Jewish state of Israel had disempowered, oppressed, eliminated as well as removed many Palestinians from their homes, olive orchards and villages. This process has been unfolding for over three generations starting with the ongoing Nakba— the caststrophe— of 1948.
How can such a breach in accountability from the Israeli government to the people of Israel be countenanced? Nothing like this event has transpired in prior Israeli history. How is it that those in the Israeli government who presided over such a major failure in their duty to safeguard their own citizens are still in charge of the radical responses to the supposedly unexpected cataclysm of October 7?
How can such a breach in accountability be countenanced? How are Israeli citizens to react if and when they discover the failure of protection was based in calculations far more sinister than bouts of incompetence in some branches of Israeli Officialdom.
In late January of 2025 Israel’s top general, Herzi Halevi, took it upon himself to resign “taking responsibility for security failures tied to Hamas's surprise attack.” It is said he thereby put “pressure on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has delayed any public inquiry that could potentially implicate his leadership.”
There are a lot of unsupported assumptions in the CBC report. Maybe the events of October 7 involved something very different than a “security failure” in response to “Hamas’s surprise attack.”
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/israel-top-general-resigns-jenin-west-bank-attacks-1.7436965
As shall be demonstrated, the Hamas attack of October 7 was no surprise for some insiders, including Benjamin Netanyahu, who were well aware that a Hamas attack was on its way. The great weight of evidence points to an elaborate set of intrigues underway that can be shown to be far more insidious than the standard mantra blaming the events of October 7 on an “intelligence failure.”
The time has come to underline the travesty that the individual who bears the largest part of the responsibility for the failure on October 7 to protect Israeli Jews, namely Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has so consistently been allowed to abuse his influence in order to block a credible investigation into what really happened.
The record makes it cleat that Netanyahu has much to hide including his supportive and “symbiotic relationship” with Hamas from 2006 right up to the prelude to October 7. The history of Netanyahu’s self-serving political relationship with Hamas, the Muslim organization that provided his political ticket away from the possibility of negotiations with the Palestinians of a two-state solution, is becoming well known in Israel.
The key to this avoidance of two-state solution was to maintain a division between the the Palestinian representatives of Gaza and the Palestinian representatives of the West Bank. This division Netanyahu and his Likud Party allies helped establish and maintain by affirming the importance of Hamas in the governance of Gaza and treating the West Bank as the exclusive domain of the Palestinian authority. With this division the Israeli PM could always proclaim that there was no unified Palestinian authority with whom to negotiate.
Meanwhile the judiciary in Israel continues to preside over the PM’s criminal prosecution for his alleged domestic crimes. The list of Netanyahu’s alleged domestic violations of laws, continues to grow. Increasingly the transgressions include the efforts of his staff and supporters to alter evidence concerning the damning details of his conduct on the day of October 7.
The court in one of Netanyahu’s domestic trials now underway, for instance, is focusing in on the illegal alterations to Prime Minister’s log book recording the time and general content of his telephone exchanges in the early morning of October 7. The judges are looking, for instance, at the actions of Tzachi Braverman, Netanyahu’s Chief of Staff. He allegedly altered the time stamps on two telephone conversations of the PM with Major-General Avi Gil.
The alleged altering of the time stamps on Netanyahu’s phone logs are a small part of a larger pattern of efforts to withhold or fabricate evidence of the Prime Minister’s cryptic actions on October 7. As reported in The Times of Israel,
“Meanwhile, Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara has approved an investigation into Netanyahu himself as the scandals around his office multiply…. A source said, “The prime minister’s people didn’t shy away from any means to change the narrative and exonerate the premier from the failures that led to the war.”
Accordingly, even without a formal investigation, the evidence is mounting that a big part of the emergency response to the breakout from Gaza of Hamas fighters and other Muslim groups, can be traced back to Netanyahu’s constant scheming to keep one step ahead of law enforcement, both domestically and internationally.
In this respect his maintaining the status of a wartime Prime Minister continues to be vital to his own personal mission to stay out of jail. The ongoing emergency underway within the person of Benjamin Netanyahu, continues to form a large and growing aspect of Israel’s increasingly cataclysmic national emergency.
As evidenced by the log book scandal, Netanyahu’s law breaking on both local and international fronts is merging.
What if the events of Oct. 7 were engineered to arouse public opinion in support of the elimination of Palestinians from Israel proper and also from Occupied Palestine? What if there is no justification to support the arguments of those who see an equivalence between the crimes attributed to Hamas and the genocidal crimes attributed to the Israel-US partnership in Gaza?
What if the events of October 7 form not a Hamas equivalence— a counter crime— to the post-October 7 genocide directed at the Palestinians. What if the events of October 7 are best understood as preplanned and facilitating aspects of the Israeli-US genocide, one directed at bringing public opinion, but especially among Christian Zionists and Jewish Israelis, into supportive alignment with the mass murder in Gaza?
Many people inside of Israel or many close observers of Israel outside the country, immediately rejected the idea that Hamas’s actions on October 7 constitute a genuine surprise attack. It seemed to them obvious that some branches of the Israeli government allowed and even assisted the prison breakout of Gazan Palestinians. Whole high-tech systems, involving the gates for entry to and exit from Gaza, were left completely open on the fateful morning. That kind of transgression could only originate in an intentional action, not in the mistake of some forgetful official.
As has been widely reported on Grayzone, Mondoweiss and Electronic Intifada, the IDF played a significant role in adding to the number of Israelis killed on October 7. Numbers like 300 of the 1200 Israelis said to have been killed on that day, have been suggested. This IDF attack on those Israelis in the company of Palestinians took place, we have been told, in order to prevent Israelis from being taken captive and thereby putting adding extra bargaining leverage in the hands of Israel’s enemies.
Former Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant explained in early February of 2025 that he had “instructed the army to implement the Hannibal Directive, which involves killing captives along with their captors.” Gallant “stressed the need for a comprehensive government inquiry into Israel’s October 7 failures.”
Netanyahu and some of his co-conspirators held back the IDF from military responses throughout the key hours during the morning of October 7 when, for instance, 15 spotters met their demise at Israel’s Nahal Oz military base. Moreover, many of the usual contingents assigned to patrol the Gaza walls had coincidentally been sent to the West Bank to handle other assignments.
Significantly, while soldiers had been called away from the site of the breach of the Gaza walls and fences, journalists seem to have been given the means to locate themselves where they could find good stories and photo opportunities which happened in abundance on the morning of October 7. One of the Western journalists was reportedly even embedded with Hamas fighters.
The next stage of the Israeli government’s preconceived plan was to use the media to whip up public antagonism by emphasizing concocted accounts of the rape and baby killing by Hamas “terrorists.” Needless to say the Zionist media in Israel, Britain, the USA, etc. simultaneously downplayed the IDF’s indiscriminate mass murder of Palestinian people all presented as campaign to “eradicate Hamas.”
The unprecedentedly high rate of slaughter of journalists in Gaza was part of the Israeli scheme for controlling media coverage and public perception of the Gaza genocide. The genocidal project was perpetrated by means of carpet bombing, forced starvation, forced dehydration, cultivated plagues, destruction of hospitals and the persistent assassination and injury of medical practitioners.
Also targeted for intentional murder were staff members of organizations trying to provide whatever dribs and drabs of humanitarian aid that were somehow brought through the blockages meant to stop or slow its movement. These blockages were imposed by the IDF as well as by zealous elements of the Israel citizenry. Generally speaking there was and is a high level of public support among Israeli Jews for the genocide of Palestinians and all that comes with it.
The genocide extended beyond the direct murder of Palestinians, mostly women and children. It also extended to the concerted military targeting of all life-support systems, both natural and manmade in the Gaza Strip. The destruction extended to cultural, sports, recreational, religious, and historical institutions. For instance, eight universities in Gaza were blown to bits.
The objective was clearly to force the survivors of mass extermination in Gaza to flea for their lives. It was to create a toxic uninhabitable environment with the goal of forcing native Palestianians to vacate their home territory and thereby de-Palestinianize Israel.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/israel-us-plan-complete-deportation-from-gaza/5842836
Already in November of 2023 the US-Israel plan to promote the mass exodus from Gaza of survivors of mass murder, was being discussed openly in the US Congress. Efforts were taking shape to persuade the government of Egypt, Yemen, Iraq and Turkey to accept Palestinian “refugees” subject to forced displacement.
In the following citation from a US proponent of the deportation, the plan is presented as a means to help the Palestinians escape the alleged tyranny of Hamas, the organization regularly painted by the apologists of the US-Israeli genocide as the fountain of all evil.
“The neighbouring borders have been closed for too long, but it is now clear that in order to free the Gazan population from the tyrannical oppression of Hamas and to allow them to live free of war and bloodshed, Israel must encourage the international community to find the correct, moral and humane avenues for the relocation of the Gazan population.”
US President Donald Trump has more or less embraced this position when he presented his idea of “finishing off the job” of de-Palestianizing Israel. He made himself an advocate of what he sees as a kinder approach to bringing about a final solution.
Let It Happen to Wipe Gaza off the Map
In many respects the October 7 event has often been described as a false flag event similar to the false flag deception of 9/11. Both events involved strategic roles for Benjamin Netanyahu, whose political career has often involved putting himself forward as an expert in Islamic terrorism whose self-assigned role in history has been to extirpate this much-hyped evil from the earth. Netanyahu’s agents have argued that they hold a formula for An End to Evil by somehow “winning the War on Terror.”
https://www.unz.com/proberts/the-israeli-hamas-conflict-is-a-continuation-of-the-9-11-plot/
Many voices have been raised, even from the very day of October 7, to point out the manipulated character of the events of that very moment in time. Here on the evening of October 7, for instance, is the very informative straight talking from the lips of Efrat Fenigson, a veteran of the Intelligence Division of the Israeli Defence Force (IDF). She expresses her extreme skepticism, saying that there are many things reported about the event that don’t make any sense at all.
https://www.bitchute.com/video/b9FTIxlTl5wb/
The next day, October 8, Phillip Giraldi, a former CIA agent, assessed the supposed surprise attack as follows:
As a former intelligence officer, I find it impossible to believe that Israel did not have multiple informants inside Gaza as well as electronic listening devices all along the border wall which would have picked up movements of groups and vehicles.
In other words, the whole thing might be a tissue of lies as is often the case…
Officials in the know chose to let it happen so they can wipe Gaza off the map in retaliation and, possibly relying on the US pledge to have Israel’s “back,” then, implicating Iran and attacking that country.
Then on Oct. 16, Giraldi wrote
“And then there was a warning from the Egyptian government to Israel ten days before the Hamas attack, with Egypt’s Intelligence Minister General Abbas Kamel personally calling Netanyahu and sharing intelligence suggesting that the Gazans were likely to do “something unusual, a terrible operation.” Other media accounts reveal how Hamas trained and practiced their maneuvers publicly.
There were also assessments made by US intelligence, which were shared with Israel, suggesting that something was afoot. So, given all of the evidence, there likely was no intelligence failure to anticipate and counter the Hamas attack. Rather there was a political decision made by the Israeli government that knew what might be coming and chose to let it proceed to provide a casus belli to destroy Gaza, vowing that “Every member of Hamas is a dead man,” and then go on from there. And “from there” might well include Lebanon, Syria and Iran, possibly with the assistance of the United States to do the heavy lifting. Iran in particular is already being blamed by the usual suspects as a party involved in the Hamas attack, so far without any evidence whatsoever, which is typical of how these stories evolve.”
“The Israeli government Allowed and Abetted the Killing of Their Own Citizens”
Now almost a year and a half after October 7, sometimes referred to as 10/7, more evidence and more honed analysis has come into play.
It seems that the leadership of Hamas, with the now-deceased strategist Yahya Sinwar prominent among them, wanted to publicize their intention to attack Israelis outside the confines of the Gaza prison enclave. The plan of Hamas was transformed into a widely-circulated, 40-page description outlining the Muslim organizations’s intentions.
Then in the months prior to October 7, the Hamas fighters known as the Qassem Brigades, openly practiced some of their manoeuvres near the Gaza prison fence. Then on October 7 Hamas and other armed Palestinian groups did pretty much exactly what they had planned and practised with the full knowledge of the intelligence agencies whose job it was and is to monitor and manipulate them.
The Hamas report, entitled Jericho Wall, was produced in early 2022. A year later on 2 Dec., 2023, the existence of the report and its heavy circulation in the world of spies, spooks, and journalists, was announced and discussed in the New York Times. The Times reporters observed,
“The document called for a barrage of rockets at the outset of the attack, drones to knock out the security cameras and automated machine guns along the border, and gunmen to pour into Israel en masse in paragliders, vans, and on motorcycles and on foot — all of which happened on Oct. 7.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/30/world/middleeast/israel-hamas-attack-intelligence.html
The Israel government followed up on the Jericho Wall report in a tentative way. In September of 2024, members of Israeli Intelligence Unit 8200 submitted a commentary indicating its officers had witnessed and described extensive preparations by Hamas for a military campaign targeting people and installations outside the Gaza Fence.
The Unit 8200 report included very precise information about the Hamas objective of taking about 250 Israeli hostages back to Gaza with detailed information about how they should be treated thereafter.
The Israeli intelligence document is entitled Detailed End-to-End Raid Training. The Report was discussed on Kan, Israeli public television. In Haaretz, Rachel Fink explained,
“While the [Unit 8200] document includes never-before-seen details, it is but one in a long list of reports which points to the extent to which military officials were warned of Hamas' plans to attack Israel.
In July 2023, a Military Intelligence non-commissioned officer (NCO) provided a warning to her commanders that Hamas intended to carry out a massacre in the Gaza border communities.
The NCO wrote three documents in the six months prior to the October 7 attack, in which she warned that Hamas had completed a series of training exercises simulating a raid on kibbutzim and IDF outposts on the Israeli side of the border…
While many Israeli citizens and lawmakers have also demanded additional investigations into the political policies that contributed to October 7, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his coalition members have insisted that those investigations wait until the end of the war in Gaza.
The New York Times explanation of the Jericho Wall story more than a month after the October 7 initiation of the Gaza fiasco was authoritatively assessed by Andre Damon who concluded,
“On Friday, the New York Times published a report establishing conclusively that Israel was fully informed, in detail, of plans by Hamas to attack its border that were executed on October 7. These revelations make clear that Israeli officials, knowing full well where and how Hamas would strike, made a deliberate decision to stand down in order to facilitate the attack.
These revelations mean that the Israeli government allowed and abetted the killing of their own citizens and that the Israeli government is responsible for the deaths that took place that day. This criminal conspiracy was aimed at establishing a pretext for a long-planned genocide against the people of Gaza.
Moreover, it is impossible to believe that the United States was uninformed of Hamas’s plans, under conditions where not only Israeli intelligence, but also Egypt had advance warnings of the attack. Everything points to a plot that involved Israel, the Biden administration and likely British and European intelligence agencies…”
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/12/02/klox-d02.html
What was the thinking behind Hamas’s production of the Jericho Wall document? The plan was hatched and made known to the spies whose job it is to monitor the Muslim organization. Then the plans formulated by the Hamas leadership were followed by a steady and quite deliberate and almost public process of practising and rehearsing for the military campaign. And then Hamas and its collaborators went through with it.
As discussed below, here is no avoiding the need to publicly illuminate the background of October 7 in terms of the history of close collaboration between Hamas and Netanyahu.
Was Hamas setting a trap for the oppressors of the Palestinians? Did Sinwar and his colleagues lure the predators of the Palestinians into playing their hand in ways that would demonstrate to the world the full depth of the ruthless blood-lust animating their genocidal preoccupations? Who is playing whom now?
Hamas as a Target of US President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice
Now we can expect that Donald Trump will probably try to make good on his bragging that he is the most pro-Israel President ever in the entire history of United States. This frequent refrain was sometimes prompted in response to the claims of former President Biden, who tried hard to demonstrate while in office that his devotion to Zionism is absolute and unbreakable.
How did it happen that serving the imperatives of the Israel First Movement became the predominate preoccupation of all those who make it to the pinnacle of US politics? At the peaks and even the middling ranks of the US power structure, criticism of Israel often is treated as heresy to be punished and silenced.
As anticipated, the new US President responded early to his number one preoccupation bolstered by the megadonation of Casino heiress, Miriam Adelson. Trump’s first official visitor to the White House was Netanyahu. Trump surprised everyone by standing at Netanyahu’s side and stating his intention to merge the territory of Israel and the United States. The US President declared an intention to “buy and own” Gaza presumably in some sort of partnership with Israel.
Trump went further, declaring his determination to push forward the ejection of the Palestinians in order to “finish the job” of transforming the Holy Land to reflect the Zionist ideal of Jewish Supremacy. By describing his preferred scenario of ejecting the Palestinians from their native lands, Trump seemed to be describing the desired outcome visualized by those who decided to help Hamas go ahead on October 7 with its plan to take Israelis hostage.
The US President even raised the possibility of deploying US soldiers to move closer to finishing the genocidal job initiated 1948 by the founders of Israel.
Trump announced that the next stage of the process would culminate in the reconstitution of Gaza to become the beach front site for exclusive casinos, hotels, office towers, and luxury habitations for the wealthy. Presumably with the “ownership” of Gaza would come a decisive claim to the extensive oil and gas resources off the shore of Gaza, Israel and Lebanon. What profanity!
No doubt the lure of eliminating any claim to the extensive oil and gas resources off the shoreline of Gaza, forms a part of Trumps preoccupation with “wiping out Gaza” as it was before October 7.
Commander-In-Chief Trump acted as if he was almost totally unaware of the causes of the demolition of Gaza and the mass murder of the Palestinians since October 7. So much of the murder and mayhem he described was made to seem as if it resulted from some act of God, from the “bad luck” of the people of Gaza rather than the from lethal weaponry supplied in unlimited quantities by the US Military Industrial Complex. In early February the Trump government approved the transfer of $7.4 billion in bombs, missiles and military equipment to Israel.
https://www.arabnews.com/node/2590474/middle-east
Trump makes it seem like he is almost totally unaware of the long history of efforts to kill and uproot Palestinians in the effort to create a de-Palestinianized Greater Israel. Trump seemed unaware of how his own proposal would fulfill this scheme of slow-motion and, more recently, fast-motion genocide.
Along with President Trump’s efforts to make US territory in the Middle East contiguous with Israeli territory, the new Trump administration is putting the uninvestigated version of what happened on October 7, front and centre in the new business of the US Justice Department. Under the auspices of the new Justice Department Secretary, Attorney-General Pamela Bondi, the Department of Justice on 5 February created a new division, Joint Task Force Oct. 7.
The Joint Task Force will “focus on holding Hamas accountable and investigate individuals and entities that facilitated Hamas’ actions during its attack on Israelis on October 7, 2023. Moreover Trump’s new DOJ is supposed to “achieving justice for victims” of “terrorist-led antisemitism.”
Attorney-General Bondi has announced that Joint Task Force October 7 (JTF 10-7) will pursue criminal charges against Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the United Nations Relief and Welfare Agency (UNRWA) as well as others said to be responsible for “the terror attacks of Oct. 7, 2023 in southern Israel.”
Attorney-General Bondi has adopted the position of the Israeli government that the UN Agency responsible for assisting Palestinians refugees channeled support to Hamas. The Justice Department also adopted the view, amplified by Republican Senator Ted Cruz, that the Biden administration directed $ hundreds of millions to Hamas through various agencies including UNRWA.
Trump’s Justice Department is not getting off to a good start if the JTF 10/7 presents an illustration of the low level of due diligence allowed to steer the boat of extensive police powers into unknown waters. The heavily politicized events of October 7 have not yet been subjected to a credible investigation so the unproven assumptions concerning the 10/7 event should not be regarded as the basis for complex juridical processes.
The DOJ should rise above the careless treatment of the rule of law by Netanyahu who in the eyes of many has shown himself to be a notorious outlaw. The US DOJ should do better than picture Hamas as if it just emerged out of no where on October 7 and started to randomly target Israelis as hostages to be seized.
It is well known in Israel that Netanyahu and two Likud Party Prime Ministers before him cultivated Hamas as a Muslim social welfare agency. The Israeli design was clear. It wanted to attract Palestinian and other support away from the popular Yasser Arafat’s secular PLO organization. With Netanyahu’s permission, the Qatar government directed a rich streams of funding to Hamas for both its armed wing and for its branch that even to this day embodies elements of Gaza’s civil governance, fraught as it is.
It is no secret in Israel that the close connection between Netanyahu and the Hamas leadership may have been a factor in the genesis of October 7, the event whose true character has yet to be properly identified by means of a fact-finding process replete with resources to assure ample objectivity, erudition, assumption of innocence, and due diligence.
From Benny Gantz’s perspective the investigation into what truly transpired on October 7, 2023, should start with the election in 2006 of Hamas as the Palestinian governors of Gaza. Gantz clearly understands the importance of the Netanyahu-Hamas connection in the genesis of the events of October 7. The authors of the report emerging from the “Unofficial Civilian Probe” of the events of October 7, emphasized that “Netanyahu Led Efforts to Fund Hamas.”
In Haaretz, Uri-Joseph highlights that in his estimation “the root mistake in the present war lies in the cultivation of Hamas by the government of Benjamin Netanyahu.
See “A Brief History of the Netanyahu-Hamas Alliance” in
Perhaps US Attorney-General Pam Bondi might have considered looking into the Netanyahu-Hamas connection before setting up the terms of the Justice Department Joint Task Force Oct. 7. Perhaps Netanyahu himself meets the criteria of a close associate of Hamas, one that requires special scrutiny.
Perhaps Netanyahu has not to this day abandoned his secret collaboration with Hamas or elements of Hamas. Hamas still provides him with the political alibi of a much-publicized terrorist enemy enabling him to divert attention from the indiscriminate genocidal slaughter he presently leads. Was collusion between Netanyahu and Hamas, or at least a part of Hamas, a factor in how the events of October 7 were planned and how they continue to unfold?
The Trump government is going along with the Israeli government’s effort to criminalize the UN’s main agency for supplying aid and relief to Palestinian refugees. On the other hand the Trump administration clearly does not support the criminalization of the Israeli government by the International Court of Justice. Nor does the Trump government support the criminal charges pressed against Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant by the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court.
The ICC has also brought charges against three Hamas officials, now all killed by the IDF. In doing so the ICC indicates it accepts the prevailing interpretation of the events of October 7, even though no formal inquiry has investigated the existing evidence of what truly transpired on 10/7.
The Cover Up Continues
The topic of prior knowledge of what was planned for October 7 is far from exhausted. There are many individuals and groups inside and outside Israel who may have had prior knowledge of what could be expected on October 7. Clearly Benjamin Netanyahu was one of those with prior knowledge because only he could have ordered the delay of the IDF’s military response to the pre-publicized Hamas plan.
After October 7 there was a very active effort by government officials to reign in those who had prior knowledge of October 7 and to prevent them from talking about what they know. Although they deny it, journalists, and especially those with cameras, are a group that seem to have had considerable prior knowledge. It seems some favoured journalists knew roughly what to expect and where to be in order to cover the most sensational stories.
As I interpret it, the Israeli representative to the United Nations, Danny Danon, cracked the whip to threaten those that broke the silence on the Israeli side of the secret preparations for October 7. As I interpret Danon’s startling words, those “photojournalists” who refused to keep their mouths shut about the backstory to October 7 fiasco were threatened with death.
The IDF’s spotters form a group with much prior knowledge of October 7. The crime lies not in the spotters’ prior knowledge but in the failure of those officials fed this knowledge to act on it. Moreover, many of the spotters cannot be threatened for talking about the build up to October 7, because they have already been killed.
The spotters were killed because the Israeli government left them without military protection on the fatal day. Was the death of the spotters part of a plot by Netanyahu and his associates to eliminate evidence of awkward incriminating evidence?
This fact alone forms one crucial aspect of a scandal within intertwined complexes of scandals generated by the still-uninvestigated events of 10/7.
The spokesperson for the IDF, Daniel Hagari, acknowledged the failure of the IDF to protect the spotters and other military personnel at the Nahal Oz military during the morning of October 7. He said, "We have a moral duty to repair what happened that day at the Nahal Oz [base] when we failed to protect [it].” For the families and loved ones of those killed on October 7 for want of protection, there is no repairing the damage.
Seven of the spotter survivors were taken into custody by Hamas as hostages. One of them, Ori Megidish, was rescued by the IDF shottly after her apprehension. Another, Noa Marciano, is said to have been killed in Al-Shifa Hospital.
The parents of the spotters, both living and dead, have become organized. In the summer of 2024 these parents put their positions directly to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. From a Haaretz report we learn,
“At the meeting, the parents told Netanyahu about how their daughters had warned repeatedly of a Hamas invasion. The mother of one of the soldiers said that her daughter, who had just finished her training and had only served at the Nahal Oz base for a week, predicted what was about to happen.
"She came home to us and said: There's going to be an invasion," the mother said. "When did she tell you that?" Netanyahu asked, and the mother replied: "During the time she was there. She said it several times, in fact."
Another woman at the meeting said, "For a month, they were telling us every day: 'It's trouble, they [Hamas] keep training.'" The prime minister asked her: "They told you that?" And another participant answered: "They told us, and we demand answers about this, immediately, not when the war ends."
Netanyahu made sure to “play dumb.” He self-servingly distanced himself from the damning information by pretending that the whole matter was all previously unknown to him.
Netanyahu is reported to have said in response to the parents,
"All of this information, I'm stunned by what I'm hearing. I didn't know they told you these things," the prime minister said. "All of this material was supposed to have reached someplace that operates the systems, and it didn't happen."
It seems that many in government studiously avoided any exchanges at all with the families of the spotters. Haaretz reports
“The families went on to tell Netanyahu about how hurt they are because the government has ignored them. "I've been sitting at home for nine months," said one person there. "No one has come to us – no one for the government, or from the Knesset. Nobody has come to ask forgiveness, to say, 'We're thinking of you, we're aware of your existence.'"
Another person added: "Not one person can come see us at home? For nine months, not one person can come and knock on the door and say: 'We erred, we're sorry'? Where's the respect?”
I can’t picture any scenario whereby Netanyahu was totally ignorant of the SOS raised by the spotters, especially after so many of them were killed through the admitted neglect of the IDF. Surely Netanyahu could not be that stupid in spite of his pretending to be so when it serves his purpose.
The IDF did conduct a mini-investigation into its own failure to protect the members of Kibbutz Be’eri. The members of the Local Council responded to the inadequacy of the IDF’s conclusion noting, that the Armed Forces report
"continues the line that governs Israel – no one is responsible. No one is to blame. This is the greatest disaster in the country's history, and the entire political and military leadership is standing still. For us, this is a partial investigation, since there was no interaction at all with the Council, and therefore does not reflect a complete picture of the heavy disaster. We demand a Commission of Inquiry, now."
Netanyahu needed October 7 to go off in a spectacular way, as FDR needed Pearl Harbor to go off to justify American intervention in the European war theater in WW-2. He moved the aircraft carriers out 2 weeks before, and the rest of the modern ships out 1 week before the attack, and was monitoring Japanese radio communications, but keeping it secret from the military commanders at Pearl Harbor and Clark airbase.
This is Netanyahu's play for the "final solution".
I have read this essay in full, and it covers the topic in detail.
amazing article...wish I had a printer, as this deserves more than a speed read off the screen. Great pic at the end of Net - he's insane.