In an impassioned speech before the U.S. Congress in June, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated, “like December 7, 1941, and September 11, 2001, October 7 is a date that will forever live in infamy.”

In the official version touted by Netanyahu, Hamas fighters on October 7 breached the Israeli security wall and attacked the Tribe of Nova music festival and surrounding kibbutzim, killing 1,139 Israelis, including 815 civilians. Israel responded by launching an all-out war.

People skeptical of the official narrative questioned how Hamas could have breached Israel’s security wall when it was among the most heavily guarded in the world and connected to sensors.

They also wondered how Israeli military forces were not immediately mobilized to rout the Hamas fighters who had come in on hang-gliders and were armed with mostly rudimentary weapons.

Even a mainstream news network like ABC aired a special report about a team of female IDF officers stationed near the border who had reported suspicious activity to their superiors days before the October 7 attack only to have their report ignored. Most of the female IDF officers were slaughtered when their base was overrun on October 7.

After October 7, Dr. Philip Giraldi, a former CIA official, wrote:

“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.” 

Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction

Giraldi’s perspective is reinforced in a new documentary about October 7, narrated and edited by John Hankey.

The film shows footage of two purported Mossad agents opening the gates to the electric fence to Hamas fighters to allow them to enter Israel and carry out the terrorist attacks of October 7.

Additionally, the film suggests that: a) Mossad knew in advance of the October 7 attack and may have helped to plan it; b) IDF officers were deliberately withdrawn to allow the Hamas invaders to enter the country and carry out their attacks; c) female IDF soldiers who reported on Hamas activities were deliberately ignored and then allowed to be killed; and d) many of the killings of Israeli civilians were carried out by IDF soldiers as part of the deception operation, whose purpose was to inflame Israeli opinion in support of war.^[1]

The notion that the October 7 attacks were a surprise is contradicted by advance reports that the IDF high command had received days and hours before, and by the launching of rockets or fireworks by Hamas seen in Jerusalem in the early morning hours of October 7.

One parallel with 9/11 is that there were abnormal stock market trades and manipulations going on just before October 7, which indicates advance knowledge of the attacks by elements of the Israeli and probably U.S. intelligence establishments.

The Netanyahu government had long supported Hamas financially, viewing it as an asset that could weaken Palestinian support for the secular Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and create unrest in the occupied territory that would enable Israel’s divide-and-conquer strategy.^[2]

Bezalel Smotrich, a member of Netanyahu’s war cabinet, is quoted in the film stating that Hamas was a terrorist organization that was not recognized by the UN Security Council; as such, the Israelis could not negotiate a peace deal with it, which they did not want to do.

A side purpose of the Tribe of Nova massacre, according to Hankey, was to allow for the slaughter of Israeli leftists/peaceniks who were attending the Tribe of Nova music festival, which was a Woodstock-type festival for peaceniks whom the Israeli hard right and Mossad hate.

Lawyers for survivors of the massacre are currently suing the Israeli government because, they say, the government knew in advance of the attacks and did nothing to protect festival attendees. The festival was even moved up to the Gaza border a few days before, even though it was known this would be dangerous.

Hankey shows footage from Israeli Apache helicopters which fired on the cars of festival goers fleeing the scene and others fleeing by foot, suggesting that many festival goers may have been killed by the IDF.

In Hankey’s assessment, the incinerated cars could not have been burned by Hamas. He believes that Mossad later staged the crime scene to make it look like festival goers had been attacked in their cars by terrorists.

While difficult to corroborate, the CIA and Mossad specialize in false-flag operations/deception operations where they carry out crimes and then plant evidence to blame their enemy, so this could have followed in that pattern.^[3]

At the outset of the film, Hankey features interviews with two IDF whistleblowers incensed by the Israeli government’s conduct.

One, a male who served on the Gaza border, stated that “Israel is probably the most advanced surveillance state in the world and the Gaza border the most heavily surveilled in the world. Do you know how long it would take for an Israeli attack helicopter to be activated and blow up any one of the Hamas tractors or pickup trucks [that breached the fence]? Less than five minutes. It could have been a matter of five minutes before the whole thing was upended. I’m sorry, that’s an inside job.”

Another, a female Israeli army intelligence officer whom Hankey characterizes as the “Israeli Snowden,” stated that the border with Gaza is “guarded 24/7 not only by patrol cars and cameras but also by the electric fence and lasers that are activated by alarm. Nobody can cross the fence. You cannot cross unless you had help from inside. This operation [on October 7] was not made by Hamas. The plan is to flatten Gaza. Let’s tell the truth.”

Truth is not, of course, a hallmark of the U.S. and Israeli governments, which clearly distorted what happened on October 7, 2023—like many other events before and since.

The ultimate aim was not only to flatten Gaza but to trigger a regional war that would allow for the long-held dream of attacking Iran and over-throwing its government, which has been considered an enemy since the 1979 Islamic revolution.

Apt Comparison with Pearl Harbor

Netanyahu’s comparisons with Pearl Harbor are quite apt because the U.S. government lied about those attacks, which provided a pretext for another genocidal war in which two atomic bombs were deployed against a dehumanized population.^[4]

The big lie about Pearl Harbor, sustained over the last 80+ years, is that the Japanese attack was unprovoked when the Roosevelt administration had a) engaged in a large-scale naval buildup in the Asia-Pacific; b) allowed U.S. pilots to fly Guomindang aircraft against Japanese troops in China; and c) imposed a crippling oil embargo on Japan that ex-President Herbert Hoover had warned would lead to war.

Additionally, the Roosevelt administration allowed Americans in Hawaii to be sitting ducks, like the Netanyahu government Israelis, by removing U.S. ships from the West Coast in what was known as the “vacant sea.” Further, it failed to adequately warn commanders in Hawaii (Admiral Husband Kimmel and General Walter C. Short) of the impending attack, which was known about because U.S. cryptologists had cracked the Japanese diplomatic code.

Early in the morning of December 7, Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall received information about the impending attack, which he sent to Kimmel and Short via regular courier rather than by scrambler phone, ensuring that the news arrived too late.

The deception over Pearl Harbor was reminiscent of earlier deception regarding the 1915 sinking of the Lusitania that provided a pretext for U.S. intervention in World War I 23 months later.

In that case, a British commission uncovered that the Lusitania—carrying more than 100 American passengers from the U.S. to Europe (over 1,000 died overall)—was rigged with explosives, though the destruction of the ship was blamed on Germany.

Winston Churchill, then the First Lord of the Admiralty, withheld rescue boats to maximize the number of deaths. The aim was to generate enough outrage for the U.S. public to want to go to war against Germany.^[5]

Evidence indicates that Benjamin Netanyahu has adopted the same strategy of Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt in sacrificing the lives of his own people in order to arouse enough anger to generate support for war.

Roosevelt and Churchill are today regarded as national heroes in their respective countries, though Netanyahu is likely to go down in history as a villain, along with his American sponsors. This is because the Israelis have failed to earn a heroic victory against Gaza and have horrified much of the world with the atrocities that they have committed.

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1. 
   

   The film features an interview with an Israeli hostage, Yasmin Porat, who states that Israeli tanks shelled homes holding hostages in Kibbutz Be’eria where 112 Israelis were killed. When asked whether terrorists had killed people in the kibbutz, Porat said people were killed in crossfire—that is in firing by IDF troops targeting Hamas. The Times of Israel on July 8 reported on an IDF probe, carried out by Major General Mickey Edelstein, a former commander of the Gaza division, which acknowledged that an IDF tank fired on the home of kibbutz resident Pesi Cohen, where Hamas terrorists allegedly held 14 hostages—including Porat. See Michael Bachner, “IDF officer recounts ordering tank fire on Be’eri home during hostage standoff on Oct. 7,” The Times of Israel, December 23, 2023. In an October 11 article in Ha’aretz, Nir Hasson and Eden Solomon interviewed the IDF deputy commander of an armored reserve battalion who described how he and his tank unit “fought inside the kibbutz, from house to house, with the tanks. “We had no choice,” he said. Another Be’eri resident, Tuval, told Nir Hasson about IDF shelling of houses on October 9 in a calculated military operation. Anonymous Contributor, “A growing number of reports indicate Israeli forces responsible for Israeli civilian and military deaths following October 7 attack,” Mondoweiss, October 22, 2023. Many stories spread in the media about rapes by Hamas, pregnant women having their bellies sliced open, and burning of children were proven to be false. The latter were reminiscent of stories spread about German occupiers in Belgium during World War I that was used to whip up war fever in Western countries. For discussion of the latter, see Phillip Knightley, The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Iraq, rev ed. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). ↑

   
   
2. 
   

   The Mossad infiltrated Hamas, which the Israelis provided with bags full of cash through Qatari emissaries. The money was used to purchase weapons. ↑

   
   
3. 
   

   See Douglas Valentine, The Phoenix Program (New York: William Morrow, 1990). The deception operations draw on techniques adopted by British intelligence agents in colonial settings. ↑

   
   
4. 
   

   See https://peacehistory-usfp.org/ww2/. During the Tokyo firebombing on March 9-10, 1944, the U.S. Air Force killed more than 90,000 civilians and destroyed much of Tokyo. Of course, the Japanese committed horrific atrocities of their own, whether against U.S. POWs, or the Chinese. But Hamas are not choirboys either and have carried out their own horrors over the years. The U.S. went to war against Japan because Japan was in the process of establishing its own regional empire in Southeast Asia that was designed to undercut U.S. hegemony while displacing European colonial empires. As a spoil of victory, the U.S. acquired a chain of military bases in the Asia-Pacific including in OKinawa that the U.S. still possesses today. See Noam Chomsky, “On the Background of the Pacific War,” Liberation, September-October 1967, ↑

   
   
5. 
   

   See Raymond Hitchcock, The Lusitania Plot (London: Ostara Publishing, 2014); Colin Simpson, Lusitania (London: Longman, 1972). ↑

   
   

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