Fake stories about Hamas ripping babies from women’s stomachs and committing mass rapes were similar to those told about German troops in Belgium—and U.S. adversaries in Vietnam
After October 7, 2023, the U.S. media went into high gear promoting stories about Hamas atrocities, claiming that Hamas had ripped babies from the stomachs of pregnant women and carried out mass rapes and beheadings in Kibbutz Be’eri after breaching Israel’s border wall.
The stories originated from Israeli government spokesmen and soldiers but were eventually discredited. Their impact was nevertheless considerable in helping to mobilize public support for Israel’s onslaught in Gaza and in neighboring countries like Lebanon.
On August 27, the Massachusetts Peace Society hosted a screening of Atrocity Inc.: How Israel Sells Its Destruction of Gaza, which debunks the official narrative about October 7.
Atrocity Inc. is produced by Sut Jhally, a communications professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who runs a media education company, and is written and narrated by Max Blumenthal of The Grayzone.
Atrocity Inc. opens with clips from CNN, MSNBC, Fox News and other prominent media outlets proclaiming that Hamas had defiled pregnant women, beheaded babies and cooked babies in ovens—the latter claim being intended to evoke the Nazi Holocaust where Jews were murdered in gas ovens at Auschwitz and other concentration camps.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is featured, stating that Hamas are “savages,” while then U.S. President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken called Hamas “pure evil.”[1]
The stories about Hamas’s conduct were implausible because the Israeli government reported that only one baby was killed on October 7 and that it was from accidental fire. No babies were ever beheaded or cooked in ovens, and there was no verifiable evidence of pregnant women being targeted.
One of the mainstay sources for the fake-news whom the media never bothered to scrutinize was an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) unit commander, David Ben Zion, who is associated with a far-right settler group implicated in serious atrocities in the West Bank and called for Palestinian villages to be wiped out.
Another source was Yossi Landau, who headed a humanitarian relief group, Zaka, that received millions in donations after October 7 when it had been on the verge of bankruptcy. Landau admitted that he did not personally witness any atrocities he fraudulently reported.
In March 2024, The New York Times featured the story of Gal Abdush who was supposedly raped while she was trying to flee from the Tribe of Nova music festival after it came under attack.[2]
Abdush’s sister subsequently wrote on Instagram that Gal had not been raped as the timing made no sense and there was no forensic evidence of this.
In April 2024, former Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg narrated a documentary about Hamas’s sexual violence that based many of its claims on the “confessions” of Palestinian prisoners, which had been obtained under torture and was hence not credible.[3]
Moran Gez, the Israeli prosecutor focusing on October 7 admitted that “we don’t have any complaints of rape occurring on October 7,” and forensic pathologists at Shura base where the bodies of October 7 victims were taken for identification, did not find signs of rape in any of the deceased.
While Hamas fighters certainly did commit atrocities on October 7, Atrocity Inc. emphasizes that many of the October 7 victims were killed by the IDF under the so-called Hannibal directive by which the IDF vows not to allow Israel’s enemies to take any Israelis as hostages.
Additionally, the film points out that 200 Palestinians were killed on October 7 along with 380 IDF soldiers. The number of Israeli civilians killed stands at around 620—far less than the official claim that 1,200 civilians were killed—with many having been killed by the IDF.[4]
Jeff Hankey’s film The Truth About October 7 gives further weight to Atrocity Inc.’s assessment by showing footage from Israeli Apache helicopters that fired on the cars of Tribe of Nova festival goers fleeing the scene and others fleeing by foot, suggesting that many festival goers may have been killed by the IDF.[5]
Hankey makes clear that the incinerated cars could not have been burned by Hamas, which did not fly in helicopters or have the military technological capabililty to do so. Hankey believes that Mossad staged the crime scene to make it look like festival goers had been attacked in their cars by terrorists.[6]
An Israeli police investigation found that an Israeli helicopter had indeed fired on festival goers and hit some festival participants. The same investigation found that Hamas attackers did not know about the festival in advance. The Israeli military further admitted to flying attack helicopters that fired huge amounts of heavy cannon shells, and an Israeli military spokesman admitted that the IDF burned people to death in indiscriminate fire.[7]
World War I Parallels
The atrocity fabrication stories spread to justify the leveling of Gaza in 2023 were eerily similar to stories that were spread about German troops after they invaded Belgium at the onset of World War I.
Though blamed for starting World War I, Germany had invaded Belgium after it was encircled militarily and threatened by the allied powers, including France and Czarist Russia which financed the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Bosnia and Herzegovina in order to draw Germany into a conflict and trigger a European war they believed they could easily win.[8]
To mobilize public support, the allied powers spread propaganda purporting that German troops had gone on a rampage in Belgium, raping women and ripping babies out of pregnant women’s stomachs.
In The First Casualty: From the Crimea to Vietnam: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist, and Myth Maker (1975), Phillip Knightley details how British media helped mold British support for the war effort as one of defense against a menacing aggressor by depicting the Germans “as only slightly better than the hordes of Genghis Khan, rapers of nuns, mutilators of children, and destroyers of civilisation.”[9]
Knightley notes that the Financial Times erroneously reported that the German Kaiser personally ordered the torture of three-year-old children, while other newspapers in Britain and France claimed that German troops were cutting off babies’ hands.[10]
In 1915, a committee of lawyers and historians under the chairmanship of Lord James Bryce, a former ambassador to the U.S., produced a report translated into 30 languages concluding that “murder, lust and pillage” had been carried out by the German army “on a scale unparalleled in any war between civilised nations during the last three centuries.”[11]
As it turns out, the Bryce committee came to these conclusions without interviewing a single witness. The main sources were bitterly anti-German refugees who provided hearsay evidence that was accepted without further investigation.[12]
This is not too dissimilar from the post-October 7 claims about Hamas atrocities, which were also based on dubious sources—as Atrocity Inc. shows.
Knightley quotes American correspondent Irvin S. Cobb, who estimated that roughly 10% of the German atrocity stories in World War I were true—the rest were fabricated.[13]
Dr. Hendrik Willem van Loon, the Associated Press correspondent in Belgium, said the atrocity reports were “indecent lies.”
William Shepherd, the United Press journalist, wrote in 1917 that he had spent a considerable amount of time in Belgium in late 1914 trying to find an authenticated atrocity story and failed to do so.
Donald Thompson, an American photographer working for London’s Daily Mail and New York’s The World, was promised handsome payment for photographs of a German atrocity, but was also unable to find a single one.
The World of January 27, 1915, quoted a State Department report which said that, of the thousands of Belgian refugees in Britain, not one had been subjected to atrocities by German soldiers.[14]
Vietnam and the Wider Historical Pattern
Building off the precedent in World War I, the CIA spread fake stories about communist Vietminh troops ripping babies out of the stomachs of pregnant women in the mid-1950s to try to help build public support for U.S. military intervention in Vietnam—which ultimately caused millions of deaths.
CIA operative Thomas Dooley wrote fake Vietminh atrocity stories in Reader’s Digest and Sunday Catholic bulletins spread across the U.S. that were organized into a best-selling book, Deliver Us From Evil (1956).
Dooley had worked as a doctor in Vietnam delivering medical aid to peasants while collecting intelligence from them. Besides the part about ripping out babies from women’s stomachs, Dooley wrote that the Vietminh were sticking chopsticks through children’s ears to prevent then from hearing the Gospel, hanging a priest to die by his legs and driving nails through a priest’s head as a “thorn of crowns.”
William Lederer, a Navy press officer who wrote the satire novel The Ugly American, told the Los Angeles Times that “those things [that Dooley reported] never happened,. The atrocities he described in his books either never took place or were committed by the French. I traveled all over the country and never saw anything like them.”
Sound familiar?
A. B. Abrams’ book, Atrocity Fabrication and Its Consequences: How Fake News Shapes World Order (2023), provides further historical context for today’s world by showing a systemic pattern of U.S. atrocity fabrication to mobilize support for endless wars.
Abrams wrote that “portraying an adversary as committing particularly egregious crimes, especially when one intends to initiate military action or other hostile measures against the adversary, has consistently provided an effective means of moving public and international opinion and justifying [U.S. imperial] actions.”[15]
Besides Vietnam, Abrams gives the example of the Korean War where U.S. media outlets like Time magazine blamed North Korean communists for committing ghastly atrocities that were actually committed by U.S.-allied South Korean troops, and the Pentagon sponsored a film, The Crime of Korea, narrated by Humphrey Bogart, which made up further atrocity stories.[16]
Charles E. Potter (R-MI), Chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Korean War Atrocities, stressed that the North Koreans and Chinese were “guilty of beast-like acts committed against civilized humanity.”
These supposed acts included a “red” nurse cutting off the toes of a GI with a pair of garden shears without the benefit of anesthesia, and “red” soldiers lining up U.S. GIs in a ditch and shooting them in cold blood with their hands wired behind their backs” and “putting them into small iron cages and starving them to death like animals, with maggots coming out of their eye sockets.”[17]
Additional chapters in Abrams’ book detail the CIA’s work with the Kuwaiti Royal Family to spread false stories of Iraqi troops turning off the incubators of premature babies during the First Persian Gulf War,[18] and the CIA’s spreading of fake rumors in 2011 that Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi was giving his soldiers Viagra in order to commit mass rapes.[19]
The parallels with the atrocity fabrications and propaganda regarding Hamas and October 7 are again saliant—especially in light of the claims about rapes and babies, which has very clearly been a staple of U.S. and Western war propaganda for more than 100 years.
One can go back even further to the branding of African Americans as sexual predators to justify lynching and the birth of the Ku Klux Klan in the Jim Crow South, and the perceived threat of Native Americans taking white women and children captive being used to justify genocidal military operations and the takeover of natives’ land across North America.
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant (2022-2024) is further shown in the film referring to Gazans as “human animals”—a term that justified their slaughter. ↑
Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Jeffrey Gettleman was the lead author on the story. Most Western media depictions obscured the historical context for the Hamas attack on October 7, notably that Gaza had been illegally occupied by Israel after Gazans were removed from their land in the 1948 Palestinians Nakba, and that Gazans were horribly mistreated and subjected to repeated military attacks that killed countless civilians. Additionally, it is often forgotten that the Mossad financed Hamas beginning in the late 1980s as part of a scheme by which the Israeli far right aimed to undermine the secular Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and support Palestinian factions that were more militant and gave them a pretext to end the diplomatic peace process and carry out military aggression that would ultimately lead to the crushing of the Palestinians and the fulfilment of their dream of establishing a Greater Israel. See Robert Dreyfuss, Devil’s Game: How the U.S. Helped to Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2005). ↑
The supposed sexual attacks carried out by Hamas were used to justify sadistic tortures in Israeli prisons, including gang rapes and sodomy of Palestinian inmates, which was openly promoted on Israeli television. Atrocity Inc. points out that Meir Benchetrit, who carried out gang rapes of Palestinians, became something of a folk hero in Israeli media and right-wing political circles. Some 65% of Israelis opposed his prosecution even though he acknowledged overseeing the rapes. ↑
For corroborating evidence, see this Al Jazeera documentary. ↑
An overview of Hankey’s film is provided in Jeremy Kuzmarov, “On the One-Year Anniversary of October 7, It is Clear We Were Not Told the Truth,” CovertAction Magazine, October 7, 2024. Evidence indicates the the rave was not an intended target of attack and that Hamas fighters were unaware of it, but that it fell on their route to an Israeli military base where it was located near. Many of the ravers may have been caught in the crossfire between IDF soldiers and the Hamas fighters. Since many of the ravers were high, survivors are unclear who was shooting at them in hindsight.Hankey’s film generally tries to show that October 7 was a false-flag attack coordinated by Mossad and probably the CIA. To make his case, Hankey discusses how the Hamas security breach should have easily been circumvented and how forewarnings of the Hamas attack were suppressed. ↑
Kuzmarov, “On the One-Year Anniversary of October 7, It is Clear We Were Not Told The Truth.” ↑
See Harry Elmer Barnes, The Genesis of the World War: An Introduction to the Problem of War Guilt (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1927). The British saw Germany as a looming geopolitical rival that threatened its ability to control much of the African continent after it had begun to acquire its own colonies. See Gerry Docherty and Jim McGregor, Hidden History: The Secret Origins of the First World War (Mainstream Publishers, 2014). ↑
Phillip Knightley, The First Casualty: From the Crimea to Vietnam: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist, and Myth Maker (New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 82. ↑
Ibid., 107, 120. As World War I progressed, British correspondents reported that Germany had established factories for boiling down the corpses of their dead soldiers from which to distill glycerine for munitions. This story too proved to be a lie spread by British military intelligence, as was admitted by one of its leading officers in 1925. ↑
Knightley, The First Casualty, 83. ↑
Ibid., 84. ↑
Ibid., 120. ↑
Idem. A 1922 Belgian commission of inquiry, which conducted investigations at the scenes of the alleged atrocities, failed to confirm even a single report of German excesses. ↑
A. B. Abrams, Atrocity Fabrication and Its Consequences: How Fake News Shapes World Order (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2023), 1. For a review of the book, see Jeremy Kuzmarov, “Was There Really a Massacre in Tiananmen Square—or Was It an Illusion Fabricated by U.S. Politicians and Corporate Media to Make Americans Hate China?” CovertAction Magazine, August 7, 2023.Abrams, Atrocity Fabrication and Its Consequences, 81. ↑
Ibid., 92, 93. ↑
A decade later, more atrocity stories were spread about Saddam Hussein, who was baselessly accused of feeding his enemies to a human shredder and using the remains as fish food, along with the infamous false allegation about Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). ↑
Abrams, additionally, covers fabrications regarding the alleged 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre and in Xinjiang by Chinese troops against the Uyghurs, and Bashar al-Assad’s fake chemical weapons attack, which was played up in the media and by pseudo-left-wing intellectuals to justify U.S. bombing of Syria and support for the CIA’s billion-dollar Operation Timber Sycamore. ↑
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About the Author
Jeremy Kuzmarov holds a Ph.D. in American history from Brandeis University and has taught at numerous colleges across the United States. He is regularly sought out as an expert on U.S. history and politics and co-hosts a radio show on New York Public Radio and on Progressive Radio News Network called “Uncontrolled Opposition.”
He is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine and is the author of eight books, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019), The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018), Warmonger. How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the U.S. Trajectory From Bush II to Biden (Clarity Press, 2023); with Dan Kovalik, Syria: Anatomy of Regime Change (Baraka Books, 2025), and Political Assassinations in America: The Intricate Nexus of Deep State Crime (Clarity Press, 2026).
Besides these books, Kuzmarov has published hundreds of articles and contributed to numerous edited volumes, including one in the prestigious Oxford History of Counterinsurgency .
He can be reached at jkuzmarov2@gmail.com and found on substack here.
