What atrocities did Hamas allegedly commit on 7 October 2023?

Rosli Omar

Israel is using the ‘atrocities committed by Hamas in its 7 October attack’ as a justification for its genocide on Gaza.

Its Western allies, too, go along with this justification, even if unstated.

In the initial few days after the attack, Western leaders were in a queue to visit Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to pledge their support and solidarity. Among them were then-US President Biden, French President Emmanuel Macron, then-UK Prime Minister Sunak and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.

At first, I accepted this charge of ‘atrocities’ with little query, as everybody was repeating the same line. But along the way, it occurred to me to ask, what really were these alleged atrocities?

We will look at three main charges: Hamas killed civilians, Hamas committed mass rape, and Hamas beheaded 40 babies – acts that are only committed by barbarians and “human animals”.

But first, let’s be clear: Hamas or any other Palestinian group is allowed by international law to resist*, including an armed struggle against Israel since they are under occupation.

The United Nations General Assembly has explicitly affirmed the right of Palestinians to resist Israel’s military occupation, including through armed struggle.

John Mearsheimer, a distinguished service professor of political science at the University of Chicago, agrees with this (see from 5:00 minutes into the video below).

Israel and its Western allies, however, say Israel has a right to self-defence.

But how can an occupying power have a right to self-defence against an occupied people? It’s like saying Russia has a right to self-defence against Ukraine when it is the occupying power.

1,400 civilians killed?

Initially, Israel said 1,400 of its citizens were killed by Hamas. Later, the figure was brought down to 1,200 and later still, 1,139. The reason: 200 were Hamas fighters who were so burnt beyond recognition they were mistaken for Israelis.

Who burnt them? Surely not by Hamas themselves. Hamas brought only light weapons for a quick attack to capture Israelis to bring back to Gaza. Thus, they had no heavy weapons and equipment to inflict that kind of damage (even if they wanted to for some strange reason).

Only the Israel occupation forces have the firepower with their helicopter gunships and battle tanks. They not only used them on Hamas but even on their own soldiers and civilians, as reported by Israeli police.

This was done under the Hannibal Directive – killing their own soldiers and citizens to prevent them from being taken hostage. From experience, they know there’s a heavy price to pay to release them. This killing happened not only when Hamas were transporting hostages back to Gaza but at Israeli settlements (eg at Kibbutz Be’eri) when tanks fired at houses with Hamas (or other Palestinian fighters and individuals) holed up with civilians. So, it was not only Hamas that attack Israel that day.

One survivor from Be’eri, Yasmin Porat, described the situation: the Palestinian fighters – who she says treated her and the other Israeli civilians “humanely” -intended to “kidnap us to Gaza. Not to murder us.”

“They were very humane towards us,” Porat said in her interview with Israel’s Channel 12.

She recalled that one Palestinian fighter who spoke Hebrew, said to her, “Look at me well, we’re not going to kill you. We want to take you to Gaza. We are not going to kill you. So be calm, you’re not going to die.”

She further testified on Israeli forces shelling hostages in houses in Be’eri: “They eliminated everyone, including the hostages,” she told Israeli radio. “There was very, very heavy crossfire” and even tank shelling: “Two tank shells were shot into the house.”

She said that although the Palestinian fighters all had loaded weapons, she never saw them shoot captives or threaten them with their guns.

Also, civilian cars burned and mangled (photo 1, photo 2) could only be the work of Israeli forces, for only they have the firepower to cause that amount of damage. See also this photo of a house destroyed in Be’eri.

Remember that every Israeli adult, man and woman, serves in the Israeli Defense Forces and after that, each one becomes an IDF reservist. This allows them to have weapons at home and carry them about in public. Thus, when it was said that Hamas shot civilians, it might not be in the usual understanding of civilians being killed in cold blood. Rather, it could be in firefights with these civilian reservists.

Netanyahu’s government does not want to hold an inquiry into this 7 October attack, presumably afraid the multiple failures to anticipate and counter it will be exposed. (There are even accusations that they knew of the coming attack but did not prevent it because they wanted to use it to their advantage, such as to ethnically cleanse Gaza of the Palestinians. It’s their 9/11, as claimed by Netanyahu.)

Thus, we wouldn’t really know how many Israelis were killed by Hamas and how many by the IDF of their own civilians. Mearsheimer believes most of the civilians were killed by the IDF (see at 5:20 minutes into the video below).

Mass rape?

Another atrocity supposedly committed by Hamas was mass rape. But ask this simple question: where would Hamas have the time to go around raping when their goal was to capture as many soldiers and civilians as hostages as possible.

Also, the IDF could appear at any moment, as they did with the helicopter gunships and tanks mentioned above. You would think Hamas would just be too busy rounding up potential hostages than to be involved in mass rape.

Remember too that hundreds of civilians also joined the attack.

One such mass rape hoax was a documentary film by Sheryl Sandberg, a former Meta/Facebook executive. This alleged mass rape has been thoroughly debunked, for example by the Electronic Intifada, using credible sources, many by Israelis themselves and by Israeli media such as the Haaretz newspaper – or just by the inconsistency of their own account.

One of the main sources of the mass rape hoax is an organisation called Zaka, a volunteer ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) organisation. Their testimonies have been used by many news outlets including CNN, the BBC and the New York Times.

Zaka was founded in the late 1990s by Yehuda Meshi-Zahav, a man of questionable character. He attempted suicide after revelations of dozens of rape and sexual assault cases on both men and women allegedly committed by him.

Zaka has a dubious history with massive cases of sexual violence and the silencing of victims,  financial corruption and the exploitation of tragic deaths to enhance its media appearance.

Zaka’s men (it’s all men) lack the professional qualifications to make rape assessments, and their testimonies lack details: no age, no location and no time.

Details and evidence have not been given to journalists who asked to see them. Thus, it is impossible to either confirm or debunk them. 

Among Zaka’s lies, Haaretz listed a falsehood about the “bodies of twenty children with severed heads”, “piles of burned children” and a “pregnant woman’s stomach ripped open, and her foetus stabbed”.

If there was a mass rape carried out by Hamas or other groups surely there would be many victims.

Yet the Israeli prosecutor, Moran Gez (who is in charge of handling cases of Palestinians caught on 7 October) cannot find a single victim – not a single one. In her interview with the Israeli website, Ynet, 15 months after the events, she said Israel still has not identified a single victim.

When the New York Times (28 December 2023) investigated the alleged mass rape, they too couldn’t find a single victim, after extensively canvassing Israeli hospitals, rape crisis centres, sexual assault hotlines and other specialized facilities.

“No one had met a victim of sexual assault,” Anat Schwartz, the reporter who did the research for the NYT investigation explained in an interview with Israel’s Channel 12 last year.

A report by Pramila Patten, the UN’s special representative of the secretary general, in March 2024 similarly couldn’t find a single victim of the alleged rape.

Norman Finkelstein, a scholar of the Palestine-Israel conflict thoroughly debunked her Israel-friendly report. I have found Finkelstein to be one of the sharpest forensic dissectors of dubious documents, having read three of his books and numerous essays and reports. His conclusion on Patten’s report:

The Patten mission “benefitted from the full cooperation of the Government of Israel.” [Israel doesn’t allow other UN or other institutions investigation.] Yet, it couldn’t locate a single victim of sexual violence or a single piece of direct evidence, be it forensic or digital, of sexual violence on 7 October. It therefore beggars belief that rampant sexual violence occurred on that day. The allegation that Hamas systematically utilized rape as a weapon of war can be safely deposited in the … dumpster.

The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory concluded on 10 June 2024: “The Commission was not able to reach a definitive conclusion with regards to rape.”

But it “verified information concerning the deliberate targeting of civilian women, including the killing, abduction, and abuse of women, as well as the desecration of women’s bodies, sexual violence, and other gender-based crimes.”

Al Jazeera’s investigative unit has carried out a forensic analysis of the events of 7 October and examined claims about widespread sexual violence (24 March 2024). It concluded that while isolated instances of rape may have taken place, there was insufficient evidence to support allegations that rape had been “widespread and systematic”.

Says Madeleine Rees, the general secretary of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom: “To show that it was widespread and systematic, we would need a lot more evidence than has come to light to date and a lot more corroborative evidence than is being put out there.”

40 babies beheaded?

Another lurid atrocity allegedly committed by Hamas was the beheading of 40 babies. This was again started by Zaka (or IDF soldiers according to the Israeli TV channel i24NEWS). It never happened.

It has since been debunked by many, such as the French newspaper Le Monde:  “There were never 40 decapitated babies. Not in Kfar Aza nor in any other kibbutz, the Israeli government press office confirmed to Le Monde.”

Wikipedia noted: “At times the Israeli government has discreetly admitted that the rumours about the beheaded children are unfounded.”

Fact-checking site Snopes pointed out: “When Snopes reached out to the IDF to comment on the underlying rumour — namely that Israeli babies were beheaded by Hamas — the military did not confirm that the purported beheadings happened.”  

Former US President Joe Biden lied that he saw photos of beheaded babies, which he later had to retract. There were no such photos. (Anyone who lied about seeing a photo that doesn’t exist had the explicit intention of deliberate lying.)

The alleged Hamas atrocities were used by Israel as justification for its onslaught on Gaza (described as a genocide by many, such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory) and its attempt at the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza.

I’m grateful to Emeritus Professor Johan Saravanamuttu for providing comments and pointing to literature that I had missed in an earlier draft of this article. But any shortcomings are my responsibility.

Rosli Omar is a former academic at the University of Malaya.

* Background note: While international humanitarian law recognises certain rights of resistance, it simultaneously imposes strict obligations on how that resistance is conducted, always prioritising the protection of civilian populations on all sides of the conflict.

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