The internet is flooded with images and videos of Hamas’s alleged atrocities against Israeli civilians. Tel Aviv claimed that most of the 1,300 fatalities of Hamas’s attack on the Israel-occupied Palestinian territories happened to be civilians. Hamas has been also accused of sexual violence and of taking hostages, which is forbidden under international conflict rules. However, supporters of the Palestinian resistance allege that these accusations are part of the Israeli secret service Mossad’s psyops to manipulate global public opinion.
Hamas beheaded 40 babies
The news that Hamas beheaded 40 babies at Kfar Azza kibbutz during its October 7th attack shocked the world. It became viral after US President Joe Biden publicly expressed his outrage on the issue after claiming he had seen the evidence.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s spokesperson Tal Heinrich reiterated the claim, which made headlines across the West’s mainstream media universe, stoking hatred against the Palestinian resistance. However, the Israeli government declined to share evidence of the incident.
“I never really thought that I would see…have confirmed pictures of terrorists beheading children”, Biden had said. His statement raised a question– whether he saw the “pictures of terrorists beheading children”?
If Biden had, then it means the Israelis have authentic pictures of the “terrorists” committing the gory act, which means someone was photographing them during the atrocity. If he hasn’t seen the pictures, then it’s an outright lie. Unfortunately, the US officials confirmed the latter.
Gauging the consequences of what can be called Biden’s fatal faux pas, the White House clarified that the president didn’t see any photographs of the atrocity but merely followed the cue from Heinrich’s claims. Such an admission by the US government shows that its foreign policy decisions are mostly based on hearsay, rather than facts.
In the beginning, the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) stated that it had no evidence to prove the massacre of babies by Hamas, but it urged the press to believe the narrative because it’s the “truth”. Later, facing harsh criticism on social media, the IDF released photographs of the purported massacre, which critics allege are AI-generated images.
Nicole Zedeck, a correspondent of the Israeli website i24News, was the first one to allege that Hamas beheaded 40 babies in the kibbutz. However, Zedeck’s source is problematic. She extracted the “news” of the beheading from a radical Israeli settler activist named David Ben Zion, who is also a reservist in the IDF.
Neither Zedeck nor other Israeli “journalists” saw the massacre site or any evidence of it but based their reporting on the statement by a radical settler activist. Following i24News, the West’s media giants like CNN, Fox News, etc, started amplifying what they termed as an “ISIS-style” massacre.
While the Islamist Hamas is an independent organisation funded and supported by several regional players in the Middle East, ISIS or the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria is a terrorist organisation that reportedly has ties with the US intelligence agency CIA and the Israeli Mossad, and it has been allegedly used against the Syrian government by them.
Lebanon-based Shiite guerrilla organisation Hezbollah actively participated in the anti-ISIS operations along with the Syrian Arab Army and the Russian Air Force. Hezbollah has supported Hamas in its armed resistance against Israel. Ironically, Israel has been attacking Hezbollah in Lebanon for decades.
In this scenario, the attempt to compare Hamas’s alleged war crimes with that of ISIS reeks of a conspiracy to malign and undermine the entire Palestinian resistance, which includes organisations from different spectrums and ideologies.
Neither Hamas nor other Palestinian resistance organisations supported the ISIS. Rather, the major criticism that had been used against the now-decimated terror organisation was that due to its allegiance towards Israel, ISIS never targeted the Zionist state but only ravaged Muslim countries.
The Hamas leadership has denied that its Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades had been involved in any form of war crimes. It stated its opposition to any form of attack on civilians or sexual violence. However, that didn’t stop the West’s mainstream press from peddling the stories around the purported massacre of 40 babies by Hamas incessantly.
Hamas’s attack on a music festival
It has been alleged that Hamas militants attacked an overnight music festival and killed hundreds of participants by indiscriminately firing at them. Several mainstream media outlets of the West and the Qatar-based Al Jazeera reported that nearly 260 participants of what appears to be a rave party were killed in the attacks.
Around 3,500 people attended the Supernova music festival, which was held in a dusty field outside the Re’im kibbutz, around 5.3km from the wall that separates Gaza from the occupied southern territories. News agencies quoted the survivors saying they escaped death narrowly by running and hiding.
Visuals shared on social media showed gunmen with Hamas headbands rushing towards the Supernova music festival riding trucks, motorcycles and some descending from the sky in paragliders. It also showed how panicked participants of the music concert were running for their lives. Visuals also showed how some of them were wounded due to gunshots.
In other visuals, it has been found that Israeli security service personnel, armed with handguns, were firing at the Hamas militants while using the panicked civilians as shields. The Israeli authorities have not clarified who these gunmen were and how did they engage with the militants, or whether their engagement resulted in the firing at the spot.
However, no concrete evidence emerged to show that 260 people were killed by Hamas militants on the spot. The western media and Al Jazeera based their stories on a claim made by an Israeli search and rescue organisation named Zaka. The background of Zaka, which is Israel-based but is also registered as a non-profit in the US, is a bit problematic.
The organisation, which has taken part in international rescue operations, have no record of helping Palestinian civilians after regular Israeli attacks. Rather, like any other hardcore Zionist organisation, it has been aligned with the government. Netanyahu’s praises for the organisation are showcased on the website, underscoring its allegiance towards the Israeli state.
Zaka, like the IDF, presented no evidence to prove its allegation. However, its allegations became the Gospel’s truth for the West’s propaganda machinery. Many others in different parts of the world also replicated the same narrative without any investigation.
A 2015 video of a Guatemalan village, where a woman was set on fire, has resurfaced on social media claiming that it shows the murder of a 25-year-old woman named Noa Argamani by Hamas militants who kidnapped her from the Supernova music festival. The old video, a clip of a few seconds, has been shared several times on social media with the same narrative.
Allegations of sexual violence
Among other things that the octogenarian US president uttered to condemn the Palestinian resistance’s attack on Israel-occupied territories, he specifically mentioned rapes committed by the Hamas militants.
He stated that women “were raped, assaulted, paraded as trophies (sic)” among other things while listing the atrocities committed by Hamas militants during their raid on the occupied territories north of Gaza on Saturday, October 7th.
According to the White House, the source of the president’s allegation was his phone call with Netanyahu in which the latter claimed that Israeli women had been “brutally raped and murdered” by Hamas militants during the Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.
Several media outlets and government officials of the West included similar narratives in their condemnation of the Hamas atrocities on the civilians, however, they didn’t cite any credible evidence to back their claim. Rather, the allegations of sexual violence against women are based on murky sources.
The origin of the rape allegations against Hamas is rooted in an article written by a far-right Zionist columnist named Liel Leibovitz, which was published by the online Zionist magazine named Tablet on Sunday, October 8th.
In this article, Leibovitz quoted unnamed survivors of the Supernova music festival who alleged that Hamas militants had raped women. “Women have been raped at the area of the rave next to their friends’ bodies, dead bodies”, Leibovitz quoted an unnamed survivor. “Several of these rape victims appear to have been later executed”, Leibovitz went on to claim, without citing any credible sources. Leibovitz also claimed that many of the rape victims were taken hostages by Hamas and paraded in Gaza.
“Others were taken to Gaza. In photographs released online, you can see several paraded through the city’s streets, blood gushing from between their legs”, Leibovitz added. Two videos circulating on social media following the attacks were used to back up the claim of sexual assault, although they didn’t match Leibovitz’s claims.
The IDF didn’t confirm the allegations of sexual violence, which the Israeli government amplified to justify its new lease of violence targeting the civilians of Gaza. In the meantime, Hamas has refuted the allegations, although it has said that in cases of military conflicts of this scale, several fringe incidents of atrocities take place, which are out of the organisation’s control.
Following the uncertainty over the rape allegations and the unreliable sources, American media outlets like Los Angeles Times and NBC News have removed the reference to the allegations from their coverage claiming they are unable to verify the claims.
Yet, these unverified claims on a sensitive matter like rape didn’t stop a large number of pro-Zionist propagandists and the West’s propaganda machinery from milling the story of gang rape of women. Several media outlets have published the gory details of the incident from Leibovitz’s controversial article, without verifying the sources.
Mossad’s psyops
While Mossad came under fire for its failure to anticipate the large-scale attacks from the Palestinian resistance, it has certainly scored brownies with Netanyahu’s government by carrying out a mammoth psyops using the mainstream media and social media since the fateful day.
Mossad’s psyops have always paid rich dividends as they have become popular in steering the public opinion in the West and in countries like India, where Islamophobia is intense, towards Israel. It’s alleged that Mossad has been using several mediums, including Hollywood, to create content that supports its narrative over the years.
It’s not merely that Mossad’s psyops have influenced public opinion in the US and Europe, but also stunned the CIA, which prepared a paper for the US military to adopt Mossad’s psyops techniques used in 1982 against Lebanon.
For years, the US intelligence and military services have followed the footsteps of Mossad. Others like the UK, France, India, etc, have also learned from Mossad’s psyops to aid their military campaigns in troubled regions.
Is Mossad’s psyops paying a dividend to Israel following Palestinian resistance’s offensive?
The depth of Mossad’s psyops against Palestine during the ongoing conflict can’t be gauged accurately at this point. However, the IDF, under Mossad’s guidance, used psyops to shape public opinion in several military campaigns in the past.
In a March 2023 report, Israeli newspaper Haaretz claimed that the IDF had used psychological warfare operations during the May 2021 Guardian of the Walls campaign in Gaza. It used Mossad’s psyops tactics to generate mass support for its campaign.
It’s claimed that during the 2021 aggression, the IDF used fake social media accounts to push its narratives. It used far-right Facebook groups to spread its messages and tagged far-right politicians to have them amplified.
Earlier, Haaretz published an investigative piece in August 2021, which claimed that the IDF may have been behind the Abu Ali Express, a popular Hebrew-language channel on Telegram through which it spread Zionist narratives to justify the attacks on Palestinian civilians.
The unnamed Telegram blogger was reportedly employed by the IDF in 2019, under Mossad’s psyops targeting the Israeli population, to build up public opinion in favour of the aggression on Palestinian people.
The amount of massive propaganda that surfaced on mainstream and social since the beginning of Hamas’s Operation Al-Aqsa Flood from both Israeli and Palestinian sides shows how information war, beyond the battlefields, has expanded its scope and captivated and polarised the world.
However, in terms of propaganda, the Palestinian side, which is driven by activists, independent journalists, and progressive forces, is far surpassed by Mossad’s psyops, which helped the Israeli government to portray itself as a victim by making unsubstantial claims about Hamas’s alleged war crimes.
As the war against Palestine intensified the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, the Israeli propaganda will also intensify to invalidate all criticisms of its war crimes by citing Hamas’s alleged atrocities. The rising tide of pro-Israeli propaganda shows how Mossad’s psyops are engulfing the internet. In this battle of psyops, truth is becoming the biggest victim of all.
