On October 7, 2023, Hamas and other Palestinian resistance organizations launched an attack out of the Gaza Strip and into Israel under the code name “Al-Aqsa Flood.” Israeli and Western mainstream media and politicians rapidly labelled this a massive act of terrorism and flooded the world with tales of horrific atrocities allegedly perpetrated by the Palestinians, such as sadistically murdering children and women and committing mass rape.

We now know that these atrocious tales were lies calculated to generate domestic and international outrage against the Palestinian resistance and Palestinians in general. They were part of the same poisonous Israeli narrative that labeled these people “Amalek” – a reference to a perversely “exemplary” genocide in the Old Testament – and denied that they were human beings. They were taking steps, in other words, to start a genocide.

These atrocious propaganda lies were made up and spread by, for instance, Israel’s Zaka activists and Western mainstream journalists, such as the New York Times, high public officials such as the UN’s Pramila Patten, and activists. For instance, former Meta executive Sheryl Sandberg acted as a Zionist propagandist, who chose to rely on Israeli disinformation.

In reality, there were no mass rapes, there were no sadistic baby murders by beheadings or in microwave ovens, no pregnant woman was found killed with a headshot, with her baby stabbed and still attached to the umbilical cord. It “simply didn’t happen,” as a detailed investigation by Israeli newspaper Haaretz found.

What did happen on October 7, 2026 was not a savage, sadistic rampage but a daring military resistance operation. It was also a mass break-out from the Gaza Strip, which was under a long Israeli siege so brutal that Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling had already called the Strip the “world’s largest concentration camp ever” almost a quarter-century ago.

The core of this offensive targeted Israel’s Gaza Division, which, according to high-ranking Israeli officers was “overpowered.” In the process, Palestinian resistance fighters killed and captured Israeli military personnel. While Israel’s propaganda has done its best to obfuscate this fact, these actions were neither “terrorism” nor hostage-taking but legitimate acts of armed resistance under international law.

The Palestinian fighters also attacked a music festival as well as several settlements. There, according to an Amnesty International summary in early 2024, they did commit crimes, including the deliberate killing of civilians and the taking of hostages, that is, civilians, not soldiers, whose capture makes them POWs and not hostages. A crime, in any case, is a crime........

© RT.com