October 7th: The Fog Begins to Clear

A New Picture is Emerging about the Events of 10/7

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Introduction

As everyone now knows, on October 7th, 2023, Hamas launched a devastating attack on Israeli military installations and communities in the territories surrounding Gaza, the walled-off open-air prison where over two million Palestinians have been confined for over 15 years. The assault, lasting several hours, resulted in approximately 1200 Israeli deaths and the seizing of over 200 hostages.

• In the months since the attack, Israel has countered this offensive by waging an unprecedented bombing campaign on the people of Gaza (mostly its civilians). This brutal campaign has killed at least 20,000 people, left several multiples of that severely injured or maimed, destroyed much if not all of the key infrastructure of the territory, and created a humanitarian crisis that is as severe as anything the world has seen in recent memory.

• As of mid-December 2023, this bombing campaign is still continuing, with no sign of abatement. The entire saga has been playing out on social media, with the entire Muslim world becoming increasingly enraged by what they are seeing daily on their news feeds.  The situation is becoming so dire for the Palestinians that Israel’s actions are now threatening to ignite a greater Middle Eastern conflict, one that is likely to draw America and Russia in should it escalate.

In the two-plus months since the initial Hamas attack took place, a steady stream of new evidence and critical analysis has come out concerning what exactly happened on October 7th and why. This new information changes drastically our perception of the 10/7 attack and why it happened. It also advances our understanding of why Israel has responded to it in the way that it has.

• In this article, we are going to be investigating this new information, beginning with a re-assessment of Hamas’s initial assault on Israel. Then, we will shift and consider the Israeli side of the equation, in particular examining what potential role the Israeli “Deep State” may have played in facilitating this catastrophe.

• Overall, the aim here is to move beyond the official story that the mainstream media and Western politicians are insisting on and instead discover the truth about what really happened in Israel that fateful day and why.

1. Others Were Involved with the 10/7 Attacks Besides Hamas

For those seeking to uncover the truth about what really happened on October 7th in Israel and why, both in terms of the initial invasion and the Israeli military’s response to it, investigative journalist Max Blumenthal has provided some of the best analysis available. To appreciate the significance of his findings, let’s first revisit the parameters of the “official story” that Western media and politicians have been insisting on.

• In Blumenthal’s words: “The official story, which has been told to Americans and Israelis, is that Hamas ‘terrorists’ stormed into Southern Israel and began shooting and killing people at random. Then burned them alive, tied up entire families in their homes, and then burned them all. Somehow, (they also) melted cars and burned people in their cars as they were trying to flee, and carried out this gigantic mass shooting.”

• In this version of events, which is the official party line of Israel, America, and Europe, the Hamas attack is depicted as the work of insane madmen: a pure terrorist onslaught intended to kill and terrorize as many people as possible, with atrocities such as rape, torture, and “beheading babies” being carried out by inhuman savages.

• For the Israeli and US governments, this is a desirable narrative to sell the public on, as it helps generate popular support and political legitimacy for the brutal bombing campaign that they have jointly exerted upon Gaza over the past two months, with the IDF doing the bombing and America providing the financing, weaponry, and political cover to support it.

When we go into the actual details of the Hamas raid, however, a different and much more complicated picture emerges. Notably, we find that several key components of the official story do not hold up.

• For example, in terms of the official death toll, it is now clear that a significant percentage of the dead were comprised of Israeli soldiers and police officers; civilians weren’t the primary target (although many were killed). It is also now clear that a significant number of these Israeli casualties were killed by their own military - the IDF (Israeli Defense Force) - in its counter-response to the invasion.

• There is also now considerable doubt about what exact terroristic atrocities the invading Gazan militants actually performed on October 7th: they have been accused of things like beheading babies and mass rape, but no tangible evidence has emerged that these actually took place.

• That’s not to say that they absolutely didn’t happen, or that other atrocities weren’t commited by them, but it's hard to differentiate fact from fiction in an environment where so much propaganda is being spewed from all sides. Everyone in this conflict has a stake in making their counterpart look as bad as possible, and in this situation it is very challenging to know with confidence what exactly happened that day.

We’ll revisit some of these issues later on in the article, but for now let’s begin our analysis by focusing on one key fact about October 7th that almost all Western commentators overlook: that the assault of Israel was a campaign waged not by one group acting alone, but rather from the collaboration of two separate Gazan political entities working in collaboration: Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ). In addition to these two factions, a third element also factored into play on October 7th: the involvement of unaffiliated third-party militants, who streamed into Israel from Gaza after the official planned operation by Hamas and PIJ was already underway.

• This third category of assailant carried out their own independent shootings and kidnappings and are responsible for committing a number of the atrocities carried out that day - ones that cannot rightly be attributed to the Hamas brigades, which Israel and the West have attempted to put everything on.

• Elaborating on the involvement of this third element, Max Blumenthal informs us that “the assault began around 6:00 AM at daybreak, and by 10:30 AM, according to Israeli media accounts, all of the special force’s commando teams and the well-trained Hamas teams had already left.” After this point, “with the rapid collapse of the Israeli military’s Gaza Division, looters, common onlookers, and low-level guerrillas not necessarily under the command of Hamas flowed freely into Israel.”

• In an interview with former NY Times journalist Chris Hedges, Blumenthal elaborates on the generally overlooked role that these free-roaming assailants played in the attack. In particular, he highlights that they appear to have played a particularly significant role in the infamous Nova Electronic Music Festival assault: “It’s there that it appears clear that after a lot of these Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad commando teams had left – this is an element that’s left out in a lot of Western media – many people from Gaza started streaming in. (These included) lower level characters from the armed factions who may have had weapons but weren’t part of the operation or weren’t trained, onlookers, people who wanted to see what Israel looked like, to see the land that their families had been kicked off of. There were some heinous killings, and you could see actual captives being taken by guys on motorcycles who didn’t even have weapons. They were grabbing people.”

To put it simply: October 7th was not solely the work of Hamas. Therefore, to attribute everything that happened that day to Hamas alone is a mischaracterization and oversimplification of the truth.

• Unfortunately, this oversimplification has served to frame the entire Gaza population as being co-conspirators in every atrocity carried out that day: since Hamas was elected by 44% of the population back in 2006 (before a vast majority of its current citizens were voting-age or even born), many Israelis and Westerners believe that the entire population is culpable for what happened on October 7th. Therefore, in their view, it is fair game for them to be bombed or killed by Israel as part of Israel’s counter-response to the attack.

• This logic is part of the justification that the Israeli government has used to legitimize its unending bombing campaign of the Gaza Strip. But, as we discover, many of the atrocities attributed to Hamas were likely not carried out by their military units: some came from the PIJ, some from unaffiliated militants, and some from the IDF’s unorganized and panicked military counter-response to the attacks.

• This latter aspect has been almost entirely overlooked by Western media, but as we will be exploring further below, a very large percentage of Israeli deaths that day actually came at the hands of their own military.

2. Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad: Uneasy Allies

Given that the October 7th assault was planned and carried out as a joint effort between two different militant factions in Gaza - Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) - it is worth taking some time to explore the differences between them.

• There is a tendency for analysts and commentators to equate the two groups together, as if they are identical, when in fact they are not. In actuality, the two often compete with each other for influence within Gaza, with the PIJ serving as the more extreme and aggressive faction of the two.

• Indeed, the PIJ’s influence within Gaza has in the past often had the effect of driving Hamas to adopt a more hostile and militant attitude toward Israel than it might otherwise take. Britannica’s entry on the PIJ provides further details on this dynamic: “Although the PIJ was not political in orientation, its activities placed pressure on Hamas—now the de facto ruler of the Gaza Strip—to react to, control, and compete with the PIJ, thereby granting it some level of indirect influence on the territory’s public policy.”

• This influence has often had the effect of pushing Hamas to escalate its hostile activities toward Israel: since “the PIJ was more prone than Hamas to initiate attacks on Israel, (it often pushes) Hamas to follow suit in order to demonstrate its commitment to the resistance against (Israel’s) blockade (of Gaza).”

• The Britannica article also points out how sometimes PIJ would refuse to cooperate with Hamas directives, causing friction between the two: “Because Israel generally held Hamas accountable for all attacks coming out of the Gaza Strip throughout the 2010s, Hamas and the PIJ occasionally clashed when the former sought to enforce cease-fires and the latter was unwilling to halt attacks.”

Delving deeper, we discover that each group is governed by different leadership structures, organizational philosophies, and political goals.

• Harel Chorev, a senior researcher at Tel Aviv University, describes Hamas’s political structure as “a decentralized organization with several separate power centers.” More specifically, Hamas’s operations are divided around a bifurcated structure, with its political and military wings kept separate and semi-autonomous from each other. The political wing, known as the political bureau, is responsible for the social governance of Gaza’s people, while the military wing, called the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, is responsible for carrying out armed operations against Israel.

• The ruling class of the political bureau operates not only within Gaza but also in various countries abroad, namely Qatar. By contrast, the military command structure, which enjoys a significant amount of autonomy from the political bureau, is focused primarily in Gaza itself. (For a breakdown of the various key individuals involved in these two different factions, see this BBC article.)

The Palestinian Islamic Jihad, by contrast, is organized quite differently than Hamas: it features a more centralized structure and its operations are focused almost entirely on military activities.

• Brittanica describes the PIJ as a "paramilitary movement”, one that “appeals to certain core values rather than to a coherent religious doctrine or political ideology.” Perhaps the core value they hold is that “the PIJ leadership refused the idea of dividing the Holy Land through a two-state solution”. They believe that “all of Palestine should fall under Islamic rule” and they attribute “the Jewish presence to colonialism and conflate it with the imposition of Western hegemony in the region.”

• Unlike Hamas, the PIJ have no formal governance responsibilities and are therefore not accountable to the Gaza population at large. Consequently, they are free to pursue their resistance activities with considerable autonomy.

Hamas and the PIJ share several important similarities to other militant Islamic factions in the Middle East region like al-Qaeda or ISIS.

• The main similarity they share is that each group is heavily influenced by fundamentalist interpretations of the Islamic religion. Each also has a desire to see the region return to an Islamic-based system of governance, although the specifics of each’s interpretation of Islam may differ.

• Because each is strongly influenced by Islam, each views the regional conflicts they are involved in as being not only political wars but also holy wars or “jihads”.

Given that these groups define their identity in large part through their outrage at Western occupation of their lands, it is somewhat ironic to discover that for many decades, stretching back to the early years of the 20th century, Western imperial powers have covertly funded and utilized these groups to foster division and instability in the region.

• The value of these fundamentalist Islamic sects to Western interests has to do with their uncompromising position on religious matters and their willingness to wage jihad or religious war on their enemies. Because of their strict religious beliefs, political compromise is impossible for them, and this has made them useful foils for the Western nations to pit against their enemies in the religion, these being governments with socialist or communist aims.

• These fundamentalist Islamic factions also create a permanent enemy for Western interests to wage unending war with. Without them, the “War on Terror” would be impossible. But the West (and in particular the US) wants and needs a perpetual “War on Terror” since it justifies the maintenance of a permanent colonizing military presence in the region.

• In reality, this military presence is needed to ensure that global energy markets remain under US control and to prevent Middle Eastern nations from allying together to reject America’s colonizing presence. The “War on Terror” is merely the outer facade that makes this permanent military presence possible. Consequently, whether they realize it or not, organizations like Hamas and the PIJ help to facilitate the very thing they are existentially opposed it.

Having now discussed the similarities and differences between Hamas and the PIJ, let’s now return to the subject of the October 7th attacks.

• The dual participation of both factions in the assault, along with the presence of other militant groups who streamed into Israel after their planned operation was completed, brings into play the idea that different parties may have been acting with different objectives during the raid.

• With several groups being involved in the attack, an opportunity is made available for outside interests beyond Gaza to potentially, in a covert manner, exert influence on the trajectory of events that took place that day. These outside interests may include on one hand other regional Islamic power players like Qatar, Iran, and Lebanon, but also may include US and Israeli intelligence agencies and Deep State interests.

• Given this dynamic, we must consider the possibility that, with so many different factions and parties being involved in the attack, there may have been one or more deliberately rogue elements inserted into the equation. These may have been deliberately implanted in order to perform atrocities under the direction of an outside influence for the purpose of undermining Hamas’s effort to draw sympathy toward their cause.

Many will find it surprising to learn that there are historical precedents for this type of tactic, both by Israel and by the US.

• One prominent example is offered by geopolitical analyst F. William Engdahl in his book Full Spectrum Dominance. He writes how “a successful false flag terrorist attack that discredited the cause of the Palestinians was the case of the hijacking of the Italian cruise ship, ‘Achille Lauro’ in 1985. The operation was ordered by Mossad, the Israeli secret services, and carried by their agents inside Palestinian organizations.”

• “The details of the preparations were related by an insider of the Israeli secret services, Ari Ben-Menashe, former special intelligence advisor to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, in his book, ‘Profits of War.’ According to Ben-Menashe, the attack on the Achille Lauro was ‘an Israeli ‘black’ propaganda operation to show what a deadly, cut-throat bunch the Palestinians were.’”

It’s impossible to know for sure, but could a certain number of the more disturbing elements of the 10/7 assault have been the product of similar ‘black propaganda units’ implanted into the situation by an outside force? If so, was their mission to perform them in order that they be used to justify the all-out assault and invasion of Gaza by the US and Israel, which is currently taking place as we speak?

• While many of the atrocities attributed to Hamas have now been shown to be falsehoods created by Israeli propaganda agencies, perhaps some of the factual ones were carried out by “bad actors’ acting outside of the parameters of the official Hamas/PIJ operation. After all, every atrocity performed that day would have aided Israel’s propaganda efforts and at the same time been counterproductive to Hamas’s goal of garnering sympathy for its cause.

• It’s hard to rectify the callousness of some of the 10/7 footage with the testimonies of released Israeli hostages who described their Hamas captors as being courteous and respectful. Some of the released hostages even shook the hands of their captors as they were released and can be seen waving to them as they drove away.

• At the very least, we must admit there is more going on here than what first meets the eye. The situation is much more complex than the simple idea that rabid terrorist savages invaded Israel in order to kill, maim, and terrorize as many Israelis as possible.

• Certainly, that may describe some subset of the invading Gazan militants, but it does not appear to be an accurate assessment of the official objectives of the Hamas-PIJ joint operation. If anything, this type of hateful terrorist behavior seems more characteristic of the actions of the IDF forces that have since invaded Gaza, along with the Israeli government that supports them and the Zionist settler communities who are attempting to seize control of the West Bank alongside them.

3. The Strategic Objectives Behind Operation Al-Aqsa Flood

Western and Israeli accounts of the October 7th attacks make it seem as if the invasion was purely terroristic in nature, with mass killings being the operation's sole objective. Admittedly, I fell victim to this narrative in my early assessment of the conflict. It now appears however that this is not the case: there were clear strategic goals to the operation, and murdering civilians was in fact not one of them.

• While some unarmed civilians were indeed shot by invading forces, it is a much smaller percentage than what was originally announced. And it is now clear that these types of murders were not part of the official operational parameters of the Hamas-PIJ joint campaign.

• Instead of irrational, savage terrorism being the sole objective of the assault, as is commonly depicted by Western media pundits and politicians, there were actually several clearly stated military objectives to the campaign. And, contrary to popular belief, massacring innocent civilians was not one of them.

• Actually, when they did happen, these killings were counterproductive to Hamas’s primary mission objectives, which involved attacking IDF bases, cutting off their communication links, and gathering as many hostages as possible in order to trigger a hostage exchange.

• Drawing public attention to the plight of Gaza can also be considered a primary mission objective, and killing random civilians clearly goes against this, since it compromises Gaza’s ability to gain public support for its freedom and instead serves to fuel Israel’s propaganda initiatives aimed at turning public opinion against Hamas and Gaza. So while the murder of innocent Israeli citizens did happen on 10/7 and should rightfully be condemned, it does not appear to have been an official goal of the mission of the invading Gazan forces.

Building on these points, in an article published on TheCradle.co analyzing the events of October 7th, authors Robert Inlakesh and Sharmine Narwani conclude that “There is little to no credible evidence that Palestinian fighters had a plan to - or deliberately sought to - kill or harm unarmed Israeli civilians on 7 October. From the available footage, we witness them engaging primarily with armed Israeli forces, accounting for the deaths of hundreds of occupation soldiers.”

• In the article, they quote Hamas’s Qassam Brigades Spokesman Abu Obeida, who stated on October 12th that the “Al-Aqsa Flood operation aimed to destroy the Gaza Division (an Israeli army unit on Gaza’s borders) which was attacked at 15 points, followed by attacking 10 further military intervention points. We (also) attacked the Zikim site and several other settlements outside the Gaza Division headquarters.”

• While the article’s authors acknowledge that “there are certainly some videos depicting possibly unarmed Israelis killed in their vehicles or at entrances to facilities so that Palestinian troops could gain access”, they emphasize that this was not the main point of the operation. Rather, “Abu Obeida and other resistance officials claim that the … key objective of their operation was to take Israeli prisoners that they could exchange for the approximately 5,300 Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli detention centers, many of whom are women and children.”

• Reporter Max Blumenthal explains that, in general, “Palestinian armed struggle has always been driven by political demands that were essentially rational and were related to ending ethnic cleansing and ending the military occupation of Palestinians.” In the case of the 10/7 attack, code-named Al-Aqsa Flood, “the leadership of Hamas put forward clear political demands … (just) as they did in 2014 during Operation Cast Lead.” In other words, the invasion was not one of irrational terrorism and we should stop treating it as such.

In this section, we will highlight the three primary strategic objectives of the Al-Aqsa Flood offensive, starting with the most obvious: to gather Israeli captives as currency for a hostage exchange.

Objective 1: Trigger a Hostage Exchange

According to Blumenthal, one of the primary goals declared by Hamas for its 10/7 “military offensive was to gather as many captives as possible, particularly Israeli soldiers, in order to trigger (a) prisoner exchange.”

• The context for this is that prior to 10/7 Israel had rounded up and imprisoned approximately 5,000 Palestinians, many without charge or trial. A significant number of these prisoners were women and children. Since “the entire West had declared Hamas a terrorist organization that could not be negotiated with” - a position that all but eliminated any formal diplomatic channels from being used to negotiate the release of these prisoners - Hamas and the PIJ concluded that “the only way to spur negotiations (was) through violence. And that’s what they did.”

• Blumenthal points out that “the 2011 swap for Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier captured five years prior and released in exchange for 1027 prisoners, provided clear inspiration for Al-Aqsa Flood. By storming military bases and kibbutzes, the Palestinian militants aimed to capture as many Israeli soldiers and civilians as possible and bring them back to Gaza alive.”

• Thus, we find that one of the primary goals of the military campaign was to gather Israeli hostages in order to orchestrate a prisoner change with Israel to free Palestinian captives. This is a goal it was partially successful in accomplishing - a prisoner exchange did take place several weeks later, but not to the extent that Hamas likely hoped.

In carrying out their offensive, Hamas and PIJ militants followed a well-orchestrated and well-rehearsed game plan.

• The operation began around 6 AM, when large swarms of militants broke through the Gaza security perimeter at numerous locations and launched an all-out assault on several different IDF military bases.

• Blumenthal describes how “Gunmen were sent with detailed maps to population centers and military bases. In the military bases, they were obviously given instructions to attack and kill Israeli soldiers who were maintaining the siege of Gaza.” In addition to these IDF targets, many first responders and armed Israeli civilians were also killed in this initial phase of the invasion.

• Aspects of the assault are captured in some of the footage retrieved from fallen Hamas militants: “Video recorded from GoPro cameras mounted on the helmets of Palestinian fighters shows Israeli soldiers cut down in rapid succession, many still dressed in underwear and caught off guard. At least 340 active soldiers and intelligence officers were killed on October 7, accounting for close to 50% of confirmed Israeli deaths. The casualties included high-ranking officers like Col. Jonathan Steinberg, the commander of Israel’s Nahal Brigade.”

Scott Ritter

, a former US Marine intelligence official, highlights that these bases were home to “the very surveillance and communication nodes the IDF relied upon to mobilize a response in case of an attack.” There was therefore a clear strategic rationale for taking them out.

• Ritter describes how “Hamas struck the Headquarters of the Gaza Division, the local intelligence hub, and other major command and control facilities with brutal precision, turning what should have been a five-minute response time into many hours—more than enough time for Hamas to carry out one of its primary objectives—the taking of hostages. This they did with extreme proficiency, returning to Gaza with more than 230 Israeli soldiers and civilians.”

• For the Gazan militants, this aspect of the campaign would have held more than just a tactical value, however: these were the same military bases “from which Israel (had) maintained its siege of the Gaza Strip” for over 15 years. Indeed, it was from out of this Gaza division that “so many massacres inside Gaza (had been carried out) over the years”.

Objective 2: Counter Zionist Threats Against the Al-Aqsa Mosque

As we previously discussed, the capture of Israeli hostages for the purpose of triggering a prisoner exchange with Israel was one of the primary strategic objectives of the joint Hamas-PIJ offensive. But it was not the only one: Scott Ritter explains that a second primary objective of the campaign was to “return the sanctity of the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, Islam’s third holiest place, which had been desecrated repeatedly by Israeli security forces over the past years.”

• Professor

  Anthony James Hall
  , on his Substack, offers background context to this situation. He writes how “One of the most ambitious projects sought by Zionist planners (in Israel) pictures … the raising of a Third Jewish Temple on the present site of the Dome of the Rock. … The Dome of the Rock is the thousand-year-old structure that is the oldest in the Islamic world. The Rock under the Dome is where Prophet Muhammed is said to have communed with the spirits of Abraham, Moses, and Jesus before being transported to heaven.”

• Because “this iconographic Dome is integral to the architecture of al-Aqsa mosque,” it is understood that the Zionist’s planned Third Temple cannot be raised without the al-Aqsa mosque’s destruction.

• For this reason, “the plan to replace the al-Aqsa mosque, which encompasses the Dome of the Rock, has explosive implications. … Many Islamic groups, including Hamas, have displayed uncompromising resistance to the assertion of Israeli jurisdiction over the site of the large compound of the al-Aqsa mosque.”

In his article “The Death of Peace in Israel”,

Frank Wright

details how Israel’s head of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, is one of the main parties responsible for flaming religious tensions around this important yet controversial site. He leads the Jewish fundamentalist Settler-Religious party, which, in Salafist-like fashion, desires to institute “Halacha - the Jewish religious laws from the Torah - as the basis of the Israeli state.”

• According to Wright, Ben-Gvir and his Settler-Religious party, which is currently in a tightly bound political coalition with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, “is committed to rebuilding the Third Temple, destroyed by the Romans in AD 70. To do this, the al-Aqsa mosque must be destroyed and replaced with it.”

• Professor Hall describes how, in the long-term game plan of these Zionist extremists, “the Third Temple is pictured as the core central point in the plan to make Jerusalem the new imperial capital for the entire world. For those who hold this conception, the Third Temple would be the site of some sort of world high court based on a modern-day adaptation of the Sanhedrin, an association of rabbinical jurists who exercised much power in the era of King Solomon’s Second Temple.”

On October 4th - only a few days prior to the 10/7 attacks - Frank Wright details how a major provocation at the site of the mosque took place. He writes that “the mosque was occupied by around 1000 Israeli settlers. Screaming ‘death to the Arabs’, this crowd appeared not only to intentionally enrage Muslims worldwide but also to restate the intention of the ruling government faction to destroy the mosque and rebuild (their desired) temple in its place.”

• These provocations, which were allowed (and even encouraged) by the Israeli government, are an outrage to Muslims everywhere. Therefore, it should serve as no surprise that the 10/7 assault was carried out partly as a military counter-response to it. Indeed, the operation was called “Al-Aqsa Flood”, which signifies the major role that the Mosque and Israel’s disrespectful actions toward it played in motivating Hamas and the PIJ to carry out their invasion.

• Given the Israeli government’s acquiescence to the October 4th riots at the Mosque, one wonders if the incident was deliberately staged in order to provoke and enrage the Islamic World. Perhaps, they were trying to lure them into invading for shadowy strategic reasons. Either way, it is clear that should Israel’s provocations at the Mosque continue, it will likely not be the last attack that the nation faces.

• Building on this point, Frank Wright cites the remarks of Ahmad Majdalani, a Palestinian minister, who warned of the dangers of continued provocations at the site. He called Ben-Gvir’s visit “a provocative expression by the Israeli government as a whole, not just an individual expression by Ben-Gvir. It is official policy to harm the feelings of Muslims worldwide, particularly Palestinians. We warn that if this continues, then it changes the situation from a political conflict to a religious one that cannot be controlled. The danger of this to the region cannot be overestimated.”

Objective 3: Shatter the Status Quo

In addition to the two mission objectives we’ve discussed so far - triggering a hostage exchange and responding to Israel’s provocations around the al-Aqsa mosque - political analyst Mouin Rabbani points to a third strategic objective behind the 10/7 attacks: to “shatter the status quo … irrevocably” in terms of Israel’s treatment of the region’s native Palestinian population - not only in Gaza but also the West Bank, where native Palestinians have become the targets of increasingly hostile ethnic cleansing actions by government-supported Zionist settler communities.

• Rabbani points out that Israel has long enjoyed “the active support of the Americans” and “the passive acquiescence of the Europeans” regarding its apartheid policies against the region's native Palestinian population.

• The Abraham Accords, initiated by the Trump Administration in 2020, threaten to permanently institutionalize the subjugation of the Palestinian people. Elaborating, Scott Ritter explains how "in September 2020 Netanyahu signed the Abraham Accords, a series of bilateral agreements brokered by the administration of then-President Donald Trump that sought the normalization of relations between Israel and several Gulf Arab States, all at the expense of an independent Palestinian nation. Prior to the Hamas attack on October 7, Israel was on the cusp of normalizing relations with Saudi Arabia, an act which would have proven to be the final nail in the coffin of Palestinian statehood.”

• Faced with this existential emergency, Rabbani informs us that “Hamas decided it needed to do something, for lack of a better term, genuinely spectacular on October 7th.” Given that all other diplomatic and non-violent routes to changing this unacceptable status quo had been eliminated, they concluded that violence was left as their last and only resort.

• To give one example of a situation in which a nonviolent protest by Gazans was brutally shut down by the IDF, Rabbani points to the massacre that took place during a peaceful protest in 2018 called The Great March of Return. During this episode, "when very large numbers of Palestinians went to the boundary between the Gaza Strip and Israel to (peacefully) demonstrate, on the anniversary of Nakba Day, … Israeli snipers shot and killed numerous Palestinians, wounded many more, medics were killed, and so on. And the world shrugged and, the following day, things returned back to what they were.”

For all of the above reasons, the 10/7 attack on Israel was planned and carried out as a joint operation of Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

• Scott Ritter offers his view that, in order to accomplish the goal of changing the status quo, “the October 7 raid needed to create the necessary conditions for victory. This was achieved by humiliating Israel sufficiently to provoke a predictable outcome—the implementation of the Dahiya Doctrine of collective punishment against the civilian population of Gaza, combined with a ground attack on Gaza that would lure the IDF into what was in effect a Hamas ambush.”

• Most likely, the grand strategists behind the invasion knew that Israel’s military response to their attack would be extremely punitive, but they volunteered the Gazan population to be subjected to it anyway because, in their eyes, that was the only way that the status quo could be overturned and the existential threat facing Palestine addressed.

• I’m not saying I support their decision, but it's hard to argue that their strategy hasn’t proven effective. As Ritter points out, “the Israeli bombardment and invasion of Gaza has resulted in (an unprecedented) international revulsion against Israel as the world recoils from the humanitarian disaster that is unfolding before their very eyes.”

• At the point I’m writing this, over 20,000 Gazans have died and countless more severely injured and maimed as a result of the IDF’s bombing campaign. These dead truly are martyrs for the Palestinian cause: the sad but true fact is that it is only because of their death and suffering these past months that the plight of the Palestinian people has now gained worldwide attention. If this was indeed the ultimate mission of the Al-Aqsa Flood operation, who can say it hasn’t been successful?

4. The IDF’s Counter-Response Killed Many Israeli Citizens

In the official narrative of the October 7th attacks, it is made to seem that Hamas is solely responsible for all of the 1200+ casualties that occurred that day. But thanks to the investigative reporting of journalists like Max Blumenthal, we now know that a significant number of these casualties were actually caused by the Israeli Defense Force’s counter-response to the invasion.

• As Blumenthal explains: “There’s growing evidence that in the chaotic fighting that took place once Hamas militants entered Israel on October 7, the Israeli military decided to target not only Hamas fighters but the Israeli captives with them. … (They) used disproportionate force on (their) own citizens in order to dislodge a politically driven military offensive by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which was aimed at extracting political concessions from the state of Israel.”

• Chris Hedges points out in his conversation with Blumenthal that the IDF’s deadly attacks against Israeli civilians are part of a controversial military doctrine aimed at killing potential hostages before they can be taken as trade bait. Summarizing the doctrine, he explains how “Israel, in 1986, instituted a military policy called the Hannibal Directive … following the capture of two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah. The directive is designed to prevent Israeli troops from falling into enemy hands through the maximum use of force, even at the cost of killing captured soldiers and civilians.”

In his analysis of 10/7, Blumenthal pinpoints three clear instances where this directive seems to have been used: at the Erez Crossing, a major border crossing between Israel and Gaza, at Kibbutz Be’eri, and at the Nova Electronic Music Festival.

• Blumenthal points out that Kibbutz Be’eri, located near the location of the music festival, “is the site that registered the most casualties of non-combatants. I counted something like 150 among the confirmed death toll printed at Haaretz and most of them, they were not soldiers. These were people who were caught in the crossfire. Hamas gunmen had tried to take them captive, and there were standoffs in their homes. And by the time Israeli special forces arrived, many of those standoffs had either ended or they ended them simply by shelling people’s homes with tanks.”

• One eyewitness, Yasmin Porat, who fled the nearby Nova Electronic Music Festival when it came under attack and took refuge in the Kibbutz, describes how IDF tanks shelled houses containing both militants and captives in them, despite knowing full well that innocent hostages were inside them. She described how (in Blumenthal’s words) “when the Israeli special forces arrived, they started shooting everyone and that most of the captives, along with the Hamas gunmen, were caught in the crossfire, and that everyone was killed except for her and her captor.” During this incident, “She saw her own partner, whose hands had been bound by her captors, get shot by Israeli special forces, and then they lobbed two tank shells into the home that she had been in.”

The Nova festival mentioned above was another site of mass chaos, with large numbers of Gazan militants swarming in to grab hostages and in some cases carry out brutal killings. Blumenthal describes how by 10:30 AM, “most of the [Palestinian] forces from the original invasion wave had already left the area for Gaza. But with the rapid collapse of the Israeli military’s Gaza Division, looters, common onlookers, and low-level guerrillas not necessarily under the command of Hamas flowed freely into Israel.”

• Curiously, the IDF response to the early stages of the attack was sparse. But by late morning “there were two squadrons of Apache helicopters that had been scrambled.” However, “they were not even at full strength until 12:00 PM.” By this point, there was chaos on the ground, with “a lot of shooting going on between festival security guards and various gunmen, and a lot of people were killed.” At the same time, many people were fleeing the festival by car: some attendees of the festival, others Gazan militants who had taken captives and were driving them back across the Gaza border, which was not far away.

• It was into this situation that IDF Apache helicopters arrived and started firing. Blumenthal describes how their pilots “had no intelligence, no way of distinguishing civilian from combatant on the ground. And yet they were told to empty their tanks, completely unload their ammo, then head back to the base, get filled up again, reload, and then go shoot as many cars and people as they could on the ground. Pure chaos.”

One veteran Israeli colonel admitted that “what we saw here was a mass Hannibal. There were many openings in the fence, thousands of people in many different vehicles with hostages and without.” IDF pilots were told “to shoot at everything they see in the fence area.” Heeding this directive, they “opened fire on all cars and people on the Gaza border without distinction.”

• Blumenthal affirms this confession, noting how “Apache helicopters appear to have focused on vehicles streaming back into Gaza from the Nova electronic music festival and nearby kibbutzes, attacking cars with apparent knowledge that Israeli captives could be inside. They also fired on unarmed people exiting cars or walking on foot through the fields on the periphery of Gaza.”

• During this chaotic assault, these helicopters apparently used not only high-powered guns, but also Hellfire missiles. Blumenthal describes how “You have all of these images that the Israeli Foreign Ministry put out of cars that are completely melted, and their corpses inside are charred. And those to me are telltale signs of Hellfire missile strikes from Apache helicopters, and the Apache crews, the squadrons. They put out a video afterward of themselves shooting cars, hitting cars with Hellfire missiles, and shooting people who were pedestrians walking on the ground with cannon fire. We don’t know who those people were, but if you look, a lot of the cars were heading back to Gaza. So they were very likely cars of people from Gaza who may have been taking captives and so many captives or would-be captives were killed.”

5. Israeli Intelligence had Foreknowledge of the Attack

Much has been made over the years about how advanced Israeli military intelligence is and how extensive its surveillance networks in Gaza are. Consequently, many have found it hard to believe that Hamas and the PIJ could have carried out their well-trained, well-supplied, and well-rehearsed attack without the IDF and Mossad (Israeli Intelligence) having at least some level of foreknowledge that it would take place.

• Summarizing the capabilities of Israeli intelligence within Gaza before 10/7, Philip Giraldi writes that “Gaza was under 24/7 complete surveillance and control at all times. Israeli military intelligence also certainly had a network of recruited informants inside Gaza who would report on any training or movements.”

• Based on this fact, in the hours and days following the attack many were in disbelief at the idea that the invasion had caught the IDF completely by surprise. Was this really just an intelligence failure or had a 9/11-style false flag taken place?

In the months since the infamous October 7th attacks took place, considerable evidence has come out revealing that Israeli Intelligence did indeed have foreknowledge of an impending Hamas attack. They appear to have “let it happen” in order to facilitate a pre-planned counter-response, one that involves flattening Gaza and ethnically clearing it of Palestinians altogether.

• I’ll go deeper into Israel’s possible motivations for allowing this attack to take place in another article. For now, let’s focus on overviewing the various pieces of evidence that suggest that Israeli intelligence did in fact have foreknowledge that a forthcoming attack was being planned and trained for.

• Indeed, the Israeli Deep State may not only have had foreknowledge that an attack was going to take place but may have gone further and deliberately sabotaged their military’s capacity to repel it - similar to how during Pearl Harbor the US Deep State set the navy up for failure in order to create a catastrophe large enough to drive the country into joining WWII.

To begin with, since October 7th numerous frustrated IDF whistleblowers have come out and revealed that they had frequently, over many occasions, observed Hamas conducting extensive training operations in anticipation of a pending attack and tried repeatedly to warn Israeli officials about it, only to find themselves ignored and gaslighted.

• For example, an October 26th article in The Times of Israel by Shira Silkoff reports that “The brutal Hamas massacre on October 7 was preceded by months of warning signs noted by IDF surveillance soldiers (but) disregarded as unimportant by intelligence officials, according to eyewitness accounts given in recent days. … The activity reported by the soldiers included information on Hamas operatives conducting training sessions multiple times a day, digging holes, and placing explosives along the border. According to the accounts of the soldiers, no action was taken by those who received the reports.”

• One soldier who had given forewarning of the attacks, Yael Rotenberg, was especially irate about the dismissals of her warnings, given that her entire unit was killed during the subsequent attack. “Rotenberg recalled frequently seeing many Palestinians dressed in civilian clothing approach the border fence with maps, examining the ground around it and digging holes. One time, when she passed the information on, she was told that they were farmers, and there was nothing to worry about. … ‘It’s infuriating,’ she (exclaimed). ‘We saw what was happening, we told them about it, and we were the ones who were murdered.’”

Maya Desiatnik, the only other soldier at the base not killed or abducted, revealed in interviews after the attacks that she had also tried to warn Israeli officials of suspicious behavior she was repeatedly observing around the Gaza security perimeter. Like Rotenburg, she also found her warnings falling on deaf ears.

• She reveals that “the Hamas terrorists would train at the border fence nonstop. … At first, it was once a week, then once a day, and then nearly constantly. In addition to passing on information about the frequency of the training going on at the fence, the surveillance soldier said she collected evidence of the content of the training, which included how to drive a tank and how to cross into Israel via a tunnel. As the activity on the border increased, she realized that ‘it was just a matter of time’ until something happened.”

• A third whistleblower - a reservist named Amit Yerushalmi, who had recently been released from duty just before the attacks took place - has also come out telling of how she likewise observed suspicious activity in the months leading up to the invasion. She is quoted in the Times of Israel article as saying: “We sat on shifts and saw the convoy of vans. We saw the training, people shooting and rolling, practicing taking over a tank. The training went from once a week to twice a week, from every day to several times a day. … We saw patrols along the border, people with cameras and binoculars. It happened 300 meters from the fence. There were a lot of disturbances, people went down to the fence and detonated an outrageous amount of explosives, the amount of explosives was crazy.”

• Silkoff writes that “like Rotenberg and Desiatnik, Yerushalmi said that she passed the information along, but that nobody seemed to take it seriously. ‘I saw what was happening, I wrote everything down on the computer and passed it on. I don’t know what happened with it, we don’t actually know what they do with the information.’”

In early December, The New York Times (of all places) published a damning article exposing the fact that Israel had been made aware of Hamas’s plan to launch an attack against Israel more than a year before the 10/7 operation.

• According to their report, Israeli officials had obtained a 40-page battle plan detailing blueprints for an attack on Israel that included rocket bombardments, drones to disable security and surveillance systems, and a mass invasion of southern communities and military bases.

• Additionally, the article reports that a month before the attack, Hamas had publicly posted a video on social media showing a simulation of the planned assault, which included the destruction of mock-ups of the wall’s concrete towers and communications antennas - things the invading militants actually did at the outset of the October 7th attacks.

• According to the Times, Israeli officials had cavalierly dismissed these reports as “aspirational” and “impractical”. If this was the only instance they had heard of the attack one might be inclined to take their word for it. But given that these same Israeli officials in the days, weeks, and months directly preceding the attacks kept dismissing the repeated warnings of IDF soldiers such as those cited above gives the entire event the feel of being staged. In other words, when you put all the facts together, it starts looking more and more like the Israeli Deep State deliberately “let it happen”.

In the months since the infamous October 7th attack went down, more evidence has come out in support of this conclusion.

• As is now relatively well known, “Egypt's intelligence minister personally phoned Israeli Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu just 10 days before the attack, warning that Hamas was poised to do ‘something unusual, a terrible operation.’” Another Egyptian intelligence official anonymously told the Associated Press: “We have warned them an explosion of the situation is coming, and very soon, and it would be big. But they underestimated such warnings.” (source)

• There is also the issue of insider trading in the days preceding the 10/7 attack. A recent report in the Social Science Research Network (authored by a Former Commissioner of the U.S. SEC and a professor at Columbia Law School) documented “a significant spike in short selling in the principal Israeli-company ETF days before the October 7 Hamas attack. … Similarly, (the authors identified) increases in short selling before the attack in dozens of Israeli companies traded in Tel Aviv.” Overall, the authors conclude that “traders informed about the coming attacks profited from these tragic events.” (source).

In addition to these factors, several aspects of Israel’s response to the attacks are also suspicious and warrant consideration. One of these involves Israel’s pernicious use of propaganda to exaggerate the brutality of the Hamas attack and justify its genocidal counter-response on Gaza.

• From the very outset of the invasion, Israeli propaganda agencies were more than ready to jump in and start shaping the narrative so as to whip the Israeli public and Western allies into a genocidal fury. For example, Professor Anthony Hall points out how “many of the most horrific reported atrocities, like brutal rapes or beheading babies and putting one of them in an oven to be cooked, have been shown to be false.” Furthermore, “many of the murders attributed to Hamas were in fact committed by the IDF.”

• The effect of this propaganda has been to build hatred in the West toward “Islamic Barbarians”: a familiar trope that Western audiences have grown accustomed to during two decades of the War on Terror. This has been utilized to garner public support and political cover for waging a nonstop bombing campaign on the citizenry of Gaza, which the US and Israel have been jointly conducting in the months since the attack.

A final element of October 7th worth considering is the question of the IDF’s inexplicably slow and disorganized response on the day of the invasion.

• The attacks began around 6 AM, and it took several hours (as many as five to six) for an organized response to come together to repel invading attackers. This being despite the small size of the country. And, as noted above, when the counterstrike did finally arrive, it ended up going “mass Hannibal” and killing many of its own citizens in its sloppy and disorganized attempt to wipe out all remaining invaders.

• The official reason given for why the Gaza border was so lightly protected on October 7th is because the attacks occurred on a Jewish holiday, Shemini Atzeret, when many IDF soldiers were put on leave. But this date was also significant for another reason, one that should have raised red flags for the IDF: it marked the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War between Israel and neighboring Arab states. This occasion should have warranted increased security at the Gaza border, not less. When we add to this the repeated warnings Israel was given about an impending Hamas attack, there is no rational explanation for why Israel would have left the Gaza security perimeter so lightly guarded on 10/7 and, on top of this, been so slow to respond to the invasion.

The only explanation about October 7th that seems to make sense is that the Israeli Deep State (working in conjunction with US Intelligence), “let it happen” in order to set the stage for a larger Middle East conflict aimed at restructuring the geopolitical chessboard of the region.

• This is the conclusion that many astute observers, such as Philip Giraldi, have also come to. He writes: “Given all of the evidence, there likely was no intelligence failure to anticipate and counter the Hamas attack but rather a political decision made by the Israeli government that knew what might be coming and chose to let it proceed to provide a casus belli to destroy Gaza.”

• Given what we’ve seen playing out in Gaza in the weeks and months since the infamous attack, who can argue with his conclusion?