Israel admits burning people on 7 October
Kibbutz Be’eri on 13 October 2023
Ali Abunimah writes in The Electronic Intifada on 17 November 2023:
On Thursday [16 November], MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan challenged Israeli government spokesperson Mark Regev about the many lies and false claims that Israel has made to justify its genocidal bombing and invasion of Gaza.
While attempting to parry Hasan’s challenges, Regev told many more lies, trying to change the subject and shift the blame for the horrifying toll away from Israel and onto Israel’s Palestinian victims. But Regev made one admission whose significance neither Regev nor Hasan appears to have recognized.
Regev was trying to make the point that Israel – supposedly unlike Hamas – can be trusted because when Israel makes a mistake, it admits it. Regev gave this example: “We originally said, in the atrocious Hamas attack upon our people on October 7th, we had the number at 1,400 casualties and now we’ve revised that down to 1,200 because we understood that we’d overestimated, we made a mistake. There were actually bodies that were so badly burnt we thought they were ours, in the end apparently they were Hamas terrorists.”
Earlier this month, Israel did in fact revise down the number of Israelis it says were killed on 7 October to “around 1,200.”
Although it has offered no direct evidence, Israel has claimed that Hamas fighters burned Israeli civilians en masse, in atrocities not seen since the Holocaust. Israel has also never explained how Palestinians fighters could have achieved this or caused the enormous damage to Israeli houses with only the light weapons they were generally seen carrying.
It simply makes no sense that 200 bodies burned beyond recognition that Israel thought were Israeli civilians could turn out to be Hamas fighters unless Israel killed people indiscriminately.
Obviously Hamas fighters did not set themselves on fire and burn themselves beyond recognition. And Israel must know the circumstances in which these people died.
Evidence Israel killed its own
Regev’s statement is a significant addition to the mounting evidence that on 7 October Israeli forces went on a panicked rampage, firing wildly with powerful weapons, indiscriminately killing both Palestinian fighters and the Israeli civilians who were with them.