INVESTIGATION REVEALS ISRAELI GENERAL KILLED ISRAELIS ON OCT 7 BLAMED HAMAS

January 20, 2024

This indepth investigation by @ElectronicIntifada, exposes the truth about why so many Israelis were killed on October 7. A growing number at the hands of their own military.

The original number of Israelis claimed to have been killed on Oct 7 was over 1400. That number was revised down to 1200 after one month and since then possibly closer to 1000. But the number of Israelis killed by Hamas versus those killed by IDF is growingly concerning.

This investigation reveals how an Israeli general ordered tanks to fire on a house filled with around 15 Israeli civilians in Kibbutz Be’eri and then tried to cover the incident up with a fake story of heroism.

Brigadier General Barak Hiram is the General in question who has now confessed to having MADE UP the story that: “”There we found 8 children tied together and shot, and a couple, a husband and wife, tied together and shot.”” – LIES

“”I ordered my commander to burst into the house and free the captive”” – LIES!

In fact, what Barak Hiram did was order his soldiers to fire on the house with tanks and missiles – which killed not only the Hamas fighters hiding in the house but 13 of the 15 Israeli captives.

WATCH THE REPORT FOR FULL DETAILS AND SHARE SO THE WORLD KNOWS THE TRUTH.

If you advocate for TRUTH & JUSTICE, SHARE to spread the knowledge.

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English Script:
Nora Barrows Friedman: Well, we’ll now take a look at a new investigation published by the Electronic Intifada about what really happened on October 7th. We reveal how an Israeli general ordered tanks to fire on a house with Israeli civilians in it that day in Kibbutz Be’eri and then tried to cover the incident up with a fake story of heroism.

Now, relatives of those he killed are demanding the truth that General Barak Hiram also appears to have originated one of the most poisonous fabrications Israel told about October seven, the atrocity tale that Hamas fighters tied up and executed children in cold blood.

That lie told directly to President Biden by Benjamin Netanyahu, helped lay the ground for genocide. Ali, you wrote this piece with investigative journalist David Sheehan that sheds more light on what happened on October 7th, particularly how Israel killed many of its own people on that day. Walk us through these new revelations.

Ali Abunimah: Thanks Nora. Yes. As you know, this is a story we’ve been on since the very first day. And it’s a central part of what happened on October 7th that mainstream media continue to pretend not to see. But important new pieces of information have come out in Israeli media over the last week or two weeks that really add to what we know. Israel’s Channel 12 released a video shot from an Israeli military helicopter on October 7th of a kibbutz Be’eri that’s one of the Israeli colonial settlements just a few miles east of Gaza. And we can actually take a look at that now. And this is was published.

Israeli man: YAMAM (commando) force in Be’eri. In Be’eri I see smoke in the northern section.

Israeli woman: For the first time since October 7, we get a rare opportunity to see the tragedy of the Kibbutz Be’eri from above as the fighters and the kibbutz residents saw it in real time. At 4:20 pm, more than nine hours after hundreds of terrorists broke into Be’eri whole neighborhoods of the Kibbutz are up in flames.

Israeli man: I am now looking at Be’eri, at the northern section. I see smoke in the northwest section opposite the cemetery. Is that where the burned KARAKAL’s are?

Israeli man 2: affirmative affirmative.

Israeli woman: We see the extent of the battle and the incomprehensible number of terrorists that took over the Kibbutz. Here are the tank that aided the forces at Pesi’s house and shot shells at the house.

Israeli woman 2: and suddenly they bought a tank and I ask one of the soldiers: “But if you shoot shells, won’t they harm the hostages”? he tells me, “No we’re only doing it on the sides to take down walls”

Israeli woman: Adding to the questions about the IDF’s and YAMAM’s actions at the house with 15 hostages.

Israeli man: wow to see a tank inside Be’eri driving on the road. Whoa! There was some shooting there. WoW.

Ali: You see an Israeli tank rolling through the streets of the kibbutz and actually firing a shell into one of the houses. And the woman you see there speaking briefly is Yasmine Porat. But what I want to emphasize here is that what we know is this was not the only tank used in Kibbutz Be’eri on October 7th, and this was not the only shot fired. It’s just the only shot that so far we’ve seen on video as David Sheen and I write an article. Another tank showed up a short time later and fired towards that particular house, killing a number of the Israeli civilians there, along with all the Palestinians, almost all of them, including the partner of Yasmin Porat and a little Israeli girl called Leah Hatsroni and the husband of an Israeli woman. There were, in fact, 15 captives at that house, along with several dozen Palestinian fighters, and all 15 of the Israeli captives were killed except for Hadassah Dugan and Yasmine Porat. Now, we already knew a lot of this from Yasmine Porat, earlier interview on Israeli state radio back on October 15th, which went viral after the “electronic intifada” translated it. Porat told about how the Palestinians holding the Israelis had treated them really humanely and assured them that they would be safe. You can see her again in this little clip talking about her immediate fears and doubts when she saw Israeli forces rolling up with a tank right outside the house where her own partner and the other civilians were. But it was indeed the Israeli forces who showed up and started firing heavily and who ended up killing everyone there, according to Yasmine Porat.

Nora: All right. And now Hadassah Dugan has spoken out herself.

Ali: That’s right. Earlier this month, she gave her first interview to Israeli television, along with relatives of some of the other Israelis who were killed at that house when the Israeli tanks opened fire. So here’s just a short clip of Hadassah, speaking to Israel’s Channel 12. And this was on December 9th.

Hadassah: Suddenly a horrible boom, and I can’t manage to move my legs. To me it’s very clear that it was a tank here. I, and (my husband) Adi, were wounded from the shrapnel of the tank shell because it happened at that very moment.

Nora: we’ve also learned more about the Israeli officer who ordered that particular tank shelling. He’s Brigadier General Barak Hiram. What did you and David Sheen find out about him?

Ali: General Barak Hiram here is a fairly senior Israeli military officer. He’s held a number of prestigious commands and has, in fact, been named as the next commander of the Gaza division. That’s the same Israeli division that was supposed to guard the perimeter around Gaza, but which was virtually destroyed and simply collapsed when attacked by the Palestinian resistance on October 7th. And Barak has tried to portray what happened in a kibbutz very in a completely different and false manner, covering up how his order killed Israelis and here’s Hiram speaking to Diane. And this was in an interview broadcast on Israel’s Channel 12 on October 26. Let’s take a look.

Diane: When the news reports a hostage incident at Be’eri…

Hiram: Yes.

Diane: And actually, sadly, there were no hostages.

Hiram: At this stage there were also YAMAM (commandos) that we brought into the settlement. And while purifying the neighborhood it was assigned one of the citizens managers to flee from the buildings and it creates a kind of dynamic or feeling that the terrorist barricaded there in the block of (houses) might be ready to talk or something like that.

Diane: A kind of negotiation.

Hiram: Supposedly. And a negotiation team even arrives and tries to communicate with them and call out.

Diane: Do they respond?

Hiram: They respond to us with an RPG rocket.

Diane: Quite the response.

Hiram: At this stage I authorize the YAMAM commander there to burst inside and…to try to save the citizens trapped in those buildings.

Diane: When the YAMAM wage a truly heroic battle there and charges inside, is there any hope that hostages can still be saved?

Hiram: Eh…I think in that block there were about 20 citizens and I think the YAMAM manages to save about 4 of them.

Diane: All the rest were murdered?

Hiram: All the rest were murdered in cold blood.

Diane: How many terrorists were there just in that complex?

Hiram: Eh…we counted the bodies of 26 terrorists.

Diane: In that complex alone?

Hiram: In that complex alone. There we found 8 children tied together and shot, and a couple, a husband and wife, tied together and shot.

Ali: So now there are a couple of outrageously false statements that David Sheen and I detail in the article. First, there were, in fact, extensive negotiations with the Palestinians inside, and that had led to the surrender of one of the Palestinian commanders along with Yasmine Porat. The second outrageous lie is that the YAMAM, the Israeli commando force, went into the house to rescue hostages and in fact, rescued four people. This is pure fiction. There was no rescue attempt by the commandos and it was Barak Hiram’s order to fire that ensured that everyone still alive among the captives was killed, except for Hadassah Dagan. So that is a complete fabrication. There was no rescue attempt. He made that up. But perhaps the most consequential lie is Hiram’s claim that the captives were tied up and executed in cold blood. This is a pure fabrication, as we detail in our article. This did not happen in this incident, and there’s no evidence that it happened anywhere else.

Nora: And why do you say that this is the most consequential lie?

Ali: Well, David Sheen and I believe that Barak Hiram’s story that he started telling very early on before this interview with Ilan Diane, is the origin of one of the major lies that Israel has been telling about October 7th. It’s a fabricated atrocity tale that Israel used and is still using to justify and incite genocide. A lot of people believe this. And here’s Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is speaking on October 9th. So this is very early on. Let’s take a look.

Netanyahu: The savage attacks that Hamas perpetrated against innocent Israelis are mind boggling, slaughtering families in their homes, massacring hundreds of young people at an outdoor festival, kidnaping scores of women, children and elderly, even Holocaust survivors. Hamas terror has bound, burned and executed children. They are savages.

Ali: Yeah. And then now here’s another clip. This is from October 11th, and it’s a clip of Netanyahu speaking to President Joe on the phone.

Netanyahu: Joe, I want to give you a clear picture of the difficult situation we face. We were struck Saturday by an attack who whose savagery I can say we have not seen since the Holocaust. I mean, we had hundreds, massacred families wiped out in their beds in their homes, women brutally raped and murdered, over a hundred kidnapped, including children. And since we last spoke, the extent of this evil, it’s only gotten worse. They took dozens of children, bound them up, burned them and executed them.

Ali: And look here. Isn’t that incredible writing on on Twitter on Christmas Eve. And he says that in his tweet: “we’re facing monsters, monsters who murdered children in front of their parents and parents in front of their children who raped and beheaded women who burned babies alive, who took babies hostage”, as you can see, he repeats a whole series of genocidal lies. This didn’t happen. They didn’t tie babies up. They didn’t rape and behead women. We did a segment a couple of weeks ago on the mass rape claims and the total absence of any credible evidence of that. So there’s no claiming that Netanyahu was just going off confused reports or the so-called fog of war in the early days on and after October 7th, his latest statements show that this is a deliberate campaign of lies, of incitement to genocide. And right under his tweet that we just showed, you could see that other users of X or Twitter were posting notes pointing out that these are lies. So that’s just one of the ways that people can try to point out the truth. Of course, that pales next to the kind of megaphone and platform Netanyahu has, and even more so, President Biden, who has been repeating these lies constantly. The difference I think, between Netanyahu and Biden is that Netanyahu knows he is lying. While Biden probably believes these lies. Of course, that’s not an excuse. I think it’s just the reality of the severely degraded capacity of the so-called leadership in the White House.

Nora: Yeah. What about any fallout over this inside Israel? What can you tell us about that?

Ali: Yes, as I said, relatives of the Israelis who were killed by General Barak Hiram are demanding an investigation. But there really has been a closing of the ranks within the Israeli leadership.

Nora: Was this tank shelling at Kibbutz Be’eri, just an isolated incident. Was it some kind of aberration or is there, you know, a bigger story here in terms of Israel killing its own soldiers and civilians on October 7th, knowing about it and and, of course, covering it up?

Ali: As David Sheen and I write, we also know that Israeli forces not only used tanks in Kibbutz Be’eri, but Apache combat helicopters as well. And here’s Erez Tidhar, an Israeli rescuer who was in kibbutz there that day describing what he saw there.

Idan Kazas: At some point we get to Be’eri and already in the junction you see car wrecks and…a war zone.

Erez Tidhar: to describe the situation, you are sitting in a Kibbutz inside the state of Israel, where I tour on Saturday with the kids on bikes. Every minute a missile comes down on you, every minute and suddenly you see a missile from a helicopter that fires into the Kibbutz. You say to yourself, I don’t get it. An IDF helicopter firing into an Israeli Kibbutz and then you see a tank driving through the streets of the Kibbutz flanking the cannon and fires a shell into a house. These are the things that you can’t comprehend.

Ali: So then let’s take a look at this photo from Kibbutz Be’eri. This is a photo from a newsagency that we purchased the license to publish at the Electronic Intifada. And look at this. There’s obviously no way Palestinian fighters could have caused such total destruction with the light weapons they had, AK 47 assault rifles and a few RPG.

Nora: Right. What about in other places aside from kibbutz?

Ali: Right well, we know this was the story across the region on October 7th. Let me remind you that in November, an Israeli police source admitted that military helicopters shot at civilians at the supernova rave, the Desert Dance party near Kibbutz Be’eri that Yasmine Porat and her partner had attended, and Nof Erez, an Israeli Air Force colonel, has even gone as far as to call the Israeli response to October 7th a mass cannibal. That’s an application on a wide scale of Israel’s so-called Hannibal directive, a military doctrine that allows the deliberate killing of Israel’s own people, rather than permitting them to be taken captive. And that same month, Israel revealed that hundreds of unrecognizably burned bodies, it thought were its own civilians were actually Hamas fighters, a clear admission of indiscriminate fire from helicopters on a massive scale. And earlier this month, the Israelis admitted the Israeli military admitted to immense quantities of so-called friendly fire incident on October 7th but asserted that it would not be morally sound to investigate them, as the Israeli newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth reported. Moreover, Israel has faced huge international embarrassment and anger at home after its army admitted to killing three Israeli prisoners who had managed to get away from their captors in Gaza. We have links to all of these other stories in the piece that David Sheen and I wrote. The key thing here is that the truth has been coming out really in bits and pieces. But unless there is a full independent inquiry, we probably will not get the full picture. But we at the Electronic Intifada will continue to pursue the story as far as we can.