The Israeli army’s first published report about the events of October 7, 2023 praises the general who led Israeli forces in battle at Kibbutz Be’eri on that day for ordering tank fire at a home killing up to 10 civilian captives.
by David Sheen and Ali Abunimah, reposted from The Electronic Intifada, July 29, 2024
The shelling killed almost everyone in and around the house, including dozens of Palestinian resistance fighters.
The report amounts to a shoddy cover-up, inconsistent with known facts, and an intentional rewriting of what happened to exonerate Israeli forces of killing their own citizens that day.
Although the report was supposed to have been written by officers with no connection to those who fought in the battle, one of its authors was Lieutenant Colonel Elihai Bin Nun who fought at Be’eri on October 7 under Brigadier General Barak Hiram, the commander of Israeli forces at the kibbutz on that day, The New York Times revealed.
When Bin Nun’s participation in the battle was revealed, the army removed from the report any mention of his role as an author, the Israeli outlet Ynet noted.
The army’s full account of what happened at Kibutz Be’eri has not been made public, but the Israeli military published official summaries of its report in Hebrew and English on July 11.
As a result of its inquiry, the army commends Hiram for acting in a “professional and ethical manner” by ordering the fatal tank fire. It whitewashes the civilian deaths the shelling caused, only accepting responsibility for one of the 13 captives killed at the home of kibbutz resident Pessi Cohen.
The army only admits to killing one civilian, Adi Dagan, as his death was directly witnessed by the only captive to survive the tank shelling, Adi’s wife Hadas Dagan.
The couple and four other Israeli civilians, including Pessi herself, spent the battle on the grassy lawn outside the home, lying low to avoid the hailstorm of bullets that whistled over their heads for hours.
While the army’s full account of the battle has not been made public, a detailed six-page synopsis of the report published by Israel Army Radio military correspondent Doron Kadosh sheds further light on the events. It acknowledges that the number of civilians inside the house was seven.
In its first public explanation of the incident one week after the October 7 attack, the army asserted that not seven civilians had died in the house but 15 – and that eight of them were babies.
“Inside this house were another 15 burned people. Among them eight babies,” Israeli army rescue chief Vach told throngs of foreign reporters on October 14, while standing in front of Pessi Cohen’s house. “They were concentrated there and they killed them and they burned them.” These were outrageous lies – and while the new report does not repeat them, it creates new fictions about this notorious incident.
The official English summary notes obliquely that “two civilians were hit by shrapnel” and claims without basis that most of the other remaining captives were likely killed by their Palestinian captors, despite all evidence pointing to the contrary.
“No civilians inside the building were harmed by tank shell fire,” it asserts. “Most of the hostages were likely murdered by the terrorists.”
These assertions are not supported by reference to any autopsies; indeed such post-mortem examinations would have been impossible in many cases even if Israeli authorities sought to carry them out, due to the catastrophic effect of the tank shelling.
“It is difficult to discern from what everyone was killed because autopsies were not conducted, but it’s important to me that they won’t say that everyone was murdered by the terrorists,” Yasmin Porat told Israel Army Radio after learning of the report’s contents. “That is not certainly true.”
Porat is one of only two civilian survivors of the events at Pessi Cohen’s house. She has been consistent since the incident in asserting that Israeli fire likely killed many of the Israelis there.
Israeli account flies in the face of logic
In an attempt to substantiate its claim that Palestinian resistance fighters executed all the civilians except for one, the army lays out a detailed scenario that not only contradicts the testimonies of survivors Hadas Dagan and Yasmin Porat but flies in the face of common sense.
The report claims that at 6 pm, the commander of all Israeli forces fighting at Be’eri and the surrounding area – 99th Infantry Division commander Barak Hiram – ordered the troops dug in at Pessi Cohen’s home to launch a ground assault on the house post haste.
“Brig. Gen. Hiram instructs: Begin the takeover before nightfall,” journalist Doron Kadosh’s synopsis states. “He stresses that he fears the terrorists will take advantage of the coming of nightfall to flee to Gaza with the hostages.”
It then notes that the Israeli forces waited until 7:57 pm to begin their operation to breach the house – an hour after nightfall, and two hours after the order was given.
At 6 pm, when the report says Hiram gave the order to breach before nightfall, the sun had already set over Be’eri. Waiting two hours to carry out those orders, after stars had been visible in the night sky for an hour already, is hardly consistent with the report’s conclusion that “the Shin Bet field command, the YAMAM commander, and the forces in the field demonstrated great heroism and with utmost determination tried everything they were able to until the final moments.”
Shin Bet is Israel’s domestic secret police and YAMAM is a special paramilitary unit similar to SWAT teams in the US.
Another claim made by the report that flies in the face of basic logic is that Palestinian fighters were the ones who incinerated Pessi Cohen’s house, scorching everyone inside it, including themselves.
At 8:30 pm – half an hour after Israeli forces supposedly began to breach the house – the Israelis again allegedly initiated “a violent takeover attempt of the house,” according to Kadosh’s synopsis.
“For another hour a difficult battle took place between our forces and the terrorists, who meanwhile are igniting the house and putting flames to it,” the army says, as related in the synopsis.
The synopsis further alleges that the Palestinian fighters had already executed the civilians held in the home when they began to torch it “in order to prevent the Israeli force from breaking inside.”
In other words, the report’s authors would have us believe that after hours of intense crossfire, the Palestinian fighters barricaded in the home died by self-immolation.
The suggestion that Palestinian fighters would have chosen to die in excruciating pain engulfed in flames when they could have quickly and easily ended their own lives by gunfire, or died fighting the Israelis, beggars belief.
But it does serve as a convenient excuse for why the house and everyone in it was totally burned.
“A horrible boom”
Besides being rife with inconsistencies and implausible claims, the scenario described in the army report is completely contradicted by the testimonies of the civilian survivors, Hadas Dagan and Yasmin Porat.
The army’s assertions that the tank shells fired at the house did not hurt any of the civilians beside Hadas and her husband Adi cannot be squared with the accounts given by either of the women.
The synopsis notes that after firing two tank shells at the path outside the house at 5:33 pm and 6:27 pm, two more tank shells were fired at the house itself at 6:34 pm and 6:57 pm.
Per the synopsis, the third shell “bounced off the ground and hit the roof at the building entrance. The roof broke from the impact, and pieces of concrete fell over Adi and Hadas Dagan, who were outside the house. Adi died, Hadas was wounded but remained alive,” the army claims.
“There is evidence that the shell did not explode, and that what hit Adi and Hadas were pieces of concrete from the impacted roof,” the synopsis adds. According to the army, this conclusion was reached from the military’s own “engineering analysis” – not from any independent forensic examination or autopsy.
Hadas Dagan’s recollection suggests something different.
“Suddenly a horrible boom … It was obvious to me there was a tank … And then the second boom,” Dagan recounted to Israel’s Channel 12 in December. “To me it’s very clear that I, and Adi, were wounded from the shrapnel of the tank shell because it happened at that very moment.”
Dagan described in graphic detail lying next to her husband Adi and placing her thumb over a hole in his “main artery” in an effort to stop the copious flow of blood, only to remove her hand once she realized he was dead.
As she spoke, Dagan gestured with her thumb and finger to indicate the size of her husband’s wound: about the size of a large coin.
It is notable that despite clearly describing the lethal tank shelling, Dagan expressed understanding for the “dilemma” she says the army found itself in.
According to the synopsis, the second of two tank shells targeting the house itself was aimed “to the roof, at the tiles. The shrapnel flew down. It is still unknown if any of the hostages were hit – but based on the evidence there, it is estimated that none of them were hit.”
As for Yasmin Porat, weeks after the incident, she recalled in a radio interview with Israel’s state broadcaster Kan how Dagan narrated to her that at least two other civilians, including Porat’s partner Tal Katz, were with certainty killed by the same tank shells that wounded Hadas and killed her husband Adi.
“Yasmin, when the two big booms hit, I felt like I flew in the air,” Porat recalled Dagan telling her. “It took me two to three minutes to open my eyes … When I opened my eyes, I saw that my Adi is dying … Your Tal also stopped moving at that point.”
Porat explained that Dagan then informed her how the same tank shells also ended the life of the youngest civilian held in the house, 12-year-old Liel Hatsroni.
“I remember, when I was there for the first hour [of the battle], she [Liel Hatsroni] did not stop screaming,” Porat told Kan, noting that her recollections dovetailed with Dagan’s.
“The girl did not stop screaming all those hours. She didn’t stop screaming,” Porat recalled Dagan telling her. “Yasmin, when those two shells hit, she stopped screaming. There was silence then.”
“So what do you glean from that?” Porat mused. “That after that very massive incident, the shooting, which concluded with two shells, that is pretty much when everyone died.”
Hatsroni and her great-aunt and guardian Ayala were officially pronounced dead only a month and a half after the battle, because there was so little left of them to identify. A relative of the Hatsronis told The Electronic Intifada that after the battle, only ashes remained of Ayala, Liel and her twin brother Yanai.
Army eyewitnesses killed in Gaza
Matching the timeline with the survivors’ testimonies dictates that Liel Hatsroni was mortally wounded by the fourth tank shell said to have been fired at 6:57 pm, and it is likely that Yanai and Ayala were fatally injured at the same time.
In its report, however, the army alleges that the battle continued for another two and a half hours, until 9:30 pm, during which time the Hatsronis and the four other civilians held in the house were executed by Palestinian fighters.
This version of events clears Israeli forces of culpability in their deaths, but it is unequivocally refuted by the testimony of Hadas Dagan. After describing in graphic detail how the tank shelling took the life of her husband Adi, Hadas told Channel 12 how it also ended the battle as a whole – hours earlier than the army claims.
“I hear one more shot from inside the house, and then I no longer hear anything. And I wait for my bullet. I don’t know how long I laid there. I see that no head lifts up. I see the shadows, all of them. No one moves,” she said.
Dagan told Channel 12 that she was eventually evacuated from the battlefield by Israeli forces at about 8:15 pm. “Suddenly I hear voices: ‘There’s a hostage here who raised her head!’ And I see points of light, headlamps, and these figures in the dark with weapons. They surround me,” Hadas recalled to Channel 12.
“They just seat me there in some vehicle. And I hear them saying, ‘We have one here badly wounded.’”
The army confirms Hadas Dagan’s claim that she was retrieved from the battlefield at that time, estimating it occurred at 8:10 pm. “The fighters trying to breach the house notice Hadas Dagan, wounded from the house roof, still alive – and evacuate her away from the house,” the synopsis says.
In the army’s narrative, however, Dagan’s removal from the battlefield did not mark the end of hostilities, but rather the beginning of bitter clashes.
“Meanwhile, an Arabic-speaking [Israeli] fighter tries to establish a conversation with the terrorists, but the terrorists shoot at them nonstop and do not surrender,” the synopsis adds. “Two YAMAM fighters were badly wounded in the battle to breach the house in the initial minutes.”
Then at 8:30 pm, according to the synopsis, an Israeli soldier approached the Cohen house and made contact with Ayala Hatsroni, allegedly still alive at that time, inside the house. “She tells him that they murdered her children,” the synopsis states. The soldier then hears “a long burst of shots – and then silence. From that moment, the YAMAM fighters no longer hear any screams or voices of hostages.”
The army’s source for this suspiciously convenient claim is Chief Inspector Arnon Zmora, but his statement cannot be independently verified, as he was killed in combat in the Gaza Strip in early June, a month before the report’s publication.
And of course the other party to this alleged conversation, Ayala Hatsroni, is also dead.
Similarly, new testimony cannot be taken from Lieutenant Colonel Salman Habaka, who fired the final tank shells at the Cohen House, as he, too, was killed in the Gaza Strip in November, and the commander who called him to assist in that battle died in combat himself a week later.
Days after the battle of Be’eri, when he was asked to regale Israelis with tales of “saving a family” on October 7, Habaka demurred, stating only that “we destroyed the terrorists before we sent in the infantry to bring people out.”
The evidence overwhelmingly suggests that Habaka accurately characterized the fighting at Pessi Cohen’s house: First the Israeli forces fired tank shells that killed everyone in and around the house, and only later did it evacuate the sole civilian survivor still there, Hadas Dagan.
No evidence of executions
Doron Kadosh’s synopsis of the full Israeli army report notes that the bodies of all seven civilians held in Pessi Cohen’s home – the three Hatsronis, three other grandmothers, residents of Be’eri, and a Palestinian from occupied East Jerusalem that the Qassam fighters forced into service as their translator – were charred. The identities of the Hatsronis and the Palestinian man, Suhaib al-Razim, could only be confirmed by DNA tests.
Still, the army report claims that these seven died not from tank shrapnel that could have easily torn through them, or from the fire that definitely burned their bodies, but by gunfire, from bullets allegedly shot by their Palestinian captors before they burned.
The army admits, however, that there is no evidence for this assertion. “The probe assesses that most hostages in Cohen’s house were killed by the terrorists, and were not hurt by the [tank] shells, but this cannot be confirmed, the IDF said, because the bodies were burned,” Haaretz reported.
Moreover, the army’s assertion that the seven civilians held captive inside the house were executed by their Palestinian captors cannot be tested “because both security forces and the ZAKA unit that clears bodies did not maintain the forensics of the bodies properly in terms of being able to check whether they had fatal gunshot wounds or stabbings,” The Jerusalem Post noted.
An ultra-Orthodox Jewish organization that collects corpses and prepares them for ritual burial, ZAKA was instrumental in spreading numerous hoaxes about the events of October 7, outright inventing barbaric atrocity crimes that never occurred, but that continue to be used as a pretext and justification for Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza.
Family members still in the dark
While the army report claims to have “presented to the bereaved families its assessment of how each citizen held in the building died,” a representative of one of those families denied to Israel’s national broadcaster that they had received any such assessment.
“We didn’t hear anything new, we still don’t understand how most of the people were killed at Pessi’s house, they did not carry out post-mortems,” a relative told Kan Channel 11.
The disappointment was shared by other residents of Be’eri, said kibbutz spokesperson Miri Gat Mesika. “We know from what angle the tank entered, where it entered, what kind of shell it used, what the shell shrapnel looks like, etc.,” Gat Mesika told Israeli news outlet Ynet. “To this day we haven’t received an answer for how our friends in Pessi’s house were murdered on that day. That which was the most important and most relevant for us was missing from the report details and conclusions.”
Regardless, their causes of death can in fact be easily ascertained by cross-referencing the army report with testimony taken from the final tank shelling’s sole survivor, Hadas Dagan.
If we only count Liel Hatsroni, Adi Dagan and Tal Katz, who all definitely died from the final tank shelling, we reach a minimum death toll of three civilians killed by tank fire. If we include all seven civilians held in the house who were found charred (including the three Hatsronis, Suhaib al-Razim, Zehava Hacker, Hannah Siton and Hava Ben-Ami) we reach a death toll of nine civilians likely killed at Pessi Cohen’s home by tank shelling.
Another civilian who was lying on the lawn, Tal Siton, either died from the tank shelling, or in the crossfire that preceded it. Two civilians, Ze’ev Hacker and Pessi Cohen, definitely died during the hours of crossfire, according to Hadas Dagan’s testimony. Only one civilian, Pessi’s brother-in-law Yitzhak Siton, definitely died at the hands of Palestinian fighters, who fatally shot him through a door during their initial conquest of the kibbutz.
“The fourth and final shell was fired” at 6:57 pm, the synopsis notes. It adds: “After the firing of the four shells, and when the force sees that the terrorists are not submitting, it is decided to carry out a planned takeover of the house and they prepare the takeover operation.”
That “takeover operation,” however, would not commence until 7:57 PM, a full hour later: “Command ‘GO’ – the takeover operation begins.”
If Hiram really ordered the tank shelling of a house full of captives “to apply pressure to the terrorists,” as army chief of staff Herzi Halevi claims in the official summary, then why did the forces under Hiram’s command not capitalize on that pressure and rush into the house to eliminate the armed resistance fighters inside, while they were caught off guard by the tank shelling?
Why did Israeli forces wait, by their own reckoning, two hours after Hiram’s command and one hour after the last tank shelling, when the sky was already dark?
The obvious answer is that Israeli forces were no longer in a rush to storm the house, because the dozens of Palestinian fighters and seven civilians still inside were already dead, incinerated by the tank shelling. The shell’s combustion apparently created such an inferno that a whole hour passed before Israeli soldiers were willing to set foot inside.
All available evidence suggests that by ordering tank fire at Pessi Cohen’s home, Hiram likely ended the lives of at least nine civilians – seven of them by immolation.
A whole new allegation
As well as claiming without evidence that the civilians inside the house were shot by their captors, the Israeli army report introduces a brand new pretext for the shelling ordered by Hiram: that it was justified by an imminent threat from the Palestinian fighters to kill themselves and their captives.
The claims supporting this pretext are inconsistent, both within the report, and in light of previous assertions by those on the scene.
The official summary states: “After gunfire was heard from within the house and the terrorists communicated their intent to commit suicide and kill the hostages, the security forces decided to breach the house to attempt to save the hostages, and conducted combat operations under difficult conditions.”
This appears to be the first time that Israel has claimed that an explicit threat made by the Palestinian fighters prompted Hiram to order the tank fire.
The official summary does not specify how this threat was communicated but gives the impression that it was in the context of negotiations with the captors.
The synopsis by Israel Army Radio’s Doron Kadosh provides a somewhat different version.
It claims that a Shin Bet team managed to intercept communications between the Palestinian fighters at Pessi Cohen’s home and their superiors in the Gaza Strip, and that after Israeli forces detonated two tank shells outside the house, they overheard the Palestinians announcing their intention to die at their own hands. At 6:32 pm, the report notes, “the terrorists informed their commanders that they are surrounded and they intend to take their own lives.”
By contrast, the official summary makes no mention of intercepted communications.
Even so, in contrast to the official summary, the more detailed version of events provided in Kadosh’s synopsis does not claim that the Palestinian fighters explicitly stated that they planned to kill the Israeli captives, but only that they would kill themselves.
What the Palestinian fighters said or meant – if indeed any of the Israeli account is true – remains a matter of speculation without audio or a transcript. But given the known doctrine of the Palestinian resistance, the fighters would more likely have said they planned to die as martyrs – meaning that in a situation where they had no other way out, they would fight to certain death rather than surrender.
That would not be the same as intentionally killing themselves and their captives.
It is also notable that the Israeli army’s claim that its assault on the house was prompted by a threat to murder the captives conveniently makes its first appearance in the context of a report justifying the tank shelling and exonerating the senior officer who ordered it. Given the inconsistencies and the claim’s late appearance, it should also be evaluated in light of previous accounts given by those who were there.
Survivor of the battle Yasmin Porat has been consistent in her accounts: Throughout the ordeal, Palestinians treated the captives “humanely” in her words and assured them they had no intention of killing them.
According to Porat, the fighters did not gratuitously mistreat or harm their captives. Their stated goal was to take the Israelis to Gaza and release them quickly in exchange for Palestinians held by Israel.
As for Hiram, he appears never to have previously claimed that the Palestinians communicated an intention to imminently kill themselves and the captives, even in his self-justifying and fabrication-filled interview with Ilana Dayan, the host of Israeli Channel 12’s prestigious investigative program Uvda, on October 26, 2023.
Hiram tells Dayan that a negotiations team brought to the scene “tries to communicate with them and call out” to the Palestinian captors.
“Do they answer?” Dayan asks.
“They answer us with an RPG rocket,” Hiram asserts. At that point, Hiram tells Dayan, he ordered the special forces “to burst inside and to try to save the citizens trapped in those buildings.”
In that “truly heroic battle” – as the fawning Dayan puts it – Hiram claims that four captives were rescued. At no point, however, did Israeli forces rescue any living person from the house, and as noted there is no credible evidence that they even entered the house until long after the tank shelling, when everyone inside was already dead.
Even in the context of this largely false account, given less than three weeks after the event, Hiram did not think to claim that a threat from the captors to kill the captives and themselves had prompted his action.
Hiram also spoke to The New York Times for a December 22 article that is one of very few in Western media to address the incident at all.
According to the Times, as dusk fell in Kibbutz Be’eri on October 7, the commander of the specialized paramilitary force, or SWAT team, on the scene and Hiram “began to argue.”
“The SWAT commander thought more kidnappers might surrender,” following the emergence of Porat and one of the Palestinian fighters. But Hiram “wanted the situation resolved by nightfall,” the Times reported.
“Minutes later, the militants launched a rocket-propelled grenade, according to the general and other witnesses,” according to the Times.
“‘The negotiations are over,’ General Hiram recalled telling the tank commander. ‘Break in, even at the cost of civilian casualties,’” the newspaper adds.
That is when a tank fired what the Times describes as “two light shells” at the house.
As quoted in the Times, Hiram makes no mention of the Palestinian fighters announcing that they intended to kill themselves and the captives, thus necessitating immediate action to save them.
Another veteran of the incident, one Colonel Ashi, gave his own account in an interview with Israel’s official media network Kan, broadcast on March 1.
According to Ashi, all the civilians killed at Pessi Cohen’s house were already dead by the time Hiram gave the order to fire the tank shells.
“I did not think that there were still people alive there,” Ashi said. “To the best of my knowledge, the tank shell hit high, above the rafters of the house, so I really don’t think that anyone was injured from it.”
Ashi added: “I was in the house afterwards, and here too, I don’t think that anyone was wounded from shooting the shell inside.”
Ashi’s account is utterly discredited by the survivors Hadas Dagan and Yasmin Porat, and it also contradicts his own commander Barak Hiram, who claimed that the shelling was motivated by a desire to free living captives.
Despite the glaring contradictions with Hiram’s shifting versions of events, Ashi too does not advance the claim that an imminent threat from the Palestinian captors had prompted the tank shelling.
“Pressure cooker”?
The Israeli army’s official account appears to retroactively paint the incident at Pessi Cohen’s house as an orderly application of the military’s so-called pressure cooker procedure, a form of extrajudicial execution habitually used against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank – although the report does not explicitly use that term.
It does say, however, that the tank fire was carried out “professionally, with a joint decision made by commanders from all the security organizations after careful consideration and a situational assessment” with the “intent to apply pressure to the terrorists and save the civilians held hostage inside.”
In the pressure cooker procedure, the army surrounds a building and fires progressively more powerful weapons at it, starting with small arms, then escalating to tank-mounted machine guns, tank shells or anti-tank missiles, in an effort to force a wanted person inside to surrender.
If the person refuses to come out, Israeli forces eventually demolish the house on top of them.
In such cases, the final demolition of the house is intended to kill the occupants. Even by the Israeli army’s standards, this form of attack would obviously not serve the goal of rescuing the hostages.
But spinning the incident as the application of a well-established procedure might in the minds of the report’s authors justify the killings in a manner more marketable to the Israeli public.
Perhaps a better fit would be the Hannibal Directive, the Israeli army’s doctrine – widely applied on October 7 – that allows the killing of captives along with their captors, to prevent Israelis being taken hostage as bargaining chips.
In blaming Palestinian resistance fighters for the gruesome deaths he caused, the army absolved Brig. Gen. Barak Hiram and applauded him for acting “in coordination and with professionalism in the face of a difficult and complex situation.”
Hiram’s command of the battle was guided by the goal “to save as many citizens as possible,” Chief of Staff Halevi states in the official Hebrew summary of the report.
Presenting the report to Israeli media on July 11, army spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari praised Hiram for his performance at Pessi Cohen’s home on October 7. “Barak acted in the best possible way that he could have. He created order amid chaos,” Hagari said.
The army’s compliments for Hiram’s command on that day were allegedly redacted from the version presented to Be’eri residents and their relatives hours before the report was made public.
If the army had dared to share with them its high praise for Hiram, “every egg left over from breakfast would have been chucked at them,” one of those present told Ynet.
Notable omissions
Unsurprisingly, the report did not mention how Colonel Golan Vach, the commander of the Israeli army home front national rescue unit, collected the corpses of the dead after the battle and lied about them to the press: He told dozens of journalists that he personally recovered from Pessi Cohen’s living room the burned bodies of 15 Israelis, including “eight babies” which never existed.
It also made no mention of Hiram’s seizing on the story Vach invented about eight infants executed by Palestinian fighters, and repeating this baseless blood libel in his October interview with Ilana Dayan, of Israel’s Channel 12.
In that interview, Hiram also lied when he claimed that Palestinian fighters bound the eight nonexistent children along with two adults, and then executed all 10 of them.
Like Dayan, most of the Israeli media is uncritically regurgitating the army’s lies about the battle at Pessi Cohen’s home and ignoring the abundance of evidence that thoroughly refutes them.
Akiva Novick, reporter for Israel’s national broadcaster Kan, berated Hiram’s critics on X, formerly known as Twitter. “They must now show humility and apologize to him,” Novick posted after the report’s release.
Another journalist, Nati Kalish of religious radio station Kol Chai, called for legal action against Hiram’s detractors. “Whoever said even the smallest word about the Israeli hero Barak Hiram must be put on trial for libel,” Kalish tweeted.
Hiram was hailed by a fellow officer who also invented October 7 atrocities tales, Major Davidi Ben Zion. “Barak Hiram, you are an Israeli hero! The Jewish people salute you,” Ben Zion tweeted.
Ben Zion, who falsely claimed that he saw 40 Israeli babies executed by Hamas added, “Thank you for what you did in Be’eri and sorry for the chorus of slanderers that hurried to falsely judge you.”
Preparing for his anticipated promotion to Gaza Division commander or another senior position, on July 15 Hiram began training the successor who will replace him as commander of Brigade 99, Israeli news outlet Walla reported.
Although it covered up how the tank fire killed at least three civilians, and likely three times that number, if not more, the report also harshly criticized the conduct of Israeli soldiers and officers who fought at Be’eri on October 7.
“The investigation found that hundreds of soldiers from various units were near the entrance to the kibbutz but refrained from entering; that the troops evacuated wounded soldiers even as civilians were being murdered in their homes and kidnapped to the Gaza Strip; that they didn’t help civilians who managed to rescue themselves; and that they sometimes left the kibbutz without informing their commanders. It also found that the soldiers fought unprofessionally in an area full of civilians,” Haaretz reported.
“The IDF failed in its mission to protect the residents of Kibbutz Be’eri,” concluded military spokesperson Hagari. “It is painful and difficult for me to say this.”
If this is the contempt Israel demonstrates for its own civilians’ lives and for the truth about how they died, then its disregard for the lives of Palestinians, the victims of Israel’s genocide, can only be orders of magnitude greater.
David Sheen is a Toronto-born Haifa-based freelance investigative journalist. He has documented and reported from Israel*Palestine for dozens of local, regional and international news outlets since 2010. Sheen’s reporting has been recognized by journalist unions and human rights groups at home and abroad, including the New Israel Fund, the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate, the Rory Peck Trust and the Front Line Defenders.
Ali Abunimah is a Palestinian-American journalist who has been described as “the leading American proponent of a one-state solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict”. A resident of Chicago who contributes regularly to publications such as the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, he has served as the vice-president on the board of directors of the Arab American Action Network, is a fellow at the Palestine Center, and is a co-founder of The Electronic Intifada website.
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