by Ali Abunimah, reposted from The Electronic Intifada, April 4, 2025
An Israeli man who claimed to have heroically rescued hundreds of people from Hamas fighters on October 7, 2023 has been exposed as an outright liar who made up stories “from beginning to end.”
The debunking of Rami Davidian’s fabrications by a high-profile mainstream Israeli journalist is highly significant.
But it comes a year after The Electronic Intifada concluded from its own investigations that Davidian’s self-aggrandizing accounts were replete with inconsistencies, impossibilities and lies.
Davidian, who was a star witness in Sheryl Sandberg’s October 7 atrocity propaganda film Screams Before Silence, also claimed to have seen dozens of dead victims of alleged rapes on that day, some with objects inserted into their genitals.
Raviv Drucker, a journalist with Israel’s Channel 13, revealed that his network was set to air an exposé of Davidian’s lies in the coming days.
The broadcast was, however, canceled after a promo trailing the report caused a public backlash.
“Today in the early afternoon the CEO of Channel 13, Elimiano Calemzuk, called and said that he decided not to broadcast the segment on Rami Davidian that was scheduled to be broadcast on Sunday,” Drucker revealed Friday in a post on Twitter/X.
“This was the first time that we spoke on this topic,” Drucker said. “I told him that it would be a grave error.”
“Made up from beginning to end”
Clearly upset at the suppression of his team’s work, Drucker went on to describe how meticulously the report was prepared and to characterize what it reveals about Davidian’s claims.
“These are not slight exaggerations, mildly inflating the number of those rescued, absolutely not,” Drucker wrote. “These are stories made up from beginning to end. Hair-raising stories that never, ever occurred.”
היום בשעת צהריים מוקדמת התקשר מנכ”ל ערוץ 13, אמיליאנו קלמזוק ואמר שהוא החליט לא לשדר את הכתבה על רמי דוידיאן, שיועדה לשידור ביום ראשון ב”מקור”. זו הפעם הראשונה שדיברנו בעניין. אמרתי לו שזו תהיה טעות חמורה, הסברתי לו על מה הכתבה, מה היא מראה, מה הערך הציבורי שלה, ביקשתי שיצפה לפני…
— Raviv Drucker (@RavivDrucker) April 4, 2025
Drucker notes that Davidian’s claims of rescuing Israelis “were quoted in a reputable film, in newspapers across the world [and] in an important book.”
The Electronic Intifada had already exposed Davidian’s lies almost a year ago, when it debunked Screams Before Silence – likely the “reputable film” to which Drucker refers.
The Sandberg film was promoted as “a documentary film on the sexual violence committed by Hamas,” but this writer exposed it as a total fraud on The Electronic Intifada Livestream for May 1, 2024.
The Electronic Intifada also concluded from inconsistencies in his accounts that Davidian had fabricated a superhero-like account of rescuing an Israeli woman tied to a tree by Hamas fighters.
You can watch the segments specific to Davidian in the video at the top of this page.
Making money from lies
Ever since October 7, 2023, according to Channel 13’s Drucker, Davidian “has turned his stories into an industry,” taking part in paid lecture tours in Israel and abroad, as well as fundraising campaigns.
In perhaps hundreds of interviews, Drucker wrote, Davidian “repeats over and over again, stories that simply never happened.”
Davidian’s debunked claims are also cited in a report by an all-party group of British lawmakers.
The “7 October Parliamentary Commission Report” purports to “meticulously document the grisly fates of the 1,182 people killed by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.”
The parliamentary report cites Davidian’s stories – as told to Sandberg – as part of its “evidence,” giving his lies a veneer of official credibility.
To date, there is not a single positively identified victim, living or dead, of the alleged mass rapes on October 7, 2023.
As The Electronic Intifada has reported since the early weeks of the genocide in Gaza, Israel’s mass rape narrative is atrocity propaganda.
It is rooted in racist stereotypes of colonized and subject peoples, similar to the routinely fabricated accusations of the rape of white women used for decades to justify the lynchings of Black men across the United States.
The handful of other “eyewitnesses” to October 7 rapes or crime scenes gave accounts that collapsed completely under scrutiny, and there was a major scandal after The New York Times published a notorious December 2023 article which contained multiple debunked claims of rape.
Nor is Davidian the first grifter allegedly seeking money and fame from the mass rapes hoax.
With Drucker’s exposure of Davidian’s lies – only the latest about October 7 to be debunked – there is no excuse for Western media and politicians to keep parroting propaganda whose only purpose is to incite or attempt to justify Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people.
Translation provided by David Sheen
Ali Abunimah is a journalist and the co-founder and executive director of The Electronic Intifada, a nonprofit, independent online publication focusing on Palestine. Based in the U.S., he has been an active part of the movement for justice in Palestine for 20 years.
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