Netanyahu (Caitlin Johnstone)
The world was lied to about the Gaza holocaust – the truth is coming out in Israeli media, and we must pay attention.
By Caitlin Johnstone, reposted from Caitlin Johnstone’s Substack, September 9, 2026
The Israeli press has published three significant revelations about the Gaza holocaust, reporting (1) that Benjamin Netanyahu concealed advanced knowledge of the Hamas attack on October 7, (2) that Israel rejected a Hamas offer to release all civilian hostages immediately after October 7, and (3) that according to an IDF drone operator, the Israeli military was intentionally firing on civilians throughout Gaza during its operations in the Palestinian territory.
The first two come from a Haaretz article titled “Revealed: Netanyahu Received an Explicit Warning Days Before Oct. 7. He Didn’t Brief Israel’s Security Chiefs”, which was released ahead of an upcoming Haaretz book about the hostage standoff in Gaza.
Haaretz describes a call between Netanyahu and UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed, citing three foreign senior sources:
“A week and a half before October 7, 2023 the Emirati ruler called Netanyahu from the Presidential Palace in Abu Dhabi and spoke with him for 45 minutes. In that conversation, bin Zayed warned that Hamas’ leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, was planning a major operation against Israel. Bin Zayed expressed concern that the event in question would not only lead to bloodshed but also destabilize the entire region and undermine the Abraham Accords.”
Haaretz reports that rather than pass these warnings on to Israeli national security officials, Netanyahu chose to sit on information which an unnamed Shin Bet official said could have “changed our entire assessment picture.”
Haaretz also notes that Israel had received similar warnings about a coming Hamas attack from Egyptian intelligence, which had been reported earlier. These are just two items in the mountains upon mountains upon mountains of evidence indicating that powerful people in Israel knowingly allowed Hamas to inflict as much damage as possible on October 7 2023 in order to advance the murderous ethnic cleansing objectives we’ve seen rolled out in the years since.
Nothing will turn you into a conspiracy theorist faster than learning basic facts about what happened on October 7. But even without knowing those facts it already strains credulity to believe Israel had no advance knowledge of a complex attack which would require extensive open-air training in one of the most heavily surveilled strips of land on our planet. Especially when you look at all the pre-existing military agendas Israel was able to push forward in the aftermath.
Later in that same article, Haaretz quotes a Palestinian politician named Samir Mashharawi describing what Hamas leadership told him during his mediation efforts between Israel and Hamas after October 7:
“He told me that in the first stage, they had no problem releasing all civilians without anything in return,” Mashharawi recounts. “I swear, those were his exact words: all civilians, without anything in return. They had only one condition: They wanted us to bring in an agreed-upon mediator as quickly as possible, so that negotiations could immediately begin over everything else.”
Mashharawi said Israel rejected the offer. A senior Israeli defense official corroborated this, telling Haaretz:
“The release of the hostages did not even enter the list of war objectives formulated by the government on the night of October 7. Could the proposal have been properly discussed and a decision reached? In substantive terms, the answer is yes. But the prevailing mood was like after Pearl Harbor: We had just suffered a brutal blow, we were in the midst of war, who had the bandwidth to talk about stopping the fighting and starting negotiations now, even if it was to save the lives of dozens of people, whose final number was still unknown?”
So all that hasbara about the hostages and the Bibas kids and how Hamas needed to be destroyed because they were refusing to release innocent civilian captives was complete bunk from the very beginning. Hamas offered to release them with no conditions but the opening of communication lines. Israel refused, because what they wanted was to steal more Palestinian land. It was never about the hostages, and anyone who said it was is a liar.
Lastly, a separate report in Hebrew from Haaretz quotes an Israeli air force reserve major describing how IDF policies and culture ensured the deaths of large numbers of civilians. Here are a few quotes, translated by Israeli-American political analyst Shaiel Ben-Ephraim:
1) He was involved in the March 23, 2025 paramedic killings in Tel al-Sultan, Rafah and said, “You could clearly tell these were rescue vehicles even as fire was opened on them from the ground. For no apparent reason, the force on the ground charged the convoy. They shot the first vehicle, the medical personnel got out, hid behind the ambulances and begged for their lives, and the soldiers shot them one after another.”
2) On how the yellow line was used as an excuse to kill innocent people: “The Palestinians didn’t know it existed, and the Air Force wasn’t always updated either. From the perspective of a farmer walking onto his own land — he has no idea he’s stepping into an area the IDF suddenly decided is a fire zone. And then all kinds of retroactive justifications started coming up. ‘He came for an arms deal.’ ‘He touched the ground, maybe he’s planting an explosive.’ To me it looked like they were trying to incriminate people with no intelligence and no proof.”
3) On how all morals were lost in Gaza: “”The feeling was that something tore, everyone had already become cynical about death, you can’t understand it from the outside. It’s not just fatigue, it’s an erosion of morality, of responsibility, of the sense that someone is still managing the event. Very quickly this whole business of ‘collateral damage’ disappeared from the considerations. They fire on anyone they see. The atmosphere started to be like the stands at a soccer match. The way you shout at a player, ‘Yalla, score,’ that’s how they shout at a soldier, ‘Kill him, strike him.’”
Like the other revelations, this report further discredits the lies the public was sold about Israel’s reasons for its atrocities in Gaza. All those lies about how Israel is taking extraordinary measures to protect civilian life in Gaza and only kills civilians because Hamas “hides behind human shields” has been thoroughly discredited by copious amounts of evidence that Israel was going out of its way to kill noncombatants throughout the course of the onslaught.
The world was lied to about the Gaza holocaust, just like it was lied to about every other act of mass military slaughter that the US involves itself in. Please carry these lessons into the future.
Caitlin Johnstone Caitlin Johnstone is a reader-supported independent journalist from Melbourne, Australia.
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