It’s taboo to talk about exactly what happened on that day, and it’s taboo to talk about how Israel’s abuses provoked the attack. How many of the 1,195 people killed were actually killed by Israeli forces? Did Israel deliberately leave its people undefended? We don’t know, and we’re not allowed to know.
By Caitlin Johnstone, reposted from Caitlin Johnstone’s Substack, June 28, 2026
The Israeli press are reporting that police documents on the security for the October 7 2023 Nova music festival were mysteriously deleted at some point in early January 2024. The Jerusalem Post reports that “it is unknown who removed them and whether copies still exist.”
A new article from the Israeli outlet YNet reports that the IDF had planned to kill an Israeli soldier who was captured by Hamas in 2006, with one document stating “Hannibal in effect.” The Hannibal Directive is an Israeli military protocol ensuring that extreme measures be taken to prevent Israelis from capture by Palestinian resistance groups, even if it means killing the Israelis.
Israel’s Channel 12 has shown footage of Israeli officers demanding that the Hannibal Directive be implemented on October 7 to prevent hostages from being taken by Hamas, with a senior officer saying “(Strike) Gaza. Break it all apart. Along with the soldiers who got abducted.”
🇵🇸🇮🇱 Nine minutes of testimonies from both Israeli soldiers and civilians explaining how the IDF killed their own people on October 7. pic.twitter.com/SMZgYbMb8R
— Middle Eastern Affairs (@OpsHQs) June 25, 2026
Many Israeli soldiers and civilians are on record saying that Israeli forces fired upon their own people on October 7.
How many of the 1,195 people killed in Operation Al-Aqsa Flood were actually killed by Israeli forces? We don’t know, and we’re not allowed to know. Electronic Intifada’s Asa Winstanley has argued that the number was in the hundreds.
Did Israel deliberately leave its people undefended from an impending Hamas attack in order to advance pre-existing agendas? We don’t know, and we’re not allowed to know, but there are mountains of evidence indicating that they did.
Ask why there’s been so much violence in the middle east these last three years and you’ll be told it’s because of October 7.
Ask why October 7 happened and you’ll be called an antisemite.
Ask what specifically transpired on that day and you’ll be called a conspiracy theorist.
It’s just so crazy how often apologists for Israel and the western empire will cite October 7 as the spark that set off all these wars of far-reaching consequence, but it’s taboo to talk about exactly what happened on that day, and it’s taboo to talk about how Israel’s abuses provoked the attack.
The official mainstream position on October 7 is that Hamas killed 1,195 Israelis for no reason other than because they are evil and wanted to kill Jews, and that anyone who suggests it may have happened for actual material reasons is an antisemitic monster. Whenever anyone spouts the official mainstream position on October 7 at me I just want to make “goo goo ga ga” baby noises at them until they shut up and go away, because such people are not thinking like adults.
Everyone who’s been watching Israel’s behavior since October 7 now understands why Palestinian resistance fighters carried out October 7 in the first place. We’re expected to avert our eyes from the glaring plot holes in the official narrative and never suggest that Israel’s horrific abuses of the Palestinians may have played some role in giving rise to the attack, but after watching a live-streamed genocide month after month after horrifying month, we all know October 7 was just Israel reaping what it sowed.
And we know there is no evil these freaks are not capable of.
*Additionally*
The Truth About Oct 7 that Israel Doesn’t Want You To Know
By JD Hall, reposted from JD Hall’s Substack, June 4, 2026
On October 7, 2023, the most sophisticated intelligence apparatus ever assembled, guarding the most sensor-dense border in human history, with the enemy’s complete battle plan in hand, failed to stop an attack that multiple foreign governments, junior analysts, and its own designated skeptics had been screaming about for months. What followed was not just a massacre. It was a real estate transaction, a government windfall, and the fulfillment of a political program its architects had been advertising in public for years. This is the account that the Israeli government has spent nearly three years trying to ensure you never read in one place.
Gaza is a narrow strip of land that’s roughly 40 miles long and approximately 7 miles wide at its widest point, with roughly 2 million people living within it. In terms of square miles, it’s almost exactly the same size as Detroit. Its population is two million people. Detroit’s population is 620k, so roughly 4 times the population density. Gaza’s inhabitants cannot leave without Israeli permission.
There’s no modern-day equivalent to this type of prison colony. East Germans, prior to the fall of the USSR, could still travel freely within the Eastern Bloc – Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, other Warsaw Pact countries – with relative ease. But Gazans cannot import or export anywhere without Israeli permission. Their telecommunications infrastructure runs through systems Israel controls, monitors, and can shut off at will.
Their coastline is patrolled by Israeli naval vessels. Their airspace belongs to Israeli drones. Gaza is not merely a territory under blockade. It is, by any honest accounting, the most comprehensively surveilled population on the surface of the earth, and has been for the better part of two decades.
The border itself represents one of the most ambitious and expensive surveillance construction projects in modern military history. Israel completed its so-called “Iron Wall” barrier system in December 2021 after three and a half years of construction, pouring 140,000 tons of iron and steel into a sixty-five-kilometer fortification that runs the entire length of the Gaza perimeter.
The above-ground smart fence stands over twenty feet high and is studded with thousands of cameras, radar arrays, and sensor packages feeding continuous data to hardened command-and-control rooms staffed around the clock. Below the surface, Israel built an underground wall equipped with seismic sensors that detect tunnel-digging activity at depth. The maritime side of the equation received equal attention, with a naval barrier incorporating infiltration-detection systems and remote-controlled weapons platforms covering the coastal approaches.
Heat sensors track vehicle and human movement by water and land. Cyber systems vacuum up every text message and phone call made within range of the barrier. One hundred Rafael-manufactured automated sniper positions, each carrying a machine gun integrated with radar and optics, were positioned along the fence line and connected to Elbit’s MARS system, feeding live targeting data to female observers working inside reinforced concrete war rooms who could announce, warn, or shoot at anything that moved on the wrong side of the wire.
The total cost of this system ran to approximately 1.2 billion dollars. Israel’s own Defense Ministry described it at completion as “innovative and technologically advanced,” and called it impenetrable.
Inside Gaza itself, surveillance has never depended solely on the border infrastructure. Israel controls Gaza’s telecommunications at the network level, meaning the capacity to monitor, record, and analyze communications across the territory has existed as a structural reality since the blockade began in earnest in 2007. Autonomous drones have maintained near-continuous aerial reconnaissance over Gaza’s densely populated urban areas for years, feeding real-time imagery into intelligence systems. The population of Gaza has lived, in effect, inside a glass box.
The organization doing the watching is no backwater signals shop. Unit 8200 is the largest single unit in the Israeli Defense Forces, operating at peak strength with up to ten thousand personnel. A British military analyst described it flatly as “one of the best technical intelligence agencies in the world.”
Its SIGINT base in the Negev Desert, code-named Yarkon, was identified by the French publication Le Monde Diplomatique as “among the most important and powerful intelligence-gathering sites in the world,” and it was running what it called “the largest wiretap network on earth.” From that facility, Unit 8200 intercepts phone calls, emails, maritime communications, and satellite transmissions across the Middle East, Europe, Africa, and Asia.
The unit maintains covert listening posts inside Israeli embassies abroad, taps undersea cables, runs clandestine listening operations inside Palestinian territories, and deploys Gulfstream jets loaded with electronic surveillance equipment.
Its documented achievements include co-developing Stuxnet, the cyberweapon that physically destroyed Iranian nuclear centrifuges, and intercepting a real-time phone call between Egyptian President Nasser and King Hussein of Jordan at the opening of the Six-Day War. It built AI models for real-time translation and predictive intelligence analysis before most Western agencies had even flirted with AI.
Its AI-targeting platforms, called “Lavender” and “Gospel,” automate the identification of combatants by simultaneously processing SIGINT, satellite imagery, drone feeds, and historical behavioral data. Unit 8200 alumni populate the senior engineering and security ranks of Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Palo Alto Networks.
It is not a signals intelligence unit in the way that phrase is ordinarily used. It is one of the most formidable intelligence organisms ever assembled by any nation of any size, operating against a captive, contained, surveilled population of two million people, penned inside forty miles of some of the most sensor-dense real estate on the planet.
That is the system that failed to see October 7 coming.
THE WARNINGS
Let’s presume, for a moment, that all of those cutting-edge technological wonders, constantly aimed directly at Gaza, were unable to give Israeli intelligence a heads-up warning about the impending October 7 attack. It seems fantastical, but for the sake of argument, we will presume that in one terrible coincidence of cascading failures after another, somehow, Israeli intelligence didn’t know. It turns out, Hamas’ operational security was so terrible that even other nations knew in advance.
The warnings did not arrive at the last minute. They arrived years, months, weeks, and days in advance, in the form of documents, phone calls, foreign delegations, internal memos, and a junior analyst’s desperate email sent in the final hours before the border broke open. At every level and at every interval, someone in Israel’s national security apparatus knew that what was coming was indeed coming.
Let’s start at the beginning. In 2018, Israeli intelligence obtained a Hamas raid plan detailing a large-scale surprise attack on Israel. In 2022, Unit 8200 acquired a forty-page document written in Arabic that outlined, point by point, the precise tactics Hamas would employ on October 7. It covered rockets to drive soldiers into bunkers. It covered drones to destroy border cameras and remote-controlled machine guns. It covered heavy machinery to punch through the fence at sixty separate points. It covered motorized paragliders to carry fighters over the wall. It covered gunmen on motorcycles flooding through the breaches. The document named the Re’im military base as a critical target. Israeli authorities code-named the plan “Jericho Wall.”
Jericho Wall was reviewed by the IDF intelligence chief, the Unit 8200 commander, the Gaza Division commander, and the Southern Command chief. Each had access to the very plan utilized by Hamas to breach the border. The New York Times, drawing on documents, emails, and interviews, reported that Israeli officials privately concede that had the military taken the plan seriously and reinforced the south, the attack would have been entirely prevented. Instead, Israeli intelligence filed away the attack plans and shored up not an inch of their defenses, making no attempt to amend even a single weakness outlined in the attack plan.
The warnings did not stop there. In July 2023, three months before the attack, military analysts inside the IDF flagged what they called a “plan designed to start a war.” Their superiors dismissed them. In September 2023, a Unit 8200 non-commissioned officer prepared a new analysis documenting that Hamas had been running military exercises that followed the Jericho Wall plan with precision, and that Hamas was actively building the capacity to execute it. She and a junior officer brought their findings to a senior IDF officer. The response was that their concerns were “fantasies.”
On September 19, 2023, eighteen days before the attack, Unit 8200 distributed a formal document to the Gaza Division warning that Hamas was planning a large-scale invasion and intended to seize up to 250 hostages. Note: This wasn’t an Israeli version of Alex Jones rambling a prophecy into the ether over shortwave radio that Israeli officials could argue they never heard, or could claim they thought the source was crazy, or claim that the warning was too broad to help. This was the division of Israeli intelligence whose job it was to warn the Israeli government of imminent attacks, warning the Israeli government of an imminent attack, and even, which specific attack plan it was.
In the days immediately before October 7, the same NCO sent a final email to multiple IDF officers with a subject line drawn from the Hebrew prophets: “The sword is coming.” She urged them to warn the people while there was still time. The email was ignored. One of the female analysts raising these alarms was threatened with court-martial if she continued talking “nonsense.” It was a cover-up, in advance.
Egypt, which shares a border with Gaza and maintains an intelligence relationship with Israel built over decades of formal peace, delivered its own alarm. A senior Egyptian intelligence official called a journalist ten days before the attack to relay that Egypt had already warned Netanyahu’s office that “something catastrophic” was about to happen from Hamas within days, because he found it unfathomable that the Israeli government wasn’t responding to their warnings, and he wanted to the public to be warned.
After getting no response over the wires, two weeks before October 7, an Egyptian diplomatic delegation arrived at the Israeli Foreign Ministry to warn their counterparts in person that an attack was imminent. On September 26, 2023, a plane linked to Egyptian intelligence landed at Ben Gurion Airport, according to Israeli officials, and flew back to Cairo. The head of Egyptian intelligence contacted Netanyahu directly. When the attack came, and Egypt’s warnings became public, Netanyahu denied receiving them. The chairman of the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee subsequently reviewed classified intelligence and confirmed that Egypt had in fact warned Israel three days before the attack.
Inside Israel’s own military, the designated skeptics were raising their hands. The head of the IDF’s “Devil’s Advocate” unit, whose institutional purpose is to challenge prevailing assumptions, issued four separate written warnings in the three weeks before October 7, assessing that Hamas would soon launch a major confrontation with Israel. He later stated that two of those assessments were formally distributed to all decision-makers in the military and government. Israel’s intelligence community had also received what analysts describe as increased communications chatter from Gaza militant groups in the period before the attack. American intelligence officials acknowledged after the fact that they, too, had observed the elevated activity and believed some kind of attack was imminent.
Every single one of these warnings pointed in the same direction. Every single one of them was dismissed, suppressed, or ignored. The NCOs were called hysterical. The Egyptian delegation was thanked and shown the door. The forty-page battle plan sat in a drawer for over a year while Hamas rehearsed its contents in broad daylight, in view of Israeli military personnel, along the most surveilled border on the surface of the earth.
THE INEXPLICABLE DELAY
At 6:29 a.m. on October 7, 2023, Hamas initiated its assault. By 7:00 a.m., 1,175 fighters operating in twenty battalions had already penetrated Israeli territory while over 1,400 rockets were in the air. A second wave of 660 fighters in fourteen additional battalions crossed between 7:00 and 9:00 a.m. What they found when they got there was a border defended by 767 IDF soldiers and thirteen tanks, spread across a forty-mile perimeter. The world’s most sophisticated military, guarding the world’s most surveilled border, staffed that border on that morning with fewer defenders than a mid-sized American police department. The border was significantly understaffed compared to normal.
The border had been stripped of IDF men and machines. A few days before October 7, three battalions were pulled from the Gaza perimeter and redeployed to the West Bank to provide security for settlers celebrating Sukkot. Two additional Commando Brigade companies, specifically deployed to the Gaza border during the Jewish holiday season, were sent to Huwara in the West Bank just two days before the attack.
The holiday itself had sent many other soldiers home. According to analysts familiar with the deployment, only two or three battalions remained around the Gaza border at the moment Hamas crossed it, and even those were not at full capacity. The men and equipment needed to stop or slow the breach were not where they were supposed to be. They had been moved.
What followed was not a fighting retreat or a rapid regroup. It was paralysis at every level of command simultaneously. The IDF detected five irregular signs of activity in the hours before the attack and determined they did not indicate an imminent threat. When the first rockets flew at 6:29 a.m., and the fence began to break, the chain of command collapsed from the top down.
Netanyahu, Defense Minister Gallant, and IDF Chief of Staff Halevi were all present at military headquarters that morning, within a few hundred meters of each other. They did not speak to one another until nearly four hours into the attack. Netanyahu’s orders to seal the northern and southern borders were relayed through his military secretary and do not appear to have reached the appropriate commanders in a timely fashion.
The IDF high command did not begin meaningfully managing the nation’s defense until approximately 1:00 p.m., which was also the time Netanyahu released his first video statement to the public. By that hour, Hamas had already murdered most of its victims and was in the process of returning to Gaza with its hostages.
Think about that. Israel stood down during almost the entire assault, let the attack continue unimpeded (except for IDF personnel against orders or without any), and didn’t lift a finger until they were already through.
The Gaza Division commander, Brigadier General Avi Rosenfeld, whose headquarters at Re’im was overrun in the opening minutes of the assault, did not call the Israeli Air Force to beg for aerial support until 9:47 a.m., over three hours after the attack began. His superiors spent those three hours waiting for his situational updates, apparently unable to process the possibility that his command had been completely destroyed.
It did not occur to anyone in the chain above him that the forward commander might have zero situational awareness because he no longer had a command post. The Israeli Air Force did not decide to provide blanket aerial fire along the Gaza border until somewhere between 10:05 and 10:20 a.m., depending on which branch’s timeline is treated as authoritative. That was nearly four hours after the fence broke.
The consequences of that four-hour window were tragic. By noon, most Hamas fighters carrying most of the hostages were already back inside Gaza. The kibbutz of Nir Oz was still entirely in Hamas hands at noon with no IDF reinforcements present, one relief unit having been ambushed and redirected elsewhere.
Forces waited outside Kibbutz Be’eri into the afternoon while residents were being killed inside it. The IDF’s own subsequent investigation acknowledged the delays and described the situation at Be’eri as “extremely grave.” By the time IDF forces achieved anything resembling numerical superiority in the field, somewhere between 1:00 and 3:00 p.m., Hamas had accomplished every objective in the Jericho Wall plan and was consolidating its position underground with 250 hostages in tow.
The official framing for all of this is chaos, denial, and institutional rigidity. Commanders could not accept the scale of what was happening. The system was designed for a different kind of incursion and could not recalibrate in real time. The technology had been relied on so heavily that the human infrastructure atrophied. What these explanations do not explain is the arithmetic. The border was stripped of defenders days before the attack.
The three most senior officials in the Israeli government sat within a few hundred meters of each other for two hours without speaking. The air force waited four hours to provide cover for a border under mass assault. The forward commander’s headquarters was overrun in the first minutes, and his superiors spent three hours waiting for his reports. Every failure, at every level, in every domain, broke in precisely the same direction, at precisely the same time, with precisely the same result. Hamas got in, took what it came for, and got out.
You may draw whatever conclusion the evidence supports. The fact is, the Israeli government stood down and watched the attack happen in real time, and did next to nothing to stop it. That’s after literal months of constant warnings, promising them with explicit specificity exactly what would occur, and how.
WHAT WAS GAINED
Before a single brick of Gaza had been reduced to rubble, the men who would benefit most from its destruction had already told the world exactly what they wanted. This is not hindsight. It is a matter of public record stretching back years before October 7, stated plainly in speeches, press conferences, and party platforms by the senior members of the government that prosecuted the war.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, whose Religious Zionism party sat at the center of Netanyahu’s coalition, had spent years calling for full Israeli annexation of the West Bank and Gaza and the expulsion of Palestinians unwilling to abandon their national aspirations. He did not pivot to this position after October 7.
He held it before, during, and after. National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, whose Otzma Yehudit party held the other pillar of the coalition, was equally explicit, calling for Palestinians to “voluntarily emigrate” from Gaza to make room for Israeli settlements, and saying publicly that he would love to live in Gaza himself. Both men attended a government conference calling for the reestablishment of Jewish settlements in Gaza while the war was still active. Academic researchers at peer-reviewed journals documented that even before October 7, key government figures were laying the legal, operational, and financial groundwork to advance full West Bank annexation as a central national project.
October 7 did not create this agenda. It accelerated it.
For well over two decades, Israeli governments had cultivated Hamas as a counterweight to the Palestinian Authority, on the documented logic that a divided Palestinian political landscape gave Israel cover to avoid negotiating over a Palestinian state. In other words, the Israeli government helped to put Hamas into power.
It was stated openly by Netanyahu himself. In a March 2019 Likud caucus meeting, Netanyahu defended allowing Qatari funds to flow into Gaza by telling his own party that “whoever is against a Palestinian state should be for” [transferring the funds], because keeping Hamas and the Palestinian Authority separate helped prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.
A retired Israeli general, Shlomo Brom, former deputy to Israel’s national security adviser, told the New York Times the same thing from the outside: an empowered Hamas helped Netanyahu avoid negotiating over Palestinian statehood. Former Israeli security chief Ami Ayalon stated that Netanyahu had done “everything in order to increase the power of Hamas and to make sure the Palestinian Authority will not be able to create a unified government.”
Israeli intelligence agents physically accompanied Qatari officials carrying suitcases of cash into Gaza, with $15 million delivered in a single transfer. Netanyahu personally wrote a secret letter to Qatar’s leadership in 2018, urging continued payments to Hamas. The transfers eventually ran to $30 million per month.
The former Mossad official responsible for counterterrorism financing until 2016 described the policy candidly: Israel decided that rather than let Hamas collapse financially, it would fund an alternative route. His characterization of it was equally candid. “That was part of Israel’s policy to buy quiet.” Two of Netanyahu’s own cabinet ministers, Avigdor Liberman and Naftali Bennett, resigned in protest over the payments. Liberman called it “the first time Israel is funding terrorism against itself.”
The strategy of propping up Hamas as a counterweight to the PLO did not originate with Netanyahu. It has roots going back to the late 1970s, when, according to multiple current and former U.S. intelligence officials cited in a 2006 United Press International investigation, Tel Aviv gave direct and indirect financial aid to Hamas over a period of years as, in the words of one former CIA official, “a direct attempt to divide and dilute support for a strong, secular PLO by using a competing religious alternative.” Historian Rashid Khalidi, writing in his 2006 study “The Iron Cage,” described Hamas plainly as “the protégés of the Israeli occupation,” the product of a deliberate divide-and-rule strategy Israel had pursued for decades.
Sharon’s 2005 unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, engineered without any negotiation with the Palestinian Authority, followed the same logic. Sharon’s own chief of staff, Dov Weisglass, described the disengagement explicitly as “formaldehyde” for the peace process, a mechanism to freeze any movement toward Palestinian statehood rather than advance it.
By conducting the withdrawal unilaterally, Israel denied Fatah any diplomatic achievement it could show its own people, while Hamas, which had always argued that negotiation with Israel was pointless, appeared vindicated. The 2006 Palestinian elections followed directly from that dynamic. Hamas won after Israel, under Ariel Sharon, propped it up in the press, reportedly aided it financially, and did whatever it could to ensure that Hamas won that election.
The organization Israel had spent decades cultivating as a useful alternative to secular Palestinian nationalism was now the governing authority in Gaza, exactly where Israel wanted the conflict to be managed, and exactly where it needed it to stay.
The government that allowed those funds to flow, that stripped the Gaza border of defenders days before October 7, that had the forty-page Jericho Wall battle plan in a drawer for over a year, that dismissed every internal and external warning, that had three of its most senior officials sitting within a few hundred meters of each other for four hours without speaking while the fence was coming down, then used the resulting massacre to launch the most comprehensive military campaign in Gaza’s history, was the same government whose leading members had publicly stated, before any of this happened, that they wanted Gaza cleared of its population and settled by Israelis.
You’re left with two possible explanations. The first is that the most sophisticated intelligence apparatus on earth, guarding the most surveilled border in the world, with the actual enemy battle plan in hand, with warnings from Egypt, from the United States, from its own analysts, from its own Devil’s Advocate unit, failed completely by accident, in every domain, at every level, simultaneously, over the course of years of preparation and hours of execution, and that the government which had spent years financially sustaining the organization that attacked it and publicly calling for the exact outcome the attack made possible simply got very lucky.
The second explanation requires no such coincidences. Israel knew the attack was coming, knew how it would come, pulled back its defenses to let it happen, and did nothing to stop it, so that they’d have a reason to commit genocide and carry out an ethnic cleansing campaign while asking, “Doesn’t Israel have a right to exist?”
The answer is no. Not if it requires genocide and ethnic cleansing. Not if it’s government delegitimizes itself by standing down to watch its own citizens be massacred as part of the supposed greater good.
If you appreciate my work, please grab a premium subscription to access exclusive content, like the rest of this article, and get the full archives to the articles and podcasts. Act now and get a HUGE 30% discount!
“COINCIDENCES”
The most explosive coincidence begins with a military doctrine called the “Hannibal Directive,” named after the Carthaginian general who poisoned himself rather than be taken alive. The doctrine authorizes Israeli forces to kill their own soldiers or civilians to prevent them from being taken hostage, on the calculation that dead Israelis are preferable to living ones in enemy hands who can be used as bargaining chips. Former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant confirmed in his first televised interview after leaving office that the Hannibal Directive was activated on October 7.
Israeli investigative journalists Ronen Bergman and Yoav Zitun, both with deep sourcing inside the IDF, reported that at midday on October 7, the supreme military command issued orders to all units to prevent the capture of Israeli citizens at any cost, even at the risk of harming the captives themselves. Haaretz reported that the order was issued as early as 7:18 a.m., less than an hour into the attack. The same Haaretz investigation found that approximately seventy vehicles heading back toward Gaza, many carrying Israeli hostages, were destroyed by Israeli helicopter gunships, drones, and tanks.
An Israeli Air Force colonel confirmed in a recorded interview that October 7 was a mass Hannibal event and that pilots blew up houses inside Israeli settlements under command authorization. The IDF has officially acknowledged an immense and complex number of friendly fire incidents that day. No autopsies have been performed to determine the cause of death for the Israeli victims, which means the number of Israelis killed by Israeli fire remains officially unknown and apparently intended to stay that way.
Then there is the matter of the surveillance footage, and this was not reported by hostile foreign media. It was reported by the Jerusalem Post and the Israeli news outlet Walla, sourced from Israeli reserve officers who discovered the problem themselves. During visits by IDF general staff officers to division headquarters after the attack, senior reserve officers found that surveillance camera footage from October 7 had been removed from the military network known as ZeeTube.
Audio communications recordings from that day had also disappeared or been transferred away from the central database. Reserve officers described an invisible hand having deleted the files. The IDF’s response was not to deny the footage had been removed but to say it had been “restricted to authorized personnel.”
Beyond the military network, the Israeli government dispatched IDF units, Shin Bet agents, and Lahav 433 investigators in the days following the attack to collect cell phones, individual cameras, and kibbutz security footage from communities across the affected area. Nearly three years later, that material has not been returned. One bereaved parent has publicly accused Israeli authorities of deleting video of her son’s final moments. An Israeli army reservist who participated in the collection mission described the process as, “they disconnected what was needed, took it, and moved on. That was the last time anyone saw the materials.”
The Nova music festival, the single deadliest site of the entire attack, was approved to proceed by IDF Southern Command with virtually no defensive planning in place. The Gaza Division’s own operations officer, Lieutenant Colonel Sahar Fogel, was on record as unhappy about an event of that size being held five kilometers from the Gaza border. His objections were overridden, and he was told to sign the approval. The security commander responsible for the festival, Chief Superintendent Nivi Ohana, explicitly asked the IDF in the days before the event about the risk of a terrorist infiltration from Gaza. He received no response.
The IDF’s own leaked internal investigation, completed in early 2025 and never released publicly, found that the festival was approved with almost no real defensive plan, that police and military units responding that morning operated with different intelligence assessments, and that no shared strategy existed between them. One hundred terrorists arrived at the festival grounds in a convoy of trucks and encountered zero military resistance. No rapid response unit had been positioned nearby. No secured evacuation route had been established. The IDF did not even mention the festival during its overnight discussions on October 6 into 7, and no decisions about the event were made at any command level before the rockets flew.
There is also the question of the Israeli High Court’s role in limiting what could be investigated. The court specifically placed off-limits for the state comptroller’s probe the security preparations at the Nova festival, the defensive plans for the southern communities, and how the intelligence community and political leadership prepared for a military emergency. Those three categories represent precisely the questions whose answers would most directly implicate government-level decisions made before the attack. The most sensitive ground was fenced off by judicial order.
The objection most frequently raised against the obvious conclusions to be drawn that Israeli government leaders wanted this attack is that Israeli citizens died, including people connected to prominent families, and that no government would deliberately sacrifice its own people. The Hannibal Directive disposes of that objection entirely.
A government that issued orders to kill Israeli hostages rather than allow them to be captured, a government whose helicopters fired on vehicles carrying Israeli civilians, a government that has spent nearly three years confiscating, restricting, and in some cases apparently deleting the documentary record of what happened that morning, is not a government that draws a firm line at the deaths of its own citizens. Collateral damage is a feature of every large operation, false flag or otherwise. The question is not whether Israelis died. The question is what the people at the top of the chain of command knew, when they knew it, and why every anomaly in the record points the same direction.
THE RIVIERA
In February 2024, while Gaza was still being systematically reduced to rubble, Jared Kushner appeared at a Harvard event and shared his thoughts on the territory’s future. “Gaza’s waterfront property, it could be very valuable, if people would focus on building up livelihoods,” he said. He added, with the casual detachment of a man evaluating a distressed asset rather than a graveyard, “It’s a little bit of an unfortunate situation there, but I think from Israel’s perspective, I would do my best to move the people out and then clean it up.” Kushner, who once described the entire Arab-Israeli conflict as “nothing more than a real estate dispute,” was not speaking off the cuff. He was speaking prophetically.
By January 2026, Kushner stood before the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, alongside President Trump, and unveiled what he called “New Gaza.” The presentation included renderings of luxury skyscrapers overlooking the Mediterranean, a new international airport, high-speed rail, and AI-powered smart infrastructure grids. The plan, reported by the Wall Street Journal as “Project Sunrise,” projects more than $55 billion in long-term profits, envisions a reconstruction timeline of ten to twenty years, and has been presented to Gulf states, Egypt, and Turkey as an investment opportunity.
Kushner’s own Affinity Partners investment fund has already received a combined $3.5 billion from Saudi, Emirati, and Qatari investors. According to a George Washington University economics professor who analyzed the redevelopment proposal, those investors are “salivating to get in.” Trump, who has been developing luxury hotels and golf courses across the Gulf with Saudi partner Dar Al Arkan, described Gaza’s Mediterranean coastline with characteristic subtlety: “I’m a real estate person at heart, and it’s all about location.” He has publicly said Gaza could be “better than Monaco.”
The plan requires somewhere between $25 and $50 billion in reconstruction funding. The question of who pays has already been answered by the American officials most visibly associated with Israel’s cause. U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee went on Fox Business in February 2026 and stated that Israel should not be expected to spend “a single penny” on Gaza’s reconstruction, arguing that Israel was in fact owed “reparations.”
The international community, the Arab states, and ultimately the American taxpayer will be presented with the cleanup bill for a war the United States funded, armed, and diplomatically shielded at every turn. The weapons were American. The bombs were American. The UN vetoes that prevented any ceasefire resolution were American. The bill for the rubble will also be American, or Arab, or European, depending on which pocket is easiest to pick. The party that reduced 141 square miles of human habitation to powder will contribute nothing, because the American government has declared it owes nothing, and the American government is the only government whose opinion on the matter has any practical consequence.
What emerges from the rubble, if Kushner’s vision is realized, will be a neighborhood that the people who lived there cannot afford. The luxury hotels, the beachfront developments, the smart cities with AI power grids, and international airports are not being designed for two million Palestinian refugees scattered across Egypt, Jordan, and tent cities on their own former land. They are being designed for the world’s investor class, underwritten by Gulf sovereign wealth funds, managed by American real estate developers with direct financial relationships to the White House, and sold to a global market as a triumph of vision over tragedy.
The Palestinians, if they return at all, will return as service staff to a resort built on their grandparents’ homes. The ethnic cleansing that Smotrich and Ben Gvir demanded from their government podiums, that Netanyahu enabled through decades of deliberate strategy, that the Jericho Wall plan made possible in a single morning, will have been completed not by soldiers but by zoning regulations, property prices, and investment prospectuses circulated in Davos.
Israel got its war. America paid for it. The international community will pay to clean it up. And somewhere in the midst of all this are American evangelicalism, nodding up and down at their End Times charts, swearing up and down that this is just the price required to bless Abraham.
Caitlin Johnstone is a reader-funded journalist, essayist, painter and poet based in Melbourne, Australia. She writes with her American husband, Tim Foley. She has published her writing in many outlets. She writes about politics, economics, media, feminism and the nature of consciousness. She is the author of the illustrated poetry book Woke: A Field Guide For Utopia Preppers.
JD Hall is the Founder of Protestia and Pulpit & Pen, he furthered the development of evangelical Polemics. Now, he uses his Substack to provide insight to incite spiritual riots.
RELATED:
