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<a class="gmail-domain gmail-reader-domain" href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/israel-admits-burning-hundreds-people-7-october">electronicintifada.net</a>
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<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">Israel admits burning hundreds of people on 7 October</h1>
<p class="gmail-node__submitted">
<span class="gmail-field gmail-field-author"><a href="https://electronicintifada.net/people/ali-abunimah">Ali Abunimah</a></span> -
<span class="gmail-field gmail-field-publication-date"><span class="gmail-date-display-single">17 November 2023</span></span> </p>
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<img src="https://electronicintifada.net/sites/default/files/styles/original_800w/public/2023-11/polspphotostwo086377.jpg?itok=RjFndnc4×tamp=1700248228" width="392" height="262" alt="Houses and buildings reduced to rubble in Kibbutz Be'eri" title="" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" style="margin-right: 25px;">
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<p>Israel has never explained how Palestinian fighters who crossed from
Gaza on 7 October could have caused mass destruction to Israeli homes,
as seen here in Kibbutz Be’eri, with their light weapons. There’s
mounting evidence that heavy, indiscriminate fire by Israeli forces
killed Palestinians and Israeli civilians alike.</p><small>
<span>Polaris</span></small>
<p>On Thursday, MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HD-yRuTasHU">challenged</a>
Israeli government spokesperson Mark Regev about the many lies and
false claims that Israel has made to justify its genocidal bombing and
invasion of Gaza.</p>
<p>While attempting to parry Hasan’s challenges, Regev told many more
lies, trying to change the subject and shift the blame for the
horrifying toll away from Israel and onto Israel’s Palestinian victims.</p>
<p>But Regev made one admission whose significance neither Regev nor Hasan appears to have recognized.</p>
<p>Regev was trying to make the point that Israel – supposedly unlike
Hamas – can be trusted because when Israel makes a mistake, it admits
it.</p>
<p>Regev gave this example: “We originally said, in the atrocious Hamas
attack upon our people on October 7th, we had the number at 1,400
casualties and now we’ve revised that down to 1,200 because we
understood that we’d overestimated, we made a mistake. There were
actually bodies that were so badly burnt we thought they were ours, in
the end apparently they were Hamas terrorists.”
</p>
Earlier this month, Israel did in fact <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israel-revises-death-toll-oct-7-hamas-attack-around-1200-2023-11-10/">revise down</a> the number of Israelis it says were killed on 7 October to “around 1,200.”
<p>Although it has offered no direct evidence, Israel has <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/hamas-worse-than-isis-its-atrocities-worst-since-holocaust-netanyahu-tells-biden/">claimed</a> that Hamas fighters burned Israeli civilians en masse, in atrocities not seen since the Holocaust.</p>
<p>Israel has also never explained how Palestinians fighters could have
achieved this or caused the enormous damage to Israeli houses with only
the light weapons they were generally seen carrying.</p>
<p>It simply makes no sense that 200 bodies burned beyond recognition
that Israel thought were Israeli civilians could turn out to be Hamas
fighters unless Israel killed people indiscriminately.</p>
<p>Obviously Hamas fighters did not set themselves on fire and burn
themselves beyond recognition. And Israel must know the circumstances in
which these people died.</p>
<h2>Evidence Israel killed its own</h2>
<p>Regev’s statement is a significant addition to the mounting evidence
that on 7 October Israeli forces went on a panicked rampage, firing
wildly with powerful weapons, indiscriminately killing both Palestinian
fighters and the Israeli civilians who were with them.</p>
<p>That is the <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/content/israeli-forces-shot-their-own-civilians-kibbutz-survivor-says/38861">testimony of Yasmin Porat</a>, an Israeli civilian who survived a massacre by Israeli forces at Kibbutz Be’eri.</p>
<p>And the Israeli air force has <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/shoot-everything-how-israeli-pilots-killed-their-own-civilians">admitted</a>
that it sent up more than two dozen attack helicopters which fired huge
amounts of heavy cannon shells and Hellfire missiles on 7 October, even
though in many cases the pilots could not tell Palestinians apart from
Israeli civilians.</p>
<p>“Shoot at everything,” one squadron leader told his men.</p>
<p>Later in the Mehdi Hasan interview, Regev regurgitates the standard
Israeli propaganda claim that the civilian death toll in Gaza is so high
because Hamas uses civilians as “human shields.”</p>
<p>Hasan challenges this with what he poses as a hypothetical question.
He asks Regev: “Would you bomb schools and houses in Israel if Hamas
militants were believed to be under them and kill Israeli human shields
in the process?”</p>
<p>Hasan does not seem to realize that this is <em>exactly what Israel did</em> on and after 7 October, as <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/asa-winstanley/watch-video-about-7-october-youtube-doesnt-want-you-see">growing</a> <a href="https://mondoweiss.net/2023/10/a-growing-number-of-reports-indicate-israeli-forces-responsible-for-israeli-civilian-and-military-deaths-following-october-7-attack/">evidence</a> <a href="https://thegrayzone.com/2023/10/27/israels-military-shelled-burning-tanks-helicopters/">indicates</a>.</p>
<p>Needless to say, Regev did not provide any meaningful answer.
</p>
Israel’s continued disregard for the lives of its own civilians has been
amply demonstrated by its carpet bombing of Gaza that is <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/hamas-armed-wing-more-than-60-hostages-are-missing-due-israeli-airstrikes-2023-11-04/">endangering</a> and <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67414353">killing</a> Israeli and foreign citizens detained there.
<h2>Burned cars, burned bodies</h2>
<p>It is also notable that graphic images of badly burned bodies in cars
that Israel released in its initial propaganda blitz after 7 October,
bear a striking resemblance to the car of a Lebanese family Israel
shelled across the border in southern Lebanon on 6 November, killing
three young girls and their grandmother, and wounding their mother:
</p>
Up until now, mainstream Western media – following the line from their
governments – have refused to challenge Israel’s increasingly threadbare
claims about what happened on 7 October.
<p>There needs to be a full, independent inquiry into what happened –
something neither Israel nor its American and European enablers are
likely to demand or allow.</p>
<p>That is because there is already undeniable evidence – and Regev’s
statement corroborates it – that the leaders in Tel Aviv ordering the
massacres of Palestinian civilians already had the blood of many Israeli
civilians on their hands even before the first bomb dropped on Gaza.</p>
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