The brutality the Palestinians suffer, and the lack of any repercussions for the perpetrators, show that international law doesn’t matter On October 7, 2023, Hamas and other Palestinian resistance organizations launched an attack out of the Gaza Strip and into Israel under the code name Al-Aqsa Flood. Israeli and Western mainstream media and politicians rapidly labelled this a massive act of terrorism and flooded the world with tales of horrific atrocities allegedly perpetrated by the Palestinians, such as sadistically murdering children and women and committing mass rape. We now know that these atrocious tales were lies calculated to generate domestic and international outrage against the Palestinian resistance and Palestinians in general. They were part of the same poisonous Israeli narrative that labeled these people  – a reference to a perversely exemplary genocide in the Old Testament – and . They were taking steps, in other words, to start a genocide. These atrocious propaganda lies were made up and spread by, for instance, Israel’s and Western mainstream journalists, , high public officials such as the UN’s , and activists. For instance, former Meta executive , who chose to rely on Israeli disinformation. In reality, there , there were no sadistic baby murders by beheadings or in microwave ovens, no pregnant woman was found killed with a headshot, with her baby stabbed and still attached to the umbilical cord. It as a detailed investigation by Israeli newspaper Haaretz found. What did happen on October 7, 2026 was not a savage, sadistic rampage but a daring military resistance operation. It was also a mass break-out from the Gaza Strip, which was under a long Israeli siege so brutal that Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling had already called the Strip the  almost a quarter-century ago. The core of this offensive targeted Israel’s Gaza Division, which, according to high-ranking Israeli officers was In the process, Palestinian resistance fighters killed and captured Israeli military personnel. While Israel’s propaganda has done its best to obfuscate this fact, these actions were neither terrorism nor hostage-taking . The Palestinian fighters also attacked a music festival as well as several settlements. There, according to an Amnesty International summary in early 2024, they did commit crimes, , that is, civilians, not soldiers, whose capture makes them POWs and not hostages. A crime, in any case, is a crime even if it’s only realistic to recognize plenty of mitigating circumstances in the immense injustice, dispossession, and often sadistic and humiliating violence Palestinians have suffered from Israelis over decades. Honesty also dictates that we take three key facts into account: First, the leader of the pro-Israeli UAE, has revealed that he warned Israel’s leader Benjamin Netanyahu personally. In a similar vein, Qatar’s leader claims that Hamas was ready to free all civilian hostages immediately after the attack (which would have left it with only military prisoners). Yet the Israeli leadership ignored the warning and rejected the offer to free all civilians. It’s almost as if it wanted the attack to happen, as a pretext to initiate a massive ethnic cleansing-by-genocide campaign, and for the civilian hostages to stay in Gaza, as a pretext for  continuing that campaign. Read more Second, it has long been clear that Israeli authorities activated an expanded Hannibal Directive: Usually prepared to kill their own soldiers rather than let them be captured, on October 7, Israeli forces also killed Israeli civilians and, most likely, in large if unknown numbers, deploying as well as . Of the roughly 1,200 casualties on 7 October, hundreds are likely to have been due to Israeli-on-Israeli violence; others were soldiers and as such legitimate targets. And finally, a simple point all too often drowned out by Israeli and pro