Atrocities against babies that the head of the Israeli army’s national rescue unit alleged were committed by Hamas fighters when they attacked an Israeli kibbutz on 7 October were in fact lurid tales of the officer’s own invention, intended to provide a pretext for genocide in the Gaza Strip, and to protect the massacre’s actual perpetrators: Israel’s own soldiers, acting on the orders of a top general.

As Israeli forces recaptured territories temporarily taken by Hamas earlier that day, the commander of the national rescue unit of the Israeli army’s Home Front Command Colonel Golan Vach led the recovery of corpses from the region, which spanned an area of hundreds of square kilometers. A week later, Vach began asserting that Hamas fighters had brutally executed “eight babies” in a single house in Kibbutz Be’eri.

“They were concentrated there and they killed them and they burned them,” Vach told a throng of reporters on 14 October, pointing through a smashed window into the charred living room of kibbutz resident Pessi Cohen.

According to the only two captives who survived the bloodbath, however, a total of 13 civilians died at Cohen’s home, including Cohen herself, and none were babies or toddlers. ….more