Israel passes law banning challenge of debunked 7 October atrocity propaganda claims

5 years jail time for questioning fake claims of rapes, beheaded babies and mass slaughter

Israel’s Knesset (parliament) has passed a law criminalising denial or questioning of Israel’s version of what happened on 7 October 2023 – despite or more likely because of the comprehensive debunking of those claims both internationally and in Israel, though not by politicians and ‘mainstream’ media in western countries who continue to collude in Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

The bill, The legislation, sponsored by Oded Forer of the far-right Yisroel Beytenu party, mandates a five-year sentence for “Anyone who says or writes things denying the October 7 massacre with the intention of defending the terrorist organization Hamas and its partners, expressing sympathy for them, or identifying with them“.

Israel’s version of events states that around 1,200 people – reduced from 1,400 when Israel realised 200 victims were in fact Palestinian – were killed by Palestinians during the 7 October raid, that babies were beheaded and baked in ovens and that rape was systematically used as a weapon. All of those claims have been disproven.

Only one baby died on 7 October, killed when a grenade was thrown into a safe room. None were beheaded. The most famous child victim on that day – used widely by Israel for propaganda purposes – has been conclusively proven to have been killed, along with most of her family, by an Israeli tank shell. Other kibbutz victims were killed by Israeli tank and helicopter fire and huge numbers, probably a majority, of those who died at the Nova music festival were killed in their cars by missiles and gunfire from Israeli helicopters as a result of orders repeated roughly every twenty minutes throughout the day by Israeli commanded to enact the ‘Hannibal directive’, which involves Israelis being killed by their own side to prevent them being taken captive. Israeli media have freely discussed these issues and admitted the ‘friendly fire’ deaths.

No evidence for rapes has been put forward by the Israeli regime or its lawyers and a United Nations examination of the claims by two senior UN women found that none of the claims were substantiated and several had been positively disproven. Claimed ‘eyewitnesses‘ only testified to sexual violence after changing their earlier testimonies. These things have been known for a year or more, during which Israel and its enablers continued to repeat them to justify the real slaughter of many tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians, mostly women and children.

Despite the discredited nature of Israel’s atrocity propaganda, colluding western media and politicians like UK PM Keir Starmer, continue to repeat the debunked claims without scrutiny – and now, in Israel where the mainstream media has been more honest than in the UK, to repeat known facts or scrutinise known lies risks being a criminal offence.

Israeli civil rights groups have condemned the new law for its shoddy, ambiguous wording and its chilling effect on investigation and free speech – just as the Starmer regime in the UK is abusing badly-drafted anti-terror legislation to pursue anti-genocide campaigners and journalists – and because its framing is so loose that the state can easily allege that scrutiny ‘defends Hamas’ or ‘sympathises’ with it, if the regime wishes to shut down discussion and pursue those scrutinising the evidence.

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