October 7 Was Shocking Enough. Why Should Israelis Embellish the Tragedy?
Yair Brill | Aug 16, 2024 | Haaretz
▻https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2024-08-16/ty-article-opinion/.premium/october-7-was-shocking-enough-why-should-israelis-embellish-the-tragedy/00000191-5a8b-d316-a9f1-decb1be60000
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On October 7 the country experienced its worst chaos ever: Dozens of points along the Gaza border were breached and thousands of terrorists stormed dozens of border communities. When my parents, residents of Kibbutz Be’eri, told my brother and me that they were entering their safe room early that morning, none of us understood the magnitude of the event. Nearly all the kibbutz’s residents were trapped in their homes, preventing them from seeing the full extent of the tragedy.
The results of that day are now known – 101 people from Be’eri were murdered, some of them dying in Hamas captivity. Some were burned to death, some were shot and others died under the rubble of their homes. There were parents who were murdered with their children, old people who bled to death, and a 9-month-old baby who was killed.
The dry facts are enough to infuriate all of us. But it seems that many people in Israel weren’t satisfied with the scale of the horror and created terrifying stories of their own.
One person tweeted a chilling story about a couple and their three children, the eldest 11. There’s no point in recounting all the details, they involve limbs being hacked off and death by torture. There’s only one problem with this account (which has reaped more than 1,000 likes): It didn’t happen. No 11-year-old boy was murdered at Kibbutz Be’eri. The details don’t align with the final figures of the kibbutz’s losses.
When I contacted the person who posted that story and told him that his version didn’t conform with the facts, she referred me to a video in which a Zaka volunteer recounts the incident. He also talks about a pregnant woman whose fetus was cut out from her.
The latter is one of the best-known tales of the massacre, but soon after it began circulating it was shown to be false. Not only did Kibbutz Be’eri disavow the story, Zaka admitted that “the volunteers may have misinterpreted what they saw.”
By the way, even though several people, among them kibbutzniks, explained to the person behind the tweet (who wasn’t an Iranian bot, I checked) that he was spreading lies, the tweet remains online and has been shared hundreds of times. Requests to remove it, which came, among others, from people who lived through the disaster, were of no avail.
Many of the people commenting on the tweet backed it because they had a hard time accepting that not all Zaka accounts are true. Or they think that the ends (defeating Hamas) justify the means. As one of them put it, “Even if it didn’t exactly happen that way, enough atrocities occurred that support the post.”
Stories like these don’t arise from marginal figures with morbid imaginations. In January, right-wing Channel 14 aired a segment in which journalist Erel Segal went into Gaza and spoke with Lt. Col. Guy Basson about the events at Be’eri. Basson shared two stories – one about a day care center where eight dead babies were found and one about a murdered Holocaust survivor named Genia.
Again, these accounts don’t fit the facts. The kibbutz doesn’t provide day care on Saturdays and it has no member named Genia who survived the Holocaust. But this account can still be found on Channel 14’s YouTube and X channels. Segal hasn’t bothered to apologize or remove the share from his X account.
The October 7 disaster affected almost every Israeli – almost everyone directly knows or is one step removed from someone who lost their life that Saturday. Out of that tragedy, many have sought to exaggerate the events, either to justify Israel’s actions in the Gaza Strip or out of a desire to help make Israel’s case to the world.
The problem is that in doing so they’re hurting those who experienced the atrocities firsthand. And they’re ignoring the fact that behind these stories are real people who lost their lives or loved ones.
Since October 7, the people from the Gaza border communities have suffered not only personal and collective losses, but also the government’s criminal neglect, whether it’s lawmakers who see them as second-class citizens, or a prime minister who hasn’t yet found time to visit Kibbutz Nir Oz, one of the most devastated communities. He has left more than 100 hostages to rot in Gaza for more than 300 days.
In this abyss it’s painful to see people cynically using the tragedy for spreading Israeli PR and justifying the war. They’re rudely trampling on the memory of the people who paid with their lives.
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