How We Remember Matters
The deep moral wound of lies told around October 7, and what it can teach us
I grew up with a deep respect for the work of memory. When I was a child, it started with the usual war monuments and other markers honouring the victims of past conflicts. As I grew, I learned to pay closer attention to how these memorials were used to different ends: sometimes to start a conversation, sometimes to end one.
In Canada, for instance, there’s a significant debate about the symbol of the poppy. For November 11, we wear red poppies, which are tied to donations for veterans… or maybe we don’t. Maybe we wear white ones, in solidarity with “peace” and the civilian victims of war. Or maybe we wear both, to signify that we understand the tension caused by war memorial, and are sitting with the pain and perspectives on both sides.
I first learned about the Holocaust in a formal way at age eight, when my grade-four class was inexplicably given the assignment of putting Hitler on trial (gifted class, but still—I wonder to this day how Aaron, one of Jewish children who made up half our class, felt about being cast in the role of Hitler). Right from the beginning, what was stressed to us was the importance of memory-keeping, and the ongoing fight against acts of denial that archivists have endured ever since. I learned then how important it was to preserve memories of atrocity properly, and how important it was to make sure that the names of the dead and their stories were neither forgotten, nor abused.
In a few days, we’ll be at the one-year anniversary of an absolute nightmare in Israel.
It’s an event that, in Israel and the Jewish diaspora, has been a cause of great pain for reasons above and beyond the fact of death itself. For the last few months, kibbutzim and families of the victims have been fighting the Israeli government’s attempts to leverage the stories of their losses even further for its own political ends. Likewise, in the world at large, many Jewish persons have been devastated by the government’s use of dead and kidnapped persons as an excuse for further regional slaughter.
This is a fight that has been ongoing since day one—because a great deal of lying has been done around the deaths and trauma of their loved ones from day one.
And even now, I see people sharing links ostensibly intended to show solidarity with Jewish persons against antisemitism, but which in large part parrot lies about October 7 that only serve the Israeli government—not the victims, and not the truth.
I don’t think most of them realize that they’re sharing lies.
I think many of them might even mortified to realize that they’re dishonouring the memories of the dead by perpetuating false versions of what happened to them, in service to a body of military propaganda that believes it’s necessary for the world to believe that wilder horrors occurred—and not just the ones that did, instead.
But this is a pain that I and many others have carried for the last year, precisely because the work of memory matters. It matters that we strive for an honest depiction of what happened, even if the truth means that we have to face some uncomfortable follow-up introspection: around the things we supported when we believed lies; around our willingness to keep believing lies (even at cost to the dignity of victims) because our desire for retribution is just too strong; and around what cruel actions we support even now, on the strength of all those lies told a year ago.
So today, a few days before the main memorial—and, unintentionally, amid Rosh Hashanah, the start of ten days of repentance/awe in the Jewish faith—I’m going to ask us to sit a little with some of the things that did not happen, and the complexity of what did, so that we can improve our practice of memorial going forward.
The aim here is not a “gotcha”. The work of accusation gets us nowhere—but the work of understanding does. So much life has been lost in the last year, and will continue to be lost in the weeks and months ahead. The least we can do, for our humanity, is to study what happened to make so many of us believe and run with lies so quickly—and to return as best we’re able to the idea that the dead should not be weaponized.
If someone came into your home and slaughtered one of your loved ones, would you be comfortable with neighbours then telling tall tales about that slaughter, and using those tall tales as an excuse to slaughter others?
If so, then there’s a wound in you no mere essay of mine will ever reach.
But as for the rest of us:
May we make the memories of the dead be a blessing once again.
Some key groundwork for October 7
Before we discuss the breathtaking number of false claims made on and after October 7 about the victims of an attack perpetrated centrally by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (with a few other loosely associated militant groups and ride-along citizens from Gaza), we need to highlight the complexity of Israeli society.
I know quite a few people who had (and maybe still have) vague notions of everyone in Middle Eastern countries: “the Palestinians” as a hivemind, “the Arabs” as a hivemind, “the Muslims” as a hivemind, and most certainly “the Israelis” and “the Jews” as a hivemind.
This is our first attack on democratic thinking: when we refuse to recognize that every demographic contains multitudes. In the case of Jewish people, it often leads us to what I call “polite” antisemitism: when we show our solidarity for “the Jewish cause” by listening to just one or two people from within the demographic, and then content ourselves with therefore understanding “the Jewish perspective” from them.
(Insert the classic, midrashic joke about how, if you ask three rabbis their views on a matter, you’ll get four opinions.)
Israel has a long-standing struggle between its Orthodox communities and its secular society—but even saying that is reductive, because some of its Orthodox communities want to live very simply and at peace, while others are deeply messianic and eager to bring upon the coming of a new age of Jewish sovereignty. Likewise, some of its secular society is highly progressive, while other components are deeply militant and eager adherents to a kind of Zionism (yes, kind—there is a range of such views) that makes the practice of faith secondary to territory in all questions of Jewish destiny.
The more messianic Orthodox communities, along with the more militant secular groups, are important to understanding the “story” of October 7—by which I mean, how the story of atrocity was immediately captured by a body of horrific claims for the media, most of which turned out to be false, while the rest of Israeli society was left painfully in the dark and struggling to get clear answers about that day.
This is because Israel has a very complex social contract, in which most of its citizens are required to partake in military service—with an exception made for the ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) Jews since the founding of the nation, up until June of this year (with ongoing protests among this religious group for that switch). But while these citizens haven’t been a direct part of the military or workforce, they have absolutely been engaged in two other parts of society: the political, and the humanitarian.
We’ll get to the humanitarian in a moment, because many of the volunteers who first engaged with the bodies of victims on October 7 were from this religious sector, as workers with the private outfit ZAKA, but the political matters, too.
In late 2022, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held on to his post in government by allying with far-right parties, which at the time sparked great fear for Israel’s democracy. Netanyahu was already facing three corruption trials, and Israelis knew that granting concessions to the parties he’d allied with to stay in power was going to lead to direct conflicts with the Supreme Court—which it did, starting in January 2023 and cascading into mass protests and a bitter fight to keep in office people like Yoav Gallant, who disagreed with the PM’s attempted judicial overhaul.
As the BBC described the election’s greatest winners, back in December 2022,
The leader [Bezalel Smotrich] of the Religious Zionism party, which in alliance with two other far-right parties won the third largest number of seats in the knesset (parliament), wants to see Israel annex the West Bank and has been given wide powers over its activities there.
Israel occupied the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip in the 1967 war. More than 600,000 Jewish settlers live in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. The settlements they live in are considered illegal under international law, though Israel disputes this. Israel pulled its settlers and troops out of the Gaza Strip in 2005. …
Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) party leader Itamar Ben-Gvir is known for his anti-Arab comments and has called for the relaxation of rules on when security forces can open fire in the face of threats. Once convicted of incitement to racism and supporting a terror organisation, he is set to become national security minister with authority over the police in Israel and the West Bank.
The other far-right partner in government, Avi Maoz of the anti-LGBT Noam party, has called for Jerusalem's Gay Pride event to be banned, disapproves of equal opportunities for women in the military, and wants to limit Jewish immigration to Israel to those defined as such according to Jewish religious law.
Putting aside the alarming amount of violent rhetoric from these three parties in general, the issue of women’s rights has unfortunately been a bitter one in Israel (as in the US: boy, we’re big fans of rolling back the clock around the world, eh?). In the past, the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community has run afoul of secular society for trying to erase pictures of women from Holocaust memorials and newspapers, and keeps trying to slip more gender-based restrictions into secular spaces. Two years on from gaining this much power in the Knesset (parliament), the centrality of these religious groups to Netanyahu’s position as PM have further emboldened many of them.
As Haaretz recently noted in “The Messianic Takeover Begins with Gender”,
This campaign continues even at a time of war. During the past year, pro-gender segregation forces in Israel have taken advantage of the state of emergency to amplify their oppressive messaging and double down on their conservative vision of the state. By tying the issue of national security to "family values," they promote the gendered doctrine of religious nationalism. On October 19, when it became clear that Israel was deeply mired in war, Rabbi Snir Gueta, a former soccer player, pleaded in a TikTok video: "Dear girls, our salvation lies in the hands of righteous women; our salvation lies in your hands. We want to start a campaign of shredding to prevent sentencing [a pun in Hebrew]. Every daughter of Israel, who, with God's help, will undertake to tear up her immodest clothes, short pants, skimpy undershirts, etc... To protect and preserve the soldiers and the hostages... Remember—when you discipline yourself, the Holy One blessed be he withholds punishment thanks to you."
In response, young women shared hundreds of videos in which they take up that call. “I tore up one piece of clothing; I am doing my best”; “I shredded all my immodest clothes; with God's help, I will save one more soldier.”
This campaign to further gendered oppression has not been limited to TikTok and has even endangered lives. In one incident, women were not allowed to enter a bomb shelter used as a synagogue during an air raid siren in Tel Aviv. In another incident involving a shelter-turned-synagogue, women were told to remain in the hallway outside, which was more vulnerable to the falling missiles.
A common response to the trends outlined here is to dismiss them as negligible and anecdotal, or to claim that to focus on them is to draw attention away from the central issues currently facing Israeli society. It has always been easy to trivialize gender issues, yet this a grave mistake—one that Israeli liberals have repeatedly made, leading them to underestimate the determination of their illiberal and political extremist foes. For instance, this is how secular Israelis have not noticed that social-studies curriculums in their children's schools have been effectively hijacked by right-wing and religious propaganda. The same shortsightedness is also evident in the liberals' failure to recognize the centrality of gender and sexuality issues in the ideology of those attempting to sabotage Israel's democracy.
(Again, the parallels to US and Canadian political troubles are profound, no?)
But misogyny isn’t an issue solely from religious extremists.
The summer before this slaughter, the IDF already had serious problems. Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi had openly criticized Netanyahu in light of the judicial-reform protests, expressing deep concern that the PM was sacrificing military fitness by advancing his judicial-reform bill (which would primarily serve the interests of religious extremists and his own skin, as a PM facing multiple corruption trials). Reservists were refusing to show up for duty, out of protest for the state.
Then there were the spotters: a female-driven position in the IDF, with work that involved closely monitoring the border and reporting any unusual activity therein.
That they did, but the concerns they raised about signs of a mounting attack by Hamas in the weeks leading up to October 7 were flatly dismissed, and many strongly feel that a broader culture of sexism, a dismissal of their work as less important than that of male soldiers, was responsible. There is a painful “what if” sown into this story, but that general attitude toward women is also important to keep in mind when we talk about the false narratives that emerged on October 7—and more to the point, the profound neglect of investigative processes that the victims that day deserved.
Now the stage is set.
We have a country with a range of secular and religious groups with competing political agendas and everyday desires (just like our own). We have a country, too, where women are complexly positioned in secular and religious life—and not always in ways that prioritize them as people of equal consideration. And we have a volunteer core of first-responders shaped by more messianic and otherwise ultra-Orthodox members, along with an IDF contingent whose number one duty is to the mission.
The beginning of multiple traumas
Then, in the early hours of October 7, Hamas and its allies surged across the Gaza-Israel border at multiple entry-points. Although they headed for many military targets, their attack path also brought them into multiple kibbutzim near the border, where they kidnapped some civilians, murdered others, and were in some cases holed up in Israeli homes with hostages for longer standoffs with the IDF.
In one case, on the way to Re’im’s military base, Hamas forces passed through a rave, the Supernova Sukkot Gathering (Nova), and slaughtered the largest concentration of civilians murdered that day. Most attendees (including teenagers sneaking around the age restriction) had only received the location a day or two in advance; artists knew two weeks in advance that their pop-up festival would be held so close to the border. There were nowhere near enough security forces on hand to protect the rest.
Because it took many hours for IDF to show up at this event (or at Be’er, Kfar Aza, and Nir Oz), Nova has been the site of particularly painful narrative spin, including conspiracy theories about the government leaving them to die, as sacrificial lambs for the coming slaughter; and victim-blaming of these young people for holding their open-air festival so close to the border in the first place. There is also a complex array of discourse tying this site into comments about the “Hannibal Protocol”, an IDF practice of shooting captured citizens to avoid future hostages, which was joined with the fact that IDF was responsible for some civilian casualties (especially at Be’eri) to spin an entirely deranged story about how all the civilians were killed by Israel.
I mention these conspiracy theories to highlight how much general untruth was circulating—and would continue to circulate—in the media then and now. The many hours it took for IDF to arrive and secure certain sites also created a huge gap in formal event logs, which provided significant narrative “real estate” for all kinds of stories about what might have transpired in the course of these brutal attacks.
The length of this ordeal also matters because Netanyahu immediately went to war on Hamas in Gaza, bombing the strip long before any of these sites in Israel were secure. His first round of mission objectives didn’t even include “the hostages”, because there was still no clear sense of how many had been killed or taken. From the outset, his primary objective was victory over Hamas—and so, there was no time for locals to process in full what had happened, let alone to grieve, before the slaughter of Israeli civilians and foreign nationals was added to by attacks on Gaza that right away killed civilians and combatants there, too.
I’ve mentioned this many times before, but this is especially where October 7 differs from 9/11. In the US, when the country was attacked, it would be three weeks before the first aerial campaigns started in Afghanistan, on October 7, 2001. That was three weeks for US citizens to populate their lists of the missing and the dead, to memorialize the fallen and celebrate first-responders, and to discuss how best to respond to their grief.
The geopolitical landscape of Israel and Gaza afforded no one a similar reprieve. People in Israel and the diaspora alike were frantically calling their families, trying to figure out who was alive or dead or taken, while word of complementary killings of Gazan civilians were starting to make their way into international news reports, too.
This created the first of many ideological and emotional schisms that would shape the narrative in the coming days and weeks: the anguish of people fearing for loved ones in Israel, and also furious that the world had the audacity to care about whatever their government did to retaliate when their own had just been attacked.
The sense of betrayal that Israelis felt, when progressives seemed to skip past the part where their own people had been brutally slaughtered and kidnapped—civilians! festival-goers! people with families in their homes!—to criticize the Israeli government for waging total war right away, would estrange many from the rest of the world in the coming days. Yes, yes, the Israeli government was saying pretty genocidal things—Gallant calling for a total siege, denying food and water and electricity to everyone; President Isaac Herzog asserting that everyone in Gaza was culpable; Netanyahu invoking Amalek (a people ordered in the Hebrew Bible to be killed down to the last child and bit of livestock) in his depiction of the current war—but didn’t the West have the decency to see how much pain Israelis were feeling?
It was in this emotional fugue state, this vicious twinned sense of abandonment by the world and need to justify the extremism of Israel’s response to their attackers, that the first round of false narratives emerged. And the next. And the next.
And if I have dwelt awhile on the importance of women’s rights before getting to this part, it’s only because a very common site of justification for retaliatory violence comes from contriving grandiose stories of horror inflicted on women and children.
Protecting “women and children” has been used to justify the slaughter of Indigenous people, Black people, and other persons of colour, for a long time in the West. White men in particular have been very good at suddenly giving a hoot about harm done to women and children in their vicinity if the harm was done by an outsider.
So even if the West has a history of dismissing violence against Jewish people, it also resonates with this vocabulary of “protecting women”—at least, among allies.
It’s not surprising in the slightest, then, that the sordid tales soon to be spun by ZAKA volunteers and IDF personnel arriving at the scenes of the dead would focus on related themes. It wouldn’t even always be intentional, as we’ll see in one example of a volunteer who retracted his claim once he was given evidence that he’d been in error. But it was in the air. The horror of this day had to take precedence over global horror over Israel’s response—and for that, outsiders had to understand how Israelis felt.
Even if this meant telling false stories about the dead.
False narratives from October 7
We now know that the following claims were wrong:
There were no “forty babies beheaded” at Kfar Aza. The youngest to die at that site, according to Israeli civic records, was 14. His name was Yiftah Kutz. The myth might have originated with David Ben Zion, Deputy Commander of Unit 71 and leader of a settler collective in the West Bank, who earlier that year called for a whole Palestinian village to be wiped out in retaliation for the killing of two Israelis. The myth was certainly first shared by i24’s Nicole Zedek, a young journalist whose visibly shaken demeanour while relating what she’d heard made the story credible to other news outlets, which spread the false narrative so widely that US President Joe Biden would repeat it for months.
There were no incinerated babies, least of all one tossed into an oven, as the first-responder Asher Moskowitz reported for his emergency service, Hatzalah, and as Hatzalah founder Eli Beer repeated at a Republican Jewish Coalition event in the US. There was a 10-month-old shot in the arms of a parent, and a pregnant Bedouin woman who died of her injuries in hospital, where her child was born and died, too. Their names, respectively, were Mila Cohen and Abu Qrenat (none listed for the newborn); Mila died with her father Ohad, and they were buried alongside her grandmother Yona, who died elsewhere in the kibbutz that day. But this fabricated story about a baby in an oven was especially painful for people in the region, because Palestinians tell a story of how Jewish soldiers tossed a child into a baker’s oven during the purge of Deir Yassin in 1948. The child’s name was Abdul Rauf. In 2015, a Palestinian toddler was also killed by Hilltop Youth, who then went on to gloat that little Ali Dawabsheh was “on the grill”.
There was no incident of “two piles of 10 children each … tied to the back, burned to death”, as Yossi Landau of ZAKA claimed for Western media. Nor did an IDF soldier’s claim of eight babies killed in a Be’eri nursery hold up, or the claim of a Holocaust survivor named Jenya being slaughtered there. The kibbutz pushed back on both lies, and a Channel 13 Israeli journalist reported on the correction.
There was also no rape of two teens in a bedroom in Be’eri, as first claimed by a paramedic. Their bodies were recorded on footage that finally gave their kibbutz this peace of mind, at least. Their names were Yahel and Noiya Sharabi, and they were found embracing their mother, Lianne, not alone and further violated.
Another rape of a young woman in Be’eri, presumed because a first responder found her in a state of undress, did not happen. Her state of undress came from IDF moving her body while checking for booby-traps. Her name doesn’t seem to have been disclosed—a small blessing for Be’eri, to have at least that much peace.
There was no pregnant woman slaughtered with her belly cut open. Yossi Landau thought he had seen such a thing, and even when a fellow volunteer told him that he was mistaken—that there was only a large woman near some cable—Landau doubled down on his narrative, sharing it widely. Shari Mendes then repeated the lie, embellishing the story with a decapitated fetus. Mendes was an IDF reservist in a rabbinical unit, and responsible for funeral preparations in the morgue. Mendes had no credentials with which to determine the presence of rape, but in later interviews claimed that shattered pelvises and broken bones (common injuries from other violence in war scenarios) were obvious signs of it.
There was no rape of Gal Abdush, despite a sensational New York Times article published on December 28, which contained many such extreme claims. Anat Schwartz, an Israeli film-maker who guided the piece, tried to pressure the family to make greater public use of their loved one’s death, but the family had a series of texts that solidify for them that their loved one was killed by grenade without undergoing sexual torture first (there was only a nine-minute window between Abdush’s last text and her husband’s report that she was dead).
There is also the story of a mass rape involving multiple women tortured using multiple implements, with body parts cut off and tossed about before slaughter, by a group of men apparently carrying the heads of other women around as trophies. This elaborate claim, which first emerged in November 8 and expanded over the next two months, has not been matched to any bodies or similar evidence from that day.
From a Hebrew-language Haaretz article,
According to [Superintendent] Edri, S witnessed the rape and murder of at least two women at a Nova party, as well as the mutilation of corpses. Haaretz learned that the police thoroughly checked the details of the testimony and found it to be very reliable. However, investigators were unable to identify the women who, according to the testimony of S. and other eyewitnesses, were raped and murdered. “I have circumstantial evidence, but in the end, my duty is to find support for [this] version and the identity of the victims,” said Adri, “At this stage I don't have specific bodies.”
More recently, there was also a false suicide note, drummed up to imagine a young man at Nova who later killed himself because he couldn’t bear to go on after having failed to save a beloved friend from a brutal rape and murder at the festival.
And there were more quotidian leaps to tales of extreme violence, too.
Yossi Landau spun a tale for reporters of a family tied up around the table, having sat down for a meal and instead being tortured in one another’s presence—a narrative impossible to confirm from forensic evidence, even if he had been properly trained for such work (which he wasn’t; ZAKA staff admitted that they were trained quickly and removed the bodies in a minute or two each, and Landau himself has said on a few occasions that he was using his imagination to interpret the scenes).
At least one photo added to Hamas-Massacre.Net, which purported to show a violated person at Nova, was a doctored image from another site you really don’t need to visit if you don’t want to traumatize yourself: a 2022 post on a Japanese website, filled with dead Kurdish women. Max Blumenthal asserts that the Israeli Foreign Office first posted the doctored Nova photo; it’s since been taken down, but another image on Hamas-Massacre, of a charred, bound woman, still has a caption claiming that she was raped, when one cannot make that determination on sight alone. (And also, isn’t it enough that she was bound and burned to death? Why isn’t that enough?)
An infamous story of rape was also spun around a hostage seen moved from the back to the front of a vehicle. The large dark stain on the seat of her pants was immediately presumed to be evidence of a violent rape, with zero time or consideration given to other possibilities (sitting in blood, especially) that would better account for how she moved and the overall shape of the stain. I have no idea if this poor young woman was assaulted, but I do know that leaping from the sight of a large dark stain amid a bloodbath to the most sordid possible conclusion for this victim was instantaneous; the idea was weaponized right away, as war fodder, without any more careful review.
Her name is Naama Levy. She is still a hostage of Hamas.
This isn’t a comprehensive list, but it covers a range of false narratives that had different origins, scales, and motivations. All of them help us to understand something about ourselves, as human beings, and deserve to be read in that light, while we try our best to recuperate the memories of the dead. These deaths were enough, and needed no embellishment to matter; furthermore, these people deserved better than to have false narratives about them used as props in a greater war.
The struggle for evidence
I watched the first public briefing from Israel’s forensic unit, on October 16, back when it went up. I saw the struggle these workers were undergoing, while swamped not only by the staggering number of bodies they needed to identify, but also by a torrent of speculation it was on them to confirm or deny. Chen Kugel was the more guarded of the group, when commenting on his team’s discoveries, but some of his associates were much more credulous, and one, Nurit Bublil, insisted on sharing the story of a beheaded baby, even though this was simply something she’d heard from someone else. That forensic worker would go on in future interviews to tell elaborate stories that said more about her trauma than what the evidence fully supported.
And she wasn’t alone in being swept up in the overall chaos, horror, and trauma of the moment. As noted above, one of these stories comes with an explicit retraction by the person responsible for it. That’s the story told by ZAKA Commander Chaim Otmazgin, who thought he’d seen a raped woman, but had only seen a woman whose pants slid off while IDF moved her body. Nevertheless, he shared what he thought he’d seen with Knesset in a national address—as he later put it, because he couldn’t imagine a different way of interpreting the evidence, until one was given to him.
This speaks to a much broader, messier culture of response. As PBS later reported,
As first responders worked, rocket fire from Gaza boomed overhead. Volunteers paused and crouched when air raid sirens blared. They used anything they could find to move bodies—even shopping carts. “We worked a minute and a half per body, from the moment we touch it to the moment it is on the truck,” said Otmazgin, commander of special units with ZAKA.
Peretz, a U.S.-based artist [and fellow ZAKA volunteer], said the volunteers weren’t there to do forensic work; he thought the soldiers who cleared the houses of explosives beforehand were handling that process. But the Israeli military told the AP that the army did not do any forensic work in the wake of Oct. 7.
Bukjin said police forensics teams were mostly focused on the southern cities of Sderot and Ofakim. Otmazgin said forensics workers were present in the kibbutzim but spread thin and could not follow standard—and painstaking—protocols because of the scale of the attack. He said forensics teams in the area mostly instructed ZAKA on how to help identify the bodies.
That means that bodies which might have shown signs of sexual assault could have eluded examination. Instead, they were loaded into body bags, sent to a facility to be identified and dispatched for quick burial.
What’s not listed in this piece, mind you, is the fact that some volunteers took time to stage shots with the remains—like a charred knife set next to a charred skull, to create the narrative of a beheading. Nor does this piece discuss how Israel’s official Twitter account also traded in false imagery, including one shot of a charred lump to support the beheaded-babies narrative, and another of toddlers supposedly killed en masse. This article also doesn’t discuss the grand interviews and other public-speaking engagements I mentioned, in which ZAKA and other emergency teams made wild claims about the events that must have befallen families on October 7.
However, the charitable Western slant in that PBS article aligns with what I wrote at the time, on an older version of OnlySky (which has now transformed in its mission, with most of my articles deleted—including a number of relevant ones from October through December; I’ll rehouse them eventually). In those four paragraphs, you get a real sense for the amount of work done under incredible duress by people untrained for forensic assessment, and who were rushing (at least some of the time) to get these bodies identified and buried quickly, in keeping with Jewish cultural standards.
That was the generous reading I, too, offered for some of the blatant falsehoods I noted back then—because I’ve certainly never worked in the middle of a massacre, so I can only imagine how my mind would be set off by moving through such a scene.
Nevertheless, local Israeli news was less willing to pull its punches. Haaretz in particular was furious with ZAKA: the shoddy quality of its field work, its wild claims, and its presence at these crime sites at all (a state of affairs strongly intimated as having something to do with Netanyahu’s far-right coalition being in power).
The following excerpt from the article is long, but important:
In the first and critical days of the war, the IDF decided to forego the deployment of hundreds of soldiers specifically trained in the identification and collection of human remains in mass casualty incidents. Instead, the Home Front Command chose to use Zaka, a private organization, alongside soldiers in the Military Rabbinate's search unit, known by the acronym Yasar, for the south.
More personnel were necessary, but when the soldiers of the Military Rabbinate's search unit in the north and the Home Front Command's unit for collecting fallen soldiers reported for reserve duty on October 7, they were told they had to wait.
“I have no explanation for why they didn't deploy [the Home Front Command's unit] and our people from the north,” says an officer in Rabbinate's southern search unit.
Officers at the Shura base were also unable to explain why the military didn’t deploy the personnel who had already been called up, all of them combat soldiers who knew how to operate under fire. An officer in the Home Front Command's unit said that his commanders “begged” senior leadership for their deployment but were rebuffed. It wasn’t until the second week of the war that these soldiers began to operate in the area—and even then, not fully.
In the meantime, Zaka volunteers were there. Most of them worked at the sites of murder and destruction from morning to night. However, according to witness accounts, it becomes clear that others were engaged in other activities entirely. As part of the effort to get media exposure, Zaka spread accounts of atrocities that never happened, released sensitive and graphic photos, and acted unprofessionally on the ground.
There was a price for choosing Zaka, say sources at Shura. “We received bags of theirs without documentation, and sometimes with body parts that were unrelated to one another,” says an officer in the camp. Such problems made the identification process very difficult, he says. Some bags came many days after the outbreak of the war," he adds.
One of the volunteers who worked at Shura says: “There were bags with two skulls, bags with two hands, with no way to know which was whose.”
In the following weeks, several hundred cases remained: bags with body parts that had been collected belatedly and which needed to be matched to victims. Some were still unknown as of the time of writing this article. A volunteer from Zaka Jerusalem who serves in the Military Rabbinate says there was a noticeable difference between the professionalism of the soldiers and the Zaka volunteers.
“We arrived at the scene at the beginning of the war, and there was not a body or find in the field that we did not properly document,” he says. “Zaka barely wrote anything on the bags, and you can forget about any documentation.” The same soldier-volunteer pointed an accusing finger at the military, which assigned the task to Zaka.
However, it wasn’t only Zaka personnel who caused problems. An officer in the Military Rabbinate's search unit said that initially, his personnel also failed to record where each body was taken from, which further delayed identification.
“At first, it wasn’t possible to document [everything] because the workload and the pressure were immense,” he says. “But we worked systematically, and later we were asked to do a retrospective reconstruction of our work.”
Later, when bags from the military arrived, the difference was obvious, says a volunteer who worked at the base. “It was obvious that more thorough work was done there,” they say.
Home Front Command soldiers and volunteers from other organizations described negligent work by Zaka in other aspects as well. According to them, on numerous occasions, they approached vehicles and houses with a Zaka sticker stating that the place had been cleared of body parts when that wasn't the case.
“Zaka took part of a body and left the other part in the same house,” says a volunteer at Shura. Someone who toured the kibbutzim of the area with Zaka said that, together with members of the organization, he entered houses that had been labeled as cleared, yet he saw human remains in them.
There are more examples. In the parking lot that was set up in the moshav of Tkuma, where vehicles that were damaged in massacres on roads and near the music festival in Re’im, uncollected body parts were found. “We found parts of bones and other parts there,” a Home Front Command soldier says. “A lot of people here are angry, [asking,] ‘Why did you train us for this, and on the day of reckoning, you didn't let us do the job?”
Even when the soldiers began working, during the second week of the war, they were sent to collect the bodies of terrorists and transport them to the Sde Teiman base in Be’er Sheva. They were also tasked with handling the scenes of attacks on military facilities.
“We asked the commanders why they weren’t letting us enter, and each time we got a different answer,” says a soldier. “One time they told us, ‘You’ve been trained for earthquakes.’ Another time, they said they didn’t want to risk the lives of soldiers, and yet another time they explained to us that the commanding general gave [the mission] to the IDF's national rescue team, one of whose members is also a senior member of Zaka.”
He adds: “Had we worked the way they taught us, we could have spared many people unnecessary suffering [and] bring [the victims] to burial much sooner.” Several Zaka volunteers admitted to Haaretz that the work would have been better, faster, and more precise had the soldiers worked alongside them.
The reprehensible outsourcing of critical forensic work to this highly religious private group is especially painful when paired with Netanyahu’s flat-out refusal of access to these crime scenes by trained UN specialists. It is still a commonly repeated talking point that the UN was delayed in its issuance of a condemnation of rape on October 7—even though the UN was not allowed to review war-crimes evidence until it had been filtered through Israeli government processes, and well after any possible initial forensics work had been so thoroughly damaged by ZAKA volunteers.
And as I’ve mentioned before, this was an exceptionally good strategy on a political level, because Israel knew full well that the UN wouldn’t support its war in Gaza (the UN and Israel fundamentally disagree on Israel’s obligations in Gaza and the West Bank, so it had to adopt a narrative of “the UN as the enemy” to shore up other allies).
But on a pragmatic level, this diplomatic gambit meant that the usual processes used to ensure the preservation of evidence of violence against women (and other war crimes) were shattered. IDF didn’t do forensics. ZAKA didn’t (couldn’t!) do forensics, either. And Israel’s national forensics department would then waver for weeks between issuing just enough evidence to lend vague credence to government narratives, while also stressing that its primary job was identification of the bodies to return them to families for swift burial—not extensive investigations for assault.
Women’s groups in Israel would be left pleading for weeks for Israel’s police and government to open formal investigations and conduct related interviews, because Israel’s warmongers were more interested in spinning the story for political ends, and not actually in respecting their citizens enough to honour this tragedy with a genuine investigation into the truth about what happened that day.
And even when the sex crimes investigation started? Early anonymous interviews quickly grew into wilder and wilder tales that, like the notoriously debunked New York Times piece, were more often employed in service to the war effort than to the work of memorializing what actually happened on October 7—at cost to the dignity of the victims, and at cost to the ongoing grief-process for their families and communities.
It’s no surprise, then, that by the time the UN was allowed on-the-ground access, its report was left to note how hard it had been to find evidence at all, because
The mission team also faced specific challenges in gathering and verifying information on the occurrence of conflict-related sexual violence. The main challenge was the limited number of and access to survivors/victims of sexual violence, and to survivors and witnesses of the 7 October attacks. While the mission team was able to meet with some released hostages as well as with some survivors and witnesses of the attacks, it did not meet with any survivor/victim of sexual violence from 7 October despite concerted efforts encouraging them to come forward. The mission team was made aware of a small number of survivors who are undergoing specialized treatment and still experiencing an overwhelming level of trauma. Further, the internal displacement of several communities from the Gaza periphery to other locations, the relocation of survivors of the Nova music festival attacks both internally and to third countries as well as the deployment of 7 October first responders from the military forces to combat, hindered access to first-hand information.
The lack of trust by survivors of the 7 October attacks and families of hostages in national institutions and international organizations, such as the United Nations, as well as the national and international media scrutiny of those who made their accounts public, hindered access to survivors of the attacks, including potential survivors/victims of sexual violence.
The absence of comprehensive forensic evidence limited the mission team’s ability to draw definitive forensic conclusions in many instances. This was compounded by evidence being spread among various agencies and limited organization of the material, and the fact that the process of linking individuals with specific photos and videos is still ongoing. The inaccurate and unreliable forensic interpretations by some non-professionals also represented a challenge.
Lastly, the mission took place over a limited period of two and a half weeks, and, in a context for Israel, where no dedicated UN country team or infrastructure is operational. Considering the scale and magnitude of the attacks, and the range of locations and the high number of casualties, the mission team could not comprehensively cover the full range of the situation.
This isn’t to say that rape didn’t happen—the above report mentions some evidence of sexual violence among murder victims, as suggested to investigators by the positions of dead bodies, torn clothes, and the presence of blood near genitals.
But what happened that day will forever remain shrouded by uncertainty, thanks to a shameful burst of early and false storytelling that not only leapt ahead of facts, but trampled over them, too. The dead didn’t ever really seem to matter here, even when the most sordid possible stories about them were relentlessly blasted on global news.
Humanist lessons from the horror of lies
But if that aforementioned PBS article was a touch too generous with first-responders—like my own writing, last year—it still speaks well to the overall sense of derangement, and high level of susceptibility to rumour, that might effortlessly consume people tasked with moving through the visceral trauma of so much death and destruction. This is something I highlighted last year, too: how human we are, and how dangerous it is to ascribe purely insidious motives even to our worst actions.
I don’t know what was going through the mind of the ZAKA volunteer who claimed that he’d seen forty beheaded babies, but I can guess that his actions were informed by a much longer-standing body of ethnic prejudices compounded by the physical stress and overwhelming trauma of the scenes he was moving through that day. In a less deranged state of mind, he might one day even be ashamed of himself for having spread falsehoods about the dead in his spiritual and ethnic community.
I also don’t think that most of the ultra-Orthodox ZAKA volunteers who claimed “modesty” kept them from taking pictures (i.e, crime-scene evidence) of the women they claimed had been raped or otherwise violated ever realized how “immodest” their eagerness to tell awful tales about violence against women for the camera truly was. I don’t think they realized how vulgar and cruel it is to add, to the already horrendous fact of the murder of women and children, such wild claims about how surely Hamas had raped and otherwise tortured them all first.
I think many of them—these men who are not usually around women at all, thanks to the strictness of their faith practice—were simply consumed by a fear of what could have happened, which was compounded by their own body of ethnic prejudices—and of course, incentivized by general convictions that they were serving a “greater good” by using these deaths to promote their organization’s and country’s wartime cause.
And I don’t think that many of the people who would then repeat these falsehoods, over and over and over for months thereafter, fully realized that they were trampling all over the already horrific memories of the dead, either.
Many have loved ones even now in Israel or Jewish diaspora, and their number one fear is that whatever happens next, in the middle of Netanyahu’s nightmare of an ever-expanding war, is going to have ripple effects that will only cause even more violence and displacement for their nearest and dearest soon enough.
So if this means continuing to share stories of October 7 that are filled with elaborate, long-debunked falsehoods, well… just because they didn’t actually happen doesn’t mean they don’t still reflect an emotional “truth” for those who lived through the days and weeks and months in which many people thought they had.
Especially since no one in this past year has been allowed to grieve properly.
Especially since the slaughter—in Gaza, in the West Bank, in Lebanon, in Syria, in Yemen, and among IDF soldiers—goes on, building its staggering and ever-growing tower of unconscionable dead upon the unconscionable dead from one year past.
We are a long way from being able to do the work of memory-keeping decently.
But in the coming week, as we’re all sure to be exposed to many forms of October 7 commemoration—including posts that will again trade on falsehoods in lieu of respect for actual stories of the dead—we can at least use this moment to recognize how fragile a thing it is to be human; and how easy it is, in the throes of so much unaddressed trauma, for any one of us to be so destructively and heartrendingly wrong.
Be well, be kind, and seek justice where you can.
ML