Enough time has passed since October 7 for Israeli media to state what we’ve been saying for over three months, which is that Israel’s military and political leadership fabricated many of the grisliest Hamas atrocities in order to generate support for the genocidal war it planned in Gaza. Here, a Channel 13 panel including Mickey Rosenfeld, the longtime Israeli police spokesman who spread many such lies after October 7, acknowledges that lurid stories of babies hung on clotheslines, a fetus cut from a pregnant woman, a baby baked in an oven, and more were invented “to increase the magnitude of hatred for Hamas.” As Rosenfeld put it, “The war is not only military, not only political, it’s mainly media.” Channel 13 manages to elicit a statement of contrition from the IDF spokesman, who apologizes for “describ[ing] a reality that didn’t happen.” Of course, confessions like these are easy when the damage has already been done.
