Debunking Myths Of October 7th And The Zionist War Against Palestine

This October 7th we will be bombarded with propaganda asserting Israeli righteousness amid three years of ongoing genocide in Gaza, so let’s set the record straight.

Republished from The Free Thought Project

Today, October 7th, 2026, will officially mark three years since the beginning of a non-stop genocide against the Palestinian enclave of Gaza.

Today, the airwaves will be full of relentless propaganda falsely asserting the victimhood of Israel and using every confounded twist of logic imaginable to paint the occupiers as the oppressed. Media will be rife with discourse that attempts to frame the slaughter of innocent people as righteous, with a collective amnesia that pretends to assert that all of this began only three years ago.

This disingenuous distortion of reality shouldn’t be allowed to stand. So allow us to counteract that narrative by comparing the myths with the actual facts.

Myth: October 7th was a surprise attack.

Fact: In the last three years copious amounts of information have come out conclusively proving that October 7th was, in fact, not only not a surprise, but it was an outright false flag attack.

An investigation from the Israeli news outlet Haaretz recently confirmed that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had foreknowledge of the impending attacks, deliberately doing nothing to prevent them. This corroborates previously revealed information that the Israeli Prime Minister was given express warning from neighboring intelligence agencies that, if acted upon, would have prevented the attacks from happening.

Myth: The casualties of October 7th were entirely inflicted by Hamas.

Fact: While it is true that Hamas did kill many Israelis during the attack, it is incorrect to say that they were solely responsible for Israeli casualties. Several investigative reports in the years since, as well as admissions from Israeli officials themselves, openly acknowledge that the Israeli military authorized the Hannibal directive during the attack — a protocol that authorizes the Israeli military to kill their own people.

The official stated purpose of the Hannibal directive is to prevent the capture of Israelis, operating under the supposition that it is better to be killed than captured. In practice, however, the Hannibal directive is utilized by Israel as a means of killing its own citizens to then falsely attribute the deaths to groups such as Hamas as a means to further justify violent actions against Palestinians.

Myth: Hamas committed mass rapes and the beheading of babies during the October 7th attack.

Fact: This is a classic example of atrocity propaganda. Numerous investigations, including by Israeli sources, have found no credible evidence of any such atrocities taking place during October 7th. Such claims were deliberately spread as a part of a mass propaganda campaign to manufacture justification for the Gaza genocide.

Myth: After taking several Israelis hostage, Hamas refused to let them go even when concessions were made during peace negotiations.

Fact: Another blatant example of disinformation. Reports indicate that Hamas leaders immediately offered several times to release all of their hostages so long as basic conditions were met by the Israelis to secure the safety of Palestinian civilians. It is on record that Israel refused to accept these terms.

Now that we’ve debunked some of the primary myths surrounding October 7th itself, allow us to focus on some of the historical context and myths that continue to circulate contributing to the spread of disinformation promoting the Zionist narrative.

Myth: Hamas is a terrorist organization started by Palestinians who hate Israel for the express purpose of committing violence against Israelis.

Fact: Hamas is a creation of Israeli intelligence. Similar to how other terrorist organizations the likes of Al Qaeda and ISIS exist as a creation of the Central Intelligence Agency in the US, the formation of Hamas was largely fomented by Israel’s Mossad.

It is a documented fact of historical record that Israeli intelligence deliberately empowered Hamas over more secular, less militant, Palestinian political organizations so that the Israeli government could use the political prominence of Hamas as a justification for enacting more violence against the Palestinian people.

Previous investigations by Haaretz have found that Benjamin Netanyahu himself personally oversaw the transfer of funds to Hamas to ensure they remained in power, including a recent investigation finding that a request was made by the Israeli government to increase funds to Hamas just a week before the October 7th attack.

Myth: Jews and Muslims have historically never been able to coexist peacefully, particularly in Palestine.

Fact: Hostilities between Palestinian and Israeli people are a relatively modern invention. For centuries Muslims, Jews, and Christians alike all lived relatively peacefully and cooperatively in the Palestinian territory.

It is a matter of historical record that during the reign of the Ottoman Empire, a Muslim caliphate, the Ottoman Turks willfully encouraged and embraced the immigration of Jews into Ottoman territory after the Jewish people experienced decades of discrimination from European countries.

Hostilities began shortly following the end of World War 1, after the Ottoman Empire dissolved and Great Britain seized control of the Palestinian territory.

British authorities had officially pledged to grant the Palestinian people their independence, but quickly betrayed this agreement in the favor of Zionist lobbying groups in Britain.

In 1917, at the behest of a Zionist campaign headed by Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild, the openly anti-Semitic British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour put forth what is known as the Balfour Declaration — an intentionally racist anti-jewish policy that supported the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine specifically to encourage the expulsion of Jews from Britain and other Western countries. Zionist groups, who have historically never cared about the safety or the security of the Jewish people, seized upon the opportunity.

Myth: The Israeli people have the right to occupy Palestine because it is their historic homeland.

Fact: The settlers who currently occupy Palestine under the Israeli colonial project are not ethnically ancestral semitic Jews, and have no rightful claim to the ownership of that territory.

History shows that the majority of Israeli settlers, particularly in the early days of Zionist colonialism, are of European descent, specifically from a group known as the Ashkenazi — a group of non-semitic ethnic eastern Europeans. While they may follow the Judaic religion, they are not ethnically Jewish semites.

Myth: All Jews are zionists, and all zionists are Jews.

Fact: This is a particularly pervasive piece of anti-jewish propaganda that is deliberately spread by zionists.

Numerous Jewish organizations outright reject the existence of Zionism as being incompatible with Judaism. Several Orthodox Jewish groups even go so far as to condemn the existence of Israel as a violation of Talmudic law, referring to the Zionist colonial project specifically as an abomination to God, since Jewish religious texts expressly specifies that a historic homeland for the Jewish people can only be granted upon the return of their Messiah.

Several Jewish organizations, most of which overlap in their opposition to Zionism, have also openly taken a stance against Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the decades of apartheid committed against Palestinians.

In regards to the existence of zionism, it is also an incorrect assertion that all zionists are Jews, since Zionism is a political ideology rather than a religious one. In the United States, the majority of zionists are actually Christian nationalists — a sect of religious extremists that promote a narrow interpretation of fundamentalist Christianity, which in part promotes a Judeo-Christian covenant that materializes as support for Zionism.

Ironically, Zionist settlers in the occupied Palestinian territory have a history of attacking Palestinian Christians as well, including destroying ancient churches and Christian holy sites.

The biggest myth of all: This is not a genocide.

Irrefutable fact: Every relevant human rights organization on the planet has characterized what Israel’s Zionist regime has done in Gaza for the last three years as a genocide, exacerbated by numerous war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Prior to the outset of the genocide three years ago, human rights organizations declared conclusively again and again and again and again over the years that Israel’s brutal occupation of the Palestinian people constituted the crime of apartheid.

In October of 2023, shortly after the launch of the genocide, The Free Thought Project provided an extensive historical synopsis elaborating upon the facts of the Israel-Palestine conflict with distinct clarification of the history of Zionist brutalization against the Palestinian peoples.

Analyzing the numbers shows that over the course of the last three years, approximately 1.98 million Gazans have been displaced, while more than 175,000 people have been injured by Israel’s onslaught. More than 75,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been exterminated, including over 21,000 children ― accounting for approximately 31% of the genocide’s total victims. In June of this year, a chilling report documented that Israeli forces have adopted the practice of deliberately targeting children.

Despite an alleged ceasefire being declared in October of 2025, Israeli forces have routinely and consistently violated the ceasefire on nearly a daily basis

As a part of Israel’s strategy to exacerbate the suffering and loss of life of the Palestinian people, 94% of Gaza’s hospitals and medical facilities have been targeted and destroyed.

In addition to the targeted destruction of healthcare, the Israeli onslaught has adopted mass starvation and dehydration among its favored genocidal strategies. Reports have confirmed that Israeli forces have deliberately manufactured a famine to use starvation as a weapon against the people of Gaza. Furthermore, Israel has been condemned by UN investigators for their intentional targeting of Gaza’s water infrastructure, causing a crisis of water insecurity for 90% of the remaining households in Gaza, utilizing dehydration as another weapon of war.

Newly updated Google Earth satellite imagery recently received viral attention as images depicted the total leveling of Gaza after the last three years of bombardment. Characterized as horrific and “apocalyptic levels of destruction”, the images show Gaza completely flattened into rubble.

Today, and every day going forward, as sympathizers of Zionist settler-colonialism and genocide apologists continue to attempt to distort reality into a narrative that seeks to dignify this repugnant atrocity, we must not shy away from standing firm in the facts and confronting their lies with the truth. One day, hopefully soon, they will face accountability for this egregious violation of the human conscience.