By Chris Menahan – Information Liberation
Israel Defense Forces on Thursday finally admitted after nine months of lies that the IDF themselves killed Israeli hostages in Kibbutz Be’eri on October 7th by firing an RPG into the home they were held in, shelling them repeatedly with a tank and then unloading on them with a hail of bullets.
Israel previously tried to hide the truth by putting out atrocity propaganda claiming Hamas went around tying up and executing children and killed every hostage themselves.
They’re undoubtedly still lying about the full extent of the slaughter.
The Times of Israel buried the lede at the end of a lengthy article covering just the first part of the IDF’s ongoing probe into their failures on October 7th.
Pessi Cohen’s house
The incident at the home of Pessi Cohen in Be’eri was one of three hostage face-offs between terrorists and security forces amid the October 7 onslaught. The others took place at a home in Ofakim and at the Sderot police station.
Terrorists, from Hamas’s two additional companies, had rounded up civilians in the southern neighborhood of Be’eri and brought them to a single home, Cohen’s. Six were held outside in the yard, while another nine were held inside the house, though one was already dead, according to the probe.
At 3:08 p.m. a first phone call was made to police regarding hostages being held in Be’eri. Due to a miscommunication, the report was forwarded to troops as a hostage situation at Be’eri’s dining hall, and not at Cohen’s home.
At 3:59 p.m., one of the terrorists holding the hostages at Cohen’s home called his superiors in Gaza and told them that the IDF had arrived. The military intercepted this call.
Meanwhile, before knowing that hostages were held in the house, members of the police’s elite Yamam unit fired a shoulder-launched missile toward Cohen’s home after coming under machine gun and RPG fire from it.
It was shortly afterward that the Yamam and Shin Bet security agency realized the house was where hostages were being held, and not the dining hall. As forces surrounded the home, the hostages in the yard were not visible to them.
As Hazan’s tank arrived in the area around 5 p.m., he crushed several Hamas pickup trucks that had apparently been intended by the terrorists to take away the hostages held at Cohen’s home.
At the same time, one of the eight terrorists inside Cohen’s home surrendered to Israeli forces, using one of the survivors, Yasmin Porat, as a human shield as he exited the house. This saved her life.
Brig. Gen. Hiram, by then in Be’eri but not at the house, gave approval to fire light tank shells near and at the building to pressure the terrorists inside to surrender.
At 5:33 p.m., Yamam and Shin Bet commanders ordered Hazan’s tank to fire the first light tank shell near the building. The first shell struck the pathway leading to the home.
At 6 p.m., Hiram arrived at Cohen’s home, and spoke to the Yamam commander there, ordering them to finish within 40 minutes as the sun was setting. After about 20 minutes, Hiram left to handle other incidents in Be’eri.
At 6:26 p.m., a call was made by Hamas commanders in Gaza to the terrorists at Cohen’s home, ordering them to run away. A minute later, at 6:27 p.m., a second light tank shell was launched at the pathway.
At 6:32 p.m., the terrorists told their commanders in Gaza that they would fight to the death, and two minutes later a third shell was launched at the pathway.
This shell bounced off the ground and struck just above the doorway of Cohen’s home, according to the probe. As a result of the impact, shrapnel killed hostage Adi Dagan, 68, and injured his wife, Hadas Dagan, 70.
A fourth shell was launched at 6:57 p.m., targeting the roof. According to the probe, this was also to apply pressure on the terrorists to release the hostages, and not aimed at harming anyone inside.
The Times of Israel doesn’t mention that Gen. Hiram blatantly lied about what took place, as the Electronic Intifada reported back in December:
ToI’s report continues:
Meanwhile, fighting continued in surrounding homes, and troops were also coming under fire from where the hostages were held. Among those involved in attempting to reach the hostages was Chief Inspector Arnon Zmora (he was killed months later during a successful hostage rescue mission in the Gaza Strip in June).
At 7:57 p.m., a long burst of gunfire was heard by the forces, and then silence with no sound of the hostages. The special forces then decided to enter the home, engaging in a gun battle with the remaining terrorists inside. Only one of the hostages, Hadas Dagan, survived the exchange of fire. The causes of death of the 13 other hostages have not been definitively identified, though many were apparently killed by gunfire.
Israel is clearly purposefully trickling these stories out and trying to paint the IDF’s actions in the best possible light to try and minimize their impact.
The IDF gave Haaretz permission to release a story on Sunday admitting Israel killed their own people under the “Hannibal Directive.”
The controlled media in America completely ignored the revelations, as Mondoweiss reported on Wednesday:
How [Israel admitting to killing their own people on Oct 7] is not news is incomprehensible. But, three days later, in the New York Times: not a word. The Washington Post: nothing. CNN: nothing. National Public Radio: nada.
Instead, if you plug “Hannibal” into the search engines at these media sites, the results only mention “Hannibal Lecter,” the fictional serial killer who was the subject of a book and popular film.
This is not entirely surprising as the NY Times laundered the Israeli government’s “Hamas mass rape” hoax to provide cover for their assault on Gaza, just as they pushed the lie Iraq had WMDs to con America into the war in Iraq for Israel.
CNN was also instrumental in pushing the Israeli government’s lies:
If our country wasn’t under occupation, the Department of Justice would launch an investigation into both the NY Times and CNN to learn the full extent of their complicity with the Israeli government in lying to the American people to con us into supporting their war.
Instead, because we are under occupation, nothing will come of it and everyone reporting on it will be accused of “antisemitism.”