By MAX BLUMENTHAL – The Grey Zone
Founded by a serial rapist known as the “Haredi Jeffrey Epstein,” Israeli ultra-Orthodox rescue group ZAKA is responsible for some of the most obscene post-October 7 atrocity fabrications, from beheaded babies to “mass rape” to a fetus cut from its mother.
Secretary of State Tony Blinken and President Joseph Biden have each echoed demonstrably false ZAKA testimonies about Hamas atrocities.
Marred by allegations of financial fraud, ZAKA is leveraging October 7 publicity to raise unprecedented sums of cash.
Its rival, United Hatzalah, has spun out bogus tales of babies baked in ovens as it closes in on a $50 million fundraising goal.
During an October 31 Senate hearing on Israel’s war in Gaza, Secretary of State Antony Blinken offered his rationale for rejecting a ceasefire. Summoning as much emotion as a dour Democratic Party operative could muster, Blinken conjured up a gruesome scene intended to illustrate the savagery of Hamas, and the impossibility of negotiations with such an organization: “A young boy and girl, 6 and 8 years old, and their parents around the breakfast table,” Blinken intoned. “The father’s eye gouged out in front of his kids. The mother’s breast cut off, the girl’s foot amputated, the boy’s fingers cut off before they were executed.”
The Secretary of State concluded, “That is what this [Israeli] society is dealing with.”
Though Blinken did not state the source of his disturbing claim – and was not prompted to do so by any senator – it matched testimony delivered by Yossi Landau, the head of operations for the southern Israel region of a religious “disaster victim identification” organization called ZAKA. Indeed, Landau has rehashed various forms of the story Blinken referenced since October 12, detailing how Hamas militants viciously mutilated and killed a 6 and 8 year-old child and their parents in Kibbutz Beeri before dining in their home.
Despite the presence of multiple potential witnesses inside Beeri before ZAKA arrived to collect dead bodies, independent testimony corroborating Landau’s claim has yet to surface. Further, there are no recorded deaths of siblings around the age of 6 to 8 in Beeri on October 7. Any record of a young child killed in the manner Landau described is similarly nonexistent, as are photos of the murdered family he described. In fact, the only siblings anywhere close to this age range who died in the community on that day—12-year-old twins Liel and Yanai Hetrzroni—were killed by Israeli tank shelling.
Landau’s story – and by extension, Blinken’s testimony before the Senate – therefore appears to have been spun out of whole cloth; a cynical fabrication intended to dramatize the supposed barbarism of Hamas in order to widen the political space for Israel’s rampage in the Gaza Strip. As this investigation will demonstrate, Landau’s tale was merely one of many tall tales concocted by a small circle of dubious characters who have managed to shape the official narrative of October 7 in Western media.
Though Israeli officials played a central role in Tel Aviv’s misinformation campaign surrounding the events of October 7— falsely claiming, for instance, that the bodies of dead Jewish babies were found dangling from a laundry line in one kibbutz—the most inflammatory allegations have emerged from a collection of ultra-Orthodox volunteer organizations such as ZAKA. Though ZAKA specializes “in body collection and disposal,” the group has no coronary credentials and is staffed by droves of poorly trained volunteers.
From “confirming” the fraudulent story of beheaded babies found in a kibbutz to blatantly inventing others about Hamas fighters cutting fetuses out of pregnant women’s bodies, severing a little girl’s arm, and baking a baby in an oven, ZAKA and rival groups have demonstrated a remarkable gift for seeding the media with depraved tales of alleged Hamas brutality. In doing so, they have armed Western leaders like Blinken and President Joe Biden with the narrative they would weaponize in order to block ceasefire proposals and rearm a military that has killed over 15,000 civilians in Gaza in less than two months.
ZAKA now sits at the center of the Tel Aviv’s campaign to convince the world that Hamas not only raped Israeli women on October 7, but has continued to abuse female hostages ever since. Indeed, Israel’s newly-unveiled, factually challenged “Civil Commission on Oct. 7th Crimes by Hamas against Women and Children” is heavily dependent on graphic second-hand claims provided by ZAKA. Yet it has been unable to produce a single firsthand testimony or video proving allegations of mass rape.
Legacy media outlets have since repeated the group’s dubious allegations, with the UK’s Sunday Times, for example, dutifully quoting a senior ZAKA staffer who claimed: “it was clear they were trying to spread as much horror as they could — to kill, to burn alive, to rape.”
ZAKA’s presence at the heart of a high-level rape investigation, however, is fraught with irony. Until recently, Israeli media coverage of the organization largely focused on gruesome sex crimes committed by its founder, ultra-Orthodox bigwig Yehuda Meshi-Zahav. Known among Jerusalem’s Orthodox community as “the Haredi Jeffrey Epstein” due to his well-documented penchant for raping young people of both sexes, Meshi-Zahav’s decades-long rampage of sexual abuse was undoubtedly known to ZAKA staffers—and only came to an end following his suicide.
In addition to being a serial rapist, ZAKA’s longtime leader was a profligate hustler, financing a lavish lifestyle with millions of dollars illegally pocketed from his organization. Brad Pearce, an independent scholar who published an extensive profile of ZAKA’s corruption in October 2023, described the group as “the most opaque and suspicious non-governmental organization I have ever investigated.”
Since its volunteers first emerged on the streets of Israel on their trademark motorbikes during the 1990s, ZAKA has engaged in a publicity war with rival ultra-Orthodox rescue groups such as United Hatzalah in a bid for millions from wealthy Jewish donors abroad. The competition between these organizations appears to be driving the stream of fake atrocity stories pouring in from both volunteer groups. The more promotion each outfit generates from the media and Western leaders, the more likely they are to smash their own fundraising goals.
The shock of October 7 has indeed proven a fundraising bonanza for these notoriously unscrupulous religious organizations, enabling them to transform the Israeli government, Western media outlets such as CNN, and the Biden administration into free publicity agents.
A scene from ZAKA’s November 19, 2023 fundraising concert in New York City, which raised over $1 million