How Israel got the media to publish false Palestinian 'rape' confessions
Video "confessions" of "father and son Hamas rapists" admitting to multiple rapes, murders, and kidnappings, do not match the events of October 7, and were likely coerced through torture.
Note: to maximize readership, our investigation below is published here in full and in a shorter version on The Grayzone. Their edit mostly removes the more complex and probabilistic issues, along with different styling and our added explanations on the mechanisms of propaganda.
On May 23, 2024, Britain’s Daily Mail published what it described as “exclusive” interrogation tapes it had been handed by Israeli intelligence. The tabloid claimed the supposed confessions exposed a pair of “father and son Hamas rapists” who had admitted “going house to house carrying out sex attacks and murder.” The proof of this apparent bombshell story consisted of two short snippets of heavily edited footage in which a Palestinian father and son seemingly admit to raping, killing, and kidnapping Israeli civilians from Kibbutz Nir Oz in Israel on October 7th.
The article makes no attempt to verify the content of the confessions (the actual job of journalists), contains no corroborating evidence, nor does it even contain any warning to the readers about the unreliability of confessions of prisoners of war in general and that these specific prisoners (like all Palestinians prisoners since October 7th) have been tortured before their confessions and were denied legal representation or even Red Cross visits.
Propaganda launderer
Natalie Lisbona, the co-author of the Daily Mail article promoting the supposed confession videos, turns out to have been an obscure Israeli-based writer with little prior experience in investigative journalism, stridently anti-Palestinian views and a Twitter timeline featuring a smiling selfie of herself with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at an official British embassy gala in Tel Aviv.
This is an old technique used by governments and other propaganda generators. It is sometimes difficult to get established journalists to publish what is known in media to almost always be clear propaganda and lies (heavily edited video confessions of tortured prisoners of war). As such, you launder the information by using an intermediate: an inexperienced journalist, who is biased in you favor (or you pressure news organizations’ editors or owners, so that when such stories naturally emerge, they wont reject them as they normally would) .
This is another red light available to readers in order to detect propaganda: if a virtually unknown journalist all of the sudden gets front page articles based on information received from propaganda generators (governments, armies, certain NGOs, think tanks, etc.), you are likely reading laundered propaganda. You can also ask this in reverse: if the information is credible and worthy of publishing, why would a government not give it to more established reporters that also have a much larger audience?
Lisbona did not hack a server to get the video confessions or got it from a leaker. It was handed specifically to her by the government of Israel, so that she would publish it in newspapers abroad. The more layers between the propagandist and the propaganda - an unknown journalist publishing in foreign media - the more believable the propaganda becomes to the uninitiated news reader.
Indeed, from basically never having an article of importance published before the war, all of the sudden Lisbona was publishing article after article in papers world-wide, with many exclusives and front-pages, all pro-Israeli and all provided to her by Israeli officials. Here are some examples:
George Galloway backed by pro-Palestinian fake bots » "According to Cyabra, a disinformation tracking company" » Cyabra's founders: Dan Brahmy,
Yossef Daar (Head of Department in Israeli Military Intelligence until 2014) and Ido Shraga - All TLV based. Former CIA director, Mike Pompeo, is on the company’s board of directors.Russia and China ‘manipulating UK public opinion by promoting pro-Palestinian influencers’ » “Research by Cyabra”
Revealed: Iran is recruiting British Muslims to spy on Jews and dissidents of the Tehran regime to gather information that may be used to carry out attacks on UK soil » "Israeli and British officials have separately told the Mail"
EXCLUSIVE to the @MailOnline Hostage family release photo - with permission of intelligence service - where DNA reveals some female hostages were held in Gaza
EXCLUSIVE Hamas will launch guerrilla warfare campaign against the IDF in Gaza after losing HALF of its forces since war broke out - leaving the terror group too weak for sustained battles » "a senior Israeli official has warned"
Foreign Office accused of multimillion-pound cover-up over Palestinian projects » based on "A freedom of information request from NGO Monitor, an Israel-based research institute," [...] "Jonathan Turner, from UK Lawyers for Israel, warned that the Foreign Office is concealing the recipients"
The Sun Gets a Look — Up Close — at an Iranian Missile, and It Is Huge, Even Without Its Warhead » “an IDF officer tells the Sun”
This is the same technique employed by Israel in the New York Times’ scandalous and since-debunked (by us as well) “Screams Without Words” feature, alleging mass sexual violence on October 7. In that article, the unknown biased writer used to launder the propaganda was Anat Schwartz, an ex-intelligence officer of the Israeli army with absolutely no background in journalism, that miraculously got a front page article in one of the most important news papers in the world.
These things do not just happen by accident (surely, not over and over) and are based in media bias and behind-the-scenes relationships between propaganda generators and the people who claim to fight against them - journalists. Indeed, it is the core function of virtually all journalists to spread propaganda (though most of them are not aware of it or believe that if done in the name of justice, as they interpret it, it is legitimate). Just like a corrupt prosecutor is the strongest asset a criminal organization can acquire specifically because he is tasked with fighting it, the very fact that journalists’ job description requires them to expose propaganda, is precisely what makes them the best tool to launder it.
As a propaganda launderer, Lisbona has written and shared many articles about the October 7th attack that have been debunked. For example, she claimed “babies were beheaded and burned alive by Hamas”, “a pregnant woman’s baby was pulled out of her and beheaded”, and that “Hamas and gangs from GAZA raped CORPSES. RAPED CHILDREN.”
None of these things are true but Lisbona has not retracted or even notified any of her readers that her claims were and are false and is still repeating these claims today.
Circular verification
In the same fashion, lacking any corroborating evidence to the video confessions (and likely not even attempting to find it), Lisbona and her co-writer, Nick Pisa, resort to lying to their readers to generate the illusion of verification. They employ a double-lie, creating a closed loop of circular verification. In the first lie, they write:
“The chilling confessions come two months after Pramila Patten, the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict, released a report on sexual violence carried out during the October 7 attacks.
She questioned several victims and said:' What I witnessed in Israel were scenes of unspeakable violence perpetrated with shocking brutality.'“
This lie of omission is designed to make the readers believe the Patten report already concluded rapes occurred on October 7 and that Ms Patten spoke to “several victims” of such sexual attacks. In reality, the report - which was not an investigation to begin with - found no proof of even a single rape (in fact, it debunked two) and the “several victims” the writers mention Ms Patten spoke to, were victims of “regular” violence - not rape or sexual attack victims (no one in Israel has ever claimed they personally were raped on October 7).
The second lie is the more critical of the two and the more extreme and telling of the standards of Lisbona and Pisa (though such lies are standard practice in journalism). The problem with using Ms Patten’s report to deceive the readers into thinking “the chilling confessions” must be true, is that the report explicitly stated no one should use such confessions as they are uncorroborated, the Palestinians confessing in these videos have no legal representation, and were likely tortured.
“The mission team did not consider for the purpose of this report accounts collected by Israeli intelligence bodies, including those related to interrogations of alleged perpetrators, despite some being offered, due to the mission team’s inability in the time allotted to establish the due process rights of the accused person and adequate authentication”. (page 9, article 31)
In their second lie of omission, Lisbona and Pisa simply hide this quote from their readers. Thus the circular verification effect is complete: video confessions that lack any corroboration and are normally not aired in media, are “corroborated” by a UN report that specifically stated no one should use video confessions without corroboration.
Once this circular verification lie is established, other news organizations can spread the content using the fake verification from the original article (which is also common practice in “journalism”).
Investigating the claims in the confessions
Stepping into the shoes of the “journalists” at the Daily Mail and the media at large, we tried to find actual corroboration for the confessions. Our investigation reveals that every crime the father and son admit to in the videos, is either contradicted by the known facts of what transpired on October 7th in Kibbutz Nir Oz or lacks sufficient details to be confirmed or refuted.
We therefore conclude that absent further explanations or evidence from Israel, it is extremely unlikely the confessions are true and they were likely coerced via torture. Here is a summary of our most significant findings:
The father claims he found a couple in their 40s alone in a house in Nir Oz and killed them but no such couple was killed.
The father claims he found a mother and daughter alone in a house and kidnapped them, but no mother and daughter were taken in such circumstances.
The father and son confess to raping and killing a woman in her 30s but no woman in that age range was killed in Nir Oz in circumstances matching the confessions.
The location from which an Israeli man was kidnapped according to the confessions, contradicts his final text messages and his mother’s testimony.
The timeline in the confessions is impossible. If, as described by the son, they arrived at Nir Oz at “about 10” AM, the acts described in the confessions (10 murders, 19-21 kidnappings, breaking into more than 7 houses, and the rape of 2 women) would have to have been committed in minutes if they were to have kidnapped the Israeli man, who wrote his last message, that his captors were “trying to get in”, at 10:08.
Three major contradictions between the confessions were found:
The kidnapping of the Israeli man did not happen according to the father’s confession.
The rape victim was murdered only in the son’s confession.
According to the father, the supposed rape victims was accompanied by 3-4 other men from Gaza when approached by the pair. In the son’s telling, the victim was with an Israeli man, who the father killed.
No corroborating evidence for any of the alleged crimes has been presented, as Israel has released no videos documenting the father and son’s presence in Nir Oz and has not named the victims described in the confessions.
The confessions were very likely extracted via torture, which is known to produce extremely high rates of false confessions.
While the interrogations likely lasted days or more, only 20 minutes have been released and those too are heavily edited with many cuts in critical places.
The confessions describe extremely rare crimes, such as a gang rape by father, son, and uncle. Over-the-top crimes such as these, are common in atrocity propaganda but are extremely rare in real life. This is not impossible but as the saying goes, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
The victimless double murder
In his taped confession, the father, Jamal Hussein Ahmad Radi (47) , tells an interrogator from Israel’s Shin Bet intelligence agency that after entering Nir Oz with his son and brother that morning, the first crime he committed was a double homicide. “In the first house I found a woman and her husband, and we hit them with fire and killed them,” he can be seen saying. “They were in their late 40s,” he adds.
A total of 113 people were killed in or kidnapped from Nir Oz on October 7, but a woman in her 40s is not listed among them. The only two women between the ages of 30 and 60 who were killed in the Kibbutz or who remain in Hamas custody are Tamar Kedem Siman Tov (35) and Maya Goren (56).
Goren was captured or killed around 9:55 am in the kibbutz’s nursery while her husband was still alive an hour later, before being killed by the attackers outside his secure room in their home.
The only other woman anywhere near the age range described, Tamar Kedem Siman Tov, was killed in her safe room, along with her husband, three children, and her mother-in-law.
So, barring any explanations or new evidence from Israel, the first confession of a double murder in Nir Oz does not match any of the victims in the Kibbutz.
The kidnapping of a mysterious mother and daughter
After killing a couple that does not exist in the victims list, the father, Radi, claimed to have moved onto another house. “I found a woman and her daughter and gave them to [Hamas’ military wing] Al-Qassam,” he states in the confession.
Again we will be checking this confession against the database of people kidnapped from or killed in Nir Oz, this time looking for mother-daughter combinations. We then investigated these combinations to find a mother and daughter who were taken from the same house with no one else, to fit the father’s confession - but no such victims exists. The closest matches include:
Irena Tati (73) and her daughter, Yelena Trufanova (50), were kidnapped from Niz Oz and subsequently returned in November’s hostage exchange deal. However, Irena and Yelena were taken from separate houses.
Karina Engel (51) and her daughters - were kidnapped but all three were taken together (and released together in November) along with the father of the family, Ronen, who is still held by Hamas.
Sharon Alony Cunio (34) and her daughters were kidnapped but in an interview with Israeli media she described a drastically different scenario, noting that the family was split among multiple locations, none of which contained a mother and daughter alone. They were returned to Israel in November.
Daniel Alony and her daughter were kidnapped but the pair was taken alongside her sister and her sister’s husband. According to text messages she sent to other family members the morning of October 7, the family surrendered from their safe room to half a dozen members of Hamas – not a single aging father, as claimed in the alleged confession. The pair was repatriated under the terms of the hostage deal.
Ruti Munder (78) and her daughter, Keren Munder (54) were kidnapped (and have since been released) but they were taken from the same house with Ruti’s husband, Avraham.
Doron Katz Asher (34) and her daughters were kidnapped (and have since returned) but they were taken together along with their grandmother.
Tamar Kedem Siman Tov and her daughters were killed but they were in the secure room along with her husband, three children, and her mother-in-law.
As such, barring any explanations or new evidence from Israel, the second confession of the kidnapping of a mother and daughter in Nir Oz does not match any of the victims in the Kibbutz.
The rape claims
In their confessions, the father and son (Abdallah Radi, 18) admit to taking turns raping a woman and then killing her. The son claims he raped another woman without his father but provides no further details and, in the videos released by Israel, is asked no further questions about this rape. As such, this second rape can not be confirmed or debunked but we note that it is odd that Israel would not ask for further details during the investigation or not release these if they exist (given how debated the claim of sexual assaults on October 7th is and how much effort Israel has invested in trying to convince the world the claim is true).
According to the elder Radi’s alleged confession, the supposed gang rape occurred in a house where he saw “a woman in shorts in the living room with a few other men,” who he claimed were from Gaza. The video shows Jamal saying he took the woman to a different room and raped her at gunpoint, while the would-be victim cried.
Initially, Jamal states that he was the only one who participated, but he is contradicted by the interrogator, who insists that he’s lying and informs him that his son confessed to the rape. At this point, after a cut in the video, the father changes his story, and claims his brother and son raped her as well. Jamal goes on to assert that he personally assaulted the woman for about 15 minutes, and tells his Israeli interrogator that his brother and son spent an additional 10-15 minutes raping the supposed victim, before the entire trio left and returned to Gaza.
According to the son’s confession (Telegram video), the woman they raped was “about thirty years old” or “in her early 30s”. Contrary to his father saying he does not know what happened to the woman after they left, his son states his father killed her.
This limits us to three women from Nir Oz, in their 30s or thereabouts, who were or might have been killed:
Tamar Kedem Siman Tov (35) was killed in her secure room, along with her husband, three children, and her mother-in-law. This does not fit the confession.Arbel Yehud (28) is being held in Gaza. Her parents said in an interview they received proof of life so she does not fit the confession.
Shiri Bibas (32) and her family were captured on video still alive in Gaza with their captors and thus do not fit the confession.
By sheer process of elimination, it can be concluded that Jamal could not have killed any woman in her ‘30s in Nir Oz on October 7th.
The only possible victim we could find that might match the son’s confession requires that the son overestimated the age of the victim by a decade or more. This would be 22-year-old Carolin Bohl.
We were unable to find the specific details of her final moments nor where and in what condition was her body found, so we can not give a definitive conclusion here. Nonetheless, some details seem highly unlikely to fit the confession.
Bohl was a 22-year-old model, with a very youthful look. It is unlikely anyone would describe her as being in her 30s. Research into the accuracy of age assessment has found that young people such as the son (18), estimating the age of other young people such as Bohl (22) are pretty accurate with neutral facial expressions (within one year of the actual age) and with negative facial expression (such as fear or disgust, that are to be expected during rape) the estimation only increases to a three-year deviation, giving a maximum estimate of 25. This means the son’s estimation of his victim being in her early 30s, is very unlikely to be of the 22-year-old Bohl.
Bohl was a blond, blue-eyed, pale, German tourist. It is unlikely someone would describe her pants or her age, as the father and son did in their confessions, and not mention her relatively uncommon look for Israel.
Contradictions between the rape confessions
Furthermore, there are contradictions between the confessions of the father and the son with regard to the claimed gang rape. We would expect certain details to mismatch, as human memory is not infallible. However, the amount of contradictions and the fact they do not deal with minute details but whole sequence of events, make them important evidence against the reliability of the confessions.
The father claims the rape victim was alive when they left but the son claims his father killed her.
The father claims they found the woman they raped in a living room with 3-4 men from Gaza but the son says they were not there.
The father claims the woman was the only Israeli in the house but the son claims she was with an Israeli man that his father killed.
The father claims the rape was their last crime, after which they went back to Gaza but the son claims they left the house and then found and kidnapped an Israeli man (see below).
These contradictions are significant because they tell very different stories but also because the father and son have no reason to lie about these details. For example, the father already confessed to rape, 7 murders (of which 2-3 were women), and 14-16 kidnappings. He has no good reason to deny one more woman killed (the rape victim killed according to the son). The father has already confessed to 7 murders. He therefore has nothing to gain by hiding the eighth (the man the son claims was with the rape victim and killed by his father).
Given that the age of the claimed victim does not match any female victim in Nir Oz, the description does not match Carolin Bohl, the confessions contradict each other in extreme ways, and the timeline described in them seems highly unlikely (as we will show in the next section), we, therefore, conclude that the confessions of raping and killing a woman in her 30s, barring new evidence and explanations by Israel, should be considered false or likely false.
The kidnapping of “Matan”
In his testimony (Telegram video), the son (Abdallah Radi, 18) confesses to kidnapping an Israeli settler named Matan. According to Israel and the details in the confession, this is Matan Zangauker, who was taken on October 7th and is still held by Hamas today. Matan’s kidnaping is the only crime described in the confessions, that is associated with a specific victim.
Here is the son’s testimony regarding this kidnapping (grammar mistakes were left uncorrected) :
Son: When I left [the house where the triple rape occurred] I saw a settler hiding between the trees, so I caught him. This happened when Hasan and my father arrived. Hasan wanted to hit him because he [Matan] attacked him verbally. He [Hasan] struck him on the back and I stopped him and told him that this man was “on me” [i.e., I will handle him]. So I took the settler and I told him “I need go to home”. He said “OK”. We went, me and Ahmad Abu Hajaj, and we sat.
Investigator: what was his name?
Son: the settler?
Investigator: yes.
Son: we talked a little and I asked him “What is your name?”. He said “Matan”. I asked “Where are you from?” and he said, “I am from Ofakim [a city not far from the Kibbutz]. I am tourist here”. I said “ok”. He gave us [Coca] Cola, Nutella, and water, and we left. We left - me, Ahmed, and Matan. When we left two [people] arrived in a Toyota jeep. There were 15 people there, they wanted to take Matan from me by force. I asked them where are they from. They said they were “from the city” and the rest said they would not answer until they could identify me. They took him from me by force, put him in the jeep, and took him to Gaza”.
So, according to the son, he found Matan alone and hiding between the trees. However, we extracted Matan’s final text messages to his parents (below) from a video interview with his mother and according to these, Matan was taken from a secure room inside a house, along with his girlfriend, Ilana Gritzewsky.
In the screenshot from Matan’s mother’s phone below (taken from here, at 13:35), Matan’s parents are telling him to “shut the window” (windows in secure rooms in Israel are made of steel and have a big lever to lock them) and Matan replies “Everything is closed”.
Matan's Parents tell him to “hold the door!!!” (safe rooms in Israel do not lock, as they were designed for rockets and not kidnappings) and he replies (below) at 9:45 am: “Wait. There are people here. I am holding the door. I can’t write”. His parents ask him to send them his girlfriend’s number, Ilana, who is with him in the secure room.
At 10:08, Matan writes his final message: “They are trying to get in”.
These messages seem to contradict the son’s confession. Matan was taken with his girlfriend, whereas according to the confession, he was alone. Matan was taken from the safe room in his house, whereas the confession states they found him hiding between trees. Also, note that like many other Israelis taken from safe rooms that day, Matan was holding the door and keeping his kidnappers at bay for some time. He first tells his parents “There are people here” at 9:45 and his final message, “They are trying to get in”, is at 10:08. This is not some minor detail but a full 23 minutes of struggle missing from the confession.
However, a security camera caught parts of the kidnapping. Matan’s girlfriend, Ilana Gritzewsky, is seen either forced to climb out of the window of the secure room or caught when she is trying to escape. She is then taken on a motorcycle to Gaza.
Matan is not seen in the video, which could leave room to fit the son’s confession claiming Matan was caught alone hiding in the trees. However, since the camera only shows one side of the house, it is also possible Matan was taken from the other side. This would fit a scenario described in Matan’s messages, that he was holding the door as people were trying to break, perhaps leading Gritzewsky to try to escape from the window.
So, with regard to Matan being taken alone while hiding in the trees or from the secure room, the evidence (text messages and the security camera photos) do not allow for a definitive conclusion. However, Matan’s girlfriend was released in the hostage exchange deal in November. We could not find an interview with her describing the abduction but she has spent all of her time since the release alongside Matan’s mother, fighting for his release. In December, a full month after Ilana returned, Matan’s mother described the kidnapping: “My son, Matan, and his girlfriend, Ilana, were kidnapped together from Kibbutz Nir Oz, from the bedroom inside the safe room where they slept on the eve of Shabat”.
This still does not prove Matan was taken from the secure room at the same time Gritzewsky was taken from the secure room window. However, this is how the event is described by his mother and seems to be supported by his messages.
We can imagine a scenario that accommodates the son’s confession. For example, his girlfriend only assumed he was taken from the secure room but did not actually see it as she was taken herself. In reality, the people inside the house had left for some unknown reason. Matan dropped his phone, which would explain the lack of further messages, and ran and hid in some trees before he too was caught.
However, we find it less likely that if the door was available for Matan’s escape, his girlfriend would use the window. We would need him to still stop communicating for an unknown reason (like dropping his only means of communication behind) and we would need all of this chain of events to go unreported in Israeli media.
As such, more likely than not, this currently contradicts the confession by the son but further clarifications from Gritzewsky could help resolve the issue.
The timeline problem
Furthermore, the timeline of Matan’s messages and the timeline of his kidnapping as described in the confessions do not match. The last question the investigator asks the son in the video released by Israel, is “How long were you in the Kibbutz?”. The son replies: “We arrived at about 10 am, something like that. We left at 12:30”.
However, according to the text messages, the Gazans who kidnapped Matan were already inside his house at 9:45 am and kidnapped him by 10:08 (unless we assume that Matan’s final message - “they’re trying to get in” - is unrelated to Matan’s final moments, which seems like the less likely assumption). If we use the timeline the father gave in his confession, this chain of events is impossible. Here are the parts of the fathers' confession relating to the sequence of events and the time each crime took:
Investigator: tell me what happened in the first house?
Father: In the first house I was surprised by a woman and her husband and I shot them. [...] after that there was another house. Hassan went inside one house and I went into another. [...] I found a woman and her daughter and gave them to [Hamas’ military wing] Al-Qassam.
Investigator: when you talked with Hamas, where were they?
Father: they were walking around [the kibbutz].
Investigator: OK. and the third house?
Father: the third house, its a house with also a man and his wife, in their 50s, and i handed them over to Al-Qassam. [...]Investigator: OK. you went to the fourth house and what happened?
Father: No, we found a group of settlers, between 10 and 12 people, men, children, and women. We surrounded them and handed them over to Al-Qassam. [...] After that, while I was walking I saw five guys, boys and girls, that tried to run away so we shot them. [...] and then I went to the house where the woman was. [...] I took her to the next room and I [...] raped her. [...] I laid on top of her, kissed her and put myself inside her, and came. It took about 15 minutes. [...]Investigator: and you say that [your son] Abdullah and [your brother] Ahmad stayed in the house. [...] How long were they in the house? [after he finished raping the woman].
Father: between 10 and 15 minutes. [...] we finished [raping her], left, and went home.
The first inconsistency that becomes apparent is that the father makes no mention of having found a man alone or kidnapping him. According to Jamal, after the alleged rape, they went home. This contrasts dramatically with the story recounted by the son, who told his interrogator that “When I left [the house] I saw a settler hiding between the trees, so I caught him,” and noted that “This happened when Hasan and my father arrived.”
Even if this extreme discrepancy is disregarded, the timeline still does not fit. According to the father, they shot a couple in the first house, then split up and went into two other houses, kidnapped 5 people, and gave them to Al-Qassam. They then proceeded to another house, kidnapped two more people, and gave them to Al-Qassam. Next, they found a group of 10-12 people, kidnapped them and gave them to Al-Qassam. Then, while walking, they saw a group of 5 people who ran from them, who they shot and killed. Then, and only then, did they arrive at the house where they raped the woman for about 30 minutes, after which — according to the son’s confession — they found Matan hiding in the trees.
So this entire chain of events, which entails multiple assaults on houses, dozens of kidnappings and murders, and three acts of rape that purportedly took over 30 minutes, needed to have happened between their arrival time at “about 10” and 10:08, which is when Matan wrote, “they’re trying to get in.” Such a scenario is simply impossible.
We can try to fit the timeline with the son’s confession. According to the son he killed two people, raped two women (one of which was the 30-minute rape with the father), and broke into five houses, from which they kidnapped people. Again, all of this needed to have happened between their arrival time at “about 10” and 10:08. This, too, is plainly false.
Where is the video?
Further questions about the authenticity of the confessions are raised by the lack of video evidence of the father and son’s supposed crime spree in the kibbutz.
The Israeli government is in possession of 200,000 videos documenting the actions of October 7, and has shown itself perfectly willing to release it when politically useful — as is the case with a taped confession by two Hamas members which Israel's Shin Bet intelligence agency published after adding security camera footage from Kibbutz Alumim corroborating them.
Yet, even though Israel has had two months to investigate the confessions and has at least hundreds of hours of video from October 7th in Kibbutz Nir Oz, no such videos have been presented.
In conclusion
We found many problems with the confessions, each important on their own, let alone in combination:
The father claims he killed a couple in their 40s but no such couple exists in the victim database.
The father claims he found a mother and daughter alone and kidnapped them but no mother and daughter were taken on their own.
The father and son confess to raping and killing a woman in her 30s but no woman in that age range was killed in Nir Oz in the circumstances described in the confessions.
The claimed location from which Matan was kidnapped contradicts Matan’s final messages and his mother’s testimony - between the trees outside, instead of the safe room of Matan’s house.
The process of Matan’s kidnapping does not match his messages - simply grabbing Matan instead of a 23-minute struggle to open the door of the safe room.
Three major contradictions between the confessions -
Matan’s kidnapping did not happen according to the father’s confession
The rape victim was murdered only in the son’s confession,
and she was with an Israeli man who the father killed according to the son but alone with 3-4 Gazan’s according to the father.
The timeline described in the confessions seems impossible - arriving at the Kibbutz at “about 10”, according to the son, requires that the acts described in the confessions (killing, abducting, breaking into houses, and raping), would have been done within minutes, though the rape alone took 30 minutes according to the father.
No corroborating evidence - Israel has not provided video documenting the father and son in Nir Oz and has not named the victims.
The confessions were almost certainly extracted via torture - which is known to produce extremely high rates of false confessions.
The confessions describe extremely rare crimes - a gang rape by father, son, and uncle. Over-the-top crimes such as this, are common in atrocity propaganda and extremely rare in real life. This is not impossible but as the saying goes, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
We therefore conclude that unless further explanations or evidence are provided by Israel, the far likelier explanation is that these confessions are false.
Whatever the case, it is clear that the Daily Mail and other news organizations which publicized these supposed confessions conducted no journalism of their own while laundering Israeli government claims. They could have avoided well-deserved accusations of malpractice by using the standard trick in corporate media of simply sharing the content and stating that this is just what Israel is claiming, and the information has not been vetted. Instead, the publication promoted the confessions as absolutely true, and portrayed the prisoners as monsters proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
The Daily Mail’s journalistic malpractice is all the more egregious given that the videotaped confessions they published contained all the hallmarks of falsified war propaganda. Rather than carrying out even minimal investigation into the content of the confessions, the Mail instead gave the benefit of the doubt to the intelligence apparatus of a nation-state (bodies officially and legally tasked with deception and finding ways to spread it through media; media that is officially tasked with revealing these deceptions).
In a shameless appeal to emotion aimed at making the very questioning of the confessions’ reliability an act of siding with monsters, the Daily Mail writes, “An evil father and son have revealed...] how they killed and raped innocent civilians.” The opening sentence distills the essence of the article as a whole: “These confessions further prove that any attempt to deny the horrors of October 7th... is part of a campaign… to promote the justification of terrorism.”
According to this twisted, Orwellian logic, the accusation is the proof, and to question it is to be guilty of endorsing the crime which you were never allowed to question in the first place.