Israel failed to protect its people and demanded the world accept Gaza’s devastation as the price of their deaths. Andrew Brown.
October 7 has become Benjamin Netanyahu’s shield. Behind that shield sits a damning record: ignored intelligence, reported warnings to Netanyahu, catastrophic failures at Nova, Hannibal directives killing hostages, false atrocity stories and a reported opportunity to negotiate civilian hostage releases that Israel declined.
Three years later, his government still refuses an independent state commission of inquiry.
The forty beheaded babies were fiction. The oven story was unsubstantiated. Some sexual violence allegations collapsed, although UN investigators found grounds to believe rape occurred. Israel’s own military investigation said Nova was not a predetermined Hamas target. Former defence minister Yoav Gallant acknowledged believing Hannibal orders were given locally. None of this excuses Hamas’s murders, but
demolishes the demand that Israel’s official narrative be accepted without interrogation.
The price
His generals resigned. Netanyahu stayed. A UN commission calls Gaza genocide and the International Criminal Court wants him arrested. Western governments and newsrooms, Australia’s among them, repeated the lies and kept the weapons flowing.
Here is the evidence.
The money. In November 2018, Netanyahu approved Qatari cash for Gaza. In March 2019, he was reported to have told Likud colleagues that keeping Hamas in Gaza, apart from the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, would prevent a Palestinian state. There is always a price, he said.
On October 7 Israelis paid it.
The warnings
The New York Times reported that Israeli officials held the Hamas blueprint, codenamed Jericho Wall, more than a year before the attack. An analyst watched Hamas rehearse it and said so. Her superiors dismissed her. In 2023, military intelligence wrote to Netanyahu directly, warning that Israel’s enemies saw a country weakened by his judicial overhaul. He pressed on.
The lookouts at Nahal Oz logged Hamas trucks, drones, combat drills and mock hostage raids for months. Nobody answered. Sergeant Roni Eshel told her father that Hamas knew almost every corner of the fence. Fifteen of those women were killed at their base. Seven were dragged into Gaza.
The morning
Golani soldier Shalom Sheetrit told a Knesset committee that an order arrived at 5:20am on October 7 cancelling fence patrols until 9am. One account is no proof of a general stand-down. It is a specific order with a time on it. Who gave it?
At Be’eri, the military’s own inquiry records troops at the gate under orders to wait. Residents did most of the fighting until about 1:30 pm. At Nir Oz, reinforcements entered at 1:10 pm, forty minutes after the last attackers had left. At Nova, the army approved an extra festival day despite thin troop numbers.
Soldiers stationed nearby were never told thousands of civilians were there.
The friendly fire
Haaretz documented Hannibal directives at military sites that day, and an instruction that no vehicle be allowed back into Gaza, whatever that meant for the hostages inside. Gallant conceded in February 2025 that the order was given “in some places”, and called that “a problem”.
A UN commission of inquiry found in June 2024 that Israeli forces applied the directive and likely killed at least 14 Israeli civilians. Israel’s own military concluded that hostage Efrat Katz was probably killed by fire from one of its helicopters.
Israelis killed by their own army are owed names.
The lies
Le Monde counted 38 minors killed, two of them infants, and found the story of forty beheaded babies false. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that Israeli police had no record of a baby killed in an oven. UN investigators found reasonable grounds to believe rape occurred at several locations, and found two widely circulated Be’eri allegations unfounded.
Fabrications were piled on top of the real dead
to harden the public for what was coming.
The cover
Haaretz reported that on October 7 itself Qatar passed on a Hamas proposal to release civilian hostages, and that Israel declined to negotiate. The terms are disputed. Who said no?
Herzi Halevi, the military chief, resigned. Aharon Haliva, the intelligence chief, resigned. Netanyahu blamed his security chiefs in a late-night tweet and deleted it. Last December he offered an inquiry overseen by his own government. The suspect proposes to appoint the detectives.
The accomplices
Joe Biden said he had seen pictures of beheaded children. His White House admitted he had seen nothing of the kind.
Israel has barred foreign reporters from entering Gaza independently since 2023, and the Committee to Protect Journalists counts more than 200 journalists and media workers killed there. Newsrooms locked out of the story kept printing the statements of the army that locked them out.
In Canberra, Penny Wong was asked whether Australia would act on the Hague warrant. She declined to speculate on hypotheticals. Australian factories kept supplying parts for the F-35s that bombed Gaza.
“Genocide Grants.” Government awards millions to F-35 suppliers
Netanyahu stands on roughly 1,200 graves and calls it a mandate. He is wanted in The Hague and unquestioned in Canberra.
Who cancelled the patrols? Who gave the Hannibal order? Who said no to Qatar? A man with good answers would have called the inquiry himself.
Israel’s ‘Facts on the Ground’ – razing Gaza and South Lebanon
Andrew Brown is a Sydney businessman in the health products sector, former Deputy Mayor of Mosman and Palestine peace activist