It was recently reported that the Palestinian Authority today is claiming that the October 7 massacre, which slaughtered over 1,400 and included the mutilation, beheading, rape, and torture of countless innocent civilians, was implanted by Israel and not the Hamas terror organization. This claim comes at a time when more and more people abroad are beginning to either diminish what happened on October 7 or justify what happened based on Israel's treatment of the Palestinians.
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It was even reported that the director of the sexual assault center at Canada's University of Alberta signed an open letter denying that Hamas raped Israeli women and girls on October 7. As an Israeli, I find this to be a complete and utter outrage. Denying the atrocities that occurred on October 7 must be condemned worldwide.
The fact that October 7 was a massacre and perhaps even a genocide implanted by the Hamas terror organization is all there for everyone to see. Article II of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention of Genocide and the Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines genocide as any of the following acts committed with the intent to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group: "Killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to the members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; the forceful transferring of children of the group to another group."
Hamas intended to slaughter part of the Israeli population on October 7 because they were Jewish and for no other reason. They massacred and raped at a music festival, forcefully transferred women and children to Gaza, burned down homes, and slaughtered, raped, tortured, mutilated, beheaded, or took hostage everyone that they saw in 10 separate cities in Israel.
If they could have killed more, they would have and Hamas has already threatened to implement October 7 again and again. Hamas is a brutal terror organization backed by Iran that opposes the very existence of the State of Israel merely because the land of Israel was Muslim in the past and thus must always be Muslim in their worldview.
For this reason, radical Islamists oppose the existence of the State of Israel, just like they oppose the existence of modern Spain and India. In their view, it is against their belief for a Jewish state to exist under any borders and thus they refuse to negotiate any peace agreement with us. They believe that all of the Jews here should either die or leave the country. And for this reason, they massacred, beheaded, mutilated, raped, burned alive, and committed many atrocities on October 7 in an entire region of Israel. If October 7 was not a genocide, then I do not know what is.
In a recent webinar hosted by the Dona Gracia Center for Diplomacy titled "Israel and Azerbaijan against Iranian-backed religious terrorism," I noted that local Israeli media has documented countless instances of rape on October 7, which have been confirmed by Israeli forensic experts. It is very hard to forget the images of 19-year-old Naama Levy being forced into a jeep by Palestinian terrorists, with blood flowing between her legs, an indication that she was raped. These images were broadcast across the globe and are very difficult to deny.
One survivor of the Supernova Music Festival massacre told the Jerusalem Post about the rape and murder of her friend: "As I am hiding, I see in the corner of my eyes that a terrorist is raping her. She was alive beforehand. She stood on her feet, bleeding from her back. But then the situation was that he was pulling her hair. She had long, brown hair." As one survivor of the Rave Music Festival massacre told Tablet: "Women were raped next to the dead bodies of their friends."
Another survivor told Haaretz of a gang rape on October 7: "They bent someone over. I realized he was raping her and passing her onto someone else in uniform." The terrorist is then said to have shot her in the head and then mutilated her body. More recently, the Israel Police has started to collect the testimony of survivors, documenting how Hamas massacred, raped and tortured en masse.
Itzik Itah, who leads emergency responders, told the Jewish Chronicle: "In one house, there was a couple tied to each other with their clothes down and you can see definitely that the women underwent rape. When she is naked faced down, and her clothes had been taken off not by her, that's a woman who underwent rape." Naturally, we do not really know in what condition the female hostages are being held, as they are denied visits by the International Red Cross.
This is not the first time that someone denied an atrocity of the magnitude of October 7. During the Khojaly massacre, 613 innocent Azerbaijani men, women, and children were massacred in one day. Shamil Sabiroghlu, chairman of the Association for the Recognition of the Khojaly massacre, told the author of "Khojaly Witness of a War Crime" Tale Heydarov, "The population of Khojaly had been about 7,000 but at the time of the tragedy, there was only 3,000 there, as many had left. This means that almost one in three suffered physically. Remember, many more were injured in some way. 1,275 people were initially taken as prisoner. Some were returned. There is unofficial information that prisoners were taken to Armenia, then on to Libya and Syria, where their organs were sold."
Heydarov wrote, "According to the testimonies of the inhabitants of Khojaly, who were captured and then exchanged, and also of defenders of Khojaly, men were subjected to beatings. There is also evidence of rape, including of minors, confirmed by doctors in Baku and Aghdam. Azerbaijan has said that as many as 1,000 refugees were killed as they tried to flee." Others froze to death in the bitter cold winter or starved. Literally, the Armenians created conditions so that the residents of Khojaly would perish and would have no chance of survival.
However, to date, there are many who deny the magnitude of the Khojaly massacre, just as people are beginning to deny what happened on October 7 today. Interestingly, Iran played a major role both in supporting the October 7 genocide and in supporting the ethnic cleansing of Azerbaijanis from the Karabakh region and the seven Azerbaijani districts in the 1990s. For this reason, Azerbaijanis have demonstrated much support for Israel during our war against Hamas, as they themselves remember what the Armenians did to them during Khojaly and have much sympathy. While some in the West deny what happened on October 7, the Azerbaijanis do not.
Esther Ha-Levi, a prominent Azerbaijani Jewish activist in Canada, proclaimed: "I always see the correlation between what happens in Azerbaijan and Israel. Since October 7, I have gotten incredible support from Azerbaijanis. The Iranian government needs to be completely destroyed. We got to show the world that Armenian propaganda is very similar to Palestinian. We saw it during the war. People are saying "death to Jews' on the streets of Toronto. The Jewish students are scared to go to school. This would never happen in Azerbaijan. 1400 people were massacred just for being Jewish, yet people are talking about a Gaza genocide. The same story with the Armenians."
Raphael Nabizade, a prominent Azerbaijani activist who sits on the audit committee of the Dona Gracia Center for Diplomacy, stated that there is a stark difference between Azerbaijan and Iran, even though both countries are majority Shia: "Iran and its proxies like Hamas seek to wipe Israel off the map. This is a far cry from Azerbaijani reality. Unlike in America and Europe, synagogues in Azerbaijan have no security. Their doors remain unlocked even at night. There is no reason to fear thieves, let alone anti-Semitic bigots. Jews in Azerbaijan can wear kippas and Star of David necklaces without living in fear. Jews who fear Shias should remember a secular Shia Muslim country, which is a trusted friend of Israel."
Israelis should raise awareness about what happened on October 7 at every available opportunity, just as the Azerbaijanis always speak up about what happened at Khojaly, as spreading information is our best defense against those who seek to deny the reality of what happened on October 7. Through this, we can build up our defense as the first step towards the repetition of an atrocity is the denial that an atrocity took place. For this reason, we Israelis must stand united against anyone who denies the magnitude of what happened on October 7 as if our very lives depended upon it.
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