Denial of the 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel

In The Washington Post in January 2024, journalist Elizabeth Dwoskin says that the 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel was a well-documented terrorist attack, including evidence from smartphone and GoPro cameras of attacking Hamas militants, but conspiracy theories exist stating that the attacks did not occur at all, or that they were false-flags. Some Jewish leaders and researchers have compared denial of the Hamas-led attacks to Holocaust denialism.

An Israeli legislative proposal approved by the Israeli Ministerial Committee for Legislative Affairs aims to impose five-year prison sentences for individuals found denying the events of or supporting the October 7 attacks.

Background
According to the Washington Post, the October 7 Hamas-led attack on Israel was a well-documented terrorist attack, including evidence from smartphone cameras and GoPros of attacking Hamas militants. However, there was a growing group that denied basic facts of the attacks and spread falsehoods and misleading narratives that minimized the violence that occurred or disputed its origins.

According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, malign actors, "In accordance with the disinformation playbook" have purposefully decontextualized their reporting to "falsely claim that Haaretz corroborated the false theory that the IDF committed mass killings of its own people." According to Shayan Sardarizadeh, BBC Verify's disinformation expert, the "denialist narrative" that "it was Israel that killed its own civilians on 7 October, not Hamas," has "sadly become prominent online." However, some incidents of friendly fire by IDF soldiers and kibbutz security teams against civilians attempting to flee or captured and brought into Gaza during the October 7 attacks, were corroborated later. There were up to 27 hostages who died on the way to Gaza who may have been killed by friendly fire, and one house in Be'eri that was hot by Israeli tank shells where several people died, including two children.

Spread
Researchers see parallels to disinformation surrounding the September 11th attacks, which some fringe groups argue was perpetrated by the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad. Joel Finkelstein of Network Contagion Research Institute stated that "there's a built-in audience that wants to deny that Jews are the victims of atrocity and further the notion that Jews are secretly behind everything." He said efforts to say Israeli was responsible for October 7 are part of a broader strategy by antisemitic extremists to undermine Jewish suffering.

The claims were found across the internet, including on the Reddit subforum 'LateStageCapitalism' and on publications critical of Israel like The Electronic Intifada and The Grayzone. They have also been popularized by right-wing Holocaust deniers like Owen Benjamin and far-right conspiracy theorists. The claims are based on cherry-picked evidence to push misleading narratives. A Telegram instant messaging group, that had also shared content and conspiracies relating to foreign policy and the Covid-19 pandemic, had nearly 3,000 people on it in January 2024 that pushed content and conspiracies blaming the attack on Israel.

In March 2024 the Israeli firm CyberWell, which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to monitor, analyze and combat antisemitism on social media, reported that the company had found about 135 separate posts that had been viewed by more than 15 million users that denied the October 7 attacks. The company found that the identified posts were almost half from Twitter, with others posted to Facebook, TikTok and Instagram.

Responses
Emerson Brooking from the Digital Forensic Research Lab at the Atlantic Council pointed to Holocaust denial as what may happen to October 7, despite copious real-time documentation of the attacks.

Jennifer V. Evans has also tied the denialism surrounding October 7 to Holocaust denial.

Legal action
On February 5, 2024, the Israeli Ministerial Committee for Legislative Affairs approved a bill aimed at penalizing denial of the October 7 attacks, imposing up to five years in prison for such acts. The bill, initiated by Yisrael Beiteinu MK Oded Forer, is aimed at individuals who deny the occurrence of the massacre or attempt to justify, praise, or support the acts carried out during the event.