The “Free Palestine” crowd doesn’t get to walk away from this with its credibility intact. From the moment the Oct. 7 massacre became known, people started throwing out the most extreme accusations imaginable at Israelis and Jews — genocide, deliberate starvation, mass expulsion, Israel killed its own people, Israel wanted Oct. 7, Israel was bombing hospitals because it wanted to kill civilians — and always before they could possibly even know if any of it was true.
These weren’t little factual mistakes. They put their judgment, their moral seriousness, and their entire reputations on the table. They went all in. And they were absurdly and disgracefully wrong.
We were all raised to be on the lookout for exactly this kind of Jew-hatred: Jews accused of monstrous collective crimes, accusations spreading everywhere, evidence barely mattering. And yet millions of supposedly sophisticated people fell straight into the same damned thing.
So hold them to account. Don’t let the people who spent years pushing this stuff quietly move on as though none of it happened. They failed the Great 10/7 Litmus Test, and none should ever recover.
Here were some of their biggest claims.
(1) “ISRAEL DID OCT. 7 TO ITSELF.”
Almost immediately came the conspiracies. Israel funded Hamas. Israel secretly wanted the massacre. Israel conspired with Hamas. Israel let it happen so it could take Gaza. Israel killed its own people under the Hannibal Directive.
No. Hamas planned the massacre, carried it out, filmed it, and bragged about it. Israel suffered a catastrophic intelligence and military failure. There is zero evidence Israel conspired with Hamas to make Oct. 7 happen, and only a vile Jew-hater could ever jump to such a conclusion without extraordinary evidence, much less without evidence at all.
“Israel funded Hamas” is also grotesquely misleading. Israel allowed Qatari money into Gaza under a disastrous policy meant to buy quiet and keep Gaza functioning. Had Israel prevented the money from getting through, many of the same people would have called that a crime.
And Hamas wasn’t alone in the war it started. The Islamic Republic had armed and funded it for years. Hezbollah opened a second front against Israel the very next day, explicitly in support of Hamas’ attack. The IR’s other proxies soon joined in. Were all those coordinated Islamist attacks ackshyually all part of Israel’s cagey plan?
Israeli friendly fire almost certainly killed some Israelis in the chaos. A UN commission found that Israeli forces likely killed up to about 14 civilians in specific incidents. The same investigation could not confirm the viral claim that Israeli attack helicopters fired on civilians or civilian cars at Nova. Those are stories only Jew-haters in a mania could possibly just lap up.
(2) “ISRAEL IS COMMITTING GENOCIDE.”
The genocide accusation started before the blood of 10/7 had dried — before the ground war and before the casualty numbers later used as proof even existed.
Then came the endless claim that the dead were overwhelmingly civilians. Gaza Health Ministry totals were routinely cited as though they were civilian death counts. They aren’t. They do not separate fighters from civilians.
And Hamas’s conduct kept getting left out: fighting from dense civilian areas, embedding among civilians, and dressing as civilians. Those are war crimes, and of course they increase civilian deaths.
Genocide requires specific intent to destroy a protected group. Despite endless claims to the contrary, the ICJ did NOT rule that Israel was committing genocide — or even that the genocide claim itself was “plausible.”
Israel issued warnings, ordered evacuations, reviewed targets, used precision weapons, and repeatedly took measures intended to reduce civilian harm — not the behavior of a military trying to exterminate the Gazan population.
For some sense of scale, Iranian health officials reportedly estimated that as many as 30,000 Iranians were killed by their own regime in just two days during the January 2026 uprising. The figure of 70,000 total deaths in Gaza bandied about was over two years, and close to half were Hamas combatants and personnel.
(3) “ISRAEL IS EXPELLING THE GAZANS.”
Evacuation orders, expanding Israeli control, and stupid remarks by individual Israeli politicians were repeatedly turned into claims that Israel was carrying out a mass expulsion of Gaza’s population.
There was enormous internal displacement. Of course there was. This was a dense urban war. Moving civilians out of active battle zones is exactly what Israel was supposed to try to do. Had Israel simply left civilians sitting in areas where it was about to conduct major military operations, many of the same people would have accused it of a war crime for that.
What did not happen was the mass expulsion of Gazans out of Gaza that people kept saying was coming.
(4) “ISRAEL TARGETS HOSPITALS.”
A hospital, school, mosque, clinic, or apartment building gets hit, and that alone was presented as proof that Israel deliberately targets civilians.
There is substantial evidence that Hamas used hospitals and other civilian sites for tunnels, weapons, command activity, hostages, and fighting positions. At Shifa, for example, investigators confirmed a tunnel and shaft on the hospital grounds, confirmed that hostages had been brought there, and documented exchanges of fire on the hospital premises. Released hostages also said they had been held in hospitals. This was not an Israeli excuse invented after the buildings were hit.
And Israel did not simply start bombing hospitals without warning. In major cases it issued evacuation orders, warned staff and civilians, and gave people time to leave.
(5) “ISRAEL IS STARVING GAZA.”
The story was screamed for years: Israel was deliberately sealing Gaza off from food and starving the population to death. In August 2025, the IPC went so far as to classify Gaza as being in famine.
But the predicted mass-starvation death toll never appeared. And when UNICEF later conducted a population-based SMART survey in 2026, it found relatively low acute child malnutrition in the accessible population.
And Israel was not “blocking the aid.” It allowed and facilitated enormous quantities of food, medicine, fuel, and other supplies into Gaza — territory controlled by the enemy it was actively fighting. How many countries at war are expected to keep facilitating humanitarian supplies into enemy-controlled territory while that enemy is still attacking them?
(6) “UNRWA IS JUST A NEUTRAL AID AGENCY.”
When Israel said Hamas had penetrated UNRWA, this was widely waved away as another Israeli smear.
U.S. investigators have now referred more than 100 current or former UNRWA employees over participation in Oct. 7 and/or alleged affiliation with Hamas’s military wing. The referrals include teachers, school principals, security personnel, counselors, and medical staff. One former UNRWA employee has already received a 10-year U.S. government-wide debarment after investigators found that he participated in Oct. 7, and additional cases are proceeding.
(7) “GAZA WAS AN OPEN-AIR PRISON.”
This was repeated for years as though Israel had simply locked two million people in a cage.
But Gaza was much closer to a badly governed, heavily constrained proto-state than a “prison.” It had its own government, police, courts, universities, hospitals, hotels, restaurants, shopping centers, farms, businesses, construction, telecommunications, imports and exports. People worked, studied, married, opened businesses, built homes, went to restaurants and beaches, and tried to build ordinary lives and an economy.
And that economy was developing despite Hamas. Gaza had private businesses, manufacturing, agriculture, fishing, construction and trade. It received enormous amounts of foreign aid and had substantial infrastructure and a young, educated population. Gaza’s living standards were within the broad range of poorer Middle Eastern societies, and substantially above places such as Yemen and Syria.
Israel had withdrawn its soldiers and settlements from Gaza in 2005. Hamas seized power in 2007 and then devoted enormous resources to rockets, weapons, tunnels and repeated wars with Israel. Israel imposed severe restrictions in that security context. Egypt restricted its border too.
Calling the whole place a “prison” also conveniently removed Hamas from the causal story, who had begun attacking Israel immediately after coming to power (and, actually, before). The “Free Palestine” community desperately wanted to make it seem as if Israel’s restrictions just appeared from nowhere, as another inexplicable cruelty inflicted by Jews.
(8) “HAMAS ARE GAZAN FREEDOM FIGHTERS.”
One of the nastier tricks is pretending Hamas simply is Gaza. Even the 2006 election gets sanitized. Hamas was already an armed Islamist movement operating in a climate where political opponents could be threatened, beaten, or killed. This was not some normal liberal-democratic election where everyone could safely campaign against them. Then Hamas murdered and tortured its Fatah rivals and took Gaza by force in 2007. No Palestinian national election since. And even all that was a generation ago.
Lebanese people don’t generally want Hezbollah. We Iranians don’t generally want the Islamic Republic. Afghans don’t generally want the Taliban. People living under armed Islamist dictatorships are not the same as the regimes ruling them.
But “Free Palestine” people somehow grant Gazans less humanity than everyone else. They just presume Gazans must want Hamas — the jihadist movement that killed its rivals, crushed dissent, and built its whole project around war with Israel. They hate Gazans so much they can’t even imagine that Gazans might want something better.
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So save the posts. Save the videos. Save the headlines. Remember who said what. Because these weren’t people cautiously saying, “We don’t know yet.” They weren’t merely arguing that Israel had made terrible decisions or that particular Israeli attacks might have been unlawful.
They instead accused Israel of genocide, deliberate starvation, mass expulsion, intentionally bombing hospitals, massacring its own citizens, and even engineering or deliberately allowing the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. They did so almost immediately. And they did so with 110% certainty.
Being wrong is normal. This was something else. If you are willing to accuse people of the most monstrous crimes imaginable on evidence that does not remotely warrant your certainty, that tells the rest of us something about your judgment.
So remember who did it. When these same people next appoint themselves authorities on misinformation, racism, human rights, fascism, morality, or anything else, their record comes with them. They used their free speech. Now everybody else gets to use theirs. That’s how reputation works.