How Israel massacred Israeli children then blamed it on Hamas

Officer Barak Hiram killed two Israeli children and his colleague Golan Vach covered it up.

First published by The Electronic Intifada

On 7 October, Israeli forces fired multiple tank shells at a home in Kibbutz Be’eri, killing most of the dozen captive civilians there, including two adolescent Israeli children.

All of their Palestinian captors, bar one, who’d surrendered, were also killed. Two other Israelis survived to tell the story of how Israel’s military killed its own civilians that day.

The head of Israel’s national rescue unit then lied to the world’s press about it, claiming that “eight babies” had been executed by Hamas at the home.

Colonel Golan Vach claimed that the Palestinian fighters had murdered the Israelis, when in fact his own “rescue” forces had been responsible.

“They were concentrated there and they killed them and they burned them,” Vach claimed of the nonexistent dead babies. No bodies of babies from the home were ever produced.

But the infamous massacre – at the home of Pessi Cohen in the Gaza-frontier settlement of Kibbutz Be’eri – was actually carried out by Israeli forces’ implementation of the the so-called “Hannibal Directive” – Israel’s national murder-suicide pact.

Hamas fighters had taken the group of Israelis captive, but had not abused them, two eyewitnesses said. The fighters were attempting to negotiate their way back to Gaza in exchange for releasing the Israelis.

But Israel’s “rescue” forces commanded by Brigadier General Barak Hiram fired on the home to end a standoff by killing everyone there, and later lying about it to the press.

Exclusive investigation

These are only some of the shocking conclusions reached by journalist David Sheen in a groundbreaking exclusive investigation published by The Electronic Intifada last month.

In the latest episode of The Electronic Intifada Podcast, Sheen takes us in detail through his important long read plus all the latest updates.

Sheen says Vach “was responsible for the worst atrocity hoaxes of all. He invented the tallest tales and the most gruesome stories.”

The colonel’s motive was “to incite genocide on the Gaza Strip, but he also did so in order to cover up the worst failures of the government and the most bloodthirsty crimes … that its army committed on that day” including the massacre at the Pessi Cohen house.

Often co-writing with our director Ali Abunimah, David Sheen has been responsible for some of the biggest revelations since 7 October about Israel’s Hannibal Directive, and how it was Israel that was itself responsible for many, if not most, of the 1,100 or so Israelis who died during the Palestinian military assault that began that day.

Watch the whole discussion in the YouTube video above, or you can listen to the Soundcloud or download the MP3 directly below. You can also listen on your favorite podcast platform.

Articles we discussed

• “How an Israeli colonel invented the burned babies lie to justify genocide,” David Sheen

• “Israeli forces shot their own civilians, kibbutz survivor says,” Ali Abunimah and David Sheen

• “Israeli child ‘burned completely’ by Israeli tank fire at kibbutz,” Ali Abunimah and David Sheen

• “Israeli HQ ordered troops to shoot Israeli captives on 7 October,” Asa Winstanley

• “Israel’s national murder-suicide pact,” Asa Winstanley

Video production by Tamara Nassar

Subscribe to The Electronic Intifada Podcast on Apple Podcasts (search for The Electronic Intifada) and on Spotify. Support our podcast by rating us, sharing and leaving a review. You can also donate to fund our work.

Full transcript

Lightly edited for clarity

Asa Winstanley: Welcome to The Electronic Intifada Podcast. I’m Asa Winstanley and I’m here today with producer Tamara Nassar behind the scenes and with the journalist David Sheen. David is a longtime contributorto The Electronic Intifada. For many years he has been reporting on Jewish extremism inside the territories of historic Palestine first occupied in 1948. That is to say: inside present day Israel itself.

Now David’s most recent article for us is titled, “How an Israeli colonel invented the burned babies lie to justify genocide” and you can read it: go over to Electronic Intifada dot net. And you can read this very long, very thorough and brilliantly researched article. I recommend you all do that after watching this episode. Now, many of you in our audience will already know about the infamous “40 beheaded babies” lie, which was invented by Israeli propagandists and how it originated in Israeli disinformation campaigns, including from groups like ZAKA, which we’ll get more into later in this episode. Now, of course, the idea – on, and soon after the 7th of October – was that Palestinian fighters had carried out a massacre, executing Israeli children when they assaulted the Gaza frontier settlements on the 7th of October 2023. This was very swiftly debunked. But what your very long and detailed article proved David was that the head of Israel’s national rescue unit, in the Israeli army, himself was also deeply involved in this disinformation campaign, which was a key part of Israel’s justification for its ongoing genocide in Gaza.

Now, this man was, and is Golan Vach. So please explain who Golan Vach is and what his role was in inventing the fake story of the executed Israeli babies.

David Sheen: Well Colonel Golan Vach has a long sordid history before he ever came to my attention. But digging back to find out where his roots were, I came to find that he was born in Hebron, he was raised in the Jewish settlement outside [Hebron] that was the first Jewish settlement created after the occupation of the ‘67 territories, in Kiryat Arba, and his father was, in fact, the mayor of Kiryat Arba. And so he was raised from birth in the most extremist household. In fact, when his father became mayor of Kiryat Arba, the first thing he did was to sign an edict making it illegal to actually conduct business with any company that hires non-Jews and hires Palestinians or that has trade with Palestinians.

So this is the wellspring he’s drawing from. And of course, as he grows up, where does he study? He studies at the Bnei David Yeshiva in the settlement of Eli, in the occupied West Bank. And this has come to the attention of the media in recent years because, besides the founder of the school receiving the Israel Prize, the most important prize in the country, this is a school that has taught the most racist ideology to its students. It’s a prep program for young Israelis who are entering the army and what they’re taught are messages that include that literal slavery should be reinstituted and that Palestinians should be the slaves of Jews. This is literally what’s taught there. Golan Vach remembers the years he spent there as the best years of his life. So this is where he’s coming from. And of course, this is not an odd thing to find someone like him at the highest positions in the army. It may have been an odd thing decades ago, but in recent decades, the far right, and the Kahana movement specifically, have made strenuous efforts to infiltrate every aspect of society and to take over key positions.

This mainly occurred following the so-called disengagement from Gaza when Israel removed its colonies from the Gaza Strip. The far right realized, well, if we can’t prevent these withdrawals on our own because the masses of Israeli society don’t care enough about these settlements, the only way that we can prevent further withdrawals and support further invasions and conquests is to put people in education, in media, academia and of course in the army as well. So Golan Vach is probably one of the most, you know, the premier example of this phenomenon of the most racist right-wing people you can imagine entering key positions in Israeli society. And then, at critical moments, when they become indispensable, to use their position as leverage to construct a reality or to leverage their position to create, in this case, horrific hoaxes that then were used to incite the genocide of the Gaza Strip that we’ve seen in recent months. That’s the origin of Golan Vach. But, of course, he graduated that prep school and went to the army and went on to have a quarter-century career in the army.

AW: And these are some of the most extremist settlements in the West Bank that you’re referring to. Kiriyat Arba, for example. Eli. We could call them the vanguard – a sort of right wing vanguard of the settler movement of the West Bank. Is that right? Is that an accurate way to characterize where Vach is coming from politically and religiously?

DS: Most definitely. In fact it’s worthwhile saying that he actually has a lot of cultural clout as well because he comes from a very prestigious family in addition to his father, being the mayor of this extremist settlement Kiryat Arba, the family is also a musical troupe, funnily enough.

AW: This is a really interesting part of your article: they’re kind of a right wing von Trapp family.

DS: Exactly. They play charming melodies, kind of like folksy renditions of Bible verses. Golan Vach is playing the guitar and his siblings his 10 or so siblings, and his mom and dad are the choir. And what’s interesting, the reason why I bring this up is not just like a factoid: his family has been heard in just about every religious family and there’s almost no families in Israel from the right wing religious sector that don’t know who they are, they don’t have a CD of theirs, that haven’t heard their music played at a wedding or at a social function, or in some manner. Everyone is familiar with them. That’s how important they are to the Orthodox culture in Israel. So in that sense, he’s already an important public figure.

But in another sense he has a lot of prestige on the international stage and in the professional realm, because, as I said, he went on into the army and became a professional soldier and served for a quarter-century in the army, but then went into the reserves. And in that time his last command in the army was for six years or so. He was the commander, as you mentioned, of the National Rescue Unit of the army’s civil defense. So what that means is that not only if there’s some kind of situation that requires extraction, some kind of building collapse, but also if there’s some kind of national emergency from natural disasters.

So not only is his team sent to rescue people in Palestine, but also around the world. Now, everywhere in the world, every country, has some kind of rescue squad that’s sent in to extract people when calamity befalls them. But Israel, I believe, is the only country in the world where it’s a military unit that does that. And so it’s pretty easy to assume that the reason they do that is in order to buff the image of the army to have this rescue squad that it sends to India, to Turkey and even to the United States.

AW: So he’s used to doing kind of PR for the Israeli military around the world. Right?

DS: Exactly. His face is the most recognized face of all the Israeli soldiers, you could say, anywhere in the world. He’s been fêted by multiple Muslim heads of state. So that’s the prestige he has. And precisely because of that prestige and that facial recognition, that’s why he was so important in the days that followed October 7th, because, as you mentioned, in the initial days that followed the Palestinian resistance attack on Israel, there were stories starting to come out: oh, there were forty beheaded babies, forty murdered babies.

And at that point, people still felt like: Okay, well, that’s a very, very serious claim. We need some kind of documentation, or we need some kind of proof before we state this as fact. And so when there was pushback from the media, those stories fell apart, because they were invented from scratch, because that had never occurred. And we of course, we now know this because after some weeks, a list of all the Israeli fatalities was developed. And then it was known that, no: there was one baby that was killed, in Kibbutz Be’eri and there was one fetus that was almost live, and she was killed in her mother’s stomach when the mother was shot through a car. So there were two babies, and none of them were decapitated, and none of them were burned.

AW: None of them were executed at all.

DS: None of them were executed. That’s also true. None of them were purposefully executed. The baby that was killed at at Kibbutz Be’eri: of course, it’s a horrific story. But she was held in her mother’s arms as her mother was holding her in a safe room in her home. And Hamas gunmen shot through the door. And that’s how they killed her. So, of course, it’s horrific, but it’s not a savage execution or anything barbaric like that. Just to put things in the proper context. And of course, that was the allegation of the Israeli government, not accidentally, the idea was to pump up, you know, to invent the worst possible atrocities in order to manufacture consent for what would quickly come afterwards.

AW: Yeah. It’s not going to be the topic of this episode, but this is also the time when there was the first rumors and stories, the fake stories, of the idea that there was a mass rape campaign by Palestinian resistance fighters during those days, which we’ve debunked very comprehensively in episodes of our livestream and podcast. But there was all these kind of atrocity stories being spread online, by pro-Israel people, by Israelis on the ground, who have these worst fears of the settler-colonial imagination happening and they’re being spread all over the place.

But in steps the highest levels [of the Israeli military] after these stories fell apart because there was no evidence of them, because they had not happened. They started to fall apart very quickly, because of inquiries of journalists saying, well where’s the evidence of this? And so, in steps higher levels of Israeli-government and Israeli-government-aligned agencies, such as this man Golan Vach. So what does he do in the aftermath of the October the 7th assault? And what does he say, and what is his role in this campaign?

DS: Well, essentially, he begins even before on October 7th itself, he heads down to the area around Gaza that was affected, these hundreds of kilometers that resistance fighters managed to secure for several hours on October 7th. And by the time he gets there, it’s aflame: everything is in ruins. But as the head of the rescue squad, he takes it upon himself to start collecting bodies, collecting corpses.

And, of course, there is an Israeli army unit that is highly trained for this specific task. They go through rigorous training in order to prepare them for the gruesome task of collecting corpses. But on that day, they were not brought in to the battlefield. And in fact, in the days that followed, they were apparently, according to reporting, begging to be brought to the battlefield to carry out the task for which they were trained. Golan Vach headed that off at the pass.

Instead of bringing in that unit he brought in ZAKA. And as you know, because EI has discussed this in detail in previous episodes of the podcast, ZAKA is an organization that was founded by a massive rapist, a child rapist and Jewish supremacist terrorist by the name of Yehuda Meshi-Zahav. And after four decades of wreaking terror and sexual terror – but he had also managed over those years of accumulating power, to insinuate himself and become one of the arms of the Israeli state, essentially, or a quasi-arm of the Israeli state, in the sense that he was one of these Jewish terrorists who leveraged his clout to become a first responder of the state.

ZAKA eventually became this group that everyone turns to when they need bodies collected after a natural disaster, or after the case of a terrorist attack, or a resistance attack on Israel. So this group was brought in for the purpose of collecting corpses, even though they were not professionally trained to deal with the kind of horror that befalls you. And all of a sudden you see the ground littered with bloody bodies, they did not go through any training for this. And of course, they didn’t go through any training, to give them the skills to look at a battlefield or a crime scene and determine who did what and what was the cause of death. Of course, they have none of those.

Their only motive is to collect Jewish body parts because they believe that their purpose – because there are Jewish burial rituals, according to the religious rights of Orthodox Judaism – that is their sole purpose. But because they shared Golan Vach’s religious, right-wing agenda, and everything that implies, that’s the reason that they were tapped. It would be easier for them to spin these atrocity tails. And in fact, that’s what happened. That’s exactly what happened, as you’ve reported in depth.

So Golan Vach brings in ZAKA. But he himself – ZAKA is responsible for some of the most gruesome tales that we’ve heard so far and have since, of course, been debunked. But Golan Vach himself, the commander of the rescue unit who brought them in, he was responsible for the worst atrocity hoaxes of all. He invented the tallest tales and the most gruesome stories. And he did so not only to incite genocide on the Gaza Strip, but he also did so in order to cover up the worst failures of the government and the most bloodthirsty crimes it committed, that its army committed on that day, that the Israeli army committed. And I’m speaking specifically about what happened at Kibbutz Be’eri in the house of Pessi Cohen.

AW: Right. Well, that’s very nicely brought us onto my next question to you. Your reporting, often co-writing with our colleague Ali Abunimah, was also crucial in the very early stages of the genocide in Gaza, in proving that Israel had actually killed its own civilians, and some of its own soldiers during the course of that assault.

Now on the 16th of October 2023, you and Ali published this article, and you were the first to report this – outside social media. But you were the first to report it in an actual journalistic and thorough fashion with a professional translation which was done by yourself. You are of course a fluent Hebrew speaker and reader and even provide us with – you along with our colleagues Dena and Daniel Shunra – provide us with most of our Hebrew translations for The Electronic Intifada.

And you and Ali published this article reporting on interviews with Yasmin Porat, who was one of only two survivors of the now infamous Pessi Cohen house massacre in Kibbutz Be’eri near Gaza. That is to say: a massacre by the Israeli military. Now explain who Porat is and how her testimony contradicts Vach’s claims.

DS: Sure. So on October 14th Colonel Golan Vach stood in front of that home. And he escorted dozens, if not hundreds of journalists and VIPs, officials from the European Union and other countries. And he claimed that within that house – first of all that “Hamas terrorists” had – you know: in his language “Hamas terrorists” had murdered, executed all the people in that house, Jewish civilians. But furthermore, he claimed that they had done so by congregating them and by purposefully torching them to death and that amongst these over a dozen Israelis that Hamas resistance fighters had torched to death, were eight babies. And he also claimed that he himself with his own hands, extracted those babies from that house. And you know, that he should be believed because it is his word. He saw it with his own eyes, he held them with his own hands.

And so based on that, as I said, Golan Vach is an allegedly reputable actor, he is that commander of Israel’s rescue force and there’s photographs of him receiving awards from the president of Turkey, there’s pictures of him being embraced by the President of Albania. And so why wouldn’t major media outlets take his word for it? And so they did. But of course, what occurred: there is nothing of the sort. And so for that, we go back to October 7th.

On October 7th, essentially what occurred, without going into too much detail, but just enough detail to so that folks understand how different it is than what was alleged. On that day, Hamas fighters entered the kibbutz from numerous directions and they attempted to take hostages and they did take many hostages. While taking hostages, they shot and killed many people. And in that effort to round up hostages, they ended up bringing 15 captives to the house of this one woman Pessi Cohen. Most of the people in that – first of all, there was Pessi herself, several members of her family, some of the neighbors to her east and west and also three others that were not from the kibbutz. One of them was actually a Palestinian from Jerusalem, who had been ferrying party goers to the Nova rave, not too far from Kibbutz Be’eri.

AW: So just to interject a little bit there, just for our viewers and listeners who may not understand the context of that: Palestinians in East Jerusalem have a separate pass. Israel has this apartheid pass system where the different segments of Palestinian society have different passes. Palestinians in East Jerusalem: in short they are residents, they have a blue pass. And they have certain access to – let’s just say they have certain access to areas of Israeli society, which Palestinians in the West Bank don’t and Palestinians in Gaza certainly don’t for the most part.

DS: Thank you for mentioning that. It’s important so that people understand the context. That’s absolutely correct.

AW: So he ended up – he was a bus driver.

DS: He was a bus driver, and he has the ability to enter ‘48 territories [present-day Israel]. And so he did so to make a living and he was ferrying Jewish Israelis to the Nova party. And at that point, he was caught by resistance fighters who came upon him. They verify: they don’t believe – they hear him speaking Arabic, but is he really a Palestinian? They ended up calling his family and they confirm yes: that in fact this is our son and he is Palestinian. Anyways, they’re like, okay, well, you’ll see him later and for the rest of the day they used him as a translator so that every time they encountered Israelis whom they hoped to take back to Gaza as captives and use as leverage to exchange for Palestinian prisoners inside Israel in a future deal, he would be used to translate between Arabic and Hebrew. And that’s exactly what happened.

They brought him to Kibbutz Be’eri and they use him for that purpose. But just to mention the other two others besides him – Suhayb al-Razim was the name of that Palestinian man – the two others who are also from outside the kibbutz were this couple: Yasmin Porat and Tal Katz. And this man and woman, they’re lovers and they attend a party. They go to the Nova party and then the rockets start coming in the morning so they flee the party and they flee to Kibbutz Be’eri. Yasmin is a kibbutz member from the north of the country and so she feels she will find safety there. She enters, she knocks on the house of a resident, and they allow her to come inside. They’re running away from the rockets, so they come inside the house.

Of course they don’t realize – at that point no one realized, none of the Israelis realize the extent that thousands of resistance fighters had crossed the border and that this was not just 10 or 12 infiltrations. So Yasmin and her partner Tal Katz are also caught up in the assault. Hamas fighters find them and the people that are harboring them and they bring them all together into one house. So they go house to house, they capture people and they bring them together. At this point, there are 15 people held hostage in the house of Pessi Cohen. Now, what’s important to remember is that we are now talking about midday when Yasmin and her partner are taken captive, meaning that at that point, most of the Israelis who would later be the captives held in Gaza, were already there, or on their way there. And because that had occurred already from the morning – from six o’clock in the morning the assault begins – so by mid-afternoon, they’re already gone. The only ones really that are left are the fighters who held the front and so it was those fighters who wanted to negotiate their own safe return back to Gaza. And so they collected a few more Israelis, and they initiated contact with the Israeli army – with the police rather.

They phoned the police multiple times saying – well, they actually got Yasmin to say it, because they didn’t speak Hebrew. But on their behalf she said, we are being held here captive. And there’s dozens of terrorists here who are holding us captive, and we are in Kibbutz Be’eri, please come, they want you to secure safe passage for them to Gaza, and to bring us with them to Gaza. And then once they’re there safely, they’ll release us the next day. That’s their demand. And so would you please come.

They don’t really respond. It takes Yasmin calling back again and again and again, five or six times before they actually respond. Over the phone they make their demands. And I guess at that point, it’s unclear how it will resolve itself. But when Israeli forces arrived eventually, in the mid-afternoon, they arrived guns blazing.

So if there was a chance of some kind of negotiations, that wasn’t going to work out.

AW: And this is all according to the testimony of Yasmin Porat and the one other survivor of this.

DS: Exactly. As I’ll go on to explain, besides those two women, there were no other civilian survivors. But thankfully there are: if it wasn’t for those two, we would still be accepting Colonel Vach’s claims as accurate, perhaps, because we would have no one to refute them. And in fact, that’s the case with probably no small number of Israelis who were killed on October 7th.

AW: I think one of the great unsolved and unacknowledged and unreported – probably even by us – aspects of this is the fact that we know so much about this particular Israeli massacre of Israelis on the 7th of October, we only know so much about it, because there was two civilians who survived: how many other similar massacres were there, where none of the Israeli civilians survived and we’re then told that they were all killed by Palestinians? That’s more of a rhetorical question, for now anyway. This is an issue I hope to investigate more at a certain point. But continue with the story.

DS: Sure. So at this point 15 hostages are being held and they’re being held by about 40 or more Hamas fighters and they are set upon by Israeli forces. And at first over the course of the battle, the fierce battle of crossfire in both directions, according to Yasmin, hundreds of thousands of bullets are flying when the Israelis arrive. Some of the captives are held outside the house on the front line, the grassy line in front of the house, and some of them are held inside the house. But all of the Hamas fighters are inside the house.

And so over the course of hours – bullets flying – about an hour into it, the commander of the Qassam forces [Editor’s note: Hamas’s armed wing] is on the phone, presumably with an Israeli negotiator, and he negotiates his own surrender. He decides, okay, well khalas [Arabic: enough], there’s nothing we can do. We’re overwhelmed. They finally arrived, they’re not going to allow us to go. I guess that was his thinking: I might as well you know, end this alive.

And so apparently what they tell him over the phone is to take a captive and – maybe they don’t tell him to take a captive, but they tell him to come outside the house, removing his clothing. To gradually become naked. And he does so, but he takes Yasmin as a human shield. I suppose they didn’t instruct him to do so. But for his own safety, he takes Yasmin. And he doesn’t grab her, he asks her to come. But he he holds her with his hand around her neck and gradually, very, very slowly, step by step by step they walk forward out of the house. And all of the other Qassam fighters are like, “What are you doing? Stop,” you know, they’re screaming. Yasmin, doesn’t speak Arabic so she doesn’t understand, but they’re objecting they’re telling him not to surrender, but he still does it. They could have shot him: they didn’t.

He keeps walking forward step by step by step by step. And finally he crosses the threshold. He’s outside the house, he crosses a little road and pushes Yasmin. They grab her and Israeli forces grabbed him as well, subdue him. And so now the commander of the forces is arrested, but 39 or more Hamas fighters are still there, still holding 14 Israeli hostages. In any case, the battle goes on for several more hours. But I guess the Israeli forces aren’t able to decide the battle, because they’re still receiving lots of gunfire in return.

And so at a certain point, after several hours, the commander of the Israeli forces at that point, who is Brigadier General Barak Hiram, he decides for his own reasons that he’s not going to wait any longer, he’s not going to hold out, he’s just going to shift the balance by ending the battle by using overwhelming force, by having one of the tanks at his disposal fire shells at the house. And according to Barak Hiram, he said this to the New York Times, as we reported, in December, he said even at the cost of civilian casualties, he was willing to use that mega lethal force, even if it would mean that all the Israeli captives inside would die. And it wasn’t that he didn’t know. He knew very well, because once Yasmin came over to the Israeli side, she in great detail explained – she drew a map for them: this is the house, this is this room, this is that room, this is where this person is hiding. This is where this person is lying down under a couch. This is – she explained everything in great detail, how many there were of each side. And she did it again and again, for every Israeli commander, she went up the chain of command and explained this all to them, behind Israeli lines in front of Pessi Cohen’s house.

So they knew – they had incredible intelligence. They knew exactly who was alive there. And who was alive was at that point, 13 of the 14 remaining remaining civilian captives. Only one Israeli civilian captive died right at the beginning. Again, just like the one-year-old baby Mila Cohen: also at Be’eri, so this Yitzhak Siton who was Pessi’s brother-in-law. He also died because when Hamas fighters attacked the house, they shot through the safe door that they were hiding in and the bullet went through and killed him. It wasn’t an execution, but they did kill him, certainly, and he died. But again, only he died from a Hamas bullet.

All the other Israelis who died, all the other civilians who died there, there was a dozen other civilians besides Mila Cohen, who died at that house – all of them seemingly died from Israeli fire. And most of them, if not 10 of them, you know up to 10 of them, died in the last, the final stroke of the battle. Because at that point at the end of the battle when you know, after hours of gunfire, and it was clear to Barak Hiram that as the sun was setting that this could go on indefinitely. Clearly they had enough ammunition there to hold off and it could last till the next day.

And of course he wanted to continue on to the next battle. He wanted to close this off and move on and, you know, make a little V [sign] and continue killing. So he decides: shoot the house with these tank shells now. When they did so, it created shrapnel that ripped through the bodies of at least – we know 100 percent – at least two of those Israeli captives, because the other survivor besides Yasmin Porat, her name was Hadas Dagan, she was the the woman who took Yasmin and her partner in that day and welcomed them in. So when the Israeli forces came firing, she was on the on the ground outside, she was on the lawn and so she was laying on the lawn for hours during this gun battle.

And on either side of her were her partner, her husband: Adi Dagan, and on the other side Yasmin Porat’s partner Tal Katz. So she knows for a fact that they were alive up until that moment. The entire gun battle, all three of them and another man are lying on the ground, still, trying to avoid bullets flying over their head, but they’re alive up until the final stroke of the battle. General Barak Hiram gives the order to fire that tank. The shrapnel from it shreds through the body of Tal and the body of Adi. And she graphically explains how her husband bleeds to death all over her. So we know for sure that those civilians were killed by the final stroke, by the tank shelling. We also know for sure that the Hatsroni family – three members of the family who live right next door to Pessi Cohen – that they too were killed by that final tank shell.

And the reason we know that is because they burned to death, they were incinerated because their families received only ashes weeks after the battle.

AW: Yeah. Tamara, if you could put the next one on screen: “Israeli child ‘burned completely’ by Israeli tank fire at kibbutz,” another early article by yourself and Ali, which showed and proved in detail how Liel Hatsroni was burned to death, not by Palestinian fighters, but by an Israeli tank shell. And you’ve explained that in quite some detail there. Tamara, if you could scroll down to the tweet, the first tweet by the @Israel account in this piece. What it shows is that the tragic death of this child along with the other 12 –

DS: Her twin.

AW: Including her twin: yes, absolutely. Who’s name was?

DS: Yanai.

AW: Yanai, thank you – they were all killed by this. By, as you’ve put it, probably 10 of the 13 were killed by the final tank shelling and they were all killed in this onslaught by the Israeli troops on this home. And yet, as we can see here in this tweet, and in other similar tweets, Israeli government social media accounts claimed the opposite: that she was burned to death as they put it here.

This one is not explicit, but they’re implicitly saying – [actually] they do say “#HamasMassacre” [at the end].

“This little girl’s body was burned so badly took forensic archaeologists more than six weeks to identify her. All that remains of 12 year old Liel Hatsroni is ash and bone and fragments.” No doubt that part is true, but they’re saying that she was killed by Hamas, which is completely untrue, as we know from the eyewitnesses.

And here’s a very similar tweet by the former Israeli prime minister, Naftali Bennett, who’s explicitly claiming that she was murdered in a home by “Hamas monsters.” Completely untrue. By that stage, everybody knew it was untrue. But it is simply being reported as a fact by so many. And your reporting has been really crucial in debunking this.

DS: And all it really required, I should add, is listening to Israeli women, right? We keep being told listen to [Israeli women].

AW: Not those Israeli women David!

DS: Right. Right. So we’ve been listening to Yasmin Porat and we’re listening to Hadas Dagan and we’re just chronicling what they say. And what they say is that first of all, Yasmin notes that the Hatsronis were on the other side of the house, is where they were hiding.

But Hadas Dagan and Yamin both note that Liel Hatsroni, the 12-year-old girl that we just we just saw a photograph of, one of the hostages, that she was screaming throughout the hours-long battle. She entire time she – “Help us!” Screaming, you know. Yasmin calls them ha teenagerim – the teenagers, she thought they were about 15 years old based on their build and their maturity level, I guess. So the entire time she’s screaming. And according to Hadas, who was present for the entire battle up to the very last stroke, she says that Liel Hatsroni screamed up to the last moment.

Meaning that she was alive up to the last moment, meaning that she definitely died from that tank fire. There’s no “ands” or “ifs” about that.

And so what we have at the end of a battle is dozens of Hamas fighters dead. And a dozen Israelis dead and the Palestinian citizen of Jerusalem is dead: all civilians.

And now the Israeli army has to account for it. It’s one thing to kill them off and conquer the territory. But now how is this going to be explained? Both to the families of the dead, also to the Israeli public eventually, and more importantly, to the media, who will be asking questions soon and, more to the point, will be arriving at Kibbutz Be’eri in just a few days time and will want to hear from the Israeli army as to what happened there. And they will take Golan Vach’s word for what happened.

And of course, this is when he spins his tall tale. He claims that he himself took the bodies out of Pessi Cohen’s house. But there were no babies there. There were no babies in the house. And in fact, everyone in the house was an adult, the only exception are the two 12-year-old twins. As I said, from Yasmin Porat’s perspective, they look 15 [years old]. So these were not runts of the litter, you know, they were healthy adolescents and there’s no way anyone could mistake them for twins.

AW: Yeah. This is one of the things that comes out later when specifically the propagandists from ZAKA get called out on their lies many months later. They say things like: Oh, well, you know, when there’s burned remains, you can’t necessarily tell whether they’re a child or a baby. [But] there’s no way these 12-year-old pre-teens could be mistaken for babies.

DS: Exactly. And I find that really insidious that discourse that occurred because on one hand, you are specifically drilling down into details and claiming that the casualties were of infancy age, and you are also specifying that they were executed and you are discerning that this was done in the most gruesome way. And then when actual evidence is brought before you to show you that that’s the furthest from the truth, then you’re like, Oh, well, why do you care about the specifics? Isn’t everything else bad enough?

So you can’t have it both ways: if you’re going to drill down into specifics, then you have to be held accountable. Because these are not neutral claims. These claims are very incendiary. And if you’re going to make them, you’re going to be held accountable for them. But no one has, and certainly Golan Vach has not, because after he did this tour de force hasbara mission to explain away the mass Hannibaling of a dozen plus civilian captives just at that one location only – more Israelis were killed at that structure than any other place on October 7. So first of all, you explain that away and you cover it up, and leverage that into incitement to genocide.

So of course the next step that occurred after Golan Vach went to the media, then it actually put the general who commanded the Israeli forces there, and who instructed the tank commander to fire these shells that kill these Israeli captives, [Barak Hiram], it put him in an awkward situation. Because even though yes, from minute one, he had gone to the media himself to kind of cover his own butt and he had already invented lies about “We found babies shot in strollers and carriages,” stuff that of course did not occur: he invented it outright. So he is already inventing blood libels himself. But he was already big-upping himself and taking credit, saying, “Oh, yeah, I acted so heroically I saved these hostages.” He’s taking credit for those two survivors as if it was something that he did, that kept them alive when just the opposite occurred.

So he’s already inventing lies from minute one. But once Golan Vach tells the world that what he found there were 19 or more incinerated civilians, including eight burned babies, so now the commander there, Barak Hiram, he’s in a spot because he never said anything about burned babies before: he never said about burned anyone before and he certainly never talked about infants. So now he’s got to cover his own story.

And so then he has an interview with Ilana Dayan, who is the chief investigator of Uvda – it’s like Israel’s “60 Minutes,” the most respected investigative news program. And so she interviews him and it’s the most softball interview you can imagine. She’s almost massaging him through it. And she’s holding his hand the whole time essentially. And she allows him to spin additional tall tales. And now he brings in, he’s kind of grandfathered those eight infants that, according to General Vach, were burned to death.

Now he doesn’t say burned to death: I guess that would have been too much to say, but he does accept the number of eight. And he doesn’t call them babies, he calls them children, but he claims, just like Vach, that resistance fighters, that Palestinians gathered together – concentrated these children, all the Israeli civilians. That they concentrated them, but including these eight children and bound them up and then shot them to death, executed them.

So he grandfathers Vach’s blood libel, just downplaying a little from “burned” to “bound and shot to death.” But that’s his claim.

And again this is never challenged in the media. Now since that time, after our reporting and reporting of others, it came out that what really happened at the Pessi Cohen house, it was no longer tenable for him to claim that eight babies were bound and shot to death there. So when he’s interviewed by The New York Times in an article that was released on December 22nd, if memory serves, of 2023, he’s no longer claiming these eight babies. But at the same time The New York Times is not holding him to account for those eight babies. So now he comes correct and says, yes I gave the order to fire the tank shell, and I did it regardless of whether there were civilians still alive there.

But no one has ever held him to account for his lies and no one has ever held to account Ilana Dayan, Israel’s premier journalist, for shepherding that line, for bringing that to the fore and she’s never apologized for that or never corrected the record, sickeningly.

AW: The mainstream media, as you said, has never questioned this or held them to account in any way. And it’s been down to us and a few other independent outlets like The Grayzone, and Mondoweiss to do so.

You’ve mentioned it already in passing, but the background to all of this, of course, is the Hannibal Directive, which is a secretive military doctrine, which was established by the Israeli military – initially in secret, it later came out – in the mid 1980s. And it was named after an ancient Carthaginian general, Hannibal, who poisoned himself rather than be captured alive by the Roman Empire. The order aims at stopping Israelis from being taken captive by resistance fighters who could later use the captives as leverage in prisoner swap deals.

And I wrote a piece on it. In your Golan Vach piece, you get into the background of it. I’ve written a few pieces on it, several others have written pieces on it. This is probably one of the more significant ones where I wrote about it in January, and it really confirms from Israeli reporting from Ynet specifically, from no less than Ronen Bergman, who is also a New York Times reporter, that the Hannibal Directive not only happened, it didn’t only happen on the 7th of October, but it was ordered from the top – it was ordered from the headquarters in Tel Aviv from midday.

And as we’re filming this six months after my article here: Haaretz, the Israeli liberal Zionist daily Tel Aviv newspaper, has finally reported – it’s taken them all these many months – has finally reported in English, confirming something quite similar, and actually revealing a couple of new points. We’ll get into that Haaretz article in another episode, I think.

But there was a second piece that I wrote as well, which gets into some of the detailed history of how the Hannibal Directive relies on a long history of a sort of national murder-suicide pact among Israelis. But in your Golan Vach article that you wrote, there was a quote that – Tamara I don’t know if you could go back to the Golan Vach article and scroll down to this particular quote that I’m about to read – there was something in your reporting on what Golan Vach did and Barak Hiram and this whole long story that you’ve been explaining, I just want to read it out in full because it really stuck with me.

DS: Right. By Omri Shifroni.

AW: Yes, that’s right. Omri Shifroni, exactly. It says: “A relative of three of the civilians Israel incinerated by tank shell inside the Cohen house,” the Pessi Cohen house “12-year-old Hatsroni twins Yanai and Liel and their 73-year-old great aunt and guardian Ayala – complained to Israel’s national broadcaster Kan, that Israel’s actions on the battlefield were a failure from a cost-benefit analysis.”

So this is what he said – Omri Shifroni, he’s the relative of these dead twins. He says quote: “ ‘I am willing to pay a price: that we will kill our civilians in exchange for something else,’ Omri Shifroni told Kan,” the Israeli broadcaster.

“ ‘But what is the something else? To advance quickly? Why? Why? Did we with certainty save anyone by shooting a shell here?’” That’s the end of the quote. That’s what he said.

Now, we can’t quite show the clip because it was on Israeli TV. And I checked their YouTube channel, the link that you sent us and it’s actually blocked to people from outside Israel from watching the clip. But you’ve watched it and you translated that quote. So what do you make of that astonishing willingness to pay such a price?

DS: Well it’s a really interesting phenomenon. Because we can say that the tactical or the strategic mistake that Hamas made on that day was over-estimating the importance that Israeli lives have to the Israeli government and maybe even also to the Israeli people. And here Omri is explaining it perfectly saying, “Look, I am willing to pay a price, I’m willing to sacrifice the lives of my cousins, bitter as it would be. It can be justified or at least excused or at least understood or contextualized if we benefited in some way. But how did we benefit? There was no benefit.”

There was a benefit: but the benefit was not to the people, the benefit was in the minds of all the people who have told people like Omri Shifroni to shut the hell up since then. Because as you might imagine, just like Omri there are other Israelis who feel that the price paid was too high, that in the event that Israeli civilians are caught and taken captive, that they should not be immediately executed by decision of an army commander, just in order to quickly capture territory and to avoid having to pay a price. No, not everyone agrees to that.

AW: Yeah. We’ve got a – Tamara, if you can show that tweet. Not all Israelis think this way, as you said, the same way as Shifroni, there’s a photo in this tweet from the recent Israeli protests criticizing the Israeli government for carrying out the Hannibal Directive. And you can see here the translation, what it says on the road: “Hannibal Government,” and this is in front of the Israeli military headquarters in downtown Tel Aviv.

DS: So obviously there are some Israelis who are horrified. These are generally secular Israelis who for the most part, do serve in the army.

AW: Probably relatives of [captives], some of them right?

DS: Some of them certainly, definitely. Right. But the point is that if you serve in the Israeli army, and still most secular Israelis do, that it means you’re willing to potentially die on the battlefield yourself. So everyone from that camp is more or less willing to make some kind of sacrifice. The question is for what?

So here we have people saying, No, you can’t. But what we found in the days that followed is that this is seemingly becoming a minority opinion in Israel, because in response, there was an immense amount of pushback from – of course from Ben-Gvir, of course from Smotrich, of course from the government ministers on the far right, and leading figures of the religious camp. But their voices were much louder and the discourse has been: No, we must support such commanders who make these decisions. These are the kinds of commanders we want to lead the Israeli army, we need more of him. And he should be praised, Barak [Hiram] because now, thanks to Omri and other family members of those who died in the Pessi Cohen house, they did succeed in the sense that they managed to force the army to investigate this particular battle before the end of the overall onslaught on the Gaza Strip.

The army initially said, we’re not looking into anything until after this is all over. But they demanded, they said they insisted. And they preserved the Pessi Cohen house so that it wouldn’t be demolished and the evidence wouldn’t be erased. And in fact, in the days to come, just in days from now, we will see the publication of the final army report, which I’m sure will be a whitewash.

AW: Okay well, you’ve answered my final question, really there. But just before we get on to that: Tamara, if you could show that article that I dropped in the chat earlier, about the Israeli general who killed Israelis and then lied about it: this is what you’re referring to. So these are two very senior Israeli officers. So the main article we’ve been discussing today is about Golan Vach, Colonel Golan Vach, and this other article from December last year: “Israeli general killed Israelis on 7 October” – this is about Brigadier General Barak Hiram, who actually fired the tank shell or ordered the firing of the tank shell, certainly on the ground anyway. And this is the man who was really responsible for those 13 deaths of the 12 Israeli civilians and the one Palestinian Jerusalemite in the Pessi Cohen house on the 7th of October.

And he then, as you mentioned, went on high profile Israeli national TV, lied about it and who is now being investigated. Because as we discussed earlier, because this is the one of these massacres, these Hannibal massacres, you could say, that we know about in so much detail and for certain that, 100 percent definite that it was a Hannibal massacre of Israelis by Israel. We know in detail because of these two surviving civilians. So because there has been so much exposure, there is an investigation that has been going on into this tank fire on the Pessi Cohen house, it’s very limited in scope in that way. But nonetheless, it has happened, the investigation [of] Brigadier General Barak Hiram.

Now, what I heard earlier this week, my latest information is that the investigation has concluded and has been handed into the top of the Israeli military, but it hasn’t been released as of this filming. So we expect that may happen soon. So what do you expect from the investigation? You’ve already said there that you think is going to be a whitewash.

Editor’s note: Since the filming of this episode, a summary of the investigation was released and did indeed prove to be a whitewash. See this article by David Sheen and Ali Abunimah for the details.

DS: I do. The main reason is because we’ve already seen leaks from it, over the course of weeks and months, the Israeli army has purposefully leaked certain aspects of their report. So they’re basing their judgment on some of the others, the Israeli soldiers who fought there. And they’ve come to the media themselves on their own accord in order to defend the record of Barak Hiram as his actions are called into question. So of course the things that they’ve said are, again, complete lies and completely detached from reality. Essentially, they’re – at least the soldiers that have been quoted so far, are essentially trying to create a narrative in which it was only after the firing of the tank shells, that the Israeli captives were killed, and that they were killed by bullet holes.

Okay well, first of all, we’re never going to really know what happened because the people who conducted those autopsies and who examined those bodies were from Israel’s department of antiquities. Well the department of antiquities is run by the Jewish Power party, the Kahanist party, the most explicitly racist party that, as you know, openly advocates for trying to expel non-Jews, Palestinians from all areas of the country. So this is the people who are issuing these reports.

But beyond that it makes no sense. Because we talked about the survivor Yasmin Porat and the other survivor Hadas Dagan. Hadas: as I said, she laid there the entire time on the grass outside the house. And she was the only only civilian to survive until the end of the battle. And she says that after those tank shells were fired, that that was it, that there were no other sounds. And she says that there was one other, one more gunshot. And that’s it.

So we can presume that every single person in the house – including all the Israeli captives, and all of the Palestinian resistance fighters – were killed. One of the resistance fighters was badly wounded and did not want to be taken captive or was, you know, lying, bleeding out and wanted to end his life, so that’s who he shot. And that was because it was only one bullet. He could not have shot an Israeli hostage and then shot himself because that would have been two bullets. And Hadas Dagan says there was one bullet fired at the end. That’s it.

So there is absolutely no way to claim that what occurred there was a tank fire and then the Hamas man decided to shoot all the Israelis that were still alive and then shoot them: no. It makes no sense. It’s complete garbage.

And Haaretz reporting has also brought to the fore one of the Israelis who fought on the Israeli side – soldiers who fought on the Israeli side – who completely reject that assertion. So there’s no way that it could occur. But again, that’s the story that the army seems to be putting together and will likely be released at the end of the week. So they’re hoping to paper over everything.

Now will that suffice? It’s very difficult to say because, as I mentioned the army relented and agreed to conduct this investigation, even before the whole campaign was over. When they agreed to that the families said, okay, well, we’ll wait for the conclusions of the army. So that was back in January, if memory serves. At that point, there were no protests in the streets. There were no Israeli centrists who were demanding the end of the war. You know, there were no hostage families. Maybe hostage families were silently protesting outside the military compounds in Tel Aviv. But there were no masses in the streets, burning tires. You know, there were no people screaming in throngs: we demand new elections for a new government. And that has occurred in recent weeks.

So we’ll be in a different situation when the army releases its report in some days. And if it is as expected: they deny any responsibility and throw praise at Barak Hiram for his courageous actions on the battlefield that day instead, then we may very well see that Israeli protest movement pick up the issue of the Hannibaling, and the dispensing of the families without any accommodation for their sorrow and an acknowledgement that the relatives didn’t have to be killed. We may see these protesters pick that up. And it may be a pivotal point, something that pushes them on to even greater protest. I don’t know if it’ll be enough to overthrow the government. That’s an open question. But we may see, finally, an Israeli, at least some sector of the Israeli people feel empowered enough to demand an end to, or at least an explanation for the Hannibal policy, that in my mind really says something sick about the country.

It’s the assumption that your life means nothing and that the people you pay your taxes to and that are expected to defend you and preserve your life are the very people that will snuff it out. If it feels that it will mean fewer Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, if it means that there will be fewer Palestinians to hold in administrative detention and to torture confessions out of, if we have to relent and allow some Palestinians to return to their families, then no: we’d prefer to kill you and your family.

To me that’s a really sick ethos to live your life by. And I as an Israeli citizen, never voted for it and no Israeli citizen ever voted for it. It was a philosophy that was developed in the army and that army commanders decided to implement, and apparently the top levels of Israeli echelons also decided to instruct their commanders to carry out that policy. We may have a debate over it. But up until now there hasn’t been a debate. And it really says something that there hasn’t been a demand yet to openly question the legitimacy of that and if that’s an ethos that the Israeli people want to continue to embrace going forward.

AW: Yeah. Well David Sheen, thank you very much for joining us again here today on The Electronic Intifada Podcast.

Once again, for our viewers and listeners, the article that we’ve been primarily discussing today, written by David is titled, “How an Israeli colonel invented the burned babies lie to justify genocide,” here it is up on the screen if you’re watching.

You can go to, as always, Electronic Intifada dot net to check it out. It’s well worth your time to read the whole thing. It’s an epicly long piece, but it’s well worth the time. David’s video report at the top of the piece, as well, that he wrote especially for this article, is also very brilliant, and it gives a very excellent and concise overview of the whole investigation. So go and check that out.

And thank you once again David Sheen for joining us today.

DS: Thanks for having me Asa.

AW: Great. I’m sure we’ll have you back on again soon before long.

DS: I look forward to it.