The source of the bizarre “Hamas beheads 40 babies” propaganda that was used by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to bamboozle U.S. President Joe Biden over Oct. 10-11, is, it turns out, a collaborator of Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich. The image of the Oct. 7 attackers as lower than animals was deliberately deployed as a pre-emptive attack on international opinions, to create room for Israel to launch what they knew would be a shocking bombing campaign, primarily killing civilians. EIR has covered the story “Max Blumenthal Exposes Fraudster at Bottom of Hamas Atrocity Stories”, including the bizarre role of ZAKA’s Yossi Landau, trotted before the media to provide his phony eyewitness horror.
The initial media report came from Nicole Zedeck of the Israeli state-sponsored i24NEWS network, who interviewed a soldier stating: “We walked door to door, we killed a lot of terrorists. They are very bad. They cut heads off children.… We know that they are animals, but we found that they don’t have any heart.” What Zedeck didn’t report was that the soldier, one David Ben Zion, had a known history as one of the most fanatical settlers, who earlier had called for a Palestinian town to be “wiped out.” He was identified by Max Blumenthal and Alexander Rubinstein as a reserve soldier, a Deputy Commander of the IDF’s Unit 71, who had incited violent riots against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank earlier this year. Just hours after his Zekeck interview, he was posted a video on his Facebook page, “repeatedly grinning ear-to-ear … an odd disposition for a supposed witness to the methodical butchering of babies.”
Ben Zion is a leader of the Shomron Regional Council of 35 illegal West Bank settlements. His Feb. 26, 2023 tweet called for the Palestinian village of Huwara to be “wiped out.… Enough talk about building and strengthening the settlements. The deterrence that was lost must return now, there’s no room for mercy.” Israeli media proceeded to cover Ben Zion saying: “The village of Huwara should be wiped out, this place is a nest of terror and the punishment should be for everyone.” Of note, the ultra-racist Smotrich liked the tweet and proceeded to issue similar pronouncements—causing Israeli legal scholars to call for an investigation of Smotrich for “inducing war crimes.” The settlers of Ben Zion’s Shomron Regional Council then engaged in violent rioting in and around Huwara, which Hamas pronounced a “declaration of war.”
He was not an unknown, run-of-the-mill soldier being interviewed. He had an extensive track record, repeatedly inciting for violence, for “deportation of the [Palestinian] masses,” and proclaiming “The Palestinian people … an enemy. We can’t change their barbaric DNA.” This settler provocateur, working in tandem with Smotrich, happened to show up in Gaza, before the cameras on Oct. 10, to testify that Hamas was cutting the heads off babies. The presumption that the IDF, the Foreign Ministry and Netanyahu all unwittingly went along with his malarkey should be taken at face value.
Joe Biden has not yet recovered from the phony operation he fell into. Even as he tries to put pressure on Netanyahu for a two-state solution, while speaking to well-heeled Democrats at a fundraiser two days ago, he launches into an outburst on Hamas, which fades into nowhere: “They’re animals. They’re animals. They exceeded anything that any other terrorist group has done of late that I—in memory.”
