Damning new testimony from an IDF soldier stationed at the Gaza border on 7 October has backed up growing evidence that Israel deliberately allowed the Al Aqsa Flood operation to happen.
The soldier’s statement has turned the mirror on Israel’s cynical propaganda once again. While the genocidal occupier and war criminal has made repeated accusations over Hamas’s ‘human shield’ strategy, instead, it’s Israel that has used its own soldiers and civilians as fodder for fueling its violent colonial aspirations in Palestine.
Unsurprisingly, none of the mainstream media have yet picked up on this. Of course, it’s in keeping with their 22 month complicity in downplaying Israel’s genocide and atrocities in Gaza.
IDF soldier testimony suggests Israel let 7 October happen
Shalom Shitrit – an IDF soldier who was on duty on 7 October – has made a damning testimony to the Knesset. He testified that high-level IDF officials issued a “strange message” the morning of Hamas’s Al-Aqsa Flood operation:
According to The Dissident, Shitrit said during his testimony that at 5.20am on 7 October:
We were playing on the phone and suddenly a strange message came up from my deputy commander, .. and what he says on the radio is something like this: ‘I don’t know why, but an order was given that there would be no patrols in the (Gaza) fence until 9am
And sure enough, an hour later, at 6.30am, suddenly sirens.
He went on to explain how:
Every morning the platoon raises alert, and in his estimation, there are no mornings in which there are no patrols on the fence because you are in an operational battalion and that is part of the matter.
So, according to Shitrit’s testimony, someone from a place of high command decided border IDF soldiers would not patrol the morning of 7 October. Shitrit indicated how unprecedented this was. It obviously raises huge questions – namely, did it know of the impending Hamas operation – and opportunistically choose to enable it?
Israel had the intel, but ignored it
Of course, this testimony from an on-duty IDF soldier sits next to a wealth of documented evidence Israel knew of the attack well ahead of time. Reporting on this, US independent outlet The Young Turks pointed to a number of these. One was a New York Times article from November 2023 detailing how Israeli officials had:
obtained Hamas’s battle plan for the Oct. 7 terrorist attack more than a year before it happened
It also highlighted an article by Israeli news site Haaretz from June 2024 which buttressed this further. It confirmed that the Israeli intelligence had “detailed knowledge of Hamas’s plan”. The same outlet has underscored IDF command ignoring intel from women soldiers patrolling at the border, warning of an impending attack.
Moreover, Israel deliberately deploying its Hannibal Directive makes the soldier’s testimony all the more believable as well. This Israeli military policy prefers the murder of its own soldiers, over them becoming hostages. Numerous Israeli press reports and revelations from Israeli military officials revealed a “mass Hannibal” order that directed the slaughter of civilians Hamas took captive.
As the Canary’s Ed Sykes previously reported:
Released hostages, meanwhile, have described how “the main threat to their lives while they were held in Gaza was not Hamas, but Israeli attacks”. One, for example, described how “Hamas guards put mattresses over us on the floor to cover us, and then they covered us with their bodies to protect us from our own forces’ shooting”. Another stated, “We were sitting in tunnels and we were very afraid that, not Hamas, but Israel would kill us”. Another, meanwhile, insisted they “were shot at by a helicopter when we were on our way to Gaza”.
Israel’s then defense minister Yoav Gallant later admitted that the government implemented the Hannibal Directive on 7 October.
In other words, Israel was fully prepared to murder its own citizens. Next to documents and accounts of its prior knowledge of Hamas’s plans, it wouldn’t be off-brand that the Israeli government let 7 October happen. After all, nearly two years into a genocide in which it has massacred at least 61,000 people – but likely hundreds of thousands more – it’s still playing victim. And that is likely the whole point.
Pretext for annexing Gaza
This is all amid Israeli government ministers’ myriad expressions of annexation and ethnic cleansing intent. It lays bare how Israel has used the insurgency as an expedient pretext for its genocide in Gaza.
The Young Turks highlighted one such incriminating instance. Referring to a piece Drop Site News published in July 2024, it drew attention to the fact Netanyahu has made no secret of Israel’s colonial ambition prior to 7 October. As the Drop Site News report detailed:
Just two weeks before the October 7 attacks, the Israeli leader delivered a speech at the UN general assembly in New York, brandishing a map of what he promised could be the “New Middle East.” It depicted a state of Israel that stretched continuously from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Gaza and the West Bank, as Palestinian lands, were erased.
Of course, Israel has been committing illegal annexations in the West Bank for years with full impunity. The writing has long been on the wall over its ambition for the complete expulsion of Palestinians from their lands.
In February 2024, Law for Palestine submitted over 500 instances of Israeli incitement to genocide and ethnic cleansing to the ICJ. That was just since its siege on Gaza began in October – a little over four months. Politicians, military personnel, and media talking heads in Israel have only continued expressing such vile, criminal intent since. The Accountability Archive has collated more than 80,000 examples of public figures making their support for the genocide known.
Now, it’s impossible to deny this is Israel’s objective.
Israel is massacring and starving the population of Gaza to death in full view of the world. Its government has left little room to doubt that total occupation of Palestine is its explicit intention. In July, Israel’s Knesset passed a symbolic motion calling for the total annexation of the West Bank. And now, Netanyahu’s security cabinet has approved plans to occupy Gaza City, with intent to occupy the entire Strip.
Propaganda and colonial ambition: read between the lines of an IDF soldier and his testimony
With a full livestreamed reel of its war criminal atrocities, Israel has grasped at outrageous straws to smear and spin the mounting evidence of its ethnic cleansing. After international press photos revealed the horribly emaciated bodies of children, Israel engaged in grotesque famine denial.
Using the same playbook, it’s peddling in depraved dismissal of aerial footage UK corporate media outlets have captured. These depict apocalyptic scenes of buildings flattened to their foundations, and city turned to rubble. Predictably, Netanyahu has been blaming Hamas, making wild claims Hamas has booby-trapped buildings. The systematic destruction – 22 months of relentless Israeli bombardment the scale of seven Hiroshima bombs – has nothing to do with it, clearly.
So, it’s not hard to imagine that Netanyahu’s far-right government did indeed let 7 October happen intentionally.
With a violent government steeped to its neck in propaganda and colonial ambition, it was the opportune impetus to launch its genocide. Its mission to free the hostages has always been a cover for this. Pounding the Gaza Strip with 2000lb bombs and blocking food, water, and medical supplies has endangered their lives. Yet, the Israeli government seems to have zero qualms about doing so.
Ultimately, it has never really added up how a highly technologically equipped, militarised, and surveilled Gaza border could be breached. This is a settler state that shoots and kills Palestinians staging peaceful protests near the Gaza fence. Now, the testimony of an IDF soldier only points further to the fact Israel made no mistake on 7 October. It laid the foundation for its annexation – long its war criminal goal that it’s now making a brutal reality.
Featured image via screengrab
https://www.thecanary.co/global/world-analysis/2025/08/08/idf-soldier-knesset-testimony/
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