The personal belongings of festival-goers are seen at the site of an attack on the Nova Festival by Hamas gunmen from Gaza, near Israel’s border with the Gaza Strip, in southern Israel. Photo: Reuters/Ronen Zvulun

Two months after Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7 and the murders, beheadings, and rapes — which Hamas terrorists themselves documented with body cameras and broadcast on social media  — Palestinian Authority (PA) officials are denying this took place.

In addition to denying the massacre as “stories and tales spun from the imagination” — some officials even accuse Israel of murdering and committing atrocities against its own citizens.

Qadura Fares, the director of PLO Commission of Prisoners’ Affairs with the rank of minister. has stated that Israel’s response to eradicate Hamas’ terror infrastructure in Gaza is “based on a lie,” and that Israelis “killed their civilians” on Oct. 7:

Qadura Fares: “This whole [Israeli] outcry and this whole campaign against the Palestinian people is based on a lie, which it took Israel 24 hours to create and formulate properly. They killed their [own] civilians [on Oct. 7], and they committed all these crimes and burned the bodies, and they made up this story and said: ‘They [the Palestinians] raped, killed, and burned.’ …However, this narrative fell apart quickly … Israel’s lie is no longer tripping anyone up.”

[Official PA TV, Nov. 20, 2023]

Right from the beginning the PA denied the atrocities committed by Hamas in southern Israel, claiming beheaded babies and rape were Israel’s “narrative,” “fabrications,” and “stories and tales spun from the imagination”:

Official PA TV reporter: “From the first day of the [Israeli] attack, some Western media outlets deliberately took action to side with Israel and adopt the occupation’s narrative by broadcasting fabricated pictures and video clips, which tell stories and tales spun from the imagination that there are Israeli babies who were beheaded, and others about cases of rape and burning among captured women.” [emphasis added]

[Official PA TV, Oct. 31, 2023]

Despite the abundance of documentation of Hamas’ atrocities, two months later PLO official and Secretary-General of the terror organization Palestine Liberation Front Wasel Abu Yusuf still denies “murder of children” and “rape of women” as “tendentious Israeli propaganda”:

PLO Executive Committee member and PLF Secretary-General Wasel Abu Yusuf: “Since Oct. 7 there has been a Zionist version that [Israel] has attempted to spread worldwide out of tendentious propaganda, [claiming] that there was murder of children, rape of women, crimes, and the like.”

[Official PA TV, Topic of the Day, Dec. 3, 2023]

Palestinian Media Watch already exposed that the PA Ministry of Foreign Affairs published a similar libel, claiming it was Israeli army helicopters that intentionally bombed young Israelis at the music festival and destroyed the “settlements” in southern Israel on Oct. 7.

Another PA official, who has been very vocal about his and the PA’s support for Hamas and its war against Israel is PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’ advisor Mahmoud Al-Habbash. After two months and a wealth of documentation of Hamas’ brutality against Israeli victims on Oct. 7, he too claims that it is all “lies, falsehoods, and fabrications”:

PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’ Advisor on Religious Affairs and Islamic Relations Mahmoud Al-Habbash: “They [the Israelis] have spread lies, falsehoods, and fabrications regarding what happened on Oct. 7, and therefore the world turned against the Palestinians.”

[Facebook page, Dec. 5, 2023]

Al-Habbash has also referred to facts about Oct. 7 as “the narrative that Israel was a victim on Oct. 7 to aggression, to an attack” — claiming this was “an incorrect picture” and that the world had fallen “victim to Israeli deceit and deceit by the lobbies that support Israel in the world.” [Al-Habbash’s Facebook page, Nov. 27, 2023]

Four days after the terror attack, Hamas itself claimed it was “not targeting children” and that Western media had spread “fabricated claims” and “adopted the Zionist version” — despite Hamas terrorists’ own published footage of the atrocities committed.

Hamas even pretended that the numerous civilian victims were “Zionist military and security establishment” and therefore “legitimate targets”:

“The Hamas Movement firmly emphasized ‘the falsehood of the fabricated claims being spread by a number of Western media outlets.’

[Hamas] said that the Western media outlets ‘are unprofessionally adopting the Zionist version that is full of fabrications and lies against our Palestinian people and its resistance, the latest of which was the claim of murdering children, beheading them, and targeting civilians…

Hamas emphasized that the Palestinian resistance and the [Izz A-Din] Al-Qassam Brigades [i.e., Hamas’ military wing] took action against the Zionist military and security establishment in ‘the Al-Aqsa Flood’ battle [Hamas’ name for its terror war against Israel], and that these are legitimate targets. It also said that at the same time they made efforts to avoid [harming] civilians, and many videos from the ground are witness to this, and many settlers [sic.] spoke about this in filmed testimonies in the media outlets.”

[Donia Al-Watan, independent Palestinian news agency, Oct. 11, 2023]

A different but equally outrageous accusation regarding Israel’s treatment of the invading terrorist murderers was voiced by a Palestinian NGO that claims to defend human rights, which is designated in Israel as a terror organization due to its ties to the PFLP. Al-Haq accused Israel of “summarily executing” the Oct. 7 terrorists, murderers, rapists, and kidnappers.