Two top Israeli officers who invented tales of nonexistent Jewish children and babies murdered on 7 October were among the army commanders who have led the genocidal destruction of the Gaza Strip ever since.

Brigadier General Barak Hiram and Colonel Golan Vach helped manufacture consent for the annihilation of Gaza by falsely claiming that Palestinian fighters executed eight Israeli children in Kibbutz Be’eri.

Hiram and Vach later leveraged that consent to carry out war crimes, jointly creating a kilometers-wide corridor of death bisecting the strip south of Gaza City.

According to reports in Israeli daily Haaretz, the officer most responsible for the area’s obliteration is Golan Vach’s younger brother, Brigadier General Yehuda Vach, who inherited from Hiram command over the so-called Netzarim corridor in the summer of 2024.

With the help of his brother, Yehuda Vach then transformed the scorched territory into a kill zone where Palestinian civilians are massacred without mercy, Haaretz reported in late December 2024.

In February, the Hind Rajab Foundation – a Belgium-based organization that seeks to bring Israelis responsible for the genocide to justice – filed a complaint with the International Criminal Court, urging that it indict Yehuda Vach for war crimes in Gaza.

The legal group said his name “has become synonymous with unrestrained brutality, sadism, and corruption.”

When Vach took command over the sector in mid-2024, he received from Hiram a corridor already in ruins, its residents expelled.

Hiram, an anti-Arab racist since his youth, is known to prefer the use of overwhelming firepower, regardless of the cost to human life. On 7 October 2023, he ordered tank fire “even at the cost of civilian casualties” at the home of Be’eri resident Pessi Cohen, where Palestinian fighters held Cohen and 13 others captive. The tank shelling instantly killed at least nine of the captives; seven of them, including four elderly women and 12-year-old twins, were torched to death.

“This is pure evil”

From April to July 2024, while the Netzarim corridor was controlled by Hiram and the 99th infantry division under his command, Palestinian civilians were regularly slaughtered there.

A soldier from the unit told Haaretz for an 18 December 2024 article how he observed a group of unarmed civilians that included children searching through the rubble.

The Israeli military then assassinated them from the air. “A combat helicopter had fired a missile at them,” said the soldier. “Who thinks it’s legitimate to fire a missile at children? And with a helicopter? This is pure evil.”

After a July 2024 army report whitewashed Hiram’s massacre of Israeli hostages at Be’eri and exonerated him of wrongdoing, the 99th division was transferred out of Netzarim, and Hiram was promoted to commander of Israel’s Gaza Division, the 143rd.

“We’re killing civilians there who are then counted as terrorists,” an officer in Yehuda Vach’s 252nd division told Haaretz

The murder of Palestinians turned “into a competition between units,” the officer added. “If Division 99 kills 150 [people], the next unit aims for 200.”

Israeli soldiers would then photograph the Palestinians they killed and their effects, and send the images back to military intelligence for analysis, only to later learn that even according to Israel’s own assessments, 95 percent of their victims were not even suspected of having been combatants.

“Of those 200 casualties, only 10 were confirmed as Hamas operatives,” another officer from Vach’s 252nd division said. Even so, he added, “no one questioned the public announcement about killing hundreds of militants.”

Soon after taking command of the sector in July 2024, Yehuda Vach instructed his officers that “there are no innocents in Gaza.”

These words closely echo those uttered by President Isaac Herzog on 13 October 2023, when the Israeli head of state asserted that the “entire nation” of Palestinians was responsible for the events of 7 October and that there were no civilians in Gaza who were “not involved.”

Herzog’s statement was cited as relevant evidence by the International Court of Justice in its January 2024 ruling ordering Israel to immediately halt any and all genocidal acts against Palestinians in Gaza.

But according to soldier testimonies given to Haaretz, Yehuda Vach translated this sentiment into new crueler marching orders, more than any other army general.

For Palestinian civilians in Gaza, this meant even deadlier rules of engagement. “[I]t wasn’t just opinion,” one officer explained. “It became operational doctrine: Everyone’s a terrorist.”

In practice, this meant Vach’s soldiers had permission to kill at will any Palestinian.

“Vach even decided anyone on a bicycle could be killed, claiming cyclists were terrorists’ collaborators,” an officer in the 252nd explained. “Every woman is a scout, or a man in disguise.”

Among the specific examples reported to Haaretz was the case of an unarmed 16-year-old Palestinian civilian believed to be Muhammad Amer Salouha.

“For about a minute or two, we just kept shooting at the body. People around me were shooting and laughing,” the officer recalled. “That evening, our battalion commander congratulated us for killing a terrorist, saying he hoped we’d kill 10 more tomorrow.”

Vach’s troops would then bulldoze the bodies of their victims under the sand or else leave them to rot. “After shootings, bodies are not collected, attracting packs of dogs who come to eat them,” a soldier reported.

Vach also arbitrarily expanded the size of the Netzarim corridor kill zone.

One soldier explained: “500 meters here today, 500 meters there tomorrow.”

By the time the 99th division returned to the corridor in November 2024, to replace the 252nd, Vach had already expanded the kill zone from 2.5 kilometers to seven kilometers wide.

Army insiders told Haaretz that Vach “spoke about deporting the people southward. He had an idea that he would carry out the Generals’ Plan on his own.”

Upon handing back command of the corridor to the 99th Division in December 2024, Yehuda Vach lamented that he had failed to deplete the northern Gaza Strip of Palestinians, then estimated to number about a quarter of a million people.

“We didn’t achieve our goal,” Vach reportedly told his officers, regretting that Israel’s siege of northern Gaza was not 100 percent hermetic, and that any food and other humanitarian aid had been permitted to enter. “As far as he was concerned, not one [aid] truck should enter,” recalled an officer under Vach’s command. “They must hassle and harangue the convoys that enter.”

“Gaza demolitions contractor”

While Yehuda Vach failed to completely cleanse the northern Gaza Strip of Palestinians, he succeeded in making much of it unlivable for the foreseeable future.

Yehuda assigned the explosives work to his older brother, the former rescue squad chief Colonel Golan Vach, along with the ad hoc unit he formed for the task, Pladot Heavy Engineering Equipment. According to soldiers and commanders of the 252nd Division, the elder brother Vach was “the Gaza demolitions contractor.”

“It’s an engineering challenge,” Golan Vach explained to Radio 103 FM in November 2024. “We need time, patience and the capabilities of heavy machinery and explosives.”

Soldiers who guarded Golan Vach and his team of about 10 men described to Haaretz how the men mined Palestinian homes with explosives.

“The sole purpose of the Pladot Heavy Engineering Equipment was to flatten as much of Gaza as quickly as possible. That’s what they did every day,” said one soldier. “They were very toxic people, soldiers and civilians, mostly religious. They felt that they were on an insane mission and as if it were a great privilege for them.”

“They’d get a particular strip in the Netzarim corridor and flatten every building in it,” said another soldier who guarded Vach and his demolitions team.

“The mission was to go house-to-house and ensure that everything there was ready for flattening,” he added. “We’re simply told to flatten from this point to that point.”

Golan Vach’s own assessments have not been dissimilar. “There are places where we have to take down very large clusters of homes,” he told Israeli radio.

The destruction of the Gaza Strip is Vach’s objective, he explained in another media interview. “I see a great value in this story of designing anew, arranging the area to allow the Israeli army to control the territory the way it should,” he told an Israeli settler podcast. “Every day that the Israeli army is located in the Strip strengthens the consciousness of Israeli soldiers’ ability to destroy Gaza.”

When a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas was announced in January, Golan Vach lamented that Palestinians he had forced from their lands would soon return to them.

“We walk from building to building, tunnel to tunnel and clear the area, and pushing the Gazans to the places we designed from the beginning,” Golan Vach explained in an interview in January. “Once you allow 1.5 million civilians to return to this territory, you lose your most valuable leverage.”

Although he claims that Pladot was founded “at the request of southern command,” Golan Vach’s unit was perceived by at least some Israeli soldiers as a semi-private militia of his brother, 252nd division commander Yehuda Vach.

When an Israeli commander from a different division inquired about Pladot and how it decides what buildings to destroy, he was told “that there was no need to make too much noise” because Pladot was led by the brother of the division commander.

“They told us they were VIPs,” an officer in Yehuda Vach’s own 252nd Division told Haaretz. “Vach brought his brothers with him when he took up the post. They made sure to make it clear to everyone that they were the division commander’s brothers.”

Yehuda Vach is said to have encouraged his division commanders to emulate him and to form their own renegade in-army militias. “I brought my brothers, you bring yours,” Vach told his division commanders, according to one whistleblower.

Vach and his brothers were also reportedly responsible for bringing far-right rabbis, settler activists and other civilians into the Gaza Strip, against army orders.

“There is no need for a military escort or logging entries and departures, which must be registered for the entry of soldiers into Gazan territory,” explained the officer in Vach’s 252nd Division. “Especially with respect to his brother Golan’s force.”

The Vach family has for decades been at the heart of the nationalist-religious settler movement. Both Golan and Yehuda Vach attended the notorious Bnei David religious military prep school in the occupied West Bank that has preached for the literal enslavement of Palestinians.

Last year, on a sensitive video conference call with the generals of Israel’s southern command, an unauthorized civilian wearing a religious skullcap was seen standing in the frame with Yehuda Vach. According to one of Vach’s officers, his immediate superior Major-General Yaron Finkelman clearly noticed the breach of security and turned red with anger, but said nothing.

Finkelman, who resigned his post in January, has a history of humiliation with Yehuda Vach.

In 2017, when Vach was deputy commander of the Givati Brigade, he was reprimanded by his superiors after weapons were stolen from the armory of an army base under his authority, the now-infamous torture camp Sde Teiman.

As the raid on the Sde Teiman armory had been the second in two years, the army chief of staff chose to also reprimand Vach’s direct superior, the Givati Brigade commander; Vach’s embarrassed direct superior was then also Yaron Finkelman.

Two years later, in 2019, Yehuda Vach was promoted to command Brigade 769 in a ceremony at Gibor army base, which then came under his authority. The following year, Vach was again reprimanded, this time by the army chief of staff, after weapons were stolen from Gibor, as well.

In September 2024, Finkelman was further embarrassed by Yehuda Vach; as many as 300 Israeli soldiers and rescuers were sent to extract his brother Golan Vach from a shaft that collapsed while he and his Pladot unit were carrying out their campaign to make Gaza uninhabitable.

Even after the accident put an unwelcome spotlight on their activities, the Vach brothers acted as if they were beyond reproach. “When we received the report, we were in shock,” a soldier in the southern command confessed to Haaretz. “Golan Vach personally carried out and wrote the investigation. He emerges from it as nothing less than a hero of Israel, even though everyone realizes that it was a disgrace and against all orders.”

Southern commander Finkelman later wrote that Col. Golan Vach’s actions were unnecessary and “had no operational urgency” but declined to discipline either of the Vach brothers.

The Israeli army spokesperson’s office affirmed that the Pladot Heavy Engineering Equipment unit commanded by Golan Vach was “an authorized military force of reservists” that was “raised in accordance with procedures.”

“Far from victory”

Yehuda and Golan are not the only Vach brothers to wreak havoc in Gaza and beyond since 7 October 2023. Like Golan, their younger brother Captain Elishav Vach commands a newly formed army unit and was injured in Gaza last year.

In Elishav’s case, he suffered from burns caused by an explosion in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip.

Like his brothers, Elishav Vach is using his family’s connections and their military records to advance the agenda of Israel’s far right. But as Yehuda and Golan are using the fog of war to quietly annihilate Palestinian life in Gaza at a more rapid rate, Elishav is now lobbying Israeli civil society to manufacture consent for even speedier carnage.

In July 2024, Elishav Vach co-authored, with dozens of other Israeli officers, a letter of complaint to Herzi Halevi, then the chief of staff, demanding he order the army to fight more aggressively.

At that stage, some nine months into the genocide, the officers ridiculed claims from senior commanders that Israel had almost won its war.

“We, who have come from the field, know very well that the situation is still far from victory,” the officers wrote. “The enemy still has cross-border capabilities, unmanned aerial vehicles, explosive drones, mortars [and] a huge tunneling infrastructure.”

Claiming that “tens of thousands of terrorists are alive, prepared to continue fighting against us,” they added, “This is not what victory looks like.”

“Don’t stop us! Let us win!” pleaded Vach and his comrades. Halevi allegedly agreed to meet with the disgruntled soldiers, but later canceled.

In August, Vach and his anti-Palestinian activist group Mishelet Am established a protest tent outside the private mansion of then-Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant.

When a tunnel shaft collapsed on his brother Golan in mid-September, Elishav Vach used the media attention to call on Gallant to ramp up the destruction of Gaza, or else resign. “Defense minister, the security of the state of Israel is your responsibility,” Vach shouted over a megaphone outside Gallant’s compound, “And you’re failing!”

His partner at the protests, Colonel Hezi Nehama, echoed Vach’s demand that the army remove all restraints, and called for this policy to be adopted without any illusions regarding the cost it would entail for Israel’s own citizens. “We need to look people in the eyes and say the truth, that there will be here many dead in the city plazas in Israel,” Nehama told an Israeli settler news outlet. “Men and women are going to deploy to the reserves a lot, it will cost a lot of money, there will be an economic crisis for the coming five years and more.”

Days after he set up the protest camp outside defense minister Gallant’s home, Elishav Vach was being interviewed about his protest on Israeli state television.

Channel 11 anchor Ayala Hasson gave Vach the star treatment and the air time to make a case for cutting off all humanitarian aid to Gaza. “You are defending us at a time when there is war going on,” fawned Hasson. “You are fighting the real enemies. And it’s really inspiring.”

In contrast to his older brothers Golan and Yehuda Vach, Elishav Vach does not represent the army in any official capacity, and thus can speak more freely about his goals and aspirations on the domestic front. In a 2021 interview, he laid out his political manifesto, explaining how his group Mishelet Am works to prevent Israel from becoming a “state of all its citizens” – that is to say, a democracy:

“The moment you see Mansour Abbas sitting in the Knesset as a king to whom everyone listens and depends … you realize that there is a snowball rolling down the slope here, and it must be stopped,” Elishav Vach complained, in reference to a Palestinian citizen of Israel and member of parliament whose tiny faction propped up the short-lived coalition government of disparate parties headed by Naftali Bennett in 2021 and 2022.

Vach also railed against members of that government “promoting issues that are completely opposite to Jewish opinion, such as same-sex marriage, conversions for everyone, reform of kosher laws and other issues that aggressively blur Jewish identity.”

Today Elishav devotes his efforts to advocating for the annihilation of the Gaza Strip and the conquest of additional Arab lands. In late December 2024, the younger Vach was recorded planting a myrtle tree on the banks of the Litani River in Lebanon, in his words, “to show presence, to determine reality.”

Vach is also a patron and fundraiser for Midbara Ka’Eden, a religious seminary in the southern city of Mitzpeh Ramon led by hatemonger rabbi Tzvi Kostiner.

Kostiner has preached for chasing gay people out of their workplaces and for the early release of Jewish terrorist Amiram Ben-Uliel.

The latter was sentenced to life in prison for in 2015 torching to death a Palestinian father, mother and 1-year-old infant: Saad, Riham and Ali Dawabsha of Duma village in the northern West Bank.

In early November, Netanyahu sacked Gallant from the defense ministry. Days later, Elishav Vach’s anti-Gallant protest partner Hezi Nehama, an officer in the reserves, was discharged from army duty, apparently due to his criticisms that his superiors were not being aggressive enough in Gaza.

Vach’s own star, however, continued to rise. Later in November, Elishav Vach was feted at a meeting of Israel’s Chief Rabbinate, where he received blessings and praise from Kalman Bar, Israel’s new chief rabbi.

The younger Vach has also been more candid than his brothers about the clan’s influence, inside and outside the army.

“In the last round [of fighting] we were more or less 20 people in the [Gaza] Strip, from the close family, very many high-ranking officers,” Elishav told Israeli radio in 2024.

A family business

Some of the Vach family history may have been deemed too controversial for broadcast, as the interview was awkwardly cut just as Elishav alluded to the family’s lesser-known Zionist activities.

In the same September 2024 interview, Elishav noted that when his older brother Golan was not working to drive Arabs out of Palestine, he was laboring to replace them with Jewish immigrants from abroad, in concert with their father, Shalom Vach. “In parallel to his military actions, he is carrying on my father’s work, a partner to his work,” Elishav told Radio 103.

In the mid-1980s, Shalom Vach headed the town council of Kiryat Arba, one of the first Jewish-only settlements established after Israel’s 1967 territorial conquest of the West Bank.

Upon his election, Shalom Vach’s first move was to form a coalition with the Jewish supremacist Kach party of Meir Kahane and ”immediately dismiss all Arab laborers employed by the local council, as well as Arab workers in other institutions in the town,” vowing to give “permits solely to those businesses which promise to employ only Jews.”

“Every one of us has a Kahane in our heads,” Shalom Vach told Kahane’s first biographer, Haaretz reporter Yair Kotler. Asked how he distinguishes himself from Kahane, Vach replied that he prefers for Israel to first absorb all the Jews of the world, and only then to become a Jewish-only theocratic state. “There is no doubt,” explained Vach. “Save the soul only after saving the body.”

In 1996, the Vach patriarch co-founded the government-funded nonprofit organization Israel Immigrant Absorption with Rabbi Oury Cherki, spiritual leader of the ruling Likud party’s Jewish Leadership faction.

Working for Israel Immigrant Absorption, Shalom Vach flies at frequent intervals to France, “going house to house to scrounge up people, to return them to the Land of Israel.”

France has long been a principal target of Israel-backed Zionist groups aiming to scare members of the large French Jewish community into abandoning their homeland to become settlers in Israel, recruits in Israel’s demographic war against indigenous Palestinians.

The Vach family’s focus on France is no accident.

In this post on Twitter/X from March 2024, Yehuda Vach is pictured with his father Shalom and his mother Liat Vach, whom Israeli army radio journalist Shir Bitton identifies, respectively, as settlers from Belgium and France.

Because there had been no “revenge” following the Holocaust, he claimed, “a feeling developed in the world that evil is winning. The moment there is revenge, you know that there is justice in the world. And that you have the power to bring it.”

Golan Vach continues to make similar twisted justifications for the annihilation of the Gaza Strip.

“We are capable of being harsh toward Gazans because we are lovers of humanity and seekers of life,” Vach told a Jewish news site in September 2024. “Fighting them is a way to love humanity.”

When Golan isn’t exploding Palestinian homes or inciting genocide, he receives a healthy salary from his father’s settlement group Israel Immigrant Absorption to proselytize to Jews from English-speaking and Latin American countries.

According to Golan Vach, “the war going on now is creating ripples in the whole world,” resulting in “thousands of Jews making their way back to Israel.”

The face of Israeli atrocity propaganda

As his father’s partner and successor, Vach flies across four continents, convincing young Jews to abandon their homelands and move to Israel “because the toxic, acid atmosphere no longer allows them to live there.”

In his civilian work, Vach leverages the fame he earned from his military exploits as the former chief of the army’s rescue squad.

Israeli state television describes him as “the face the world most associates with the IDF.” It was this same face that the Israeli army leveraged after 7 October 2023, to help convince foreign diplomats and news outlets of atrocities against Israeli infants that had never occurred, and were only sick stories of Vach’s imagination.

After the 7 October attacks, Golan Vach was the first Israeli official to lead VIP tours and press junkets of Kibbutz Be’eri, inventing false tales about personally recovering the corpses of eight Israeli babies allegedly burned to death by Palestinian fighters as well as the corpse of a ninth Israeli baby supposedly both burned and decapitated.

In one interview, Vach stares straight ahead at the camera and claims to have seen multiple nonexistent “decapitated babies.”

A June 2024 investigation by The Electronic Intifada revealed that Vach’s lies served two purposes. The first was to bury the embarrassing truth – that the burned bodies at kibbutz resident Pessi Cohen’s house belonged not to infants but to a group of Israeli captives torched to death by Israeli tank shells fired on the orders of Brigadier General Barak Hiram.

The second purpose was to manufacture consent for the genocide in Gaza that followed. Vach lied to each tour group in turn about evacuating nonexistent burned babies and then argued that their horrible suffering justified a maximalist Israeli response.

“We need to clear this region, not only the perimeter around the kibbutz,” Vach told one British newspaper.

“We cannot use the same democratic tools that the world uses,” he told CBN News, a US-based Christian Zionist outlet.

In an interview with another British paper, Vach threaded one of his invented atrocities into a call for ethnic cleansing using just 28 words: “Not only have I seen a baby beheaded by Hamas, I held it in my hands. This is why this region needs to be cleared of these people.”

Lies about the Supernova rave

In addition to his blood libels about the battle at Be’eri on 7 October 2023, Vach also attributed other atrocities to the Palestinian fighters who attacked the Supernova music festival that same day.

The Israeli army claims that Hamas militants killed about 200 of the festival’s approximately 3,500 attendees, mostly with assault rifles.

In the weeks that followed, Vach claimed to have personally recovered the charred corpses of young Israeli partygoers from the festival. “We dealt mainly with burned people. The fire still burned, piles of burned people in the area of the party and outside it,” Vach told Israeli daily Makor Rishon in October 2023. “This was not accidental fire that spread due to the shooting. The vile terrorists took wounded and dead people, piled them up and lit them on fire.”

Vach never explained how the lightly armed fighters could have carried or obtained the enormous amount of fuel or accelerant that would be needed to carry out such a mass cremation – and a media eager to reproduce his lies unchallenged did not generally ask.

Britain’s Daily Express newspaper also published as fact Vach’s claim that at the Supernova festival site, “dead bodies were bundled together, shot and then burned as terrorists showed no mercy.” In this version, Vach claimed to have witnessed “at least 65 young boys and girls piled up and burned together.”

At Israeli news site The Times of Israel, editor-in-chief David Horovitz reported that Vach removed “120 bodies from a bonfire constructed by Hamas of its victims at the Supernova outdoor music festival.” Horovitz wrote that “Vach and his team pulled the bodies from the pyre, he explained as calmly as he could, so they would not be consumed beyond the possibility of identification.”

Vach made the same claim to an Israeli settler news outlet. “More than 120 young people were collected and burned in the music festival,” Vach asserted to Channel 7. “We burned our shoes trying to get them all out.”

In fact, the corpses of about 18 Israelis were recovered from the Supernova parking lot in and around an ambulance that Palestinian fighters attacked with gunfire, grenades and RPG rockets, Aviyah Margolin, a survivor of the attack, told Israel state TV Kan.

Bodies later recovered from the torched vehicle were thoroughly burnt, but the charred corpses were found in situ, however, not arranged into piles.

Several videos preserved online said to be filmed at the Supernova site on the night of 7 October appear to show Israeli rescue forces chronicling the charred remains of around two dozen bodies. None of the blackened corpses in the videos appear to be arranged in piles.

If there were any Israeli first responders other than Golan Vach who testified to witnessing piles of charred bodies at the Supernova festival on 7 October, the internet has not preserved their accounts.

In November 2023, the Israeli government admitted that it had torched the bodies of at least 200 Palestinian fighters and had initially counted them as Israeli fatalities.

“We originally said, in the atrocious Hamas attack upon our people on October 7th, we had the number at 1,400 casualties and now we’ve revised that down to 1,200 because we understood that we’d overestimated, we made a mistake,” Israeli government spokesperson Mark Regev told MSNBC. “There were actually bodies that were so badly burnt we thought they were ours, in the end apparently they were Hamas terrorists.”

That same month, Israeli police admitted that at least one Israeli military helicopter fired indiscriminately at people at the Supernova festival on 7 October, ostensibly aiming at “terrorists,” but hitting an undisclosed number of civilians.

In January 2024, Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth reported that on 7 October, Israeli tanks, drones and helicopters blew up “some 70 vehicles” driven by Palestinian fighters returning to Gaza, and that many Israelis were also likely burned to death in these attacks.

In recent months, the Israeli army sample-tested bodybags it believes contain the remains of Palestinian fighters it killed on 7 October 2023, and found that they include the DNA of dead Israelis as well, the paper reported earlier this month.

Israeli officials are now torn over whether or not to retest that entire set of 1,660 bags at Sde Teiman base, plus over half of the 350 bags it holds at Shura base, until now assumed to hold the bodies of Israeli casualties.

In December 2024, the Israeli army’s report on the attack on the Supernova festival revealed that a significant number of bodies recovered from the site appeared to have been brought there after the fact and were not those of people killed at the party.

Brigadier General Ido Mizrahi is heard informing army brass in recordings published by Israel state broadcaster Kan: “220-230 bodies emerged from there. That is the approximate figure that we recovered from the [Supernova] compound itself, somewhat fewer were associated with the party.”

“In other words, over the course of that day a great many bodies were transported to that compound, I have no idea why,” Mizrahi added.

Neither Kan nor any other media outlet, Israeli or foreign, has hitherto questioned why the bodies of slain Israelis would have been transported to the Supernova site and left there.

The accumulated evidence suggests that Golan Vach invented lies about Palestinian fighters assembling dozens of Nova partygoers into piles and torching them. As with his hoaxes about Be’eri, it stands that Vach sought to portray Palestinians as remorseless barbarians who deserve to be genocided in revenge, and to cover up for the Israeli forces who incinerated many of their own citizens on that day with missiles and mortars.

In an interview with Christian Zionist mega-fundraiser Mike Evans published in November 2023, Vach also claimed that Palestinian fighters raped Supernova partygoers in the festival bar area. “They raped some women on these refrigerators,” Vach said, pointing at a group of large red refrigerators.

A woman who hid in one of the festival refrigerators testified that she overheard other partygoers in the bar area being shot to death by Palestinian fighters. “I hear someone opening a fridge, and a female says, ‘Why? Why? Why?’ And then – bang, bang, bang,” Elinor Gambarian, 24, said. “Evil incarnate, right in front of you. I understand everything, I see nothing.”

Gambarian says that grenades were also used in the attack on the bar area, and that when she emerged from her hiding spot after six hours, she saw many dead bodies. Although Gambarian did not spare graphic details of the horrors she says she witnessed, she did not claim to hear any sexual assaults take place in the area of the refrigerators.

Vach also told The Daily Express that he personally witnessed the dead bodies of dozens of Israeli women who had been stripped naked and bound, implying that Palestinian fighters had raped and executed them. “I can also testify to seeing around 100 women who were tied up and had no clothes on them,” Vach stated. “I don’t know what happened to them before they were killed.”

In another interview just days later, Vach inexplicably reduced the number of women he allegedly saw with his own eyes who were stripped naked and bound from “around 100” to just two. “I saw two women with the arms tied back,” Vach said. “Totally naked.”

Only one other Israeli has claimed to have personally witnessed women bound to trees at the Supernova festival; a February 2024 report by the Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel states that Israeli farmer Rami Davidian saw the bodies of six or more women “naked. Their hands were tied around the tree with clothes or blankets, or standing, leaning, tied to the tree.”

In the 2024 atrocity propaganda film Screams Before Silence, narrated by billionaire former Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg, Davidian claimed to have been the sole witness to a crime scene where no fewer than 30 women were raped and murdered, a significant increase from the previous claim of “six or more.” Davidian also claimed to have tampered with the crime scene, by repositioning and covering up all the naked bodies, “so no one else would see what I saw.”

In April, Israel’s Channel 13 canceled its broadcast of a 50-minute documentary that exposed Davidian as a grifter who garnered fame and fortune from inventing tall tales about the 7 October attacks. “These are not slight exaggerations,” wrote Channel 13 journalist Raviv Drucker after the exposé his team had painstakingly produced was canned by the station’s CEO. “These are stories made up from beginning to end. Hair-raising stories that never, ever occurred.”

As with his lies about Israeli babies beheaded and burned on 7 October, Golan Vach’s unsupported claims of personally witnessing masses of Israeli rape victims that same day have been used to build and sustain uncritical support for Israel’s annihilation of the Gaza Strip.

Israel still stands behind them

Vach was also responsible for tapping the ultra-Orthodox group ZAKA to recover bodies of Israelis killed on 7 October, sidelining the unit of the army’s Home Front Command specially trained for that grisly work. Besides Vach himself, ZAKA first-responders were responsible for some of the most ghastly lies spread about the events of that day.

While ZAKA’s lies have been thoroughly discredited, the colonel who brought them onto the battlefield and who used his celebrity status to persuade politicians and news crews from around the world of horrific atrocities that never occurred is still being cited by top Israeli officials as a trustworthy source of information.

Netanyahu, in particular, relies on Golan Vach’s fabrications when he regularly repeats online and to the US Congress and the United Nations General Assembly, that on 7 October 7, “They burned babies alive.”

Most recently, Netanyahu made this claim on 4 February at the White House, where President Donald Trump called to complete the ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip.

After Vach’s injury in September 2024, a group of former Israeli government spokespersons copied a photograph of Vach published exclusively by EI and utilized it in a video clip they published praising Vach as “a hero of Israel.”

The following month, a program on Israeli state television admitted that Vach’s invented burned babies were “one of the most painful fakes of 7 October,” regretting not that his lies were used to solidify support for the campaign of genocide that followed, but that they were “later used against us as proof of untrustworthiness.”

“In retrospect we know that it did not occur,” explained On the Other Hand host Guy Zohar. “But on the other hand, the world reported it as if it did occur.”

Almost a year after The Electronic Intifada first revealed in June 2024 that Vach invented the burned babies hoax to cover up for Brigdaier-General Barak Hiram burning to death seven captive civilians at Kibbutz Be’eri, the treachery is just now being exposed in Hebrew for the first time.

“Is it possible that it’s easier for us to talk about fake stories of eight burned babies than about the decision to shell the kibbutz residents to death?” Israeli journalist Israel Frey asks in an Instagram video uploaded earlier today.

“The horror stories that were spread and are still being marketed around the world achieved exactly what they intended: rage, dehumanization, and a thirst for revenge that served as a license for the occupation of Gaza and a license to kill,” concludes Frey. “This is how genocide was justified.”

Until now the Israeli government has continued to rely on Golan Vach, the biggest blood libeler of 7 October, to explain what actually happened on that day.

At the Israeli parliament’s first annual memorial ceremony marking those events, Vach was recruited by Knesset Speaker Amir Ohana to give a “briefing for ambassadors of countries stationed in Israel.”

When the January 2025 ceasefire agreement threatened to put a wrench in his far-reaching plans for Gaza, a frustrated Colonel Vach repeated his 7 October atrocity tales, adding that they were worse even than the Nazi Holocaust. “These are not human beings, the way they treated women, babies, elders,” Vach told a podcast hosted by Gabe Groisman, lawyer and son-in-law of Simon Falic, top funder Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and of the Jewish supremacist Kahane movement.

“You should replace the pictures of the Hamas leaders and double and triple Hitler’s picture. Because what they are doing right now, their intentions about us and about the free world are worse than the Nazis,” exclaimed Golan Vach. “The Nazis did not want to eliminate, to demolish, to kill everyone. They wanted to rule. They wanted to control. They wanted to conquer! They [Hamas] don’t want only that. They want everyone to be subordinate to the jihad. And this is who we are dealing with.”

For Vach, culpability for committing genocide falls not on Nazis or Israelis, but rather on the Palestinian people, proclaiming that “the Gazans, they are leading us the whole way to their total extermination.”

Vach’s revisionist whitewashing of Hitler – in the service of justifying the extermination of Palestinians – echoes Netanyahu’s own widely condemned statements a decade ago despicably shifting blame for the Nazi Holocaust from the German leader onto Palestinians.

In response to emailed questions from this reporter about the unsubstantiated claims he has repeatedly made, Golan Vach declined to provide answers and referred further inquiries to the Israeli military spokesperson’s office.

In January, a coalition of Israeli lawmakers from both the government and opposition took aim at those who would expose Israel’s lies about 7 October, passing a law that would make “denial” of the official Zionist narrative of what occurred on that day punishable by up to five years in prison.

The law does not specify which Israeli claims about that day are now crimes to deny. In January, an Israeli official claimed that the number of Israelis beheaded on 7 October was no less than 600.

Yehuda Vach, responsible for the destruction of much of northern Gaza, has now received the backing of Israel’s new defense minister and army chief of staff to spearhead the destruction of the rest of the strip.

In March, soldiers serving under Vach destroyed the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital in central Gaza and executed 15 Palestinian paramedics and aid workers in southern Gaza, burying them along with their ambulances.

That the Vach brothers – Golan, Yehuda and Elishav – are not punished by the army for their lies and subversions, but are instead praised and promoted by political leaders and permitted to commit additional war crimes, indicates that official Israel shares their genocidal aspirations.

Israeli soldiers interviewed by Haaretz about the destruction they sowed in the Gaza Strip interpreted the brothers Vach as a semi-rogue militia, a vanguard army-within-an-army.

As the paper’s veteran columnist Gideon Levy noted, however, the power and the impunity that the Vach family flaunts is daily evidence “of the fact that Israel stands behind them.”

David Sheen is the author of Kahanism and American Politics: The Democratic Party’s Decades-Long Courtship of Racist Fanatics.

Tags

• Golan Vach
• atrocity propaganda
• war crimes
• Netzarim
• Netzarim corridor

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