Al Jazeera Report Shows Fore-Knowledge of 10/7 Massacre

Examining the implications of the false report published by Al Jazeera three days days before the attack.

On Wednesday 4th October, three days before Hamas’ brutal attack on Southern Israeli communities, Al Jazeera published a strange, incendiary, and entirely false report titled “Israeli settlers storm Al-Aqsa Mosque complex on fifth day of Sukkot”.

I was in Jerusalem at the time and there was no trouble on Temple Mount (also known as Haram al-Sharif) where the Al-Aqsa Mosque is located. On the contrary, so peaceful was the area, that I visited it the following day, Thursday 5th October as a tourist. I met Rafi Faber, a Jewish financial commentator, whom I had previously interviewed. He was there with his wife and young children. All was quiet. There was no unusual tension. There was nothing out of the ordinary whatsoever.

Dome of the Rock, photographed by the author on Thursday 5th October 2023

The implications of this false report became apparent on the following Sabbath morning when air-raid sirens went off all across Jerusalem and reports started filtering in of a massive series of atrocities being perpetrated at a music festival being held near the Gaza border and of attacks on the surrounding Kibbutz communities.

The name given to the series of coordinated land, sea, and air attacks by Hamas was “Operation Al Aqsa Flood”.

The centrality of the Al Aqsa Mosque to the Arab-Jewish conflict in the Middle East is not new and neither is the weaponisation of false reports concerning the integrity of the mosque and claims of Jewish desecration. It all happened before. For example on September 28th, 2000, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon visited Temple Mount. The result was the “Al Aqsa Intifada”. And in August 1929, news of conflict over the Jerusalem religious sites sparked horrendous events in Hebron.

The 1929 Hebron Massacre marked a watershed in the deteriorating Arab-Jewish relationships in Palestine. The Mandatory Government’s “Report on the Palestine Disturbances of August 1929” described the events are follows:

The British High Commissioner, John Chancellor, later described these events in a letter to his son in this manner:

The horror of it is beyond words. In one house I visited not less than twenty-five Jews, men and women, were murdered in cold blood.

In both its merciless brutality and its epoch-changing effects, The Hebron Massacre is a clear ante-type of the recent Hamas attack. The Hebron Massacre was also sparked by conflict over the holy sites in Jerusalem, in that case concerning Jewish access to and liturgical practices at the Western wall of the platform on which the Al-Aqsa Mosque stands, the so-called Wailing Wall. Also similar was the fact that deep, long-held resentments and fears were at the root of the violence.

A further similarity in these events is that the violence put back the cause of peaceful coexistence. This was explicitly recognised in the conclusions of the Shaw Commission Report which stated:

Shaw expanded further on this point concluding that:

Without a doubt, the flash-point that is presented by any threat to, or encroachment upon, the religious rights at the Al-Aqsa Mosque is well known to all sides in this conflict. A headline such as “Israeli settlers storm Al-Aqsa Mosque” is a call to arms and carries with it the risk of murderous violence being unleashed. Thus to place such a false report is reckless in the extreme. But, in this case, it seems to be something more than a mere disregard for the consequences.

The timing of the report, three days before the attacks from Gaza, even taken alone, is suspicious. But, to this, we must add the name given to this long-planned Hamas operation “The Al-Aqsa Flood” and the specific statements of Hamas, whose spokesman Khaled Qadomi said:

We want the international community to stop atrocities in Gaza, against Palestinian people, our holy sites like Al-Aqsa. All these things are the reason behind starting this battle. [emphasis added]

In other words, the false report of the storming of the Al Aqsa Mosque formed part of the stated war aims of Hamas when they commenced the attack.

Furthermore, there is the incitement by Hamas to promote a more general pogrom against Jews everywhere. Al Jazeera reported some of the statements coming from Hamas military commander Mohammed Deif as follows:

• This is the day of the greatest battle to end the last occupation on Earth,” Mohammed Deif, the Hamas military commander said, adding that 5,000 rockets were launched.

• “Everyone who has a gun should take it out. The time has come,” Deif said, according to reports.

• Hamas called on “the resistance fighters in the West Bank” as well as “our Arab and Islamic nations” to join the battle, in a statement posted on Telegram.

And, of course, to electrify the feelings of the Arab and Muslim streets across the world, a claim of “Jews Storm Al Aqsa” is the perfect stimulus.

Thus in terms of timing, the name of the operation, the reasons given for the operation, and the attempt to spread violence against Jews all across Palestine and indeed around the globe, the false report by Al Jazeera seems to be more than merely irresponsible. It appears to be prescient; that is to say, it shows fore-knowledge of events.

Al Jazeera is the English-Lamguauge news service of the Government of Qatar. That same government is a major funder of Hamas and it harbours the Hamas leadership. For example, Ismail Haniyeh, the chief of Hamas’s political bureau, is a resident of Qatar, as is Khalil al-Hayya, head of Hamas’s communications office, and Khaled Mashal, the head of the group’s diaspora office. It is therefore entirely plausible that whoever placed this report in Al Jazeera had access to information about the coming massacre before it occurred.

Back in 1929, The Shaw Commission recognised the deadly danger of irresponsible or politically motivated press incitement:

Today in the age of the internet, with instantaneous international communication, laws to act against such whipping up of dangerous emotions are impossible to police. Reports, whether from State Actors like Al Jazeera or individual activists posing as alternative-media journalists, can circulate relatively freely. But foreknowledge of a crime that saw more than 1200 people murdered in a day and thousands more innocent lives lost in the war that it triggered - surely that is something that should be investigated.

In short, it appears that someone in Al Jazeera knew what was coming and placed a false news report in furtherance of the violent aims of the Hamas organisation. We should demand that Al Jazeera and their Qatari Government overseers should be held to account.