Israeli occupation forces ordered that no vehicle return to Gaza. Their own investigations name Israelis they killed. The BBC never named the order.

Three officers of the IOF's Northern Command, Yossi Peled, Gabi Ashkenazi and Yaakov Amidror, wrote the Hannibal procedure in 1986 after Hezbollah captured two soldiers. Its original text, as Ronen Bergman reproduced it in Yedioth Ahronoth, ordered fire “in order to hit the abductors, even if this means hitting our soldiers”. In 2000 the IOF's Military Advocate General, Menachem Finkelstein, told the chief of staff that “an instruction to foil an abduction at any cost is immoral and illegal!” Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot ordered the procedure “cancelled immediately” in June 2016, and the order that replaced it tells soldiers to fire on abductors “while avoiding as far as possible harm to the abductee”.

Fighters of Hamas's al-Qassam Brigades and allied Palestinian armed groups began their attack at 06:29 on 7 October 2023. The IOF's orders that day, in its commanders' own words:

The fighters took three soldiers alive from Erez: Ron Sherman, Nik Beizer and Tamir Nimrodi.

Southern Command wrote the word civilians into its own order of 11:59. Its commanders knew fighters were taking civilians towards Gaza when they ordered every withdrawal stopped “at any cost”, the words the IOF's own Military Advocate General had called illegal 23 years earlier.

Yedioth Ahronoth reproduced the 11:59 order in Hebrew in January 2024. Its reporters concluded that at midday the IOF “in practice ordered all its combat units to apply the 'Hannibal procedure', though without clearly stating that explicit name”. The IOF told the paper that “neither the Command nor the GOC declared the Hannibal procedure”.

On the vehicles, a Southern Command source to Haaretz: “Everyone knew by then that such vehicles could be carrying kidnapped civilians or soldiers.” The same source: “There was no case in which a vehicle carrying kidnapped people was knowingly attacked, but you couldn't really know if there were any such people in a vehicle. I can't say there was a clear instruction, but everyone knew what it meant to not let any vehicles return to Gaza.”

On the captives, Air Force personnel to Yedioth Ahronoth: “it was clear to them there was a chance they were also hitting abductees, but there was no other choice, both because that was the order they received and because they believed it was what had to be done”.

IOF crews fired mostly inside Israel. Ynet reported on 15 October 2023 that 28 attack helicopters “fired all the ammunition in their bellies” over the day, and that in the first four hours helicopters and jets struck “about 300 targets, most of them in Israeli territory”.

In February 2025 Ynet's military analyst Ron Ben-Yishai wrote that the 09:30 rules allowed strikes even where the attackers were suspected of holding abductees, and called that, in his own words, the Hannibal procedure. A senior Air Force commander told him: “When we understand that there are no forces of ours on the fence, we attack everything that moves there”. The same month Yedioth Ahronoth asked Yoav Gallant, Israel's defence minister on 7 October, about the procedure “known in the media as 'Hannibal'”. He answered: “What you are describing are activations at local levels”.

Israel's own investigations and memorial records put 13 deaths between 7 and 9 October down to Israeli fire: 12 Israelis and a worker from Thailand. IOF soldiers and crews killed eight of them. The IOF made each admission months or years later, usually after the families pressed for it.

Efrat Katz, 68, of Nir Oz. Minutes after the division network broadcast “Not a single vehicle can return to Gaza”, an IOF helicopter crew fired on a tractor trailer about 150 metres from the border. Fighters were taking Nir Oz residents to Gaza on it, among them Efrat Katz, her daughter Doron Katz-Asher and her granddaughters Raz, four, and Aviv, two. The IOF's April 2024 finding says the helicopter “fired at a vehicle carrying terrorists, which in hindsight, according to testimony, also carried abductees. As a result most of the terrorists in the vehicle were killed, and apparently Efrat Katz”. The Air Force commander “found no fault in the helicopter crew, which acted according to orders”. The IOF's Nir Oz investigation of March 2025 confirmed that the helicopter's fire killed her.

Tomer Arava Eliaz, 17, and his mother Dikla Arava, 51, of Nahal Oz. The IOF's investigation found that IOF soldiers killed Tomer “with high probability” after misidentifying him, and that there is “a reasonable concern” that IOF fire on the abductors' jeep killed Dikla at 11:20. It added that neither death could be determined with full certainty. A security volunteer picked up in Netivot shot dead Ran Poslushny, 48, a member of the kibbutz squad, the IOF's Nahal Oz investigation found.

At Kfar Aza, the IOF's published investigation records that the last resident killed in the kibbutz, at 17:52, was killed by Israeli fire while lying unseen in an attackers' vehicle. At Alumim, the kibbutz squad or security forces “mistakenly identified” Ofek Aton, who had escaped the Nova festival, as an enemy, and he was “shot dead by them”. An IOF soldier killed a Thai worker at Alumim after mistaking him for an attacker.

IOF forces killed Tom Godu at Kissufim on the morning of 8 October after mistaking him for a Hamas fighter, the IOF's Kissufim investigation found; his widow was told 562 days later. On 9 October IOF counter-terror soldiers at Avshalom junction killed Dani Aloush and Tal Danieli, two Israel Electric Corporation workers, after mistaking them for attackers. Israel's National Insurance memorial pages record that police officers at a checkpoint near Ashkelon shot dead Adi Ohana at 21:20 on 7 October, believing him to be an attacker, and that Niv Ayos was “killed by mistake by our forces' fire” on 8 October.

The house of Pessi Cohen, in Be'eri

Fighters held 15 captives in Pessi Cohen's house in Kibbutz Be'eri on the evening of 7 October. Two came out alive. Brig. Gen. Barak Hiram, the IOF commander at Be'eri, recalled telling a tank commander: “The negotiations are over. Break in, even at the cost of civilian casualties”. He said it to the New York Times, which printed it on 22 December 2023.

Thirteen people died at the house: Pessi Cohen; Hanna, Yitzhak and Tal Sitton, who were visiting the kibbutz; Tal Katz and Suhaib Abu Amer Razeem, who had fled the Nova festival; Ayala, Liel and Yannai Hetzroni; Hava Ben-Ami; Ze'ev and Zehava Hacker; and Adi Dagan. Two of them were 12 years old. None of the 13 had any security role.

Yasmin Porat, one of the two survivors, told Kol Barama radio on 17 October 2023 that two tank shells were fired, and that “after the firing only Hadas and I were left alive”. Hadas Dagan, the other survivor, described the second shell to Channel 12: “then came the second boom and I feel I've been hit”.

The IOF's Be'eri investigation of July 2024, as presented to the families and reported by N12, found that a fragment of a tank shell killed Adi Dagan, Hadas Dagan's husband. Its published summary says no civilian inside the house was hit by tank fire and two outside were wounded by shrapnel. It concluded that “most of the hostages were likely murdered by the terrorists, and further inquiries and reviews of additional findings are necessary”. The IOF has published none of those further inquiries.

The UN Commission of Inquiry found in June 2024 that “some or all of the 13 civilian hostages being held in a house in Be'eri had been killed by Israeli tank fire”, and that Israeli forces violated “the principles of distinction, precaution and proportionality” there. Hiram apologised to the bereaved families in July 2024. On 26 October 2023 he had told Channel 12's Uvda of eight children found tied up and shot together in the house. Two of the 13 dead were children, and neither survivor described bound children.

The count, and the decision not to make one

The UN Commission of Inquiry found that in several locations Israeli forces “applied the 'Hannibal Directive', killing at least 14 Israeli civilians”: Efrat Katz and the 13 at Pessi Cohen's house. The IOF itself has counted no further: in December 2023 it decided not to.

On 12 December 2023 Ynet's military correspondent, Yoav Zitun, reported the IOF's position: soldiers had been killed by their own side's fire on 7 October, and beyond its operational investigations it would not be “morally right” to investigate “at the level of the Ground Forces Safety Department the immense and complex quantity of incidents in the kibbutzim and moshavim”. The same day N12's military correspondent, Shai Levy, reported that “the assessment in the army is that a considerable percentage of those killed on the Black Saturday of 7 October, soldiers and civilians, were killed by our forces' fire due to mistaken identification and amid the chaos that day”.

Yedioth Ahronoth reported in January 2024 that “it is not clear at this stage how many of the abductees were killed because this order was applied”. Elite IOF troops had examined “some 70 vehicles” hit on the way to Gaza by fire from helicopters, drones or tanks, and “in at least some of the cases everyone in the vehicle was killed”. The IOF has never published who was inside them.

Israel has set up no state commission of inquiry into 7 October. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the Knesset on 10 November 2025 that none would be established, and his government voted six days later for a non-state commission instead. Israel votes on 27 October 2026.

During Israel's genocide in Gaza, the IOF also killed captives held there. It admits killing six outright or with high probability. On 15 December 2023 IOF soldiers in Shuja'iyya shot dead Yotam Haim, Alon Shamriz and Samer Talalka. The IOF found that Ron Sherman, Nik Beizer and Elia Toledano were, “with high probability”, killed by a byproduct of its air strike of 10 November 2023. It found that a seventh, Yossi Sharabi, was apparently killed when a building next to one it struck collapsed, and said it could not rule out that Hamas killed him. Sherman and Beizer were two of the soldiers whose capture at Erez brought the order “Hannibal at Erez” on 7 October.

The fighters broke the IOF's Gaza Division. The IOF's own general investigation says the division was overrun for nearly ten hours, and that just over 700 troops guarded the 59-kilometre border on that holiday morning.

The UN Commission of Inquiry found that “at least eight Israeli military bases and outposts were attacked on 7 October, among them Zikim, Paga outpost, Nahal Oz outpost, Sufa, Urim, Re'im, Kerem Shalom and Erez Crossing. At least 314 Israeli Security Forces personnel were killed in these and other locations”. Fighters entered the Gaza Division's headquarters at Re'im and reached the Northern Brigade commander's office at 09:15. They overran the Nahal Oz outpost by 08:54, killed 53 soldiers there by the IOF's count and 66 by the UN's, and took ten into Gaza. Every IOF site investigation NewsCord retrieved finds that the IOF failed in its mission at that site. The UN Commission found that “Israeli Security Forces provided no external assistance to kibbutz Nir Oz during the 7 October attack”.

Israel's own name lists record 286 soldiers, police officers and Shin Bet officers killed on duty on 7 October: 225 IOF soldiers, 57 police officers and four Shin Bet officers. Every one of the 145 people who died at military posts and bases was a soldier. The fighters took 27 soldiers among their 251 captives. Hamas's January 2024 document Our Narrative says the operation “targeted the Israeli military sites, and sought to arrest the enemy's soldiers” and “focused on destroying the Israeli army's Gaza Division”.

The same document says the fighters “only targeted the occupation soldiers and those who carried weapons”. The UN Commission of Inquiry found that claim false. The fighters deliberately killed civilians in every community they entered, and they killed most of the civilians who died on 7 October. The Commission found “deliberate killings of civilians ... in all the attacked Israeli villages and towns, as well as at the Nova festival” in the attackers' own bodycam footage and CCTV, and Human Rights Watch verified “over 280 photographs and videos” of “fighters seeking out civilians and killing them across the attack sites from the first moments”. The fighters shot Mila Cohen, nine months old, in her mother's arms in Be'eri.

Israel's National Insurance Institute, the IOF, the Israel Police and the Shin Bet each publish a memorial list of the dead, and the volunteer oct7database project, which Amnesty International also uses, links its records of the 1,144 people who died on 7 October 2023 to those pages. NewsCord read the memorial pages and sorted the 1,144 by what each person was doing when they died.

Israel's lists sort people by status, not by what they were doing. The IOF's list counts a conscript killed unarmed at the Nova festival as a fallen soldier. The National Insurance list counts a pensioner who shot an attacker breaking into his safe room as a civilian.

On every legal reading, at least two in three of the dead were civilians: 765, or 66.9%, on the strictest.

NewsCord counts in the 850 the 61 police and Shin Bet officers killed on duty, most of them while fighting: civilians by status, not bystanders. The dead included 37 children, seven of them killed by rockets, 123 people aged 65 or over, and 70 foreign nationals, 39 of them from Thailand. In Be'eri, Kfar Aza and Nir Oz, where NewsCord checked every name, 35 of 222 resident dead, 16%, had any security status at all. People aged 65 or over were 46% of Be'eri's resident dead and 18% of its people. Every resident taken alive to Gaza was an unarmed civilian.

Every attacked community lies inside Israel, on Israel's side of the 1949 armistice line around Gaza. Several began as IOF outposts. Nahal Oz was founded on 26 July 1951 as Israel's first Nahal outpost, “Nahal-ites A, facing Gaza”, in the presence of Moshe Dayan, and became a civilian kibbutz in September 1953. Kfar Aza was the “fifth Nahal outpost on the Gaza Strip border”, and Nir Oz the “15th Nahal outpost”, “established as a military outpost to guard the area between Nirim and Nir Yitzhak”. Sufa and Holit began as Nahal outposts in occupied Sinai, and moved inside Israel in 1982. Be'eri and Nirim were two of the “11 points” of 1946, a land-claiming operation the Jewish Agency gave to Haganah headquarters to plan and carry out. Israel's own definition of a Nahal outpost is a “combination of a military unit and a civilian-agricultural community”.

Several stand on the land of Palestinian villages that Zionist forces emptied in 1948. Sderot stands on Najd, whose people Zionist troops expelled on 13 May 1948. Israel's own records say Zikim was founded “on the lands of the Alami family in the village of Hiribya, destroyed three months earlier”. Nirim, Nir Oz, Ein HaShlosha and Magen stand on al-Ma'in, the Abu Sitta family's land. Salman Abu Sitta, expelled from it as a child, recalls: “On May 14, 1948, the Zionist militia Haganah attacked our land with 24 armored vehicles, burning our homes, destroying the school my father built, and expelling us from al-Ma'in”. Most of his family lives in Gaza.

In April 1956, at the funeral of Nahal Oz's security officer Ro'i Rothberg, Moshe Dayan said: “For eight years they have been sitting in the refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we turn into our estate the land and the villages where they and their fathers lived.” He said Rothberg went “to build his home at the gates of Gaza, to be a wall for us”. The version Dayan read on the radio the next day dropped the sentences about the refugees.

Israel wrote the communities into its defence plan. Presenting the Defence Service Law bill to the Knesset on 15 August 1949, David Ben-Gurion listed “frontier settlements, living from their farms and their work, which will be specially equipped, trained and fortified to serve as a first protective wall in case of an enemy breakthrough”. The Local Authorities (Regulation of Guarding) Law of 1961 lets the general commanding each IOF regional command appoint an “officer in charge of guarding” and lets the Interior Minister impose guard duty on a community's residents. The IOF's own history journal calls the emergency squads “community-defence platoons”, trained one or two days a year, and Kfar Aza's defence order puts “the civilian emergency squad” under the command of the first IOF force to arrive. Israel's Defence Ministry counts 43 squad members killed on 7 October among the IOF's fallen.

Barry Meirovitch, who headed Nahal Oz's squad, told an unofficial civilian inquiry that the squad's guns were taken when the barrier along the border was built in April 2021. The Jerusalem Post reported that on 7 October his team was left without guns “because electricity was out on the morning of October 7 and the safe was electric”.

The Military Justice Law of 1955 counts a reservist as a soldier only “when he is in service”. The Reserve Service Law of 2008 calls the reserve system “an inseparable part” of the IOF, and defines reserve service as “active service in the reserve system”, which begins with a call-up order under section 8. Israel's defence minister approved large-scale reserve mobilisation at about 08:35, two hours after the attack began, according to a real-time log kept by the Israeli site Zman Yisrael. NewsCord found no resident killed in the attacked communities who had reported for duty. The ICRC's study of customary international humanitarian law draws the same line: “Potential mobilisation does not render the person concerned a combatant liable to attack”.

In its figures for October 2023, published by HaMoked, the Israel Prison Service held 5,192 “security” inmates, almost all of them Palestinians from the occupied territories: 2,410 serving sentences, 1,463 on remand and 1,319 held without charge or trial. Israel held the 1,319 on secret evidence, under six-month orders that IOF commanders can renew without limit. They were a quarter of all “security” inmates, and more than Israel had held without charge at any time since at least 2001. From 2015 to July 2017 the IOF's military courts cancelled 48 of 3,909 detention orders, 1.2%, the IOF's own figures show.

At the end of September 2023 Israel held 23 Palestinian children without charge, 15% of all the Palestinian children in its military detention, DCI-Palestine found from Israel Prison Service data. Khader Adnan died in Ramle prison on 2 May 2023 after an 87-day hunger strike, having spent, Amnesty International records, “nearly six years in administrative detention without charge or trial”.

From 1 January 2009 to 6 October 2023 Israel demolished or seized 9,916 Palestinian structures in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, 2,607 of them inhabited homes, and displaced 14,374 people, 7,372 of them children, OCHA's database records. Israel gave the lack of an Israeli permit as the reason for 97% of them. Israel's Civil Administration granted Palestinians 98 of 4,422 building permit applications in Area C from 2009 to 2018, 2.2%, its own data show. In 2019 and 2020 it approved about 32 Palestinian plans and permits and rejected 310; in the same two years Israel approved plans for 16,098 settlement housing units.

Israel's demolitions and firing-zone orders, and settler attacks that the IOF did not stop, drove whole Palestinian herding communities off their land in 2022 and 2023. A UN assessment found that 1,105 people from 28 herding communities left between January 2022 and early September 2023, “citing settler violence and prevention of access to grazing land by settlers as the primary reason”.

Ras al-Tin: the last 89 residents, 39 of them children, left on 8 August 2023. OCHA wrote: “The community now stands empty”.

Ein Samiya: 26 households, 132 people including 68 children, left on 22 May 2023 “after a series of settler attacks and other coercive measures”. Israel demolished the school serving the families who remained in August.

Al Baqa'a: settlers set up an outpost in the village on 20 June 2023 and set fire to a home with two people inside on 7 July. The last two families left on 28 July, “leaving only the newly established Israeli settlement where the Palestinian community once stood”, OCHA recorded.

Masafer Yatta: Israel's High Court ruled on 4 May 2022 “that there were no legal barriers to the planned expulsion”. Two of its villages, Khirbet Sarura and Kharoubeh, “no longer exist”, OCHA reported.

B'Tselem's database records that from 29 September 2000 to 6 October 2023 Israeli forces killed 10,559 Palestinians: 7,779 in Gaza, 2,568 in the West Bank, 89 in East Jerusalem and 123 inside Israel. Of them, 2,270 were children. In the same period Palestinians killed 1,330 Israelis: 881 civilians, 145 of them children, and 449 members of the security forces. Israel had held Gaza's 2.1 million people under a land, sea and air blockade since June 2007.

OCHA's database starts in 2008 and counts only deaths that two independent sources verify. It records that from 1 January 2008 to 6 October 2023 Israeli forces and settlers killed 6,346 Palestinians, 1,418 of them children, and that Palestinians killed 315 Israelis, 25 of them children. By 6 October OCHA recorded 198 Palestinians killed in the West Bank and East Jerusalem in 2023, 40 of them children, and 835 settler attacks that caused Palestinian casualties or damage in those nine months, about three a day.

NewsCord read what 14 Western outlets published in the week after the attack, on each anniversary of it, and in the fortnights around the first two anniversaries, and checked the false atrocity claims they carried in 2023 against their pages as they stand today. The outlets are the BBC, the Guardian, the Telegraph, The Times, the Independent, the Daily Mail, The Sun, Sky News, the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, Fox News, AP and Reuters. Section 07 says how we counted and how much of each we could read. For British coverage beyond these outlets, see the Centre for Media Monitoring's report and NewsCord's UK analysis.

The orders

Israel's own press reported IOF fire on Israelis within days. On 15 October 2023 Ynet reported the helicopter strikes inside Israel. On 17 October Yasmin Porat described the tank shells on Israeli radio. In January 2024 Yedioth Ahronoth published the 11:59 order. In June 2024 the UN Commission of Inquiry found that Israeli forces had applied the Hannibal Directive. In July 2024 Haaretz published the Hannibal orders from IOF documents.

NewsCord searched the 14 outlets for the Hannibal Directive under each of its English names, and read every BBC result. In three years the BBC, the New York Times, CNN, Reuters, AP and Sky News have not named it in their own reporting. NewsCord found no BBC article that reports the orders of 11:22 or 11:59.

The BBC reported the IOF's Be'eri investigation on 11 July 2024. It wrote that the investigation “also focused on the command given to a tank to shell a house in which 13 hostages were being held”, and gave its conclusion as the finding: “The report's authors concluded that as far as they could assess, no civilians inside the house were harmed by tank-shell fire”. It left out Haaretz's investigation of four days earlier and the UN Commission's contrary finding of a month earlier. The same report said, in the BBC's own voice, that “Hamas killed one in 10 of the 1,000 residents of Be'eri”, and gave Gaza's dead “according to the Hamas-run health ministry” while giving Israel's without attribution. CNN wrote the same day: “There had been speculation that the hostages had been killed by tank fire from the Israeli military as it tried to force entry to the house, but the inquiry found that Hamas operatives at the house probably killed the hostages.”

A viewer complained that BBC News at One on the first anniversary, 7 October 2024, left out the Israelis killed by Israeli fire. The BBC's Executive Complaints Unit answered that the UN “was able to establish that 14 people died as a result of Israeli fire”, said it knew of no credible independent source for “a significantly higher figure”, and ruled that due accuracy did not require the bulletin to mention them. The UN's 14 come from two incidents. The IOF decided not to count the rest.

The New York Times printed Hiram's order on 22 December 2023, and FAIR found that readers reached it only after “150 paragraphs”. FAIR noted in February 2024 that Ronen Bergman, who shared the byline on that investigation, was one of the reporters on Yedioth Ahronoth's “at any cost” story, and that the Times had not mentioned it. AP's 38-paragraph report on the Be'eri families on 11 January 2024 did not mention the directive. The Guardian's report of 7 July 2024 named it, under a headline saying the protocol “may have risked civilian lives”, where Haaretz's headline said the IOF ordered it. The Guardian wrote that “Allegations first surfaced in January”. Ynet had reported the helicopter fire inside Israel, and Yasmin Porat had described the tank shells on Israeli radio, in October 2023.

The week after the attack

From 7 to 13 October 2023 the 14 outlets published at least 2,014 articles on Israel, Gaza or the attack that we could read and code. In 1,128 of them, 56.0%, the outlet condemned the attack in its own words, with words such as massacre, slaughter, atrocity, terror attack, terrorist, murder and barbaric. Israel's bombardment killed about 1,900 people in Gaza that week. In 20 of the 2,014, 1.0%, the outlet used a condemnatory or legal word for Israel's killing of Palestinians in its own voice, and six of those 20 applied the word to both sides at once.

Of the 14 that used it for Israel alone, nine were opinion pieces. In news reporting there were five: three Daily Mail pages that repeated one sentence, “hundreds of Palestinians in Gaza have now also been slaughtered”, and two Guardian reports that added, after quoting UN experts, that collective punishment is a war crime. The BBC used a condemnatory word for the attack in its own voice in 20 of 137 articles, and for Israel's killing in none.

In their own voice the outlets wrote about 2,600 sentences on the Israeli dead, and 42.7% of them used murder, massacre, slaughter or butcher. They wrote about 360 on the Palestinian dead, and 1.1% of those did.

The outlets ran 405 articles mainly about the Israeli dead and 126 mainly about the Palestinian dead, with about 1,200 and 1,900 dead by 13 October: 338 articles per 1,000 Israeli dead against 66 per 1,000 Palestinian dead, 5.1 times as many per death. Across all the English-language media that GDELT indexes, condemnatory phrases for the attack appeared 4.6 times as often per death that week as the same kinds of phrases for Israel's killing in Gaza, on a count of phrases rather than a reading of the articles.

We read 249 of the same outlets' Gaza articles from that week. In 158 the headline reported harm to Palestinians, and 69 of those headlines, 43.7%, named nobody as doing it. At the BBC it was 10 of the 13 such headlines in the 18 Gaza articles we could read, 77%: “Massive explosion as Gaza high-rises destroyed by jets”; “Aftermath of airstrike on Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza”; “Bodies line corridors as Gaza hospital warns it's at breaking point”.

The anniversaries

On 7 October 2024 the outlets' news articles condemned the attack in their own words in 82 of 183 (45%); on 7 October 2025, 49 of 128 (38%); on 7 October 2026, up to our freeze, 13 of 63 (21%). In three years not one news article used the word genocide in its own voice for Israel's conduct. Two news articles in 2024, one in 2025 and two in 2026 used any condemnatory word for it. Israel had killed 41,909, 67,173 and 74,250 people in Gaza by each anniversary.

When the outlets gave Gaza's toll they increasingly gave it as “Hamas-run”: 17 of 75 tolls in 2024, 10 of 37 in 2025 and 8 of 16 in 2026. The BBC used it on 3 of its 6 tolls in 2024, 6 of 8 in 2025 and 4 of 4 in 2026. Judged by headline and standfirst, the anniversary articles of every kind led on Israeli victims 75 times and on Palestinian victims 17 times in 2024, 38 and 10 in 2025, and 22 and 5 in 2026.

The false claims of 2023 barely came back on the anniversaries. In what we read of the 14 outlets on the three days we found two. The Daily Mail in 2025 printed, without comment, a counter-protester asking a protester how they would feel if “your baby was cooked in the oven”. The Guardian in 2024 ran an opinion piece by Mark Dreyfus, then Australia's Attorney-General, stating that Hamas “weaponised sexual violence”, beyond what either UN body found. We found no anniversary article that repeated the beheaded babies, the 40 babies, the foetus or the clothesline.

The Gaza fortnights of 2024 and 2025

We read the same outlets' reporting of Israel's killing of Palestinians in the fortnight around the first and second anniversaries, against the week after the attack, coding an equal-sized random sample of each outlet's Gaza articles in each period. Of the sampled headlines reporting harm to Palestinians, the share that named nobody as doing it rose from 40.0% in 2023 to 48.8% in 2024 and 65.4% in 2025. The outlets' own use of “Hamas-run” for Gaza's ministry or government rose from 1.4% of their Gaza articles to 12.8% and 15.3%.

In the same fortnights the same outlets condemned 7 October in their own words in 66 of 452 news articles in 2024 and 72 of 756 in 2025, and Israel's conduct in 2 and 7. In 2025 the Daily Mail did so for 7 October in 30 articles and for Israel's conduct in none, of 175 Gaza and Israel articles we read; Fox News 14 and none, of 81; The Sun 18 and none, of 49. The BBC used none of these words in its own voice for either side, in 22 articles. On 6 October 2025 Fox News ran both of these headlines: “Israel's covert campaign targets Hamas terrorists behind Oct 7 massacre”, and “Pope's top diplomat blasts Israel's Gaza offensive as 'ongoing massacre,' condemns Hamas attacks”.

The false claims, three years on

NewsCord found 93 articles published by these outlets from 7 October to 31 December 2023 that stated one of these claims in their own words, or quoted it with nothing in the article saying it was false or unconfirmed: the Daily Mail 51, Fox News 16, The Sun 11, the Independent 6, the Telegraph 5, the Guardian 2 and The Times 2. Not one carries a correction. Not one has been taken down. Of them, 77 read today word for word as they did in their first fortnight, and one was quietly softened.

We found no such article at the BBC, CNN, the Washington Post, AP or Reuters in what we could read. We could read 55 of 231 Sky News pages and 51 of 119 New York Times pages from the period, and found none in those.

Where the outlets changed their claim articles after publication, they mostly made the claim stronger: 14 articles were changed in a way that kept, added or strengthened a claim, against one that softened one, and none carries a notice. Three of them, as first published and as they stand:

In a fourth, of 12 October 2023, the Daily Mail deleted a line in which an IOF spokesman, Maj. Doron Spielman, said he “could not confirm how many babies had been beheaded”, and added the foetus story.

The same outlets reported the claims' collapse in 30 separate articles in 2023, among them Sky News's explainer of 11 October, CNN's report of 12 October and the Washington Post Fact Checker's of 22 November. None of them links to the outlet's earlier pages, and none of the earlier pages was updated to say so.

The New York Times still runs “Screams Without Words” under the headline “How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7”. It has added a correction of a witness's age and an update saying a video undercut its Be'eri paramedic's account. The UN's sexual-violence mission found “reasonable grounds to believe” that rape and gang rape took place in at least three locations, and found at least two of the widely repeated Be'eri allegations “unfounded”.

No regulator required a correction. IPSO ruled on complaints against four of these papers, The Sun, the Telegraph, the Daily Mail and The Times, and upheld none. It treated inverted commas, “reportedly” or a line saying the paper could not verify the claim as enough, and it found that The Times's line about terrorists who “chop the heads off in-utero babies” “fell short of being a literal assertion”. The BBC's Executive Complaints Unit called a “beheaded children” claim “contentious and unproven” and found no breach.

We counted 14 outlets: the BBC, the Guardian, the Telegraph, The Times, the Independent, the Daily Mail, The Sun, Sky News, the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, Fox News, AP and Reuters. We read four periods: the week of 7 to 13 October 2023, with the same week's Gaza articles; 7 October to 31 December 2023 for the false claims; the days of 7 October 2024, 2025 and 2026; and 30 September to 14 October in 2024 and 2025 for Gaza.

We found articles through each outlet's own sitemaps, day pages and archive listings, the Internet Archive, GDELT and NewsCord's own article archive, and read each on the outlet's own site or in the Internet Archive. A computer marked candidate words. A person read every headline and standfirst, every word that would count as an outlet condemning Israel's conduct in its own voice and every false-claim sentence, and checked samples of the rest by hand. For the Gaza fortnights we coded a seeded random sample from each outlet, the size of its count of 7 October articles in the first week, between 10 and 40. For the false claims we compared each article's earliest capture in the Internet Archive with the page as it stands. For the Hannibal Directive we ran Google site searches and each outlet's own search where it has one, read every BBC result, and searched the text of every page the census read. We stopped collecting at 19:00 UTC on 7 October 2026.

1. The BBC, the New York Times, CNN, Reuters, AP and Sky News each publish, under their own names, a news report that names the Hannibal Directive and reports the IOF's orders of 7 October: “Hannibal at Erez” at 07:18, “Not a single vehicle can return to Gaza” at 11:22 and “at any cost” at 11:59, with the 13 people Israel's own records say Israeli fire killed and the IOF's decision that its safety department would not investigate the rest.
2. The BBC takes down its report of 11 July 2024, which gave the IOF's Be'eri investigation as the finding and left out the UN Commission's finding that Israeli tank fire killed “some or all” of the 13 at Pessi Cohen's house. CNN takes down its report of the same day, which called the tank fire “speculation”.
3. The New York Times takes down “Screams Without Words”.
4. The outlets still carrying the 93 articles with false atrocity claims take them down: the Daily Mail 51, Fox News 16, The Sun 11, the Independent 6, the Telegraph 5, the Guardian 2 and The Times 2.
5. Every outlet named here reports, whenever it gives the toll of 7 October, that Israel's own investigations admit Israeli fire killed Israelis that day, and that the IOF decided its safety department would not investigate the rest.

Yedioth Ahronoth printed the 11:59 order in January 2024, and the BBC has yet to report it.

Sources: IOF investigations as reported by Ynet, Yedioth Ahronoth, Haaretz, N12, Walla, Israel Hayom, the Jerusalem Post and the Times of Israel, October 2023 to September 2026; Haaretz, 7 July 2024; Yedioth Ahronoth and Ynet, 10 and 19 January 2024; N12, 12 December 2023; National Insurance Institute and Defence Ministry memorial pages, read October 2026; UN Commission of Inquiry, A/HRC/56/26 and A/HRC/56/CRP.3, June 2024; UN Special Representative on sexual violence, mission report, March 2024; Human Rights Watch, July 2024 and 2002; Amnesty International, December 2025; oct7database name lists; Military Justice Law 1955, ss. 1 and 11; Reserve Service Law 2008, s. 8; Local Authorities (Regulation of Guarding) Law 1961, s. 2; ICRC Customary IHL Study, Rule 3; Israel Prison Service figures published by HaMoked; DCI-Palestine; OCHA demolition and casualty databases, read 7 October 2026; B'Tselem fatalities database; Peace Now, from Civil Administration data; Hamas, Our Narrative, January 2024; FAIR, February 2024; The Intercept, February 2024; IPSO rulings 21446-23, 21744-23, 21812-23 and 21982-23; BBC Executive Complaints Unit findings; NewsCord media census of 14 outlets, frozen 19:00 UTC, 7 October 2026; GDELT.