Yossi Landau is the head of operations for the southern region at Zaka, an Israeli search-and-rescue organization. Assigned to collect human remains after the October 7 Hamas attack in Israel, Landau and his fellow Zaka members riveted media outlets worldwide with the horrific atrocities they saw.
Speaking through tears at the Jerusalem Press Club shortly after the attack, Landau described finding a pregnant woman in Kibbutz Be’eri in a “big puddle of blood, face down.”
Long after Landau’s emotional recollections were replayed, repeated, cited, and quoted in the global media, a problem emerged: No one could find any evidence that the two massacres ever took place — in Be’eri or elsewhere.
In the case of the butchered mother and fetus, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz concluded the killing “simply didn’t happen.” As for the tortured family, no one killed in Be’eri matches Landau’s account. The one brother and sister to die in the kibbutz were 12-year-old twins, killed when an Israeli general ordered a tank to fire on a house where Hamas militants were holding them hostage. Nevertheless, Landau told these stories unchecked in interviews and press conferences.
Landau spread his tales far and wide with little pushback — telling similar stories on camera to CNN, Fox News, and the Media Line, and at an outdoor press conference. Even after reporters showed his accounts lacked any substantiation, news organizations continued to let him off the hook. The New York Times recently interviewed Landau as part of a profile about Zaka, but it did not mention either of his atrocity stories.
Zaka stories have been essential to justifying Israel’s all-out war against Gaza, which has killed around 30,000 Palestinians in less than five months. Speaking at the United Nations in December, Zaka deputy commander Simcha Greiniman broke down while describing alleged atrocities. He later told the same stories to a meeting of British parliamentarians.
Given its prominence, Zaka has been scrutinized by the Israeli press but not the U.S. media.
…Landau has talked openly on four occasions of inventing stories: “When we go into a house, and we’re using our imagination. The bodies is telling us the stories that happened to them.” Another Zaka official said in an Israeli Foreign Ministry video, “The walls, the stone shouted: ‘I was raped.’”
Zaka volunteers have become ubiquitous in media reports about the attacks of October 7. They have been quoted by Reuters, CNN, New York Times, BBC, The Guardian, NBC News, Politico, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and many other outlets — with few, if any, mentions of past scandals or present controversies.
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Article URL : https://theintercept.com/2024/02/27/zaka-october-7-israel-hamas-new-york-times/