FACT CHECK: No, Israel Did Not Admit To Killing All 364 Israelis At The Nova Music Festival
A post shared on Instagram claims that Israel admitted to bombing and killing all 364 Israelis at the Nova Music Festival.
View this post on Instagram
Verdict: False
The Israel Defense Forces (DF) did not admit to killing all 364 people at the festival. There is visual evidence showing Hamas killing and executing people at the festival.
Fact Check:
Social media users are sharing claims that Israel admitted to killing all 364 people killed at the Nova Music Festival. One Instagram account posted an image stating, “BREAKING NEWS: Israel officially admits the Israeli Army bombed at Nova Festival and killed 364 Israelis.”
There is no evidence that the IDF admitted to killing all 364 people at the festival. If they had done so, media outlets would have covered it, yet none have. The IDF has not made any such admittance on its Telegram channel or X accounts.
The article that the Instagram post cites deals with IDF friendly-fire casualties. The article details how 20 percent of IDF deaths in Gaza were a result of friendly fire. The Ynet article discusses IDF casualties, not civilian ones, during the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks.
“Casualties fell as a result of friendly fire on October 7, but the IDF believes that beyond the operational investigations of the events, it would not be morally sound to investigate these incidents due to the immense and complex quantity of them that took place in the kibbutzim and southern Israeli communities due to the challenging situations the soldiers were in at the time,” the article reads.
There is some evidence that the IDF did kill civilians during the festival attack. Haaretz reported Nov. 18 that an Israeli police official said that a police investigation found that an IDF helicopter fired upon the festival and may have hit some of the attendees. The Israeli police disputed this in a statement to the Times of Israel, saying outlets should “take responsibility for their publications and only base stories on official sources.”
Haaretz has also published and promoted an op-ed from Dr. Michal Perach, a biological researcher, who criticized efforts to pin civilian casualties caused by Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks on Israel. (RELATED: Did Israel Kill Most Of The Civilians On Oct. 7?)
“All told, Blumenthal’s 3,680-word article mentions Hamas violence in one sentence, with the rest exonerating the terror group and blaming all the deaths on Israel, despite the evidence showing that the overwhelming majority of casualties were caused by Hamas. The article is convoluted and uses the same testimonies several times to create the impression that there are more of them. It also uses dubious sources like the anonymous Twitter/X account Lord Bebo, which is known to spread Russian propaganda,” Perach wrote.
There is also verified footage of Hamas killing and executing civilians during the festival attack. For example, BBC Verify reported on how a video caught Hamas terrorists executing a man hiding from them, video showing Hamas shooting at civilians fleeing from the festival and a woman being shot at the festival.
Check Your Fact has reviewed videos published by the South First Responders, a Telegram channel that has published footage of Hamas Oct. 7 terrorist attacks, and found videos showing Hamas killing festival-goers. Check Your Fact is not linking to these specific videos.
“If the shootings of people hiding in toilets, the machine-gunning of fleeing youth, and the summary executions recorded on Hamas’ own cameras were not enough… we will be posting even more evidence of Hamas’ systematic, intentional killing and targeting of civilians who attended the Nova Music Festival,” the South First Responders said in a Nov. 20 Telegram post.
The Palestinian Authority made a similar false claim in a Nov. 19 statement that Israel killed every civilian at the festival goers, according to the Times of Israel. The statement was then deleted from its social media accounts, the outlet reported. (RELATED: Hamas Official Falsely Claims Group Did Not Kill Civilians)
The IDF referred Check Your Fact to the Israeli Police. Check Your Fact has reached out to the Israeli Police and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office.
