October 7: An Interview With Al Jazeera Investigative Unit's Richard Sanders

Al Jazeera's months-long investigation into the events of October 7th has finally been released.

The details of the Hamas attacks on October 7th and the subsequent Israeli response have been shrouded within a dark fog, heavily contributed to by Israeli and American officials and media alike, with stories of horrifying atrocities spreading quickly through newspapers and legislatures, and actual journalistic investigation conventions falling by the wayside for many.

After months of interviewing, pouring through casualty reports and video from the scene, Al Jazeera has released the results of its findings, attempting to create as objective as a scene as it can of what actually occurred on that day: what Hamas actually did, how much of the destruction was actually caused by Israeli fire, and how much of the crimes we were told about were actually fabricated.

I spoke with Richard Sanders, the director of the documentary, about the pressures of the Israel lobby, whether anything will change how the Western media treats Israeli narratives, about claims about how many Israelis were killed by IDF fire on that day, and about how independent and alternative media has been forced to do the legwork that mainstream organizations have been unwilling or unable to do.

The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.

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Séamus: How soon after October 7th did this investigation begin by Al Jazeera?

Richard: The investigation began within a few weeks of October 7. It was motivated in part by skepticism about some of the atrocity stories—particularly regarding babies—that were being accepted uncritically in Western media. We felt somebody needed to do proper scrutiny.

S: The story about the beheaded babies as you allude to was debunked early on in the war, but through your investigation, what story told about October 7th was the most difficult to determine the exact veracity of?

R: Sexual violence is much more complicated than babies. With babies we can see that there are two in the list of the dead. Neither was burned or mutilated—so any story about babies that does not relate to those two, and there were a lot, is not true. That immediately flagged up for us that information from Israeli officials, IDF officers and first responders was unreliable. And if it was unreliable regarding babies, it was likely to be unreliable regarding sexual violence. It quickly became clear the bulk of the information was coming from the same sources. However—we were very aware sexual violence is extremely common in conflict and may well have occurred. In the end we reached the conclusion that, while there may have been rapes, there simply wasn't the evidence to support the claim it was widespread and systematic.

S: Those claims about systematic rape by Hamas fighters was spread around by a lot of sources, but among them was the Israeli emergency response team ZAKA. You had actually managed to secure an interview with Yossi Landau, who ran ZAKA's southern region operations and had spread a plethora of atrocity stories about October 7th. Why do you think he said yes to Al Jazeera whereas I presume others you contacted declined?