There exists a particular species of moral vandalism that thrives in the aftermath of genuine horror. It feeds on outrage and ultimately serves to cheapen the very suffering it claims to champion. We witnessed this phenomenon following October 7th, 2023, when Hamas terrorists murdered roughly 1,200 Israelis in a campaign of unprecedented brutality.
The facts require no embellishment. Children were burned alive. Families were executed in their homes. Young people at a music festival were hunted down like animals. These are documented realities, confirmed by video evidence and forensic investigation.
Yet even as the blood was still drying on kibbutz floors, a different kind of violence was being perpetrated: the systematic corruption of truth itself. Perhaps no case better illustrates this corruption than the fabrications of Eli Beer, founder of United Hatzalah, who stood on a stage claiming to have witnessed horrors with his own eyes that never occurred.
Beer's most viral lie involved a pregnant woman whose unborn child allegedly died after the mother. Standing before the Republican Jewish Coalition conference in Las Vegas, Beer emotionally described what he claimed to have witnessed personally:
The most horrific things I saw in my own eyes a woman who was pregnant four months pregnant she was in a little village, a little kibbutz, they came into her house in front of her kids they opened up her stomach she was pregnant they opened up her stomach took out the baby and stabbed a little tiny baby in front of her and then shot her in front of her family and then they killed the rest.
The claim is medically absurd. How would anyone determine, in a mass casualty zone, that a woman was exactly four months pregnant? Such precision would require medical confirmation. Beer cited none. More damning still, this allegedly pregnant woman has never been identified by name. In a country where victims of October 7th have been widely mourned and memorialized, the absence of any personal details exposes the fabrication.
Perhaps most telling is what appears in "Angels in Orange," the official book documenting United Hatzalah's response to October 7th. The book includes an entire chapter about Beer's speech at the Republican Jewish Coalition conference, complete with photographs of him at the podium. It documents his Holocaust analogies, his meeting with Donald Trump, and his general remarks about the tragedy. But despite Beer's dramatic claims of witnessing pregnant women and babies in ovens, the book makes no mention of these alleged eyewitness accounts. When an organization's own official record omits what would be among the most horrific testimonies from its founder, the silence speaks volumes.
Compare this to the one well-documented case involving a pregnant woman whose fetus did not survive. A woman in her third trimester was brought to Soroka Medical Center with shrapnel wounds. She underwent emergency surgery, but the fetus did not survive. This heartbreaking event was confirmed by Prof. Rely Hershkovitz, who treated the woman herself. The difference is not merely one of detail but of principle. The documented case has a hospital record, a medical team, and a source willing to go on the record.
Beer also championed the thoroughly discredited claim that babies had been placed in an oven and burned alive. Despite mounting skepticism, he insisted the story was authentic, comparing doubters to Holocaust deniers. "I believe the testimony I received, not Ha'aretz," he declared. "A lot of people don't believe the Holocaust happened... There is a lot of fake [news] but this is so not fake news." He speculated that "it makes sense that a mother would put the baby in the oven to save it then Hamas burned down the house."
But forensic investigations and official sources have found no evidence supporting the oven claim. It remains one of the more extreme examples of a narrative circulated without corroboration, yet Beer continued to present it as fact he had personally witnessed.
The pattern of fabrication extends to other cases. Consider Noiya and Yahel Sharabi (Eli Sharabi’s daughters), two teenage sisters whose deaths became the subject of a New York Times story citing an anonymous Israeli paramedic who claimed to have discovered their bodies with evidence of sexual assault. The evidence was nonexistent. Their grandmother told Israeli Channel 12: "They were just shot, nothing else had been done to them." Kibbutz Be'eri itself rejected the allegations: "They were not sexually abused."
This corruption reached its apex with Rami Davidian, who was honored as a torch-lighter at Israel's Independence Day ceremony for allegedly rescuing 700-750 people from the Nova festival in 48 hours. The mathematics are unforgiving. To rescue 725 people using a standard vehicle would require 182 round trips covering 7,280 kilometers—over 334 hours under emergency conditions. Davidian claims to have accomplished this in 48 hours, a mathematical impossibility.
Most troubling, Davidian claimed to have discovered "naked, dead bodies tied up to trees"—a detail that appears nowhere else in the extensive documentation of October 7th. Like Beer's fabricated pregnant woman, this represents the invention of atrocity for dramatic effect.
These fabrications are particularly obscene because they overshadow genuine heroism. Real heroes like Aner Shapira threw back seven grenades before an RPG killed him, saving countless lives. Security coordinator Inbal Rabin-Lieberman continued coordinating defenses under fire for many hours. These individuals performed acts of genuine courage that required no embellishment, no invented atrocities.
The danger of misinformation is not that it makes us care too much about genuine suffering. The danger is that it erodes trust in truth itself. When men like Beer and Davidian stand on stages claiming to have witnessed horrors that never occurred, they provide ammunition for denial and conspiracy. They create confusion and invite people to doubt even the things that are indisputably true.
To state that Hamas committed war crimes on October 7th is to state a simple fact. The massacre of civilians, the killing of children, the taking of hostages, and the documented cases of rape already constitute some of the worst atrocities of the 21st century. To invent or embellish details is not to honor the victims but to dishonor them.
The truth requires no sensationalization. It demands only to be honored. By repeating only what we know to be true, we preserve the integrity of the historical record and ensure that the memory of those killed is not distorted by misinformation.
What happened on October 7th was enough. More than enough. The facts are horrifying. The pain is real. The evil was absolute. There is no need for men to stand on stages claiming to have witnessed horrors that never occurred. The dead deserve better. The living deserve better. And the truth, however painful, deserves to stand unadorned and uncorrupted.
The choice should not be difficult. The truth is terrible enough.
Why, why embellish? This itself is appalling disrespect & dishonour of victims leading to disbelief, denial & doubt of what they went through. Beautifully expressed—Todah.