On October 28, 2023, Eli Beer took the stage at the Republican Jewish Coalition summit in Las Vegas. In the room: every Republican presidential primary candidate, every Republican Governor in America. Beer told them what he said he personally witnessed on October 7. A woman, four months pregnant. Hamas terrorists who “opened up her stomach,” “took out the baby and stabbed the little tiny baby in front of her.” He also told them about babies placed in an oven and burned alive. Speaker Mike Johnson wept. Beer later went on social media to share that Johnson himself told him his words “moved him to tears and helped him advocate for Israel without restrictions.”
None of those specific stories happened.
Let me be clear about what that means and what it does not mean. October 7 was one of the worst days in Jewish history. Hamas murdered roughly 1,200 people, kidnapped hundreds more, committed documented acts of sexual violence and torture, and filmed themselves doing it. The atrocities were real, overwhelming, and do not require embellishment. But the specific stories Beer told, the four-months-pregnant woman, the baby in the oven, are not among them. The pregnant woman has never been identified. Not by name, not by family, not by anyone. Every other victim of October 7 has been mourned publicly, memorialized, documented. This one does not exist. The claim is also medically nonsensical. How does anyone determine, in the chaos of a mass casualty attack, that a woman is exactly four months pregnant? As for the oven, forensic investigators found nothing. Official sources found nothing. And Angels in Orange, United Hatzalah’s own book about their October 7 response, contains no mention of Beer’s alleged eyewitness accounts. Not a word.
I have been writing about this for a while now. Beer and United Hatzalah ran their fabricated stories through both ends of the media spectrum: Ben Shapiro’s show on the right, Morning Joe on the left, giving the narrative a false credibility that let it travel fast and wide. When people started questioning the oven story, Beer didn’t correct himself. He compared the skeptics to Holocaust deniers. The speech he gave at the RJC, titled “Hatzalah Founder & President Eli Beer Speaks at Republican Jewish Coalition Summit, Oct. 28, 2023,” is still sitting on the RJC’s YouTube channel. No retraction. No correction. No apology.
What made this worse was how Beer’s credibility got treated as a given. When someone pushed back on his claims, Saul Sadka replied: “Eli Beer is a reliable source. That is verification.” Full stop. That is the mentality that lets bad information calcify into accepted truth. The original lie spreads at full speed. The correction, if it ever comes, crawls. And once the lie is exposed, it doesn’t just take down the specific claim. It poisons everything around it. Suddenly critics have a foothold: if they made up the babies in the oven, why should anyone believe anything else they say?
That is exactly the opening that Israel's enemies have been waiting for. Matti Friedman wrote about this recently in the Free Press, in a piece he called "Introduction to Gazology." Friedman zeroes in on how writers like Omar El Akkad exploit this exact vulnerability. "In what turns out to be another hallmark of the genre," Friedman writes, "El Akkad dodges the actual butchery of that day by zeroing in on one debunked tale about Israeli babies being beheaded or shoved into ovens. That didn't happen." That is the game. Sidestep the documented carnage, fixate on the one story that fell apart, and use it to cast doubt on everything else. The fabricated story becomes a rhetorical escape hatch, a way to wave away the real atrocities as just more Israeli propaganda. Beer and the people who amplified him handed that escape hatch to people who were already looking for one.
This is not a PR problem. It is a strategic one. Israel does not need invented horrors to make its case. Hamas murdered roughly 1,200 civilians in a single morning, took hundreds hostage, and posted videos of themselves doing it. That case makes itself. But the moment Israel’s advocates start reaching for stories that fall apart under scrutiny, they give the other side exactly the weapon it needs. The lies don’t just discredit the liars. They cast doubt on the truth.
Israel’s enemies don’t need our help. They have money, organization, and motivation. What they lack is credibility. We should not be in the business of giving it to them.
October 7 was devastating enough on its own terms. The truth is the strongest argument Israel has. Every fabricated atrocity story chips away at it. And the people handing out those microphones need to understand: they are not defending Israel. They are making it harder to defend.
There is also a broader reckoning that the Jewish community has avoided for too long. Anyone who has promoted fabricated first-person testimony about October 7, and has not retracted it, not apologized, not shown any accountability, should no longer be treated as a credible voice. Not at conferences. Not on fundraising stages. Not in the press. The Jewish community has a habit of protecting its prominent figures even when those figures have done real damage. That instinct needs to stop. Credibility is not a birthright. It is earned, and it can be lost. If someone stood before a room full of political leaders and told them things that were not true, things they presented as personal eyewitness accounts, that person has forfeited the right to be taken seriously as a communal leader. Giving them another microphone is not loyalty. It is negligence.
Great article, I 100% agree with you. Have you compiled a list of the non-trustworthy voices? I recall you mentioned a Zaka person as well, though I can’t remember the name at the moment
“Beheaded babies didn’t happen” is its own kind of lie, because it was verified that at least one of the minor victims had been beheaded
One of the Thai victims was viciously beheaded with a garden hoe