Never Again?

Peloni:  The failure to pursue a full accounting for what took place in the lead up to, and aftermath following, October 7 is a political albatross which will plague this govt and likely the next, til such an accounting has been completed.  Meanwhile, the Supreme Court’s efforts to control such an inquiry demonstrates the fact that even those out of power have a reason to control the narrative from such an inquiry.

This is the text of a speech given by MEMRI President and Founder Yigal Carmon in the Israeli Knesset on February 4, 2026.

Yigal Carmon | Memri | Feb 6, 2026

MEMRI’s Yigal Carmon. Screengrab via Youtube 

On the morning of Saturday, October 7, 2023, over 1,200 of our brothers and sisters were slaughtered by butchers from the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) and their collaborators. Men, women, girls, boys, infants, the elderly, and young people at a music festival were murdered. They were butchered, shot, suffocated, burned alive, raped, and slaughtered in grotesque ways, and their limbs were hacked off. Children were murdered in front of their parents, and parents in front of their children. To all these victims – and to those who survived, wounded in body and soul – we owe an accounting.

The State of Israel inscribed upon its banner the promise “Never Again,” and on October 7, it failed to uphold that promise.

The fact that a state commission of inquiry has yet to be established to examine the events of October 7 constitutes a moral low point in the history of the Jewish people.

Therefore, I have taken it upon myself to serve as a voice for all those who were slaughtered, and to investigate how it all came to pass.

This week, the introduction and first chapter of a comprehensive investigation I conducted – spanning hundreds of pages and hours of recordings – will be published, examining the misconceptions, actions, and failures that led to October 7.

The failures of every state authority and their heads will be published over the coming weeks.[1] The common denominator among them all is corruption in its various forms.

Corruption takes many forms, and it is not necessarily just a suitcase packed with dollar bills.

Some will sell out their brothers and sisters to murderers for the sake of money. But there are also those who would sell them for the chance to buy one more day of false quiet. Some would sell them for academic prestige, and some would sell them to avoid being suspected of racism.

In its most extreme form, the corruption in question was manifested in the long-standing cooperation on the part of Israel’s government and defense establishment with the Emirate of Crime and Terrorism – Qatar.

It is in this context that billions of dollars, over seven million tons of concrete, and hundreds of thousands of truckloads of goods were transferred to Hamas-controlled Gaza over the years.

It was this transfer of Qatari money that enabled Hamas to build itself up militarily – 500 kilometers of tunnels, tens of thousands of missiles and rockets, and over 30,000 militant-murderers and without these funds, the October 7 massacre could not and would not have happened.

In order to justify this unforgivable crime of facilitating the transfer of Qatari funds to Hamas-ruled Gaza, Israel’s government, defense establishment, media, and academic establishment fabricated a colossal lie that Gaza was on the brink of “humanitarian collapse” and that the funds were intended to prevent this.

All it would have taken to refute this lie is to simply examine with one’s own eyes reports from international media outlets, journalists (BBC, Al-Jazeera, TRT, and others), and social media influencers in Gaza and around the world – all of which have been published by MEMRI.[2] According to the words of the son of slain Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, Gaza’s economic prosperity had already begun between 2008 and 2009, after Hamas violently seized power there. At a time when Israeli intelligence predicted that Gaza would soon be “uninhabitable,” Haniyeh said: “Gaza was more beautiful than many Arab cities… People who came to Gaza in 2020-2021 could not believe that this was Gaza, because it was so beautiful.”[3]

Before October 7, Gaza had 17 higher education institutes, 34 hospitals, modern shopping malls (including in refugee camps), bustling boulevards, thriving local markets, a seaside promenade, office and residential towers, five-star hotels and restaurants, luxury car showrooms, gyms and sports clubs for all ages, riding clubs, a cat café, and a dog grooming salon.

But in the eyes of Israel’s defense establishment, Gaza was on the brink of humanitarian collapse.

I have addressed the issue of the Qatari money in several articles I have published over the years, including: “Is Gaza In Need Of Qatar’s Aid?” (2018), “The Blood Wedding Of Netanyahu And Qatar” (2021), and “Qatar Is A State Sponsor Of Islamist Terrorism – Israel’s Cooperation With It Is Strategically Disastrous And Morally Shameful” (2022).

In these articles I warned that Israel’s ties with Qatar would lead to disaster.

On August 31, 2023, just weeks before the Hamas attack, I published a warning about “signs of possible war in September-October.” Because of this article, I was accused by colleagues in the intelligence research community worldwide of “racism.” My work was labeled politically biased. Publications by MEMRI – the institute that I founded and still lead – about incitement in Palestinian textbooks and other materials were dismissed as “dealing with nonsense.”

The intelligence officials had their own supposedly objective interpretation: that Qatari money could buy “calm and quiet,” and restrain Hamas. They believed it was possible to buy a 1,500-year-old religion – which spread in 150 years from the Arabian Peninsula to the borders of China in the east and France in the west – with suitcases of dollars and work permits in Israel.

In reality, Hamas’s religious ideology was never for sale. Only the State of Israel and the Zionist dream were for sale – and they were indeed sold.

In the time leading up to October 7, Israel was taken over by Orwellian discourse, and this discourse continues to dominate us today. According to this Orwellian “newspeak”:

Qatar “is not an enemy state” (Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu);

Qatar “does not at all oppose the existence of Israel” (Mossad chief Yossi Cohen);

“Hamas is an asset” (Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich);

Rockets from Gaza are part of a “quiet interval” (also Yossi Cohen);

Submission to the enemy is actually an “arrangement”;

Paying protection money to the enemy is framed as creating a “civilian loss price”;

Economic prosperity is “a humanitarian crisis.”

It is in this context that the IDF’s Southern Command chief, entrusted with the security of the residents of the Gaza envelope, traveled with the Mossad chief to Qatar to request more money for the killers of his own soldiers. Even Orwell could not have imagined such an absurdity.

The belated awakening of various Israeli political elements against Qatar – having suddenly remembered to distance themselves from it now that the depth of its penetration of Israel’s establishment has become clear – is merely shameful opportunism. The entire security establishment had cooperated with the policy of the prime minister, who had led the entire initiative of transferring Qatari money to Hamas-ruled Gaza.

None of the senior officials who are now saying that “Qatar is Hamas and Hamas is Qatar” voiced this at the time, and certainly none have resigned in protest of this policy.

Every military and government official involved in transferring funds from the Wahhabi and Islamist emirates to Hamas not only carried out an egregiously illegal order marked by a black flag – but was also complicit in the moral corruption of cooperating with the enemy. Under Israeli law, particularly the Counter-Terrorism Law of 2016, providing any assistance to a terrorist organization constitutes a severe security offense.

On December 22, 2023, I published a comprehensive report about Qatari documents containing instructions by Qatari officials to transfer funds to senior figures around the world. Among the names appearing in the documents was that of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

I want to emphasize: These documents in and of themselves do not constitute evidence. But they are a reason for an investigation, if only to refute the suspicions they raise.

There is, however, more significant evidence of the corruption in question, and that is the very policy of cooperation with Qatar – regardless of any personal gain – which is led by the prime minister and which continues to this day.

Since the October 7 attack, the prime minister of the Qatari Emirate of Crime and Islamist Terrorism has repeatedly emphasized that the transfer of funds from Qatar to Hamas-ruled Gaza was carried out in full coordination with the Israeli government, at its request. This is true.

There has never been – and there never was – any rational explanation for the Israeli government’s continued cooperation with the Qatari Emirate of Crime and Terrorism. The only explanation has been Prime Minister Netanyahu’s fear that Qatar would expose his collaboration with it.

The importance of this gathering lies not only in discussing past failures, but even more so in preventing the repetition of such collaboration today.

This policy of collaboration with Qatar continues to this day, even after the return of the living hostages and the recovery of the bodies of those who were murdered. This process was itself used to justify the continued ties to Qatar, which was supposedly a “mediator” while it was in fact a partner in the murder, having backed Hamas and supported its demands.

A day will come – and it is not far – when the State of Israel will hold accountable all those responsible for the October 7 catastrophe.

In this context, it is important to note that only a few people in Israel and around the world have been exposed to the “atrocity film” – documenting the actions of Hamas’s murderers from their body cameras (Bearing Witness to the October 7th Massacre, produced by the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit) – because the Israeli government is totally preventing its release.

The footage could have been released after being edited to remove segments as requested by some of the bereaved families.

The true reason the “atrocity film” has not been made public is that the prime minister, along with several IDF officers and senior security officials, fear the public’s uncontrollable anger toward them once the full scale of the atrocity – and their responsibility for it – is revealed.

Indeed, during the fighting with Hamas, IDF operations have also caused deaths among the civilian population in Gaza. Women, elderly people, and children who were not members of Hamas have been killed. This took place because Hamas positioned its bases, ammunition depots, launch sites, and fighting positions in the heart of the population – beneath residential buildings, hospitals, and schools – with one of its main command centers located beneath the UNRWA headquarters.

Israel’s military actions comply with international law, which stipulates that civilian population centers lose their protected status when exploited by terrorists. In her speech, Germany’s former Foreign Minister and UN General Assembly President Annalena Baerbock cited this provision of international law in support of Israel’s right to defend itself.[4] I have not heard representatives of the State of Israel say such statements themselves.

On October 7, Hamas’s murderers abducted 251 Israelis – children, women, and the elderly. Among the population of Gaza, there was not a single “Righteous Among the Nations,” as there had been under Nazi rule – those who lost their lives to save Jews. There will be no grove for the Gazan Righteous Among the Nations in the Yad Vashem Memorial, because there were none in Gaza. Not a single one.

One may ask: Could it have been predicted in advance that Hamas’s murderers would commit atrocities so severe and cruel? Does their religion permit these acts? The answer is yes. Their religion instructs, encourages, and promises reward for such deeds – either victory in this world, or paradise in the next (“Imma an-nasr, am ash-shahad”). The October 7 attacks were carried out in accordance with the same model of atrocities carried out against Jews in the seventh century by the followers of this religion and its prophet.

Historically, such Islamic atrocities were not only directed against Jews – Christians in the 15th century were massacred the same way when the Ottomans conquered the Byzantine capital of Constantinople in 1453.

The ancient Islamic roots of the October 7 attacks will be described in a special research report that we will publish on this subject, based on captured documents that have been made public, and based on publicly-available incitement material.

For years, Hamas indoctrinated people with the well-known Islamic battle cry: “Khaybar, Khaybar, ya yahud, jaysh Muhammad sawfa ya’ud” – “Remember Khaybar, O Jews! The army of Muhammad will return.” And it did return, on October 7.

The children who were raised on this battle cry over the past 20 years are the ones who carried out the atrocities of October 7 in the Gaza envelope.

Decision-makers in Israel must recognize that religious ideology cannot be bought out with money. Only a sober acknowledgment of this reality can pave the way to peace.

Yigal Carmon

Jerusalem

February 4, 2026