Israeli network censors report exposing Oct 7 ‘hero’ as hoaxer

By Wyatt Reed - April 8, 2025

Under public pressure, an Israeli network censored a report which would have exposed a key face of Israel’s October 7 PR campaign as a fabulist. Rami Davidian claimed to have rescued over 750 young Israelis and witnessed hideous scenes of rape by Hamas. His bogus testimonies were cited by the UN and filmmaker Sheryl Sandberg.

Israeli broadcaster Channel 13 has announced that it will no longer air an investigation into the fabrications of Rami Davidian, a settler who was lionized as a hero after claiming to have rescued over 750 Israelis at the Nova music festival on October 7, following a major public pressure campaign.

“We are aware of the public’s feelings and the consequences of broadcasting the episode and prefer not to broadcast it at this time,” Channel 13 wrote in an April 4 statement. A promotional video published by Channel 13 reporter Raviv Drucker on X the day before attracted hundreds of crude and expletive-filled comments from fanatical Israeli settlers, with the most-liked reply referring to Drucker as a “piece of shit” and accusing him of seeking to push Davidian to commit suicide.

Drucker defended the investigation in a post on X, stating that Davidian’s lies were “not slight exaggerations” like “mildly inflating the number of those rescued — absolutely not.” Instead, “these are stories made up from beginning to end. Hair-raising stories that never, ever occurred.”

One of the most explosive fabrications featured prominently in Sheryl’s Sandberg’s propaganda film, “Screams Before Silence,” which shows Davidian seemingly on the verge of tears in a field in southern Israel as he declares: “these trees… I saw girls tied up to every tree here with their hands behind them.”

“Someone murdered then, raped them, and abused them, here on these trees. Their legs were spread.” As the camera displays a number of trees with rope tied around them by unknown actors, Davidian continues: “Everyone who sees this knows right away that the girls were abused. Someone stripped them, someone raped them. They inserted all kinds of things into their intimate organs, like wooden boards, iron rods.”

“Over 30 girls were murdered and raped here. I had to close their legs and cover their bodies, so no one else would see what I saw. No one can see those kinds of things,” Davidian states, as a concerned-looking Sandberg leans in for a tearful hug.

Davidian’s fabrications were immediately embraced by legacy media outlets, with The New York Times’ Bret Stephens declaring in a glowing review of Sandberg’s propaganda film that “the refusal by so many people to acknowledge what happened, often accompanied by sneering derision, makes it necessary” to print his claims. The day before, an op-ed in the Washington Post cited Davidian’s false testimony to insist that compared to the “the terrible damage inflicted on the civilian population in Gaza,” the “violence described in Sandberg’s documentary… occupies a different plane of calculated cruelty — indeed, of evil.”

Davidian’s now-debunked assertions even made their way into the infamous 2024 UN report on sexual violence in conflict, which appears to have relied on Davidian as a “credible source” for the clearly dubious claim that there were “multiple murdered individuals, mostly women, whose bodies were found naked from the waist down, some totally naked, with some gunshots in the head and/or tied including with their hands bound behind their backs and tied to structures such as trees or poles.”

The UN was far from the only group to take Davidian’s lurid fantasies at face value. As Drucker wrote, “In the year and a half since the October 7 attacks, Davidian has turned his stories into an industry, [with] endless paid lectures, in Israel and abroad” and “dozens or perhaps hundreds of interviews with the media, in which he repeats again and again stories that did not exist.” In 2024, Davidian was even selected to light the national torch on Israel’s Independence Day, a prestigious honor bestowed on him in light of his supposed “heroism.”

Less than two months after the Hamas attacks, Davidian was already cashing in on his dubious stories by way of an international speaking tour, beginning with what the Adelson-funded Jewish News Services described as “a series of gatherings and speaking opportunities in Miami and New York to describe the role he played as a civilian hero during the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks.” In New York, Davidian posed alongside Israel’s notoriously mendacious UN ambassador, Gilad Erdan.

The next year, Davidian embarked on a hasbara tour of US college campuses, appearing at numerous events sponsored by Chabad, the far-right Jewish sect known for its virulent anti-Arab racism. During one such event at Duke University, Davidian repeatedly claimed to have encountered the corpses of multiple naked women tied to trees at the site of the music festival. An Israeli woman live-translating for Davidian stated: ‘“He cried, he screamed, ‘Who? Who can do that?’ He tried to untie the bodies and cover them. He did that for 20 minutes, then he had to continue… with his mission.”

Other doubtful anecdotes peddled by the man Israeli media now refers to as “the heroic farmer” include the supposed rescue of Amit Parizer, a 23-year-old woman who is described in a LinkedIn account matching her age as a former full-time Communication Officer of the J6 & Cyber Defense Directorate of the IDF. Davidian, who speaks Arabic, claims Parizer was being “actively kidnapped by five [or] six terrorists” when he allegedly saved her by posing as a Yemeni Muslim.

Due to Channel 13’s last-minute move to axe their own report, the full extent of the lies told by Davidian may never be known. According to Drucker, that decision was made by the Israeli broadcaster’s CEO, Emiliano Kalamzuk, who hadn’t even seen the report when he decided to pull the plug. According to Drucker, Kalamzuk stated that he was attending a wedding but would “try to shorten his stay there and go watch the [program]” then “talk in the afternoon after he had watched it.”

But the determination had apparently already been made. “An hour later he wrote to me that the episode would not be broadcast and that his decision was final. Two minutes later a statement was issued to the media,” Drucker wrote. As Israeli outlet Walla explained, “Drucker’s words raise the suspicion that the network’s CEO, Emiliano Kalamzuk, did not even watch the investigation before censoring it.”

“That’s true,” a source at Channel 13 reportedly told Walla, while acknowledging “there is a small chance” that the broadcaster’s non Hebrew-speaking CEO “immediately left the wedding, sat on a chair to the side and watched the investigation, which is in Hebrew without translation.” Nevertheless, the source noted, “the investigation is 53 minutes long, and he [Kalamzuk] wrote a message in an hour.””

Now that Channel 13’s report has been buried, the exact nature and quantity of Davidian’s fabrications remain unclear. What is clear, however, is that his colorful stories are having their intended effect. While happily participating in Israel’s public relations push to manufacture consent for Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, the “heroic farmer” urged one Israeli podcast: “Wipe out Gaza, there’s nothing good about them.”