Roger Waters, the Pink Floyd front man and frequent pontificator on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, said in an interview last week that there was something “very fishy” about Hamas's October 7 attack on Israelis. He questioned whether Hamas actually targeted civilians, and suggested that it may have been a “false flag operation.”
“We don’t know if we will ever get much of the story,” the 80-year-old rocker and activist told Glenn Greenwald, in a Rumble-exclusive podcast interview. ‘They’re calling it their 9/11. What actually happened on the American 9/11? Nobody knows.”
“Do you think what Hamas did on October 7 can be justified?” Greenwald asked.
“Well, we don’t know what they did do,” Waters responded. “Was it justified to resist the occupation? Yeah, it’s the Geneva Conventions,” he said. “They are absolutely legally and morally bound to resist the occupation since 1967.”
Waters’ dating presumably refers to Israel’s conquest of Gaza, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights during the Six Day War. Although the status of these territories is disputed, all of the communities targeted by Hamas on October 7 fall within Israel’s internationally-recognized borders.
The Geneva Convention, which Rogers cited to justify attacks on Israel, prohibits the targeting of civilians, as well as any “acts or threats of violence” whose primary purpose is to “spread terror among the civilians.”
Waters refuses to state that Hamas targeted civilians
“Are there limits,” Greenwald asked, “on the way in which [Palestinians] can resist?”
“If war crimes were committed,” Waters said, “I condemn them,” but he refused to definitively say that such crimes had taken place. “Haaretz,” he said, citing a prominent Israeli newspaper that publishes in both Hebrew and English, has "finally come out with figures of how many were killed. Probably the first 400 were Israeli military personnel, and that is not a war crime.”
It is unclear what article Waters was referring to. Haaretz, like the Jerusalem Post, maintains a running list of those murdered, taken hostage, or killed in battle since the October 7 attack. The list—which includes the more than 260 Israelis whom Hamas murdered at an outdoor music festival during the early hours of the attack—prominently displays children, the elderly, and foreign nationals.
If civilians were targeted, Waters said, “Of course, I don’t condone that. But the thing is, it was thrown out of all proportion, by the Israelis making up stories about beheading babies. They even got the president of the United States, dotard that he is, to claim that he had seen photographs.”
"They even got the president of the United States, dotard that he is, to claim that he had seen photographs.”
Roger Waters
President Joe Biden did refer to photos of beheaded babies in the days following the attack, comments that inflamed controversy when he later clarified that he'd seen reports of the photos rather than the photos themselves. The Jerusalem Post confirmed on October 12 that photos of burnt and decapitated babies had been shown to US Secretary of State Antony Blinken during a visit to Israel.
An IDF spokesman, Jonathan Conricus, also said that Hamas had likely carried out decapitations of babies in kibbutz Be’eri, and forensic investigators later confirmed the discovery of babies without heads, though they could not confirm whether or not the heads were removed after the babies were killed.
Forensic teams have also confirmed signs of torture, rape, and other atrocities. A forty-seven-minute video of footage from the attacks, taken largely from cameras on the terrorists themselves, has been screened in recent weeks for foreign journalists, members of Knesset, and others. Although not all of this video is public, at the request of the families of those depicted, much of the footage is available online, for example on october7.org.
Greenwald and Waters condemn Israel’s response in Gaza
Despite Waters’ skepticism about the events of October 7, neither he nor Greenwald expressed qualms about condemning Israel’s handling of the war with Hamas in response to the attack.
“I don’t recall anything that has made me sicker or more disgusted,” Greenwald said, “than seeing the level of suffering that’s taking place in Gaza. It’s “one of the worst crimes, if not the worst crime, I’ve seen in my life.”
Asked whether he seems to value Palestinian lives more than Israeli ones, Waters called the suggestion “absolute patent nonsense, complete rubbish. No, I don’t.” He said that this was the difference between his view and that of the Israeli government. “I believe in equal human rights for all our brothers and sisters all over the world,” Waters said.
“The Israeli government doesn’t,” believe that, he charged, and “that’s why they are committing genocide” against the Palestinians.
“I’m sorry to grit my teeth,” Waters said, “but I weep. You said this is the most horrific thing in your lifetime. It is, in my lifetime. I’m eighty years old; this is the most horrific thing to happen in front of my eyes."
Neither mentions kidnappings, captivity of civilians in Gaza
At no point in the nine-minute clip posted to YouTube did either Waters or Greenwald mention the 240 hostages currently held in Gaza, about 30 of whom are children.
More than a thousand experts and practitioners from the fields of child welfare and child psychology have signed an open letter to the secretary-general of the UN calling for all possible action to secure their immediate release before any more psychological damage is done to them, some of it irreparable.