From the Liveblog of
Monday, February 16, 2026
Oct. 7 survivor files complaint against Culture Minister Zohar for denying massacre
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An activist and survivor of the October 7, 2023, Hamas invasion of southern Israel files a formal complaint against Culture and Sports Minister Miki Zohar for denying the massacre.
Avi Dabush, the executive director of Rabbis for Human Rights and a resident of Kibbutz Nirim, announces in an opinion piece in the Haaretz daily that he filed the complaint with the attorney general and urges other Israelis to follow suit.
The complaint was filed after Zohar defended the Prime Minister’s Office’s efforts to remove the word “massacre” from the title of a bill establishing an annual commemoration of the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack.
Zohar said that using the word reflects a “victim mentality.”
Dabush urges Zohar to be sanctioned under the law criminalizing the denial, minimization or celebration of the Hamas terror group’s October 7 attack on southern Israel that was passed by the Knesset last year.
The legislation, sponsored by Yisrael Beytenu MK Oded Forer, is modeled after a 1986 law prohibiting Holocaust denial. “Anyone who says or writes things denying the October 7 massacre with the intention of defending the terrorist organization Hamas and its partners, expressing sympathy for them, or identifying with them, will be sentenced to five years in jail,” it states.
On October 7, 2023, thousands of Hamas-led terrorists burst across the border into Israel, killing some 1,200 people and seizing 251 hostages, while committing many acts of brutality and sexual assault.
The Times of Israel Community.