Roger Waters
Roger Waters
The singer and BDS activist says 'the thing was blown out of proportion by Israeli lies'

English singer-songwriter Roger Waters, notorious for his anti-Israel vitriol, said that Israel's account of the October 7 massacre was "fishy" and that Israel "made up stories" about atrocities visited on young children.

Speaking on the "System Update" podcast, the Pink Floyd founder told host Glenn Greenwald that his first reaction to the early news of the massacre was "let's wait and see what happens," followed by "how the hell did the Israelis not know it was going to happen, and I'm still a little bit down that rabbit hole."

Asking about how the Israeli security apparatus could have suffered such a dramatic intelligence failure, Waters asked: "didn't the Israeli army in those 10 or 11 camps hear the bang when [Hamas] blew up whatever they had to blow up to get across the border? There is something very fishy about that," he said, apparently referring to the sparsely staffed IDF bases located close to the border fence; most of the predominantly female observation soldiers on these bases were murdered shortly after the incursion.

Asked if Hamas's actions could be justified, Waters began his response with the words "A) we don't know what they did do," before proceeding to say that "resistance to occupation" is not merely justified but the Palestinians are "absolutely legally and morally bound to resist the occupation."

The Gaza Strip is not occupied by Israel after the disengagement in 2005, which saw Israel raze all Jewish settlements in the enclave and withdraw its military. It has maintained strict control of Gazan airspace and border customs, in an attempt to curtail the transfer of weapons and other materials to Hamas terrorists, the territory's rulers.

"If war crimes were committed, I condemn them," Waters told Greenwald, before casting further doubt on whether those took place. "There may have been individual things," he said, referring to a report in Grayzone, which denied much of the evidence Israel has produced from the scenes of the massacre. Grayzone is a widely discredited site known for airing propaganda for the Russian and Syrian regimes, including the denial of Damascus's chemical weapons attacks on civilian population.

"The thing was thrown all out of proportion by Israelis making up stories about beheading babies," he said.

The Israeli military and rescue services have confirmed that beheading was one of the numerous grisly ways in which Hamas terrorists murdered young Israeli children.

A figurehead of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, Waters stands out among the far-left activists associated with the movement for the ferocity of his rhetoric, which routinely crosses into demonizing the Jewish state, projecting on it age-old antisemitic stereotypes.

Earlier this year a British-produced documentary featured interviews with his former collaborators, who recounted numerous instances of antisemitic abuse by the songwriter.