This photo has appeared in countless posts and viewed millions of times.
The Community Note provides 8 links to mainstream news and factchecking websites.
I like the Community Note system in general, and I am deeply opposed to shadowbanning, blocking, deleting, and banning. I am grateful that I can read both sides of the story, and check out the Community Notes for myself.
But it seems there is less in these particular debunkings than the Community Note suggests.
Most of the mainstream debunking is addressed not to the photo of burned out cars, but to a "viral video" showing cars being shot up by Apache helicopters. That video has long been established not to have come from the attacks on October 7, but later and inside Gaza. Very little if any debunking is addressed to photos of burned out cars. (All they say is that there is "no evidence" that IDF caused this, nor have IDF admitted it.)
I remember these posts as they were originally being posted just after October 7. While Syrian Girl and others may have initially claimed the video was an attack on the Nova festival cars by IDF, they almost immediately walked that back, as it was quickly proven back then that the video did not come from the Nova Festival. They said that the video showed what shooting cars would be like. Now imagine this happening at the Nova Festival, they said. That's how so much destruction could have been created there, by Apache helicopters.
So the main claim that is being debunked is really a strawman which nobody (at least nobody doing the original postings) claims. The Apache shooting video is not being shown as direct evidence of what happened at Nova, but as the kind of thing which could have happened there too. IOW, the video shows that an attack by Apache helicopters is a a plausible explanation of what happened at Nova.
What's really more convincing is the picture of burned out cars. It's hard to imagine lightly armed militants causing so much destruction, or even wanting to when it would not provide them with any more hostages--which was their main objective. That is really the argument, and none of the debunking addresses it at all. The evidence therefore comes from a kind of argument: reductio ad absurdum. The Israeli narrative denies that Hamas had any objective other than creating terror atrocities, alleging that Hamas are just monsters. That is a continuation of the absurdity.
Now there is a picture of all the burned out cars together in a big heap that appears more than any other nowadays. Debunkers like to point out that this photo of all the cars was taken 10km away from the Nova festival, where Israel had collected all the cars for destruction.* But there is another video showing drone footage on October 7 showing these burned and shot out cars before they were moved. That footage is even shared by the Washington Post. It is not so easily "explained" (nor does it seem that mainstream sources even bother to try) except by blaming it on Hamas.
(*Although the heap of cars was not at the original location, it still does show a massive amount of destruction which would be hard to imagine Hamas militants being responsible for. This is even more clear seeing the drone footage of the cars before they were moved.)
In fact what seems to have happened* is that IDF blocked the exit of cars from the festival on the assumption that many would be hostages being taken by Hamas. And then IDF went back and shot up the cars, to be sure that Hamas wasn't getting any hostages. Even if Israeli ravers, hostages or not, would be shot in the process. This is the infamous Hannibal Directive, which IDF denies. Shooting up cars was not an Hamas objective, and they probably didn't have the firepower to destroy so many cars, nor would they have wanted to.
(*I posted on this way back in October, following a long X thread on it.)
If IDF had been innocent of shooting and burning the cars, it would have been far better if Israel had left the cars in their original positions, for international monitors to come and check it out for themselves. Or if they had established detailed forensics for as many cars as possible, explaining what happened. In that context, the fact that they almost immediately moved the cars to a different location for destruction is itself very suspicious. If there is no clear evidence of Israel shooting up the cars it is because Israel itself destroyed the evidence as quickly as it could.
A further argument not addressed at all in the debunkings is that the Nova festival wasn't originally planned to occur in the Gaza adjacent location. It was planned to occur elsewhere, but very curiously moved to the Gaza adjacent location on October 6, long after Israeli intelligence had become aware of Hamas plans for an imminent attack (about which Israeli leadership decided on the night of October 6 to do nothing, because it would be a dud, they declared).
Not only are those facts not discussed in the debunkings, they were hardly mentioned in mainstream media at all.
Even ignoring how these facts suggest that Israeli leadership wanted a large number of deaths to arise from an attack they knew would happen, in order to justify crushing Gaza completely, the fact is that Hamas could not have included the Nova festival in their planning, which had gone on for years.
The Israeli narrative never describes how the route that Hamas took inside Israel was not directed at the Nova festival, or the nearby Kibbutz, but on several IDF bases ringing Gaza where Hamas planned to take hostages. The Israeli narrative never mentions that at all because it makes the Hamas plans sound like a military rather than a terror operation. So all the discussion is focused on atrocities at the Music festival which Hamas had no way of knowing would be in their planned path.
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