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| At G2E Expo, gaming-industry executives, Benjie Cherniak and Joe Asher introduce Israeli photographer, Inor Kagno, who testifies his experience and views since surviving the Oct 7th massacre 2-years ago. |
That inversion of truth set the stage for Inor "Roni" Kagno’s remarks. Standing before gaming professionals who live by evidence, he told them he had nothing to sell and no platform to promote — only the story of survival that began at dawn on October 7, 2023, when his camera stopped being a tool of art and became a witness.
Mr. Kagno described the Nova Music Festival not as a battlefield but as a trap sprung on civilians — thousands of young people caught between gunfire and flaming cars, running through open fields that offered no cover. Kagno refused to call it “cross-fire.” “There was only one side shooting,” he said. “And there were no soldiers among us.”
In recounting how information was manipulated after the massacre, Mr. Kagno warned: “And the same people giving this information to Hamas.” He explained that roughly three thousand infiltrators crossed from Gaza that morning — “a thousand of them soldiers with a uniform, Nukhba and stuff … just to kidnap, just to rape civilians.” His point was clear: the same networks that feed Western reporters unverifiable casualty tallies were, in many cases, the very pipelines through which Hamas coordinated its atrocities.
He told the audience how Hamas filmed its own massacres — the deliberate mutilations, the executions in traffic jams — and how those videos now circulate as recruitment propaganda while global media amplify casualty numbers supplied by the perpetrators. “The same organizations that cannot account for the bodies of the hostages,” he said, “are the ones the press still trusts to count the dead.”
Kagno warned that Hamas’s failure even to deliver the cadavers of Israeli hostages in the agreed numbers revealed not only contempt for human life but also for truth itself. In negotiations, he said, the terror group substituted random corpses to meet quotas — and still the world called it diplomacy.
“Integrity,” he told them, “is not a luxury of peace. It’s the only thing that survives when peace collapses.” The line drew a long silence in the room — a rare pause at a convention built on the mathematics of chance.
From there he pivoted to the information war, urging his listeners — many of them data analysts and compliance officers — to recognize the parallel between statistical integrity in gaming and moral integrity in reporting. He said that if their industry demanded provable odds and verifiable data, the world should demand no less from those narrating this war.
Kagno’s closing words turned from indictment to invitation: that those who build systems of transparency, verification, and trust in commerce must be willing to defend those same principles when they’re assaulted in public discourse. “Because if truth becomes negotiable,” he said, “then so does every contract, every partnership, every life.”
The audience rose in spontaneous applause — not the perfunctory kind reserved for keynote speakers, but the quiet, standing kind that marks the boundary between professional respect and moral recognition.
During the Question and Answer period, several attendees asked questions that reflected both professional curiosity and personal unease. One compliance officer from a European sportsbook said he had never heard a survivor speak so directly about “the information pipelines behind atrocity.” Kagno answered that he had no monopoly on truth — only firsthand experience. “I saw who they shot, who they dragged, and who they filmed,” he said. “Everything else is commentary.”
A data-security consultant asked whether he still believed in communication across divides. Kagno paused. “You cannot make peace with people who believe murder is prayer,” he replied quietly. “But you can still make peace with the truth.” The room fell silent again.
Another attendee asked what message he wanted the gaming industry to carry forward. Kagno said that people who work with risk understand that every system has an edge case — the one event that proves whether the model can withstand chaos. “October 7 was Israel’s edge case,” he said. “It showed which values hold under fire, and which dissolve.”
When the session ended, Benjie Cherniak, who had organized the memorial gathering with Joe Asher, took the microphone. He thanked Kagno for his courage and reminded the audience that the event was not an official G2E session but an act of conscience by colleagues who felt they could not let the anniversary pass unmarked. Cherniak said the intent was simple: ““to create a space to pause, to remember, and to be decent human beings for a few minutes before we go back out there.”
He acknowledged that among the crowd were Israelis and diaspora Jews who had spent the past two years under a cloud of hostility, caricatured for defending their own right to exist. “We wanted to give them a place to stand upright,” Cherniak said, “and remind everyone that truth still matters in business — and in history.”
As people filed out, some paused to shake Kagno’s hand, others simply nodded. Outside the ballroom, the convention floor buzzed again with lights and pitches and the sound of deals being made. But for those who had stepped into that side room, the metrics of value had shifted.
For a few minutes on October 7, 2025, in a city built on odds, integrity had the final word.
