Tag: israel

IDF Veterans: Post-10/7 Rules Allowed Hundreds of Civilian Deaths to Kill Single Hamas Member

Former Israeli military and intelligence personnel affirmed that rules for targeting confirmed and alleged Hamas members in Gaza were dramatically loosened after the October 7, 2023 attack, allowing strikes expected to kill hundreds of Palestinian civilians to target even low-ranking members of the Palestinian resistance group, according to a report published Monday.

In an article published by Haaretz, Israel’s oldest daily newspaper, Yaniv Kubovich gathered testimonies from former Israel Defense Forces intelligence personnel that add to the body of evidence from Israeli whistleblowers, military officials, and investigative journalists documenting how the IDF expanded its targeting practices during its devastating US-backed annihilation of Gaza, which has killed or wounded more than 250,000 Palestinians in the coastal exclave over the past three years.

One change described by some of those interviewed by Kubovich was “the opening of the intelligence apparatus to untrained personnel.”

“People arrived at military intelligence who weren’t from the unit, reservists who’d never even served in intelligence, brought in from all sorts of places,” said one veteran, identified as “A.”

“They sat in the Targeting Directorate looking for the most insignificant targets, the small fry, so they could kill them,” A added. “Anyone displaying Hamas symbols on Facebook or identifying themselves as Hamas was marked as a target. Some were Hamas members, some were fighters too, but they really were small fry.”

Another veteran, “D,” who was assigned to a strike cell – units that coordinate drone and other aerial attacks – said: “Suddenly, the IDF was striking even the lowest of the low indiscriminately, and everyone had forgotten about conserving ammunition. We were striking Hamas drivers. That’s how far it went.”

Kubovich wrote that “a recurring theme in the accounts is the gap between a target’s importance, the scale of the strike and the civilian toll deemed acceptable.”

For example, on October 31, 2023, IDF warplanes dropped 2,000-pound “bunker-buster” bombs supplied by the United States on the densely populated Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza in order to kill one Hamas commander, Ibrahmi Biari.

“We knew Biari was underground, beneath several large buildings, but we couldn’t pinpoint which building he was under,” said D. “So they chose several buildings that were still occupied and decided to bring down all the buildings above the tunnel he was in. We didn’t initiate an evacuation because it was important to kill him before he could get away.”

A, who was also involved in the mission, said the decision to bomb the buildings was referred to the IDF chief of staff for approval, since intelligence officials estimated that there would be hundreds of civilian casualties. The IDF calculated that roughly 100 people would be killed or wounded in the proposed attack.

“We couldn’t get any more intelligence to pinpoint his exact location,” said veteran D. “They told us, ‘He’s killing soldiers right now. We have to strike him,’ out of concern for the troops on the ground, and in the end the strike was approved. They really wanted to kill this guy.”

Hamas said that 400 people were killed or wounded in the attack.

“Among other things, we relied on figures coming from Hamas, which we considered relatively plausible, even if they weren’t 100% accurate,” veteran A told Kubovich. “As time went on, we realized the death toll was around 250. I remember being stunned that we were bringing down several densely populated buildings, killing and injuring hundreds of people, to kill a battalion commander who, just a few weeks earlier, hadn’t even been someone we were supposed to gather intelligence on.”

The UK-based civilian casualty monitor Airwars said that at least 126 civilians, including 69 children, were killed in the attack, which wiped out whole families.

“You can’t authorize the potential killing of 300 civilians for a battalion commander, or the killing of 20 civilians for every Hamas truck driver, and still tell the public we did everything we could to avoid harming innocent people,” Nadav Weiman, executive director of the IDF veterans’ group Breaking the Silence, told Kubovich.

Referring to the Jabalia massacre, D said: “I can’t say this particular strike is what really messes with my head. What’s much harder for me is the system of strike after strike after strike, with collateral damage running into dozens of people, sometimes hundreds. Being part of a system like that bothers me more than taking part in any particular strike.”

The veterans’ accounts raise further questions about Israel’s repeated assertions that its military operations have been conducted in accordance with international humanitarian law, which requires parties in armed conflicts to distinguish between civilians and combatants and prohibits attacks expected to cause excessive civilian harm relative to the anticipated concrete and direct military advantage.

Those claims stand in stark contrast with statements by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other senior Israeli officials, who began calling for the genocidal destruction of Gaza and its 2.2 million people in the immediate aftermath of the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023.

Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant – his former defense minister who ordered the “complete siege” of Gaza, explaining that “we are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly” – are currently fugitives from the International Criminal Court in The Hague, where they are wanted for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes, including murder and forced starvation.

The International Court of Justice (ICJ), also in The Hague, is currently conducting a genocide case against Israel filed by South Africa and formally supported by more than 15 nations. While a ruling in the case isn’t expected until at least 2029, a United Nations commission of inquiry, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, and other experts – including many Israeli and international Jewish academics, jurists, human rights campaigners, and others – have already concluded that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

The new Haaretz investigation adds to the body of reporting on Israel’s loosened rules of engagement and their disastrous implications for Gaza civilians, including a December 2024 New York Times exposé involving interviews with over 100 IDF soldiers and veterans, Israeli officials, dozens of airstrike victims, and experts on the law and conduct of war.

Kubovich’s revelations also come as the documentary NAZA, directed by Israeli journalists and filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, brings testimony from Israeli military and intelligence insiders to international audiences. The film features 24 anonymized insiders describing the surveillance, artificial intelligence-assisted targeting, and military procedures used during the assault on Gaza.

IDF veteran testimonies are consistent with earlier investigations into the IDF’s use of artificial intelligence to generate targets at extraordinary speed, often with limited human scrutiny.

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NatCon Conference Dials Up Islamophobia (on Israel’s Behalf)

This past week, a flock of Israel supporters jetted to Jerusalem to attend this year’s “National Conservative” conference, the project led by Israeli political thinker Yoram Hazony. Days later, the offspring of neoconservatism’s godfather Norm Podhoretz, John, revealed the conceit and deception behind the “National Conservatism” project:

“[Yoram Hazony] wants to secure intellectual support in America and the West for the annexation of the West Bank and the creation of what people call Greater Israel… but that’s not what he says he’s doing,” Podhoretz explained. “What he says he’s doing is ‘understanding nationalism’ and trying to make a bond between Israel and the rest of the conservative world by saying, ‘We’re nationalist and you’re nationalist… We’re all the same…But in fact, that is disingenuous…I’m right because I’ve talked to him about it, and I talked to him about it standing on the West Bank at his house in 1996 or 1997. So, I know that that’s what he wants.”

As support for Israel crumbles within the United States as a consequence of Israeli behavior, principally its livestreamed genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing of the West Bank and Lebanon, Israelis have revived an old strategy for creating “a bond between Israel and the rest of the conservative world”: ginning up fear and hatred of Muslims. As Drop Site News previously reported, a study commissioned by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs and conducted by Mark Penn’s Stagwell Global concluded that the “best tactic to combat” Israel’s increasingly negative public image “is to foment fear of ‘Radical Islam’ and ‘Jihadism,’ which remain high.”

“By highlighting Israeli support for women’s rights and gay rights while elevating concerns that Hamas wants to ‘destroy all Jews and spread Jihadism,’” Drop Site reported, “Israeli support rebounded by an average of over 20 points in each country.” The study added: “Especially once the situation in Gaza is resolved, the room for growth in all countries is very significant.”

Speeches at this year’s National Conservatism conference suggest that Israel and its powerful lobby have embraced that tactic, fearmongering over the supposed Muslim hordes plotting to take over Europe and the U.S. Amichai Chikli, who heads Israel’s primary state propaganda organ, the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs, used his speech to warn of what he called “the Islamist offensive [on the West]”: “First, entry into politics… then, positions of power… finally, an Islamist culture forced on neighborhoods, cities, and eventually entire countries.” Israeli Diaspora Minister Chikli used this same refrain earlier in the year, telling an Israeli-government-sponsored conference on antisemitism in January that he seeks to “mobilize all forces in the ideological and physical struggle against the heirs of the modern Nazis,” adding that “this is not just the struggle of the Jewish people. This is the struggle of the free world against the imperialism and tyranny of radical Islam.” Describing the conference, Chikli said that “the real threat to European Jewry is radical Islam” and that  “our goal is [to] form a broad camp to fight together the lethal antisemitism that is coming from within.” Chikli’s Ministry was revealed in 2024 to have paid Stoic, a Tel Aviv marketing firm, roughly $2 million for a covert influence campaign launched shortly after October 7, which ran hundreds of fake accounts that pushed Pro-Israel and Islamophobic content. One affiliated site, “United Citizens for Canada,” labeled Muslim immigrants a threat to the country.

At the National Conservative conference this month, Priest Benedict Kiely similarly decried what he called “the myth of the Andalusian paradise,” telling the Jerusalem audience that “from the start, Islam has aided persecution.” Sebastian Gorka, the sitting NSC deputy for counterterrorism, told the conference that “President Trump is working 20 hours a day to not just save America, but to save our joint civilization,” which he said is under threat from “The Red-Green Alliance…The Islamists working with the Marxists.” A few weeks earlier, Gorka said that under the theology of Islam, “Allah could decree tomorrow that murder is just…Our [Christian] G-d can’t do that. In the theology of Islam, that is deemed to be heretical. There can be no limitations on Allah. Therefore, he can have a capricious attitude to morality.”

The wave of Islamophobia spewing out of Tel Aviv ultimately reaches American shores with consequences on local communities. In Delray Beach — whose county is the world’s largest holder of Israeli bonds — residents earlier this month packed a council meeting to protest the construction of an Islamic center. A similar demonstration against a proposed Islamic center occurred in August at a McKinney City Council meeting in Texas after the county’s Congressional representative Keith Self — who receives significant backing from Israel’s lobby — declared that “The McKinney Planning and Zoning Commission just UNANIMOUSLY approved plans for a new mosque in your neighborhood” and urged residents to “STOP the spread of Sharia in Texas.”

As the U.S. approaches the midterm elections, Islamophobia has found a home in the mainstream of the GOP, with President Trump labeling Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El Sayed “a jihadist” and Representative Nancy Mace posting that “every single Muslim holding public office in America is a Trojan horse, and a threat to both national security and our republic.” Both Trump and Mace are loyal servants of Israeli interests. With Israel’s popularity declining rapidly, Americans should expect more of this variety of intolerance from our uniparty class of Pro-Israel elected officials.

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Israel’s New – and Terrifying – Security Doctrine

If you read one thing today, make sure it is this:

In a stunning piece published by the head of one of Israel’s most prominent think tanks, Maj. Gen. Tamir Hayman describes the reality of Israel’s new security doctrine:

A few crucial principles he describes:

1. The United States is a “declining power” and, given its ongoing social and political shifts, will soon abandon Israel in any event. This is compelling Israel to move toward greater self-reliance in order to avoid “excessive dependence” on the US since it “exposes Israel to the influence of a progressive American value system that is incompatible with Israel’s Jewish character.”

Then he concludes: “Severing ties with the United States is therefore not only inevitable, but essential to Israel’s independence and the resilience of its Jewish national identity.”

2. Primacy of Jewish Identity over Democracy: The state’s Jewish identity takes precedence over its democratic system of government.

3. Peace as a Means Rather Than an End: “A meaningful peace agreement is unattainable in the Middle East, as peace agreements are merely technical and temporary arrangements requiring constant reassessment. According to this view, peace is not an intrinsic value that generates security, but a means of achieving other policy objectives.”

4. “Rejection of the Independent Existence of Arab States: The underlying premise is that most Arab states are not genuine nation-states, but collections of tribes and ethnic groups lacking a shared history and a foundational national vision. Consequently, undermining their stability is viewed as a natural process, one that Israel can manage more effectively than it can contend with strong nation-states, and one that it should even encourage.”

5. “War as a Foundational State: War is essential to national security and cannot be replaced by a state of peace, which, as noted, is merely a means rather than an end…. War is necessary, and preventive war is preferable because it secures a significant achievement at the outset.”

6. “Absolute Priority for Initiative and Offense over Defense: Preemptive, surprise strikes are viewed as the only way to achieve victory, giving offense precedence over defense.”

And there’s more.

Important to note that Hayman does not advocate for this. Rather, he contends that this already is the new security doctrine of Israel.

He is describing reality as he sees it. And that reality simply is not compatible with a US or Western alliance with Israel – unless the West transforms into a similar entity that treats war as a permanent and desirable state of being.

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Former Spymasters, a Taped Mouth, and the Market in Cross-Border Snatching

Just after midnight on New Year’s Day 2024, a man and his two children stood near the harbor in the Danish town of Gråsten, watching fireworks over the water a short walk from the house where the children had been living. A witness later told a court in Hamburg that several gray cars had drawn up near the quay in the last minutes of the old year, and that around a quarter past midnight masked men rushed the family and knocked the father, then forty-nine, to the ground. The same witness described one child being loaded into a car while the other fought back, held by two men who carried it by the limbs. The six attackers dragged the children through forest and mud, and both feared for their lives. One of them managed to press an alarm button that Danish police had issued the family after an earlier scare, and cried out into a night where officers were already searching with dogs and flashlights.

It did them no good. By the time the vehicles reached the German frontier the children had been moved to a camper van bought for the operation, and the men had taped the ten-year-old boy’s mouth and bound his thirteen-year-old sister’s hands. One of the kidnappers, an Israeli, told the children to keep quiet or be killed. They were carried more than eight hundred kilometers south to a farm in Baden-Württemberg and held in a mobile home until their mother arrived to collect them and take them to Hamburg.

The mother is Christina Block, heiress to the Hamburg steakhouse dynasty built on the Block House and Jim Block chains, a group of nearly eighty restaurants and a five-star hotel, with several food producers besides, employing some 2,400 people. She is on trial in Hamburg, charged with aggravated child abduction, grievous bodily harm and unlawful detention, facing up to ten years, alongside her partner, the former television sports presenter Gerhard Delling, accused of helping her. She denies all of it.

The men she is accused of hiring were not ordinary criminals. The prosecution’s case and the testimony of the operatives themselves describe an operation brokered by the former head of Germany’s foreign intelligence service and carried out by veterans of Israel’s. The skills used to seize two children on a Danish quay were the skills of the state, available for a fee.

The war that produced that night had been running for a decade. Christina Block met Stephan Hensel through friends in 1999 and married him in 2005, and they had four children. Hensel had trained as a banker and gone to work inside the Block business, moving into the meat trade, and then, as happens to executives who fall out of favor in the family’s world, he lost the job. He blames the dismissal on the patriarch Eugen Block and holds it responsible for the collapse of the marriage. They separated in 2014 and divorced in 2018, and the fight moved to money and to the right to decide where the children would live.

It was the children who moved first. In early 2021 the eldest daughter left her mother and went to her father after a holiday on Sylt. That August, Hensel kept the two youngest in Denmark after what was meant to be an ordinary visit, telling the youth welfare office that Block beat the children, a charge she rejects as freely invented. She answered that Hensel had turned the children against her and was holding them away from her and the rest of the family. Hensel’s position was that the children lived with him by choice. A youth-office worker would later testify that his isolation of them looked like a demonstration of power.

On paper, the German courts sided with the mother. The Hanseatic Higher Regional Court in Hamburg gave Block the authority to decide where the children lived and ordered Hensel to hand them back. He refused, and a Danish court had already granted him provisional custody, so Denmark declined to enforce the German order. In February 2023 a Danish court rejected the return of the children outright and left Block with a visitation right she could not exercise. “I still have no contact with my children, although I have a contact order,” she told Bild in late 2024.

The operation grew in this gap. Germany and Denmark run on separate legal systems, and Denmark sits outside the European framework that would have forced automatic recognition of the German ruling, leaving the matter to the slow machinery of the Hague Conventions. A German court had named Block the parent entitled to the children and could not deliver them across a border fifty kilometers from Hamburg. After two years of stalemate, German jurisdiction lapsed on the ground that the children had settled with their father, and the case passed to Denmark. A woman holding what a German court had called the right to decide where her own children lived watched the German state prove unable to enforce its own decision.

That failure is real, and it is the part of the story that the tabloid account of a monstrous heiress erases. It does not make what happened on the quay defensible, and the record does not let Block stand as a wronged innocent either. The children had run toward their father, not away from him. Her defense in court is that holding the German custody order, she could hardly have kidnapped her own children, and that she had been talking to the security firm only about an assignment for a family hotel. Against that sits her own phone, which investigators say held a diary of schemes to recover the children, from a hired makeup artist to a body double for the father’s new partner. She called it blue-sky thinking that kept her sane, and said she only drove south after someone told her to come quickly because it was about her children.

The money behind all of this sits inside a second family war that the coverage mostly leaves out. Block has been a shareholder in the Eugen Block holding company since 2011, yet she does not control the fortune, and she has been in open conflict with her own father over the succession, pushed at times out of the company’s management. Eugen Block, in his eighties and still the group’s dominant figure, told the Hamburger Abendblatt he had nothing to do with the abduction and could say nothing about it. The war over the children was being waged by a woman who had been sidelined inside her own family’s empire by the man who held its purse.

The operatives tell a story that begins long before the camper van. Block and Delling, by the Israeli side’s testimony, started looking for ways to retrieve the children in 2021. An early attempt to brand Hensel and his lawyer as pedophiles failed. Investigators drawing on the security firm’s own data found that in September 2023 there was an effort to plant incriminating material on Hensel, and the charge sheet carries the allegation that the firm was to place fabricated child-abuse material on him to break him in the custody courts. A security contractor is separately accused of watching Block’s Hamburg house so the children could not flee once they were brought there. By the time of the New Year’s operation this had stopped being a parent’s desperation and had become a sustained private campaign, run by professionals, against a man and his household.

The person who connected a Hamburg heiress to an Israeli intelligence cell was August Hanning. He ran the Bundesnachrichtendienst, Germany’s foreign intelligence service, from 1998 to 2005, and afterward went into private security. Prosecutors say he put Block in touch with former Israeli intelligence officers and, with a retired police officer, took more than €100,000 from her in connection with the job. A letter from the veteran German private investigator Werner Mauss to the domestic intelligence service in January 2025 named Hanning as the man who had approached the former Shin Bet chief Yaakov Peri to assemble a team. Days later, by the same account, Peri offered to tell the court about Hanning’s role if his confidentiality were guaranteed. Hanning denies all of it, saying he never contacted Peri and knew of no payment.

His name surfaced because of an accident that the author reported on last week. On 6 October 2026 Hanning, the former chief of Germany’s intelligence service, was arrested on suspicion of treason and espionage, a case that grew out of the search of his home in the Block investigation. The man accused of brokering the abduction of two children was found to have a second life worth a separate indictment – and a movie. For the children, the simpler fact holds. The broker was a former chief of the German state’s intelligence service, and the state he once served had lost track of what he did next.

The firm named in the German courtroom is Cyber Cupula Operations, an Israeli outfit whose team, by the reporting around the trial, included former Mossad operatives and ran to at least eight people, most of them Israeli. The man described as the head of the abduction cell is David Ram Barkai, a veteran of the Israeli military’s Unit 504 and, by various accounts, a former Mossad agent. Over four days of testimony he told the court that Block and her lawyer had paid him and his men around €220,000 to take the children from their father and deliver them to her. Prosecutors have charged a second Israeli, Tal Sasson, and sought the arrest of Barkai and of Keren Tenenbaum, who left Germany. One member of the team, arrested earlier in Cyprus, told the court he had taken part not for money but to help the children, having been told their father was evil. He apologized to Hensel, who accepted it.

Above the cell, the name German media attached to the operation is Yaakov Peri, for six years the director of Israel’s internal security service and later a government minister, now president of a private intelligence firm called CGI. Bild reported that Peri assembled the Israeli team. In testimony, Block was asked whether she knew Peri’s name or knew of seven million euros said to have moved to CGI, and she said nothing. Peri could not be reached, his wife saying he was in a clinic. CGI’s chief executive told Der Spiegel the firm had nothing to do with the affair and did not know how its name had become attached to it. Block, for her part, has said the operatives acted on their own and that her late mother had engaged them.

CGI is a business-intelligence company of the kind Israel’s security establishment has produced in quantity, staffed from the alumni of its spy services and sold to governments and corporations around the world. The same firm was hired to review security after the 2019 theft of jewels worth more than a hundred million euros from the Green Vault in Dresden. These are not fringe operators. They are the commercial afterlife of state intelligence, and their client list is a question of who can pay. The defense in Hamburg has leaned on a related point, its lawyer telling the court that none of this could have happened if the police had done their job, which is a strange thing for an accused to argue and an accurate description of the vacuum these firms were hired to fill.

The method on display in Gråsten belongs to a wider pattern. Seizing a person by force across a border and delivering them to where someone else has decided they belong is the privatized retail form of something states have made routine. On 3 January 2026 the president of the United States announced that American forces had struck Venezuela and “captured” its president, Nicolás Maduro, flying him out of the country “in conjunction with U.S. Law Enforcement” to stand trial in Manhattan, a fifty-million-dollar bounty on his head. The abduction in Denmark happened two years before that, so the point is not imitation. The taboo against reaching across a border to take a person has dissolved at the top, and the men who built their careers performing such operations for states are now for hire to anyone with a grievance and the means. A sidelined heiress bought it for a custody fight.

The custody fight ended within days. A German court ordered the children returned to Denmark, and Block complied. She had held them for a long weekend. In the time since, a Danish family court has given Hensel sole custody, and a higher Danish court has barred Block from any contact with the children. Danish authorities say the two children want no further contact with their mother. They now live with their father at a secret address under changed names.

The operation worked, for about a day, and the working of it destroyed the thing it was meant to secure. A woman who believed, with a German court order behind her, that the law had abandoned her children reached outside the law and lost them completely. The children were the one party in this with no lawyers and no say, taped and bound in the back of a van while adults who had run the secret apparatus of two states collected their fees. The courts that could not move two children to safety across fifty kilometers of border proved able, once they had been taken by force, to move them only further out of reach.

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Israeli False Flags From Irgun to Flydubai

By now, you’ve likely seen the “terror at 30,000 feet” that just played out in the skies over Tel Aviv last week. And you’ve probably marveled at how the narrative of that fateful Flydubai flight—a narrative dutifully parroted by the eager propagandists of the establishment media—disintegrated in the exact same way that Boeing’s airframe miraculously didn’t disintegrate.

As unsurprising as this latest manipulated news story may be to us veteran conspiracy researchers, however, there are millions around the world who, shocked by the ongoing genocide in Gaza, are only now beginning to look into the false flag trickery and the bloody deceptions upon which the modern state of Israel has been built.

So, for the benefit of such newly awakened students of suppressed history, today let’s examine some of the foundational false flag terror events of Israeli history.

On July 22, 1946, terrorists associated with the Irgun—a Zionist paramilitary organization operating in Mandatory Palestine and led by Menachem Begin—bombed the King David Hotel in Jerusalem.

Their targeting of the hotel was a response to Operation Agatha, a security operation conducted by British troops days earlier that had resulted in the arrest of 2,700 Zionist operatives.

Operation Agatha included the seizure of documentary evidence that the Jewish Agency for Palestine—a branch of the World Zionist Organization—had approved sabotage operations as part of their insurgency against the British Mandatory government. Knowing that the King David Hotel housed the Secretariat of the Government of Palestine and the Headquarters of the British Armed Forces in Palestine and Transjordan, the Irgun terror squad presumed that this was where the Brits were storing these incriminating documents.

An article from History Today recounts the set-up for the attack.

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Soldier blocks Palestinian harvest, says ‘Jews have prior right over Arabs to everything’

A soldier was filmed blocking a Palestinian olive harvest near Ramallah on Friday because, he said, “this is a Jewish state” and “Jews have a prior right over Arabs to everything in this country.”

The soldier documented in the central West Bank’s Birzeit area also said settlers were allowed to be there because those were his orders.

The IDF did not immediately comment on the incident.

Near the village of Yabrud, about 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) east of Birzeit, separate footage on Friday showed settlers trapping a Palestinian vehicle and assaulting its occupants, reportedly a father and son, who fled.

Police said they arrested a 15-year-old settler on suspicion of involvement and seized one of the cars that the perpetrators used in the attack, which police described as a “nationalist” assault and car theft.

Rabbis for Human Rights, which published the footage from the Birzeit-area olive grove, said the Birzeit incident occurred as Israeli activists with the group were helping with the harvest on private Palestinian land in the West Bank’s Area C, which Israelis can legally enter without notifying Israel’s Civil Administration.

Nonetheless, soldiers shut down the harvest and removed the Palestinians and activists from the area, according to Rabbis for Human Rights.

The footage published by the group from the scene showed a masked soldier in full gear confronting Israeli activists, who asked why Jewish settlers could be in the area but Palestinians couldn’t.

“I don’t know if you remember, but this is a Jewish state. So Jews have a prior right over Arabs to everything in this country, whether you like it or not,” the soldier said.

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New York Times report on AIPAC hides a central truth about Israel’s unpopularity

At first glance, that recent New York Times article on AIPAC, the wealthy pro-Israel lobbying organization, may have looked promising. It ran on the front page of the Sunday print edition, the week’s most prominent location. It jumped inside, where it covered nearly an entire page. It was 53 paragraphs long. The byline indicated that 4 Times reporters had worked on the article.

But, astonishingly, not a single one of those 53 paragraphs explained that AIPAC’s efforts to influence American elections have changed dramatically in recent years. These days, the organization often actually hides its pro-Israel views, even though promoting Israel is the only reason it exists in the first place. Instead, it dumps money into political campaigns and frequently raises issues that have absolutely no connection to Israel and Palestine.

Let’s take, for example, the Democratic primary earlier this year for the House seat in New Jersey’s 13th Congressional district. AIPAC decided to target Tom Malinowski, a former congressman who had the temerity to mildly suggest that military aid to Israel should be “conditioned” on its human rights record. This site’s estimable Michael Arria succinctly explained how AIPAC acted:

“Of course, AIPAC can’t actually run ads telling Democratic voters to reject Malinowski for being sufficiently pro-Israel as the [Democratic] base has completely soured on the country, and lobbying groups supporting that relationship.

“So, the AIPAC-funded [television] ads attack Malinowski for allegedly supporting Trump’s immigration policies. The allegation stems from a 2019 vote, in which that year Congress passed a funding bill that included money for law enforcement at the southern border. Most Democrats, including Malinowski, backed the package.”

(In that race, AIPAC’s strategy backfired. It dumped $2 million into TV ads attacking Malinowski — which apparently damaged him enough so that Analilia Mejia, who is even more progressive on Israel/Palestine, won the Democratic primary, and is presently in Congress.)    

AIPAC’s new stealth strategy was by no means a secret. Both Politico and MS Now covered the New Jersey race, and revealed the Israel lobby’s behind the scenes maneuvering.

AIPAC deployed the same stealth strategy in August, when it helped defeat progressive former Rep. Cori Bush’s effort to win back her seat in Missouri’s Democratic primary. The pro-Israel lobby had already helped her opponent, Wesley Bell, two years before. This time around, AIPAC’s ads sidestepped Israel again, and instead emphasized Bush’s alleged missed votes in Congress and her supposed criticism of the Biden administration. 

So: how did 4 NYTimes reporters, who were handed 53 paragraphs of space, miss this vital Stealth AIPAC angle? How did the echelon of editors who reviewed the report also fail to do anything? The only plausible explanations are institutional bias and conscious whitewashing and self-censorship.

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After 3 Years, Mainstream Media Accepts That Netanyahu Knew Oct 7 Would Happen—And Allowed It

The mainstream corporate media — always a mere two to three years behind on every story — is finally coming to terms with (some of) the reality of the October 7, 2023, attack. It is suddenly acceptable for the liberal corporate pro-Israel outlets to say Netanyahu obviously knew October 7th was going to happen.

It’s been three years since the attack. For three whole years, many of us in the endlessly maligned and suppressed independent media world have been shouting from the hills that Israel’s ruling elite knew the attacks would happen, knew exactly how they would happen, facilitated them by pulling troops and security away from the border wall, then greatly amped up the death count by having the Israeli military massacre hundreds of innocent people via the Hannibal Directive.

For revealing the truth, per usual, we are mocked, suppressed, harassed and called conspiracy theorists.

And just this week, our beloved corporate media outlets such as NPR, MS Now, The Atlantic, BBC, the New York Times and more have “realized” we were right all along.

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Mike Rogers Now Says He Welcomes AIPAC Support After Allies Previously Told Group To Butt Out

Republican Michigan Senate nominee Mike Rogers said during a Thursday debate that he welcomed support from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) after allies previously reportedly discouraged the group from spending in the race.

Rogers’ allies told AIPAC in August not to advertise on his behalf after his rival Abdul El-Sayed defeated his primary opponent, Democratic Michigan Rep. Haley Stevens, who received backing from AIPAC, Axios first reported. The Republican nominee said during the debate that he welcomed all the help he could get to defeat El-Sayed.

“Do you welcome AIPAC’s public support given that you do support many pro-Israeli positions?” moderator Rick Albin, a west Michigan-based WOOD TV8 political reporter, asked.

“Anybody that wants to help my campaign, stop a guy who can’t condemn terrorism in our own country because he’s so close to the people who are supporting the Muslim Brotherhood, I’ll take all of that help,” Rogers said.

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Genocide Treated as Afterthought by Media on Third Anniversary of October 7 Attacks

October 7 marked three years since the Hamas attacks on Israel that left some 1,200 people dead and 251 taken hostage. It also marks three years since Israel launched its genocide of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip with material and moral support from the United States, with an official death toll surpassing 74,000—including more than 20,000 children.

The official death toll is no doubt an underestimate, given the large number of missing and disappeared persons. (When Western corporate media outlets cite this toll, they often feel compelled to qualify it—e.g., as the BBC [10/7/26] had it, the “war between Israel and Hamas has killed more than 74,200 people in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run health ministry, whose overall figures are seen as accurate by the UN”—lest, presumably, they be seen as taking Hamas’s word for it that the figure is so high.)

The killing spree continues in spite of an alleged ceasefire implemented last year, although the Jerusalem Post (10/5/26) charitably reckons that “less than 50%” of the casualties have been civilians.

The genocide was not, of course, a sudden violent outburst that came out of nowhere. Rather, it was a climax of genocidal momentum that had been building since the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, which was itself achieved via the destruction of some 530 Palestinian villages, the killing of 15,000 Palestinians, and the expulsion of three-quarters of a million more.

Now, three years later, the corporate media still can’t bring themselves to refer to the genocide of Palestinians as such—notwithstanding it being a pretty textbook case of the phenomenon. Predictably, then, the third anniversary of the commencement of mass slaughter and devastation in Gaza has been cast in corporate media as an afterthought to the anniversary of the Hamas attacks.

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