Tag: israel

Palestinian prisoners endure ‘Guantanamo-like’ conditions in Israeli torture camps: Report

A new report from The Washington Post published on 29 July details Israel’s torture, starvation, and killing of Palestinians in its prison system in a manner resembling the notorious US prison in Guantanamo Bay.

Based on eyewitness accounts from former prisoners and autopsies carried out by Israeli authorities, The Post reports that “One Palestinian inmate died with a ruptured spleen and broken ribs after being beaten by Israeli prison guards. Another met an excruciating end because a chronic condition went untreated. A third screamed for help for hours before dying.”

The three prisoners are among at least 12 Palestinians from the West Bank and Israel to die in Israeli jails since 7 October, according to Physicians for Human Rights Israel (PHRI), whose members sat in on the autopsies.

An unknown number of Palestinians abducted by the Israeli military from the Gaza Strip have also died in detention camps outside of Israel’s formal prison system.

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Israel bombs Gaza field hospital massacring dozens of displaced Palestinians

Israeli jets launched airstrikes on a girls’ school in central Gaza’s Deir al-Balah being used as a field hospital on 27 July, killing at least 30 Palestinians and injuring dozens more.

Following the latest massacre of Palestinian civilians, the Israeli army claimed its attack was targeting a “Hamas command and control center.”

“The occupation continues to lie by claiming that the Khadija school is a leadership complex for the movement. What happened in Deir al-Balah is a continuation of the genocide plan practiced by the Israeli occupation,” Hamas leader Osama Hamdan said on Saturday afternoon.

“We agreed to the serious proposals of the mediators, but the occupation does not want to stop its aggression. The occupation is trying to pressure the resistance by escalating its military operations,” Hamdan added.

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Butcher of Gaza Netanyahu Repeatedly Lied to Congress about Iraqi “Nukes,” and Now Wants US War on Iran

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a master of misdirection, the technique master illusionists use to divert the viewer’s attention from the trick and to pull the wool over their eyes. He uses his slick American accent, his bulging eyes, his rhetorical flourishes, his maniacal certainty, to fool people whenever and however he can. 

Netanyahu, the Butcher of Gaza, boasted of destroying the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords that would have resulted in a Palestinian state and an Israeli withdrawal from the Occupied Palestinian Territories by 1997. He has consistently attempted to annex Palestinian private property and covertly has paid for a movement of Israeli squatters onto Palestinian land. He has engaged in collective punishment of innocent noncombatants in order to quash any resistance to his vast acts of grand larceny. He bankrolled Hamas for a decade with Egyptian and Qatari funds deposited in Israeli accounts, which he transferred to Gaza, in hopes of taming the organization by giving it Gaza as a fief. He thereby hoped to continue to split the Palestinians, most of whom support instead the secular, nationalist Palestine Liberation Organization. Most Israelis recognize that Netanyahu’s brain-dead policies led to the October 7 terrorist attack.

One of the twenty-first century’s worst war criminals, responsible for more deaths of innocents and children than Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Netanyahu needs a bright shiny object to distract the world from the threat his racist, fascist Likud-led government, armed with 200 nuclear devices, poses to the planet.

Ben Norton at The Real News Network has reviewed Netanyahu’s long history of blatant warmongering lies:

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Israeli soldiers suspected of raping Palestinian prisoner arrested, sparking far-right riot

Nine Israeli soldiers in the notorious Sde Teiman detention centre were arrested on Monday on suspicion of raping a Palestinian detainee, sparking a riot where far-right activists and MPs stormed the facility.

Israeli military police raided Sde Teiman but were met with resistance by soldiers, who reportedly barricaded themselves into the facility and used pepper spray to defend themselves before eventually being taken into custody.

The soldiers were suspected of abusing a Palestinian detainee, who according to Arab48 is suffering from “a serious wound in his rectum area”.

The prisoner had been transferred from Sde Teiman in the Negev desert to a hospital in Beersheba, which is also in southern Israel. Haaretz said the prisoner is unable to walk.

The Israeli army said an investigation is underway.

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Israeli army probe covered up “friendly fire” killings on 7 October

The Israeli army’s first published report about the events of 7 October 2023 praises the general who led Israeli forces in battle at Kibbutz Be’eri on that day for ordering tank fire at a home killing up to 10 civilian captives.

The shelling killed almost everyone in and around the house, including dozens of Palestinian resistance fighters.

The report amounts to a shoddy cover-up, inconsistent with known facts, and an intentional rewriting of what happened to exonerate Israeli forces of killing their own citizens that day.

Although the report was supposed to have been written by officers with no connection to those who fought in the battle, one of its authors was Lieutenant Colonel Elihai Bin Nun who fought at Be’eri on 7 October under Brigadier General Barak Hiram, the commander of Israeli forces at the kibbutz on that day, The New York Times revealed.

When Bin Nun’s participation in the battle was revealed, the army removed from the report any mention of his role as an author, the Israeli outlet Ynet noted.

The army’s full account of what happened at Kibutz Be’eri has not been made public, but the Israeli military published official summaries of its report in Hebrew and English on 11 July.

As a result of its inquiry, the army commends Hiram for acting in a “professional and ethical manner” by ordering the fatal tank fire. It whitewashes the civilian deaths the shelling caused, only accepting responsibility for one of the 13 captives killed at the home of kibbutz resident Pessi Cohen.

The army only admits to killing one civilian, Adi Dagan, as his death was directly witnessed by the only captive to survive the tank shelling, Adi’s wife Hadas Dagan.

The couple and four other Israeli civilians, including Pessi herself, spent the battle on the grassy lawn outside the home, lying low to avoid the hailstorm of bullets that whistled over their heads for hours.

While the army’s full account of the battle has not been made public, a detailed six-page synopsis of the report published by Israel Army Radio military correspondent Doron Kadosh sheds further light on the events. It acknowledges that the number of civilians inside the house was seven.

In its first public explanation of the incident one week after the 7 October attack, the army asserted that not seven civilians had died in the house but 15 – and that eight of them were babies.

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Israeli PM Netanyahu always brings his dirty laundry to US state visits so White House staff can clean them for free, report says

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu consistently brings bags of dirty laundry when he and his family visit President Donald Trump in Washington, DC, so White House staff can clean it for free, according to The Washington Post.

“The Netanyahus are the only ones who bring actual suitcases of dirty laundry for us to clean,” an anonymous US official told The Post. “After multiple trips, it became clear this was intentional.”

Since former President Barack Obama’s administration, the US government has offered laundry services to all foreign leaders for free, The Post reported. The trend has continued into Trump’s administration, US officials told the newspaper.

Netanyahu last visited the White House on September 15, 2020, when Trump presided over the signing of the Abraham Accords, a diplomatic-normalization agreement between Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain.

The Post did not specify where Netanyahu and his wife stayed the night, but the venue was likely Blair House, one of a clutch of buildings opposite the White House that together make up the President’s Guest House.

Netanyahu also stayed at Blair House in January 2020 and March 2018.

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Lebanon Prepares For Total War As Ex-Pats Evacuate, IDF Prepares Response

The Lebanese government is preparing for an Israeli military response against Hezbollah, the Iranian proxy army which occupies the halls of power in the Middle Eastern state, and who fired a large ballistic missile which killed a dozen Druze children playing football in the Golan Heights yesterday.

The funerals are today.

Foreigners are being told to leave Lebanon immediately due to the likely break-out of all-out war. France joined Norway in calling on its citizens to evacuate. The airport in Beirut is packed as many ex-patriots are fleeing the country.

In Israel, the Port of Ashdod is getting prepared to serve as an alternative to the Port of Haifa in case of war, reported Amir Tsarfati.

The military staff is meeting to coordinate and plan a response to the missile attack in northern Israel. CDM has long been reporting on the likely break-out of war in the north of The Jewish State. The conflict is expected to be bloody on both sides as Hezbollah is a much stronger fighting force than Hamas in Gaza, and controls hundreds of thousands of rockets which can severely damage Israeli and population.

Progressive political elements in Israel are said to be preventing military plans for retribution at this point. Approval is in the balance but likely to happen soon, as the political pressure inside Israel is great, from Arabs especially, whose children were murdered.

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US delivers over 20,000 ‘dumb bombs’ to Israel since 7 Oct

The US has sent tens of thousands of bombs to Israel since the start of its genocide in Gaza, the New York Times (NYT) reported on 25 July, citing data compiled this week by the Jewish Institute for National Security of America. 

The data shows that Washington has sent over 20,000 unguided bombs, around 2,600 guided bombs, and 3,000 precision missiles. 

Unguided bombs, also known as “dumb bombs,” are typically less precise and kill larger numbers of civilians, especially in densely populated areas like Gaza. 

Aircraft, air defense systems, and ammunition have also been shipped to Israel since the start of the war in Gaza. 

Many of these shipments have been classified or kept under the table. What had been delivered by March this year already constitutes “an enormous number and variety of weapons,” according to an analysis by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. 

The report came as Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was on a visit to Washington, where he met with Joe Biden and his vice president on 25 July and gave a speech in front of the US Congress a day earlier. 

It also coincided with a report by Politico, which said, “Israel is privately ramping up pressure on the Biden administration and lawmakers on Capitol Hill to greenlight weapons it says it needs to protect itself from an increasingly aggressive Iran and its proxies.” 

Netanyahu’s delegation is circulating a list of weapons systems to US lawmakers that it wants to be delivered faster, according to an informed source. The source added that Israeli representatives gave the list to members of Congress after Netanyahu’s speech on 24 July. 

Israel “needs the weapons to bolster its stockpiles,” the source said. “The fact that Israel is pushing for the weapons now indicates that it is attempting to solidify the transfers and bolster its stockpiles before the US election in November,” the Politico report adds. 

According to the source, the weapons on the Israeli list being sent around differ from those held up by Biden’s government in May over “concerns” about the situation in Rafah, which Israel invaded that month in defiance of months of international warnings. 

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‘Terrorist Organization’? What’s Behind the Israeli War on UNRWA

Targeting a school during a war could be justified or, at least, argued to have been a mistake. But striking over 120 schools, killing and wounding thousands of civilians sheltered inside, can only be intentional and horrific war crimes.

Between October 7 and July 18, Israel has done precisely that, targeting with total impunity, United Nations infrastructure in the besieged Gaza Strip.

The price has been horrific. According to UNRWA estimates, at least 561 internally displaced people in UNRWA shelters have been killed and 1,768 injured since the start of the war.

In fact, within a period of ten days, between July 8 and July 18, at least six UN-run schools which have served as makeshift shelters for displaced Palestinians have been targeted by the Israeli army, resulting in the killing and wounding of hundreds.

Historically, UN-linked organizations seemed to be somewhat immune from the impact of war on local populations. The privilege of being neutral outsiders to the conflict, allowed those affiliated with such organizations to carry out their duties largely unhindered.

The Israeli war on Gaza, however, is the primary exception among all modern conflicts. According to UN sources, 274 aid workers and over 500 healthcare workers have been killed.

These figures are consistent with all other numbers produced by the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza. Indeed, not a single category of people has been spared: neither doctors nor civil defense workers, nor mayors or even traffic police.

It was obvious from the very start of the war that Israel wanted to criminalize all Palestinians, not only those affiliated with Hamas or other groups, but the very civilian population and any international organization that came to their aid.

Blaming and dehumanizing all of Gaza was and remains part of an Israeli strategy that would allow the Israeli army to operate without any restraints, and without even the most minimal threshold of morality or respect for international law.

But the Israeli attacks on the UN, all its institutions, but particularly the UN agency responsible for the welfare of Gaza’s refugees (UNRWA), serve a different purpose than that of mere ‘collective punishment’.

Israel does not attempt to mask or justify its attacks on the organization as it did during previous Gaza wars. This time around, the Israeli war was accompanied, from the very start, with the outlandish accusation that UNRWA members had participated in the October 7 assault by Hamas and other Palestinian groups.

Without providing any evidence, Tel Aviv launched an international campaign of vilification against the UN organization which has, for decades, provided educational, medical and humanitarian services to millions of Palestinian refugees.

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Leaks reveal Israel killed 366 UN staffers, family members in Gaza: Report

Hundreds of UN staff members and their family members have been killed by the Israeli army in Gaza, according to an unreleased UN report obtained by the Drop Site news outlet on 24 July. 

At least 195 UN staff and 172 of their dependents had been killed by Israeli forces by the end of June, the unreleased UN report states. The UN defines dependents as persons belonging to a staff member’s family who are formally recognized as financially reliant on that staff member.

The UN Crisis Coordination Centre found that five UN Development Program dependents, four UNICEF dependents, three World Food Programme (WFP) dependents, two World Health Organization (WHO) dependents, and 158 UNRWA dependents have been killed by Israeli forces. 

It had been reported in May that Israel had killed 188 members of UNRWA. UNRWA regularly releases situation reports detailing Tel Aviv’s targeting of staff members and facilities. 

UNRWA facilities have been the sites of numerous massacres committed by Israeli troops. 

However, these are the first numbers indicating the extent to which Israel has targeted the families of UN staff members. 

According to Drop Site, the report was circulated internally at the start of this month. The UN did not respond to a request for comment.

Over the weekend, on 21 July, a UN convoy came under heavy fire by Israeli forces despite prior coordination with the army. 

An Israeli airstrike on the UNRWA-run Abu Oreiban school in central Gaza’s Nuseirat Camp a week earlier, on 14 July, killed at least 15 people, just a day after the strike on southern Gaza’s Al-Mawasi that killed at least 90 and injured hundreds on 13 July. 

Tel Aviv has accused UNRWA members of involvement in Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on 7 October but has yet to provide evidence for its claims. 

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