Tag: israel

US Media and Factcheckers Fail to Note Israel’s Refutation of ‘Beheaded Babies’ Stories

In late November, the Washington Post (11/22/23) factchecked President Joe Biden’s repeated claims that babies had been beheaded during Hamas’s October 7 attack in Israel.

Biden’s remarks during a November 15 news conference triggered the factcheck:

Hamas has already said publicly that they plan on attacking Israel again, like they did before, to where they were cutting babies’ heads off to burning women and children alive.

Despite acknowledging a lack of confirmation of such atrocities, the Post stopped short of branding Biden’s statements false, and declined to dole out any of its iconic Pinocchios.

“It’s too soon in the Israel/Gaza war to make a definitive assessment,” Post Factchecker Glenn Kessler wrote, noting that even the most basic facts weren’t yet known.

“The Israeli prime minister’s office has said about 1,200 people were killed on October 7, down from an initial estimate of 1,400,” he said, “but it’s unclear how many were civilians or soldiers.”

That statement isn’t true. While the exact number killed amid the extreme violence and chaos of October 7 may never be finalized, an authoritative count of civilian deaths—as well as data that definitively refutes claims babies were beheaded—was available to anyone with access to the internet little more than a month after the attack.

That’s when Bituah Leumi, or National Insurance Institute, Israel’s social security agency, posted a Hebrew-language website (11/9/23) with the name, gender and age of every identified civilian victim and where each had been attacked.

Two days later Bituah Leumi (also transliterated as Bituach Leumi) posted an English-language news release (11/11/23) publicizing the website as a memorial to the civilian victims of the “Iron Swords” war—Israel’s name for Hamas’s attack and Israel Defense Forces’ response. (The news release refers to “695 identified war casualties,” but there are no wounded; all the victims are listed as “killed.”)

The journalistic importance of the memorial website was shown less than a month later, when Haaretz (12/4/23), Israel’s oldest newspaper, used the social security agency’s data to debunk some of the most sensational atrocities blamed on Hamas.

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BIDEN IS BANKROLLING ISRAEL’S WAR AMID GROWING FINANCIAL HARDSHIP AT HOME

IN LATE OCTOBER, President Joe Biden issued two supplemental funding requests. The first, primarily to support Israel’s war on Gaza and Ukraine’s war against Russia, became the $95 billion National Security Act, which the Senate passed in February. This week, Biden urged House leadership to pass the bill as soon as possible.

Never has the president appeared more committed to advancing one of his priorities. Biden delivered a rare Oval Office address specifically to market the plan — something he hasn’t done for any other proposal — and designated the funding as “emergency requirements.” In the weeks and months that followed, he ensured that it remained at the top of Congress’s agenda, even if that meant delays to other legislative business. His hard work paid off: The current bill gives Biden pretty much exactly what he asked for.

The second proposal is half the size of the first and funds domestic programs such as grants to child care providers and disaster relief. This request wasn’t designated as emergency spending.

While Biden personally and repeatedly urged Congress to approve his foreign policy plan, there is not a single instance of him even mentioning his domestic proposal in a statement since offering it on October 25. It hasn’t made an appearance on his personal or presidential X accounts either. Indeed, the way the proposal is written suggests that Biden never intended it to be taken seriously. The foreign policy request is a 69-page, fully drafted legislative proposal that’s formally addressed to the House speaker; the domestic request is a two-page summary table.

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Biden Admin Quietly Approves 100+ Arms Sales to Israel While Claiming Concern for Civilians in Gaza

While the Biden administration has been publicly voicing reservations over the mounting death toll in Gaza, a Washington Post investigation revealed the administration has quietly approved and delivered more than 100 separate weapons sales to Israel over the last five months, amounting to thousands of precision-guided munitions, small-diameter bombs, bunker busters and other lethal aid. Only two approved foreign military sales to Israel have been made public since the launch of Israel’s assault on October 7, which the Biden administration approved using emergency authority to bypass Congress. “It is actually illegal to provide military assistance to a country that is restricting U.S.-funded humanitarian assistance, and we know that this is the case with Israel,” says Josh Paul, a veteran State Department official who worked on arms deals and resigned in protest of a push to increase arms sales to Israel amid its assault on Gaza. Paul describes the “production line”-style sale of weapons to Israel and says increasing internal dissent is putting pressure on Biden to change his “dead-end” policy of unconditional support for Israel. “We have a president and a set of policies … that remain set on this course regardless of the harm it is doing to Israeli security, to American global interests and, of course, to so many Palestinians.”

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Air-Dropped Aid Crushes 5 Palestinians to Death in Gaza

The parachutes of air-dropped pallets of aid failed, causing the large objects to plummet to the ground in northern Gaza, killing five. The US and several other countries have dropped a token amount of aid onto northern Gaza because Israel is only allowing a trickle of aid to enter the Strip by land.

A witness speaking with Al-Jazeera explained the botched aid drop caused a building to collapse, killing some of the people sheltering inside. “People were waiting for the drops when they noticed they were coming in fast. So a group of people took cover in a construction site,” they said. “One of the packages fell atop the site, causing it to collapse, killing and wounding people inside. I rushed to help the people inside when I realized my cousin was among them. He is now dead.”

Palestinian health officials and an eye witness who spoke with CBS News said that the aid crate killed five people, including two children, on Friday morning in northern Gaza. Multiple videos show several pallets of aid floating to the surface when some appear to tangle and plummet to the surface.

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Bullets Found at Gaza Flour Massacre Site Belie Israel’s ‘Stampede’ Claim

Bullet wounds caused by the same type of large-caliber ammunition used in several Israel Defense Forces rifles and machine guns undercut Israeli officials’ dubious claim that most victims of last week’s “Flour Massacre” near Gaza City died in a stampede, one human rights monitor said Wednesday.

Gaza officials said at least 118 Palestinians were killed and 760 others injured when Israeli troops shot and shelled a large crowd of starving people waiting for food distribution in the al-Nabulsi Roundabout area south of Gaza City on February 29. Israeli officials said many or most of the victims were trampled as the large crowd of people starving due to Israel’s siege and blockade of Gaza desperately rushed aid trucks.

However, Dr. Mohammed Salha, the acting director of Al-Awda Hospital, told reporters last Friday that more than 80% of Flour Massacre victims treated at the facility suffered gunshot wounds. A United Nations team that visited al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City found “a large number of gunshot wounds” among the 200 or so patients being treated there.

On Wednesday, the Geneva-based Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, which is investigating the massacre, said that many victims suffered injuries from 5.56×45 mm NATO bullets, which are used in various guns carried by Israel Defense Forces (IDF) troops including M4 and Tavor assault rifles and IWI Negev light machine guns.

“A sample of 200 dead and injured victims revealed that they were indeed hit by this type of bullet, and that the bullets were discovered and examined at the massacre site along with shrapnel found in the bodies of the wounded and dead,” the group said.

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Western media concocts ‘evidence’ UN report on Oct 7 sex crimes failed to deliver

Western media promoted a UN report as proof Hamas sexually assaulted Israelis. Yet the report’s authors admitted they couldn’t locate a single victim, suggested Israeli officials staged a rape scene, and denounced “inaccurate forensic interpretations.”

On March 4, the United Nations released a report into sexual violence which has supposedly taken place amid the Israeli war on Gaza. The report was immediately celebrated in mainstream media outlets as proof of what scores of Israel lobbyists and journalists under their sway have insisted for months (despite a wealth of evidence to the contrary): that Hamas forces engaged in a systematic campaign of rape during their attack on Israel on October 7.

There was just one problem. The report’s authors flatly contradicted the idea that any evidence existed to prove a campaign of rape by Hamas.

Many legacy media outlets papered over this inconvenient fact with a few clever tweaks of language. The Associated Press, for example, repackaged claims of rape at Kibbutz Be’eri — which the UN report dismissed as “unfounded” — as “allegations of rape that could not yet be verified.” 

The AP wasn’t the only outlet to indulge in such creative writing. A March 5 New York Times headline insisted the UN report had uncovered the sought-after “Evidence of Sexual Assault in Hamas-Led Attack on Israel.”

But following a social media post by The Grayzone’s editor-in-chief, Max Blumenthal, the Times quietly amended its headline to read: “UN Team Finds Grounds to Support Reports of Sexual Violence in Hamas Attack.”

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UN Report Finds Palestinians Sexually Abused and Beaten in Israeli Detention

A document compiled by the UN Palestinian agency (UNRWA) found rampant abuse of Palestinians in Israeli detention facilities. The detainees report frequent beatings, sexual abuse, and even the deaths of prisoners. Thousands of Palestinians have been rounded by the Israeli Defense Forces in Gaza over the past four months. 

The New York Times viewed a UNRWA report that documents pervasive abuse in Israeli detention camps. “Detainees said they were beaten, stripped, robbed, blindfolded, sexually abused, and denied access to lawyers and doctors, often for more than a month,” the outlet wrote. “Some detainees, according to the report, told UNRWA investigators that they had often been beaten on open wounds, had been held for hours in painful stress positions, and had been attacked by military dogs.”

One prisoner reported he was “beaten so badly that his genitals turned blue and that there was still blood present in his urine,” adding that “guards made him sleep naked in the open air, next to a fan blowing cold air, and played music so loudly that his ear bled.” 

The draft document describes “a range of ill-treatment that Gazans of all ages, abilities, and backgrounds have reported facing in makeshift detention facilities in Israel.” Such treatment, the report concluded, “was used to extract information or confessions, to intimidate and humiliate, and to punish.”

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So They’re Experimenting With Military Robots In Gaza Now

One of the most horrifying facts about this dystopia we live in is that large-scale military operations are routinely used as testing grounds for new war machinery, using human bodies as guinea pigs for experimentation in what amount to giant blood-soaked field laboratories — all to benefit the strategic objectives of empire managers and the profit margins of the military-industrial complex.

Haaretz has a new article out titled “Gaza Becomes Israel’s Testing Ground for Military Robots”, which reports that “In an effort to avoid harming soldiers and dogs, the IDF has been experimenting with the use of robots and remote-controlled dogs in the Gaza War.”

(Yeah because my gosh, can you imagine how terrible it would be if Israeli soldiers and dogs got harmed while carrying out a genocide?)

The article’s author Sagi Cohen reports that drone-mounted robot dogs and remotely controlled bulldozers are two of the new apocalyptic horrors currently being battle-tested in Gaza, saying “defense establishment officials confirm that there has been a leap in the use and sophistication of robots on the battlefield.” Which is a pretty disconcerting sentence to read.

This news comes out at the same time as a new Public Citizen report warning of the likely imminent arrival of autonomous weapons systems which will kill people with minimal instruction from human pilots, saying “The most serious worry involving autonomous weapons is that they inherently dehumanize the people targeted and make it easier to tolerate widespread killing, including in violation of international human rights law.” 

The more normalized robots become within the world’s militaries the closer we come to this point, and steps are already being taken in that direction. As Common Dreams’ Thor Benson notes in an article about the Public Citizen report, “Israel has purchased and at times deployed self-piloting, lethal drones.”

Back in January I wrote that “Gaza is a live laboratory for the military industrial complex,” saying “Data is with absolute certainty being collected on all the newer weapons being field-tested on human bodies in Gaza (just like has been happening in Ukraine) to be used to benefit the war machine and arms industry.”

What sparked this comment at the time was reports and first-hand witness accounts we’d seen coming out about the prolific use of IDF “sniper drones” in Gaza since October, with Israeli forces frequently shooting Palestinians with quad drones armed with rifles. Copious records are most assuredly being compiled on the effectiveness of these newer weapons and tactics in ending human lives, which will then be used to help market those weapons to other states and to improve their efficiency in killing.

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On Hypocrisy and Genocide – How Gaza Has Exposed the West Like Never Before

The Israeli genocide in Gaza will be remembered as the moral collapse of the West.

As soon as the Israeli war began, following the Al-Aqsa Flood Operation on October 7, every moral or legal frame of reference that Washington and its western allies supposedly held dear was suddenly dropped. Western leaders rushed to Israel, one after the other, offering military, political and intelligence support – along with a blank check to rightwing Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu and his generals to torment the Palestinians.

The likes of the US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, went as far as joining Israel’s first war council meeting, so that he could take part in the discussion which directly resulted in the Gaza genocide.

“I come before you not only as the United States Secretary of State, but also as a Jew,” he said on October 12. The interpretation of these words is disturbing, no matter how it is spun, but it also ultimately means that Blinken has lost all credibility as an American, as a politician or even as a fair-minded human being.

His boss, President Joe Biden, as if in an infinite loop, has been, for years, repeating that “You don’t have to be Jewish to be a Zionist”. Indeed, he has lived up to his maxim, declaring, time and again, “I am a Zionist”. Indeed, he is.

Like many other US and western officials and politicians, the US President abandoned international and humanitarian laws altogether, even the law of his own country. The Leahy Law “prohibits the US Department of State and Department of Defense from providing military assistance to foreign security force units that violate human rights with impunity.” Instead, he, like Blinken, subscribed to tribal affiliation and ideological notions, which simply added fuel to the fire.

Though “protected persons” under international law, Palestinians seem dispensable, in fact, irrelevant to the point that their collective death appears critical for Israel to regain its ‘deterrence’, and to protect itself, in the words of Israeli Minister of Defense, Yoav Gallant, against the “human animals” of Gaza.

If there is a stronger word than hypocrisy, one would have used it. But, for now, it would have to suffice.

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U.S. Blocks UN Resolution That Blames Israel for Gaza Massacre at Food Convoy

The Biden administration, once again, proved that there is no crime too severe that Israel can commit against Palestinians that would result in public condemnation or a policy change.

Just a day after over 100 Palestinians were killed at a Gaza food convoy — including many with gunshot wounds — the U.S. blocked consideration of a UN Security Council resolution blaming Israel for the deaths, The Jerusalem Post reported.

The report read:

The Associated Press reported that 14 of the 15 members of the Security Council favored approving the resolution, drafted by Algeria, but that the United States, one of five permanent members of the council with veto power, blocked it, seeking more information about the incident. The text of the draft resolution was not available.

The White House’s position is that is waiting for the result of investigations because Israel claimed that many of those killed died in a stampede near the convoy.

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