Tag: israel

Data of thousands of Israel soldiers leaked

A security breach on an external Israeli ticketing website led to sensitive data belonging to soldiers in the Israeli occupation army, including Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir and high-ranking officers, being made available online, Haaretz reported yesterday.

According to the report, the breach allowed access to personal information, including their full names, ID numbers and phone numbers, through the TickChak website, which is used by army units to offer recreational benefits to their employees.

The breach, coupled with the weak security of the website, allows anyone to access soldiers’ data simply by entering their ID number, without going through any additional verification. This allowed for the extraction and collection of personal information belonging to tens of thousands of soldiers.

The breach occurred using simple software tools created by an anonymous user identifying themselves as the “Persian Prince”. The user was able to run a programme that tested potential ID numbers and extracted the details of their owners.

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Israeli Defense Minister Says No Humanitarian Aid Will Enter Gaza, Vows Indefinite Occupation

On Wednesday, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said that no humanitarian aid will enter Gaza and vowed that the IDF will occupy the territory it has captured in Gaza indefinitely.

Since March 2, Israel has imposed a total blockade on aid and all other goods entering Gaza, which constitutes collective punishment of the entire civilian population. Katz said that the blockade was one of Israel’s main “pressure tools” against Hamas.

“Israel’s policy is clear: no humanitarian aid will be allowed into Gaza, and preventing humanitarian aid to Gaza is one of the central pressure tools that stops Hamas from using this means against the population,” Katz said in a post on X.

“No one, under the current reality, is going to allow any humanitarian aid into Gaza, and no preparations are being made to allow any aid of this kind,” Katz added.

Katz’s comments were meant to clarify an earlier statement where he suggested Israel could allow the distribution of aid “through civilian companies.” In that statement, he also said IDF troops would not leave the territory they’ve captured since Israel restarted its genocidal war on March 18.

“The IDF will remain in the security zones as a buffer between the enemy and the communities in any temporary or permanent reality in Gaza—similar to Lebanon and Syria,” Katz said. “To date, hundreds of thousands of residents have been evacuated, and dozens of percent of the territory have been incorporated into the security zones.”

He added that “in parallel” to the Israeli occupation of territory in Gaza, the “plan for the voluntary relocation of Gaza residents is being advanced,” referring to the goal of ethnic cleansing.

The Israeli military now controls more than 50% of Gaza’s territory and is working to turn the entire southern city of Rafah into a “buffer zone” free of Palestinians. The Associated Press noted that Katz’s comments will likely further complicate negotiations with Hamas since the Palestinian group is insisting it will only free the remaining Israeli hostages in exchange for a permanent ceasefire and Israeli withdrawal, terms Israel has refused.

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The Hidden Alliance: U.S. Presidents and Israel’s Nuclear Power

In his 2006 Senate confirmation hearings for the position of Secretary of Defense, former CIA Director Robert Gates remarked, while he was serving as a university president, that Iran is encircled by “nuclear-armed powers,” specifically mentioning “the Israelis to the west.” Additionally, former President Jimmy Carter has reiterated this point in both 2008 and 2014 during various interviews and speeches, where he estimated Israel’s nuclear arsenal to be between 150 and 300 warheads. According to its own policy, Israel neither officially confirms nor denies that it has nuclear weapons. The Israeli strategy of ambiguity, known as ‘Amimut’, is understood as a means to safeguard both Israel and its nuclear program. According to Israeli sources, Amimut comprises two key components:

“(1) maintaining the confidentiality of its nuclear operations, which involves refraining from testing or publicly declaring the possession of nuclear weapons, and (2) enhancing its nuclear profile through strategic leaks, public statements, and speculation, alongside the dissemination of indirect evidence regarding its nuclear capabilities.”

Declassified US State Department documents show that by the end of the 1960s, Israel was nearing the achievement of its nuclear objectives, prompting the involvement of Kissinger and Nixon. A memorandum from the State Department to Kissinger in 1969 stated:

“Intelligence suggests that Israel is swiftly advancing its ability to manufacture and deploy nuclear weapons, with delivery methods including surface-to-surface missiles or aircraft.”

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On Palm Sunday, Israel Bombs The Only Christian Hospital In Gaza

Claiming it held a “command and control center used by Hamas,” Israel chose Palm Sunday to bomb the only Christian hospital in war-shattered Gaza. It was also the last fully-functioning hospital in Gaza City. No casualties from the bombing per se were reported by Gaza’s civil emergency service. However, a child who’d been hospitalized for a head wound died from “the rushed evacuation process,” said the Episcopal Diocese of Jerusalem, which runs the al Ahli Arab Hospital. The diocese is part of the Anglican Church. 

Citing Gaza Civil Defense, Middle East Eye reports that the bombs resulted in “the destruction of the surgery building and the oxygen generation station for the intensive care units.” St. Philip’s Church was one of multiple nearby buildings that also suffered damage. The IDF attributed the low casualty count to its effort to “mitigate harm to civilians or to the hospital compound, including issuing advanced warnings in the area of the terror infrastructure, the use of precise munitions, and aerial surveillance.”

A local journalist told BBC that the IDF called an emergency room doctor and urged the hospital’s immediate evacuation, saying “You have only 20 minutes to leave.” A previously-injured Khalil Bakr said he and his three wounded daughters — two amputees and a third “full of platinum plates” — managed to get out of the hospital just a couple minutes before destruction rained down.  

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Israel is About to Empty Gaza

Israel is poised to carry out the largest campaign of ethnic cleansing since the end of World War II. Since March 2, it has blocked all food and humanitarian aid into Gaza and cut off electricity, so that the last water desalination plant no longer functions.

The Israeli military has seized half of the territory — Gaza is 25 miles long and four to five miles wide — and placed two-thirds of Gaza under displacement orders, rendered “no-go zones,” including the border town of Rafah, which is encircled by Israeli troops.

On Friday Defence Minister Israel Katz announced that Israel will “intensify” the war against Hamas and use “all military and civilian pressure, including evacuation of the Gaza population south and implementing United States President [Donald] Trump’s voluntary migration plan for Gaza residents.”

Since Israel’s unilateral ending of the ceasefire on March 18 — which was never honored by Israel — Israel has been carrying out relentless bombing and shelling against civilians, killing over 1,400 Palestinians and wounding over 3,600, according to the Palestinian health ministry.

An average of one hundred children are being killed daily according to the United Nations. Israel is, at the same time, inciting tensions with Egypt to lay what I suspect will be the groundwork for a mass expulsion of Palestinians into the Egyptian Sinai.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, echoing Katz, said Israel would not lift the total blockade until Hamas was “defeated” and the remaining 59 Israeli hostages were released.

“Not even a grain of wheat will enter Gaza,” he vowed.

But no one in Israel or Gaza expects Hamas, which has weathered the decimation of Gaza and sustained mass slaughter, to surrender or disappear.

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‘We Give Israel $4B a Year – That’s a Lot’: Trump Tells Netanyahu He May Not Drop Tariffs

President Donald Trump on Monday told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the US might not drop its new 17% tariff on Israel because we “give [them] four billion dollars a year” and they’re “one of the highest” recipients of foreign aid.

When asked by a reporter if the US would reduce the new 17% tariff on Israeli goods, Trump responded: “Well, we’re talking about a whole new trade — maybe not, maybe not.”

“Now, don’t forget we help Israel a lot. You know, we give Israel $4 billion a year. That’s a lot. Congratulations, by the way. That’s pretty good,” Trump quipped. “But we give Israel billions of dollars a year. Billions. It’s one of the highest of any — we give a lot of countries money.”

The US not only gives Israel over $4 billion a year but also fights their wars (which in the case of the war in Iraq cost $2 trillion).

Israel’s not simply “one of the highest recipients” of foreign aid but the highest recipients of foreign aid — and it’s not even close. The aid money we give to Egypt is also a bribe to normalize relations with Israel.

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Protest at Travis AFB Against US Weapons for Israeli Genocide

At 7:30 a.m. on April 9, the heavy traffic flow into California’s Travis Air Force Base came to a sudden stop.  As they have done numerous times, the “People’s Arms Embargo” blocked the main road into the base. The action this time commemorated the recently deceased long-time peace advocate David Hartsough, one of the co-founders of the Peoples Arms Embargo.

With traffic into the base stopped, one angry airman jumped out of his pickup truck and threatened to assault the peaceful protestors. He finally thought better of it and returned to his truck. Other waiting airmen and airwomen were patient and a few indicated support for the protest. One lowered his window and said, “Palestine will be free!” In the workout gym in an adjacent plaza, many people on their workout machines waved and jumped up and down in support.

At the blockade on the six-lane divided highway, about forty police officers were quickly on the scene. They broadcast a recorded message in English and Spanish that anyone blocking traffic would be arrested. Twelve protesters were arrested and cited with the crime.

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Trump White House holds Hamas ‘entirely responsible’ for Israeli execution of Palestinian medics

The Trump administration has doubled down on its position that Hamas is to blame for Israeli troops executing 15 Palestinian medical workers in Gaza, even after a video showed that the Israeli military was lying about the incident.

The Israeli army initially claimed its forces opened fire on vehicles that were advancing “suspiciously” and had no headlights or flashing emergency lights. But a video recorded by one of the executed paramedic’s phone showed the ambulances they were driving had emergency lights on when the Israeli army opened fire.

“Forgive me, mother. This is the path I chose. To help people,” said Palestinian medic Refaat Radwan moments before he was killed.

The Israeli soldiers tried to cover up the crime by burying the 15 medics and their ambulances in a shallow grave. The army has since changed its story, acknowledging the lights were flashing and that they opened fire on unarmed men but claiming six of them were linked to Hamas while offering no evidence.

Despite the clear evidence of a war crime, the US is still backing the Israeli army’s conduct. “Hamas uses ambulances and more broadly human shields for terrorism,” White House National Security Council spokesman Brian Hughes told Reuters. “President Trump understands the impossible situation this tactic creates for Israel and holds Hamas entirely responsible.”

Before the video came out, State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce was asked about the executions and also said that Hamas was to blame. “Every single thing that is happening in Gaza is happening because of Hamas. Every single dynamic,” she said.

On Monday, Hamas responded to Hughes’s statement and denied that it uses ambulances for military purposes. Hamas wrote on Telegram that the statement represents “a horrific example of unethical solidarity with the Nazis of our time, in their brutal war against innocent civilians and humanitarian organizations.”

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AIPAC leader boasts of special ‘access’ to top Trump natsec officials in leaked audio

The Grayzone has obtained audio of an off-the-record session from the 2025 Congressional Summit of AIPAC, the main US lobbying arm of the state of Israel. Recorded by an attendee of the panel discussion, the audio features AIPAC’s new CEO, Elliott Brandt, describing how his organization has cultivated influence with three top national security officials in the Trump administration – Secretary of State Marco Rubio, National Security Director Mike Waltz, and CIA Director John Ratcliffe – and how it believes it can gain “access” to their internal discussions.

Joining Brandt on the panel was Dana Stroul, formerly the highest ranking civilian overseeing Middle East issues in the Biden administration’s Department of Defense. Stroul made it clear that defending Israel’s strategic imperatives from within the US government was a top priority, arguing that Washington should deepen its “mutually beneficial” special relationship with its “strong partner” in Tel Aviv. 

Stroul dismissed the bloodbath in Gaza as the result of supposed Hamas tactics which supposedly aim to maximize the amount of children killed by Israel. At the same time, she and her fellow Israel lobbyists fretted about the impact of the post-October 7 war on public support for the self-proclaimed Jewish state. She was particularly troubled by Sen. Bernie Sanders’ attempts to force votes on military aid packages to Israel which, in her view, should never be debated in the open. Another unidentified AIPAC panelist worried that pro-Palestinian academics could eventually influence AI knowledge systems, leading to a dangerous shift in national security policy unless they were decisively suppressed. 

The Congressional Summit was permeated with anxiety, as AIPAC leaders told rank-and-file members to hide their badges when they left the Marriott Hotel for fear they would be confronted by anti-genocide protesters. Other than a handful of sessions, such as a keynote address by Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, the conference was strictly off-the-record. 

With the cameras off, AIPAC leadership provided unusually candid details of their activities. In one revealing admission, Brandt explained how he and his lobbying organization groomed the future CIA director and other top Trump officials as pro-Israel assets.

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Israeli Troops Blow Whistle on War Crimes in Gaza ‘Kill Zone’

An Israeli human rights group on Monday published a report in which Israel Defense Forces officers and soldiers who took part in the creation of a buffer zone along Gaza’s border with Israel described alleged war crimes including indiscriminate killing, as well as the wholesale deliberate destruction of civilian infrastructure in what multiple whistleblowers called a “kill zone.”

The new report from Breaking the Silence (BTS) details how Israel – which for decades has dubiously relied upon defensive buffer zones in territories it conquers or controls – decided on a policy of “widespread, deliberate destruction” in order to create a security perimeter ranging between roughly half a mile and a mile in width on the Gaza side of the Israeli-Palestinian border.

“To create this area, Israel launched a major miltary engineering operation that, by means of wholesale destruction, entirely reshaped about 16% of the Gaza Strip… an area previously home to some 35% of Gaza’s agricultural land,” the report states. “The perimeter extends from the coast in the north to the Egyptian border in the south, all within the territory of the Gaza Strip and outside of Israel’s internationally recognized borders.”

“The mission given to soldiers in the field, as revealed in their testimonies, was to create an empty, completely flat expanse about a kilometer wide along the Gaza side of the border fence,” the publication continues. “This space was to have no crops, structures, or people. Almost every object, infrastructure installation, and structure within the perimeter was demolished.”

“Palestinians were denied entry into the area altogether, a ban which was enforced using live fire, including machine gun fire and tank shells. In this way, the military created a death zone of enormous proportions,” the report adds. “Places where people had lived, farmed, and established industry were transformed into a vast wasteland, a strip of land eradicated in its entirety.”

“The testimonies demonstrate that soldiers were given orders to deliberately, methodically, and systematically annihilate whatever was within the designated perimeter, including entire residential neighborhoods, public buildings, educational institutions, mosques, and cemeteries, with very few exceptions,” the paper says. “Industrial zones and agricultural areas which served the entire population of Gaza were laid to waste, regardless of whether those areas had any connection whatsoever to the fighting.”

Palestinians who dared enter the perimeter, even accidentally were also targeted, including civilian men, women, children, and elders. The officers and soldiers interviewed by BTS struggled to explain whether noncombatants were informed of the no-go zone’s limits, with one saying civilians knew to stay away when they saw that “enough people died or got injured” crossing the unmarked boundary.

Some people who entered the perimeter out of sheer desperation were targeted. Israel’s blockade of Gaza has fueled widespread and sometimes deadly starvation, and Palestinians entered the “kill zone” to pick hubeiza, a nutritious wild plant, after the area’s farmland was razed.

“The IDF really is fulfilling the public’s wishes, which state: ‘There are no innocents in Gaza. We’ll show them,’” one reserve warrant officer explained. “People were incriminated for having bags in their hands. Guy showed up with a bag? Incriminated, terrorist. I believe they came to pick hubeiza, but… boom,” tank shells were fired at him from half a mile away.

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