Tag: palestine

Neocon Nikki Signs Israeli Bombs Urging Israel To Kill Palestinian Civilians

Just when you thought “Neocon Nikki” could not sink any lower, former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis has posted on Twitter/X a deeply disturbing photo of former Republican presidential candidate – and reportedly in the running for Trump’s VP pick – in Israel signing bombs destined for Palestinian refugees living in tents in Rafah with the slogan, “FINISH THEM!”

Just one day after the Israeli military incinerated untold scores of Palestinian refugees in Rafah and after the International Court of Justice demanded that Israel stop its offensive against civilians, Nikki Haley urges the Israeli regime to “finish” the job of killing Palestinians.

You can despise Hamas if you wish, but if you call yourself “conservative” or especially “pro-life” it should go without saying that urging a foreign military – fully underwritten by the US government through the involuntary “contributions” of the US taxpayer – to “FINISH” families displaced in tent encampments after their homes have already been destroyed, is the epitome of endorsing mass murder.

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To cover for war crimes, Israel claims it ‘lost control’ over soldiers

Several months after media commentators began predicting a “strategic defeat” for Israeli forces in Gaza, Israel’s military high command is claiming it has lost control over various units in their armed forces. 

The argument appears to scapegoat occupation soldiers to provide plausible deniability for their superiors and dissociate them from war crimes charges. The vast body of evidence emerging on these alleged ‘rogue Israeli units’ could potentially lead to a damning indictment of Tel Aviv’s military leadership.

Despite the International Court of Justice’s (ICJ) recent call on Israel to halt its military operation in Gaza’s southernmost city of Rafah, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu remains resolute in his vow to invade, even while personally facing an International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrant. Marred by internal division and pressure to comply with the ICJ order, Tel Aviv finds itself in a precarious position.

‘Rogue units’ in the occupation army 

Hebrew-daily Haaretz dropped a narrative bombshell last weekend when it claimed that the Israeli army’s “General Staff lost control over the units, especially reserve units, months ago.” The article attempts to depict a situation in which Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi has just “woken up” to the reality of allegedly rogue elements operating under his watch, with these ‘uncontrolled units’ committing the crimes cited by the ICJ against Israel.

Throughout the war in Gaza, Israeli soldiers have been publishing evidence of themselves committing crimes, showing genocidal intent, and performing perverse acts while operating inside the besieged coastal territory. 

These incriminating clips, published primarily on TikTok and Instagram and also within Telegram groups that glorify the killing of Palestinian civilians, have attracted a lot of bad press. It appears that Israel’s leadership is now floating the “few bad apples” strategy to absolve their military high brass of accountability.

It won’t be easy. Some of these social media groups are run by occupation officials. Furthermore, the Israeli military establishment has admitted to running accounts on Telegram that showcase snuff films as part of a psychological warfare operation under the “Operations Directorate’s Influencing Department.”

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Israel’s 2025 budget in the hole as Gaza war cost to reach $70bn

The chief of Israel’s central bank said on 30 May that the cost of the ongoing war in the Gaza Strip will amount to nearly $70 billion of the Israeli budget for 2025.

“The costs of the war, by 2025, will reach NIS 250 billion (approximately $67.4 billion),” said central bank head Amir Yaron at an economic conference on Thursday.

“There is no doubt that more expenses will be needed, since the economy needs security and security needs the economy. However, it is important to emphasize – you cannot give an open check on the issue of security spending, you must find the right balance between things,” Yaron added. 

“The defense and civilian costs amount to hundreds of billions of shekels – it is a heavy burden … The country’s risk premium increased while the excess devaluation of the shekel continued, with devaluation of course leading to price increases.” 

The significant boost in defense spending has played a major role in the mounting costs. 

Manuel Trajtenberg, a professor from Tel Aviv University’s economics department, warned that Israel “may slide back into another lost decade” if it does not lower its defense-spending-to-GDP ratio, referring to a period of economic decline following the 1973 Arab–Israeli war after which Israel spent years trying to balance between its defense and development spending as a result of the costs of that war on its economy. 

The central bank chief’s comments came a day after Tzachi Hanegbi, head of Israel’s National Security Council, said that another seven months of fighting is expected to take place in the Gaza Strip, where Tel Aviv has yet to achieve its stated goal of eradicating Hamas and returning its captive prisoners. 

Israel’s economy has taken significant losses as a result of the war. 

Its gross domestic product (GDP) plummeted nearly 20 percent in the final months of 2023, according to statistical data released in February. 

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Pro-Palestinian Group Claims To Cut Fiber Cables At UK Defense Factory Making F-35 Targeting Systems

“It’s only a matter of when – not the if – when you are going to see a nation-state, group, or actor engage in destructive behavior against critical infrastructure in the United States,” Michael Rogers, the former second commander of the US Cyber Command (2014-18), warned during a 2016 speech.

Back then, Rogers should’ve expanded his geographical threat horizon across the West, not just the US. This is because there are mounting risks that some terrorist organizations, such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), under the guise of pro-Palestinian demonstrations – are attempting to dismantle the Western world. Sounds outrageous, right? 

Well, not really. According to the Director of National Intelligence, PFLP is a terrorist group based in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. It unites Arab nationalism with Marxist-Leninist ideology. It promotes the destruction of “Israel as integral to the struggle to remove Western capitalism from the Middle East and ultimately establish a Communist Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital.” 

It should come as no surprise that the relationship between some Palestinian activist groups and global Marxist networks, like Black Lives Matter, are cut from the same radical cloth, with the end goal of destroying the West.

The quiet part is said out loud. 

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Democrats Surprised To Learn Bombs Are Used To Bomb People

Bombs kill people. When someone provides bombs to a government at war, those weapons will be used to kill people. It’s a simple fact but one that seems to have eluded Democrats.

After voting to send bombs to the Israeli military, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) condemned the Israeli military for killing Palestinian civilians with an American-made bomb. And after urging the Israeli military to use smaller munitions, the Biden administration found itself scrambling to deal with a mass civilian casualty event caused by one of those smaller weapons.

On Sunday, the Israeli Air Force bombed Tel al-Sultan, a neighborhood of Rafah that Israel had previously designated a safe zone for fleeing civilians. The Israeli government claimed the airstrike successfully killed two senior Hamas commanders. But a fire started by the bomb spread through the densely-packed tent city, burning to death at least 45 people, including 12 women, eight children, and three elderly. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated that the civilian deaths were a “tragic mistake.”

British doctor James Smith called the fire “one of the most horrific things that I have seen or heard of in all of the weeks that I’ve been working in Gaza.” CNN found pieces of a GBU-39/B Small Diameter Bomb, a type of 250-pound bomb that the U.S. military had rush-shipped to Israel following the Hamas attacks last October, with serial numbers from a California manufacturer.

“The Israeli bombing of a refugee camp inside a designated safe zone is horrific,” Warren stated on social media. “Israel has a duty to protect innocent civilians and Palestinians seeking shelter in Rafah have nowhere safe to go. Netanyahu’s assault of Rafah must stop. We need an immediate cease-fire.”

Last month, Warren had voted for a $26.38 billion U.S. military aid package to Israel, as Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.) pointed out. “Ma’am, you voted to send those bombs to Israel,” he wrote in a response to Warren’s statement.

Warren’s office did not respond to a request for comment. In a statement last month, Warren noted that she voted for the aid package after the Biden administration agreed to certify that every military receiving U.S. aid “follows international law, protects civilians in war zones and allows for humanitarian aid.”

On May 10, the administration ruled that there are “reasonable” accusations that Israel breaks the laws of war but that the Israeli government gave “credible and reliable” assurances about how it plans to use U.S. weapons. President Joe Biden also said that he would not be “supplying the weapons” for an Israeli invasion of Rafah that threatened the civilian population and held up a shipment of Mark 80 series bombs, which were responsible for some of the worst mass-casualty attacks in Gaza.

At a Senate hearing earlier this month, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin presented the GBU-39/B Small Diameter Bomb as a safer alternative to the Mark 80 series: “A Small Diameter Bomb, which is a precision weapon, that’s very useful in a dense, built-up environment, but maybe not so much a 2,000-pound bomb that could create a lot of collateral damage.”

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What Israel Is Doing to Gaza Is a Choice

Anyone who has voiced opposition to what the government of Israel is currently doing in Gaza has undoubtedly heard the various ways Israel’s defenders excuse, dismiss, and justify Israel’s actions. Sometimes you’ll hear that the Israel Defense Force (IDF) is doing everything in its power—more than any other military in history—to avoid hurting civilians and that Hamas is responsible for any innocents who get killed because they are using them as human shields.

Other times you’ll be told that the people of Gaza, as a whole, deserve what’s happening to them because some of them voted for Hamas eighteen years ago or because Palestinian support for the attacks on October 7 has only grown in the months since.

But there is a common assumption underlying just about every argument you’ll hear. Israel’s defenders act like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other top Israeli officials have had no choice but to react to the attacks of October 7 in the manner that they have.

With that assumption smuggled in, defenders can then act like anyone who has problems with what Israel is doing in Gaza is actually opposed to the operation’s stated goals—rescuing the hostages and breaking up Hamas.

It’s a rhetorical trick that is as dishonest as it is ridiculous. Israel did not have to wage an assault on Gaza like this. And, in fact, by doing so, it appears to be impeding its own stated objectives.

Hours after Hamas fighters had withdrawn back to Gaza on October 7 and the IDF had retaken control of the assailed southern border towns, Israel began employing what would become the defining tool of its response: the airstrike.

In the months since, Israeli forces have dropped tens of thousands of bombs on the Gaza Strip. In some cases, these strikes are meant to provide direct air support for IDF troops engaged on the ground. In others, Gazan infrastructure and high-rises in the heart of cities are targeted to help “exert civil pressure” on Hamas.

But most of these strikes are designed to kill men that Israeli forces have determined to be Hamas militants. The method used to select such targets was laid out thoroughly in a recent report by Israeli investigative journalist Yuval Abraham.

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Biden’s $320M Gaza Pier Has Detached & Drifted Onto Israeli Beach

A section of the $320 million floating pier built and erected off Gaza’s coast has broken off and floated onto an Israeli beach. The Saturday mishap is the latest setback for the US humanitarian aid project, after three US troops were reported injured aboard the pier two days prior, including one critically.

The Times of Isreal’s military correspondent Emanuel Fabian has reported that “An American vessel used to unload humanitarian aid from ships into the Gaza Strip via a floating pier disconnected from a small boat tugging it this morning due to stormy seas, leading it to get stuck on the coast of Ashdod, eyewitnesses say.”

The recovery operation has not gone well either, as “Another ship was then sent to try and extract the stuck vessel, but also got beached,” Fabian writes.

And yet a second US Army vessel also got stuck in shallow waters while trying to rescue the pier section. Overnight US ships had been moving two pieces of the floating pier to the Port of Ashdod in southern Israel when the now beached section detached and drifted away. American troops can be seen in footage standing helplessly on the beach.

An official US Central Command (CENTCOM) statement says the following:

This morning four U.S. Army vessels supporting the maritime humanitarian aid mission in Gaza were affected by heavy sea states. The vessels broke free from their moorings and two vessels are now anchored on the beach near the pier.

The third and fourth vessels are beached on the coast of Israel near Ashkelon. Efforts to recover the vessels are under way with assistance from the Israeli Navy.

The pier operation was already last week off to a rough start — and was paused for two days — after desperate Palestinians mobbed and ransacked the first trucks transporting aid unloaded from the pier before they could reach a distribution warehouse managed by the World Food Programme.   

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Israel’s censorship of the AP is a cautionary tale for the US

Philosophers consider slippery slope arguments to be logical fallacies. But those philosophers haven’t met Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government. 

It took Israel about three weeks after banning Al Jazeera — due to purported national security risks stemming from its Qatari funding — to use the same law as a pretext to censor the Associated Press, one of the world’s largest news agencies. 

Fortunately, Israel quickly reversed course after pressure from the U.S. and press organizations. But the ordeal should serve as a cautionary tale for President Biden and U.S. lawmakers and prosecutors. They keep empowering future administrations to harass the media — apparently trusting them, against all historical evidence, to use restraint.  

And if (more like when) the U.S. government does abuse its new powers against the press, the superpower is not likely to back off in response to international pushback like Israel did. Otherwise Julian Assange would be a free man. 

Israel’s justification for the raid was that the AP broke the law by providing images to Al Jazeera, which is among numerous clients worldwide that receive video feeds from the AP. There was no allegation that any image endangered national security, but officials nonetheless seized the AP’s equipment, killing its live feed and temporarily stripping millions of people of a view inside Gaza. 

Perhaps Israeli authorities saw transparency itself as a national security threat. The U.S. should be able to relate — officials who once sought to censor the Pentagon Papers on security grounds now acknowledge the government’s real concern was embarrassment. 

Israel has shut the international press out of Gaza (in addition to killing at least 100 journalists). Some even floated sanctioning the country’s oldest newspaper, Haaretz, for criticizing the current government. Biden’s administration is reportedly concerned about journalists turning public opinion against Israel by exposing the devastation the Israel-Gaza war has caused. 

With that backdrop, who could’ve predicted that Israel wouldn’t stop with Al Jazeera once it started censoring news outlets? Well, other than press freedom advocates everywhere. 

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Pentagon says none of the aid unloaded from US pier off coast of Gaza has been delivered to broader Palestinian population

None of the aid that has been unloaded from the temporary pier the US constructed off the coast of Gaza has been delivered to the broader Palestinian population, as the US works with the UN and Israel to identify safe delivery routes inside the enclave, the Pentagon said on Tuesday.

Several desperate Gazans intercepted trucks delivering aid from the pier over the weekend, leading the UN to suspend the delivery operations until the logistical challenges are resolved.

The US is working with Israel and the United Nations to establish “alternative routes” for the safe delivery of the 569 tons of aid transported to Gaza since last week, Pentagon spokesperson Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said on Tuesday.

Asked whether any of the aid has been delivered to the people of Gaza, Ryder said, “As of today, I do not believe so.” He added that aid had been held in an assembly area on shore, but as of Tuesday had begun getting moved to warehouses for distribution throughout Gaza as alternative routes have been established.

A US official told CNN that the Defense Department and UN are still working to determine how much aid can be held at he staging area inside Gaza at any given time.

The amount of aid getting to the Gaza shoreline from its initial staging area in Cyprus has also fallen short of initial Pentagon estimates.

Since Friday, more than 569 metric tons of humanitarian assistance have been delivered through the temporary pier, called JLOTS, or Joint Logistics Over-the-Shore, to the shore of Gaza to be distributed by humanitarian partners, Ryder said. But Adm. Brad Cooper, the commander of the US Naval Forces Central Command, said last week that the US hoped to initially transport 500 tons of aid per day via the pier, and scale up as time went on.

Over the weekend, as trucks began moving the aid delivered off the floating pier, CNN reported that a group of men in Gaza intercepted the aid, saying they did not trust that it was actually meant for the Palestinian people.

“I have doubts,” Mounir Ayad, a Gaza resident, told CNN near the pier. “I don’t understand this floating pier or what it indicates and what its purpose is. They say it’s for aid, but people are apprehensive. Is this aid or something else? We know that the US has never supported the Palestinian cause, so it’s implausible that it’s giving us aid without something in return.”

Ryder acknowledged on Tuesday that some initial aid brought into Gaza was “intercepted by some people who took that aid off those vehicles.”

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Gallant Tells Sullivan Israel Will Escalate Military Operations in Rafah

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant made clear to US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan in a meeting in Israel on Monday that Israel will escalate in Rafah despite the White House’s supposed objection to a major military operation in the city.

“We are committed to broadening the ground operation in Rafah to the end of dismantling Hamas and recovering the hostages,” Gallant told Sullivan, according to a statement from the Israeli minister’s office.

President Biden has threatened consequences for Israel if it launched a major attack on “population centers” in Rafah, but he has not taken action as Israel continues to escalate its operations in the city.

The UN estimates that over 800,000 civilians out of the 1.4 million who were sheltering in Rafah have already evacuated, and aid groups are warning that the places they are going lack water supplies and other basic necessities.

The US claimed it was opposed to an Israeli plan to attack the city without accounting for the civilians but has continued to back Israel as it’s ordered evacuations with no clear place for civilians to go.

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