Tag: palestine

IDF Knew Real Hamas HQ While Lying About al-Shifa 

Although corporate news media have made it clear they don’t buy the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) claim that al-Shifa Hospital has been a cover for a Hamas command and control center and weapons armory, Western media have failed to report a much bigger story.

The IDF and the Israeli government already knew when they launched their propaganda campaign about al-Shifa that Hamas had no military command and control facility hidden there because it had already found the complex kilometers away.

As Consortium News reported last week, for 15 years the Israelis claimed  Hamas was operating its primary command and control base from a tunnel underneath al-Shifa. After the Israeli bombing campaign against Gaza began in October, the Israeli military amplified that message to press its contention that by hiding the Hamas high command, al-Shifa Hospital had lost its immunity from military operations under the law of war, and could now legitimately be taken over by force.

On Nov. 11, IDF spokesman Richard Hecht declared that al-Shifa was the “main hub of Hamas activity;” Newsweek reported the IDF regarded al-Shifa Hospital as “Hamas’s main command post” and the Times of Israel headlined “Hamas leaders again hiding under hospital”.

The crescendo of Israeli propaganda about al-Shifa being a “human shield” for Hamas came with a long report published by The New York Times on Nov. 14. It was based on interviews with eight present and former intelligence and defense officials, describing a vast military command complex under al-Shifa with multiple levels.

But something quite unexpected had happened during this new round of press stories on al-Shifa that completely demolished the entire IDF story line: the IDF had gained control of the real Hamas command and control center in an area where the Hamas leadership had previously had their above-ground offices in the Al Atatra neighborhood, in the extreme northwest of Beit Lahiya city, 8.5km away from al-Shifa.

After that office building was demolished, the IDF discovered a major tunnel facility that was quite certain had been the central headquarters for the Hamas high command — the command and control center for the entire war. 

As the IDF leaked to The Jerusalem Post in a story published Nov. 14, the discovery was made “several days ago” of a tunnel with an elevator that reached thirty meters underground, compared with only five meters underground in other tunnels.  Furthermore it had been equipped with oxygen, air conditioning and more advanced communications than seen anywhere else.

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As Israel pounds Gaza, BBC journalists accuse broadcaster of bias

The BBC has been accused by its journalists of failing to tell the story of the Israel-Palestine conflict accurately, investing greater effort in humanising Israeli victims compared with Palestinians, and omitting key historical context in coverage.

In a 2,300-word letter written to Al Jazeera by eight UK-based journalists employed by the corporation, the BBC is also said to be guilty of a “double standard in how civilians are seen”, given that it is “unflinching” in its reporting of alleged Russian war crimes in Ukraine.

Fearing reprisal, the journalists requested anonymity. The group does not plan to send the letter to BBC executives, believing such a move was unlikely to lead to meaningful discussions.

They sent Al Jazeera the letter as a humanitarian disaster in Gaza escalates, and as grim milestones are reached at pace. At the time of writing, more than 14,500 Palestinians have been reported as killed by Israeli bombardment, including at least 6,000 children.

“The BBC has failed to accurately tell this story – through omission and lack of critical engagement with Israel’s claims – and it has therefore failed to help the public engage with and understand the human rights abuses unfolding in Gaza,” the letter reads. “Thousands of Palestinians have been killed since October 7. When will the number be high enough for our editorial stance to change?”

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Israel’s War on Hospitals

Israel is not attacking hospitals in Gaza because they are “Hamas command centers.” Israel is systematically and deliberately destroying Gaza’s medical infrastructure as part of a scorched earth campaign to make Gaza uninhabitable and escalate a humanitarian crisis. It intends to force 2.3 million Palestinians over the border into Egypt where they will never return. 

Israel has destroyed and nearly emptied the Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. The Indonesian Hospital in Beit Lahia is next. Israel is deploying tanks and armored personnel carriers around the hospital and has fired rounds into the building, killing 12 people. 

The playbook is familiar. Flyers are dropped by Israel over a hospital telling people to leave because the hospital is a base for “Hamas terrorist activities.” Tanks and artillery shells rip away parts of the hospital walls. Ambulances are blown up by Israeli missiles. Power and water is cut. Medical supplies are blocked. There are no painkillers, antibiotics and oxygen. The most vulnerable, premature babies in incubators and the gravely ill, die. Israeli soldiers raid the hospital and force everyone out at gunpoint. 

This is what happened at Al Shifa hospital. This is what happened at Al Rantisi Children’s Hospital. This is what happened at Gaza’s main psychiatric hospital. This is what happened at Nasser Hospital. This is what happened at the other hospitals that Israel has destroyed. And this is what will happen at the few hospitals that remain. 

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This Is The Real Face Of The US Empire

Someone uploaded one of those viral “help identify this racist jerk” clips featuring a man accosting a street vendor with awful Islamophobic vitriol, and it turned out he was the former US State Department Deputy Director in the Office of Israel and Palestinian Affairs.

It sounds made up, but that’s exactly what just happened; Vice has a whole article out about it. The video was uploaded today, and within hours the man was identified as Stuart Seldowitz, who helped direct US diplomacy on Israel-Palestine from 1999 to 2003 and then served on the Obama administration’s National Security Council. 

Seldowitz’s identity was confirmed by his former employer Gotham Government Relations, who released a statement denouncing him and saying they’ve ended all affiliation with him. 

Seldowitz is seen hounding the New York City vendor or vendors in multiple different videos wearing multiple different outfits, showing a sustained campaign of harassment and abuse. He told them while fully aware he was being filmed that Israel killing thousands of Palestinian kids “wasn’t enough”, insulted their religion, threatened them, mocked their intelligence and their English, called them terrorists, and asked “Did you rape your daughter like Mohammed did?” From the videos he appears to be harassing them for no reason other than because they are Muslims selling halal food.

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NBC Journalist Arrested in Israel on ‘Very Serious Offenses’

A reporter who is currently working for NBC News was arrested in Jerusalem last week for allegedly praising Hamas and celebrating the terror group’s Oct. 7 terror attacks on social media as they were happening.

Those attacks left at least 1,200 Israelis dead and hundreds more were kidnapped.

According to The Jerusalem Post, 45-year-old freelance reporter Marwat Al-Azza was taken into custody last Friday.

She is described by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz as a Palestinian residing in East Jerusalem.

She had been wanted for questioning by police since last month over pro-Hamas Facebook posts. Last week, prosecutors granted police that request.

Haaretz reported that Al-Azza praised Hamas on her Facebook page while Israeli citizens were being massacred.

The newspaper, Israel’s oldest publication still in print, reported:

“On October 7, Al-Azza put up posts on her personal Facebook account allegedly supporting Hamas terrorism.

“She wrote on the kidnapping of an elderly woman from a Gaza border community, ‘It’s killing me, it’s a black comedy, the old woman looks happy, a bit of action before she dies.’”

Haaretz further reported in other posts on her Facebook page, Al-Azza portrayed the ongoing massacre as a film in which Hamas militants were the stars.

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Deputy Speaker of Israeli Knesset ‘We Are Too Humane. Burn Gaza Now No Less!’

An Israeli official called for the complete destruction of Gaza. In six weeks of bombing Gaza, Israeli forces have killed over 5,500 Palestinian Children. Still, Deputy Speaker of the Knesset Nissim Vaturi said, “We are too humane. Burn Gaza now no less!”

Vaturi, a Lukid Member of the Knesset, made the remarks in response to the Israeli government allowing a small amount of fuel into Gaza. “All of this preoccupation with whether or not there is internet in Gaza shows that we have learned nothing. We are too humane. Burn Gaza now no less!” he demanded. “Don’t allow fuel in, don’t allow water in until the hostages are returned back!”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agreed to allow two trucks of fuel into Gaza every other day. However, aid groups say the small amount of fuel is insufficient to maintain basic humanitarian operations.

On Friday, the UN said that it was no longer able to continue aid deliveries into Gaza as an Israeli fuel blockade of the enclave has led to a widespread communications blackout. The World Health Organization warned that the ending of aid deliveries means the “immediate possibility of starvation” for the 2.3 million people in Gaza. 

The fuel deliveries are intended to allow Palestinians to operate sewage and communications in Gaza. Still, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said allowing a small amount of fuel into Gaza is “a grave mistake.”

National Security Council chairman Tzachi Hanegbi told reporters that Tel Aviv had to allow the fuel into Gaza so it could continue its military operations. “If plague were to break out, we’d have to stop the war,” he said. 

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The Burning Question: Was 10/7 A False Flag?

The October 7th Hamas attack on Israelis has been referred to as “Israel’s 9/11,” which gives us good reason to believe that it was probably another false flag psy-op.

Some people really do believe it was a false flag, i.e., that the Israeli regime allegedly knew that it was being planned and let it happen.

As Paul Craig Roberts notes, how could Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency not know this was being planned? Don’t Israeli intelligence and military have the most sophisticated and comprehensive monitoring and surveillance of the Israeli sheeple and of Palestinians and of Hamas?

The planning allegedly was going on for 2 years. Really?

And there were warnings from other countries or intelligence agencies, including Egypt who had warned the Israelis of a terrorist attack being planned, warnings ignored.

In any event, the official narrative of “surprise” attack is just not believable. A possible motive for a false flag op as reported by Jonathan Cook is a planned expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza to Sinai which is controlled by Egypt, an ethnic cleansing plan allegedly under way since at least 2007, according to Cook.

Many people dismiss such allegations as “conspiracy theory.” But would it really be that surprising that government-employed losers would intentionally allow a terrorist attack to occur, and for the sake of implementing a plan of ethnic cleansing of an entire population whose presence is inconvenient?

After all, government bureaucracies generally attract psychopaths. The worst of the worst, as F.A. Hayek had noted.

And now we are learning that there is a high probability that many of the Israelis killed on October 7th were killed by the Israeli military (IDF) itself, possibly as high as 80% of the Israeli deaths, according to Scott Ritter. And Ron Unz described the IDF as possibly “trigger-happy Apache pilots”. It has also been difficult for Israeli authorities to distinguish between many killed Israeli and Palestinian bodies.

But there is some history that is important here. The fact that Israel contributed to the creation of the Hamas organization is quite relevant to the allegation of false flag ops.

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Al-Shifa Hospital was Turned into a ‘Death Zone’ – WHO

The team, consisting of public health experts, logistics officers, and security staff from various UN agencies, described the hospital as a “death zone” and the overall situation as “desperate.”

The World Health Organization (WHO) has described the situation at the Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza City as a “death zone”, a day after the forced evacuation ordered by the Israeli army, the official Palestinian news agency WAFA reported.

On Saturday morning, the invading Israeli military forced most of the patients, wounded, and medical staff out of the medical complex, demanding they walk on foot to the south of the Gaza Strip.

A joint United Nations humanitarian assessment team, led by WHO, accessed Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza on Saturday to evaluate the dire situation within the facility.

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Activating the Genocide Convention

There are 149 states party to the Genocide Convention. Every one of them has the right to call out the genocide in progress in Gaza and report it to the United Nations. 

In the event that another state party disputes the claim of genocide — and Israel, the United States and the United Kingdom are all states party — then the International Court of Justice is required to adjudicate on “the responsibility of a State for genocide.”

These are the relevant articles of the genocide convention:

“Article VIII
Any Contracting Party may call upon the competent organs of the United Nations to take such action under the Charter of the United Nations as they consider appropriate for the prevention and suppression of acts of genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in article III.

Article IX
Disputes between the Contracting Parties relating to the interpretation, application or fulfilment of the present Convention, including those relating to the responsibility of a State for genocide or for any of the other acts enumerated in article III, shall be submitted to the International Court of Justice at the request of any of the parties to the dispute.”

Note that here “parties to the dispute” means the states disputing the facts of genocide, not the parties to the genocide/conflict. Any single state party is able to invoke the convention.

There is no doubt that Israel’s actions amount to genocide. Numerous international law experts have said so and genocidal intent has been directly expressed by numerous Israeli ministers, generals and public officials.

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Israel admits burning hundreds of people on 7 October

On Thursday, MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan challenged Israeli government spokesperson Mark Regev about the many lies and false claims that Israel has made to justify its genocidal bombing and invasion of Gaza.

While attempting to parry Hasan’s challenges, Regev told many more lies, trying to change the subject and shift the blame for the horrifying toll away from Israel and onto Israel’s Palestinian victims.

But Regev made one admission whose significance neither Regev nor Hasan appears to have recognized.

Regev was trying to make the point that Israel – supposedly unlike Hamas – can be trusted because when Israel makes a mistake, it admits it.

Regev gave this example: “We originally said, in the atrocious Hamas attack upon our people on October 7th, we had the number at 1,400 casualties and now we’ve revised that down to 1,200 because we understood that we’d overestimated, we made a mistake. There were actually bodies that were so badly burnt we thought they were ours, in the end apparently they were Hamas terrorists.”

Earlier this month, Israel did in fact revise down the number of Israelis it says were killed on 7 October to “around 1,200.”

Although it has offered no direct evidence, Israel has claimed that Hamas fighters burned Israeli civilians en masse, in atrocities not seen since the Holocaust.

Israel has also never explained how Palestinians fighters could have achieved this or caused the enormous damage to Israeli houses with only the light weapons they were generally seen carrying.

It simply makes no sense that 200 bodies burned beyond recognition that Israel thought were Israeli civilians could turn out to be Hamas fighters unless Israel killed people indiscriminately.

Obviously Hamas fighters did not set themselves on fire and burn themselves beyond recognition. And Israel must know the circumstances in which these people died.

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