Tag: war crimes

Video confirms Israeli troops fired three tank shells at Gaza’s Nasser Hospital

New video shows that a double-tap attack carried out by Israeli forces on a hospital in Gaza involved three separate munitions, one in the first strike and two in the second, CNN reported on 28 August.

The 25 August attack on Nasser Hospital in the southern city of Khan Yunis in Gaza killed 22 people, including health workers, emergency response crews, and five journalists.

On the morning of the strike, Reuters journalist Hossam al-Masri was operating a live stream from an exterior stairwell on the top floor of the Nasser Hospital.

At 10:09 am, an Israeli munition targeted Masri, killing him and one other man.

Journalists and rescue workers rushed to the stairwell to look for survivors.

At 10:17 am, as rescue workers were carrying a body down the stairwell, a second and third Israeli strike, just milliseconds apart, targeted the stairwell, killing 20 more. 

“One shell hits the staircase where first responders had gathered; a fraction of a second later, another explodes at almost the same spot,” CNN wrote, describing the video.

N.R. Jenzen-Jones, director of Armament Research Services, said the munitions were likely fired by two separate tanks at the same time.

“The impact of two projectiles at nearly the exact same moment suggests two tanks may have fired on the target simultaneously,” Jenzen-Jones told CNN. “It’s hard to read too much into that, but it suggests a more carefully coordinated attack, rather than a single vehicle firing at a ‘target of opportunity.’ Modern tank guns, supported by the sensors and systems of modern tanks, are very precise.”

“In gruesome video filmed after the second and third strikes, scores of bodies can be seen on the staircase on both the top floor and the floor below,” CNN added.

The five journalists killed were Reuters journalist Hossam al-Masri, Al Jazeera cameraman Mohammad Salama, Independent Arabia and AP journalist Maryam Abu Daqqa, and NBC journalist Muath Abu Taha. 

Journalist Ahmad Abu Aziz later succumbed to his wounds, which were sustained in the same attack. 

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Palestinian Boys Allege Sexual Assault, Torture by Israeli Jailers

Palestinian teenagers kidnapped and imprisoned by Israeli occupation forces during the genocidal war on Gaza accused their jailers of torturing and sexually assaulting them in a report published Saturday by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

“They took me from the aid distribution site and transferred me to a hospital in Rafah, where I was interrogated for an hour,” one 16-year-old boy identified by his first name Sami, who was abducted on June 29, told ABC. “They stripped me and conducted a body search. Then, they loaded me into a jeep and transported me to a prison in Israel.”

“During the interrogations, they tortured us – handcuffing us, beating us with sticks, and using electric shocks,” the teen continued. “They did countless things to break us.”

“I was tortured for a week until I lost all sense of time and awareness,” Sami said. “They put me in a one-square-meter cell, where I spent the entire week. I never saw daylight, never stepped outside. They only came to deliver food.”

“They asked if I knew anyone from Hamas, and whether I had crossed over on October 7,” Sami recounted. “They kept pressing me about who I knew and who I had seen. I told them I was just walking down the street – I didn’t know anything.”

“They would beat me. Each person that talked to me would beat me,” the teen alleged. “I was handcuffed, blindfolded, and they put electricity in my legs.”

Mahmoud, age 17, said that his Israeli abductors “began hurling insults, cursing at us, and accusing us of being with Hamas.”

“They stripped us of our clothes and took us to Kerem Shalom, completely naked, with nothing,” he continued. “There, the beatings and torture began.”

“The Israeli women soldiers beat us. They stripped us and ‘played’ here, and here, and there,” Mahmoud said, indicating his genitals. “They beat us with sticks. Got on us while we were lying on the ground. We were handcuffed like that and naked.”

Mahmoud said his captors wanted to humiliate him and other teenage boys in custody, accusing the troops of taking nude photos of them and sending female soldiers to mock and touch his body – an especially shameful ordeal for Muslims.

“When I was released from prison, I had a breakdown,” Mahmoud said. “I felt mentally exhausted and deeply disgusted. What I witnessed – no one should ever have to see.”

“I was tortured, we are children,” he added. “What have we done?”

ABC published photographs showing signs of torture on the teens’ bodies, including from shackling.

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More than a dozen people killed in Israeli strikes on hospital in southern Gaza, including journalists, officials say

More than a dozen Palestinians were killed in a pair of Israeli strikes on a hospital in southern Gaza, according to the Nasser Medical Complex, including journalists from multiple outlets.

The Palestinian Ministry of Health said at least 20 people were killed in the attack on Monday, with many more injured.

Israel carried out back-to-back strikes on the hospital in Khan Younis separated by only a matter of minutes, the ministry said. The “double-tap” hits killed journalists, health workers, and emergency response crews who had rushed to the scene after the initial attack, the Nasser Hospital said.

Dr. Mohammad Saqer, a Nasser Hospital spokesman and head of nursing, said that five journalists and four health workers had died.

The journalists killed include Mohammad Salama, a cameraman from Al Jazeera, Hussam Al-Masri who was a contractor for Reuters, and Mariam Abu Dagga, who has worked with the Associated Press (AP) and other outlets throughout the war. Moath Abu Taha, a freelance journalist, was also killed, the hospital added.

The Israeli attacks hit a balcony on the hospital used by reporters for an elevated view of Khan Younis.

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Leaked recording reveals ex-Israeli military intelligence chief calling 50,000 deaths in Gaza ‘necessary’

In leaked audio, the former head of Israeli military intelligence can be heard saying the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza are “necessary and required for future generations.”

“For everything that happened on October 7, for every one person on October 7, 50 Palestinians must die,” said Israel Defense Force’s (IDF) Maj. Gen. Aharon Haliva in the recordings released by Israel’s Channel 12 news on Friday. “It doesn’t matter now if they are children.”

“The fact that there are already 50,000 dead in Gaza is necessary and required for future generations,” Haliva said in the recordings.

It’s unclear when he was speaking, but the number killed in Gaza surpassed 50,000 in March.

“There is no choice — every now and then, they need a Nakba in order to feel the price,” Haliva said. The Nakba, or “catastrophe” in Arabic, is a seminal event in Palestinian history when roughly 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes by armed Jewish groups in 1948 during the establishment of the State of Israel.

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Human Rights Watch says Israeli airstrike on Iranian prison was an ‘apparent war crime’

Human Rights Watch alleged Thursday that an Israeli airstrike on a notorious Iranian prison was “an apparent war crime”, while also accusing Tehran of harming and disappearing prisoners after the attack.

Israel struck Evin Prison in Tehran, one of Iran’s most notorious detention facilities for political activists and dissidents, on June 23, during its 12-day war with the Islamic Republic.

The strikes during visiting hours hit Evin Prison’s main southern entrance, another northern entrance and other areas of the complex, destroying buildings that had medical facilities and prison wards.

The Iranian authorities initially said at least 71 people were killed during the airstrike, among them civilians including inmates, visiting relatives, and prison staff. Iranian media later raised that number to 80. It was unclear why Israel targeted the prison.

Human Rights Watch said the attack was “unlawfully indiscriminate” and that there was no evidence of an advance warning or a military target before striking the prison complex, which it estimates holds over 1,500 prisoners.

“To make matters worse, Israeli forces put at grave risk prisoners who were already victims of Iranian authorities’ brutal repression,” said Michael Page, the rights group’s deputy Middle East director.

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The Genocidal Partnership of Israel and the United States

For decades, countless U.S. officials have proclaimed that the bonds between the United States and Israel are unbreakable. Now, the ties that bind are laced with genocide. The two countries function as accomplices while methodical killing continues in Gaza, with both societies directly – and differently – making it all possible.

The policies of Israel’s government are aligned with the attitudes of most Jewish Israelis. In a recent survey, three-quarters of them (and 64 percent of all Israelis) said they largely agreed with the statement that “there are no innocent people in Gaza” – nearly half of whom are children.

“There is no more ‘permitted’ and ‘forbidden’ with regard to Israel’s evilness toward the Palestinians,” dissident columnist Gideon Levy wrote three months ago in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. “It is permitted to kill dozens of captive detainees and to starve to death an entire people.” The biggest Israeli media outlets echo and amplify sociopathic voices. “Genocide talk has spread into all TV studios as legitimate talk. Former colonels, past members of the defense establishment, sit on panels and call for genocide without batting an eye.”

Last week, Levy provided an update: “The weapon of deliberate starvation is working. The Gaza ‘Humanitarian’ Foundation, in turn, has become a tragic success. Not only have hundreds of Gazans been shot to death while waiting in line for packages distributed by the GHF, but there are others who don’t manage to reach the distribution points, dying of hunger. Most of these are children and babies…. They lie on hospital floors, on bare beds, or carried on donkey carts. These are pictures from hell. In Israel, many people reject these photos, doubting their veracity. Others express their joy and pride on seeing starving babies.”

Unimpeded, a daily process continues to exterminate more and more of the 2.1 million Palestinian people who remain in Gaza – bombing and shooting civilians while blocking all but a pittance of the food and medicine needed to sustain life. After destroying Gaza’s hospitals, Israel is still targeting healthcare workers (killing at least 70 in May and June), as well as first responders and journalists.

The barbarism is in sync with the belief that “no innocent people” are in Gaza. A relevant observation came from Aldous Huxley in 1936, the same year that the swastika went onto Germany’s flag: “The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.” Kristallnacht happened two years later.

Renowned genocide scholar Omer Bartov explained during an interview on Democracy Now! in mid-July that genocide is “the attempt to destroy not simply people in large numbers, but to destroy them as members of a group. The intent is to destroy the group itself. And it doesn’t mean that you have to kill everyone. It means that the group will be destroyed and that it will not be able to reconstitute itself as a group. And to my mind, this is precisely what Israel is trying to do.”

Bartov, who is Jewish and spent the first half of his life in Israel, said:

“What I see in the Israeli public is an extraordinary indifference by large parts of the public to what Israel is doing and what it’s done in the name of Israeli citizens in Gaza. In part, it has to do with the fact that the Israeli media has decided not to report on the horrors that the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] is perpetrating in Gaza. You simply will not see it on Israeli television. If some pictures happen to come in, they are presented only as material that might be used by foreign propaganda against Israel. Now, Israeli citizens can, of course, use other media resources. We can all do that. But most of them prefer not to. And I would say that while about 30 percent of the population in Israel is completely in favor of what is happening, and, in fact, is egging the government and the army on, I think the vast majority of the population simply does not want to know about it.”

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Former Green Beret: ‘Without Question, I Witnessed War Crimes’ In Gaza

A retired US Army Special Forces lieutenant colonel who worked as a contractor at an aid distribution point in Gaza has gone on-the-record with claims that he personally witnessed war crimes perpetrated by the Israel Defense Forces and by American contractors working for the shadowy Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). 

“I witnessed the Israeli forces shooting at the crowds of Palestinians,” Anthony Aguilar told BBC. “I witnessed the Israeli forces firing a main gun tank round from the Merkava tank into a crowd of people, destroying a car of civilians that was simply driving away from the site. I witnessed mortar rounds being fired at the crowd… to keep them controlled.” 

The GHF is led by an evangelical Christian leader with close ties to Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Trump. The organization was established in Israel in a collaboration of American evangelicals and private security contractors. Soon after the GHF began distributing aid to war-torn Gaza in May, disturbing reports emerged of Israeli soldiers killing unarmed Palestinians approaching aid points for food. Reports of dozens of Palestinians being killed in single incidents have become common. Last week, the UN human rights office said more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed while trying to receive food at the distribution points. 

Aguilar was blunt in characterizing what he observed in the context of his US military service: 

“In my entire career, I have never witnessed the level of brutality and use of indiscriminate and unnecessary force against a civilian population…an unarmed, starving population. I’ve never witnessed that in all the places I’ve been deployed to war until I was in Gaza, at the hands of the IDF and US contractors … Without question, I witnessed war crimes.”

He also condemned the GHF and its hired American guns:    

“My professional opinion of how the sites were established was what I would describe as ‘amateur.’ Inexperienced, untrained, no idea of how to conduct operations of this magnitude. That would be my most benign assessment. In my most frank assessment, I would say that they’re criminal.”

The GHF said Aguilar’s allegations were “categorically false,” telling BBC that the retired Green Beret is “a disgruntled former contractor who was terminated for misconduct.” In a separate statement, GHF said its own investigation concluded his claims are “false and have no basis in reality.” 

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‘No nation is above the law’: Colombia to host international summit against Israeli impunity

More than 20 states will gather in Bogota on 15–16 July to declare “concrete measures” against Israel’s violations of international law, according to diplomats speaking to Middle East Eye.

The summit, co-chaired by Colombia and South Africa, will bring together members and supporters of The Hague Group, a bloc launched in January to confront what it calls “a climate of impunity” surrounding Israel’s actions in Gaza.

The group includes Bolivia, Colombia, Cuba, Honduras, Malaysia, Namibia, Senegal, and South Africa, with additional countries such as Spain, Ireland, Turkiye, Portugal, China, Qatar, Algeria, Bangladesh, Brazil, Chile, Indonesia, Lebanon, Nicaragua, Oman, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Uruguay, and Palestine set to attend.

Colombian Vice-Minister of Multilateral Affairs Mauricio Jaramillo Jassir said the summit would not only reaffirm the group’s resistance to the ongoing “Palestinian genocide,” but also outline specific steps to move from words to collective action. 

“Colombia cannot be indifferent in the face of apartheid and ethnic cleansing,” he said.

The conference will be hosted at the Museo Nacional de Colombia under the banner Collective Action in Defense of Palestine, with keynote remarks to be delivered by UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine Francesca Albanese – who was recently sanctioned by the US for what US Secretary of State Marco Rubio called a “campaign of political and economic warfare against the United States and Israel.”

Other speakers include UK parliamentarian Jeremy Corbyn, EU lawmaker Rima Hassan, and Andres Macias Tolosa of the UN Working Group on Mercenaries. Colombia’s Minister of Culture, Yannai Kadamani Fonrodona, will also participate.

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US threatens ICC: Drop Israel war crimes probe or ‘all options on the table’

A senior legal adviser to the US State Department has issued a dramatic threat to the International Criminal Court’s oversight body, warning that “all options are on the table” if the court does not drop investigations and arrest warrants against the US and Israel.

Reed Rubinstein made the threat on Tuesday during a meeting of the Assembly of State Parties (ASP), the ICC’s oversight body, in New York.

“We will use all appropriate and effective diplomatic, political and legal instruments to block ICC overreach,” the US representative warned.

“Our additional sanctions of June 5 should underscore our resolve,” he added, referencing the US’s recent move to sanction four ICC judges who issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant last November.

Rubinstein went on to threaten the ICC: “To be clear, we expect all ICC actions against the United States and our ally Israel – that is, all investigations and all arrest warrants – to be terminated,” he said.

“If not, all options remain on the table.”

The ASP was meeting to discuss a potential amendment to the Rome Statute, the ICC’s founding treaty, to expand the court’s jurisdiction over the “crime of aggression”.

The court has jurisdiction in the 125 countries that recognise its authority.

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President Trump Issues a Serious Veiled Threat to Israel as Leftist Prosecutors in the Jewish State Try to Lock Up Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Bogus Charges

President Trump appears to be ready to hit Israel directly where it hurts the most if leftist prosecutors do not leave Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu alone.

As The Gateway Pundit’s Jim Hoft reported on Thursday, Trump erupted after learning Netanyahu had been summoned to Court next Monday for the continuation of a long-running legal witch-hunt.

To make things more insulting, the Netanyahu announcement came 48 hours after Iran and Israel agreed to a ceasefire in their ongoing war. The Bibi-hating leftists did not even wait to give the prime minister time to catch his breath after one of the most consequential battles in Jewish history.

As Trump noted, this is the first time a sitting Israeli Prime Minister has ever been on trial. This politically motivated case concerns ridiculous things like cigars and a Bugs Bunny doll.

Trump went on to demand that the trial be cancelled immediately or a pardon given to Netanyahu. He did specify what consequences Israel would face if this travesty of justice continued, though.

But in a new statement released on Truth Social Saturday night, Trump strongly implied that failure to drop this garbage case would result in the end of all U.S foreign aid to Israel.

It is terrible what they are doing in Israel to Bibi Netanyahu. He is a War Hero, and a Prime Minister who did a fabulous job working with the United States to bring Great Success in getting rid of the dangerous Nuclear threat in Iran. Importantly, he is right now in the process of negotiating a Deal with Hamas, which will include getting the Hostages back.”

How is it possible that the Prime Minister of Israel can be forced to sit in a Courtroom all day long, over NOTHING (Cigars, Bugs Bunny Doll, etc.)? It is a POLITICAL WITCH HUNT, very similar to the Witch Hunt that I was forced to endure. This travesty of “Justice” will interfere with both Iran and Hamas negotiations. In other words, it is INSANITY doing what the out-of-control prosecutors are doing to Bibi Netanyahu.

The United States of America spends Billions of Dollars a year, far more than on any other Nation, protecting and supporting Israel. We are not going to stand for this. We just had a Great Victory with Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu at the helm — And this greatly tarnishes our Victory. LET BIBI GO, HE’S GOT A BIG JOB TO DO!

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