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White House Says No Deadline for Israel to End Gaza Onslaught

Gaza’s Health Ministry says over 17,000 Palestinians have been killed.

By Dave DeCamp / Antiwar.com, https://scheerpost.com/2023/12/09/white-house-says-no-deadline-for-israel-to-end-gaza-onslaught/

US Deputy National Security Advisor Jon Finer said Thursday that the Biden administration has not set a deadline on Israel’s war in Gaza and reiterated US opposition to a ceasefire.

“We have not given a firm deadline to Israel, not really our role. This is their conflict. That said, we do have influence, even if we don’t have ultimate control over what happens on the ground in Gaza,” Finer told the Aspen Security Forum.

Financial Times reported last week that the Israeli onslaught is expected to last over a year. US officials told CNN that they expect the current phase of the war, which involves constant airstrikes and a ground operation, would continue into 2024, and then Israel would narrow down its targeting to specific Hamas members, possibly by January.

Finer said the US supports Israel’s goal of ensuring that “Hamas can no longer govern,” although Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly stated his objective is the elimination of Hamas altogether. Finer said the US is “not in place yet of asking Israel to stop or for a ceasefire.”

There’s no indication that Israel is successfully taking out Hamas fighters, as its bombardment has incurred a massive civilian death toll. Gaza’s Health Ministry said Thursday that 17,177 Palestinians have been killed since Israel unleashed its campaign on October 7, and about 70% of the dead are women and children.

December 11, 2023 Posted by | Israel, politics international, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

‘Israel-Hamas War’ Label Obscures Israel’s War on Palestinians

FAIR, GREGORY SHUPAK 8 Dec 23

Since October 7, the day the escalation in Israel/Palestine began (FAIR.org, 10/13/23), American media outlets have persistently described the fighting as an “Israel-Hamas war.” From October 7 through midday on December 1, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post have combined to run 565 pieces that use the phrase “Israel-Hamas war.”

This paradigm has been a dominant way of covering the violence, even though Israel has been clear from the start that its assault has not been narrowly aimed at Hamas. At the outset of the Israeli onslaught, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant (Times of Israel, 10/9/23) said: “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed.” Oxfam later said that such restrictions on Palestinians’ ability to eat—which left 2.2 million people “in urgent need of food”—mean that Israel is deploying a policy wherein “starvation is being used as a weapon of war against Gaza civilians.”

A day later, Israeli military spokesperson Adm. Daniel Hagari (Guardian, 10/10/23) said that “hundreds of tons of bombs” had already been dropped on the Gaza Strip, and admitted that “the emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy.”

The indiscriminate nature of Israel’s assault is clear. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported on November 24 that “over 1.7 million people in Gaza, or nearly 80% of the population, are estimated to be internally displaced.” On November 25, the Swiss-based Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor reported that Israel had killed 20,031 Palestinians in Gaza, 18,460 of whom (or 92%) were civilians, since October 7.

Thus, while Israel has openly acknowledged that it is carrying out indiscriminate violence against Palestinians, US media outlets do Israel the favor of presenting its campaign as if it were only aimed at combatants. “Israel-Gaza war” comes closer to capturing the reality that Israel’s offensive is effectively against everyone living in Gaza. Yet “Israel-Gaza war” appears in 265 pieces in the three papers, exactly 300 fewer than the obfuscatory “Israel-Hamas war.”

Consider also the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor finding that Israel has slaughtered 8,176 children. If 41% of all the Palestinians Israel has killed in the first seven weeks of its rampage have been children, and 8% have been combatants, then it is less an “Israel-Hamas war” than an Israeli war on Palestinian children.

Characterizing what has happened since October 7 as an “Israel-Hamas war” fails to adequately capture the scope and the character of Israel’s violence. Describing the bloodbath in Palestine this way obscures that grave violence is being visited upon virtually all Palestinians, whatever their political allegiances and whatever their relation to the fighting.

Cognitive dissonance

Corporate media have often stuck to the “Israel-Hamas war” approach even when the information the outlets are reporting shows how inadequate it is to conceive of Israel’s attacks in that way. For instance, the New York Times (10/20/23) ran a story about Israel ordering 1.2 million Gaza residents to evacuate their homes, and still classified the evacuation as part of the “Israel-Hamas war.” The Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’ armed wing, is estimated to have 30,000–40,000 fighters (Axios, 10/21/23).

The Wall Street Journal published a short piece (11/6/23) that noted:

The United Nations said that the Israel-Hamas war has killed the highest number of UN workers in any single conflict. The UN said that over 88 workers in its Relief and Works Agency [UNRWA], the largest humanitarian organization in the Gaza Strip, have been killed since October 7.

But UNRWA did not itself use the “Israel-Hamas war” narrative in the report to which the Journal referred, instead opting for “escalation in the Gaza Strip.” Indeed, Israel killing UN workers at a rate of almost three each day would seem to fall outside the bounds of an “Israel-Hamas war,” but that’s how the paper categorizes the violence. (“Israel’s war on the UN” falls well outside the bounds of the ideologically permissible in the corporate media.)……………………………… more https://fair.org/home/israel-hamas-war-label-obscures-israels-war-on-palestinians/

December 9, 2023 Posted by | Israel, spinbuster | Leave a comment

Abject failure to forge ceasefire means international community complicit in unfolding catastrophe in Gaza

December 7, 2023, by: The AIM Network, https://theaimn.com/abject-failure-to-forge-ceasefire-means-international-community-complicit-in-unfolding-catastrophe-in-gaza/

Oxfam says that many within the international community – particularly Israel’s state supporters – are complicit in the mass death, forcible displacement, starvation and deprivation being inflicted upon more than 2 million people being penned and moved around Israeli designated target zones in Gaza, both in the besieged north and now throughout the entrapped south.

Oxfam staff in Gaza speak of young children asking their parents to pack their clothes into separate bags for their next displacement under fire, in case their parents are killed. People are now fighting over basic necessities like food, water and fuel. An Oxfam partner told us today:

“This is one of the most difficult days and wars that we have experienced. If you look anywhere around, you will find displaced people, injured people, people sleeping in the streets, and even we face many difficulties in distributing aid because there is no safe place in Gaza. Every area can be dangerous, each and every place can be bombed at any moment.”

Virtually no aid is now going into Gaza. Whatever Israel might allow to trickle in is insufficient and cannot be safely distributed to civilians being forced to run for their lives. “This kind of systemic, militarised chaos has overwhelmed the international humanitarian system. Our governments don’t even have the smokescreen of humanitarianism to hide behind now as Israel carries out its campaign of collective punishment,” said Garcia.

“Israel’s so called safe zones within Gaza are a mirage: unprotected, not agreed or trusted, not provisioned, and not accessible. We hold genuine fears that masses of terrified people will be forced beyond Gaza itself under the guise of ‘safety’,” she said. “This would force the humanitarian system into an impossible choice between helping civilians and being complicit in their forced deportation.”

“The terrible irony is that this militarised destruction of Gaza is literally blowing away any chance of real security for both Palestinians and Israelis alike. Gaza needs a ceasefire now and humanitarian agencies need the guarantee of safe access in order to help its people and save lives.”

December 8, 2023 Posted by | Israel, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Suffering and killing in Gaza must stop now

December 6, 2023,  The AIM Network,  https://theaimn.com/suffering-and-killing-in-gaza-must-stop-now/

Plan International Australia Media Release

STATEMENT: The horror and trauma children are facing in Gaza right now is indescribable and unconscionable – suffering and killing must stop now.

After a pause in fighting for just one week, Plan International is devastated by the resumption of violence in Gaza over the weekend and the shocking number of civilians and children being killed in a matter of days.

Following the week-long pause and the release of 110 hostages from Gaza and 240 Palestinian prisoners, hopes held out by humanitarian agencies of a permanent and lasting ceasefire were crushed when Israel’s bombardments across the Gaza Strip resumed on Friday 1 December.

More than 500 civilians – including children – have been killed since bombing resumed, according to the Palestinian health ministry, as of Monday 4 December. Of those killed, 70% been women and children. The UN says more than 1.9 million people in Gaza are now displaced from their homes.

This sudden escalation of violence reverses the limited gains made in terms of humanitarian assistance during the pause. The devastating number of deaths, total destruction of health facilities and lack of basic sanitation and clean water, and other lifesaving and life-sustaining infrastructure and materials bring a grave risk of more children dying of disease and starvation. Sustained bombing is causing emotional distress and trauma amongst children that no words can truly explain.

With Israel expanding its ground military operations in the south of the Gaza Strip on Sunday, millions of people who had previously fled from the north have been left with nowhere to go. The health system in Gaza has now collapsed and UNICEF staff have described the few hospitals that remain in operation as “warzones”.

There is never any justification for the killing or maiming of children. In war and conflict, children are always innocent and must not be targeted. The horror and trauma children are facing in Gaza right now is indescribable and unconscionable.

While limited humanitarian assistance is being provided, the intensifying violence makes the situation in Gaza immensely dangerous for humanitarians and civilians alike.

Plan International is closely monitoring the situation in Gaza and is preparing to scale up operations through our offices in Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon and through local partners. Plan International Egypt are supporting the Egyptian Red Crescent to deliver supplies including food and first aid kits via the Rafah crossing, while Plan International Jordan have signed an MoU with Terre Des Hommes to support their work in Gaza. In the south of Lebanon, where cross-border tensions have led to widespread internal displacement, Plan International Lebanon are providing a range of support to displaced children and their families including non-food items, food, and household hygiene kits.

With the two-month mark of this terrible escalation of violence approaching, Plan International continues to call on all parties involved for an unconditional, immediate, sustained and complete ceasefire and improved humanitarian access. We also call for the release of all civilian hostages and Palestinian children held as prisoners.

About Plan International

About Plan International

Plan International is the charity for girls’ equality. Working across 83 countries, we tackle the root causes of poverty, support communities through crises, campaign for gender equality, and help governments do what’s right for children and particularly for girls. We believe a better world is possible. An equal world; a world where all children can live happy and healthy lives, and where girls can take their rightful place as equals. www.plan.org.au

December 8, 2023 Posted by | Israel, weapons and war | Leave a comment

US officials think Gaza ground operation could end by January as Biden admin privately warns Israel about its tactics, (but USA still sending weapons)

By Natasha Bertrand, MJ Lee, Alex Marquardt and Oren Liebermann, CNN 6 Dec 23

US officials expect the current phase of Israel’s ground invasion of Gaza targeting the southern end of the strip to last several weeks before Israel transitions, possibly by January, to a lower-intensity, hyper-localized strategy that narrowly targets specific Hamas militants and leaders, multiple senior administration officials tell CNN.

But as the war enters this new ground phase in the south, the White House is deeply concerned about how Israel’s operations will unfold over the next several weeks, a senior US administration official said. The US has warned Israel firmly in “hard” and “direct” conversations, they said, that the Israeli Defense Forces cannot replicate the kind of devastating tactics it used in the north and must do more to limit civilian casualties.

The US has conveyed to Israel that as global opinion has increasingly turned against its ground campaign, which has killed thousands of civilians, the amount of time Israel has to continue the operation in its current form and still maintain meaningful international support is quickly waning………………………………………………………………………………………. more https://edition.cnn.com/2023/12/05/politics/israel-ground-operation-us-warnings/index.html

December 8, 2023 Posted by | Israel, weapons and war | Leave a comment

British government to send surveillance planes to facilitate Israel’s genocide

Robert Stevens, WSWS, 5 December 2023

On Saturday, Britain’s Ministry of Defence (MoD) said that the Royal Air Force (RAF) would carry out surveillance flights over Gaza.

A joint statement by the Ministry of Defence, Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, and Home Office, headed “UK military activity in the Eastern Mediterranean”, announced, “In support of the ongoing hostage rescue activity, the Ministry of Defence will conduct surveillance flights over the eastern Mediterranean, including operating in air space over Israel and Gaza.”………………

Britain has been up to its neck in the arming of the Israeli regime that has killed tens of thousands, mainly civilians and the vast majority women and children, and reduced Gaza to rubble. Now everyone is expected to believe that the RAF will be carrying out blanket surveillance of Gaza and a large part of the eastern Mediterranean with no military purpose and will not make information gathered available to its main military ally in the region.

British imperialism is gearing up for an escalation of the war in the Middle East and putting the necessary resources in place. Just two days before the drone surveillance announcement, Defence Secretary Grant Shapps revealed that the UK is sending one of its most lethal warships to the Gulf, HMS Diamond, a Type 45 destroyer with the ability to shoot down missiles…………………………………………..

Britain’s role in supplying Israel’s war-machine is critical. According to the Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT), “UK industry provides 15% of the components in the F-35 stealth combat aircraft that are currently being used in the bombardment of Gaza. The contract for the components is estimated… to be worth £336m since 2016.”

Israel has 50 F-35s on order from the US, with 22 already delivered by the end of 2022, reports CAAT. The organisation estimates that “each aircraft involves around $12 million to UK industry. This would imply a value of $72 million (£58m) for total UK deliveries of F-35s to Israel in 2022…”

Much of what the UK sends to Israel’s military is not even documented, with CAAT noting, “Between 2018 and 2022, the UK exported £146m in arms sales via Single Issue Export Licences. However, a large proportion of military equipment exported is via Open General Export Licences. These open licences, which include the F-35 components, lack transparency and allow for unlimited quantities and value of exports of the specified equipment without further monitoring.”………………………………………………….

The Sunak government refuses to confirm whether it has troops on the ground already in Gaza. On Monday, MPs were allotted just one hour to ask the government questions of the “Humanitarian Situation” in the Strip; a debate which hardly any of the mainly pro-war MPs across all parties showed up for.

Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn—who remains a party member but sits as an Independent having been expelled from the parliamentary party three years ago by leader Sir Kier Starmer—said in his comments that “Israel is clearly undertaking an act of cleansing of the entire population of Gaza”, which “is illegal in international law.” He then asked, “What is the role, purpose and military objective of British military participation in the whole area? Can he [Leo Docherty, a parliamentary under-secretary of state at the Foreign Office] assure us that there are no British soldiers on the ground in Gaza?”………

Britain’s military role in the region is maintained to ensure its ruling elite profit from the spoils of genocide and war, as the trusted partners of US imperialism. Bloomberg and Newsweek reported in October that the Biden administration is considering sending in “peacekeepers for the Gaza Strip”, once Hamas is wiped out and Gaza depopulated, and that the “Multinational force could include American, UK, French troops.”

Despite a November 1 statement by White House spokesperson John Kirby that there are “no plans or intention to put US military troops on the ground in Gaza, now or in the future”, Bloomberg reported that the Biden administration “is still talking to partners about what a post-conflict Gaza should look like. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said, “if that means some sort of international presence, then that’s something we’re talking about.”

Bloomberg reported that “one option would grant temporary oversight to Gaza to countries from the region, backed by troops from the US, UK, Germany and France.”

On Monday, John Bolton, the former Republican US national security adviser, proposed at the UK’s Foreign Affairs Select Committee that the Gaza Strip should be split into two territories, with Gaza north of the Wadi Gaza River administered by Israel and an area to the south run by Egypt.

This would be initiated after the ethnic cleansing of most Palestinians and facilitate the transfer of those that remain. No Palestinians would be allowed to settle in Israel, which Bolton said would not even provide work visas, but must all be resettled in other countries.  https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/12/05/ttog-d05.html

December 7, 2023 Posted by | Israel, UK, weapons and war | Leave a comment

One Family’s Harrowing Journey Out of Gaza City

December 6, 2023,  https://scheerpost.com/2023/12/06/one-familys-harrowing-journey-out-of-gaza-city/

Zakaria Baker and his family were forced from their home in Al-Shati refugee camp by Israeli bombs on November 7. As they traveled south over 15 kilometers they witnessed incredible horrors and not everyone survived the journey. This is their story.

By Zakaria Baker / Mondoweiss

[Mondoweiss] Editor’s Note: The following testimony was given by Zakaria Baker on November 11, 2023. The testimony was collected by Amplify Gaza Stories, an organization working on the ground in Gaza to collect and translate testimonies from Gazans, ensuring their stories of struggle, resilience, and survival are heard.

November 11, 2023

am Zakaria Baker, one of the people who were displaced from their homes four days ago in November 2023 – around November 7, 2023.

The beginning of the displacement is as follows: An Israeli intelligence officer called one of my cousins. There were about 20 of us sitting on chairs. The bombing of Al-Shati Refugee Camp did not stop for a single second. The missiles that were fired at the camp – we couldn’t see or hear them. They were barrel bombs. When they were dropped on a residential block of six or seven houses, they destroyed them completely. The scariest and most painful thing is that these missiles are fired at houses crowded with people. The bodies in Al-Shifa Camp are still under the rubble. We could smell the bodies.

The Israeli intelligence officer called one of my cousins who was sitting with us and said, “Bakers, why haven’t you left? Your neighbors have evacuated. You have 30 minutes to leave for your safety. If you don’t go, we will drop death on you.”

Ok, half an hour… What do we do? We are families and children and have to get ready to leave?

Less than half an hour later, about 20 minutes, maybe less, the bombing started a few meters away from us. It was targeting houses that were just two or three houses away. We couldn’t take anything with us, just some medication because I had had open heart surgery. So we walked – women, children, and elderly – as we kept walking, the bombing got closer to our houses. Whenever we passed a house, it was destroyed behind us.

The bombardment continued to Rono Mosque near Al-Shifa Hospital. When we were under the mosque, a bomb hit its minaret. Thousands of people were in the street. Some of them came from the hospital too. Many elderly people were with us. There were 160 people from our family in the street, and from our extended family, there were around 4 or 5 thousand.

We all started walking. When we reached the Al-Shifa there were thousands of people there. Most of them were residents from around Al-Shifa Hospital, or people who were seeking shelter inside the hospital who fled because the hospital was targeted.

We reached Dola interchange, some five to six kilometers we had already covered. We saw a scruffy-looking bus, but it was working, and we asked the driver to take us to the Dola interchange. He asked for 80 shekels, and we were approximately 40 people. We agreed on 80 shekels to take us to the Dola roundabout near Salah al-Din. We reached the Dola interchange, and we got off the bus, and we walked approximately one kilometer after the Kuwait roundabout, and we saw huge crowds, you know, don’t say hundreds or 1000s or 10s of thousands, there were hundreds of thousands of people and horrific scenes – women 80 and 90-year-olds, old men of 70 and 80 years old, some of them were wounded, some carrying children. We kept walking until we met a donkey and cart, and the owner said 20 shekels, so we loaded everything onto this cart – women, children, all our luggage, everything that we could get on the cart. Halfway up, the donkey was struggling, so the driver asked us to push. So we pushed it for the sake of helping the elderly and the children. 

. We pushed until we were within 100 meters of the Israeli IDF. We got down, and we were asked to show our IDs. I picked up my grandson and played with him in order to assure him and for him to be assured by me. We walked within 10 meters of the soldiers. They said, “Stop.” We stopped. We saw three tanks move in front of us. Once they passed, we were told to walk on.

We only had one suitcase each. There were bodies everywhere. Some decomposed, some were charred. We saw a car with a person inside it dead. His bottom half was intact, his upper half was decomposed. Horrific scenes, enough to make a stone cry. Enough to make a stone cry. We left the area with the tanks, and we moved to Wadi Gaza Bridge, and they said to us now you are in a safe zone. From the area with the tanks to Wadi Gaza, my grandson was crying, he was hungry. 

There was a small wall, and we let his mother use it to hide behind it so that she could breastfeed him and stop him crying just for a few minutes, about five minutes. In general, we felt easier and a little bit calmer after my grandson was fed. We continued walking in an enormous stream of humans in a column

On the bridge, we were not allowed to stop. It was forbidden to stop, in fact, one of the old women with us, who was married to my relative, she was 86 years old, her name was Kefah Bakr. She fell down from fatigue and died, she couldn’t survive the journey, the walking. She was kinda lucky because she died 10 meters after passing through the Israeli IDF-controlled area, and so she was taken to hospital.

Back in the tank area, you’re not allowed to look left or right. You must keep looking straight.

(Question from Mohammed Ghalayini, a volunteer with Amplify Gaza Stories: Were the instructions from the soldiers given by loudspeakers?)

Answer: No, the instructions were passed from one person to another. The people in the front were instructed to do something, and they would tell it to someone behind them and so on, and the instructions would be spread to all the others.

Many of the old people fell down and were left. People would walk past them. One person dropped his suitcase. His name Alaa Abu-Stata. He bent down to pick up his suitcase, and he was shot dead. Many of the old women couldn’t withstand this hard work, and they fell down to the ground. No one dared to stop to help them, they would shoot dead all those who would help her. So we had to sacrifice one old person to save 10 or 20 others from being shot or humiliated. I saw four cases, one person was called by name by loudspeakers. They stripped him down naked, and he was arrested, and no one knows where he has been taken. No one knows anything about him. This is what I have seen at a distance of 100 meters, and others have seen similar cases of arrests.

We kept on walking until Burej. Imagine! From Al-shati’ to the bridge – something like 15 kilometers. At Burej, there were no cars, only lorries. One lorry driver came along, and I told him we wanted to go to Khan Younis or the Hamad area. He said 300 shekels. I said, never mind just get us out of here. We reached Hamad, and we had another torturous journey at Hamad.

(Question: Did you find accommodation in Hamad?)

No, we couldn’t find any rooms. We spent three nights sleeping rough on the floor, unprotected, under the skies—cold nights. On the third night, only on the third night, we switched on spotlights to repel insects and flies from the eight and nine-month-old babies. On the 4th day, we managed to sort out the situation. We broke a partition that belongs to the council – some 4 meters square, and we put 40 people in it. This was my project. I made a makeshift tent from it with used plastic sheets, and six families were able to shelter there.

Since 12:00 yesterday, we haven’t been able to find a piece of bread. We have one meal a day – for two reasons: to avoid going to the toilet and because we can’t find any food. It’s a hunger war. No tinned food. We went to all the supermarkets and could not find anything. Women slept in the same clothes they left home with. This water I was given by Abu Mohammed. We were subjected to pain, suffering, anger, humiliation. I can’t talk anymore about this.

Since this story was recorded, Baker, his family, and thousands of others seeking refuge were again forced to leave their shelter in Hamad City, Khan Younis, on December 2 after receiving an evacuation order from the Israeli military.

December 7, 2023 Posted by | Israel, PERSONAL STORIES, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Israel orders more Gazans to flee, bombs areas where it sends them

By Arafat Barbakh and Mohammed Salem, 6 Dec 23

GAZA (Reuters) -Israel ordered Palestinians to leave parts of the main southern city in the Gaza Strip on Monday even as its bombs rained down on areas where it had told them to go.

Israeli troops and tanks also pressed the ground campaign against Hamas militants in the south of the enclave after having largely gained control of the now-devastated north.

Israel’s military posted a map on social media platform X on Monday morning with around a quarter of the city of Khan Younis marked off in yellow as territory that must be evacuated at once.

Three arrows pointed south and west, telling people to head towards the Mediterranean coast and towards Rafah, near the Egyptian border.

Desperate Gazans in Khan Younis packed their belongings and headed towards Rafah. Most were on foot, walking past ruined buildings in a solemn and silent procession.

But Rafah itself was coming under Israeli fire. The head of the United Nations agency in Gaza (UNWRA), Thomas White, said people there were themselves being forced to flee.

“People are pleading for advice on where to find safety. We have nothing to tell them,” he said on X.

Bombing at one site in Rafah overnight had torn a crater the size of a basketball court out of the earth. A dead toddler’s bare feet and black trousers poked out from under a pile of rubble. Men struggled with their bare hands to move a chunk of the concrete that had crushed the child…………………………………………….

Gaza’s health ministry said on Monday that at least 15,899 Palestinians, 70% of them women or under 18s, have now been killed in Israeli air and artillery strikes on the enclave since Oct. 7. Thousands more are missing and feared buried in rubble.
As many as 80% of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have fled their homes in the Israeli bombing campaign that has reduced much of the crowded coastal strip to a desolate wasteland………………………………..

The United Nations said the areas in the south that Israel has ordered evacuated in the three days since the truce had housed more than 350,000 people before the war – not counting the hundreds of thousands now sheltering there from other areas.

“We were sleeping at 5 a.m. when we felt things collapse, everything went upside down,” she told Reuters. “They told (people) to move from the north to Khan Younis, since the south is safer. And now, they’ve bombed Khan Younis. Even Khan Younis is not safe now, and even if we move to Rafah, Rafah is not safe as well. Where do they want us to go?”……………………………………………….. (Reporting by Mohammed Salem and Roleen Tafakji in Gaza, Maayan Lubell, Ari Rabinovich and Emily Rose in Jerusalem, Maggie Fick in Beirut, Andrew Mills in Doha, Writing by Peter Graff and Angus MacSwan; Editing by Mark Heinrich and Alex Richardson)  https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/israel-orders-more-gazans-to-flee-bombs-areas-where-it-sends-them/ar-AA1kZ4rK

December 7, 2023 Posted by | Israel, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Chris Hedges: Israel Reopens the Gaza Slaughterhouse

Nothing is off limits. Hospitals. Mosques. Churches. Homes. Apartment blocks. Refugee camps. Schools. Universities. Media offices. Banks. Sewer systems. Telecommunications infrastructure. Water treatment plants. Libraries. Wheat mills. Bakeries. Markets. Entire neighborhoods. Israel’s intent is to destroy Gaza’s infrastructure and daily kill or wound hundreds of Palestinians. Gaza is to become a wasteland, a dead zone that will be incapable of sustaining life. 

Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Israel this week, and while calling for Israel to protect civilians, refused to set conditions that would disrupt the $3.8 billion Israel receives in annual military assistance or the $14.3 billion supplemental aid package.

https://scheerpost.com/2023/12/01/chris-hedges-israel-reopens-the-gaza-slaughterhouse/

Phase One of Israel’s genocidal campaign on Gaza has ended. Phase Two has begun. It will result in even higher levels of death and destruction.

By Chris Hedges / Original to ScheerPost

The skies over Gaza are filled — after a seven-day truce — with projectiles of death. Warplanes. Attack helicopters. Drones. Artillery shells. Tank shells. Mortars. Bombs. Missiles. Gaza is a cacophony of explosions and forlorn screams and cries for help beneath collapsed buildings. Fear, once again, is coiling itself around every heart in the Gazan concentration camp. 

By Friday evening, 184 Palestinians — including three journalists and two doctors — had been killed by Israeli air strikes in the north, south and central Gaza, and at least 589 injured, according to the Ministry of Health in Gaza. Most of them are women and children. Israel will not be deterred. It plans to finish the job, to obliterate what is left in the north of Gaza and decimate what remains in the south, to render Gaza uninhabitable, to see its 2.3 million people driven out in a massive campaign of ethnic cleansing via starvation, terror, slaughter and infectious diseases. 

The aid convoys, which brought in token amounts of food and medicine — the first batch was shrouds and coronavirus tests according to the director of al-Najjar hospital — have been halted. No one, least of all President Joe Biden, plans to intervene to stop the genocide. Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Israel this week, and while calling for Israel to protect civilians, refused to set conditions that would disrupt the $3.8 billion Israel receives in annual military assistance or the $14.3 billion supplemental aid package. The world will watch passively, muttering useless bromides about more surgical strikes, while Israel spins its roulette wheel of death. By the time Israel is done, the 1948 Nakba, where Palestinians were massacred in dozens of villages and 750,000 were ethnically cleansed by Zionist militias, will look like a quaint relic of a more civilized era. 

Nothing is off limits. Hospitals. Mosques. Churches. Homes. Apartment blocks. Refugee camps. Schools. Universities. Media offices. Banks. Sewer systems. Telecommunications infrastructure. Water treatment plants. Libraries. Wheat mills. Bakeries. Markets. Entire neighborhoods. Israel’s intent is to destroy Gaza’s infrastructure and daily kill or wound hundreds of Palestinians. Gaza is to become a wasteland, a dead zone that will be incapable of sustaining life. 

Israel began to bomb Khan Younis on Friday after dropping leaflets warning civilians to evacuate further south to Rafah, located on the border crossing with Egypt. Hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians had sought refuge in Khan Younis. Once Palestinians are pushed to Rafah, there is only one place left to flee — Egypt. The Israeli Ministry of Intelligence, in a leaked report, calls for the forcible transfer of Gaza’s population to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. A detailed plan to intentionally displace the Palestinians in Gaza and push them into Egypt has been embedded in Israeli doctrine for five decades. Already, 1.8 million Palestinians in Gaza have been driven from their homes. Once Palestinians cross the border into Egypt — which the Egyptian government and Arab leaders are seeking to prevent despite pressure from the U.S. — Palestinians will never return. 

This is not a war against Hamas. It is a war against Palestinians.

Israeli strikes are generated at a dizzying rate, many of them from a system called “Habsora” — The Gospel — which is built on artificial intelligence that selects 100 targets a day. The AI-system is described by seven current and former Israeli intelligence officials in an article by Yuval Abraham on the Israeli sites +972 Magazine and Local Call, as facilitating a “mass assassination factory.” Israel, once it locates what it assumes to be a Hamas operative from a cell phone, for example, bombs and shells a wide area around the target, killing and wounding tens, and at times hundreds of Palestinians, the article states.

“According to intelligence sources,” the story reads, “Habsora generates, among other things, automatic recommendations for attacking private residences where people suspected of being Hamas or Islamic Jihad operatives live. Israel then carries out large-scale assassination operations through the heavy shelling of these residential homes.”

Some 15,000 Palestinians, including 6,000 children and 4,000 women, have been killed since Oct. 7. Some 30,000 have been wounded. Over six thousand are missing, many buried under the rubble. More than 300 families have lost 10 or more members of their families. More than 250 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since Oct. 7, and more than 3,000 injured, although the area is not controlled by Hamas. The Israeli military claims to have killed between 1,000 and 3,000 of some 30,000 Hamas fighters, a relatively small number given the scale of the assault. Most resistance fighters shelter in their vast tunnel system. 

Israel’s playbook is the “Dahiya Doctrine.” The doctrine was formulated by former Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Chief of Staff Gadi Eizenkot, who is a member of the war cabinet, following the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Dahiya is a southern Beirut suburb and a Hezbollah stronghold. It was pounded by Israeli jets after two Israeli soldiers were taken prisoner. The doctrine posits that Israel should employ massive, disproportionate force, destroying infrastructure and civilian residences, to ensure deterrence.

Daniel Hagari, spokesman of the IDF, conceded at the start of Israel’s most recent attack on Gaza that the “emphasis” would be “on damage and not on accuracy.”

Israel has abandoned its tactic of “roof knocking” where a rocket without a warhead would land on a roof to warn those inside to evacuate. Israel has also ended its phone calls warning of an impending attack. Now dozens of families in an apartment block or a neighborhood are killed without notice.

The images of mass destruction feed the thirst for revenge within Israel following the humiliating incursion by Hamas fighters on Oct. 7 and the killing of 1,200 Israelis, including 395 soldiers and 59 police officers. There is a sadistic pleasure voiced by many Israelis over the genocide and a groundswell of calls for the murder or expulsion of Palestinians, including those in the occupied West Bank and those with Israeli citizenship. 

The savagery of the air strikes and indiscriminate attacks, the cutting off of food, water and medicine, the genocidal rhetoric of the Israeli government, make this a war whose sole objective is revenge. This will not be good for Israel or the Palestinians. It will fuel a conflagration throughout the Middle East. 

Israel’s attack is the last desperate measure of a settler colonial project that foolishly thinks, as many settler colonial projects have in the past, that it can crush the resistance of an indigenous population with genocide. But even Israel will not get away with killing on this scale. A generation of Palestinians, many of whom have seen most, if not all, of their families killed and their homes and neighborhoods destroyed, will carry within them a lifelong thirst for justice and retribution. 

This war is not over. It has not even begun. 

December 5, 2023 Posted by | Israel, weapons and war | Leave a comment

US Sent Israel 15,000 Bombs Since October 7

The transfer has included thousands of 2,000-pound bombs that have been used to devastate Gaza.

By Kyle Anzalone / Antiwar.com,  https://scheerpost.com/2023/12/03/us-sent-israel-15000-bombs-since-october-7/

The Wall Street Journal published details about the White House’s secretive arms transfers to Israel since October 7. The US has provided Israel with 57,000 artillery shells and 15,000 bombs, including over 5,000 with 2,000-pound warheads.

According to a list of weapons obtained by the Journal, the US has shipped Israel “more than 5,000 Mk82 unguided or ‘dumb’ bombs, more than 5,400 Mk84 2,000-pound warhead bombs, around 1,000 GBU-39 small diameter bombs, and approximately 3,000 JDAMs.”

The US has additionally shipped 57,000 155 MM shells to Israel. NBC News previously reported in October that Washington sent Tel Aviv artillery rounds that are cluster munitions.

Mick Mulroy, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense and officer in the Marine Corps, described the weapons as those the US would use in non-urban areas. “They are kind of the weapons of choice for the fights we had in Afghanistan and Syria in open, non-urban areas,” he said. “The US may use them in more urban areas, but first it would do a lot of target analysis to make sure the attack was proportional and based on military necessity.”

By contrast, Gaza is about 140 sqare miles and home to 2.3 million people—one of the most densely packed regions on earth. Additionally, Israel has relied on an AI program to rapidly generate lists of suspected low-level Hamas members to target, without respect to civilians in proximity.

The Israeli policy has led to the widespread devastation of Gaza. At least 15,000 civilians have been killed. The number of dead Palestinian children exceeds the number of Hamas fighters Israel has claimed to kill by many thousands. Nearly 100,000 buildings in Gaza have been damaged by Israel’s bombing campaign, including the destruction of universities, hospitals, schools, and entire residential neighborhoods.

On Saturday, the New York Times reported that Israel was killing civilians in Gaza at a “historic pace.” The outlet added that part of the explanation for the huge death toll was Tel Aviv’s willingness to drop 2,000-pound American-made bombs on various civilian centers.

Marc Garlasco, a former Pentagon analyst who advises the Dutch organization PAX, told the Times that he’s never seen anything like it. “It’s beyond anything that I’ve seen in my career,” he said. Garlasco added that to find a historical comparison for so many large bombs in such a small area, one would have to “go back to Vietnam or the Second World War.”

Israeli officials and American politicians have attempted to justify Tel Aviv’s slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza by referring to the allied bombings of Tokyo during World War II. In a single night during the bombing of Tokyo, more than 100,000 people were burned to death by American napalm bombs.

The White House has made some requests to Tel Aviv to try to curb civilian casualties. However, the Biden administration has refused to condition future weapons shipments to Israel on reducing the civilian death toll.

The US has primarily relied on aircraft for quick shipment to Israel hundreds of millions of dollars in arms during the past two months. Unlike weapons shipments to Ukraine, the Biden administration has refused to provide the public with information on the arms it is providing to Tel Aviv.

December 4, 2023 Posted by | Israel, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

The Nakba 2.0: Issa Amro’s Insider Account of Israeli Torture in Hebron

By Alan Macleod and Mnar Adley / MintPress News

Coming back to his house on October 7, world-renowned activist Issa Amro was dragged away by 15 armed Israelis, blindfolded, gagged, and cuffed so tightly he now needs an operation on his hands. The settlers and soldiers kept him imprisoned for days, beating and torturing him, constantly simulating his execution.

Speaking with MintPress News, Amro told the story of what life is like for Palestinians living in the West Bank city of Hebron. “In my city where I live now, since October 7, there is a curfew,” he told Mnar Adley and Alan MacLeod.

But this curfew is far more restrictive than others. Palestinian families – those who have not already fled the genocidal Israeli violence – are given only six hours a week to leave their homes. They are not even allowed out into their own yards. This means that school has stopped, work has ended, and life is on pause.

In those six hours, Palestinian families must buy all their food, pick up essentials such as medicine and conduct any social activities. But being outside is dangerous, as they have to pass though multiple checkpoints with armed guards and AI smart shooters pointing guns at them. Violence from vigilante settler groups is also a danger.

“It’s scary to walk alone between armed soldiers and armed settlers, all of them pointing their guns at you. Then, when you come back, it takes them five to ten minutes to search every person,” Amro said, revealing that the guards wanted to go so far as to cut open his potatoes and tomatoes to check for “weapons.”

“It’s a kind of jail” right now, Amro said, although he notes that being in jail is considerably safer than being a Palestinian in Hebron right now.

Issa Amro is an activist and the co-founder of the grassroots group Youth Against Settlements. He has led campaigns of non-violent civil disobedience against apartheid and Israeli occupation and has been recognized and given awards by international organizations, including the United Nations. He joins MintPress to chronicle recent Israeli attempts to force Palestinians from their homes and their ancestral land.

While leaving the house is extremely dangerous, staying inside is barely safer. Amro and others have experienced Israeli raids where troops tell Palestinians that they have 24 hours to leave or they will be murdered.

“History is repeating itself,” Amro told Adley and MacLeod today, “Now I understand why my people left in 1948,” referencing the Israeli genocide of three-quarters of a million Palestinians from their land in order to create the state of Israel.

It is no exaggeration to call the current Israeli actions genocidal. Indeed, senior Israeli politicians are directly comparing it to the events of 1948. Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter, for example, described his country’s actions as the “Gaza Nakba 2023.” “We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba,” he told local outlet Channel 12 on Saturday. “From an operational point of view, there is no way to wage a war – as the Israeli army seeks to do in Gaza – with masses between the tanks and the soldiers,” he added.

In this conversation, Amro provides a crucial first-hand perspective rarely heard in corporate media. Watch the full interview only at MintPress News.

December 4, 2023 Posted by | Israel, secrets,lies and civil liberties | Leave a comment

“Nuremberg Trial” for Israel’s Crimes Against Palestinians?

,  https://www.thepostil.com/a-nuremberg-trial-for-israels-crimes-against-palestinians/

Make no mistake. Israel has committed massive crimes in Gaza and in the West Bank against the Palestinians. When will the thousands killed get justice? Or are we all supposed to just go on with our lives and pretend that it’s all the pursuit of “the right of self-defense?” Who are these IDF snipers who anonymously shoot children, and no one is even curious to know who these killers are? Is this the way of war now, according to the “international rules based order” that we should be so proud of in the West, which is supposedly the hallmark of our “civilization?”

A day of reckoning will come. There are good men and women who are wokring to make that a reality.

And what are we to make of our politcal class that utters not a peep about the slaughter that Netanyahu is doing, but who earlier could not get the ICC to issue an arrest warrant for President Putin fast enough, because Putin was assumed to have “kidnapped” Ukrainian orphans that they might have a decent life in Russia. But Netanyahu can kill as many children as he wants, since that is not a crime according to the “rule of law,” so the “jurists” at the ICC stay busy identifying “Russian crimes” that might be spotted at the backs of their cereal boxes.

Kurt Tucholsky was paraphrasing a French joke when he observed that “the death of one person: that’s a catastrophe. One hundred thousand dead: that’s a statistic!”

What Israel has done for over a month in Gaza is now a matter of statistics, for they have killed over 15,000 so far, more than 4000 of them children. It is the Palestinian Holocaust, because there are many more thousands buried under all those pancaked buildings where people once lived. And now that the Israeli assault continues, many thousands more will die.

Given these grim statistics, it becomes more and more important to remember the one person, rather than mention in passing the vast number of the now faceless thousands dead.

One such person was Elham Farah, a Christian Palestinian, living in Gaza, where she had taught music all her life. She was 84 years old and was the daughter of the Palestinian poet, Hannah Farah.

On November 12, 2023, an Israeli sniper shot her in the leg, as she came out of the Holy Family Church in Gaza City, where she had been sheltering to escape the bombing. She wanted to make sure that her home had not been hit. A sniper was waiting who are trained to shoot in the leg.

Those inside the church tried to rescue her, as she cried out for help, but people were afraid of Israeli snipers who long have had a reputation for being merciless. Elham Farah bled to death over several days. No one came to help her because of the sniping. She had just survived the bombing of Saint Porphyrios, the 850-year-old church in Gaza, which took the lives of 18 other Christians. Is such a death for a gentle old lady acceptable to those who see themselves as “civilized?” And why no one even knows about the crimes of Israeli snipers is unimaginable.

The hell unleashed by the Herod of our time in the Holy Land escapes the mind’s ability to describe horror—to see little children torn apart by bombs, dropped by pilots in their sophisticated flying machines is beyond the reach of words…

Then Herod perceiving that he was deluded by the wise men, was exceeding angry: and sending killed all the menchildren that were in Bethlehem, and in all the borders thereof, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had diligently inquired of the wise men.

Then was fulfilled that which was spoken by Jeremias the prophet, saying:

A voice in Rama was heard, lamentation and great mourning; Rachel bewailing her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not (Matthew 2:16-18).

Rama” or “Ramah” is the name of several Palestinian towns, and “Rachel” stands in for all mothers whose children have been slaughtered by the powerful. Such killing was “righteous revenge” because the Hamas razzia of October 7th was fabricated as brutal, with beheaded babies and babies in ovens, when it was the IDF that did most of the slaughter of Israelis that day. Why the need to lie by Israel? The full truth about what really happened on October 7th is now coming out: Hamas killed IDF soldiers in combat. It was not a “terrorist” attack:

Thus on October 7th:


  • The IDF killed anything that moved;
  • Many Israeli captives were still alive, two days after October 7;
  • Israelis were killed by the IDF with heavy shelling of houses and cars;
  • Most of the civilian deaths happened because of the IDF;
  • It was a razzia by Hamas because most of the captives taken were IDF officers.

And in the West, we have the war enthusiasts, eagerly cheering on Netanyahu and his ilk to kill more, to kill without compunction, for there will be no red lines drawn, because Israel is for “civilization,” because that is how you fight wars, by killing as many babies as you can with bombs.

Perhaps in the months or even years ahead, there will come a time for a “Nuremberg Trial” for the murderers that are now in power in Israel—and for the IDF soldiers snipers who shot down Elham Farah and the two liitle Christian Palestinian boys, and also for the many “journalists” and “scholars” who justified and whitewashed the crimes against humanity now permanently recorded for the world to see. Remember, they did hang Julius Streicher, even though he perosnally had killed no one.

December 2, 2023 Posted by | Israel, Legal, Religion and ethics, weapons and war | Leave a comment

What lies behind Benjamin Netanyahu’s lies and Hamas’s evasions?

The official version of the Hamas-Israel war raises more questions than it answers. Here, the author highlights seven major contradictions. On reflection, Hamas and Benjamin Netanyahu, far from being enemies, are acting in concert with no regard for the lives of Palestinians or Israelis. Behind them, the United States and the United Kingdom are pulling the strings.

VOLTAIRE NETWORK | PARIS (FRANCE) | 28 NOVEMBER 2023 by Thierry Meyssan

We are reacting to the attack on Israel on October 7 and the massacre of Palestinian civilians in Gaza on the basis of the information available to us. However, we feel that the official version of the Israeli government and Hamas is a lie.

Seven major questions remain unanswered:

1. How did Hamas manage to dig and build 500 kilometers of tunnels at a depth of 30 meters without arousing suspicion?

 Tunnel-drilling equipment is considered to have both civilian and military uses. It is not manufactured in Gaza and cannot be brought in under any circumstances, unless there is complicity within the Israeli administration.

 The excavated earth (1 million m3) was not detected by aerial surveillance. Even supposing it had been scattered in many different places and mixed in with the soil from other construction sites, it is impossible for the Israeli intelligence services not to have detected anything for twenty years.

 Tunnel ventilation equipment is not considered to be for military use. It is possible to bring it into Gaza, but the quantity required should have attracted attention.

 The reinforced concrete needed to solidify the walls is not manufactured in Gaza. It too is not considered military equipment, but the quantity required should have attracted attention.

2. How could Hamas stockpile such an arsenal?

 Hamas, the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, has large quantities of rockets and handguns at its disposal. Hamas may have manufactured parts of the rockets itself, but it has managed to import thousands of handguns into Gaza, mainly from the Ukraine, despite high-performance scanners. This seems impossible without complicity within the Israeli administration.

3. Why did Benjamin Netanyahu dismiss all those who warned him?

 Egypt’s Minister of Intelligence, Kamel Abbas, personally phoned him to warn of a major Hamas attack.

 His friend, Colonel Yigal Carmon, Director of Memri, personally warned him of a major Hamas attack.

 The CIA sent Israel two intelligence reports warning of a major Hamas attack.

 Defense Minister Yoav Galland was fired in July because he warned the government of the “perfect storm” prepared by Hamas.

4. Why did Benjamin Netanyahu demobilize the security forces on the evening of October 6?

 The Prime Minister had authorized the Security Forces to stand down for the holidays of Sim’hat Torah and Shemini Atzeret. At the time of the attack, therefore, there were no personnel available to monitor the security fence around Gaza.

5. Why did security officials remain locked up at Shin Bet headquarters that morning?

 The Director of Counterintelligence (Shin Bet), Ronen Bar, had called a meeting of the heads of all the security services for 8 a.m. on October 7, to examine the second CIA report warning of a major Hamas operation in preparation.

However, the attack began at 6.30 a.m. on the same day. Security officials didn’t react until 11am. What did they do during this interminable meeting?

6. Who triggered the “Hannibal directive” in this way, and why?

 When the Security Forces began to react, the IDF was ordered to apply the “Hannibal directive”. This stipulates that enemies must not be allowed to take Israeli soldiers hostage, even if it means killing them. An Israeli police investigation confirms that the Israeli air force bombed the crowd fleeing the Supernova Rave Party. A significant proportion of those killed on October 7 were therefore not victims of Hamas, but of Israeli strategy.

 In theory, the “Hannibal directive” only applies to soldiers. Who decided to bomb a crowd of Israeli civilians, and why?
It is not possible today to determine with any certainty which Israelis were killed by the attackers and which were killed by their own army.

7. Why are Western forces threatening Israel?

 The Pentagon has deployed two naval groups, around the USS Gerald Ford and the USS Eisenhower, and a cruise missile submarine, the USS Florida. Haaretz even mentioned a third aircraft carrier. America’s allies (Saudi Arabia, Canada, Spain, France, Italy) have installed fighter-bombers in the region.

These forces are not installed to threaten Turkey, Qatar or Iran, which the Western press accuses of being involved in the Hamas attack, but off the coast of Israel, in Beirut and Hamat. They are encircling Israel. And Israel alone.

WHAT LIES BEHIND THESE MYSTERIES?

Obviously the version defended by both Hamas and Israel is false. We must consider other possible explanations so as not to be manipulated by either one or the other.

Let’s formulate a hypothesis. There is nothing to say whether it is the correct one, but it is compatible with the factual elements, which is not the case with the version shared today by everyone. So it’s better than that one. It is obviously extremely shocking, but only those who are able to answer the previous 7 questions can dismiss it.

This interpretation is based on an analysis of the complex structure of Hamas, whose rank-and-file fighters are unaware of what their leaders are up to. There it is :

The entire operation of Hamas and Israel is led by Americans, perhaps under the direction of the Straussian Eliott Abrams [1] and his Vandenberg Coalition (Think Tank which succeeded the Project for a New American Century). The Muslim Brotherhood and the Revisionist Zionists, who apparently are waging a cruel war, are in reality accomplices at the expense of the rank-and-file Hamas fighters, the Palestinian people and Israeli soldiers. Here is their plan: Hamas is presented as the only effective resistance force to the oppression of the Palestinians, but it lets Israel liquidate the hope of a Palestinian state, while the Muslim Brotherhood, crowned with the sacrifice of the Palestinians, takes power in the Arab world.

The heads of Hamas’s military and political branches are both subordinate to the Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza, Mahmoud Al-Zahar, the successor to Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, yet nobody talks about him. From his point of view, the Brotherhood will be the big winner of the “Flood of Al-Aqsa”, even if Gaza is razed to the ground and the Palestinians driven from their land.

Hamas is now divided into two factions. The first, under the leadership of Ismaël Haniyeh, follows the Brotherhood’s line. It seeks neither to liberate Palestine from Israeli occupation, nor to found a Palestinian state, but is dedicated to building a Caliphate over all the countries of the Middle East. The second, under the leadership of Khalil Hayya, has abandoned the Brotherhood’s ideology, and is fighting to put an end to the oppression of the Palestinian people by the Israelis.

The Muslim Brotherhood is a political secret society, organized by British intelligence services on the model of the United Grand Lodge of England [2]. It was gradually taken over by the CIA to the point of being represented on the US National Security Council. After the collapse of the Islamist regimes of the Arab Spring, the Brotherhood fractured into two trends. The London Front, led by Guide Ibrahim Munir (who died a year ago), proposed a way out of the crisis by leaving the political arena and securing the release of prisoners in Egypt. The Istanbul Front, led by interim leader Mahmoud Hussein, advocates, on the contrary, changing nothing and continuing the struggle to establish a Caliphate. A third group is attempting to establish an intermediate position, putting forward the idea of abandoning politics until the prisoners have been released, only to return to it at a later date………………………… more https://www.voltairenet.org/article220078.html

December 2, 2023 Posted by | Israel, secrets,lies and civil liberties | Leave a comment

‘The Gospel’: how Israel uses AI to select bombing targets in Gaza

Guardian 1 Dec 23 Harry Davies, Bethan McKernan and Dan Sabbagh in Jerusalem

Concerns over data-driven ‘factory’ that significantly increases the number of targets for strikes in the Palestinian territory.

srael’s military has made no secret of the intensity of its bombardment of the Gaza Strip. In the early days of the offensive, the head of its air force spoke of relentless, “around the clock” airstrikes. His forces, he said, were only striking military targets, but he added: “We are not being surgical.”

There has, however, been relatively little attention paid to the methods used by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to select targets in Gaza, and to the role artificial intelligence has played in their bombing campaign.

As Israel resumes its offensive after a seven-day ceasefire, there are mounting concerns about the IDF’s targeting approach in a war against Hamas that, according to the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza, has so far killed more than 15,000 people in the territory.

The IDF has long burnished its reputation for technical prowess and has previously made bold but unverifiable claims about harnessing new technology. After the 11-day war in Gaza in May 2021, officials said Israel had fought its “first AI war” using machine learning and advanced computing.

The latest Israel-Hamas war has provided an unprecedented opportunity for the IDF to use such tools in a much wider theatre of operations and, in particular, to deploy an AI target-creation platform called “the Gospel”, which has significantly accelerated a lethal production line of targets that officials have compared to a “factory”.

The Guardian can reveal new details about the Gospel and its central role in Israel’s war in Gaza, using interviews with intelligence sources and little-noticed statements made by the IDF and retired officials.

This article also draws on testimonies published by the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and the Hebrew-language outlet Local Call, which have interviewed several current and former sources in Israel’s intelligence community who have knowledge of the Gospel platform.

Their comments offer a glimpse inside a secretive, AI-facilitated military intelligence unit that is playing a significant role in Israel’s response to the Hamas massacre in southern Israel on 7 October.

The slowly emerging picture of how Israel’s military is harnessing AI comes against a backdrop of growing concerns about the risks posed to civilians as advanced militaries around the world expand the use of complex and opaque automated systems on the battlefield.

…………………………………..a short statement on the IDF website claimed it was using an AI-based system called Habsora (the Gospel, in English) in the war against Hamas to “produce targets at a fast pace”.

The IDF said that “through the rapid and automatic extraction of intelligence”, the Gospel produced targeting recommendations for its researchers “with the goal of a complete match between the recommendation of the machine and the identification carried out by a person”…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

However, experts in AI and armed conflict who spoke to the Guardian said they were sceptical of assertions that AI-based systems reduced civilian harm by encouraging more accurate targeting.

A lawyer who advises governments on AI and compliance with humanitarian law said there was “little empirical evidence” to support such claims. Others pointed to the visible impact of the bombardment.

“Look at the physical landscape of Gaza,” said Richard Moyes, a researcher who heads Article 36, a group that campaigns to reduce harm from weapons.

“We’re seeing the widespread flattening of an urban area with heavy explosive weapons, so to claim there’s precision and narrowness of force being exerted is not borne out by the facts.”

According to figures released by the IDF in November, during the first 35 days of the war Israel attacked 15,000 targets in Gaza, a figure that is considerably higher than previous military operations in the densely populated coastal territory. By comparison, in the 2014 war, which lasted 51 days, the IDF struck between 5,000 and 6,000 targets.

………………………“We prepare the targets automatically and work according to a checklist,” a source who previously worked in the target division told +972/Local Call. “It really is like a factory. We work quickly and there is no time to delve deep into the target. The view is that we are judged according to how many targets we manage to generate.”

A separate source told the publication the Gospel had allowed the IDF to run a “mass assassination factory” in which the “emphasis is on quantity and not on quality”. A human eye, they said, “will go over the targets before each attack, but it need not spend a lot of time on them”.

For some experts who research AI and international humanitarian law, an acceleration of this kind raises a number of concerns……………………….. more https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/01/the-gospel-how-israel-uses-ai-to-select-bombing-targets

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December 2, 2023 Posted by | Israel, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Israel’s Savagery Is So Shocking It’s Sometimes Hard To Take In

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE, NOV 30, 2023,
 https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/israels-savagery-is-so-shocking-its?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=139284801&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&utm_medium=email

Sometimes Israel’s crimes are so horrific that at first you don’t even understand what you’re looking at. You just stare at it trying to make sense of what you’re seeing for a bit, like you would if you suddenly saw a space alien or a leprechaun or something.

It happened to me yesterday when I was watching a Sky News report about a teenage boy who was shot by Israeli forces in Jerusalem for celebrating the release of Palestinian prisoners in the hostage negotiations with Hamas. I was watching it thinking to myself, I must be misunderstanding what I’m looking at. I know that Israel does gross things, but surely the story here isn’t that they shot a kid for being happy about something.

Then, as has happened so many times over the last two months, I kept watching and learned that yes, that is indeed what happened. The deputy mayor of Jerusalem Fleur Hassan-Nahoum is seen defending the shooting by saying “part of the deal is that there would be no celebrations for the release of attempted murderers” (this was actually not a part of the deal, it was just a decree issued by Israel’s national security minister) and claiming dishonestly that “we’re talking about the release of attempted murderers” (the vast majority have not been convicted of any crime and have been denied any due process for the accusations against them).

The band Eve6 nicely summed up what it felt like watching the clip of the deputy mayor’s comments, tweeting, “The remarkable thing about this clip is her self assurance. Like she’s supremely confident that ‘we shot the teenager because he was celebrating’ is a thing that people will find reasonable.”

I had the same experience reading about the five premature babies who were left to die after the IDF raided al-Nasr Pediatric Hospital in Gaza earlier this month, their decomposing bodies only discovered when the temporary ceasefire allowed access to the hospital. It’s just too insane to believe — they attacked a pediatric hospital? And then they left the babies there to die? What??

The only reason we’re learning about this now is because the pause in fighting allowed journalists to get cameras into the building and show the dead infants to the world. This calls to mind the Politico report immediately prior to the ceasefire which said that the White House was worried “an unintended consequence of the pause” would be “that it would allow journalists broader access to Gaza and the opportunity to further illuminate the devastation there and turn public opinion on Israel.”

Indeed, since the pause in fighting began the world has been receiving drone footage from mainstream platforms like Reuters and The Washington Post revealing vast expanses of urban terrain completely destroyed by a blanket of Israeli military explosives spanning from city block to city block. Looking at the blatantly indiscriminate devastation that’s been caused by Israel’s assault on Gaza since October 7 makes it clear that the IDF are not targeting Hamas but Gaza itself………………………….

I cannot imagine what it’s like to be living in the midst of this horror for the last two months, trying to figure out the best way to survive while also grieving the family, friends and neighbors you’re losing along the way. These people have all been deeply traumatized in ways that will haunt them for the rest of their lives, if they survive the violence, disease and deprivation that’s to come.

This thing is so astonishingly ugly, and it could get a whole lot uglier after the ceasefire ends. If there’s anything positive to be found in this living nightmare, it’s that it’s so earth-shakingly ugly that it just might shake the world awake.

December 1, 2023 Posted by | Israel, weapons and war | Leave a comment

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