casualties
Israeli captive in Gaza says IDF has killed 70 captives and shames Netanyahu
Hersh Goldberg-Polin, a US-born Israeli, wishes his parents a good Passover – and says Netanyahu and his far-right government should be ‘ashamed’
A US-born Israeli held captive in Gaza has said on video that Israel’s military has killed seventy of his fellow captives and that Israeli PM Netanyahu and his far-right government ‘should be ashamed of yourselves’.
Hersh Goldberg-Polin, a 24-year-old Californian-born Israeli taken captive on 7 October, went on to tell his parents that he loves them and hopes they somehow manage to have a happy Passover:
Goldberg-Polin, who at 24 years old will have served in the Israeli military, has lost part of his left arm, presumably under fire on 7 October last year, although it is unclear from what he says whether he was wounded by Palestinian fighters or by Israeli forces. It is now well known – admitted by the IDF and freely discussed by Israeli newspapers, though still ignored by UK media and politicians – that Israeli helicopters and tanks killed ‘immense’ numbers of Israeli citizens under the IDF’s ‘Hannibal doctrine’ of killing potential hostages. His performance is passionate, but it is, of course, unknown whether he was speaking under duress.
Relatives of Israeli captives killed in Gaza have also accused the Israeli military of killing them; the IDF is known for sure to have killed three hostages who had escaped, stripped to show they were no threat, and were calling out in Hebrew, while waving a white flag, for soldiers not to shoot. Israel is holding around nine thousand Palestinian hostages, who have been arbitrarily detained and imprisoned without trial. The EU is calling for an independent investigation of the hundreds of executed Palestinian captives currently being unearthed behind Al Shifa hospital after Israel’s raid there. Israel has murdered more than 40,000 civilians, mostly women and children.
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Israeli families demand investigation as truth about mass ‘friendly fire’ deaths starts to percolate
‘Immense’ Israeli death toll from IDF shells, missiles and bullets is already on record – now Israeli families demand immediate investigation
Furious Israeli families have demanded an immediate investigation into the deaths of their loved ones caused by Israeli military fire during the 7 October Hamas raid.
The fact of ‘immense’ deaths to so-called ‘friendly fire’ has already been very quietly admitted by the IDF and reported by Israeli media, but has been ignored by western ‘mainstream’ media – including the UK’s – and have been slow to percolate into the awareness of ordinary Israelis, but the evidence is overwhelming that many and probably most of those killed during that day were killed by IDF weapons, fired either in panic and incompetence or as part of the military’s ‘Hannibal directive‘ to kill potential captives rather than allow them to be taken.
Ynet’s report of the IDF’s claim it would be wrong to investigate deaths because the number of deaths is ‘immense’
But awareness and outrage appear to be growing. Israeli newspaper Haaretz has reported that:
Family members of Israelis who were killed on October 7 after a standoff between Hamas terrorists and the Israeli army led to the army firing a tank at a house where the civilians were held hostage are demanding that the military probe its actions that day.
According to the paper, the families are insisting that the investigation take place right now and not, as the regime has proposed, after the ‘war’.
As journalist Jonathan Cook noted:
Their concerns have been heightened by the recent admission from an Israeli commander that he ordered a tank to fire a shell into a house where 14 Israelis had been taken hostage by Hamas in Be’eri. Many of those hostages were incinerated by the shell, along with the Hamas fighters. Nonetheless, Israel cited the charred bodies as proof of Hamas’ barbarity, and justification for its subsequent genocidal campaign in Gaza – rather than as evidence of its own scorched-earth policy, one indifferent to the lives of its own civilians.
Similarly, the incinerated bodies of Israelis found in cars at a rave near the kibbutz and near the Gaza border were caused by weapons that Hamas does not have – and released hostages have testified that they were protected and treated well by Hamas fighters but were fired on by Israeli helicopters and plans as their captors took them across the border, killing many.
So intense was this firestorm that for weeks the Israeli regime thought that some two hundred bodies it initially thought were Israelis were in fact Palestinians – and clearly Hamas did not incinerate them. Israeli police have also confirmed that many killed at the rave were in fact shot by Israeli helicopters.
The Israeli mainstream media have in fact been more honest than their UK and US counterparts in reporting these facts. Now that the families are demanding action, will UK papers and broadcasters finally start to cover them? Don’t hold your breath.
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‘Israel is losing war’ says ex-Israeli adviser – as IDF ‘hides mass military casualties’
‘Considerable and unexplained gap’ between admitted casualties and hospital records of severely wounded soldiers at least double acknowledged number
Image: IDF
A former Israeli prime ministerial adviser has said that Israel is losing its war against Hamas – and hospital records suggest the Israeli government and military are hiding at least half of the number of Israeli soldiers killed and injured in Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
In an article for US site The Nation, Daniel Levy – who advised then-Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak – compares the situation in Gaza to the unwinnable US war in Vietnam, where unacceptable casualty levels among US soldiers meant the Viet Cong only had to survive to win, and writes:
It may sound daft to suggest that a group of armed irregulars, numbering in the low tens of thousands, besieged and with little access to advanced weaponry, is a match for one of the world’s most powerful militaries, backed and armed by the United States. And yet, an increasing number of establishment strategic analysts warn that Israel could lose this war on Palestinians despite the cataclysmic violence it unleashed
Levy also notes that the ‘delusion’ that Israel’s conduct did not contribute to the 7 October attack is being exposed and having serious consequences for Israel and its US backers:
the delusion that Israel was just another Western nation peacefully going about its business before it suffered an unprovoked attack on October 7—it’s a comforting fantasy to those who prefer to avoid recognizing a reality they’ve been complicit in creating.
And at the same time, US news site Breaking Point has highlighted studies by Israeli media of Israeli hospital data – and sudden reductions in the official casualty numbers posted on the IDF’s website – to conclude that the real casualty rate inflicted on IDF forces by Hamas’s guerilla tactics are at least twice as high as the Netanyahu government is admitted and that among the wounded there are high rates of severe injuries consistent with videos released by Hamas of grenade and rocket-propelled grenade ambushes on Israeli tanks and infantry:
Breaking Point considers that this high rate of attrition, and a lack of appetite among the Israeli public for casualties in the military, may be driving Israeli efforts to get the US to commit troops as a ‘peacekeeping’ force.
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Israel says it will pursue Gazan Palestinians on Lebanese, Turkish and Qatari territory
Israeli security service director’s threat on Israeli national TV
The director of Israel’s domestic security service, the Shin Bet, has said that the Israeli government intends to pursue Palestinian resistance activists outside Palestine – specifically threatening Turkey and Qatar.
Speaking to Kan, Israel’s national broadcaster, and reported by Israeli paper Haaretz, Ronen Bar compared the 7 October kibbutz raid to the 1972 massacre of Israeli athletes, saying:
This is our Munich. Everywhere – in Gaza, in the Palestinian territories, in Lebanon, in Turkey, and in Qatar. It will take us a few years, but we will be there to do it… we are drawing our lessons from the events and are already passing them on to other arenas, not just in the Gaza Strip…
the scope of threats facing the State of Israel is unprecedented in the past year, even before these
events. Even in this case, the main thing is hidden from the eye. There are many things brewing beneath the surface.
As well as constituting an open threat to the sovereignty of three nations, Bar’s comments are exposed as a farce by the fact that Israel knew what Hamas was planning at least a year before the kibbutz raid and did nothing – and that a growing mountain of evidence now shows that the bulk of Israeli casualties during the raid were caused by the Israeli military firing on buildings and vehicles that contained Israeli citizens, and at people on foot that pilots and tank commanders did not pause to identify before destroying.
Despite the mounting evidence, UK and western media have refused to cover the fact of Israeli ‘friendly fire’ under the military’s ‘Hannibal doctrine‘, as it would fatally undermine Israel’s attempts to justify its genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.
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