friendly fire
Uni ‘urgently investigating’ pro-Israel professor who told Greenstein ‘all Jews should be gassed’
Justin Stebbing says he was clearly speaking ironically in attack on left-wing, pro-Palestinian Jew Tony Greenstein – but went on to say Greenstein would have been ‘thrilled’ to murder all Jews during WWII
A professor at Imperial College is being ‘urgently’ investigated by the university after sending emails to left-wing Jewish pro-Palestinian activist Tony Greenstein about ‘gas[sing] all Jews.
Greenstein is a Brighton-based human rights campaigner who received a suspended sentence last year in a farcical trial for criminal damage to an Israeli-owned weapons factor when no damage occurred and who has been further targeted by anti-terror police for saying he supports the struggle of Gazans for freedom. He told Skwawkbox that he didn’t know who Stebbing was when he first received an email, from a personal email address, linking to discredited claims of mass rape and mutilation by Hamas and saying that Stebbing ‘agree[d] with you [Jews] should all be gassed‘.
Greenstein reported the incident to police as hate speech, but then realised Stebbing is an academic and, assuming his email had been hacked, contacted him on his university address to let him know. Greenstein said he was astonished when Stebbing wrote back – from his official email – to attack him further.
Stebbing retorted that he was being ‘ironic’ when he made his comment – but claimed that Greenstein would have been ‘thrilled to gas all Jews’ if he had been alive during the Second World War:
“My e mail was pure irony, but as always here the response to the crime is blamed. I have zero doubt that in WW2, you ,would have been thrilled to gas all Jews. That was the point I was making.”
The email headers showed that the email was genuinely from an Imperial email account. Greenstein accordingly sent a complaint to the university, which received an email acknowledgment.
Skwawkbox contacted Prof Stebbing about his emails to Greenstein. He responded:
The reason I wrote to Tony Greenstein was him contacting several senior colleagues accusing them of being doctors for genocide. He was of course aware he had just written that e mail and would and should have understood my e mail as being ironic in that context. We have had previous contact. Tony Greenstein knew that he’d written that so would have understood the context and this affects the meaning of what I wrote and it was clear, as I’d said, I was being ironic.
On Stebbing’s allegation that Greenstein had previous contact with him, Greenstein said:
They were doctors opposing a BMA statement calling for a ceasefire and accusing Israel of having broken international law including his colleague at Imperial. Yes I accused them of being Doctors 4 Genocide. There was an article in the Jewish Chronicle (see below) naming them. However Stebbing wasn’t named and I didn’t contact him. So it’s a lie that we have had previous contact. I’ve searched my email and his name doesn’t come up and it’s an unusual name so I would see immediately.
All these doctors say they have resigned from the BMA which is a good thing. Good riddance as Ghada Karmi said.
He added:
I emailed Stebbing to let him know that someone was clearly impersonating him. You could have blown me down with a feather when he responded saying that I was wrong. He wasn’t being impersonated. It was him. An ultra Zionist lunatic.
An Imperial College spokesperson told Skwawkbox that it was ‘urgently investigating this case involving a Visiting Professor’:
There is no place for antisemitic or hateful behaviour of any kind at Imperial. We are urgently investigating this case involving a Visiting Professor.
The International Court of Justice is expected to give a decision on South Africa’s application under the Genocide Convention for an order to Israel to stop its slaughter, which has killed and maimed more than a hundred thousand Palestinians, mostly women and children, as well as 117 journalists and more than 150 United Nations staff.
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UK exclusive: Hamas issues statement about events of 7 October raid
Group’s denial of Israeli claims and description of mass killing of Israelis by IDF fits with evidence and witness testimonies
Hamas breaks through Israeli border fence on 7 October
Hamas, the government of Gaza and resistance group – designated terrorists by the UK, US and other western governments – has issued a statement about the background and events of its 7 October raid into Israel, countering the ‘atrocity propaganda’ that Israel has used to try to justify its genocide and other war crimes against Palestinian civilians, including tens of thousands of children and women murdered and around double the number wounded and maimed.
The statement has been ignored by the UK and other so-called ‘mainstream’ media. It includes the historical and political background of Israel’s decades-long apartheid and oppression of the Palestinian people, a detailed account of its aims and actions on the day targeting military personnel and installations, refutation of Israeli claims – and a call for a full and transparent international investigation – along with a summary of its own political aims.
On the events of 7 October, it reminds readers of the testimonies of survivors and hostages about the civil treatment they received from Hamas fighters and of the now common knowledge – of course ignored by the UK media, but not by their Israeli counterparts – of the ‘immense’ (the IDF’s own description) ‘friendly fire’ deaths inflicted on Israeli citizens by Israeli tanks, helicopters and troops, as well as informing readers of the deaths of sixty Israeli hostages to IDF bombs and shells in Gaza.
The briefing, which was forwarded to Skwawkbox, via Flavio Centofanti, a UK-based activist for Palestinian rights, from renowned Palestinian academic Professor Mazin Qumsiyeh, who, after a long career in the US, now teaches at Bethlehem University and runs the Palestinian Museum of Natural History, reads:
In light of the Israeli fabricated accusations and allegations over Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on Oct. 7 and its repercussions, we in the Islamic Resistance Movement – Hamas clarify
the following:
- Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on Oct. 7 targeted the Israeli military sites, and sought to arrest the enemy’s soldiers to pressure on the Israeli authorities to release the thousands of Palestinians held in Israeli jails through a prisoners exchange
deal. Therefore, the operation focused on destroying the Israeli army’s Gaza Division, the Israeli military sites stationed near the Israeli settlements around Gaza.- Avoiding harm to civilians, especially children, women and elderly people is a religious and moral commitment by all the Al-Qassam Brigades’ fighters. We reiterate that the Palestinian resistance was fully disciplined and committed to the Islamic values during the operation and that the Palestinian fighters only targeted the occupation soldiers and those who carried weapons against our people. In the meantime, the Palestinian fighters were keen to avoid harming civilians despite
the fact that the resistance does not possess precise weapons. In addition, if there was any case of targeting civilians; it happened accidently and in the course of the confrontation with the occupation forces.
Since its establishment in 1987, the Hamas Movement committed itself to avoiding harm to civilians. After Zionist criminal Baruch Goldstein in 1994 committed a massacre against Palestinian worshippers in the Al-Ibrahimi Mosque in occupied Hebron City, the Hamas Movement announced an initiative to avoid civilians the brunt of fighting by all parties, but the Israeli occupation rejected it and even did not give any comment on it. The Hamas Movement also repeated such calls several times, but received by a deaf ear from the Israeli occupation which continued its deliberate targeting and killing of Palestinian civilians.- Maybe some faults happened during Operation Al-Aqsa Flood’s implementation due to the rapid collapse of the Israeli security and military system, and the chaos caused along the border areas with Gaza.
As attested by many, the Hamas Movement dealt in a positive and kind manner with all civilians who have been held in Gaza, and sought from the earliest days of the aggression to release them, and that’s what happened during the week-long humanitarian truce where those civilians were released in exchange of releasing Palestinian women and children from Israeli jails.- What the Israeli occupation promoted of allegations that the Al-Qassam Brigades on Oct. 7 were targeting Israeli civilians are nothing but complete lies and fabrications. The source of these allegations is the Israeli official narrative and no independent source proved any of them. It is a well-known fact that the Israeli official narrative had always sought to demonize the Palestinian resistance, while also legalizing its brutal aggression on Gaza.
Here are some details that go against the Israeli allegations:Video clips taken on that day – Oct. 7 – along with the testimonies by Israelis themselves that were released later showed that the Al-Qassam Brigades’ fighters didn’t target civilians, and many Israelis were killed by the Israeli army and police due to their confusion.
was fully denied including by the Hamas Movement. A report by the Mondoweiss news website on Dec. 1, 2023, among others, said there is lack of any evidence of “mass rape” allegedly perpetrated by Hamas members on Oct. 7 and that Israel used such allegation “to fuel the genocide in Gaza.”- It is also a matter of fact that a number of Israeli settlers in settlements around Gaza were armed, and clashed with Palestinian fighters on Oct. 7. Those settlers were registered as civilians while the fact is they were armed men fighting alongside the Israeli army.
- When speaking about Israeli civilians, it must be known that conscription applies to all Israelis above the age of 18 – males who served 32 months of military service and females who served 24 months – where all can carry and use arms. This is based on the Israeli security theory of an “armed people” which turned the Israeli entity into “an army with a country attached.”
- The brutal killing of civilians is a systematic approach of the Israeli entity, and one of the means to humiliate the Palestinian people. The mass killing of Palestinians in Gaza is a clear evidence of such approach.
- The Al Jazeera news channel said in a documentary that in one month of the Israeli
aggression on Gaza, the daily average killing of Palestinian children in Gaza was 136, while the average of children killing in Ukraine – in the course of the Russian-Ukrainian war – was one child every day.- Those who defend the Israeli aggression do not look at the events in an objective manner but rather go to justify the Israeli mass killing of Palestinians by saying there would be casualties among civilians when attacking the Hamas fighters. However, they would not use such assumption when it comes to the Al-Aqsa Flood event on Oct. 7.
- We are confident that any fair and independent inquiries will prove the truth of our
narrative and will prove the scale of lies and misleading information in the Israeli side. This also includes the Israeli allegations regarding the hospitals in Gaza that the Palestinian resistance used them as command centers; an allegation that was not proven and was refuted by reports of many western press agencies.
The document is far more in accord with the available evidence than the claims of the Israeli regime – but it is Israel’s claims that are being amplified by western media, including the Guardian and the New York Times, despite the evidence. More will be published in the next day or so.
Mr Centofanti told Skwawkbox:
There has been a good deal of coverage by other news outlets including the Israeli media of evidence pointing to a large number of Israelis having been killed by their own forces on Oct 7th. Many of the claims of atrocities committed by Hamas originally made by Israel, such as those involving babies beheaded or baked in ovens have been dropped or debunked.
According to the journalist Jonathan Cook, the Israeli military itself has conceded that it had killed its own civilians “in immense and complex quantity” but that “it would not be morally sound to investigate these incidents”. A lot of evidence points to the IDF’s indiscriminate use of tanks and helicopter gunships as the cause of many deaths. The fact that Israel revised its original figure of 1400 Israelis killed down to 1200 and then again to 1140 suggests that it was not sure who its own forces had killed. Its claims of systematic rape and torture have also been questioned as they are based on partisan and unreliable witnesses who have changed their stories several times.
We also know that the IDF have a strategy of using overwhelming and disproportionate force. And from the way they killed their own three hostages waving white flags that they are trigger-happy. Also, on Oct 7th they will have been in a state of panic. Finally, that the IDF have a rule called ‘Hannibal’ which they employ to prevent hostages being taken even if it means killing them.
All of this suggests that the version of events we have been given requires verification. Has The Guardian checked its sources to verify all the claims of atrocities made by Israel. If not, why does it routinely repeat the Israeli narrative without clarifying the source (Israel). For example, The Guardian routinely refers to what happened on Oct 7 as “Hamas’s atrocity against Israel”. This suggests that The Guardian is satisfied that all the claims made by Israel are correct. But if questions are being raised about the truth about what happened on Oct 7 even in the Israeli media, why has The Guardian not covered this story?
Not doing so is highly irresponsible and dangerous because it gives Israel continued moral justification and makes it complicit in prolonging the ongoing slaughter in Gaza.
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Israeli media discussing ‘horrifying’ mass ‘friendly fire’ killings by IDF – but UK media stay silent
Mass murder of Israeli citizens by country’s own military during Hamas raid has been a topic of discussion in Israeli papers and TV for some time – now it is an acknowledged fact, yet UK media still talking as if it never happened
Cars burned – it’s now clear by Israeli rockets – on a road from an Israeli rave to the Gaza border in October
Israeli media has begun to freely discuss as fact the mass murder of Israeli citizens by so-called ‘friendly fire’ from the IDF during the 7 October Hamas raid near Israel’s border with Gaza.
The reality of the killings has not been treated with any serious doubt by Israeli papers and broadcasters for weeks – they could hardly do otherwise, when they have interviewed survivors who have talked about it, Israeli police have admitted it and even the IDF issued a statement to Israeli press saying it would not be ‘morally sound’ to investigate the ‘immense and complex’ deaths its troops, tankers and pilots had caused on that day.
But now a new article in Israeli paper Haaretz – including quotes from a similar article by Yediot Aharonot, a more right-wing paper than Haaretz – discusses the ‘friendly fire’ attacks by Israeli tank fire and helicopter missiles as established fact with Asa Kasher, the Israeli army’s ‘ethics chief’. For example:
Kasher discussed another incident that took place on October 7, on the Israeli border with Gaza. According to an investigation conducted by the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot, troops received orders to prevent hostages from being taken into Gaza by force, if necessary.
Around 12:00 P.M. on October 7, IDF helicopters strafed cars attempting to cross the border.
The burned cars and incinerated bodies were caused, according to experts, by US-made ‘Hellfire’ rockets fired by Israeli helicopters. A number of Israeli civilians – including children – were similarly killed by tank shells deliberately fired into kibbutz homes. Kasher discussed those with Haaretz too and the paper noted:
According to [survivor Yasmin] Porat, after she was released by a Hamas terrorist, she was questioned by the Police Special Anti-Terror Unit and told them that there were about 40 terrorists and 14 civilian hostages still in the house. Dagan was among the hostages inside the house, where she says an Israeli tank fired two shells at it. She was the only Israeli to survive, and she has confirmed Porat’s account.
Kasher is no ‘bleeding heart liberal’ eager to criticise Israel’s genocidal military. On the contrary, he is a right-winger who has openly valued Israeli lives above those of Palestinian civilians – in 2006 Asher wrote that Israeli troops must never be put at risk to protect Arab civilians, summarised by Haaretz:
Professor Asa Kasher, who compiled the IDF’s Code of Ethics, said that the restraint exercised by Israel to save civilian lives when bombing a terrorist apartment was a “mistake” that cost more Israeli lives later…
Kasher said it was inconceivable to let people be killed in Israel because the only way to prevent it involved killing dozens of Palestinians. “It is unacceptable to let people get killed here even if the number of people killed there is expected to be bigger,” he said.
Kasher considered the idea of Israeli soldiers deliberately firing at Israeli civilians ‘horrifying’, saying:
How is it possible that a high ranking army official would give a command that so immediately and definitely endangers the life of so many civilians? It’s just horrifying.”
But Kasher doesn’t for a moment deny or doubt that it happened.
As journalist Jonathan Cook has pointed out, despite the open discussion of the mass ‘friendly fire’ deaths on the day of the Hamas raid, the UK media continues to discuss the deaths as if they were all caused by Hamas. In an email article to subscribers, Cook writes:
So how is it possible that the BBC and the rest of the western media keep revisiting the horrors of October 7 but never to raise these issues , even though they have been so prominent in the Israeli public space for many weeks?
The only possible answer is that western media outlets are consciously censoring this story because it directly conflicts with the West’s ideological and strategic agenda. It raises disturbing questions about western complicity in genocide.
Once again, the establishment media’s unwillingness to report the real story starkly gives the lie to their claim to be ‘free and fearless’. In truth, they are there to uphold a narrative of western moral and civilisational superiority. They are there to justify the West’s wars – and the war industry and resource-grab portfolios that our economies, and the media corporations themselves, are so heavily invested in.
Subscribe to Jonathan Cook’s email bulletins here. Skwawkbox has received no incentive for including this link.
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Video: released Israeli women say Hamas treated them like ‘queens’
Testimony of mother and daughter Hin and Ajam highights dishonesty of Israel’s already-discredited lies to the ICJ
Israel’s statements to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) yesterday were a fabric of already-discredited lies about supposed atrocities that even Israel’s own records make impossible – and completely ignored the many deaths caused by Israeli forces among their own people during the 7 October resistance raid.
At the centre of Israel’s lies was a litany of ‘atrocity porn’ of rapes, mutilations and beheaded babies – again, already debunked and contradicting the evidence – but the testimony of an Israeli mother and daughter, interviewed on TV after they were released by Hamas, undermines even further Israel’s lurid lies. Hin and Ajam told their Israeli TV interviewer that they were treated like ‘malkot’, queens – and that this is how Palestinian men treat women generally:
Unsurprisingly, this has not been shown on UK ‘mainstream’ TV. Hin and Ajam are not unique. Numerous women survivors of Israel’s ‘friendly fire’ and released hostages have told how they were treated courteously and well – and even that their captors put their own bodies between them and IDF bombs to protect them.
By contrast, under Israel’s ‘Hannibal directive’, Israeli forces killed hundreds of their own citizens with missiles and tank shells, a number that the IDF itself described as ‘immense’.
It is to be hoped that the ICJ judges are not as ignorant as the insulting Israeli statements take them to be.
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Video: former US assistant SecDef agrees kibbutz/rave deaths caused by IDF
In ‘extraordinary’ interview, Chas Freeman blames Israeli forces for ‘massacre’ and says Israel has equated itself with ‘burned buildings and dead babies’
A former US assistant Secretary of Defence has blamed Israeli forces for the mass deaths inflicted on kibbutz residents and rave-goers, either intentionally through Israel’s ‘Hannibal doctrine’ of killing potential hostages rather than let them be taken captive, or through poor training and discipline.
The explosive video was posted by French observer Arnaud Bertrand, who earlier spotted former Israeli ambassador to the UK Mark Regev’s inadvertent admission that Israel had killed the many people found incinerated after the raid:
In a series of posts accompanying the video on Twitter/X, Bertrand noted that:
– [Freeman] agrees that many of the victims of Oct 7th were killed by the Israeli army in the form of “undisciplined fire by helicopters with hellfire missiles or by tanks with incendiary rounds directed at buildings”. In the case of the victims of the music festival he even says they “were largely killed, it appears, by hellfire missiles and by other undisciplined fire by Israeli forces”.
To him this “disgrace in military terms” stems from a “lack of discipline and training necessary to respond” but also from the IDF’s “Hannibal directive”, which “says that rather than get into bargaining over hostage exchange you should just kill the Israeli hostages along with their captors.”
– He says that with Oct 7th “Hamas had 2 objectives”:
1) “Put the Palestinian self-determination issue back on the global agenda”, something he says they’ve “succeeded” in doing since they’re is “widespread recognition outside Israel that only self-determination for Palestine in the form of a 2-state solution can provide security to Israel”. He says that even in “the US, which has a larger Jewish population than Israel, many Jews have come to realize that this is the case. Younger Jews in particular in the U.S. are very disillusioned with Zionism and don’t want to suffer contagion from it in the form of antisemitism, which is actually growing now as a result of Israeli actions”.
2) “Give Hamas enormous popularity among Palestinians because they are seen as having stood up, as having been willing to accept death rather than captivity”. He refers to Norman Finkelstein’s “analogy of slave revolts in the U.S.” and particularly the “1831 revolt by Nat Turner, a well-educated very intelligent enslaved African who led a slave revolt in Southern Virginia which had as its objective the murder of every white person they encountered.” He says it “raises a moral question: ‘Is the violence of the slave-owner morally the same as the violence of the slave trying to end that violence?’. The same moral question arises with Israeli oppression of Palestinians versus Palestinian resistance to oppression.”– All in all he concludes that much like the violence against African-Americans that followed slave revolts in the 19th century, the Israeli vengeance against Palestinians “won’t be remembered fondly by anyone in the future”. In fact he goes as far as saying that “when people think of Israel in the past they thought of it as a refuge for the victims of the Holocaust… now they will think of it as the home of perpetrators of genocide. When they think of Israel, they will think of burned buildings and dead babies. This is an image problem of a fundamental nature and from the point of view of Israel it strips Israel of its protection by charges of antisemitism against anyone who is critical of Israel because to be critical of people who are carrying out genocide cannot be antisemitism, it cannot be considered immoral. Antisemitism is a despicable attitude but to oppose genocide by Israel is not.”
With Israeli families also now awake to the fact of the mass ‘friendly fire’ deaths – which the IDF quietly admitted were ‘immense and complex’ – Israel’s narrative of ‘Hamas savagery’ on the day of the raid is fundamentally discredited.
That does not, of course, cause a moment’s pause for the regime’s apologists, western politicians or western ‘mainstream’ media in repeating it.
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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 and media ‘Hamas rape’ claims collapse under scrutiny
‘Eye-witness’ accounts contradict evidence – and earlier claims of the eye-witnesses – as yet another atrocity propaganda campaign falls apart. Warning: potential triggering or distressing content
The outraged reaction of the family of an alleged ‘Hamas rape’ victim to a newspaper’s con is just one of the ways in which the ‘Hamas rape’ narrative now being pushed hard by the Israeli regime and its apologists has fallen apart hard – like every other piece of atrocity propaganda Israel has tried to use so far to justify its genocide in Gaza.
The New York Times has published an article claiming to have evidence of the weaponisation of rape by Hamas during the 7 October raid, but the centrepiece of its claims was supposed ‘evidence’ that Israeli woman Gal Abdush was raped and murdered by Hamas fighters, quoting extensively from an interview with her family.
But her family has furiously insisted that there is no evidence that Ms Abdush was raped – and slammed the paper for misleading and manipulating them by telling them the interview was for a memorial about her and her husband and not mentioning anything about rape.
Speak Up, which fights violence against women, condemned the NYT investigation as ‘disgraceful’ ‘weaponisation’ of sexual violence for propaganda
The family – who appear to be hardline right-wingers perfectly prepared to propagate the already-discredited Israeli lines about beheadings and dismemberments, and therefore not inclined to discredit the rape report out of support for Palestinians – responded after the article was published. They pointed out, among other things, that there were only a few minutes passed between one message from their sister’s husband that they were at the Gaza border and another saying she had been shot – no time for the rape claimed by Israeli authorities and the NYT:
Gal Abdush’s family’s statement (translation by David Sheen and Electronic Intifada)
In fact, the family’s comment – though they don’t seem to have joined the dots – suggests that Ms Abdush and her husband were killed by Israeli forces determined, under the ‘Hannibal directive‘ of killing potential hostages rather than allowing them to be taken, since ‘at the border’ the Hamas fighters would only have been interested in getting them into captivity – and Hamas had no weapons capable of leaving bodies ‘totally burned’, while Israeli planes and helicopter gunships armed with missiles did and it is now well known in Israel, if ignored by UK and US media, that IDF forces killed Israelis in their determination to eliminate Hamas fighters holding them.
Another element of the atrocity propaganda to collapse are the lurid tales from supposed eye-witnesses who claimed that Hamas fighters – while trying to flee with their captives or fight Israeli troops – stopped to rape and dismember a woman and play catch with her body parts.
The ‘eyewitnesses’ have changed their stories. One was interviewed earlier and neglected to mention the claims of beheadings and games; another – coincidentally an Israeli ‘security consultant’ – had earlier admitted that he saw nothing because he was hiding with his head down the whole time, yet now claims he saw the same as the other witness.
Haaretz, 8 Nov 2023
Not only that, but Israeli lists of victims and their means of death do not claim to have found people at the site in question who had been beheaded or mutilated.
Another ‘eyewitness’ to a different supposed rape, Raz Cohen, happens to have recently been in the Democratic Republic of Congo, training DRC soldiers. While he claims to have seen the rape and to be haunted by the victim’s ‘screams without words’, shortly after the Hamas raid he filmed himself talking about the incident and published it on TikTok – where he seems upbeat and doesn’t mention any of the claims now attributed to him. Journalist Max Blumenthal analysed the changes in Cohen’s testimony:
While much of the NYT “mass Hamas rape” report relies on innuendo, it also purports to contain several credible eyewitness testimonies. One was delivered by a survivor of the Nova electronic music festival named Raz Cohen, who also happens to be an Israeli special forces vet who trains Congolese soldiers. Since his first interview on October 9, Cohen has altered his testimony several times.
Cohen told the NYT he personally witnessed a white van filled with Hamas militants pull up a mile from the Nova music festival, gather over a woman, and gang rape her: “I saw the men standing in a half circle around her. One penetrates her. She screams. I still remember her voice, screams without words.” He said they then butchered the woman with knives.
When Cohen was interviewed on October 9 about the attack on the music festival, however, he did not mention any act of sexual assault committed by Hamas militants. See here: https://twitter.com/i24NEWS_EN/sta… And here: http://tiktok.com/@lior.shapira9…
A day later, Cohen began to introduce vague suggestions of sexual assault into his testimony, but did not indicate that he witnessed any such acts taking place. “The terrorists captured women and hurt them in any way possible, and when they were done with them, they started butchering them in front of their friends,” Cohen told an Israeli publication: http://ashkelnayes.co.il/%D7%97%D7%A8%D…
Cohen was also interviewed by Canada’s CBC on October 10, but was not quoted about witnessing any rape: http://ici.radio-canada.ca/rci/en/news/20…
The same day, Cohen offered lurid new details to PBS, claiming that “the terrorists” not only slaughtered women after raping them on October 7, but engaged in necrophilia as well: “The terrorists, people from Gaza, raped girls. And after they raped them, they killed them, murdered them with knives, or the opposite, killed — and after they raped, they — they did that.” http://pbs.org/newshour/show/…
Testimony he provided to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation on October 11 differed slightly, and remained vague: “We see from there a lot of people and girls screaming and murdered by knives. And the girls, the terrorists rape them,” he stated abruptly and without apparent emotion. http://tiktok.com/@abcnewsaus/vi…
By this point, no Israeli media had reported that any rapes occurred on October 7. Cohen quickly fell off the media’s radar. He would not be heard from for over two months, when the Israeli government launched an international propaganda campaign accusing Hamas of mass rape in a transparent bid to maintain international support for its genocidal military assault on Gaza.
At this point, when the NY Times’ Jeffrey @gettleman interviewed Cohen, likely reaching him with assistance from the Israeli government, the “IDF” special forces soldier summoned for the first time a vivid account of a shocking gang rape on October 7.
How and why did Cohen’s story transform so dramatically over time, providing explosive new details at a moment of political urgency for the army in which he served? Was it plausible that a group of hardened Hamas commandoes suddenly paused their surprise attack, which was focused on taking as many captives as quickly as possible, stood in a circle and gang raped a woman, one after another, while Israeli forces mobilized to attack them?
Why did Hamas militants use knives to kill their victims, as Cohen alleged, when they carried rifles and grenades? Why did he drop his earlier allegation of necrophilia when speaking to the Times? And why did he mention seeing “a lot of people and girls” being raped to the ABC on October 11, but alter his testimony to refer specifically to a single female victim when interviewed by the Times?
Perhaps most importantly, why did Cohen’s friend, Shoam Gueta, who took shelter with him on October 7, not describe witnessing a gang rape when interviewed by the Times?
In his very first interview, with a US news station only two days after the Hamas raid, Cohen appeared mostly relaxed – and didn’t mention anyone being raped, as this clip aired recently on Grayzone shows:
Other Israeli mouthpieces have tried to bypass the eyewitnesses altogether, claiming it would be wrong to expect eyewitnesses to come forward and that ‘the corpses tell the story’. But they don’t, because the bodies were buried without evidence being taken, using Jewish burial practices to justify the failure to collect evidence – just as the huge number of cars incinerated by weapons Hamas does not possess were scrapped and buried without collecting evidence. Not one piece of actual evidence appears to have been put forward by Israel, yet the atrocity propaganda continues to be repeated by the so-called ‘mainstream’.
Yet again, Israel’s attempts to demonise Palestinian resistance to justify genocide have fallen apart under scrutiny – scrutiny that the so-called ‘mainstream’ press and broadcasters are simply not doing, or even reporting facts that media in Israel have already acknowledged, such as the mass killing of Israelis during the raid by Israeli media.
For full analysis and more video highlighting the collapse of yet another Israeli atrocity propaganda narrative, watch this video by Electronic Intifada and this by Grayzone.
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Video: designer and actor use fashion show to call for peace for all Palestinians
Emraan Rajput and Ahsan Khan demand peace ‘for every child for every home’
Fashion designer Emraan Rajput and actor Ahsan Khan have used Khan’s appearance in Rajput’s Pantene Bridal Couture Week fashion show to call for an end to Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Khan held a placard, as he walked along the catwalk, demanding “FOR EVERY CHILD FOR EVERY HOME PEACE FOR PALESTINE:
Israel is losing the propaganda war, with its attempts to excuse its war crimes a shambles, the news that it killed hundreds of Israelis during the 7 October Hamas raid percolating globally despite the best efforts of the regime and its political and media allies, and millions marching every week around the world to demand a ceasefire, a lasting peace, and justice. Some Israeli analysts are even saying it is losing its whole assault on the innocents of Gaza, as the occupation and its armed forces try to hide the reality of their losses.
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IDF admits killing 3 escaped Israeli hostages in Gaza
Yet more Israelis killed by so-called ‘friendly fire’ after mass deaths 7 October as hostages shot dead
Yotam Haim, one of three Israeli hostages murdered ‘in error’ by Israeli forces
The Israeli army has admitted shooting dead three Israeli hostages who had escaped captivity in Gaza, claiming soldiers ‘mistook’ them for a Hamas threat, prompting a furious reaction among Israeli families against the Netanyahu regime.
IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari claimed the IDF feels ‘deep regret’ over the deaths of Yotam Haim, Samer Talalka and an as-yet unnamed Israeli.
The deaths have been reported by some UK media – unlike the hundreds of Israeli victims now known to have been killed by so-called ‘friendly fire’ from tanks, helicopters, drones and troops during the 7 October Hamas raid, as IDF forces killed indiscriminately under the ‘Hannibal doctrine‘ to prevent hostage-taking.
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Israeli government ‘ordered assassination’ of Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer
Netanyahu cabinet approved murder of Palestinian poet who mocked discredited atrocity propaganda, says Tikkun Olam security site
The Netanyahu government officially approved the murder of Palestinian poet, academic and activist Refaat Alareer, according to a website known for its sources inside the Israeli security apparatus.
Tikkun Olam, a news site run by writer Richard Silverstein, whose title refers to a concept in Judaism of healing the world, has broken a string of firsts since its creation in 2003 – and it has this to say about the assassination of Prof Alareer, who had mocked Israel’s now thoroughly-discredited atrocity propaganda about the murder and dismemberment of babies during the 7 October Hamas kibbutz raid:
Israel ordered Refaat Alareer’s assassination after derided Israeli claim of babies burned in an oven as hoax. He was right, but died for it.
Refaat was a Palestinian poet and professor. It’s rare that countries assassinate poets. Not just murder them in wartime, but intentionally assassinate them…
But Refaat was an unusual combination of teacher and activist. He not only taught his students Palestinian poetry. He also taught them Hebrew poetry. For this, he was profiled in the New York Times: In Gaza, a Contentious Palestinian Professor Calmly Teaches Israeli Poetry. And the Times published an op-ed by him as well: My Child Asks, ‘Can Israel Destroy Our Building if the Power Is Out?’
Unlike Israel’s educational system, which promotes a triumphalist ideological indoctrination, Alareer’s teaching of Hebrew poetry analyzed and appreciated the beauty of the language, but critiqued that ideology underpinning it. This clearly unnerved the Times editors, presumably pressured by one of alphabet soup of pro-Israel media watchdog groups (CAMERA, MEMRI, Honest Reporting, etc), and published a “correction” to the profile.
He responded to them (unfortunately they did not offer a full quotation of what he wrote):
…He denied that there was a “substantial change” in his teaching and said that showing parallels between Palestinians and Jews was his “ultimate goal.” But he said that Israel used literature as “a tool of colonialism and oppression” and that this raised “legitimate questions” about Mr. Amichai’s poem.
Apparently, this sort of social-political-ideological analysis of literature, a method taught at almost all educational institutions, troubled these editors. Instead, their correction implied he was a propagandist, rather than an academic professor…
I broke the story here about Israel’s security cabinet issuing the Amalek Directive to assassinate six senior Hamas leaders and their families. It also similarly targeted specific journalists and their families. The IDF has murdered 80 journalists suggesting that it is deliberately targeting them for execution. This is a war crime.
An Israeli security source confirms my suspicion that the cabinet ordered Refaat’s execution, because his joke marked him as being a member of the tribe of Amalek. An eternal enemy of the Jewish people. He was no such thing of course.
He was a poet, a teacher who loved literature. He was also a champion of his people. He was an implacable enemy of injustice. For that he died. Along with him, Israel killed his brother, sister and their four children. It knew it would them along with the intended target. But killing entire families is now the Israeli modus operandi...
Refaat was displaced multiple times during this war and ended up at his sister’s home along with his parents, wife and children. A few days ago, Refaat moved with his wife and children to an UNRWA school in al-Tufah neighborhood in Gaza according to his family.
However, a close friend of Refaat’s told Euro-Med Monitor that he had received an anonymous phone call from someone who identified himself as an Israeli officer and threatened Refaat that they knew precisely the school where he was located and were about to get to his location with the advancement of Israeli ground troops.
While the credibility of the threat itself is unclear, it contributed to prompting Refaat to move back to his sister’s apartment, believing it was more concealed than an open and overcrowded school where it would have been difficult to hide.
For weeks since the start of this war, Refaat has been receiving numerous death threats and hateful messages from Israeli accounts on social media after prominent public figures [Bari Weiss, among others] singled him out for harassment and incitement.
In 2014, Israel bombed Refaat’s home in Shejaiya and killed over 30 of his and his wife’s families.
Read the full story, including details of how Refaat Alareer was stalked, threatened and ultimately murdered, and details of how Silverstein’s attempts to spread the news on social media were censored, here.
Many if not most of the Israeli victims of the Hamas raid are now known to have been killed by Israeli forces as part of the so-called ‘Hannibal doctrine’. Despite the abundance of evidence, the UK and other western media continue to ignore it.
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