IDF
Video: Liverpool City Council supports ceasefire after ‘rebellion’
Cross-party agreement forces climbdown – watch Liverpool Community Independents leader Alan Gibbons’s speeches
Liverpool City Council voted on Wednesday evening – despite a ban imposed by the leadership on a speech by local Jewish woman Helen Marks – to call for a full and immediate ceasefire in Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Council insiders have told us that the council’s Labour leadership folded in the face of a rebellion among many of the city’s Labour councillors – and the determination of the council’s smaller parties.
Liverpool Community Independents group leader Alan Gibbons – a former Labour councillor who was one of many to renounce the party last year over planned cuts to services for the city’s most vulnerable people – spoke to the assembled councillors in favour of a ceasefire call:
Gibbons then spoke outside the City Hall after the result, alongside Helen Marks, to assembled protesters who had gathered to pressure the council to call for a ceasefire:
This modicum of sanity in a small part of the Labour party had to be wrung from it by public outrage and the exposure of its attempts to quell freedom of speech.
Liverpool Community Independents group has announced that it will stand a candidate against Garston Labour MP Maria Eagle because of her support for Keir Starmer’s refusal to call for a ceasefire.
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Israeli police admit rave-goers shot by IDF helicopter
Earlier reports confirmed by police finding
An official Israeli police investigation has confirmed that Israelis attending a rave on 7 October were shot by an Israeli Defence Force (IDF) helicopter – confirming reports from Israeli witnesses, media and security personnel.
According to Haaretz – which had previously condemned those reporting the testimonies of killings by Israeli forces as conspiracy theorists – investigators concluded that a helicopter ‘also hit some festival participants’, but without confirming the number:
According to a police source, the investigation also shows that an IDF combat helicopter that arrived to the scene and fired at terrorists there apparently also hit some festival participants.
Last week, Netanyahu adviser Mark Regev inadvertently admitted that Israeli forces were responsible for at least some of the 7 October deaths were caused by Israeli forces when he said that two hundred of the burned bodies that had been included among the Israeli dead were in fact Hamas fighters – Hamas clearly did not incinerate its own and does not have weapons capable of burning bodies to a crisp in moments.
Israeli survivors of the attack have also told Israeli media that the Hamas operatives were kind and polite but that Israeli forces fired indiscriminately and killed many hostages. A senior Israeli pilot also told Haaretz that the mass killing of Israelis was a ‘mass Hannibal’ – referring to the Israeli doctrine of killing everyone, including Israelis, to prevent a hostage situation. Col Nof Erez said that he and other military pilots had been training for Hannibal responses for the last twenty years – the doctrine was officially abandoned in 2008.
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Video: Israeli reserve colonel says Oct 7 killings were ‘mass Hannibal’ directive by IDF, not Hamas
Israeli media interview supports eyewitness accounts and inadvertent admission by Netanyahu spokesman that Israeli military, not Hamas, responsible for most deaths at Kibbutz Be’eri
A candid interview with a senior Israeli Defence Force (IDF) reserve pilot corroborates reports from eyewitnesses that Israeli forces were responsible for most deaths in the 7 October kibbutz raid – and not Palestinian resistance group Hamas.
The ‘Hannibal directive’, an instruction to the military to kill both hostages and raiders to prevent hostages being taken into captivity, was officially repealed in 2008, but Colonel Nof Erez said that he and his fellow pilots have been practising it for the past twenty years – and that the carnage at Kibbutz Be’eri was a ‘mass Hannibal’, with helicopter gunships shooting indiscriminately at cars leaving the area, without knowing whether they contained hostages or not.
Erez, speaking to Israeli media outlet Haaretz and translated by Asian news magazine The Cradle, said that the absence of any Israeli forces on the ground at the time ruled out any chance of ground coordination of the air assault – meaning that the helicopters would have been shooting at any target that moved:
Speaking with Haaretz, Israeli reserve pilot Col. Nof Erez describes Israeli army's response to Oct. 7 as "MASS HANNIBAL."
The Hannibal Directive orders the army to kill their own to prevent them being taken captive. pic.twitter.com/5IrERAAtVl— The Cradle (@TheCradleMedia) November 20, 2023
Survivors of the slaughter have said that they were treated well by the Hamas raiders, but that Israeli forces fired indiscriminately – with one eyewitness reporting that her husband had been killed by Israeli bullets – and the kibbutz security head said that houses had been shelled to bring them down on their occupants and kill them and the Hamas fighters.
And last week former Israeli ambassador Mark Regev, now a key Netanyahu adviser, inadvertently admitted that the many charred bodies had been burned by Israeli weapons – as long suspected by military experts and commentators who knew that Hamas does not have weapons that will do it – when he said that two hundred bodies had been thought to be Israeli but were in fact Palestinians.
Western media and politicians remain stubbornly silent on these facts, allowing the Israeli regime to continue to deceive the UK and US public with lurid and entirely unevidenced tales – what has been put forward as supposed evidence has rapidly fallen apart – of rapes and beheadings to justify Israel’s war crimes and mass murder of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.
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Video: Israel’s latest ‘evidence’ of Al Shifa Hamas base is embarrassingly feeble
CCTV footage – in a hospital the Israelis claimed had taped up all its cameras – showing wounded men being taken into a hospital is supposed to be proof Al Shifa hospital is a Hamas base
IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari claiming a ‘hostage’ shows no signs of being hurt
The Israeli military’s attempts to justify its incessant bombing of Gaza’s hospitals and schools by claiming that Al Shifa – Gaza’s largest hospital – was a Hamas base started feebly and have become an international embarrassment.
‘Evidence’ so far put forward has been full of holes, including claiming an IDF laptop on a desk was a Hamas computer – and a claim so transparently false that even the BBC felt obliged to point out the obvious problems and changes in a supposed weapons stash between the IDF publishing a video of it and them allowing the BBC in to film.
And now, IDF propaganda-pusher Daniel Hagari is telling us to believe that Israel has ‘concrete evidence’ of Hamas’s use of the base, because of CCTV footage showing them bringing in two men – when at least one of them is clearly badly wounded and the other is staggering like he might well be and appears to have blood on his shirt.
It’s impossible to tell from the footage – if it’s genuine at all – whether the wounded men are Palestinian or Israeli – or, as Hagari claims, from the Far East – but we’re supposed to think that bringing two wounded men into a hospital is ‘conclusive proof’ of anything except that, well duh, you take wounded people to a hospital if you’re a humane human being.
Hagari also claims ‘Hamas’ bringing military trucks into a hospital is illegal, yet then goes on in his own presentation to show they are bringing wounded people into the hospital for treatment – the war crime would be to not bring them to the hospital:
And even if the men in Hagari’s video are hostages, Hamas is unlikely to have shot them and then try to save their lives – and evidence is now piling high that the deaths and woundings at the Beeri kibbutz were caused by Israeli troops ordered to destroy houses and vehicles even though they knew they might be killing Israelis – including an inadvertent admission by a senior Netanyahu spokesman – though this is unsurprisingly being ignored by the UK’s so-called ‘mainstream’ media.
When in a hole, you should stop digging – but Israel is so desperate to justify its war crimes that it is embarrassing itself more with each attempt. It would be funny if they weren’t trying to cover genocide, ethnic cleansing and war crimes.
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Video: BBC does actual journalism to expose IDF Al Shifa claims
IDF’s ‘evidence’ of Hamas presence at Al Shifa hospital falls even further apart under BBC analysis
The BBC has done its job of scrutinising ‘evidence’ claimed by the Israeli military (IDF) to show the presence of a Hamas base at the Al Shifa hospital in Gaza – and the Israeli claims fell even further apart under even that rudimentary scrutiny.
The IDF had already been widely and rightly derided for the feebleness of its attempts to persuade the world that it had found evidence of a Hamas base, after it pointed to a calendar claiming it showed the names of Hamas fighters when it showed only the days of the week in Arabic – and deleted a video showing a supposed ‘Hamas laptop’ was in fact an IDF machine, then released another version with the laptop blurred out.
But the BBC’s analysis:
- showed that the supposedly ‘one take’ video put out by the IDF had in fact been edited
- showed that weapons ‘found’ near an MRI machine in the hospital had in fact been multiplied between the IDF’s video shoot and the BBC being allowed in to film
- noted that the IDF claimed the additional weapons had been found ‘throughout the day’ – but the regime did not explain why they appeared in a location that supposedly showed a weapons stash ‘as found’
- concluded that the IDF had yet to provide any believable evidence to support its attempt to justify its slaughter of civilians in Gazan hospitals by demonstrating a significant Hamas presence:
The BBC did not mention the nonsense of the fact that stashing a pile of metal weapons next to an MRI machine – which would have been in use until fuel ran out in the last few weeks – would also be disastrous, because even a metal bracelet would be pulled into the machine’s magnets, but the point still stands.
Every time Israel has provided ‘evidence’, it has collapsed and been rightly ridiculed – but the wilful collusion of western governments (and in this country the so-called ‘opposition’) has enabled Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Al Shifa hospital is now in the middle of a forced and probably deadly evacuation, after the IDF destroyed the hospital’s last oxygen reserves to force doctors to comply who had been refusing for the sake of their desperately-ill patients.
Now if only the BBC would continue to hold governments to account – including the UK government’s continuing assault on the poor, vulnerable and disabled and all of our human and civic rights – as well.
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VIDEO: What really happened on October 7?
The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal joins Chris Hedges to discuss his investigation into Israel’s indiscriminate use of heavy weapons against Israeli citizens on October 7, and the shock-and-awe campaign of misinformation it subsequently employed to create political space for its brutal assault on Gaza. This was originally published by The Real News Network. Editor’s note: Since the publication of this interview, an Israeli police investigation has confirmed that Israeli Apache helicopters killed numerous Israeli citizens at and around the Nova electronic […]
The post VIDEO: What really happened on October 7? first appeared on The Grayzone.
The post VIDEO: What really happened on October 7? appeared first on The Grayzone.
Facebook blocks Skwawkbox for video showing IDF hospital deception
Video of laptop screen falls foul of social media giant’s ‘standards’
Social media giant Facebook has blocked access to this morning’s Skwawkbox post highlighting the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) video that claimed to show a ‘Hamas laptop’ but in reality appears to show an IDF laptop, with Hebrew keyboard and standardised marker number. The video was subsequently deleted and replaced with one that had the laptop details blurred out.
Shortly after a link to the article was posted to Facebook, a warning appeared on the Skwawkbox Facebook page warning the page admin that access to the article had been blocked for everyone but the admin – supposedly for content breaching ‘Community Standards on nudity or sexual activity‘:
Facebook has also placed a 24-hour restriction on Skwawkbox’s use of the platform:
Skwawkbox has appealed the block and restriction, but the ‘review’ by the platform will undoubtedly take far longer than it took to block the post from public view. It’s possible that the site’s bots were triggered by the word ‘unblurred’, but if so they are shockingly unsophisticated, for one of the world’s richest companies, to block a post that has literally no sexual content or reference to anything that might be sexual – and just happened to block access to a post showing deception by the Israeli military in its attempt to justify its campaign of bombing hospitals and schools that has killed thousands of Palestinian women and children.
Update: Facebook eventually restored the post.
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IDF’s accidental unblurred video ‘shows laptop is their own’
Deleted-then-re-uploaded video shows unlocked, fully-charged laptop with IDF-standardised marker number and alleged Hebrew letter keys, showing IDF image of captured-and-released soldier
The IDF released a version of its propaganda video shot in Gaza’s Al Shifa hospital, with unblurred footage that contradicts the IDF spokesman’s narrative and appears to show an IDF laptop, according to analysis by media company HotSpot, which appears to have been the first to spot the blunder. The tweet was subsequently deleted by the IDF and replaced with a version in which the laptop was blurred out.
The footage of the laptop is narrated as showing an incriminating Hamas laptop – but the fully-charged machine has a charger with a label marking it ‘QI-148’, apparently compatible with the IDF’s standard numbering of electronic items, and is fully charged in a hospital that has been without power for an extended period:
Some observers have said that the unblurred keyboard has letter keys in Hebrew – a Hebrew keyboard of the same model is shown in the final image of the group below – not Arabic.
The image of an IDF soldier taken hostage and subsequently released, a Private Megidish, that appears on the laptop screen – apparently supposed to be an image of her taken by captives – also matches an image released to western media by the IDF:
The occupation regime wants to convince the world that the hospital housed a Hamas headquarters, to justify its bombing of Gaza’s hospitals, killed hundreds or even thousands of hospital staff and civilians as part of its ethnic cleansing of the territory.
Previously-released footage showed a different IDF spokesman pointing to a chart he said showed a Hamas terrorist schedule in Arabic – but Arabic speakers quickly pointed out it showed only the days of the week – and displaying a handful of guns in pristine condition.
As one commenter pointed out, according to the IDF, Hamas bases have IT departments that put standard numbers on their electronic equipment that the IDF needs to blur out.
The IDF’s attempts to persuade the world that missiles hitting hospitals were Hamas misfires have also been thoroughly debunked by specialist sound and video analysts – and a Netanyahu staffer also boasted about the IDF’s involvement in a tweet that was quickly deleted when the narrative of the misfire was circulated.
After ordering Gazans to move to the south of the country or be bombed – and bombing them there too – Israel has now ordered them to evacuate parts of the south as well. Leaked documents and statements by Israeli government ministers show plans to clear Gaza entirely and force what remains of the population over the border into Egypt to a permanent ‘tent city’.
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