Missiles
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 ‘kills several’ in two new attacks on Red Crescent HQ in Khan Younis
Occupier targets humanitarian group – again
Israel has killed ‘several people’ in two separate attacks on the Khan Younis HQ of the International Red Crescent humanitarian organisation in Gaza. The group, the sister organisation in Muslim areas of the International Red Cross, has not yet put a number on how many were killed and injured.
The attacks are the second and third times in just over a week that Israel has targeted the Red Crescent HQ – with the first attack taking place just after Christmas:
The bombings come om the day that the genocidal regime also destroyed buildings and killed civilians in a missile strike in Lebanese capital Beirut, claiming to have targeted a Hamas building to assassinatea single official of the Palestinian resistance group, Saleh Al Arouri, in yet another extra-judicial murder. The attack is likely to trigger retaliatory strikes by Lebanese forces, perhaps in the form of long-range rockets.
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Video: Israel removing anaesthetics from aid supplies to Gaza
More than a thousand children have had one or more limbs amputated without anaesthetic
Doctors in Gaza have accused Israel of removing anaesthetic from aid supplies entering the territory. According to the Grayzone‘s Max Blumenthal, speaking to Andrew Napolitano’s Judging Freedom channel, Israeli officials are targeting anaesthetics during the final inspection before aid – already woefully inadequate quantities – goes through, forcing more than a thousand Palestinian children to undergo limb amputations without pain relief:
At least one surgeon was forced to perform an amputation on his own child, who died in terrible suffering.
This week, South Africa filed a detailed genocide case against Israel with the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for its actions in Gaza. As well as depriving children and other hideously wounded civilians of pain relief, Israel has killed more than 30,000 innocents, 70% of them women and children, and has blockaded food, water and energy and targeted homes, schools and hospitals, including UN-run facilities, for bombing and shelling, in what genocide experts say is a ‘textbook case’.
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US trying to persuade Switzerland to waive Geneva Conventions for Israel in Gaza
Rules of war banning inhumane treatment of POWs and civilians should not be invoked, say US diplomats behind scenes as US complicity in Israeli war crimes becomes explicit
Image: Red Crescent Society
US diplomats are trying to persuade Switzerland – the custodians of the Geneva Conventions governing the rules of conduct during war, with the ability to decide when meetings are held to discuss non-compliance – to set aside the application of the Conventions to Israel’s genocidal campaign against Palestinians in Gaza, according to documents seen by the HuffPost US.
The Geneva Conventions are a set of treaties and protocols known particularly for the strictures of the third and fourth conventions on how nations can treat civilians and prisoners of war:
- The First Geneva Convention “for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded and Sick in Armed Forces in the Field” (first adopted in 1864, revised in 1906, 1929 and finally 1949);
- The Second Geneva Convention “for the Amelioration of the Condition of Wounded, Sick and Shipwrecked Members of Armed Forces at Sea” (first adopted in 1949, successor of the Hague Convention (X) 1907);
- The Third Geneva Convention “relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War” (first adopted in 1929,[35] last revision in 1949);
- The Fourth Geneva Convention “relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War” (first adopted in 1949, based on parts of the Hague Convention (II) of 1899 and Hague Convention (IV) 1907).
But Israel – whose advocates frequently complain that they want Israel to be treated like any other country – and its US backers want Israel to be exempted from these universal rules of war.
This is unsurprising, given the mass slaughter of civilians, especially children, the targeting of schools and hospitals, the alleged execution of women and children and the mass graves of victims – but it is surprising to hear this homicidal exceptionalism being so bluntly stated.
Yet according to the article:
U.S. diplomats are finalizing a démarche ― a diplomatic initiative ― to their Swiss counterparts that Washington hopes will scuttle plans for a meeting to discuss violations of the Geneva Conventions in the current war between Israel and Hamas, the Gaza-based militant group, according to State Department documents seen by HuffPost.
The revelation comes as the U.S. is simultaneously slow-rolling the most high-profile international attempt to ease suffering in Gaza: a United Nations Security Council resolution that would drastically increase the flow of humanitarian aid into the besieged strip…
Palestinian diplomats and a significant group of U.N. member states, including some European nations allied with the U.S., are preparing a call for Switzerland to launch such a conference focused on the fighting on Israel-Palestine that would cover Geneva Conventions violations by all parties, according to the State Department documents and a person familiar with the Palestinian effort.
Despite global public opinion abhorring Israel’s constant war crimes against Palestinian civilians in Gaza and the West Bank, the US is determined to keep Israel unaccountable for its actions.
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Exclusive: Greenstein arrested by anti-terror cops – for one tweet
Brighton-based Jewish human rights activist targeted for standing against genocide
Tony Greenstein in Wolverhampton
Jewish human rights – and therefore pro-Palestinian – activist Tony Greenstein has been arrested by police – for a single tweet supporting Palestinians against genocide and oppression.
In the 15 November post, Greenstein – responding to yet another right-wing attack on Black Jewish activist Jackie Walker – told the person baiting Walker that he supported Palestinians and preferred Hamas to the occupying Israeli army that is perpetrating genocide in Gaza:
The gaslighting pro-Israel troll was one of many attacking Walker for condemning Israel’s repeated bombing of hospitals in Gaza, war crimes that have taken hundreds and probably thousands of civilian lives and that Israel has invented evidence to try to justify:
Seized
Police arrived at Greenstein’s home at around 7am this morning, seized his phone and laptop and held him for around nine hours. His electronics were not returned on his release.
Greenstein was released around 4pm and has not, as yet, been charged with any crime. He was one of several Palestine Action supporters convicted of criminal damage against one of Israeli weapons-maker Elbit’s UK factories, despite no damage being done – and who received a suspended sentence at Wolverhampton Crown Court.
It seems the UK Establishment considers Greenstein to be supporting the wrong ‘terrorists’ against the ones who are actually perpetrating mass murder, including against their own Israeli citizens.
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Al Jazeera news crew hit by Israeli missile as they reported on bombed South Gaza UN school
Wael Al-Dadouh’s family was killed in earlier Israeli airstrike targeting journalists’ homes
Al-Dahdouh receiving treatment after the missile strike
At least two Al Jazeera journalists have been hit by an Israeli missile as they reported on Israel’s overnight strike on a UN relief agency (UNRWA) school in southern Gaza that killed twelve people and seriously wounded at least twenty-five others. The victims were mainly women and children sheltering in the school after being driven from northern Gaza to the supposedly ‘safer’ south.
Wael Al-Dahdouh, whose family was killed in an earlier strike, was wounded but able to walk clear of the attack zone, while his cameraman was severely wounded and could not be reached by ambulances as the vehicles came under attack from Israeli forces. Al Jazeera showed footage of Mr Al-Dahdouh, bloodied and shaken, receiving treatment for shrapnel wounds:
Israel has been accused of targeting the homes and families of journalists and of Palestinian academics and artists, including poet and professor Refaat Alareer last week. The apartheid regime has also hit Al Ahli hospital in northern Gaza, which it bombed early in its genocidal assault killing more than five hundred people, with multiple strikes from drones and jets overnight.
The Committee to Protect Journalists reports that at least sixty-three journalists in Gaza have been killed by Israel since 7 October: fifty-six Palestinians, four Israelis and three Lebanese, plus another fourteen missing and nineteen arrested, with more deaths reported but still to be confirmed. At least one more has been murdered in southern Lebanon and another lost her leg in a tank shelling.
Update: camera operator Samer Abu Daqqa has died of his wounds, the 64th journalist (some calculate 78th) confirmed murdered by the genocidal apartheid Israeli regime.
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Video: Israel’s ‘minister for Hamas rape propaganda is ‘proud to be a racist’
May Golan was withdrawn by Israel in May as proposed new New York consul after outrage over racist rally – now she’s pushing wild claims about Hamas atrocities
Israel’s ‘Minister for the advancement of women’, May Golan, has been at the forefront of the apartheid regime’s latest attempt to dig itself out of the pit of its PR and propaganda disaster over the 7 October Hamas raid.
Among a long list of failed propaganda attempts, the Israeli regime has been caught out trying to fake a ‘Hamas ambush’, faking a ‘recording’ of Hamas operatives, faking ‘evidence’ that Israel did not bomb a hospital and kill five hundred or more refugees – and seeing the news that Israel forces killed many of the Israelis who died during the raid, including the child it used for its atrocity-propaganda push, spread rapidly despite the silence of so-called ‘mainstream media.
So the regime’s latest tactic is to push claims that Hamas committed ‘widespread’ rapes during the raid – and, as so often, its ‘evidence’ is a single ‘eyewitness’. Israel has even been caught using an old image of a killed Kurdish woman soldier that it claimed was an Israeli rape victim. The ‘commissioner’ appointed to ‘investigate’ the rapes is an Israeli lawyer who has previously written a position to justify Israel circumventing the human rights of Palestinian captives and who runs an agency closely linked to Israel’s far-right government – and the commission did not even take any testimony from witnesses.
And one of the main faces of the latest propaganda push is May Golan – a woman who has told a far-right Israeli rally that she is ‘proud to be a racist’ and that ‘it’s our right to be racist’:
So great was outrage at her racism earlier this year that Israel withdrew its proposal to make her its consul in New York – yet despite this very recent history, her claims have been transmitted without scrutiny by the BBC and other UK and international ‘mainstream’ media, and with no mention of her record. Some media have even claimed ‘witnesses upon witnesses’ have testified to the commission about sexual assault by Hamas, even though it heard none.
Israel’s propaganda disaster continues – but so-called ‘mainstream’ media and commentators are slavishly, even enthusiastically, pushing the latest unevidenced narrative.
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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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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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