West Bank
US declares Israeli units guilty of war crimes – but whitewashes them as ‘individual’ acts
US laws ban sale of arms if they might be used in war crimes – but there will be no pause
The US government has declared five Israeli army units guilty ‘gross violations of human rights’, according to the State Department.
However, while going through the motions of attributing guilt, the US has simultaneously whitewashed the IDF’s systematic genocide and war crimes by describing the crimes as “individual incidents of gross violations of human rights” against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank before the current genocidal onslaught – and claiming that the units in question have taken ‘remedial’ corrective measures.
No findings have been made against the IDF for its slaughter of more than 40,000 Palestinian civilians in Gaza, mostly women and children and including summary executions and deliberate bombing of families, schools and hospitals – despite the recent discovery of mass graves in Gaza and the advice of senior government officials to the State Department that Israel is committing war crimes with US-made weapons.
State Department spokespeople have told journalist that it has found no evidence that Israel is committing war crimes in its slaughter since 7 October. The US government is currently trying to stop the International Criminal Court issuing international arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli ministers.
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Israeli AI ‘using WhatsApp data’ to target Gaza families for bomb strikes
‘Lavender’ AI set to prioritise hitting targets at home with their families and is said to be using WhatsApp data for its process – but how is Israel getting hold of it?
Israel’s AI system for targeting people for murder in Gaza uses WhatsApp data among its targeting criteria, according to a report in the Israeli 972 magazine and analysis by Paul Biggar of Tech for Palestine.
The platform is marketed as encrypted ‘end to end’, supposedly offering complete security, and WhatsApp told Middle East Monitor that:
WhatsApp has no backdoors and we do not provide bulk information to any government. For over a decade, Meta has provided consistent transparency reports and those include the limited circumstances when WhatsApp information has been requested. Our principles are firm – we carefully review, validate and respond to law enforcement requests based on applicable law and consistent with internationally recognized standards, including human rights.
However, a 2021 Freedom of Information Request to the FBI revealed that WhatsApp’s owner provides ‘near real-time’ information to US authorities – not the content of messages in most cases, but of who is sending and receiving messages:
WhatsApp will produce certain user metadata, though not actual message content, every 15 minutes in response to a pen register [a special type of federal request], the FBI says. The FBI guide explains that most messaging services do not or cannot do this and instead provide data with a lag and not in anything close to real time: “Return data provided by the companies listed below, with the exception of WhatsApp, are actually logs of latent data that are provided to law enforcement in a non-real-time manner and may impact investigations due to delivery delays.”
This potentially fits with reports in Israeli media that Israel is using an artificial intelligence platform named ‘Lavender’ to identify thousands of human targets in Gaza and flag them for an airstrike, with WhatsApp data forming a key part of the AI’s decision process, based on the WhatsApp connections of supposed ‘militants’ – and that the system is designed to kill large numbers of civilians. One source told 972 that when Lavender identifies a target, Israeli forces:
bombed them in homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.
But of course, people are in WhatsApp groups of all kinds of topics and for all kind of reasons – and merely being in a group which has a ‘militant’ member is no guarantee of any kind of ‘guilt’ – even if the right to resist occupation is disregarded, as Israel, the US and UK do.
This pattern raises the possibility that Israel is obtaining WhatsApp data, whether directly or from the US government. Another possibility is that Israel is accessing the data through the notorious ‘Pegasus’ hacking programme that has been shown to target WhatsApp users, hijacking their phones through WhatsApp even, in the later Pegasus versions, if they don’t open any suspicious links. Journalists, politicians, human rights activists and others are known to have been hacked by governments using the software, including its use by the Saudis against dissident Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
So serious was the issue that in 2021 tech firm Apple sued NSO, the maker of Pegasus, for targeting Apple users. NSO claimed that the software is used only against ‘terrorists’ – as which Israel, the UK, US and some others have designated Palestinian resistance groups – but there is clearly no guarantee that the definition of ‘terrorist’ is not extended in practice to anyone targeted by Israel. Biggar has accused WhatsApp’s owners of breaking international law and violating human rights.
Facebook, which belongs to the same Meta parent group as WhatsApp, has been accused of shutting down the circulation of pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist posts and treating the term ‘Zionist’ as hate speech. In 2020, the company admitted changing its algorithms to filter out left-wing news and analysis from users’ feeds while allowing right-wing propaganda to flow unchecked.
However Israel is accessing the WhatsApp data it is said to be using to target Palestinians and their families, undoubtedly a war crime, the news that it is doing so is a warning for those who dissent from Establishment narratives and use ‘private’ messaging services to do so.
Meta continued its statement to Middle East Monitor:
Our principles are firm – we carefully review, validate and respond to law enforcement requests based on applicable law and consistent with internationally recognized standards, including human rights.
The US and UK governments, however, continue to insist that Israel is following international law and recognised human rights standards, even as it murders tens of thousands of civilians, mostly women and children.
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US unis even arresting TEACHERS as Israel lobby group demands anti-Palestine crackdown
Students and teachers targeted by police as ADL demands government breaks student anti-genocide protest movement
At least one US university has called in police to arrest faculty members as well as students, as the so-called ‘Anti-defamation League’ (ADL) demanded a crackdown on the spreading anti-genocide protest movement among US students.
NYPD officers took NYU teachers as well as students away from a demo against Israel’s genocide in Gaza, as demonstrations spread to universities around the country. Columbia University, also in New York, has seen further student arrests as a sit-in demo by students against Israel’s slaughter of innocents continues undeterred.
In a tactic reminiscent of the recent rigged stunt in the UK by the Israel-linked, so-called ‘Campaign against Antisemitism’ (CAA), the ADL has claimed Jewish students are unsafe and demanded the immediate suspension of anyone who dares protest against mass murder:
Innocent women and children in Gaza are being slaughtered by the tens of thousands by Israel – and Palestinian students have been attacked, leaving at least one paralysed, by morons whipped up by the Islamophobic speech of politicians and pro-Israel lobbyists – but it seems we are meant to treat the feelings of the friends of genocide and apartheid as more important, on both sides of the Atlantic.
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Breaking: UN Special Rapporteur confirms Israel committing genocide (video)
Report to go before UN’s human rights commission against backdrop of starving Palestinian children and continued murder of innocents
The United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, international lawyer Francesca Albanese, has told Al Jazeera this morning that she will present her expert findings confirming Israel’s genocide to the UN’s human rights commission next week.
In January, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) found that there is a ‘plausible’ case that Israel is committing genocide, but Albanese – like hundreds of millions of people around the world – knows that the case is far more than merely ‘plausible’, even more so after Israel ignored the ICJ’s instructions to stop bombing, shooting and starving the Palestinians of Gaza:
Albanese’s interview took place against a backdrop of another confirmation of the obvious – that Gaza is now officially in famine and approaching a point where starvation and disease caused by Israel’s continued will kill more than Israel’s bombs and bullets. The harrowing footage of emaciated, dying children shown on Al Jazeera shows that Palestinian children are Israel’s main targets in the starvation campaign, just as they have been in the mass murder of civilians through bombs and missiles.
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Met confirms arrest of Gaza protester at Thornberry’s office
Outrage among activists at anti-genocide protest
The Metropolitan Police Service has confirmed the arrest of a protester on Monday night at what outraged other protesters have said was a lively but entirely peaceful protest, outside the Islington office of Shadow Attorney Emily Thornberry, against Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the Labour regime’s support for it.
A Met spokesperson told Skwawkbox that a woman had been arrested on suspicion of inciting racial hatred and bailed ‘pending further investigations’:
A small demonstration was held in Islington High Street during the evening of Monday, 26 February. A woman was arrested at the scene on suspicion of inciting racial hatred. She was taken into custody and later released on bail pending further enquiries. Next due on a date in April.
Protesters against genocide and for the human rights of Palestinians have been demonised by politicians and supporters of Israel for supposed ‘hate speech’ since Israel’s slaughter of civilians in Gaza and the West Bank accelerated after the Hamas raid and the Israel military’s well-known – but ignored by the UK ‘mainstream’ media and politicians – killing of ‘immense’ numbers of its own citizens. The Tory government, aided by ‘opposition leader’ Keir Starmer, have continued to attack the civil rights of the UK people to protest.
Right-wing MPs, along with pro-Israel campaigners, continue to call for tougher police action against demonstrators, despite the overwhelmingly peaceful nature of protests.
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Video: Israeli forces dress as hospital staff, Muslim visitors to assassinate paralysed patient in West Bank
Yet more war crimes – and in the West Bank where Hamas does not operate
Israeli troops dressed as medical staff and Muslim visitors to infiltrate a hospital in the West Bank today – where Hamas does not operate – before assassinating a paralysed man and two visitors in his room, as well as terrorising genuine staff and visitors, including forcing one man to kneel with a coat over his head as they milled about with guns. Some of the Israelis appeared to be men dressed as women:
Israel later claimed the man they killed was about to launch an attack on Israel similar to the 7 October raid from Gaza – in which Israel killed ‘immense’ numbers of its own citizens, a fact now common knowledge and discussed by media in Israel but ignored by western press and broadcasters – despite being paralysed, in a wheelchair, and a patient in hospital.
Just days after the ICJ’s confirmation that it is on trial for genocide, Israel has added to its war crimes the crime of ‘perfidy’, using civilian dress to claim protected status and then attacking – and added to its already horrific tally of summary executions, the slaughter of civilians and bombing of hospitals and schools.
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The Spark That Lit the Fire: The Untold Story of the October 7 Attacks
The dramatic, earth-shattering events in Palestine starting on October 7 have taken many people by surprise. However, attentive observers were not among them.
Few expected that Palestinian fighters would be parachuting into southern Israel on October 7; that instead of capturing a single Israeli soldier – as done in 2006 – hundreds of Israelis, including many soldiers and civilians, would find themselves captive in besieged Gaza.
The reason behind the ‘surprise,’ however, is the same reason that Israel is still reeling under collective shock, which is the tendency to pay close attention to political discourses and intelligence analyses of Israel and its supporters – while largely neglecting the Palestinian discourse.
For better comprehension, let us go back to the start.
The Spark
We entered 2023 with some depressing data and dark predictions about what was awaiting Palestinians in the new year.
Just before the year commenced, the United Nations Mideast envoy, Tor Wennesland, said 2022 was the most violent year since 2005. “Too many people, overwhelmingly Palestinian, have been killed and injured,” Wennesland told the UN Security Council.
This figure – 171 killed and hundreds wounded in the West Bank alone – did not receive much coverage in Western media. The mounting number of Palestinian victims, however, registered among Palestinians and their Resistance movements.
As anger and calls for revenge grew among ordinary Palestinians, their leadership continued to play its same traditional role – of pacifying Palestinian calls for resistance while continuing with its ‘security coordination’ with Israel.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, 88, carried on rehashing the old language about a two-state solution and the ‘peace process’ while cracking down on Palestinians who dared protest his ineffectual leadership.
Defenseless in the face of a far-right Israeli government with an open agenda to crush Palestinians, to expand illegal settlements and to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, Palestinians were forced to develop their defensive strategies.
The Lions’ Den – a multi-factional Resistance group that first appeared in Nablus in August 2022 – grew in power and appeal. Other groups, old and new, emerged on the scene throughout the northern West Bank, with the single objective of uniting Palestinians around a non-factional agenda and, ultimately, producing a new Palestinian leadership in the West Bank.
These developments sounded alarm bells in Israel. The Israeli occupation army moved quickly to crush the new armed rebellion, raiding Palestinian towns and refugee camps one after the other, with the hope of turning this nascent revolution into another failed attempt to challenge the status quo in occupied Palestine.
The bloodiest of the Israeli incursions occurred in Nablus on February 23, Jericho on August 15 and, most importantly, in the Jenin refugee camp.
The July 3 Israeli invasion of Jenin was reminiscent, in terms of casualties and degree of destruction, of the Israeli invasion of that very camp in April 2002.
The outcome, however, was not the same. Back then, Israel had invaded Jenin, along with other Palestinian towns and refugee camps, and succeeded in crushing armed resistance for years to come.
This time around, the Israeli invasion merely ignited a broader rebellion in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, creating a further schism in the already deteriorating relationship between Palestinians, on the one hand, and Abbas and his PA, on the other.
Indeed, just days after Israel concluded its attack on the camp, Abbas emerged with thousands of his soldiers to warn the bereaved refugees that “the hand that will break the unity of the people .. will be cut off from its arm”.
Yet, as the popular rebellion continued to build momentum in the West Bank, Israeli intelligence reports started talking about a plan composed by the deputy head of Hamas’ political bureau, Saleh Arouri, to ignite an armed Intifada.
The solution, according to the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, citing official Israeli sources, was to kill Arouri.
Indeed, Israel’s attention and counterstrategy were focused intently on the West Bank, as Hamas, in Gaza at the time, in Israel’s viewpoint, seemed disinterested in an all-out confrontation.
But why did Israel reach such a conclusion?
Miscalculation
Several significant events, the kind that would have pushed Hamas to retaliate, have taken place without any severe armed response by the Resistance in Gaza.
Last December, Israel had sworn in its most right-wing government in history. Far-right ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich arrived on the political scene with the declared objectives of annexing the West Bank, imposing military control over Al-Aqsa Mosque and other Palestinian Muslim and Christian holy sites and, in the case of Smotrich, denying the very existence of the Palestinian people.
Their pledges were quickly translated into action under the leadership of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Ben-Gvir was keen on sending a message to his constituency that the seizure of Al-Aqsa Mosque by Israel had become imminent.
He repeatedly raided or ordered raids on Al-Aqsa at an unprecedented frequency. The most violent and humiliating of these raids occurred on April 4, when worshippers were beaten up by soldiers while praying inside the mosque during the holy month of Ramadan.
Resistance groups in Gaza threatened retaliation. Several rockets were fired from Gaza toward Israel, merely serving as a symbolic reminder that Palestinians are united, regardless of where they are in the geographic map of historic Palestine.
Israel, however, ignored the message and used the Palestinian threats of retaliation and the occasional ‘lone-wolf attacks’ – like that of Muhannad al-Mazaraa at the illegal Maale Adumim settlement – as political capital to ignite the religious fervor of Israeli society.
Not even the death of Palestinian political prisoner Khader Adnan on May 2 seemed to have shifted Hamas’ position. Some even suggested that there is a rift between Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad following Adnan’s death as a result of a hunger strike in the Ramleh Prison.
On the same day, the PIJ fired rockets into Israel, as Adnan was one of its most prominent members. Israel answered by attacking hundreds of targets inside Gaza, mostly civilian homes and infrastructure, which resulted in the death of 33 Palestinians and the wounding of 147 more.
A truce was declared on May 13, again with no direct Hamas participation, giving further reassurance to Israel that its bloody onslaught on the Strip had achieved more than a military purpose – often referred to as ‘mowing the lawn’ – but a political one, as well.
Israel’s strategic estimation, however, proved to be wrong, as attested by Hamas’ well-coordinated October 7 attacks in southern Israel, targeting numerous military bases, settlements and other strategic positions.
But was Hamas being deceptive? Hiding its actual strategic objectives in anticipation of that significant event?
‘Roaring Flood’
A quick examination of Hamas’ recent statements and political discourse demonstrates that the Palestinian group was hardly secretive about its future actions.
Two weeks before 2023 commenced, at a Gaza rally on December 14, Hamas leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, had a message for Israel: “We will come to you in a roaring flood. We will come to you with endless rockets; we will come to you in a limitless flood of soldiers … like the repeating tide.”
The immediate response to the Hamas’ attack was the predictable US-Western solidarity with Israel, calls for revenge, the destruction and annihilation of Gaza and the revitalized plans of displacing Palestinians out of Gaza into Egypt – in fact, out of the West Bank as well, into Jordan.
The Israeli war on the Strip, also starting on October 7, has resulted in unprecedented casualties compared to all Israeli wars on Gaza, in fact, on Palestinians during any time in modern history.
Quickly, the term ‘genocide’ was being used, initially by intellectuals and activists and eventually by international law experts.
“Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza is quite explicit, open, and unashamed,” associate professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Stockton University, Raz Segal, wrote on October 13 in an article entitled ‘A Textbook Case of Genocide.’
Despite this, the UN could do nothing. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on November 8 that the UN has “neither money nor power” to prevent a potential genocide in Gaza.
In essence, this effectively meant the disabling of the international legal and political systems, as every attempt by the Security Council to demand an immediate and permanent ceasefire has been blocked by the US and Israel’s other Western allies.
As the death toll mounted among a starving population in Gaza – all food deprived per the November 28 estimation of the World Food Program – Palestinians resisted throughout the Gaza Strip.
Their resistance was not only confined to attacking or ambushing invading Israeli soldiers but was predicated on the legendary steadfastness of a population that refused to be weakened or displaced.
Sumud
This sumud (steadfast perseverance) continued, even when Israel began to systematically attack hospitals, schools, and every place that, in times of war, is seen as ‘safe places’ for a beleaguered civilian population.
Indeed, on December 3, UN Human Rights Chief Volker Türk said that “there is no safe place in Gaza.” This phrase was repeated often by other UN officials, along with other phrases such as “Gaza has become a graveyard for children,” as first noted by UNICEF Spokesperson James Elder on October 31. This left Guterres with no other option but to, on December 6, invoke article 99, which allows the Secretary-General to “bring to the attention of the Security Council any matter which in his opinion may threaten the maintenance of international peace and security.”
Israeli violence and Palestinian sumud also extended to the West Bank as well. Aware of the potential for armed resistance in the West Bank, the Israeli army quickly launched major, deadly raids on countless Palestinian towns, villages, and refugee camps, killing hundreds, injuring thousands, and arresting thousands more.
But Gaza remained the epicenter of the Israeli genocide. Aside from a brief humanitarian truce from November 24 to December 1, coupled with few prisoner exchanges, the battle for Gaza -for the future of Palestine and the Palestinian people – continues at an unparalleled price of death and destruction.
Palestinians know full well that the current fight will either mean a new Nakba, like the ethnic cleansing of 1948, or the beginning of the reversal of that very Nakba – as in the process of liberating the Palestinian people from the yoke of Israeli colonialism.
While Israel is determined to end Palestinian Resistance once and for all, it is evident that the Palestinian people’s determination to win their freedom in the coming years is far greater.
Feature photo | Palestinians burn tires and wave the national flag during a protest against an Israeli military raid in the West Bank city of Jenin, along the border fence with Israel, in east of Gaza City, June 19, 2023. Fatima Shbair | AP
Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of six books. His latest book, co-edited with Ilan Pappé, is ‘Our Vision for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders and Intellectuals Speak Out.’ His other books include ‘My Father was a Freedom Fighter’ and ‘The Last Earth’. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net
The post The Spark That Lit the Fire: The Untold Story of the October 7 Attacks appeared first on MintPress News.
Fry equated pro-Palestine demo to nazism. In ’08, he said Israel founded on terrorism
Stephen Fry’s ‘alternative’ Christmas message appeared to equate UK protests against the slaughter of Palestinians with ‘1930s Europe’. But fifteen years ago he was prepared to put his name to the most direct condemnation of the very founding of Israel
Stephen Fry has rightly been widely criticised for his supposedly ‘alternative’ Christmas message, produced by a pro-Israel production company, that has been described as minimising the horrific suffering of Palestinian women and children at the hands of the genocidal Israeli regime – and which appears to equate UK protests against the genocide with the rise of nazism in the 1930s.
Fry’s more than six-minute video builds to his claim that:
I’m glad [my Jewish grandparents] aren’t alive now to read newspaper stories that would have reminded them of the 1930s Europe that they left.
As one former ardent fan put it:
To hear him conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism has shocked me… Smashed windows vs carrying your dead child?
By contrast, Jewish comedian Alexei Sayle’s ‘alternative alternative’ Christmas video, standing in solidarity with Palestinians facing genocide – and pointing out that he confidently and safely marches regularly for Palestinian human rights alongside thousands of other Jewish people – was watched millions of times and received overwhelmingly positive comment.
But Fry’s message in 2023 is starkly at odds with his position just fifteen years ago – when he was prepared to put his name to a letter, on the occasion of Israel’s sixtieth anniversary, that condemned the apartheid regime as one ‘founded on terrorism’, a reference to the 1948 ‘Nakba’ or catastrophe of the violent expulsion of more than 700,000 Palestinians from their homes and the massacres that marked it.
The full letter read:
In May, Jewish organisations will be celebrating the 60th anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel. This is understandable in the context of centuries of persecution culminating in the Holocaust. Nevertheless, we are Jews who will not be celebrating. Surely it is now time to acknowledge the narrative of the other, the price paid by another people for European anti-semitism and Hitler’s genocidal policies. As Edward Said emphasised, what the Holocaust is to the Jews, the Naqba is to the Palestinians.
In April 1948, the same month as the infamous massacre at Deir Yassin and the mortar attack on Palestinian civilians in Haifa’s market square, Plan Dalet was put into operation. This authorised the destruction of Palestinian villages and the expulsion of the indigenous population outside the borders of the state. We will not be celebrating.
In July 1948, 70,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes in Lydda and Ramleh in the heat of the summer with no food or water. Hundreds died. It was known as the Death March. We will not be celebrating.
In all, 750,000 Palestinians became refugees. Some 400 villages were wiped off the map. That did not end the ethnic cleansing. Thousands of Palestinians (Israeli citizens) were expelled from the Galilee in 1956. Many thousands more when Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza. Under international law and sanctioned by UN resolution 194, refugees from war have a right to return or compensation. Israel has never accepted that right. We will not be celebrating.
We cannot celebrate the birthday of a state founded on terrorism, massacres and the dispossession of another people from their land. We cannot celebrate the birthday of a state that even now engages in ethnic cleansing, that violates international law, that is inflicting a monstrous collective punishment on the civilian population of Gaza and that continues to deny to Palestinians their human rights and national aspirations.
We will celebrate when Arab and Jew live as equals in a peaceful Middle East.
Fry’s name appeared among more than one hundred Jewish signatories – many of whom have maintained to this day their principled opposition to Israeli apartheid, occupation, brutality and ethnic cleansing, such as Michael Rosen, Rica and Jo Bird, Diana Neslen, Sayle and many more.
Mr Fry, despite Israeli ministers’ boasts that they want their slaughter in Gaza to be a ‘Nakba 2023’, has not – and has now equated opposition to Zionism with antisemitism. What happened to him?
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Watch Alexei Sayle’s ‘Alternative alternative’ Xmas message here 6pm tomorrow
Left-wing comedy legend will deliver his own antidote to Charlie’s annual broadcast – and to Fry’s pro-Israel ‘alternative’
Skwawkbox and Socialist Telly will showcase Alexei Sayle’s ‘Alternative alternative Christmas Message’ on Christmas Day at 6pm.
Sayle is broadcasting his message as an alternative to Stephen Fry’s planned ‘alternative Christmas message’, which is said to be themed around ‘supporting Jews’ but is expected to be a pro-Israel piece.
Watch from 6pm on Skwawkbox Facebook and Twitter and on Socialist Telly’s YouTube channel. Spread the word.
The YouTube video will embed below once it goes live:
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