Biden’s Gaza plan: A repackaged, flawed initiative
The White House’s ‘Gaza ceasefire’ proposal is essentially a rehash of April’s Hamas offer. It reveals Biden’s shrinking options in exiting his self-created Gaza quagmire as US presidential elections draw closer.
Khalil Harb
JUN 4, 2024
(Photo Credit: The Cradle)
Everyone who watched US President Joe Biden announce his Gaza ceasefire plan on 31 May must have wondered where the “surrender or die” threat that US officials – notably, White House National Security Communications Advisor John Kirby – have been wagging at Palestinian resistance fighters for months has gone.
No, the American president, who essentially banned the word “ceasefire” from the lips of western and UN officials for the first part of Israel’s brutal military assault on the Gaza Strip, has not suddenly become a pacifist.
Rather, as Israeli journalist Gideon Levy recently summed up in Hebrew daily Haaretz on Israel’s unwinnable war:
The war has become an endless cycle of death and destruction. After Rafah we go back to the beginning, to the northern Gaza Strip, like in a game of Monopoly, but with cruelty, and from there southwards to Rafah, through the ruins of Jabalya, and so on, in blood-soaked mud.
Biden wants out of this quagmire for several reasons: the resistance’s steadfastness in Gaza, the regional military support and international solidarity it has garnered, and the Israeli army’s fluctuating fortunes on the battlefield all have played significant roles. Domestically, the looming prospect of Donald Trump’s return to the White House in the November elections has added to the president’s mix of considerations.
Miscalculations and limited options
Biden thinks it isn’t too late to fix matters. The shaken president is licking his wounds, the price of his losing bet on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s failed war strategies. But it isn’t early either: the “peace plan” Biden presented last Friday indicates Washington’s lack of viable options, and many hurdles lie ahead, not least from his Israeli “ally.”
From the outset, Hamas and other Palestinian resistance factions have maintained a clear stance in negotiations with various parties, including Egypt, Qatar, and France. They have insisted on a ceasefire agreement that ensures an end to the war and a complete withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Gaza Strip.
On the other hand, Netanyahu is betting on manipulating the language and objectives of the deal’s clauses to assure his ‘extremist’ coalition partners that he has shed the most Palestinian blood possible and plans only to grant a temporary truce for him to return to his genocidal ways whenever desired.
A Resistance Axis source in Beirut tells The Cradle that preventing this Israeli trickery is the essence of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s (PIJ) stance in negotiations. But, interestingly, Biden’s plan is based on principles that Hamas already agreed to last month – an agreement that embarrassed Israel at the time and which it sought to avoid.
‘Cosmetic’ update to the old agreement
Biden’s announcement is essentially a repackaging of last month’s Hamas-approved agreement, which he is now repositioning as an Israeli-sanctioned deal. He even brazenly states that Tel Aviv had submitted “new proposals” structured in three stages, which serve as a roadmap for a ceasefire:
The first stage involves halting the fire, releasing prisoners, and allowing Palestinians to return to their homes. The second phase includes the exchange of living prisoners, including Israeli soldiers. The third phase focuses on reconstruction, which the White House is selling as necessary to prevent Hamas from repeating the events of 7 October.
The Israeli Broadcasting Corporation also quoted Israeli and American officials saying that the Israeli proposal document is remarkably similar to the document Hamas accepted a month prior, which Tel Aviv had refused.
Dimitri Diliani, a member of the Revolutionary Council in the Fatah movement, reveals to The Cradle that the occupation state initially approved the Biden initiative at the end of April. Hamas approved the initiative several days later. But Netanyahu walked back his support for political reasons – mainly because he had anticipated Hamas would reject that deal.
When Hamas unexpectedly approved the initiative, Netanyahu balked. As Diliani recounts:
initiative was proposed more than once, but the name differs. The first time, it was Egyptian, and today it is called the Biden Initiative, but what is different is that it is clear that there is an American political will to stop the war in Gaza, not in the service of humanity, peace, human rights, or mercy for women and children. But to make it a card for Biden and the Democratic Party after it became clear that he would lose the White House in the upcoming elections, for reasons that include mainly Biden’s support for the war in Gaza and the high number of supporters of stopping the war within the Democratic Party.
In any case, the “Biden plan,” says the Beirut-based Resistance Axis source, is an attempt to alter the status quo – akin to tampering with a crime scene – noting that the US president omitted a clause that demands the establishment of a “Palestinian state.” The White House also opportunistically hopes to use its proposed ceasefire deal to jumpstart the stagnating Saudi–Israeli normalization process – just in time for the November elections.
The plan’s lack of mention of a Palestinian state or a two-state solution has raised concerns. It appears to prioritize Israel’s security and regional integration goals, including normalization with key Arab states, over Palestinian sovereignty.
The source close to the Palestinian resistance movements says the most dangerous part of Biden’s new rhetoric is that he openly acknowledges Israel’s right to renew its war if Hamas “violates” the terms of the deal.
This loophole would allow Israel to exploit any Gaza-related incident, however innocuous, to restart its genocidal campaign on Gaza after the Palestinian resistance releases Israeli captives.
The same source points out that Biden’s initiative raises questions due to his administration’s role as a guarantor for Israel, while Egypt and Qatar are expected to provide assurances to Hamas. This is concerning for several reasons. First, the US has been deeply involved in the conflict from its onset, acting as the key player and weapons supplier in its escalation. Second, there is no certainty that Biden will remain in power after the upcoming November elections, which casts doubt on the long-term reliability of the US as a guarantor.
Internal Israeli politics
Diliani sums up the inherent weaknesses of Biden’s ceasefire plan well, warning that it will set Washington and Tel Aviv on a path of conflict:
There is an American will, for domestic political reasons, to stop the war, but it clashes with a domestic Israeli political will in Netanyahu’s coalition not to stop the war for political reasons. This is what may cause conflict to escalate between the two allies.
Part of the White House’s dilemma lies in the fact that its every initiative tiptoes around the far-right group within the Israeli government (led by National Security and Finance Ministers Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich) that does not want the war on Gaza to stop.
At the same time, there is another Israeli grouping within the government’s “War Cabinet” represented by War Cabinet Minister Benny Gantz – and a third external group led by opposition leader Yair Lapid, who supports halting the war and ousting Netanyahu from power.
But this complex circle of entanglements inside Israel is no longer in the interest of Biden and his Democrats. It is not unlikely that Biden is trying to lure Netanyahu into accepting the deal and going through with it, which could lead to his overthrow by Ben Gvir and Smotrich, who actually threatened to do so as soon as Biden announced his initiative. This is a scenario that could lead to the rise of a movement more willing to reach an understanding with the Americans, represented by Benny Gantz and Lapid.
Was it not remarkable that Biden directed many of his speeches and promises to the “Israeli people” on Friday, reminding them – most importantly – or actually acknowledging that the Gaza battle, despite its ferocity, has not closed and that salvation from Hamas is not within reach, completely as a concept? “The absolute victory” that Netanyahu and his minister Yoav Gallant promised them on 7 October 2023 did not come.
The “end” now is a pain for Israel that will not be cured soon, just as it would if it went ahead with an endless war. Both options are fatal.
In a wide-ranging interview, the US president hinted that Israel’s prime minister is prolonging the war for his own interests
News Desk
JUN 4, 2024
(Photo credit: Samuel Corum/Sipa via Reuters)
US President Joe Biden said in an interview with Time magazine, published on 4 June, that Washington does not recognize the International Criminal Court (ICC), which is currently seeking arrest warrants against Israeli leaders for war crimes in the Gaza Strip.
In response to a question about whether Israel is committing war crimes in Gaza, Biden said that “it’s uncertain” and is being “investigated by the Israelis themselves,” adding: “The ICC is something that we don’t, we don't recognize.”
Tel Aviv and Washington are not among the 124 signatories of the ICC Rome Statute of 1998, which established genocide as one of four core international crimes.
Upon the ICC decision to seek arrest warrants against Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, US officials threatened the ICC with sanctions. Mike Johnson, Republican Speaker of the US House of Representatives, called last month for ICC prosecutor Karim Khan to be put “back in his place,” adding that “aggressive legislation” against The Hague-based court was in the works.
During the interview with Time, Biden was asked about ongoing efforts to reach a ceasefire and prisoner exchange deal in the Gaza Strip.
“The Israelis desperately want a ceasefire in order to get the hostages home,” the US President said, blaming Hamas for the delay and saying that the group “could end this tomorrow.”
On 31 May, Biden made a speech during which he presented a new proposal for a ceasefire and exchange deal, which includes a permanent cessation of hostilities and a full withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Gaza Strip.
Biden said that the proposal was offered by Israel. An Israeli official close to Netanyahu said that Tel Aviv had agreed to the proposal, albeit reluctantly. Hamas said it was positively viewing the new initiative.
On Monday, however, the Israeli premier effectively disowned the initiative and said that no permanent ceasefire would be accepted. He confirmed Israel’s intention to continue the war as soon as Israeli prisoners were returned, a violation of the terms of the new proposal.
He also claimed that there were gaps between the proposal Israel agreed to and the proposal presented by Biden, something that both Hamas and a US official denied.
Many Israelis, including the families of prisoners in Gaza, have recently accused the premier of deliberately sabotaging ceasefire talks and prolonging the war for political reasons. In response to a question on such accusations, Biden said: “I’m not going to comment on that. There is every reason for people to draw that conclusion.”
Biden went on to reject accusations that Israel is intentionally using starvation as a weapon in its war against the Gaza Strip.
“No, I don't think that,” he said, saying, however, that Israel has “engaged in activity that is inappropriate.”
His rejection comes despite warnings on the matter from Human Rights Watch (HRW), the UN, and others, including South Africa, which is accusing Tel Aviv of genocide in a case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
Last month, the UN warned that northern Gaza was stricken by “full-blown” famine.
Thousands of children are currently facing the risk of death by starvation as a result of the Israeli war, particularly the current operation in Gaza's southern city of Rafah, which has severely hindered efforts to bring aid into the strip due to Israel’s closure of the city’s border crossing, which has long been a key lifeline for Palestinians in the enclave.
Israeli army says over one third of captives in Gaza are dead
The captives were killed by Israeli airstrikes that struck the Gazan city of Khan Younis
News Desk
JUN 4, 2024
(Photo Credit: Reuters)
An official Israeli government count said on 4 June that around 120 living Israeli captives currently remain in the Gaza Strip, meaning just over a third of the 251 Israeli soldiers and settlers held captive in Gaza have been killed since 7 October.
A day earlier, the Israeli military announced that four captives held by Hamas in the Gaza Strip have been confirmed dead.
The head of the Israeli army's spokesperson unit, Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, disclosed in a video address that the four captives died in Gaza's southern city of Khan Yunis as Israeli soldiers were conducting an operation in the area.
Representatives of the Israeli army notified the families of the four captives, Chaim Perry, Yoram Metzger, Amiram Cooper, and Nadav Popplewell, who had been taken captive by the Palestinian resistance during Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on 7 October 2023.
According to Hagari, Israeli–British national Popplewell died after succumbing to wounds caused by Israeli airstrikes. Back in December, Hamas published a video of three of the four remaining captives.
On 30 May, Israeli National Security Adviser Tzachi Hanegbi told relatives of Israeli captives held in Gaza that the Netanyahu government would only reach a deal to bring back their loved ones if it provided a political benefit.
Since the start of the war, the Israeli government and army have demonstrated negligence over the lives of the captives, as Israelis continuously take to the streets calling for a hostage release deal with Hamas.
Israel 'not serious' about reaching ceasefire deal: Hamas
Israeli ministers are seeking to fight an 'eternal war,' families of the Israeli captives in Gaza say
News Desk
JUN 4, 2024
Hamas officials Sami Abu Zuhri (right) and Mushir Al-Masri in Gaza (Photo credit: AP/Hatem Moussa)
Senior Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri stated on 4 June that Israel was not serious about reaching a ceasefire deal in Gaza and was maneuvering under US cover to extend the war.
Reuters reported that Abu Zuhri criticized Washington’s call for the Palestinian resistance movement to accept a ceasefire deal proposed by Israeli negotiators and announced by US President Joe Biden last Friday, saying it was “as if it is Hamas who is hampering the deal.”
The Israeli proposal announced by Biden includes three phases to end the war on Gaza, which has killed some 37,000 Palestinians and created famine conditions in many parts of the strip.
The offer calls for a ceasefire, the release of Israeli captives held by Hamas and Palestinian captives held by Israel in its prisons, and the reconstruction of Gaza.
Following Biden’s remarks on Friday, Hamas said it had a positive view of the proposal’s contents.
The US said on Sunday that if Hamas accepted the proposed plan, it expected Israel to follow through.
“This was an Israeli proposal. We have every expectation that if Hamas agrees to the proposal, as was transmitted to them, an Israeli proposal, that Israel would say yes,” White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told ABC News.
In this context, a leader in the Hamas movement told Al Mayadeen that the movement would not send a delegation to Cairo on Wednesday for new negotiations starting from “point zero” again after agreeing to the previous proposal. He added, “Our basic condition now is that we obtain official, declared, and explicit Israeli approval for the previous proposal; otherwise, it is not possible to enter into rounds and discussions from scratch.”
He expressed surprise at “the US administration’s constant request from the mediators to agree first while the Israeli side does not agree,” and therefore, “we will not discuss any proposal unless there is Israeli approval for it first.”
Among Israelis, Palestinians, and the US, there is a growing consensus that Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu and his fellow ministers do not want any end to the war, even at the cost of the lives of Israelis held captive in Gaza by Hamas.
Channel 12 reported that after the Israeli army announced on Monday that four more Israeli captives held by Hamas had died, families of the captives accused the government of “wanting the war to continue forever” and that they were “ready to sacrifice the prisoners.”
Many of the 240 Israeli soldiers and civilians taken captive by Hamas on 7 October have been killed by the same Israeli bombing of Gaza that has killed over 37,000 Palestinians in the past seven months.
The families’ statement called on Netanyahu to “go out to the public and announce his acceptance of the deal,” noting that there are parties in the government that “want eternal war.”
In an interview with Time Magazine on 28 May, US President Joe Biden also suggested that Netanyahu is seeking to prolong the war.
Asked whether he thought Netanyahu wanted to extend the war for his own political reasons, Biden said: “There is every reason for people to draw that conclusion.”
Ministers in Netanyahu’s governing coalition, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir, have made clear they want the war to continue. They wish to ethnically cleanse Gaza and annex it to Israel for its gas resources and its land, which they want for future Jewish colonization.
Both have indicated they may leave the governing coalition if a ceasefire is reached, forcing Netanyahu to call for new elections and possibly lose power. Netanyahu is currently under investigation on corruption charges, which may result in imprisonment if he loses his position as prime minister.
According to Denisova’s behests
colonelcassad
June 4, 14:07
The UN found no cases of rape during the Hamas attack on Israel.
The UN reviewed 5,000 photographs and 50 hours of video and audio from October 7 and determined there was no evidence of sexual violence.
The October 7 mass rape was just another Israeli fake news, like the news about 40 beheaded babies.
@parstodayrussian
According to Denisova’s behests.
This has never happened before and here it is again.
Damage to buildings in Sektkor Gaza according to UN data by May 31, 2024.
The scale of destruction is quite comparable to the destruction in the Warsaw Ghetto in the last stages of its existence.
The US will impose sanctions against the ICC
June 5, 9:51
The US House of Representatives passed legislation on sanctions against the ICC.
The bill proposes to apply property and visa restrictions to persons who participate in any attempt to investigate, arrest, detain, or prosecute any protected person in the United States or allied countries.
Israeli army raises reservist call-up number by 50,000
The army said the decision relates to a need for more personnel in Rafah but comes as Tel Aviv has stepped up threats against Lebanon
News Desk
JUN 5, 2024
(Photo credit: Michael Giladi/Flash90)
The Israeli army said on 5 June that it is raising the number of reservist soldiers that the military is authorized to call up from 300,000 to 350,000.
The army said that the decision has nothing to do with Hezbollah’s attacks against Israel’s north and instead relates to the ongoing operation in Gaza’s southernmost city of Rafah needing more military personnel than initially expected.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made a speech earlier on Wednesday during a visit to Kiryat Shmona, the northern settlement that has been among the main targets of the Lebanese resistance and was subjected to massive fires due to rocket attacks in recent days.
Tel Aviv is “prepared for an extremely powerful action in the north,” Netanyahu said.
“Whoever thinks that he can harm us and we will sit with our hands clasped has made a major mistake,” the premier went on to say.
“The ground burned yesterday and I am happy you put it out,” Netanyahu told firefighters, adding that “the ground also burned in Lebanon,” referring to fires that erupted in south Lebanon on 4 June as a result of indiscriminate Israeli bombardment, including illegal white phosphorus shelling.
Israel called up 287,000 reservists a few months earlier. The cap was initially set at 300,000 before being raised to 360,000 in the first weeks of the war. It was then brought back down to 300,000 and is now being raised to 350,000.
The raising of the call-up count comes as Israel continues its brutal operation in Gaza’s southernmost city of Rafah, which began on 7 May, resulting in numerous massacres and the forced displacement of around one million Palestinians. Heavy clashes are raging in the city between the army and the Palestinian resistance, including Hamas’ armed wing, the Qassam Brigades, and other groups.
It also comes as Hezbollah has stepped up the intensity of the daily operations it has been carrying out against Israel since 8 October. Due to numerous Hezbollah rocket and drone attacks since Sunday, massive fires broke out across several northern settlements, injuring at least ten reservists and settlers, and have continued for two days.
For months, Israel has been threatening to expand its indiscriminate campaign of airstrikes against southern Lebanon into a full-blown assault, citing the need to return tens of thousands of settlers who have been forced out of their homes as a result of the Hezbollah attacks.
Settlers from the north have reached a state of heightened frustration due to what they say is their government’s inability to protect them and push the Lebanese resistance away from the border.
Israeli army Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi said on Tuesday that Tel Aviv was “close to making a decision” regarding Hezbollah’s daily attacks.
“If Israel wants to wage a comprehensive war, we are ready for it,” Hezbollah’s Deputy Secretary-General, Naim Qassem, said on 4 June.
Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar reported this week that the UK warned Lebanon that Israel is planning an offensive against the country in mid-June, calling on Beirut to “make the necessary provisions” for war.
Half of Gaza's population faces death, starvation by mid-July: UN
Deaths due to famine have been steadily increasing as Israel continues to block the entry of aid
News Desk
JUN 5, 2024
(Photo Credit: Reuters)
A joint report by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the UN World Food Programme (WFP) released on 5 June states that over one million Palestinians may face fatal levels of starvation by mid-July.
“Between mid-March and mid-July, half of the population of the Gaza Strip (1.1 million people) is expected to face catastrophic conditions and the entire population of the Gaza Strip is expected to face crisis or worse levels of acute food,” the joint FAO-WFP report reads.
The report continued, “According to the [Integrated Food Security Phase Classification] Famine Review Committee, as of March 2024, all evidence pointed towards a major acceleration of starvation-related death and malnutrition.”
The FAO-WFP report states that the movement of humanitarian aid access is constrained both into Gaza and within its territory.
“Humanitarian assistance remains the primary source of essential items since early October, given ongoing heavy restrictions on imports of commercial goods,” the report adds.
The report also states that the consequences of Israel’s aggressions have spread eastward towards the West Bank and the occupied East Jerusalem, where “violent incidents, mobility restrictions and border closures has contributed to a 22 percent year-on-year contraction of GDP in the fourth quarter of 2023.”
Emergency recommendations put forward by the two human rights organizations include the proposal by The Flash Appeal for Palestine, which “requests $2.8 billion for April to December 2024. This funding will aim to address the needs of 2.3 million people in the Gaza Strip and 800,000 people in the West Bank. Approximately $782.1 million is to be allocated for food security interventions.”
These interventions include ensuring the supply of fuel and cooking gas to aid humanitarian efforts and help keep services like mills and bakeries in working condition. They also seek to help restore the agriculture, livestock, and fishing sectors to ensure sustained food production.
Another scheme would be to establish a secure humanitarian corridor to help the access of food items to the Gaza Strip.
A report released by Gaza’s Government media office on Monday stated that thousands of children aged five and under may die as a result of Israel’s systematic use of starvation.
“More than 3,500 children under the age of five are at risk of death in the Gaza Strip due to starvation policies, lack of food, the absence of nutritional supplements, and the prevention of aid by the occupation,” the statement read.
Israel has been actively delaying the entry of needed aid into Gaza, per an Oxfam report, some of these delays last upwards of 20 days.
Humanitarian aid trucks stuck at the Rafah crossing have reported food items rotting on board before reaching the besieged enclave.
Other nations highlighted alongside Palestine in the FAO–WFP report as hotspots with high concern include Mali, Sudan, Haiti, and South Sudan.
Over 1,000 settlers storm Al-Aqsa Mosque ahead of Jerusalem Flag March
Israel deployed thousands of police to secure the incursion and prevent Palestinians from entering the holy site
News Desk
JUN 5, 2024
(Photo Credit: AHMAD GHARABLI/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES)
Over a thousand Israeli settlers stormed the Al-Aqsa Mosque grounds in occupied East Jerusalem under police protection on the morning of 5 June.
The raid of the holy site came as Israeli settlers prepared to participate in the annual flag march of “Jerusalem Day,” commemorating the 1967 six-day war that saw Israel occupy East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
The Islamic Endowments Department in Jerusalem reported that at least 1,091 settlers stormed Al-Aqsa Mosque compound.
According to Roya, the settlers performed Talmudic rituals and dances during their incursion, while Israeli forces prevented Palestinians from entering the holy site.
The provocative acts by Israeli setters break decades-long international agreements that prohibit incursions, prayers, and rituals by non-Muslims.
Local reports say the setters were joined by rabbis and far-right former Israeli lawmaker Moshe Feiglin. The settlers performed Jewish rituals near the Al-Qattanin market and Al-Qattanin Gate, one of the main entrances of the courtyards of Al-Aqsa.
Israeli security forces deployed over 3,000 members in East Jerusalem to secure Wednesday's march, setting up military checkpoints on some of the occupied city’s main roads.
The flag march is set to pass through East Jerusalem’s majority Muslim neighborhoods, as Israeli forces have closed the area from the Damascus Gate to Bab al-Sahira. It will begin from the Hebron Gate and King George Street, where settlers will pass through the Damascus Gate to the Western Wall.
“The permission given by the fascist occupation government to the settler gangs to organize the so-called ‘Flags March’ in the streets of occupied Al-Quds [Jerusalem] … confirms the arrogance of this fascist government and the occupation’s approach aimed at Judaizing the sanctities,” Hamas wrote in a statement Wednesday.
“We warn the occupation of the consequences of continuing these criminal policies against our sanctities, especially Al-Aqsa Mosque. We affirm that the resistance, which is writing heroic chapters in the Al-Aqsa Flood battle across our Palestinian land and is pursuing the occupation and its settlers in the West Bank, will find ways to cause pain to this criminal enemy, ensuring the restraint of its extremist settler leaders,” the statement adds.
The resistance movement called upon the Palestinian people to mobilize and confront Israel’s plans against Al-Aqsa Mosque and called upon the Arab and Muslim peoples and those who support the Palestinian cause to escalate their pressure against Israel.
Several Israeli lawmakers and ministers, including far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, have planned to attend the march.
The Islamic Christian Commission for Supporting Jerusalem and the Holy Sanctities spoke about the dangers of Israeli aggravation at Al-Aqsa grounds, calling upon Palestinians to confront the settlers storming the site.
A group of fighters snuck from Rafah towards the Kerem Shalom border crossing and opened fire at Israeli army positions
News Desk
JUN 6, 2024
(Photo credit: Abed Rahim Khatib/Flash90)
Hamas’ Qassam Brigades claimed responsibility for an attempted infiltration into Israel on 6 June, during which fighters snuck from Gaza’s southernmost city of Rafah to an area near the Kerem Shalom border crossing and ambushed soldiers.
“In an operation behind the [enemy] lines, the Qassam Mujahideen were able to penetrate the fence and attack the headquarters of the enemy division operating in the city of Rafah, south of the Gaza Strip,” the Qassam Brigades said in a statement.
A group of Palestinian resistance fighters attempted to infiltrate Israel early on 6 June, using the cover of fog to sneak their way from Gaza’s southernmost city of Rafah towards the Kerem Shalom border crossing.
The attempt began at around 4:00 am, according to an Israeli army probe. The probe says the surveillance camera spotted “suspicious” movement in the fog.
It adds that soldiers from the Desert Reconnaissance Battalion were deployed to the scene and that at around 5:00 am, the fighters opened fire at the Israeli forces. The investigation says the resistance fighters were armed with assault rifles and RPGs.
Two were killed in a drone strike and a third by tank shelling, while the fourth resistance fighter may have escaped back to Gaza, according to the probe. It added that the fighters were not able to cross the barrier.
The army said it is looking into how the fighters were able to reach the border area.
“The battle went on for many minutes and at the end of the heavy exchange of fire, one of the terrorists managed to escape back to Rafah, despite the tanks and aircraft that were flown to the area,” Israeli news site Ynet reported on Thursday morning.
The operation came as heavy clashes were raging across Rafah, a month after Israel launched its brutal assault on the city.
The Qassam Brigades announced earlier on Thursday that its fighters detonated a booby-trapped tunnel entrance near a group of five soldiers west of the southern city, effectively “eliminating” them.
Israel took over the Rafah border crossing on 7 May and has since been pushing troops into the city under violent bombardment, defying repeated international warnings and displacing around one million Palestinians. Several Israeli attacks on tents near Rafah, and where Palestinians fled from Rafah, have resulted in dozens of civilian deaths.
Tel Aviv had been saying before it launched the operation that Rafah was Hamas’ final stronghold. Yet the group’s armed wing remains entrenched across the Gaza Strip along with other factions that continue to target Israeli forces in daily operations.
Israel Threatening to Take on Hezbollah After Cross-Border Attacks Produce Intense Wildfires
Posted on June 5, 2024 by Yves Smith
Israel Prime Minister Netanyahu has just visited the border area in northern Israel and vowed to take “intense action” against Hezbollah, as reported in lead stories in the Jerusalem Post and the Times of Israel. By what some may regard as an odd coincidence of timing, this announcement came the same day that a Syrian who shot at the US embassy in Beirut was injured in return fire and taken captive by the Lebanese army.
Back to the main event. We have recounted Alastair Crooke some months back describing how Israel has been politically committed to ending Hezbollah strikes into the border area with Lebanon, which has resulted in large scale evacuation, with reports ranging from 60,000 to as many as 100,000. Not as well covered has been that Hezbollah has been making these attacks to create a second mini-front in the Gaza war (as in if Israel would enter into a settlement with Palestinians, the attacks would presumably be dialed back to their former nuisance level) and that Israel has been firing into southern Lebanon, making life similarly miserable for its border town denizens.
The displacement of these Israeli settlers has been a festering economic and political wound. Businesses there are shuttered. Israel is providing temporary housing. The settlers say they can’t/won’t go back until Hezbollah has been removed from the border, which Israel treats as meaning Hezbollah must withdraw or be forced to retreat to the Litani River. Mind you, Israel did not get that far in its failed 2006 war with Lebanon.1 By all accounts, Hezbollah is much stronger than then and Israel weaker.2 Hezbollah leader Hassam Nasrallah has said Lebanon will not cede one inch of territory to Israel.
So we have a bit of an out-trade.
Again, back when Crooke first started warning that Israel had committed itself to attacking Lebanon so as to make life safe again for its settlers, defense minister Benny Gantz started blustering that Israel would force Lebanon out of its own border areas if it had to. From the Times of Israel in December:
War Cabinet Minister Benny Gantz on Friday warned that Israel would be forced to push the Hezbollah terror group away from the Lebanese border if the international community could not do so through diplomatic means.
Note that the US and Israel idea of negotiating is Lebanon should cede its border areas because they say so, another element of the out-trade.
However, despite the displaced Israeli setlers remaining vocal, not much has happened to advance their cause until perhaps today. One reason is that the IDF has gotten bogged down in Gaza. That underscores a second problem, the IDF has performed much less well against Hamas than officials had expected.
But the third and big problem is that Israel is very likely to lose and lose more bigly against Hezbollah than in 2006. As both Scott Ritter and Crooke have explained, Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas have all organized themselves to fight Israel and the US. Both wage wars the same way: airpower heavy combat, with the plan/preference being to mount intense, overwhelming, but comparatively short conflicts. So all three forces have created deep and extensive tunnel networks so as to be beyond Israel and US fire. They have also worked out how to be effective with lots of relatively cheap weapons. Crooke stresses that they set out to fight attritional wars, which neither the US or Israel can handle well. and to dial up and down intensity of the engagements.
So if the failure to get the border town settlers back into their homes is a festering wound, why has Israel not acted? I have no idea, but some commentators have suggested that saner heads in Israel, particularly in the IDF, have warned that a war with Lebanon would be a very bad idea. The only reason Hezbollah has not welcomed it is that Lebanon is an economic basket case. A war, even a comparatively short one where Hezbollah won, would still produce a lot of costs in terms of physical damage.
What about the hope that the US would ride in to help Israel if Lebanon were to look like it was winning? Many in Israel keenly desire getting the US involved militarily. The fact that Israel has not (yet) escalated with Lebanon suggests they have doubts about how forcefully and effectively the US could intervene. The US has not been able to check the Houthis. US weapons stocks have been drained in the Ukraine war. Hezbollah’s tunnel systems reportedly dwarf those of Hamas. And they have lots more rockets and missiles too, some of them also more sophisticated.
With that high-level overview, things are heating up because they have heated up, literally. The last set of Hezbollah barrages set off wildfires in northern Israel. Israel and Western accounts are depicting this escalation as kicked off by Hezbollah, although that is far from clear:
Hadi
@HadiNasrallah
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Follow Israel is on fire. In response to Israel’s burning of olive trees in Lebanon with white phosphorus, Hezbollah is burning the Israeli settlements in the north. If we burn.. you burn with us
Human Rights Watch confirmed the use of white phosphorus in post October 7 attacks in South Lebanon (but not the allegations of fresh attacks)
The fires resulting from the Hezbollah strikes are fierce:
Sulaiman Ahmed
@ShaykhSulaiman
·
Follow
BREAKING: FIRE RAGES ON IN ISRAEL WITH 16 DEAD AND 7 SOLDIERS INJURED
Several settlements in northern occupied Palestine suffered fires due to rockets launched by Hezbollah, resulting in injuries.
Hence the government feels compelled to Do Something. First from the Times of Israel:
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned on Wednesday that Israel was prepared with an “extremely powerful” response to attacks from Hezbollah in Lebanon, which have escalated significantly in recent days.
“Anyone who thinks that they can harm us and we will sit on our hands is sorely mistaken,” Netanyahu during a visit to the northern city of Kiryat Shmona, which has been largely evacuated since the Lebanon-based terror group began attacking Israeli communities and military posts along the border on a near-daily basis on October 8….
The prime minister visited the area hours after after firefighters confirmed that they had gained control of a series of major blazes in northern Israel sparked by Hezbollah rocket and drone attacks, following some 48 hours of intense firefighting efforts….
Earlier on Wednesday, the government raised the number of reservists the IDF is authorized to call up if needed from 300,000 to 350,000, though military sources told The Times of Israel that the move was related to expanded operations in the Gaza Strip, rather than the northern front.
The IDF said that the cap was increased due to ongoing operations in Gaza’s southernmost city of Rafah, which has taken more additional personnel than initially planned.
And from the Financial Times:
Israeli leaders have threatened to take more “intense action” against Hizbollah after an escalation in cross-border fire, increasing tensions and the prospect of all-out war with the Lebanese militant group.
In a visit to the largely evacuated northern Israeli city of Kiryat Shmona on Wednesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu referred to the fires that raged across much of the region over the past two days, mostly a result of Hizbollah rockets and drone attacks…
“We are prepared for very intense action in the north. One way or another, we will restore security to the north,” he [Netanyahu] added.
The long-serving Israeli leader’s comments come after his military chief, Herzi Halevi, warned that a “point of decision” was fast approaching over whether an offensive would need to be launched in Lebanon….
In recent weeks both Hizbollah and Israel have increased the frequency and range of their strikes. Local leaders and residents in northern Israel have grown exasperated by the inability of the Israeli government to restore security and return people to their homes, and have criticised the absence of a timeframe for a resolution to the crisis.
Hizbollah officials have said that they do not seek to escalate tensions with Israel, but would not halt strikes as long as the conflict in Gaza continues…
Pressure is growing on the Israeli government to act more forcefully against Hizbollah. Apocalyptic night-time images of forests going up in flames have only added to public distress over the loss of security in the north.
Israel is clearly overextended yet feels compelled to make a powerful response. Uber hardliner Ben-Gvir is calling for war against Hezbollah. But what can Israel do that might not wind up being self defeating? Stay tuned.
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1 As I heard from one of the YouTubers commenting on the the 2006 conflict, Israel’s troops did get to the Litani long enough to raise a flag, take a picture, and run away.
2 I am basing this on Scott Ritter, who worked extensively with the IDF in the 1990s. He had a great deal of respect for what they were then. His take since then (my paraphrase) is the IDF has over time both fallen in love with its own mythology and has also become optimized for breaking arms of Palestinian kids.
'Useless, thieves, collaborators': UAE official rails against Palestinian rulers
The UAE was at the forefront of Arab normalization with Israel under the auspices of the US
News Desk
JUN 6, 2024
(Photo Credit: WAM)
Top UAE and Palestinian officials had an “unusual shouting match” during a meeting with US State Secretary Anthony Blinken and other Arab authorities at the end of April in Saudi Arabia, according to informed sources who spoke with Axios.
Pent-up tensions flared between UAE Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed and Hussein al-Sheikh, a close deputy to Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas, after the latter said the West Bank-ruling organization “isn't getting enough political and financial support" to advance reforms and create a new government, as Washington and Arab countries have tasked them.
Following this claim, the Emirati foreign minister “pushed back” and told Al-Sheikh that Abu Dhabi has not witnessed any “significant reform” within the PA.
He then called the PA leadership “Ali Baba and the forty thieves,” charged them with being “useless,” and said that "replacing them with one another will only lead to the same result."
"Why would the UAE give assistance to the Palestinian Authority without real reforms?" the top Emirati diplomat reportedly asked.
An Emirati official who spoke with Axios confirmed the remarks and said: “His Highness added that if the Palestinian Authority paid as much attention to its own people as it does to security coordination with Israel, the Palestinians will be in much better shape.”
In response to this, the PA official shouted back, saying that “nobody will dictate” how the PA will conduct its reforms.
In addition to Blinken, the foreign ministers of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Qatar, and Kuwait were also present at the Riyadh summit.
As the meeting to discuss the Gaza genocide went off the rails, the sources say Saudi Foreign Minister Faisal Bin Farhan Al Saud “tried to cool down the heated exchange and said reforms take time.”
Nevertheless, his efforts were for naught as the Emirati foreign minister left the room in anger. He reportedly returned a few minutes later after Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman al-Safadi went to speak with him.
Bin Zayed then “apologized to Blinken that he had to witness the internal squabble.”
Bad blood grew between the PA and the UAE after Abu Dhabi normalized ties with Israel in 2020 under the auspices of the US. Since then, Ramallah rejected financial assistance from the oil-rich nation at least twice.
In 2021, Israeli think tank the Center for Near East Policy Research reported that the UAE slashed funding for the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in the wake of the normalization deal.
First Yemeni, Iraqi joint operation targets weapons shipments to Israel
Several ships en route to the port of Haifa were targeted by Yemeni and Iraqi drones
News Desk
JUN 6, 2024
(Photo credit: X)
The Yemeni Armed Forces announced on 6 June that it carried out two joint operations with the Islamic Resistance of Iraq (IRI) coalition, coming just weeks after Yemeni and Iraqi officials vowed to step up coordination.
BREAKING | Yemen Armed Forces announces that it conducted joint operations with the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, which targeted three ships heading to Israel's Haifa port. pic.twitter.com/3FYnWhMmHE
— The Cradle (@TheCradleMedia) June 6, 2024
“The Yemeni Armed Forces carried out two joint military operations with the Islamic Resistance of Iraq … The first targeted two ships that were carrying military equipment in the port of Haifa, and the second targeted a ship that violated our decision to ban entry into the port of Haifa in occupied Palestine,” said Yemeni army spokesman Yahya Saree on Thursday.
“The two operations were carried out with a number of drones, hitting their targets accurately,” Saree added.
Last month, the leader of Yemen’s Ansarallah movement, Abdul Malik al-Houthi, held a phone call with the chief of Iraq’s Kataib Hezbollah, Abu Hussein al-Hamidawi, during which the two resistance leaders discussed coordinating efforts to confront Israel.
Hamidawi “praised the military operations of the Yemeni forces, which contributed greatly to imposing the ban on Israeli maritime navigation … and stressed the necessity of maintaining readiness and high coordination between the forces of the axis of resistance, especially between Iraq and Yemen, to support the Palestinian people.”
As part of the naval campaign waged by Ansarallah and the armed forces of Yemen’s Sanaa government since the start of the war in Gaza, Yemeni forces have recently expanded their operations against Israeli maritime interests to include the Mediterranean Sea.
The Yemeni army had previously been attacking Israeli-linked ships and ships bound for Israeli ports across the Red Sea, Arab Sea, Gulf of Aden, and Indian Ocean. It also targeted US and British vessels in response to the brutal campaign of airstrikes launched by Washington and London against Yemen since January.
In response to deadly US airstrikes on Yemen late last month, which killed at least 16 people, Yemen’s Armed Forces announced in a statement on 31 May that it targeted Washington’s USS Eisenhower aircraft carrier in the Red Sea.
Sanaa’s forces said they struck the aircraft carrier again on 1 June.
The IRI has also continued to carry out frequent attacks against sites within Israel since it halted operations against US bases in Iraq and Syria in late January.
‘Digital kill chains’: The dark side of tech in warfare
Are Palantir Technologies, Starlink, and other tech giants seizing the opportunity to test their products’ war applications on civilians in Gaza, turning the besieged strip into a proving ground for their technology?
Anis Raiss
JUN 6, 2024
(Photo Credit: The Cradle)
In recent years, the intersection of technology and warfare has come under public fire, raising profound ethical and legal questions about state military use of advanced tech tools. The role of advanced data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) in modern conflicts is under intense scrutiny, especially when civilian lives are at stake.
As the genocide in Gaza advances, attention is turning to the companies whose technologies may be facilitating Israel’s daily atrocities, with US-based Palantir Technologies among them.
While the International Criminal Court (ICC) is stepping in to address genocide accusations, the tech barons who design and supply the tools of warfare remain largely unchallenged.
Since 8 October, over 36,000 Palestinians have been killed in a brutal conflict that has left more casualties than all other wars combined over the past two years. This staggering loss of innocent lives has renewed scrutiny of the technologies that are incorrectly and systematically targeting civilians instead of combatants.
Palantir’s integration in Israel
Companies like Palantir Technologies, led by CEO Alex Karp, have been implicated in enabling some of these atrocities. Its advanced data analytics and AI tools that supposedly provide “precision targeting” are mass-killing civilians and have transformed warfare into a calculated and systematic campaign of extermination with little human oversight.
Founded in 2003 by Karp and Peter Thiel, Palantir Technologies has grown from a secretive data analytics startup to a cornerstone of modern military and intelligence operations. Initially funded by the CIA’s venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel, Palantir’s tech products have become integral to numerous US government agencies, including the FBI, Department of Defense, and various police departments.
This deep entanglement with US intelligence and military bodies paved the way for Palantir’s strategic alignment with Israel.
The tech giant’s involvement in Israel predates its formal agreements by many years. The company established an office in Tel Aviv in 2015, strategically located overlooking Rothschild Boulevard on one side and Yehuda Halevy Street on the other.
This location underscores the company’s deep integration into the Israeli tech ecosystem. Karp himself highlighted Palantir’s strong ties to Israel in a December 2023 interview on Fox Business, stating, “We are very well known in Israel. Israel appreciates our product.”
Formalizing the partnership
The partnership between Palantir and Israel’s military began to solidify with a formal agreement signed on 12 January 2024 – three months after the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza began – following a visit by company executives to Israel, during which they held their first board meeting of the year in Tel Aviv.
As Palantir Executive Vice President Josh Harris stated, “Both parties have mutually agreed to harness Palantir’s advanced technology in support of war-related missions,” a euphemism for what has been qualified as enabling genocidal actions.
Palantir’s arsenal of technological tools – akin to digital weapons of mass destruction – is currently being deployed by the occupation army, leaving no doubt about the company’s complicity in the ongoing genocide.
The brutal reality of precision
The recent carnage in Rafah on 26 May, in which Israel bombed a refugee camp, killing dozens of Palestinians, and the deaths of seven World Central Kitchen workers in April during airstrikes, highlight the brutal misuse of Palantir’s so-called “precision” technology.
The company’s TITAN system, promoted as a highly accurate AI model designed to enhance targeting precision, epitomizes the problems with Palantir’s claimed high accuracy capabilities. While there is no direct evidence that TITAN, specifically, is used by Israel, the company’s tech claims are integral to its broader product offerings, some of which are employed by Tel Aviv.
Marketed as providing real-time actionable intelligence and integrating sensor data for pinpoint accuracy, Palantir’s TITAN system is touted for reducing collateral damage. However, in Gaza, the deployment of Palantir’s technology has not prevented but facilitated widespread civilian casualties and destruction. The tragedies in Rafah and the deaths of aid workers expose the grotesque irony and devastating human cost of such “accuracy.”
The collaboration has deeply embedded Palantir into Israel’s military infrastructure, providing a technological or “digital” backbone for brutalities in Gaza and other occupied Palestinian territories.
Tech titans in warfare
Given that Palantir has been active in Israel since 2015, the timing of the strategic agreement, dubbed the “Partnership for Battle Tech,” in early 2024 raises serious questions.
Was this a calculated move by Palantir to use the intensified conflict as an opportunity to test their AI models on civilians, turning Gaza into a gruesome proving ground for their technology? This suggestion would cast yet another dark shadow on Palantir’s ethics, implying that their business strategy might involve exploiting human suffering for technological advancement.
Palantir’s deep involvement in Israel’s military infrastructure is part of a broader, troubling pattern of technology enabling warfare. That connection extends to another tech giant – SpaceX’s Starlink, led by Elon Musk. Understanding this intricate relationship is crucial to grasping how modern conflicts are increasingly driven by advanced technologies developed by private corporations.
In Ukraine, the collaboration between Palantir and Starlink starkly illustrates the profound impact of integrated technology on warfare. Palantir’s AI models provide the Ukrainian military with essential data analytics, transforming raw images from drones, satellites, and ground reports into real-time actionable intelligence.
This process, which Palantir’s CEO Karp chillingly refers to as a “digital kill chain,” has become central to Ukraine’s defense strategy, enabling precise targeting and battlefield assessments. Simultaneously, Elon Musk’s Starlink ensures uninterrupted communication for Ukrainian forces, maintaining a continuous flow of critical information vital for modern warfare.
The Ukraine war, of course, has proved catastrophic, with Ukrainian military casualties accumulating in astounding numbers, all while President Volodymyr Zelensky – despite the assistance of cutting-edge technologies from tech barons – and his allies in western capitals pretend otherwise.
Now, Israel’s war on Gaza appears to be descending into a similar quagmire. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, like Zelensky, seems politically detached from the grim military realities on the ground, counting on, it appears, the false illusion of control provided by tech barons through “sophisticated” technological support.
Starlink’s controversial approval in Gaza
On 12 January, the Israeli government approved the use of Starlink services at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza, ostensibly for medical purposes.
This approval should not be viewed as a purely humanitarian gesture. Instead, it lays the groundwork for another potential insidious integration of Palantir and Starlink, mirroring their collaboration in Ukraine.
By enabling advanced satellite communication, Starlink’s approval in Gaza potentially supports military operations, suggesting the establishment of the “digital kill chain” behind the fig leaf of humanitarian aid.
The brutal siege on Al-Shifa Hospital by Israeli forces, involving severe atrocities against both civilians and medical staff, sharply contradicts any supposed altruistic intent behind Starlink’s deployment. After a two-week siege that ended on 1 April, Al-Shifa Hospital was mostly destroyed, and hundreds of dead Palestinians were found in and around the hospital, including in mass graves.
The question arises: was this highly publicized approval of Starlink at Shifa a soft PR salvo laying the groundwork to integrate the company’s products into Israeli military operations inside the Gaza Strip? The timing and context of these developments raise unsettling questions about the actual intentions of both Starlink and Tel Aviv.
Enter Musk
Musk’s highly publicized visit to Israel on 27 November 2023, where he met with Netanyahu, was far from a mere diplomatic event. Musk, who has been meticulously cultivating an image as a champion of free speech via his acquisition of social media Platform X – a role he cultivates like a carefully tailored suit of shining armor – found himself ensnared in a propaganda display orchestrated by Israel.
This scenario is reminiscent of the myth of Icarus, who, despite the heat, flew too close to the sun with wings made of wax and feathers.
Similarly, Musk’s involvement with Netanyahu and the Israeli government, amidst growing scrutiny over war crimes, threatens to destroy his meticulously constructed image. In retrospect, with the ICC’s investigation into war crimes intensifying, this meeting casts a long shadow over Musk’s carefully cultivated persona.
Holding tech execs accountable
Recent legal actions, such as the case in the UK brought by the International Centre of Justice for Palestinians (ICJP) against British ministers, highlight the growing effort to hold enablers of genocide accountable.
Yet, prominent figures in the tech industry remain conspicuously unexamined. But why? This situation mirrors the prosecution of individuals in Nazi Germany who enabled the Holocaust through their technological and logistical support, underscoring the need for comprehensive accountability in modern times.
The statutes of the International Criminal Court (ICC), the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) explicitly recognize various forms of complicity. These include aiding and abetting, which encompass providing the necessary tools and support for committing war crimes and genocide.
This legal framework implies that tech executives whose innovations facilitate large-scale violence should be held accountable under international law.
The intersection of advanced technology and warfare, driven by powerful tech magnates, illustrates a chilling reality: the tools designed to connect and protect are being repurposed to destroy and devastate. Worse yet, it seems war fields like Gaza are viewed as relatively risk-free testing grounds for these tech systems. It is time to make business collaborations with genocide a risk-heavy endeavor, and those efforts must start in the courtroom.
Israel bombs UN-run school in central Gaza, kills at least 40
Israeli genocide of Gaza continues, mostly women and children killed as Palestinians sift through the rubble for human remains
June 06, 2024 by Peoples Dispatch
Photo: WAFA Images
On Thursday June 6, Israeli forces bombed a UN-run school in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, killing over 40 people, mainly women and children.
Videos of the aftermath of the massacre circulated social media and horrified millions, showing pools of blood amid the rubble and men collecting the ragged remains of children’s bodies.
The Government Media Office in Gaza stated, “We hold the ‘israeli’ occupation and the American administration fully responsible for these crimes against humanity and international law, and we call on the world to condemn these crimes and the ‘israeli’-American aggression on the Gaza Strip.”
“We demand the international community and all international and global organizations to pressure the ‘israeli’ occupation to stop the genocide against civilians, children, and women in the Gaza Strip. We demand the international community to prosecute the ‘israeli’ and American war criminals participating in these daily massacres and genocide against civilians in the Gaza Strip,” the statement continued.
A Wafa correspondent reported that an Israeli war plan targeted the upper floors of the school as people were sleeping, resulting in more deaths. Thousands of displaced Palestinians have been sheltering in the school.
Nuseirat refugee camp has been targeted by Israel multiple times since October 7, causing hundreds of victims. The Nuseirat massacre is only one of at least six massacres committed by Israel within a 24-hour period.
Beyond Rafah: What the Zionist Entity is Headed Toward
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on JUNE 6, 2024
Robert Inlakesh
The Zionist regime is now faced with a dead end (Illustrated by Mahdi Rtail; Al Mayadeen English)
The tunnel systems have not been destroyed, the weapons capabilities of the Resistance remain, and the fighters have survived some of the toughest onslaughts the Israelis are capable of mustering.
Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has set the invasion of Rafah as the route to a comprehensive victory against the Palestinian Resistance in Gaza. This is a lie, and the Zionist regime will not achieve its war goals, so what comes next when the Israeli public is faced with the truth?
The Zionist entity launched its genocidal military campaign against the Gaza Strip, claiming that it sought to both dismantle Hamas and retrieve its captives by force. Neither was achieved in around 8 months of confrontations, despite having inflicted massive death and destruction on a scale that hasn’t been seen since the Vietnam War.
Before the Israelis launched their ground incursion into the Gaza Strip, the line of propaganda was to pretend as if their unprecedented bombing campaign was going to dismantle the Palestinian Resistance’s complex web of tunnels underneath the besieged coastal territory. We heard about all the various munitions that were supposedly going to penetrate the tunnel systems and destroy the majority of them, prior to any face-to-face fighting.
When “Israel” did invade the Gaza Strip, it soon became clear that they were not even trying to penetrate the majority of the tunnels, despite their propaganda. The Zionist army came in on the ground, choosing to set up positions in open areas, before packing their soldiers in armored personnel carriers, tanks, and militarized bulldozers, refraining from using infantry to clear areas prior to penetrating them. They were subsequently met with tough resistance from the Palestinian armed factions. As for the tunnels and the attempts to recapture their captives, the rescue missions were all foiled, and the Israelis seemed to only be sealing off tunnel entrances they found, instead of sending forces underground to fight face-to-face.
The Zionist entity then set its sights on Gaza City, choosing to target the northern sector of the coastal territory in the initial stages of the invasion. Despite their attempts to completely ethnically cleanse the north, hundreds of thousands remained steadfast on their lands and refused to leave. Petty tactics were then employed by the Israeli ground forces, such as flying their flag in areas they managed to reach temporarily in their armored vehicles and tanks.
All this was going on as their leadership claimed that the “Hamas headquarters” was situated under the Al-Shifa Hospital, for which they released a CGI video depicting a multi-layered tunnel system. After finally invading the Shifa medical complex, the Zionist regime was outed as a bunch of liars as no headquarters was found there. Nonetheless, their evidence-free conspiracy theories about Hamas using hospitals as military headquarters’ and bases continued to drive the invasion of the north.
Suddenly, after being pointed out as having fabricated evidence in the north of the alleged “Hamas bases” and “Hamas headquarters” underneath hospitals, they began to pivot to Khan Younis. Khan Younis is the “real Hamas headquarters” they told their own settler population and the international community, deciding to invade the city in December, after the conclusion of a brief cessation of hostilities and prisoner exchange. In early January, they had already besieged the city of Khan Younis completely, finding no “Hamas headquarters”, and then began to obsess over the southernmost city of Rafah.
For months, the threats to invade Rafah were constant, and Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, asserted that his regime could not win the war without invading Rafah, and we repeatedly heard about the authorization of the operation to force a ground incursion into the area. This was met with international condemnation and a series of contradictory remarks from the US President, Joe Biden, who still can’t decide on what his “red line” actually is.
On May 6, Hamas called the Israeli-US bluff and accepted a ceasefire proposal. This was despite the fact that Netanyahu had been talking about his unwillingness to accept any ceasefire with Hamas for over a week prior. Although the Israeli premier was promising an invasion of Rafah, the US Secretary of State was publicly lauding the ceasefire proposal and urging Hamas to take it during his visit to West Asia. When Hamas decided to accept the proposal, which was almost identical to the one that was promoted by the US and elements within the Israeli regime’s leadership, it caused shockwaves, and the Zionist military responded by launching its invasion that same day.
The Israelis made a fatal mistake, however, deciding to also invade the al-Zaytoun neighborhood near Gaza City and Jabalia, both located in the north of the Gaza Strip. The invasion of Jabalia appeared to be an attempt to try and pull off a propaganda victory, by extracting the bodies of Israeli captives killed by their own airstrikes. However, they were surprised by the level of fighting waged against their soldiers by the Palestinian Resistance, who not only inflicted heavy losses on the Zionist invaders but, in the case of Jabalia, managed to pull off one of the toughest battles of the entire war as well.
The Zionist entity is renowned for concealing its casualties, but it could not hide all of them, and the public was exposed to daily reports about incidents in which their soldiers were killed and dismembered. This was a major embarrassment because the Israelis had told their own people that they managed to dismantle all of the Resistance battalions in the north months before, which clearly was not true.
Then came the announcement last Saturday from Abu Obeida, the spokesperson for the al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, who informed the world that an ambush had taken place in which the Resistance group managed to capture, kill, and injure the members of a force that they lured into a tunnel. The very next day, after increased rocket fire into the surrounding settlements during the weeks prior, al-Qassam launched a barrage of rockets from Rafah that struck north of “Tel Aviv”, managing to cause impacts and bypass the Iron Dome system. Embarrassed and in disarray once again, the Zionist entity decided to commit a series of massacres against civilians, the most egregious taking place against refugees sheltering in tents northwest of Rafah City.
All of this is to say that the Zionist regime is now faced with a dead end, as it will not find victory in Rafah and will fail as it did everywhere else. Not one of the dozen armed Resistance groups operating in the Gaza Strip have been defeated, let alone Hamas. The tunnel systems have not been destroyed, the weapons capabilities of the resistance remain, and the fighters have survived some of the toughest onslaughts the Israelis are capable of mustering. Moreover, the captives have not been extracted by force and now they have lost even more in Jabalia. So what is next?
The Zionists are out of real options in the Gaza Strip, they have not found any reasonable plan for a day-after scenario, and once they meet failure in Rafah, there is nowhere else they can claim is the “real Hamas headquarters” any longer. This is why they have to pivot away from Gaza and find another target.
The single biggest thorn in the side of the Israelis right now is the Lebanese Resistance. Over the course of the war, Hezbollah and its allies have annihilated the Israeli monitoring and defense capabilities, smashed their military sites to pieces, destroyed many settler housing units in the bordering settlements, and forced over 100,000 Israeli settlers to flee in fear. The Israeli economy in the north has been paralyzed and the image of the Zionist army has been dismantled, as Hezbollah uses Israeli soldiers and military bases as test subjects for its military equipment.
What the Israelis could do is to either wrap up their invasion of Rafah quickly or continue it in a slow fashion, while deciding to launch a limited military operation against Lebanon. In the event that this occurs, it is not likely for the Zionist regime to commit suicide, and so, it is more likely that, despite the propaganda that they will release about such an operation, they would attempt to prevent it from spilling over into a full-scale war.
If “Israel” chooses this option, it understands well that Hezbollah will respond with unprecedented strikes that will shake the entity to its core, which will result in the sidelining of the Gaza war. Not only will the Israeli settler population be focused almost entirely on Lebanon, but so too will most of the world and certainly the international community. This would provide them with the opportunity to bring a close to the Gaza war and conclude a prisoner exchange while ensuring that it looks like they are attempting to restore their broken image. Such a scenario would also buy Netanyahu and his leadership more time in power.
If this happens, the course of the struggle will not come to a conclusion, however, as there is another very obvious front and that is the occupied West Bank. It is possible that the Israeli leadership could then shift its focus again, this time to the usurpation of what is known as area C of the West Bank; an area which constitutes around 60% of the total territory. For a long time, the Zionists have sought to seize this area, but due to external pressures from their allies, they have refrained from doing so.
The excuse in the West Bank will be the Resistance groups, which are primarily operating in the north of the territory and would work to justify a large-scale military campaign. In the event that a ceasefire is already concluded in Gaza, they could then go in without the fear of the resistance in the Gaza Strip pulling off a major defensive attack and seizing the land they seek. This would be the embodiment of their decades-long plot to divide the four parts of Palestine from each other, that being the 1948 territories, occupied eastern part of al-Quds, the West Bank, and Gaza. If Netanyahu manages to end his bloody campaign of terrorism and genocide in the West Bank, it is the one place where he can actually extract what appears on paper to be a victory and it may be enough, in his mind, to save him from the inevitable political death he is slowly dying today.
What is mentioned above may not occur in the exact order listed, but it is almost inevitable that the war on Gaza is going to shift to Lebanon and the West Bank in the foreseeable future. Unless the Zionist regime comes up with another excuse to maintain the course of the war in Gaza for a longer period of time, which will delay the pivot to other fronts, it seems like what lies beyond Rafah will be Lebanon and/or the West Bank. The decision to delay the invasion of Rafah for so long seems to have been down to the fact that this will be the end of their justifications for remaining at war in Gaza. The response to what the Zionist Entity is planning will be in the hands of the resistance.
How the resistance ensures Israeli capitulation
Hannan Hussain
The Israeli occupation’s heinous crimes and massacres in Gaza will not go unanswered, and nothing can relent the Palestinian resistance.
The latter fired a large barrage of rockets toward Tel Aviv and has since cut through occupation defenses in northern Gaza. The resistance’s highly coordinated operations also make it abundantly clear that all occupation soldier positions are well within sight and fully exposed. Rafah as the launchpad of resistance attacks says it all: the site where scores of brave Palestinians are clustered together in defiance of Israeli illegal occupation and continuing onslaught. The resistance reaction out of Rafah thus captures the spectacular symbolism of the Palestinian cause, its deep roots, and its unwillingness to cede an inch to genocidal forces that prey on innocent Gazan lives.
“[Continuation of the Israeli aggression] means more Israeli captives in the hands of the Palestinian resistance in the Gaza Strip,” said senior resistance official Bassem Naim in a recent interview to Al Mayadeen.
The Israeli occupation deserves to be put on the back foot for its unspeakable atrocities against Palestinian civilians in Rafah. Scores of innocent faces were burned to death in unwarranted airstrikes, and the genocidal regime thinks it can proceed with such murders upon will.
This is a recipe for occupation destruction. The resistance has shown that “Israel’s” deliberate bombardment will warrant swift, high-precision attacks that expose occupation vulnerabilities. These retaliatory attacks are also geared towards settling Palestinian blood with firm defiance. Such were the scenes when resistance operations continued to push up IOF casualties on various fronts, and confronted occupation troops in the Tel al-Hawa neighborhood of southwestern Gaza city. It is the undeniable right of Palestinian resistance forces to respond to “Israel’s” murderous campaign against civilians. The occupation was repeatedly warned but never listened. Palestinians will not blink twice in putting their principled resolve into action for all times to come.
Interestingly, the Israeli occupation is feeling the heat and should prepare for continued pushback if genocidal massacres do not cease. The resistance has shown it can strike Israeli personnel carriers, muster a powerful response to invading Israeli helicopters, target soldier coordinates, occupation troop positions, and any so-called “defense” that the genocidal regime insists on. This is important because war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu is leading a campaign of assassinating all Palestinians, and is banking on an unwarranted occupation status-quo to justify this slaughter worldwide.
But make no mistake. Resistance forces continue to halt IOF attempts to penetrate the Gaza Strip on all fronts, and enjoy asymmetrical leverage in ambush tactics. Occupation forces appear to capitulate against these tactical strengths and have no response to the resistance’s complex counteroffensive operations across the Strip. Invading forces have been compelled to retreat, a significant example of the on-ground effectiveness and strategic prowess of the resistance. From occupation tanks to bulldozers, none of the Israeli assets are outside of the resistance’s attack radar. The use of heavy-caliber mortar shells also sends occupation forces scrambling, and makes clear that US support for the genocide will not go unnoticed.
As IOF casualties mount, the message to “Israel” and its allies is telling: your actions will determine the strength of Palestine’s legitimate reaction. The resistance is absolutely correct to call out Washington for its brazen and uninterrupted support for “Israel’s” genocidal actions in the Strip. After all, without Washington’s cover and diplomatic support, Israeli occupation forces wouldn’t have dared to attack the forcibly displaced families in Rafah. The massacres are rightly described as a “blatant challenge, complete disregard, and defiance” of the International Court of Justice (ICJ)’s order to cease aggression.
Palestine will never be a murder field for “Israel” to mount its atrocities and get away unscathed. The resistance makes sure of it by releasing footage and exposing Israeli falsehoods about the extent of its bombardment, genocidal atrocities, and mass slaughter. This is not the only front where the resistance is doubly effective. It has led ground and aerial attacks at any given point in time.
For instance, its rockets into Tel Aviv clearly prove that no occupation target is safe if Palestinian lives are compromised through a deliberate policy of obliteration, hate, and brutality. Behind “Israel’s” impunity lie Western allies, who are directly responsible for shielding decades of occupation war crimes to enable genocidal belligerence. Against this backdrop, the resistance will continue to break this colonial nexus that has dehumanized Palestinians and normalized assaults on their liberties and survival.
It shows in the continued damage dealt to the IOF, which counts its number of injured officers and soldiers at 3,657 since the beginning of the war. But don’t give into the occupation’s official acknowledgement of losses. It has a habit of fabricating casualty tolls and deliberately downplaying battleground losses. The actual injury figures run higher, according to media and hospital reports.
As “Israel” rages ahead with its genocide in Gaza, that IOF toll will shoot up significantly. And it is “Israel” that bears full responsibility for what is destined to follow.
Eight months into the most recent flaring up of the decades long conflict and Israel's military cannot match the unwavering resistance of the Palestinian masses.
As the Israeli army faces severe personnel shortages, fatigue and desertion, and with their political leadership focusing on personal survival, a top Israeli general is predicting that the end of Israel is near at hand.
Dan Cohen
Thursday 6 June 2024
This article is reproduced from Uncaptured Media, with thanks.
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On 9 October, two days after the surprise Hamas military assault on Israeli bases and settlements surrounding Gaza, prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu pledged to defeat Hamas.
However, eight months later, Israel has failed to achieve its stated goal. Instead, it is facing unprecedented international isolation, political instability, charges of genocide at the top world court, and arrest warrants for its leadership. With no end in sight as Netanyahu rejects ceasefire proposals, the Israeli military is now facing its most dire challenge yet: personnel shortages, fatigue and desertion.
A series of articles in Israeli media reveal the depths of the challenge Israel is facing.
Amir Rapaport, a top Israeli journalist with close links to the military establishment, wrote that army brass are worried by “the physical and mental exhaustion and burnout of the soldiers, particularly those in regular service, alongside a severe shortage of commanders”.
He added that these shortages are “present throughout the ranks of the military, with the most severe shortage among field-grade commanders – platoon and company commanders, and even beyond that. Training each commander is a process that takes years, and the shortage is felt everywhere.”
The Israeli military admits to the deaths of 644 soldiers, and 3,703 injuries since 7 October. However, that injury figure is almost certainly an undercount. In April, the Israeli outlet Calcalist reported that 7,200 soldiers were injured, nearly double what the government’s official statistics revealed. Those numbers have surely increased by now as the Palestinian resistance in Gaza has carried out numerous successful attacks on invading Israeli forces.
Those who continue to fight are tasked with operating in areas that the Israeli military declared were conquered months ago. On 6 January, Israel claimed that Hamas had been defeated in Jabaliya refugee camp. However, soldiers returned there in May, waging a 20-day operation that many described as “Sisyphean” – a reference to the Greek myth about a king punished with the endless task of moving a boulder up a steep hill, only to watch it roll down again.
One company commander in the 196th Battalion complained: “It’s frustrating to see this, seven and a half months after the war began.”
Missing from mainstream accounts is that Israel committed heinous massacres in its second failed reconquest of Jabaliya, leaving decomposing bodies amid large swaths of rubble.
Meanwhile, an IDF manpower directorate survey published by the Israeli news site Ynet found that only 42 percent of Israeli military career officers indicated that they would like to continue serving in the military, compared to 49 percent in August 2023. This decrease shocked Israeli army brass, which had assumed that morale would increase in times of war.
“The long war is exhausting, family life is affected for both men and women who don’t see their spouses and children, and the compensation is inadequate given the long working hours alongside the stress and responsibility involved in some roles,” the article noted.
Beyond the personal aspects, Israel’s abject failure to defeat Hamas or bring back prisoners of war alive has affected their willingness to continue fighting.
“The sense of failure haunts the officers, and they don’t want to serve in a failed organisation,” according to a senior officer quote in the article.
Indeed, some reserve soldiers have refused to fight. In April, 30 paratroopers from a reserve company informed their commanders that they would not show up for duty because of burnout. The company commander complained to Channel 12 that morale among the soldiers is “very low”.
‘The IDF and the state are going to collapse from within’
Major General Yitzhak Brik, the former military ombudsman who earned the nickname ‘Prophet of Wrath’ for accurately predicting long before 7 October that Israel was totally unprepared for an imminent regional war, has penned a column warning that Israel has already lost the war against Hamas and the political and military leadership’s refusal to recognise this fact is driving Israel into an “abyss”.
“One fact is clear and certain, and I sign it knowing the facts – the IDF does not have the power to win this war against Hamas, and certainly not against Hezbollah. I think so not because we don’t want to win, but God simply does not have our hand to do so. Our army is tiny and worn out and has no surplus of forces. In this situation, every day that the war continues, our situation is getting worse,” Brik wrote.
If the war is not immediately stopped, Brik warns, the Israeli state will soon come to an end.
“The IDF and the state are going to collapse from within. The collapse of the state is only a matter of time because we may lose it if a complete regional war also breaks out.
“The ‘captains’ at the political and military levels, who are leading the war in Gaza, do not want to acknowledge the harsh facts for which they are responsible. They have only one agenda – to continue the fighting at any cost because it’s the only thing that guarantees them the continuation of holding their positions for another short period of time.”
While Israel struggles to make any achievement in Gaza beyond committing genocide, Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich fantasises about conquering the much stronger Lebanese militant group Hezbollah and conquering southern Lebanon “up to the Litani”.
“Many who heard his remarks raised questions about the IDF’s ability to carry out such a mission,” Rappaport commented on Smotrich’s statement.
Brik’s warning about the leadership was even more dire.
“They must be stopped. They are leading the people of Israel like sheep to the slaughter; this is a group that has gone completely and utterly out of its mind and ‘went off the rails’. Not saving the country stands before their eyes, but saving themselves and their survival in power.”
Brik compared Israel’s fate to the biblical Bar Kochva revolt, when jewish zealots attempted to rise up against the Roman empire but suffered a historic defeat and brought massive casualties to the jewish population. While jews see the failed uprising as a warning against false messiahs, zionist ideologues did the opposite, taking inspiration and naming themselves after its central figures.
With the physically and morally depleted Israeli military treading water (more accurately, blood) in Gaza, and the Biden administration refusing to use its leverage to compel Netanyahu to sign a ceasefire agreement, it may be Israel’s closest allies that push Israel into the end times scenario Brik envisions.
Their Rules-Based International Order Is the Rule of the Mafia: The Twenty-Third Newsletter (2024)
In defiance of the International Court of Justice, Israel continues to bomb Gaza. Like the United States, Israel refuses to abide by international law, exposing the hypocrisy of the ‘rules-based international order’.
6 JUNE 2024
Ana Segovia (Mexico), Huapango Torero (‘Huapango Bullfighter’), 2019.
Dear friends,
Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
The skin is the largest organ of the human body. It covers our entire surface, at some points only as thin as a piece of paper and at other points about half as thick as a credit card. The skin, which protects us from all manner of germs and other harmful elements, is fragile and unable to defend humans from the dangerous weapons we have made over time. The ancient blunt axe will break the skin with a heavy blow, while a 2000-pound MK-84 ‘dumb bomb’ made by General Dynamics will not only obliterate the skin, but the entire human body.
Despite a 24 May order from the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the Israeli military continues to bomb the southern part of Gaza, particularly the city of Rafah. In blatant disregard of the ICJ’s order, on 27 May Israel struck a tent city in Rafah and murdered forty-five civilians. US President Joe Biden said on 9 March that an Israeli attack on Rafah would be his ‘red line’, but – even after this tent massacre – the Biden administration has insisted that no such line has been violated.
At a press conference on 28 May, communications advisor to the US National Security Agency John Kirby was asked how the US would respond if a strike by the US armed forces killed forty-five civilians and injured two hundred others. Kirby responded: ‘We have conducted airstrikes in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, where tragically we caused civilian casualties. We did the same thing’. To defend Israel’s latest massacre, Washington has chosen to make a startling admission. Given that the ICJ has ruled that it is ‘plausible’ that Israel is conducting a genocide in Gaza, could it be said that the US is guilty of the same in Iraq and Afghanistan?
Ficre Ghebreyesus (Eritrea), Map/Quilt, 1999.
In 2006, the International Criminal Court (ICC) began to assess the possibility of war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, and then, in 2014 and 2017, respectively, opened formal investigations into crimes committed in both countries. However, neither Israel nor the United States are signatories to the 2002 Rome Statute, which established the ICC. Rather than sign the statute, the US Congress passed the American Service-Members’ Protection Act – known informally as the ‘Hague Invasion Act’ – which legally authorises the US government to ‘use all means necessary’ to protect its troops from ICC prosecutors. Since Article 98 of the Rome Statute does not require states to turn over wanted personnel to a third party if they have signed an immunity agreement with that party, the US government has encouraged states to sign ‘Article 98 agreements’ to give its troops immunity from prosecution. Still, this did not deter ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda (who held the post from 2012–2021) from studying evidence and issuing a preliminary report in 2016 on war crimes in Afghanistan.
Afghanistan joined the ICC in 2003, giving the ICC and Bensouda jurisdiction to conduct their investigation. Even though it signed an Article 98 agreement with Afghanistan in 2002, the US government fervently attacked the ICC’s investigation and warned Bensouda and her family that they would face personal repercussions if she continued with the investigation. In April 2019, the US revoked Bensouda’s entry visa. Days later, a panel of ICC judges ruled against Bensouda’s request to proceed with a war crimes investigation in Afghanistan, stating that such an investigation would ‘not serve the interests of justice’.
Staff at the ICC were dismayed by the court’s decision and eager to challenge it but could not get support from the justices. In June 2019, Bensouda filed a request to appeal the ICC’s decision not to pursue the investigation into war crimes in Afghanistan. Bensouda’s appeal was joined by various groups from Afghanistan, including the Afghan Victims’ Families Association and the Afghanistan Forensic Science Organisation. In September 2019, the Pre-Trial Chamber of the ICC ruled that the appeal could go forward.
Dawn Okoro (Nigeria), Doing It, 2017.
The US government was enraged. On 11 June 2020, US President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 13928, which authorised his government to freeze ICC officials’ assets and ban them and their families from entering the United States. In September 2020, the US imposed sanctions on Bensouda, a national of Gambia, and senior ICC diplomat Phakiso Mochochoko, a national of Lesotho. The American Bar Association condemned these sanctions, but they were not revoked.
The US government eventually repealed the sanctions in April 2021, after Bensouda left her post and was replaced by the British lawyer Karim Khan in February 2021. In September 2021, ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan said that while his office would continue to investigate war crimes by the Taliban and the Islamic State in Afghanistan, it would ‘deprioritise other aspects of this investigation’. This awkward phrasing simply meant that the ICC would no longer investigate war crimes committed by the United States and its allies from the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. The ICC had been sufficiently brought to heel.
Alexander Nikolaev, also known as Usto Mumin (Soviet Union), Friendship, Love, Eternity, 1928.
Prosecutor Khan again demonstrated his partial application of justice and fealty to the Global North ruling elites when he rushed into the conflict in Ukraine and began an investigation into war crimes by Russia just four days after its invasion in February 2022. Within a year, Khan would apply for warrants for the arrest of Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Commissioner for Children’s Rights Maria Lvova-Belova, which were issued in March 2023. Specifically, they were charged with colluding to abduct children from Ukrainian orphanages and children’s care homes and take them to Russia, where – it was alleged – these children were ‘given for adoption’. Ukraine, Khan said, ‘is a crime scene’.
Khan would use no such words when it came to Israel’s murderous assault on Palestinians in Gaza. Even after more than 15,000 Palestinian children had been killed (rather than ‘adopted’ from a war zone), Khan failed to pursue warrants for the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his military subordinates. When Khan visited Israel in November–December 2023, he warned about ‘excesses’ but suggested that since ‘Israel has trained lawyers who advise commanders’, they could prevent any horrendous violations of international humanitarian law.
Ayoub Emdadian (Iran), The Sapling of Liberty, 1973.
By May 2024, the sheer scale of Israel’s brutality in Gaza finally forced the ICC to take up the issue. The orders from the ICJ, the outrage expressed by numerous governments of the Global South, and the cascading protests in country after country together motivated the ICC to act. On 20 May, Khan held a press conference where he said that he filed applications for the arrest of Hamas leaders Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Diab Ibrahim al-Masri, and Ismail Haniyeh and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and his head of military, Yoav Gallant. Israel’s Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara said that the ICC accusations against Netanyahu and Gallant are ‘baseless’ and that Israel will not comply with any ICC warrant. For decades now, Israel – like the United States – has rejected any attempt to apply international humanitarian law to its actions. The ‘rules-based international order’ has always provided immunity for the United States and its close allies, an immunity whose hypocrisy has increasingly been revealed. It is this double-standard that has provoked the collapse of the US-driven world order.
Buried within Khan’s press statement is an interesting fragment: ‘I insist that all attempts to impede, intimidate, or improperly influence the officials of this Court must cease immediately’. Eight days later, on 20 May, The Guardian – in collaboration with other periodicals – published an investigation that revealed Israel’s use of ‘intelligence agencies to surveil, hack, pressure, smear, and allegedly threaten senior ICC staff in an effort to derail the court’s inquiries’. Yossi Cohen, the former head of Israel’s spy agency, Mossad, personally harassed and threatened Bensouda (Khan’s predecessor), warning her, ‘You don’t want to be getting into things that could compromise your security or that of your family’. Furthermore, The Guardian noted that ‘Between 2019 and 2020, the Mossad had been actively seeking compromising information on the prosecutor and took an interest in her family members’. ‘Took an interest’ is a euphemistic way of saying gathered information on her family – including through a sting operation against her husband Philip Bensouda – to blackmail and frighten her. These are clichéd mafia tactics.
Hamed Abdalla (Egypt), Conscience du sol (‘The Consciousness of the Earth’), 1956.
As I followed these stories of the blood and law, I read the poems of Chechnya-born Jazra Khaleed, writing in Greek in Athens. His poem ‘Black Lips’ stopped me in my tracks, the last stanzas powerful and bleak:
Come let me make you human,
you, Your Honor, who wipe guilt from your beard
you, esteemed journalist, who tout death
you, philanthropic lady, who pat children’s heads without bending down
and you who read this poem, licking your finger—
To all of you I offer my body for genuflection
Believe me
one day you will adore me like Christ
But I’m sorry for you sir—
I do not negotiate with chartered accountants of words
with art critics who eat from my hand
You may, if you desire, wash my feet
Don’t take it personally
Why do I need bullets if there are so many words
prepared to die for me?
Which words are slowly dying? Justice, perhaps, or even humanitarianism? So many words are thrown about to assuage the guilty and to confuse the innocent. But these words cannot muffle other words, words that describe horrors and that demand redress.
Words are important. So are people, such as Gustavo Cortiñas, who was arrested by the Argentinian military dictatorship on 15 April 1977, never to be seen again. He became one of the 30,000 people whom the military killed between 1976 and 1983. On April 30, two weeks after Gustavo was arrested, his mother, Nora Cortiñas (or Norita, as she was lovingly known), joined other mothers of the disappeared to protest in front of the government house Casa Rosada, at the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, the first in what became a regular feature.
Norita was a co-founder of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, which courageously shattered the wall of misleading words that tumbled out of the mouths of the military Junta. Though her son was never found, Norita found her voice looking for him – a voice that was heard at every protest for justice and spoke with great feeling about the pain in the world until the weeks leading up to her death on 31 May. ‘We say no to the annexation of Palestine’, she said in a video message in 2020. ‘We oppose any measure that tends to erase the identity and existence of the Palestinian people’.
Norita leaves us with her precious words:
Many years from now, I would like to be remembered as a woman who gave her all so that we could have a more dignified life… I would like to be remembered with that cry that I always say and that means everything I feel inside me, that means the hope that someday that other possible world will exist. A world for everyone. So, I would like to be remembered with a smile and for shouting loudly: venceremos, venceremos, venceremos! We will win, we will win, we will win!
Hamas Calls for a Permanent Ceasefire, Israeli Withdrawal
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on JUNE 7, 2024
Resistance News Network
On June 6, Israel bombed a school in central Gaza’s Al-Nuseirat refugee camp.
There is no meaning to any agreement that does not explicitly stipulate a permanent ceasefire, and there is no meaning to an agreement that allows occupation forces to remain on our land.
Hamas sent a letter to the Palestinian factions and Arab parties regarding the ongoing ceasefire negotiations, which Quds Network (https://qudsn.co/post/205116) obtained and translated by RNN on June 6.
In the message, Hamas stated that, in agreement with the resistance factions, it has always shown flexibility and positivity towards the efforts of mediators throughout all previous rounds of negotiations, according to Quds Network.
This culminated in the announcement of the acceptance (https://t.me/PalestineResist/38531) of the mediators’ proposal on May 6th (https://t.me/PalestineResist/38580), when the movement found that the proposal included the necessary foundations and aligned with the logic of permanently ending the war, responding to our people’s demands, including a permanent cessation of aggression and fire, a complete withdrawal from the Strip, the return of displaced persons, the flow of humanitarian aid, reconstruction, and a serious prisoner exchange deal.
Excerpts can be found below:
“The occupation rejected the mediators’ proposal and responded with blatant aggression on Rafah and the occupation of the crossing. They committed many massacres and burned the tents of the displaced along with their occupants, and continued the starvation war, which is a systematic policy to exterminate the Palestinian people. All of this led to the obstruction of the mediators’ efforts.”
“When President Biden made his statements, the movement announced its welcome of what he said because it provided the necessary foundations to reach an agreement that achieves a permanent ceasefire, the withdrawal of the occupation army from the Strip, the flow of large amounts of aid, the return of the displaced, reconstruction, and prisoner exchange. The movement did not hesitate to announce its positive stance immediately towards these statements as they are in line with the May 6th paper and contain the required foundations, the most important of which is a permanent ceasefire and complete withdrawal from the Strip.”
“When the movement reviewed the content of the proposal mentioned by President Biden, which he said was the “israeli” proposal, it found it devoid of the positive foundations mentioned in Biden’s statements. There is a difference between what is in the paper and what Biden said, causing a lot of confusion and debate. Is what Biden spoke about his personal interpretation of the paper, or are they verbal agreements with “israeli” parties, or something else?”
“After reviewing the content of the “israeli” proposal, it was found that it does not set the correct foundations for the required agreement. It does not guarantee a permanent ceasefire but only a temporary one. It does not closely link the three phases stipulated, but on the contrary, it has dismantled the bridges that transition the agreement from one phase to another, aiming to disrupt the unity of the agreement in all its stages, reducing it to a single phase where the aggression stops temporarily, while their forces remain on the ground of the Strip. In exchange, the occupation obtains the segment of prisoners that concerns them, then resumes the genocide war against our people.”
In its letter, Hamas and the resistance factions adhered to the correct foundations for reaching an agreement and expressed their readiness to agree to any agreement that includes those foundations, which are fundamental principles, “for there is no meaning to any agreement that does not explicitly stipulate a permanent ceasefire, and there is no meaning to an agreement that allows occupation forces to remain on our land and only achieves what the occupation wants in terms of releasing their prisoners while continuing the genocide and starvation war against our people.”
In the letter, Hamas noted its awareness of the risks of a Security Council resolution being issued before an agreement is reached between the parties, in addition to the preemption of this with a draft resolution aimed at pressuring the movement and Palestinian factions.
Hezbollah air defenses force Israeli jets to turn tail
Thursday’s operation marked Hezbollah’s first confirmation of its ability to target Israeli fighter jets
News Desk
JUN 7, 2024
Hezbollah fighters during a military exercise in May 2023. (Photo credit: Anwar Amro/AFP/Getty Images)
Hezbollah announced in a statement on 6 June that it targeted Israeli warplanes over the south of Lebanon, forcing them to withdraw to their airspace.
The statement marked the Lebanese resistance group’s first acknowledgment that it possesses the ability to confront Israeli fighter jets, something which observers have speculated about for years.
“In support of our steadfast Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip and in support of their brave and honorable resistance, the Mujahideen of the Islamic Resistance fired air defense missiles at enemy warplanes that were attacking our skies and broke the sound barrier [sonic boom] in an attempt to terrify children, forcing them to retreat to behind the borders,” Hezbollah’s statement read.
It did not elaborate further on the air defense weaponry.
The resistance group carried out several more attacks that day, including a Burkan missile attack on Israel’s Al-Baghdadi site.
Throughout the course of this war, Hezbollah has demonstrated its ability to down advanced Israeli drones flying over the south of Lebanon to carry out attacks. Several Hermes drones, made by Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems and worth several million a piece, have been shot down by Hezbollah in recent months.
“We still do not know much about the air defense missile itself, but it will restrain the ability of Israel to fly freely over Lebanon,” retired Lebanese General Amine Hoteit told The New Arab, referring to Thursday’s Hezbollah statement.
It is likely that Hezbollah has more advanced air defense weaponry than the missile launched towards Israeli warplanes on Thursday, Hoteit added.
US media reports from early November last year claimed that Washington has intelligence that Syria agreed to send Hezbollah a Russian-made missile defense system.
Hezbollah has turned up the heat on its operations against Israeli military sites in recent days, coinciding with the continued indiscriminate bombardment of south Lebanon and increasing Israeli threats of a wide-scale war against the country. A drone attack on Wednesday killed at least one soldier and injured around ten.
It has said that while it does not want a wider war, it is prepared to fight one if it is imposed on Lebanon.
Israel massacres over 80 Palestinians to rescue four captives
Israeli media says the operation succesfully rescued four Israelis taken captive by Hamas at the Nova music festival on 7 October
News Desk
JUN 8, 2024
Mourners react during the funeral of Palestinians killed in Israeli strikes, amid the Israel-Hamas conflict, in Deir Al-Balah, in central Gaza Strip, on June 7, 2024. (photo credit: DOAA ROUQA / Reuters)
Israeli forces carried out a major operation in the Nuseirat camp in central Gaza on 8 June, killing at least 80 Palestinians and rescuing four Israeli captives.
Telegram channels of multiple Israeli media outlets said that an Israeli special forces unit penetrated deep into the Nuseirat camp to free a group of living captives amid heavy bombing by Israeli warplanes.
Israeli authorities issued a statement saying that the Israeli army, internal security (Shabak) and Yamam special police commandos jointly carried out a “complex special daytime operation in Nuseirat” to rescue four Israelis taken captive by Hamas at the Nova music festival on 7 October. The rescued captives include Noa Argamani (25), Almog Meir Jan (21), Andrey Kozlov (27), and Shlomi Ziv (40).
The statement added that the captives were rescued from two separate locations in the heart of Nuseirat and have been transferred to Israeli hospitals in good condition.
Staff at Al-Aqsa Martyrs hospital in Deir al-Balah have told Al-Jazeera that the bodies of 47 Palestinians killed by Israeli bombing in Nuseirat had arrived at the hospital. Footage posted on social media shows chaos as many wounded women and children were brought to the hospital to be treated.
Al-Jazeera's correspondent later reported the toll of Palestinians killed in the Israeli operation had reached 80.
Saturday’s operation followed Israel’s bombing of a second UN-run school in two days on Friday. Israeli pilots targeted the Asmaa School in the Shati refugee camp in northern Gaza, killing three Palestinians.
Israeli warplanes bombed a UN school in central Gaza on Thursday, killing at least 33, including 12 women and children, according to local health officials.
Qatari Defense Minister Khalid bin Mohamed al-Attiyah on Friday said Gaza is the “largest open prison in the world and now the largest mass grave” as Israel’s war on the Palestinians of Gaza enters its ninth month.
Regarding the conditions of the region, he added: “The Middle East and North Africa region has been a theatre for global powers, and the Gaza Strip has been under siege for nearly 20 years.”
UN to place Israel on blacklist alongside ISIS, Al-Qaeda, Boko Haram: Report
Israeli officials failed to lobby the UN against the move, which they describe as 'highly problematic' as it could lead to countries imposing an arms embargo on Tel Aviv
News Desk
JUN 7, 2024
(Photo Credit: Majdi Fathi/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is expected to include the Israeli army in the annual blacklist of countries and organizations harming children in conflict zones, according to reports in Israeli media.
Hebrew-language Channel 13 News reported late on 6 June that Guterres has informed Israeli army Defense Attaché in the US, Major General Hidai Zilberman, of his “final decision.”
Israel will reportedly appear on the blacklist to be published next week as part of a report distributed to UN Security Council members. A discussion on the report will take place on June 26.
According to Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth, Israel's “efforts to persuade Guterres to avoid this move have failed.”
“The current secretary-general is anti-Israel and can no longer be influenced,” unnamed Israeli officials told the Israeli daily last month, expressing concerns that the move was imminent. “Including Israel on the blacklist is highly problematic and could lead to countries imposing an arms embargo on Israel,” the sources added.
Nonetheless, the UN is not expected to explicitly mention Israel or the Israeli army but rather “Israeli security forces.”
The annual report, authored by UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict Virginia Gamba, will cover all of 2023, with a notable increase in incidents due to Israel's campaign of genocide in Gaza.
Last year's blacklist included Afghanistan, Colombia, Congo, Iraq, Mali, Myanmar, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, and Syria, along with extremist armed groups Al-Qaeda, ISIS, Al-Shabaab, and Boko Haram.
The Russian army was also included in the blacklist last year for “attacking Ukrainian schools and hospitals and transferring children from Ukraine to Russia.”
Guterres excluded Israel from the list in 2023 despite recording grave violations against 1,139 Palestinian children, including 54 killings. Instead, he welcomed “Israel’s engagement” with Gamba and its “identification of practical measures, including those proposed by the UN” to protect children.
Since 7 October, more than 36,000 Palestinians, including approximately 15,500 children and 10,300 women, have been killed by the Israeli army in Gaza. The number of wounded during the genocidal war surpasses 80,000, predominantly children and women.
These numbers are not final, as thousands more remain trapped under rubble or on the streets, with rescue teams unable to reach them due to constant Israeli attacks.
“Gaza is becoming a graveyard for children. Hundreds of girls and boys are reportedly being killed or injured every day,” Guterres said last November. “More journalists have reportedly been killed over a four-week period than in any conflict in at least three decades."
'We will not disarm’: Hamas chief tells Arab mediators
Yahya Sinwar confirmed to negotiators that Hamas will accept nothing less than a permanent end to the war, according to a WSJ report
News Desk
JUN 7, 2024
(Photo credit: Mohammed Abed/AFP)
Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar said in a message sent to Arab negotiators that the resistance movement will not give up its arms and will only accept a ceasefire proposal that commits to a permanent end to the war, according to a 6 June report by the Wall Street Journal (WSJ).
“Hamas will not surrender its guns or sign a proposal that asks for that,” Sinwar told Arab mediators. The message came as CIA director William Burns is back in Qatar’s capital, Doha, to continue talks, this time aimed at reinforcing the ceasefire proposal presented by US President Joe Biden on 31 May.
Biden presented the proposal in a speech last week, saying Israel had offered it. Tel Aviv later acknowledged that it allowed the negotiating team to present the plan to mediators, but officials have since stressed that the draft unveiled by the US president was “incomplete.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed on Monday that Tel Aviv will not agree to a permanent ceasefire until Hamas is defeated. “The war will be stopped for the purpose of returning hostages, and then we will proceed with a discussion,” he said on Monday.
Tel Aviv has rejected a US-drafted UN Security Council resolution that Washington aims to put to the vote.
According to a copy of the US-proposed ceasefire plan, obtained exclusively by Middle East Eye (MEE), the initiative does not include a permanent ceasefire. Instead, it calls for a 42-day “temporary cessation of military operations” that will be followed by “open-ended” negotiations for a permanent ceasefire.
The “temporary ceasefire” could potentially be extended after the 42-day phase “as long as negotiations on the conditions of stage two of [the] agreement are ongoing,” the document reads, according to MEE.
The plan violates Hamas’ main terms for an agreement, most prominently a permanent end to the war, making it unlikely that the movement will accept.
Hamas has signaled that it is still reviewing the proposal presented by Biden.
US army aided Israel in bloody military op launched from Gaza 'Aid Pier'
The operation saw the mass killing of over 200 Palestinians, with health officials describing the inside of Al-Aqsa Hospital as a 'slaughterhouse'
News Desk
JUN 8, 2024
(Photo Credit: US Central Command via AP)
A video shared widely by Hebrew Telegram channels on 8 June shows that the Israeli army made use of the US-built pier installed in central Gaza as part of a bloody rescue operation that saw the killing of at least 210 Palestinians in the Nuseirat refugee camp.
Furthermore, according to Israeli journalist Barak Ravid, a special US military unit specialized in rescuing captives “supported the effort” that decimated the Nuseirat camp.
Multiple Israeli media outlets reported on Saturday afternoon that a special forces unit penetrated deep into the Nuseirat camp to free four living captives amid heavy bombing by Israeli warplanes.
They were then flown out of Gaza via the US-built pier, reinstalled on the coast on Friday after undergoing tens of millions in repairs.
On Saturday, the Israeli army announced that it has started “securing the coastal area of the US military's Joint Logistics Over-the-Shore (JLOTS) pier in Gaza.”
Upon announcing the project earlier this year, Washington stated that the floating pier was built to serve as a “maritime corridor” to deliver desperately needed aid into Gaza.
“I’m directing the US military to lead an emergency mission to establish a temporary pier on the Gaza coast in the Mediterranean. This pier will facilitate the arrival of large ships loaded with food, water, medicine, and temporary shelters,” US President Joe Biden said earlier this year when announcing plans for the pier, which is meant to make up for an Israeli blockade of all land crossings into the besieged enclave.
Nevertheless, the Palestinian resistance repeatedly warned that the floating pier was built to deliver weapons to Israel.
“The pier is intended to provide cover for Washington’s support for the occupation state with weapons … International and regional talk about introducing aid has had no real impact on the famine in the Strip," Hamas said last month.
The Cradle columnist Suat Delgen recently questioned whether the US-built pier is meant to serve as a “smokescreen for political maneuvers.”
“The suspicion is that the project, while ostensibly ‘facilitating’ aid delivery, might also allow for increased control over the entirety of Gaza under the guise of humanitarian assistance. This control could potentially streamline Israel’s military operations and fortify its strategic positions within Gaza, ultimately influencing the broader geopolitical dynamics of the conflict.”
Troops hid inside aid truck for deadly US-Israel operation in Nuseirat
The Palestinian resistance called the operation a 'complex war crime' and reported that the Israeli army killed a number of their remaining captives during a massacre that left over 200 dead
News Desk
JUN 8, 2024
(Photo Credit: AFP)
Israeli ground forces hid inside a truck used for the delivery of humanitarian aid to infiltrate the Nuseirat refugee camp on 8 June and perpetrate a new massacre of more than 200 Palestinians.
Footage aired by Al Jazeera TV shows the truck inside Nuseirat accompanied by armored tanks.
“A truck arrived carrying humanitarian aid and clothes, and suddenly 10 soldiers got out and shot me, once in the chest and twice in the feet. The artillery shelling started, and I saw dozens of citizens on the ground, including people with their heads cut off,” a Palestinian man who survived the massacre told reporters.
“The truck came from the American port that the occupation established in the Gaza Sea,” he adds.
Israeli media confirmed the troops hid inside a truck described as being used for “furniture delivery.”
“Israeli forces, including Shin Bet and the Israel Police special counterterrorism unit, Yamam, utilized a furniture delivery truck as cover to infiltrate the area near Al-Awda Hospital,” Israel Hayom reported in the hours following the bloody operation that saw the recovery of four Israeli captives.
The captives were withdrawn to the US-built floating pier using the same truck.
Gaza health officials have reported that over 200 Palestinians, the majority women and children, were killed during the operation that was launched with the assistance of the US army.
“We confirm that what was revealed by American and Hebrew media about American participation in the criminal operation that was carried out today,” Hamas said in a statement, adding that Washington's involvement “proves once again the complicit role of the American administration and its full participation in the war crimes committed in the Gaza Strip.”
“We call on our Arab and Islamic peoples, and the free people of the world, to put more pressure and escalate the movement denouncing the aggression and genocide in Gaza … We must work to stop it and bring its perpetrators to justice to hold them accountable for their crimes and killing of children and civilians in cold blood,” the statement adds.
Dr Tanya Haj-Hassan, a pediatric intensive care doctor with Doctors Without Borders (MSF), told Al Jazeera that Al-Aqsa Hospital “is a complete bloodbath … it looks like a slaughterhouse.” “There is blood everywhere. There are many people missing, extremities. It was so horrific."
“We will not stop working until all hostages come home and a ceasefire is reached. It is essential that it happens,” US President Joe Biden said from France. “The United States is supporting all efforts to secure the release of hostages still held by Hamas, including American citizens. This includes through ongoing negotiations or other means,” National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan added from Washington.
The spokesman for Hamas' armed wing, the Qassam Brigades, said later on Saturday that the massacre in Nuseirat is a “complex war crime,” revealing that Israel also killed a number of the remaining captives.
“By committing horrific massacres, the enemy was able to free some of his captives, but at the same time, he killed some of them during the operation. The operation will pose a great danger to the enemy prisoners and will have a devastating impact on their conditions and lives,” the statement by Abu Obeida reads.
For their part, Israeli officials hailed their first successful captive rescue operation after eight months of a genocidal war.
“They said that this operation will be [under] very complicated and dangerous circumstances. I knew that, but without hesitation, I decided to do this operation because they were Israeli captives, and I trusted the heroes in Yamam and Shabak [special police commandos and internal security] who attacked and freed the captives,” Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu said.
The recovery of the four captives also prompted opposition leader Benny Gantz to delay his impending resignation from Netanyahu's emergency government.
Civilians shot execution style during 'near perfect' Gaza rescue op
Executing Palestinian civilians in cold blood in their homes and indiscriminately bombing them from the air was a crucial part of the Israeli strategy to rescue four captives from central Gaza's Nuseirat refugee camp on Saturday
News Desk
JUN 9, 2024
Nuseirat camp after the June 8 Israeli operation (Photo credit: The New Arab)
Testimony from Palestinians indicates Israeli forces deliberately executed civilians in their homes with gunfire and indiscriminately bombed civilians from the air as part of the military operation in Gaza to rescue captives held by Hamas.
Israeli newspaperYedioth Ahronoth described the 8 June operation in the Nuseirat refugee camp, which killed 210 Palestinians, as a "near-perfect execution in broad daylight."
"Precise intelligence, meticulous planning and execution, and quick and professional action resulted in a successful operation to free four hostages," the paper added.
But Euro-Med Human Rights monitor documented that Palestinian civilians were shot execution-style in their homes and in the street as the operation began.
Chairman of the Euro-Med Human Rights organization Rami Abdu reported that according to preliminary testimonies, Israeli forces used a ladder to enter the home of Dr. Ahmed Al-Jamal and immediately executed 36-year-old Fatima al-Jamal upon encountering her on the staircase.
Israeli troops then executed her husband, journalist Abdullah al-Jamal, 36, and his father, Dr. Ahmed, 74, in front of his grandchildren. The army also shot Dr. Ahmed's daughter, Zainab, 27, who sustained serious injuries.
Abdu reported further that Israeli forces executed Muhammad Salhiya with a bullet to the head while he was sitting on a chair reading the Quran in his home in the Nuseirat refugee camp.
Abdu stated that Euro-Med had initially documented field executions and killings in at least seven homes during the operation.
"In this world, the blood of a white westerner is equivalent to the lives of thousands of innocent non-westerners," Abdu concluded, noting the focus of the western and Israeli press on the fate of the four rescued Israeli captives.
Euro-Med compiled a preliminary list of the identified Palestinian victims in Saturday's Al-Nuseirat massacre, committed by Israeli forces in just one hour.
Israeli army spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari stated in a press conference that the operation began at 11 am and "was a high-risk, complex mission based on precise intelligence conducted in daylight in two separate buildings deep inside Gaza. While under fire, under fire inside the buildings, under fire on the way out, our forces rescued our hostages."
This has led some to believe that Israeli forces only bombed the Nuseirat Camp, killing hundreds of civilians, to clear the way for the special forces and the captives to escape.
However, Palestinian witnesses report that Israeli forces indiscriminately bombed the Nuseirat refugee camp in multiple locations before they heard any fighting break out, indicating that the bombing was to create chaos and prepare the way for the rescue operation to begin.
One woman from Nuseirat stated, "Around 10:30, the assault began. Various types of aircraft bombarded us, and drones fired at anyone moving. It was as if it were the Day of Judgment. People around me were torn apart, limbs scattered everywhere. They annihilated us, they truly annihilated us."
She stated further, "I was taken by surprise as bullets rained down on us and rings of fire encircled us. Then, I found myself gathering the remains of my son. Yes, I collected the pieces of my child's body."
A Palestinian woman named Nour stated, “At 11 am, Yamen and I were sitting by the tent when suddenly, an Apache helicopter appeared above us, dropping thermal bombs and then live ammunition on the people by the sea and around the tents. Then, heavy shelling began, and the tents next to us were bombed and caught fire. We started running with the crowd as if it were the Day of Judgment.”
One Palestinian man described how Israeli special forces disguised as civilians entered the camp in a car and large truck used for delivering humanitarian aid. After the driver in the car put a mask on, people gathered around. The driver reversed the vehicle and drove it next to the truck. People started saying these were Israeli special forces.
“While we were standing in the street, suddenly, there was a strike. Where, how, how, or why, nobody knew what was going on.”
At 8 months since the start of Israel’s genocide, the world will mobilize for Palestine
International platforms call the movements, organizations and people of the world to take action on June 8 for Palestine
June 07, 2024 by Peoples Dispatch
A Palestine protest in San Juan, Puerto Rico on May 30, 2024. Photo: Yanira Arias
International formations including the International Peoples’ Assembly and Progressive International have called for a day of action on June 8 against Israel’s genocide in Gaza and for the people of the world to “hold their governments accountable and demand they must cut political, diplomatic, economic and cultural ties with Zionism.”
“The international community increasingly condemns and rejects the genocide that Israel is carrying out on the Palestinian people, as evidenced by the call for ceasefire in the UN security council, the call for investigations and arrest of Israeli leaders for war crimes in the ICC, the call for a halt to the invasion of Rafah by the ICJ and the recognition of Palestinian statehood by various countries,” the IPA wrote in a recent statement.
The demands listed by the organization include an immediate and permanent ceasefire, but also include an end to the siege on Gaza, freedom for all Palestinian political prisoners, and an end to the occupation of Palestine.
Actions have been organized in several countries. In the US, tens of thousands will surround the White House in protest of Biden’s continued funding and supplying of the genocide, despite the ongoing invasion of Rafah, which he had earlier claimed was a “red line” for the United States. Over 200 national and international organizations have endorsed the mass mobilization, including the Palestinian Youth Movement, National Students for Justice in Palestine, The People’s Forum, Al-Awda: The Palestine Right to Return Coalition, US Palestinian Community Network, ANSWER Coalition, and the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights.
For this action, people across the United States will travel from as far as Michigan, Iowa, Florida, and Kentucky to converge on the White House.
“The Israeli military has just carried out another horrific massacre—this time targeting a United Nations school in Gaza where refugees were sheltering. Dozens have been killed, including many children. The bombs, jets and other weaponry Israel uses to commit atrocities like this on a regular basis are provided by the United States—that’s why we are going to surround the White House on Saturday to protest at the doorstep of the war criminal Joe Biden,” said Miriam Osman of the Palestinian Youth Movement.
In Italy, the student movement organized mobilizations at several universities on June 7. The students are also protesting their government’s support for the Israeli genocide in Gaza. The Italian government continues to send arms to Israel despite widespread opposition and protest.
“From our country we continue sending weapons to support the atrocities as well as political legitimacy, which came unanimously from the whole ruling class from right to left,” wrote Cambiare Rotta, an organization of communist youth in Italy.
“As students we have been mobilized from the very beginning to attack the role that the academy has in genocide. Throughout Italy we have achieved victories by blocking agreements with Israel, Israeli universities and with Italian companies and institutions that militarily support the Zionist regime,” the organization continued, calling for all Italian universities to mobilize on June 7.
In São Paulo, Brazil, a mass mobilization has been called for June 9 by organizations including the São Paulo Palestine Front and the Truth and Peace Brigades, to end the genocide and to urge the Brazilian government to fully cut ties with Israel. President Lula has frequently denounced the genocide, including by comparing it to the holocaust, which resulted in Israeli officials formally banning him from the Zionist state. Most recently, on May 29, Lula withdrew Brazil’s ambassador to Israel.
The Socialist Movement of Ghana has organized a car caravan in solidarity with Palestine in Accra, Ghana, on June 8. In Nepal, students at the School of Philosophical Studies are also mobilizing for Palestine on June 8.
In London, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign has organized a national march for Palestine on June 8, calling on the government to stop arming Israel. Since 2008, the UK government has licensed arms worth over 574 million pounds to Israel. Palestine solidarity demonstrators have encountered police repression at previous marches, and the PSC, alongside other organizations, issued a statement ahead of June 8 regarding police presence at a previous march.
“At the last march, a serious issue emerged when the Met Police placed a counter demonstration within a meter of the main demonstration, leaving protestors exposed to abuse and direct threats. When we made these concerns public, the Met Police apologized for their actions and indicated that Assistant Commissioner Matt Twist would meet with us to ensure that such scenes would not be repeated. No such meeting has been offered despite our requests,” read a statement issued by the PSC, the Palestinian Forum in Britain, Friends of Al-Aqsa, Stop the War Coalition, the Muslim Association of Britain, and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. “Even more concerningly, all of our requests in the past 2 days to speak with the Gold Commander about how the counter demonstration will be managed to ensure safety, have been rebuffed.”
“We will not allow these issues or the actions of counter demonstrators to distract us from ensuring that the demands for an end to UK complicity in genocide once more echo on the streets of London. The demonstration will assemble at 12.30 pm at Russell Square tomorrow,” the organizations affirmed.
Speakers at the London march include artists and cultural workers such as poet Michael Rosen and actor Juliet Stevenson, as well as several labor leaders, including Dave Ward, the General Secretary of the Communication Workers Union, Maryam Eslamdoust, the General Secretary of the Transport Salaried Staffs’ Association, and Chris Smalls, President of the Amazon Labor Union.
Across the world, people have vowed to continue mobilizing and taking action to demand an end to the genocide and an end to their governments’ backing and normalization of Israel.
It’s a completely synthetic nation created without any regard for the organic sociopolitical movements of the land and its people, slapped rootless atop an ancient pre-existing civilization with deep roots.
Caitlin Johnstone
June 8, 2024
Everything about Israel is fake. It’s a completely synthetic nation created without any regard for the organic sociopolitical movements of the land and its people, slapped rootless atop an ancient pre-existing civilization with deep roots. That’s why it cannot exist without being artificially propped up by nonstop propaganda, lobbying, online influence operations, and mass military violence.
Israel is so fake that its far right minister of national security Itamar Ben-Gvir has been stoking religious tensions by encouraging militant Zionists to pray on the Temple Mount — known to Muslims as Al-Aqsa. This is an illustration of how phony Israel and its political ideology are because Jews were historically prohibited from praying at the Temple Mount under Jewish law; a sign placed there in 1967 and still upheld by Israel’s Chief Rabbinate reads, “According to Torah Law, entering the Temple Mount area is strictly forbidden due to the holiness of the site.” It’s just this weird, evangelical Christian-like thing that Zionists have started doing in contravention of their own traditions and religious texts to advance their nationalist agendas.
Journalist Dan Cohen explains on Twitter:
“‘Prayer’ on the Temple Mount is 100% a Zionist invention in total contravention of Jewish law. Jews don’t step foot onto the Temple Mount, let alone ‘pray’ there. That’s why the sign below is posted at the entrance non-Muslims use.
“Ben Gvir publicly announced this in order to provoke a reaction to use as a pretext to restrict and expel Muslims from the site, explode Jerusalem and the West Bank, and expand the regional war.
“Ben Gvir holds Netanyahu hostage. Together, they’re leading Israel to self-destruction.”
There’s no authentic spirituality in such behavior. It has no roots. No depth. No connection. It’s the product of busy minds with modern agendas, with nothing more to it than that.
Israel is so fake that Zionists artificially resurrected a dead language in order for its people to have a common “native” tongue for them to speak, so that they could all LARP as indigenous middle easterners together in their phony, synthetic country.
Israel has no real culture of its own; it’s all a mixture of (A) organic Jewish culture brought in from other parts of the world by the Jewish diaspora, (B) culture that was stolen from Palestinians (see “Israeli food”), and (C) the culture of indoctrinated genocidal hatred that is interwoven with the fabric of modern Zionism. The way Israel has become a Mecca of electronic dance music points clearly to an aching cultural void that its people are trying desperately to fill with empty synthetic pop fluff.
Even international support for Israel is fake, manufactured astroturf that has to be enforced from the top down, because it would never organically occur to anyone that Israel is something that should be supported.
The phenomenally influential Israel lobby is used to push pro-Israel foreign policy in powerful western governments like Washington and London. Just yesterday US Representative Thomas Massie told Tucker Carlson that every Republican in Congress besides himself “has an AIPAC person” assigned to them with whom they are in constant communication, who he describes as functioning “like your babysitter” with regard to lawmaking on the subject of Israel.
The Israel lobby exists with the full consent of the western imperial war machine and its secretive intelligence cartel, because western military support for Israel is also phony and fraudulent. The western empire whose strategic interests directly benefit from violence and radicalism in the middle east pretends it’s constantly expanding its military presence in the region in order to promote stability and protect an important ally, but in reality this military presence simply allows for greater control over crucial resource-rich territories whose populations would otherwise unite to form a powerful bloc acting in their own interests. The Israel lobby is a self-funding consent manufacturer which helps the empire do what it already wants to do.
Support for Israel in the media is also phony and imposed from the top down. Since October outlets like The New York Times, CNN and CBC have been finding themselves fighting off scandals due to staff leaks about demands from their executives that they slant their Gaza coverage to benefit the information interests of Israel. Briahna Joy Gray was just fired by The Hill for being critical of Israel as co-host of the show “Rising”, a fate that all mass media employees understand they will share if they are insufficiently supportive of the empire’s favorite ethnostate.
Israel’s support from celebrities is similarly forced. A newly leaked email from influential Hollywood marketing and branding guru Ashlee Margolis instructs her firm’s employees to “pause on working with any celebrity or influencer or tastemaker posting against Israel.” As we discussed recently, celebrities are also naturally disincentivized from criticizing any aspect of the western empire by the fact that their status is dependent on wealthy people whose wealth is premised upon the imperial status quo.
Support for Israel on social media is likewise notoriously phony. For years Israel has been pioneering the use of social media trolls to swarm Israel’s critics and promote agendas like undermining the BDS movement. After the beginning of the Gaza onslaught Israel spent millions on PR spin via advertising on YouTube, Instagram and Facebook, and The New York Times has just confirmed earlier reports that Israel has been targeting US lawmakers with fake social media accounts to influence their policymaking on Israel.
In truth, nobody really organically supports Israel. If they’re not supporting it because their lobbyists and employers told them to, they’re supporting it because that’s what they were told to support by the leaders of their dopey political ideologies like Zionism, liberalism and conservatism, or by the leaders of their dopey religions like Christian fundamentalism. It’s always something that’s pushed on people from the top down, rather than arising from within themselves due to their own natural interests and ideals.
Israel is not a country, it’s like a fake movie set version of a country. A movie set where the set pieces won’t even stand up on their own, so people are always running around in a constant state of construction trying to prop things up and nail things down, and scrambling to pick up things that are falling over, and rotating the set pieces so that they look like real buildings in front of the camera. Without this constant hustle and bustle of propagandizing, lobbying, online influence ops, and nonstop mass military violence, the whole movie set would fall over, and people would see all the film crew members and actors and cameras for what they are.
Clearly, no part of this is sustainable. Clearly, something’s going to have to give. Those set pieces are going to come toppling down sooner or later; it’s just a question of when, and of how high the pile of human corpses needs to be before it happens.
Hamas Has Not Lost, Therefore They Win
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on JUNE 9, 2024
Indrajit Samarajiva
The brave and devout Palestinian people, still turning to Allah (via
Ramy Abdu|)
After October 7th, ‘Israel’s’ stated goal was eliminating Hamas. Specifically, destroying the Al Qassam Brigade’s ability to 1) leave Gaza 2) launch rockets 3) exist at all. On all three counts ‘Israel’ has lost. As spokesman Abu Obeida (who is notably not dead) said in late May, “despite their genocide war and indiscriminate destruction, our fighters have been and remain vigilant against the enemy force.” As Henry Kissinger (who thankfully is dead) said, “The conventional army loses if it does not win. The guerrilla wins if he does not lose.” And Hamas has not lost. ‘Israel’ is winning the genocide and losing the war.
Let me show you, using footage from Hamas HQ (largely via the Resistance News Network on Telegram). This is just a fraction of the information out there, which may be news to western audiences, but which is all over Arabic satellite TV and social media, ie the people that ‘Israel’ is supposed to be deterring.
Terms
Before we get into it, note that I’ll use ‘Hamas’ and ‘Al Qassam Martyrs Brigade’ interchangeably though they are (having evolved in the crucible of assassination and infiltration) operationally separate. Also note that I, up to a point, use Hamas as the representative of the entire Resistance, which actually comprises many groups, most notably Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the PFLP (commies), the Mujahideen Movement, and even the armed wing of Fatah. You can read more about the whole Axis of Resistance here, but I think that’s too much detail for this article. I also use the term White Empire to refer to ‘Israel’, America, Germany, the UK, Australia and all of the colonizers and colonized because they are, to us on the bottom, one phenomenon.
Tactics
First we’ll discuss how Hamas is winning tactically, then strategically anon.
Tactically, Al Qassam can still penetrate ‘Israel’, they can still fire rockets, and their leadership still has full command and control. ‘Israel’ has won against hospitals and lost the plot to Hamas.
1) Ground
The main problem on October 7th—from the ‘Israeli’ perspective—was that the Palestinians got out of the Gaza ‘envelope’. On that day, Hamas broke down walls, flew paragliders, disabled ‘Israeli’ spy cameras and towers, attacked their military outposts, and took hostages to exchange for the thousands of hostages ‘Israel’ holds in horrific conditions. The Resistance called this operation the Al Aqsa Flood, and has outlined their reasoning on it in this document, written in English for you. I encourage you to read it yourself.
Our Narrative-Operation Al-Aqsa Flood – PDF
This ‘problem’ is not solved. October 8th, 9th, 10th, nth have been attempts by ‘Israel’ to stuff the Palestinians back inside the envelope and burn it, but it hasn’t worked. ‘Israel’ has razed the earth, but Hamas is literally underground. This completely upends all imperial counter-insurgency tactics. The Empire may figure out tunnels someday (or maybe not), but right now, they’re completely flummoxed.
Hence, in a small but significant operation on June 6th, Al Qassam was able to pop up outside the perimeter fence, and hit the ‘Israelis’ all over again. This was really a disproof of concept. The conceptual border around Gaza that forms ‘Israel’s’ psychological security blanket is still broken. And, indeed, southern ‘settlers’ have still largely not returned.
As Al Qassam said in a statement, “In a landing operation behind the (enemy) lines, the Al-Qassam Mujahideen were able to breach the fence and attack the headquarters of the enemy division operating in the city of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip.” The IOF acknowledged that one of their soldiers was killed, and three Palestinians martyred. This was a small operation but with big significance because of where it happened. Hamas is still pushing the envelope.
Inside Gaza, ‘Israel’ cannot secure an inch of ground. They can invade and occupy almost anywhere, but they can’t hold anything. As the ‘educated martyr’ Basil Al-Araj wrote in his ‘8 Rules’,
The Palestinian resistance consists of guerrilla formations whose strategies follow the logic of guerrilla warfare or hybrid warfare, which Arabs and Muslims have become masters of through our experiences in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, and Gaza. War is never based on the logic of conventional wars and the defense of fixed points and borders; on the contrary, you draw the enemy into an ambush. You do not stick to a fixed position to defend it; instead, you perform maneuvers, movement, withdrawal, and attack from the flanks and the rear. So, never measure it against conventional wars.
Since the Palestinian Resistance is underground, the IOF is always outflanked (in three dimensions). It doesn’t matter what the map says if your enemy is taking the metro. Thus the Resistance lets the IOF take land, monitors them from underground, plans meticulous ambushes, and then pops out and executes them. There are countless videos like this, I’m just selecting a recent one (from May 22nd). Bear in mind that this happens every day that the ‘Israelis’ are in Gaza. As the Al Qassam video says:
At dawn on Tuesday, 22/5/2024, the fighters of Al-Qassam carried out a complex operation, setting up a tight ambush against a zionist special force that penetrated north of Beit Hanoun. The fighters detonated a Ra’adiya explosive device in the infantry force, a Shuath explosive device in the rescue force, and after 6 hours, after additional forces advanced to evacuate the dead and wounded, the fighters sniped 3 soldiers, including a senior officer.
See for yourself:
Video Link
Again, I have seen countless videos like this. This selection is just based on recency, I can’t even go through them all. Like the Nazis in Stalingrad, the Nazis of ‘Israel’ have completely fucked themselves by reducing Gaza to rubble. They made a mess and now Hamas is rubbing their nose in it. There’s no way they can find the tunnel entrances under all that shit, but Hamas can find them. This is a huge tactical problem because the IOF is always surrounded (in the third dimension, as mentioned). Hamas is literally playing 3D chess while the IOF is playing checkers.
In one crazy example that I already discussed a few weeks ago, multiple ‘Israeli’ tanks park in an area without securing it. Because they practically can’t, their Air Force made such a mess of it. Hamas militants are able to emerge surrounded by tanks, literally touch one, and place explosives directly up its ass. You can see an IOF soldier right behind the tank, their situational awareness is null while the Al Qassam fighters are Metal Gear Solid.
Via Hamas In Action (Day 221)
Once they place the charges, they run back to the tunnels where another guy is waiting with an RPG (homemade Yassin 105s) to hit the other tanks, just as the charges go off. The guys look simple (they’re just out there in tracky bottoms and sandals) but the coordination and planning is highly sophisticated. Al Qassam’s bullet discipline is legendary. They make every shot count. Again, note that I (and everybody in the Arab world) have seen this happen over and over again. The IOF is hopeless against anyone who shoots back, and the Resistance is still shooting, mashallah. There is no deterrence when you look like dumbasses, which is how ‘Israel’ has looked for this whole campaign.
Despite the massacrely bloody rescue of four hostages (with American help, cynically disguised as an aid convoy), the flow of battle (not genocide) is still with the Resistance. As Hamas Political Bureau member, Izzat Al-Rishq said:
Despite the occupation’s claim to have destroyed all Hamas brigades in Gaza, it was only able to liberate its captives through a difficult and complex operation and under massive firepower eight months after the start of the war, facing fierce resistance, which cost it heavy prices, contradicting its claims.
The resistance is still at the heart of the battle and has a lot up its sleeve, and the battle is back and forth. At a time when the occupation announces the release of four captives, after eight months of war, this is evidence of a strategic failure in achieving its declared goals.
Al-Qassam Brigades are still increasing their yield of enemy captives, and the best evidence of this is what happened in the qualitative operation in Jabalia at the end of last month. The enemy is trying hard to hide its real losses in the operation to free its captives, but the final word always belongs to the resistance. This operation will not change the final price the occupation will be forced to pay.
After eight months, three nukes worth of bombs, and the support of America and the whole White Empire, ‘Israel’ simply cannot bury the Palestinian Resistance. They can ‘take’ land, they can massacre innocents, but they cannot accomplish their stated goal of eliminating or even meaningfully degrading Hamas. All they’ve done is degrade their reputation and eliminate their own soldiers. How do you bury what’s already underground? The IOF is just joining Hamas there, but in coffins.
2) Air (Artillery)
Hamas has no air force, but the entire Resistance has invested in fuck-off missiles
Hamas has no air force but artillery remains the ‘god of war’. For decades, the Axis of Resistance (led, technologically, by Iran) has prioritized ‘stand-off’ missiles. The technology transfer has included manufacturing, many of these weapons are homemade, across the Resistance. Hamas has its own small but functional military-industrial complex underground, which is bonkers.
On October 7th, Hamas fired at least 3,000 rockets into occupied Palestine and haven’t stopped firing since. These rockets are often shot down, but this is an advantage in and of itself. ‘Israel’ is spending millions of dollars to shoot down tens of thousands of dollars worth of rockets. Hamas is bleeding ‘Israel’s’ coffers, overwhelming its Iron Dome, and the settlers around the Gaza ‘envelope’ still can’t resettle. As I’ve discussed, ‘Israel’s’ Iron Dome is simply broken in the north (against the more powerful Hezbollah) and it’s increasingly ineffective in the south against Hamas. More and more of these rockets get through, and Hamas has strategically not used the good stuff yet.
Hamas has a wide range of missiles, with the number usually denoting the range (the M90, for example, goes 90 km). Some of the rockets (as you can see in the ‘promo’ video above) are quite sophisticated, but even the small mortars are a constant irritation to the IOF. Just look at this Al Qassam fighter, having a coffee while reloading his mortar. These guys can do this shit all day, and ‘Israel’ can’t do shit about it.
Via Palestine Chronicle
As the Palestine Chronicle says, “The video has predictably ignited Arabic social media with comments about the bravery of Palestinians, 242 days after the start of the Israeli genocide in Gaza. The video also contains a message to the Israelis, that the Resistance is prepared to fight a long war, and that repelling invading Israeli forces in Gaza has now become a routine, as in drinking a cup of coffee in the morning.”
Artillery is the god of war, and Hamas is unbroken and unbowed. Their artillery is still firing and increasingly hitting, as the Iron Dome becomes the Iron Sieve from sheer exhaustion.
3) Command and Control
The Al-Qassam’s military leadership of Mohammed El-Deif, Yahya Sinwar, and spokesman Abu Obeida are household names across the Middle East, and they’re still living. This is a huge problem for ‘Israel’. Many field commanders and soldiers have been martyred—as you can see, these operations are insanely risky—but the military leadership (within Gaza) is completely intact. ‘Israel’ has responded by assassinating Hamas leaders abroad or killing the political leadership’s children and grandchildren in Gaza, but they’re just mindlessly lashing out. Hamas’s brain-trust inside Gaza is still going strong.
Like the Americans when they invaded Iraq, the ‘Israeli’s’ have released a deck of playing cards with high-value targets.
This guy is supposed to be Mohammed Shabana, a field commander in Rafah, but it is actually Mohamed Shabana, an Egyptian sports writer. A football commentator. This has made ‘Israel’ a laughingstock around the Arab world which, again, is the opposite of what they’re trying to do. Machiavelli said a prince could be feared or loved, but they cannot be laughed at. This is fatal to anyone trying to project power, and ‘Israel’ is just a killing joke right now.
I won’t go on in this section because what can I say? The Al Qassam leadership is completely intact in Gaza. Far from decapitating them, ‘Israel’ hasn’t harmed a hair on their bodies. Though it does look like Abu Obeida has lost a bit of weight, peace be with him someday, inshallah.
‘Israeli’ Strategy
So far I’ve been analyzing ‘Israel’s’ stated goal which is, of course, bullshit. ‘Israel’s’ actual goal is ethnically cleaning Palestine once and for all. Genocide most foul. As Abu Obeida said, ‘genocidal war and indiscriminate destruction.’ So now let’s look at what ‘Israel’ is actually doing, and how they’re still fucking that up.
‘Israel’ is completely open about their genocidal intentions in Hebrew and open enough in English. Just hit auto-translate on a Zionist’s post if you want to singe your eyebrows off. As ‘Israel’s’ Minister of National Insecurity Itamar Ben-Gvir has said when asked “Dad, what is the solution for Gaza?”
Occupation, settlement, and encouragement of migration. Only in this way can we solve the problem of Gaza. To occupy all the land, to settle in all the land, and—of course—to encourage the voluntary [?] migration of as many people as possible to other countries. We need to live in security.
As ‘Israel’s’ Prime Monster Benjamin Netanyahu said at the start of their genocidal campaign (October 28th). “Remember what Amalek did to you. We remember and we fight.” Amalek is an Old Testament concept taken out of context by a criminal, and the relevant part is this:
Samuel said to Saul, “I am the one the Lord sent to anoint you king over his people Israel; so listen now to the message from the Lord. This is what the Lord Almighty says: ‘I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt. Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.’
I fear Allah (just the Arabic word for God) and I apologize for taking this out of context. Netanyahu is trying to make it look like he has some biblical command, while he’s really just trying to duck corruption charges. What ‘Israel’ is doing is really just colonialism 101. The British did this in the Uva Province of Sri Lanka, ask anybody in the south and they probably have some story like this. Killing everyone and salting the earth. The general colonial policy in case of rebellion is massive retribution, kill or subjugate/enslave everyone. ‘The seed of Amalek’ was really just mendacious marketing, and it worked within ‘Israel’. Soldiers sing about it before committing war crimes and this genocidal rap song went to #1 in Israel. The racist rappers say:
We brought the whole army on you and I swear there will be no forgiveness
Tffi, the children’s of Amalek
All the units are ready? (Listen up)
The rappers added death threats to Mia Khalifa and Dua Lipa for good measure. This seems bonkers but 73% of ‘Israelis’ said (in March/April) that their military response had been ‘about right’ or ‘not gone far enough’. Once you separate out Arabs trapped inside, it’s even worse. Only 4% of Jewish ‘Israelis’ think the military response has ‘gone too far’. This is a population in the throes of genocidal mania even more than Nazi Germany, and they’ve dragged Hip Hop into it.
Again, just hit auto-translate on random ‘Israeli’ posts if you want to strafe your eyeballs. Genocidal rhetoric is quite common and open in Hebrew and they don’t even try to hide it in English. The western media does, but the ‘Israeli’s’ don’t give a fuck. As the former header of the occupation National Insecurity Council, Giora Eiland, wrote:
The international community warns us of a humanitarian disaster in Gaza and of severe epidemics. We must not shy away from this, as difficult as that may be. After all, severe epidemics in the south of the Gaza Strip will bring victory closer and reduce casualties among IDF soldiers. And no, this is not about cruelty for cruelty’s sake, since we don’t support the suffering of the other side as a goal but as a means.
Thus actual aim of ‘Israel’ in Gaza today is the same as their aim since the Nakba began in 1947. Kicking the Palestinians out and taking their land. Hitting them so hard they never complain again. The truth is not that complicated. But the lie is.
I mention this not to point out that ‘Israel’ is hypocritical or heinous, though they are. I mention this so that we understand the strategic thinking behind the tactics. ‘Israel’s’ tactics make no sense if you believe that they’re actually trying to eliminate Hamas, but they make total sense once you realize that they’re attacking hospitals, homes, and food/water supplies on purpose. ‘Israeli’ is not following the Clausewitzian strategy of engaging and annihilating the enemy’s forces. They are trying to annihilate Gaza entirely. To understand this as a continuous ‘Israel’ policy just listen (or, ideally, don’t) to this hate crime recorded by children and posted by their national broadcaster:
Autumn night falls over the beach of Gaza
Planes are bombing, destruction, destruction
Look the IDF is crossing the line
to annihilate the swastika-bearers
In another year there will be nothing there
And we will safely return to our homes
Within a year we will annihilate everyone
And then we will return to plow our fields
This is actually an updated version of a 1948 poem, which they’ve made explicitly genocidal instead of implicitly so. As you can see the Nakba (catastrophe) is still going and culminating in the genocide of Gaza. October 7th was the beginning of the end, not the beginning at all.
I mention the difference between stated and actual goals because it’s a big reason why ‘Israel’ has not eliminated Hamas. They’re not trying to. I suppose the logic is that Hamas is a people’s movement therefore kill all the people, but this just isn’t practical, to be quite bloodless about it. Complete genocides are basically impossible in the modern era. ‘Israel’ has certainly killed or wounded at least 10% of the population of Gaza, but there’s still 90% to go! And then the West Bank after that, and the people in occupied Palestine, and the surrounding diaspora. In addition to being evil, this genocide is just not feasible.
Sadism is not, in itself, a strategic position, but that’s what ‘Israel’ is standing on.
Hamas Strategy
Hamas, on the other hand, is a rational actor. They have their guns and they’re sticking to them. As Hamas’s famously unkillable Khaled Mashal said in the past,
Dear sister, nations are not easily liberated. The Russians sacrificed 30 million people in World War II, in order to liberate it from Hitler’s attack. The Vietnamese sacrificed 3.5 million people until they defeated the Americans. Afghanistan sacrificed millions of martyrs to defeat the USSR and then the US. The Algerian people sacrificed six million martyrs over 130 years. The Palestinian people are just like any other nation. No nation is liberated without sacrifices.
Blood sacrifice seems to be required for true liberation. I wish it wasn’t so, but that’s how it goes. If you watch interviews with Hamas members these are dudes who were into the gym, or studying, or entirely normal things once. They have simple dreams, but they were born into a nightmare. Many of them are orphans, the children ‘Israel’ didn’t kill in previous incursions. Before you condemn them A) shut the fuck up and B) ask yourself, what would you do in their situation? One of my favorite quotes (which I’ve seen on the tents of student protest in the US) is “whoever is in solidarity with our corpses but not our rockets, is a hypocrite and not one of us.”
Hamas is just painfully aware that this is what liberation costs. The pages of history are unfortunately written in blood. Even Americans have a dim mythical awareness of this. Thomas Jefferson said, “the tree of Liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. It is its natural manure.” Jefferson was discussing suppressing a debt rebellion, but him and Kissinger can still make some pertinent points from their new appointments in Hell. Kissinger said that “the conventional army loses if it does not win. The guerrilla wins if he does not lose” and Hamas has not lost. This is a victory in and of itself. By denying the whole White Empire a monopoly of violence for eight months now, Hamas has won.
'Israel' has completely lost the north of occupied Palestine. It's under fire and on fire every day now. Hezbollah has methodically eye-poked 'Israel's' intelligence outposts and is literally blasting them in the nuts every day, on camera. The map above shows the new line of control for occupied Palestine, as reported by the thinking man's Der Stürmer, Haaretz. 'Israel' has lost it.
Eyes And Ears
It's fascinatingly boring how Hezbollah did this. For months their videos have been methodically mundane, blowing up this communication tower, that building, that listening station. It seemed like a bunch of nothing, but it adds up. Hezbollah had a list of 'Israel's' eyes and ears in the north and has spent months methodically eye poking them, like Odysseus and the Cyclops. Now—however big the IOF might be—they're effectively blinded.
As Hezbollah opens bigger and bigger gaps in 'Israel's' air defenses, they can send bigger and more missiles in, with better and better penetration. For 'Israel', this attrition is a compounding problem. Their air defenses are a connected system and the network is increasingly returning 404. Take for example, the destruction of the $230 million dollar SKYDEW blimp/spy balloon.
This balloon is designed to detect low-flying drones and missiles, especially important as this is the vector most used by the Resistance. SKYDEW can stay up much longer (and relatively cheaper) than planes, and can 'see' much further than ground-based systems. It was also placed in a highly strategic area that let them cover attacks from Syria, Iraq and—to a lesser degree—from Hezbollah, specifically on the port of Haifa. But now the party's over. Look at the balloon now:
SKYDEW is now as shriveled and useless as Joe Biden's nutsack. This is a big loss, which also signals a big breakdown. As the SKYDEW 'Target Card' (from Hezbollah intelligence) says, it was “protected by an electronic monitoring and jamming system against drones and UAVs (Drone Dome),” and “secured by three layers of missile interception systems: Iron Dome, David's Sling, and Hetz [Arrow].” That all got sliced through like the layers of an onion, leaving only Zionist tears behind.
The northern front is porous now, and the 'settlers' more than anybody knows it. As Moshe Davidovitz—head of the Asher regional council—said, “Ten rockets fell in the center of the country and the media is in an uproar — the country is in turmoil,” he wrote. “But every day dozens of rockets are fired towards the confrontation line settlements and the Galilee, including anti-tank missiles and suicide drones, and the country remains silent. Once again, it's proof that the north is not being counted.”
Meron Air Base, one of 'Israel's' two main bases (Via)
Hezbollah of course, has counted the north. They have a list of 'Israeli' military targets and they go through them one by one. Take, for example, the Mount Meron Air Surveillance Base, one of the two main bases in 'Israel'. This is what the IOF says about the base, in a 2016 article by Maariv (via translation):
One of the senior officials of the Air Force adds: "The air control system is crucial for the operational capability of the Air Force. Its main duty is to protect the occupied airspace. Through the control system, we activate all capabilities to protect the sky, including helicopters, aircraft, missiles, and other classified systems."
And this is what Hezbollah intelligence released, as they were bombing it:
Firstly, the Meron Air Surveillance Base is located on the summit of Mount Jarmaq ["Mount Meron"] in northern occupied Palestine, the highest peak in occupied Palestine. Meron Base is the sole center for administration, surveillance, and air control in the northern part of the usurping entity and there is no major alternative to it. It is one of two main bases in the entire usurping entity: "Meron" in the north, and the second being "Mitzpe Ramon" in the south.
The Meron Base is responsible for organizing, coordinating, and managing all air operations towards Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, Cyprus, and the northern part of the eastern basin of the Mediterranean Sea. Additionally, this base is a main center for electronic jamming operations in the aforementioned directions and is staffed by a large number of elite officers and soldiers of the zionist forces.
Secondly, the fighters of the Islamic Resistance at 07:50 AM on Saturday, January 6, 2024, as a part of the preliminary response to the crime of assassinating the great leader Sheikh Saleh Al-Arouri and his martyr brothers in the southern suburb [Dahiyeh] of Beirut, targeted the Meron Air Surveillance Base with 62 missiles of various types, inflicting direct and confirmed hits.
I know the demonic testicles of Meron Air Base well, having seen Hezbollah come at them like sperm to an egg, over and over in countless videos. They've been relentless. It honestly gets boring because the whole thing never fireballs, but each small hit adds up. Each time a hole in 'Israeli' air defenses opens, the hole only gets bigger, because of Hezbollah is damaging complex, interconnected systems.
Now the Meron base can barely defend itself, let alone the region. 'Israel' has responded by assassinating Hezbollah (and Iranian) leaders, but the Resistance just names missiles after the martyrs and send more. This is a battle of attrition and Hezbollah is paying attention while 'Israel' is mindlessly lashing out. 'Israel' is completely distracted by a genocide in the south, and has lost the battle for the north.
After months of this boring de-administrative work, Hezbollah has finally gotten to the good stuff. 'Israel's' northern air defenses today are like a ragged old mosquito net that the dog chased the cat through. It's full of holes, and big ones. Hezbollah can increasingly fire at will, with increasingly accurate weapons. For example, here is Hezbollah taking down a SKYSTAR 330 by drone-striking its Battalion 869 operator literally in the nuts.
In this case, Hezbollah targeted not the spy balloon itself, but the balloon controllers, in three locations at the same time. With the operators eliminated, the balloon drifted out of control, landing in Lebanon where some kids recovered it. This is the state of 'Israel's' eyes and ears in the north. They're on the ground.
Iron Done
'Israel' has nothing worth calling an air-defense in the north anymore. The Iron Dome is done. Hezbollah can fire at will, and has for every single day for seven months now. Iraqi Resistance missiles are flying right over them, towards Haifa. Iran can overwhelm the entire national system whenever it wants. 'Israel' can still offend the conscience, but they're missile defenseless now. Even Hamas is hitting them, from within traumatized Gaza. It's open season, and the 'settlers' know it.
'Israeli' settlers openly bemoan their unsettled state all over the Hebrew press. Some settlers were so Pyrrhicly pissed they threatened to secede from the entire abomi-nation and form the new State of Galilee. As The Jerusalem Post (the ethnic cleanser's preferred real estate supplement) said,
The straw that broke the camel's back was the prime minister's answer at the cabinet meeting to a question by Benny Gantz, as reported by N12. Gantz wondered if the residents would return to their homes on September 1, for the start of the school year, and Netanyahu replied, "What's the worst that will happen if they return a few months after September 1?"
This is of course the worst that can happen. The entire premise of 'Israel' is that they can do whatever they want and fuck everyone else. If the Iron Dome doesn't work, 'Israel' doesn't work, and the Iron Dome doesn't work. It's the Iron Sieve now. Holy warriors have poked it full of holes.
An Iron Dome battery, all busted up.
This is a huge problem because the Iron Dome is not just 'Israel's' physical defense mechanism, it's their psychological defense mechanism. It's what makes the whole colonial project believable, that they can piss off everyone in the region and suffer no consequences. Belief in the 'Iron Dome' is belief in 'Israel' and neither is believable anymore. Thus the northern 'settlements' have emptied out and they're not coming back anytime soon. As the Resistance News Network (RNN) said (on May 29th):
930 settler houses in northern occupied Palestine have been damaged by Hezbollah rockets in 86 settlements since October 7th, according to the zionist Ministry of War.
In Al-Manara for example, 130 out of 155 houses were destroyed. "Metulla" has just 34 residents left in the settlement, at most. "Kiryat Shmona," one of the largest settlements, has seen its population plummet from 24,000 to under 4,000, and 124 houses have been damaged within it.
This comes as over 200,000 settlers in the north are displaced by the resistance, having built their own refugee camp. Some want to secede from "Israel" and build their own state, while others, such as the settlement of "Margaliot" have severed their ties with the entity as of yesterday.
Perplexingly, the IOF reportedly plans to significantly cut down the number of soldiers it has on the northern border and nearby settlements, citing funding reasons, or perhaps to lessen the number of targets available to Hezbollah.
Let's look at one example of Hezbollah eliminating one target, an Iron Dome battery. They systematically do this over and over. This Al Jazeera report describes how Hezbollah first gets the battery to reveal itself by firing bullshit at it, then hits it with the real shit:
At 3:30, exclusive footage reveals the monitoring and reconnaissance operations that enabled Hezbollah to uncover the positions of "Iron Dome" batteries stations near the settlement of "Kfar Blum" using a tactic called "fire luring." The footage reveals that Hezbollah launched munitions toward the sites and documented the interception process carried out by the "Iron Dome," which enabled Hezbollah to execute a high-precision qualitative operation.
The scenes at 4:25 reveal a successful targeting of the "Iron Dome" batteries, without them being able to detect, track, or thwart the attack. Then, exclusive photos obtained by Al Jazeera show Hezbollah's intelligence penetration of the IOF soldiers in these newly established sites, and the ability to document the geographical details and the size of the fortifications used.
Hezbollah has done this over and over, methodically hunting and seeking Iron Dome batteries one by one. Given that the rest of their surveillance equipment is decimated and they can't even see what's coming, 'Israel' has to then draw its military assets further and further from the border. Otherwise this is what happens:
This is the moment Hezbollah hits “the garrison unit of Barkat Risha with an Iranian Almas top-attack ATGM [Anti-Tank Guided Missile].” 'Israel'—unlike Hezbollah and Hamas—has not spent the last 20 years tunneling underground, so their soldiers are all exposed without the Iron Dome. Take also, for example, the IOF's 769th Brigade Headquarters, or what's left of it.
The colonial condom is full of holes and 'Israel' is pregnant with a Palestine reborn. When the soldiers leave, the settlers have to leave also, it's a total failure of colonization. This is not a strategic retreat, it's strategic defeat. This is not a solution, just dissolution. But it's all 'Israel' can do. They've lost control of the north and, worst of all, they've lost control of the tempo of this war. Hezbollah can keep turning the heat up and up until 'Israel' is cooked. Behold Kiryat Shmona (occupied al-Khalisa), which is literally on fire right now:
This is directly because the Iron Dome is not intercepting drones and Hezbollah has fire control of the whole region. Hence it burns. Settlers now see a 'welcome' board that's literally melting. The message is clear. 'Fuck off'.
I have watched this process play out for the past seven months, and now the grapes of wrath bear fruit. Hezbollah has fire control over the north, while 'Israel' is retreating further and further. The collapse of the northern front also opens up 'Israel' for attack from Syria and Iraq, which can fly straight through. This is all causing massive psychological damage to 'Israel' because the Iron Dome was their safety blanket, and now they have to face the skeletons under their bed alone. This is all because Hezbollah had a strategy while 'Israel' was just ratchety, bombing ambulances and homes with no military value. Now 'Israel' has lost northern Palestine and it's not coming back. This is decolonization in action. 'Israel' has lost the north and a liberated Palestine is slowly coming into view.
Netanyahu's emergency govt tumbles after 'moderate' Gantz bolts
Gantz exited the emergency war cabinet hours after the army's Gaza division commander also announced his resignation
News Desk
JUN 10, 2024
(Photo Credit: Flash90)
Opposition leader Benny Gantz on 9 June officially abandoned Israel's emergency government coalition formed following the Palestinian resistance attacks of 7 October, blaming Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the failure of the war on Gaza.
“Netanyahu prevents us from getting a real victory. This is why we are leaving the government with a heavy heart but a full heart,” Gantz said during a news conference originally scheduled for Saturday.
The leader of the National Unity party also urged the premier to hold early elections, saying, “There should be elections that will eventually establish a government that will win the trust of the people and be able to face challenges.”
“I call on Netanyahu: set an agreed election date,” Gantz stressed.
Following his speech, Netanyahu told Gantz, “Israel is in an existential war on several fronts” and “this is not the time to abandon the campaign – this is the time to join forces.”
Gantz's exit from the emergency government came one day after the Israeli army killed nearly 300 Palestinians in central Gaza and injured 700 more in a bloody rescue operation that saw the release of four Israeli captives.
The “success” of the joint US–Israel operation prompted Gantz to delay his exit from the government until Sunday.
Gantz last month gave Netanyahu an ultimatum, threatening to bolt if the premier failed to present a post-war plan for the besieged and bombarded Palestinian territory.
Ultranationalist National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir responded to Gantz's resignation by saying he would demand increased say over government decisions, including in the war cabinet. In a letter on social media, Ben Gvir insisted that he be added to the body, saying it was time to bring in officials who “warned in real-time against the conception and viewpoint that everyone today accepts was wrong.”
Fellow anti-Arab minister Bezalel Smotrich blasted Gantz, saying his move “aimed at dismantling [the government’s] cohesion for political reasons and is irresponsible.”
“There is no less stately act than resigning from a government in time of war,” he wrote.
Gantz, often presented by western media and authorities as a “moderate” Israeli political figure, previously served as defense minister and commander-in-chief of the Israeli army.
During his tenure, he oversaw the brutal bombardment of Gaza in 2012, 2014, and 2021, which killed thousands of Palestinian civilians.
Shortly before Gantz's statement on Sunday, the Israeli army's Gaza division commander, General Avi Rosenfeld, announced his resignation, becoming the first army combat commander to resign since 7 October.
Yemen strikes UK warship in response to Israel’s Nuseirat massacre
The Yemeni army said it struck a UK warship, as well as two ships belonging to companies that violated the ban on sailing to Israeli ports, in response to the massacre in central Gaza on Saturday
News Desk
JUN 9, 2024
(Photo credit: Yemen Military Media)
Yemen’s Armed Forces announced on 9 June several operations in the Red and Arabian Seas, including the targeting of a UK warship.
The operations were carried out as a response to Israel’s massacre in central Gaza’s Nuseirat refugee camp on 8 June, which killed nearly 300 Palestinian civilians during an operation to retrieve four living Israeli captives.
“In response to the Zionist enemy’s crime in the Nuseirat camp yesterday … The missile force carried out a military operation targeting the British warship destroyer (Diamond) in the Red Sea with a number of ballistic missiles, and the hit was accurate,” said army spokesman Yahya Saree.
“The naval forces, missile force, and unmanned air force of the Yemeni [army] also carried out two joint military operations against two ships belonging to companies that violated the decision to ban access to the ports of occupied Palestine. They are the NORDERNEY ship, which was directly hit, causing a fire to break out, and the MSC TAVVISHI ship, in the Arabian Sea, which was directly hit,” Saree added.
“The two operations were carried out with a number of naval and ballistic missiles and drones.”
The UK maritime security firm Ambrey reported on Sunday that a cargo transport vessel flying the flag of Antigua and Barbuda was hit by a missile 83 nautical miles southeast of Yemen’s Aden. The British Maritime Trade Operations Authority reported on Saturday another incident on a ship 80 nautical miles southeast of Aden.
Saree’s announcement came a day after 274 Palestinians were killed and nearly 700 injured during an Israeli military operation to rescue captives in central Gaza’s Nuseirat refugee camp. Israeli undercover units, aided by US forces, infiltrated Nuseirat disguised as displaced civilians and using an aid truck as cover before indiscriminate bombardment wreaked havoc upon the camp
Four prisoners were retrieved alive, and one Israeli officer was killed. The spokesman for Hamas’ Qassam Brigades said a number of Israeli captives were killed in the operation.
As part of the naval campaign waged by the Ansarallah movement and the armed forces of Yemen’s Sanaa government in solidarity with the people and resistance in Gaza, Yemeni forces have recently expanded their operations against Israeli maritime interests to include the Mediterranean Sea.
The Yemeni army had previously been attacking Israeli-linked ships and ships bound for Israeli ports across the Red Sea, Arab Sea, Gulf of Aden, and Indian Ocean.
Yemen has also continued to target US and British vessels in response to the brutal campaign of airstrikes launched by Washington and London against Yemen since January.
In response to deadly US airstrikes on Yemen late last month, which killed at least 16 people, Yemen’s Armed Forces announced in a statement on 31 May that it targeted Washington’s USS Eisenhower aircraft carrier in the Red Sea.
Sanaa’s forces said they struck the aircraft carrier again on 1 June.
WFP pauses Gaza deliveries via US 'Aid Pier' in wake of Nuseirat massacre
The US and Israeli militaries are accused of using the 'Aid Pier' to launch a bloody rescue operation that left behind nearly 1,000 Palestinian casualties
News Desk
JUN 10, 2024
(Photo Credit: US Navy Photo/MC3 Morales)
The director of the UN World Food Programme (WFP), Cindy McCain, announced on 9 June that the organization is hitting pause on its distribution of humanitarian aid via the US-built pier located on Gaza's coast.
“I’m concerned about the safety of our people,” McCain told reporters. “We’ve stepped back for the moment … to make sure we’re on safe terms and on safe ground before we restart. But the rest of the country is operational. We’re doing everything we can in the north and the south.”
The US Agency for International Development (USAID) described the pause as a “step to allow for a security review” of aid distribution in Gaza.
“[USAID is working with the WFP and other partners] to ensure that aid can safely and effectively resume movement following completion of the security review that the humanitarian community is currently undertaking,” the CIA soft power cutout said in a statement.
The WFP announcement came one day after the US and Israeli militaries launched a bloody rescue operation in central Gaza's Nuseirat refugee camp, leaving behind nearly 300 Palestinians killed and about 700 injured.
According to eyewitness accounts and a video shared across Israeli Telegram channels, the operation was launched from the US-built pier and included the use of an aid delivery truck to hide Israeli commando forces as they infiltrated the overcrowded camp.
US Central Command (CENTCOM) responded to the reports on Saturday by claiming that the “humanitarian pier facility, including its equipment, personnel, and assets, were not used in the operation to rescue hostages today in Gaza.” The statement noted that Israel used “an area south of the pier” during the joint operation.
News of the suspension of WFP activities via the US-built pier comes as famine spreads across Gaza, with Israel blocking the entry of aid via seven land crossings.
After bad weather damaged the pier less than two weeks after its installation, Stephane Dujarric, spokesperson for the UN Secretary-General said the pier “cannot replace” opening land crossings that had been blocked by Israel. While about 97 trucks of aid had come over the pier, Dujarric said, “It's just a small add to what we actually need.”
The Nuseirat Massacre, Seen from the Complicity of the West
JUNE 10, 2024
Pro-Palestinian and anti-genocide protestors near the White House, Washington DC. Photo: AFP.
By Al Mayadeen – Jun 9, 2024
Following the announcement by the Zionist regime, “Israel”, of the “successful” rescue of four of its citizens held by the Palestinian Resistance in the Nuseirat camp, in the center of the Gaza Strip, Western media covered the event as a breakthrough in the war, and they ignored the massacre associated with that operation [which has taken the lives of more than 283 Palestinians, mostly women and children].
Instead of acknowledging the several hundred martyrs and wounded civilians, or the death of other prisoners and an officer, they highlighted the role of US advisors in this event, and its link to the internal Israeli political context.
The biased narrative of the event demonstrates once again the complicity of the world hegemonic press with the crimes of the Zionist regime, by using audio and video fragments in accordance with the Israeli propaganda agenda.
While exaggerating Israeli speeches highlighted the recovery of four people, they ignored the victims of the massacre, or justified it as an unfortunate result of a necessary process.
Some media even tried to reinforce to the public the position of extremists in the government by recovering the prisoners “through military actions, not through negotiations.”
However, its supposed achievement at the Nuseirat camp does not change the outcome of the war for the Zionist regime, but rather reinforces the paradox of its dependence on US military, ground and intelligence support.
The Western media did not draw attention to the fact that in eight months of straining all their intelligence and technological capabilities, and counting on US support and military superiority, they only recovered four hostages, at the cost of the lives of hundreds.
Therefore, what happened this Saturday does not change anything in the strategic equation and the general panorama of the confrontation, and the occupying entity maintains its state of denial in the face of demonstrated failure. What happened, and will happen from now on, is a process of managing the damage of a failure that will haunt it for a long time.
In fact, the occupation forces failed to displace Palestinians from the Gaza Strip, nor impose a convenient norm there, and none of their stated objectives were achieved, as several of their leaders, officials and allies acknowledged.
Viewed more broadly, “Israel” is in a state of turmoil, its deterrence has collapsed, and the weapons it has always boasted of are attacked every day. It is humiliated and shamed on the northern front and tries in vain to separate the aggression in Gaza from the responses of the Resistance support fronts in the region.
In the global context it is a pariah entity, since public opinion has turned against it, not only with hostile statements, but with its support for the Resistance within the framework of a strategic change never witnessed before.
Added to this is the wait of rulings in international courts, while its ally the United States can no longer cover up its misdeeds and crimes.
This process does not answer the occupation’s most important questions: how will it get its prisoners back? How will the settlers from the north return? How is deterrence restored? How will its global reputation be restored? How will it achieve victory and restore confidence in the army and in the entity itself?
US hypocrisy and participation in the massacre
Regarding the role of the United States, two important facts came to light. The first, is its open participation of the planning, which confirms its direct and declared responsibility for this massacre–along with many others–it would not be surprising to also later learn of US soldiers on the ground.
The second factor is the falsehood of North American humanitarian headlines, and the proof that its maritime dock is a military and security center at the service of the Israeli troops, as was demonstrated this Saturday, since it was the focus of the operation, according to the Israeli narrative.
However, the United States actually used humanitarian aid tools to build a base and use it to serve the military and security purposes of the Israeli occupier. This confirms its hypocrisy in the face of the accusations made by countries, groups and individuals, and in its justifications of the attacks on hospitals as supposed bases of the Resistance.
Regarding the internal political context, some observers highlighted that the prisoner recovery event is part of the management of the internal battle of extreme division and polarization, with exchanges of accusations and responsibilities for the accumulated failure, and therefore an attempt to save the Israeli war cabinet from collapse.
This is proven by the coverage from the Israeli media and their efforts to paint an unrealistic scene than the usual one during the months of aggression, to cover up the military and security failures.
Even the head of the occupation government, Benjamin Netanyahu, rushed to meet with the rescued prisoners to exploit the matter for his fleeting political interest.
Regarding the negotiation file, analysts consider the scene drawn in the media as another maneuver to try to misconstrue the Resistance’s decision in the face of US pressure to accept the Israeli proposal in a negotiated agreement.
Ranjeet Brar: Palestine Catastrophe: from British mandate to al Nakba
What led to the original orgy of terroristic ethnic cleansing in Palestine, and how does this help us understand the resistance war now being waged?
Ranjeet Brar
Monday 10 June 2024
In this video, Dr Ranjeet Brar provides the vital context that is entirely missing from western corporate media when they report on what they have historically described as the ‘Palestine-Israel conflict’ and what they today refer to as the ‘Hamas-Israel war’.
But the story of Palestine is not one of ‘conflict’ between two peoples or even two states. It is a history of colonisation, oppression and resistance. British imperialism adopted the zionist project as a useful tool to deepen and perpetuate its control over the entire middle-eastern region when it became clear that oil had become the most strategically important of all raw materials.
For this reason the British government signed the Balfour declaration in 1917 as it moved to colonise the country. For this reason it oversaw the mass migration of zionist settlers during the interwar period. For this reason it armed jewish settlers and disarmed and suppressed all Palestinian opposition.
For this reason it drew up the plan for the partition of the country, which it pushed through the United Nations at a time when that institution didn’t have representatives from the majority of the world’s colonised peoples and on the back of a wave of sympathy for European jews following the Nazi holocaust.
Dr Ranjeet gives a profound overview of the events that led up to the terroristic orgy of ethnic cleansing that the Palestinians remember as ‘al Nakba’, the Catastrophe. In the process, he lays bare the true motives of the imperialists and the true nature and history of the racist and colonial ideology of zionism.
The settler colonial state of Israel did not materialise from thin air. It was an integral part of the British and French Sykes-Picot secret treaty – the plan to conquer and redivide the Ottoman empire that was the real motivation for the 1914-18 interimperialist war. Britain wanted to extend its middle-eastern colonies in order to better safeguard its existing colonial possessions and sea routes to India. And it wanted in particular to control the newly-discovered oil reserves of the region, which were already becoming of vital economic importance.
Fully two thirds of global oil reserves lie beneath the ground of the Arabian peninsula and west Asia. This explains why Anglo-American imperialism created Israel and continues to back it. It is also why it maintains support for the feudal relics of the Saudi monarchy, the Gulf states and Jordan as loyal stooges in the quest to maintain its stranglehold over the region.
It is these economic interests that underly all the terrorist outrages committed by the Nato states and their proxies in the region, from the Nakba to the Iraq and Afghan wars, the Syrian and Libyan genocides, and the ongoing maintenance of the medieval theocracies that syphon off the region’s wealth from the impoverished masses, grotesquely offering footballers $2bn contracts while the Palestinian people are slowly starved, bombed and strafed into oblivion.
But the heroic fight of the Axis of Resistance has turned the tide. The people of the region have refused to succumb to their allotted fate.
The temper of the masses is quickening. The balance of forces changing, and imperialism now faces the inevitable prospect of losing its hold over the region.
This video is essential viewing for anyone who wants to understand what lies behind the war that is now raging in Gaza and spreading across the region – a war between the forces of zionism and imperialism on the one hand and the combined forces of Arab national liberation on the other.
100,000 form “red line” around White House to protest US support of Israel
A hundred thousand people descended upon Washington DC to surround the White House with a miles-long “red line”, later forming a “People’s Court” to try Biden and Netanyahu for genocide
June 10, 2024 by Natalia Marques
Protesters on June 8 forming the red line in front of the White House. Photo: PYM
“The ruling class, they’ve shown us that they have no red line,” said Lamees M, an organizer with the Palestinian Youth Movement, opening a rally of over 100,000 people in front of the White House in the capital of the US on Saturday, June 8. “They will bankroll the murder of 40,000 Palestinians. They will provide cover for the wholesale destruction of the entire Gaza Strip. They’ll provide the blueprint for the mass displacement of over a million Palestinians, and then send bombs to rain down on people in their tents of refuge.”
Over 200 organizations came together to hold the demonstration and to organize dozens of buses to bring demonstrators from all over the country to converge in Washington DC. 1,000 protesters traveled overnight from Tampa, Florida, and more protesters came from as far away as Detroit, Iowa, and Kentucky. Convening organizations included the Palestinian Youth Movement, National Students for Justice in Palestine, The People’s Forum, Al-Awda: The Palestine Right to Return Coalition, US Palestinian Community Network, and the ANSWER Coalition.
Earlier on June 8, Israel once again dropped bombs on the Nuseirat refugee camp, in a so-called “rescue operation.” Zionist forces “rescued” four hostages, but in the process killed 274 Palestinians and injured over 698 more—all using US-made bombs.
As tens of thousands, young and old, representing a multitude of nationalities, gathered at Lafayette Square in front of the White House, the overwhelming mood was one of outrage that the government of the United States has thus far refused to abandon its unconditional support for Israeli genocide.
Demonstrators formed a “red line” around the White House, a miles-long red banner, parts of which were inscribed with the names of the 40,000 Palestinians killed by Israel in the ongoing genocide since October.
The demonstrators were denouncing Biden’s previous claims that the invasion of Rafah by Israel would be a red line for his administration, even threatening to withhold weapons shipments when Israel was still threatening to invade.
“I made it clear that if they go into Rafah—they haven’t gone in Rafah yet—if they go into Rafah, I’m not supplying the weapons that have been used historically to deal with Rafah, to deal with the cities—that deal with that problem,” Biden said during a CNN interview on May 8.
But Israel has since invaded, perpetrating massacre after massacre in Rafah using US-made weapons—resulting in no material policy changes from the Biden administration. The US continues its decades-long policy of sending arms to Israel to carry out the systematic destruction of Palestinian life.
Peoples Dispatch spoke to Mohammad from the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM), who said that “the ruling class are not the ones that set the red lines. The working class people of this world are the ones that set the red lines.”
Mohammad also spoke at the rally in Lafayette Square as a representative of PYM, speaking to the state of the larger struggle for Palestine within the diaspora since October. “The people of Gaza, the popular cradle, exists as the mark by where we should always measure ourselves. And for that reason, we cannot allow ourselves to succumb to despair, to succumb to defeatism,” he said, speaking to those gathered at the square.
“We merely exist as one front of many,” Mohammad continued. “We have shut down streets, we have shut down bridges, airports, train stations… this has never happened in the history of empire for a very long time. Day in and day out, we organize to clog the arteries of imperialism, here within the belly of the beast.”
Later on in the day, thousands gathered on the other side of the White House, to hold a People’s Court of Justice trying Benjamin Netanyahu, Yoav Gallant, Joseph Biden, Lloyd Austin, Anthony Blinken, as well as the states of the US and Israel, with the crimes of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.
Thousands gathered at the Ellipse in Washington DC for the People’s Court of Justice. Photo: Adrian Antonioli / ANSWER Coalition
“To all of the people of conscience who are entering into the People’s Court, we welcome you to your rightful place in history as the judges of what is right and wrong,” said Layan Fuleihan, Palestinian organizer and Education Director at the People’s Forum.
Attendees at the People’s Court heard testimony directly from Gaza, read by Palestinian organizers. These included a testimony from a 13-year-old Palestinian girl who lost both her parents and her siblings in an Israeli bombing on December 11, 2023, in which only she and her brother survived with significant injuries. She is now sheltering at an UNRWA school at Nuiserat camp, which has been bombed several times by Israeli forces. “Our life in the shelter is difficult. Everyday I have to go up and down the stairs many times, which is very difficult with my injuries,” read the testimony. “I miss coming back from school and finding my mother preparing food, and eating together. But my mother was martyred. The occupation killed her, and left me to continue my life without her.”
The People’s Court concluded with finding all the accused parties guilty of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.
Peoples Dispatch spoke to Brian Becker, executive director of the ANSWER Coalition, who explained the significance of thousands of working people coming together to put the powerful on trial. “This is a rare moment for people who come to a mass demonstration in Washington, DC, to have as a concluding event, the testimony of international lawyers, human rights lawyers, legal scholars on the direct testimony from people in Gaza themselves about war crimes, crimes against humanity and crimes against peace,” Becker said.
Becker also spoke to the significance of the current stage in the movement for Palestine in the United States, eight months into the genocide, highlighting that more and more people, “now think that the Israeli narrative is false.”
“We have created this consciousness…all of the groups in the movement who have been in the streets, using all kinds of tactics to show protest, to show opposition, to show struggle. People’s consciousness changes when they are in struggle. When they are in struggle, they open their minds to new ideas. And that’s what we’re witnessing in the United States.”
Netanyahu's emergency govt tumbles after 'moderate' Gantz bolts
Gantz exited the emergency war cabinet hours after the army's Gaza division commander also announced his resignation
News Desk
JUN 10, 2024
(Photo Credit: Flash90)
Opposition leader Benny Gantz on 9 June officially abandoned Israel's emergency government coalition formed following the Palestinian resistance attacks of 7 October, blaming Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the failure of the war on Gaza.
“Netanyahu prevents us from getting a real victory. This is why we are leaving the government with a heavy heart but a full heart,” Gantz said during a news conference originally scheduled for Saturday.
The leader of the National Unity party also urged the premier to hold early elections, saying, “There should be elections that will eventually establish a government that will win the trust of the people and be able to face challenges.”
“I call on Netanyahu: set an agreed election date,” Gantz stressed.
Following his speech, Netanyahu told Gantz, “Israel is in an existential war on several fronts” and “this is not the time to abandon the campaign – this is the time to join forces.”
Gantz's exit from the emergency government came one day after the Israeli army killed nearly 300 Palestinians in central Gaza and injured 700 more in a bloody rescue operation that saw the release of four Israeli captives.
The “success” of the joint US–Israel operation prompted Gantz to delay his exit from the government until Sunday.
Gantz last month gave Netanyahu an ultimatum, threatening to bolt if the premier failed to present a post-war plan for the besieged and bombarded Palestinian territory.
Ultranationalist National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir responded to Gantz's resignation by saying he would demand increased say over government decisions, including in the war cabinet. In a letter on social media, Ben Gvir insisted that he be added to the body, saying it was time to bring in officials who “warned in real-time against the conception and viewpoint that everyone today accepts was wrong.”
Fellow anti-Arab minister Bezalel Smotrich blasted Gantz, saying his move “aimed at dismantling [the government’s] cohesion for political reasons and is irresponsible.”
“There is no less stately act than resigning from a government in time of war,” he wrote.
Gantz, often presented by western media and authorities as a “moderate” Israeli political figure, previously served as defense minister and commander-in-chief of the Israeli army.
During his tenure, he oversaw the brutal bombardment of Gaza in 2012, 2014, and 2021, which killed thousands of Palestinian civilians.
Shortly before Gantz's statement on Sunday, the Israeli army's Gaza division commander, General Avi Rosenfeld, announced his resignation, becoming the first army combat commander to resign since 7 October.
Majority of US citizens reject arming Israel: Poll
The White House and US Congress have sent unprecedented amounts of weapons to support Israel's genocide of the Palestinians, despite opposition from the US public
News Desk
JUN 10, 2024
The BLU-109 bombs are intended to destroy underground bunkers, and have been used by the US in its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (Photo credit: LEILA GORCHEV/AFP via Getty)
The majority of US citizens say the US government should not send weapons to Israel but should send humanitarian aid to Gaza, a poll published on 7 June by CBS News and YouGov shows.
The poll asked, “Regarding the situation with Israel and Hamas, which one of these should the US do or not do now?”
Sixty-one percent of US citizens responded, saying the US should not send weapons to Israel.
Among Democrats, 77 percent said the US should not send weapons, compared to 38 percent of Republicans.
At the same time, 62 percent of US citizens said the US should send humanitarian aid to Palestinians in Gaza, while 38 percent opposed it.
The poll highlights the weak influence of US public opinion and the strong influence of the Israel lobby and pro-Israel US officials over US foreign policy.
Despite strong opposition from voters in his own Democratic Party, US President Joe Biden has prioritized sending unprecedented amounts of weapons to Israel since the start of its war on Gaza on 7 October last year.
“What the US started to do almost immediately was send an extraordinary flow of weapons,” a former US Army officer told the New York Times.
The Times adds that “there were so many arms shipments to Israel that a senior Pentagon official said the Department of Defense sometimes struggled to find sufficient cargo aircraft to deliver them.”
Biden's Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, has played a vital role in advancing weapons deliveries to Israel. After the war began, he expressed solidarity with Israel as someone of the Jewish faith, the Jerusalem Post reported.
“I come before you not only as the United States secretary of state,” Blinken told Israelis during a live-streamed press conference in Tel Aviv, “but also as a Jew.”
In April, only 37 Democrats and 21 Republicans voted against a bill to provide military aid to Israel. A large majority, 173 members in total, voted to approve the bill.
Support for Israel from members of Congress from both political parties is strong in large part due to the pro-Israel lobby, most notably the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).
In a recent interview with host Tucker Carlson, Republican Congressman Thomas Massie said every Republican member of Congress has an “AIPAC babysitter,” who is assigned to advise them on issues concerning support for Israel.
Congressman Massie said, “I've had four members of Congress say, I'll talk to my AIPAC person. Its really what we call them, 'It's my AIPAC guy.'”
AIPAC and other Israel lobby groups also provide significant funding for election and re-election campaigns.
In April, AIPAC announced it was committing $100 million to defeat a handful of Democratic congressional candidates in this fall's elections who had expressed criticism of Israel's war on Gaza, which has so far killed over 15,000 children and is widely viewed as genocide.
The efforts of AIPAC and the rest of the Israel lobby far outweigh efforts by Arab and Jewish activists who oppose US support for Israel's war in Gaza.
Israel perpetrated Nuseirat massacre to ‘block’ ceasefire deal: Hamas
Israel killed 274 Palestinians in Gaza Saturday as part of an operation to rescue four Israel captives
News Desk
JUN 10, 2024
Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh at a groundbreaking ceremony for the Rafah Medical Complex in Rafah, southern Gaza Strip on November 23, 2019. (Photo credit: Abed Rahim Khatib/Flash90)
Ismail Haniyeh, the head of the Hamas movement’s political bureau, says Israel launched its bloody massacre and captive rescue operation in Gaza’s Nuseirat camp Saturday to block a ceasefire deal.
Speaking with Al Jazeera Arabic on 10 June about the US-proposed ceasefire deal and prospects for ending the war, Haniyeh said Israel attacked the Nuseirat camp, killing at least 274 Palestinians and retrieving four Israeli captives to block any agreement that would end the war.
Israeli forces bombed various civilian areas of Gaza from the air to create chaos and pave the way for Saturday’s operation while executing Palestinians in cold blood in their homes where no Israeli captives were present.
Haniyeh also accused the US of being a part of the attack, saying the Biden White House is “no less criminal” than the Israeli leadership.
A video posted by an Israeli soldier showed the captives being extracted by helicopter from the beach in Gaza where the US built a floating port, allegedly to deliver humanitarian aid.
On Sunday, US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said the US offered help with the rescue of four Israeli captives but did not specify how, citing security reasons.
A senior White House official told NBC News on Monday that the operation will likely complicate efforts to reach a ceasefire and captive exchange between Israel and Hamas.
The freeing of the four Israeli captives has “strengthened Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s determination to continue pursuing military operations, rather than agreeing to a ceasefire,” the official said.
Before Saturday’s massacre, the US had been pushing Israeli officials to accept a ceasefire proposal announced by US President Joe Biden on 31 May.
US officials claimed Israel put forward the proposal, but Netanyahu and other ministers in his government stated they would refuse any deal that would force them to permanently end their seventh-month bombing and demolition campaign in the besieged Gaza Strip.
Hamas has insisted that any ceasefire deal must lead to a permanent end to the war.
On Monday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Cairo and then Tel Aviv, allegedly to renew the push for a ceasefire deal. He will next visit Amman and Doha.
Blinken specifically seeks support for the latest draft of the ceasefire deal presented by Biden. The US also hopes to put the proposal to a vote at the UN Security Council.
A senior Hamas official, Sami Abu Zuhri, urged the US on Monday to pressure Israel to end the war.
“We call upon the US administration to put pressure on the occupation to stop the war on Gaza, and the Hamas movement is ready to deal positively with any initiative that secures an end to the war,” he said.
Hamas accepts UNSC Gaza resolution, demands Israel follow suit
Though the Security Council resolution states Israel has accepted the proposal, Israeli officials have not confirmed agreement to it
News Desk
JUN 11, 2024
(Photo credit: Seth Wenig/AP)
The UN Security Council voted on 10 June to support a US resolution backing a ceasefire plan for the war in Gaza. Hamas has accepted the resolution, according to a top official in the movement, while Israel has not.
The BBC reports that the proposal sets out conditions for a “full and complete ceasefire,” the release of Israeli captives held by Hamas, the return of dead captives' remains, and the release of Palestinians held captive in Israeli prisons.
Fourteen of the 15 Security Council members voted in favor of the US-drafted resolution. Russia abstained.
US President Joe Biden unveiled some aspects of the three-part plan in a televised statement on 31 May, describing it as an Israeli ceasefire proposal.
The resolution states that Israel has accepted the ceasefire proposal and urges Hamas to agree to it, too.
Senior Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri told Reuters the movement accepted the ceasefire resolution and was ready to negotiate over the details, adding that it was up to Washington to ensure that Israel abides by it.
“The US administration is facing a real test to carry out its commitments in compelling the occupation to immediately end the war in an implementation of the UN Security Council resolution,” Abu Zuhri stated.
Hamas also issued a statement saying, “The movement would like to emphasize its readiness to cooperate with the mediators to enter into indirect negotiations on the implementation of these principles that are in line with the demands of our people and our resistance.”
“We also affirm the continuation of our endeavor and struggle… to achieve [our] national rights, foremost of which is defeating the occupation and establishing an independent, fully sovereign Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital,” it added.
However, it is unclear if Israel has accepted the proposal as stated in the draft resolution and as claimed by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken in statements made earlier this week.
In responding to the UNSC vote, Israeli diplomat Reut Shafir Ben Naftali did not explicitly confirm that Israel indeed accepts the proposal but instead echoed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's criticisms of it over the past week.
In discussing Russia's abstention vote, Moscow's Ambassador to the UN, Vasily Nebenzya, said UNSC members were being told that Israel accepted the proposal, while Netanyahu has repeatedly insisted that the war will continue until Hamas has been defeated, implying that both cannot be true at the same time.
“Given the many statements from Israel on the extension of the war until Hamas is completely defeated ... what specifically has Israel agreed to?” Nebenzia asked.
The Russian ambassador also said that UNSC members were being asked to approve a proposal they had not seen in its entirety.
Despite voting in favor, China also expressed concerns over the text. The Chinese ambassador to the UN questioned whether the resolution would be implemented when three previous Security Council resolutions regarding the conflict were not implemented despite being legally binding.
A senior Israeli official said the resolution “restricts Israel's freedom of action.” According to him, “The US accepted very problematic formulations to prevent the Russians from vetoing, and the fact that Algeria supported the proposal tells the whole story.”
Algeria is a strong backer of the Palestinian cause, and many Israeli officials have stated they want the freedom to continue the war to ethnically cleanse Gaza, annex it to Israel, and build settlements for Jewish Israelis.
At the same time, the Times of Israel reported that a clause that stressed opposition to Israel's establishment of security buffer zones in Gaza was removed following pushback from Israel.
Israel months ago began work on a security buffer zone on the Gazan side of its southern border, which will see Israel illegally confiscate some 16 percent of Gaza's territory and maintain security control of the strip.
The US has publicly condemned the establishment of the buffer zone, but a senior Israeli official told the Times of Israel earlier this year that Washington's opposition has not been “as fierce behind closed doors.”
Hezbollah assault drones strike new Israeli command center
The Lebanese resistance group has expanded its range of attacks in recent days, targeting Israeli jets flying over Lebanon
News Desk
JUN 10, 2024
(Photo Credit: X)
Hezbollah announced on 10 June that it successfully targeted the headquarters of the Israeli army’s 146th Division near Nahariya.
The Lebanese resistance group said it carried out an “air attack with a squadron of assault drones on the newly established command headquarters of the 146th Division east of Nahariya.”
According to the statement, the 146 Division headquarters had previously moved from the Gaatoun area to Nahariya after it was targeted and damaged by Hezbollah.
It added that its drones targeted “the locations and settlements of enemy officers and soldiers, and hitting it directly, leading to its destruction and its ignition. And causing enemy personnel to be killed or wounded.”
The site targeted is roughly 9.3 kilometers from the nearest Lebanese border point.
The group said that the attack on Nahariya was in solidarity with the Palestinians and in support of the resistance, as well as a response to attacks on the Lebanese towns of Aitaroun and Markaba on Saturday “and the martyrdom of two mujahideen.”
The resistance group also announced on Monday the targeting of two buildings where Israeli soldiers were stationed in the Yiron and Avivim settlements, saying that these two operations were conducted with “the appropriate weaponry” and left a number of casualties.
Later that day, Hezbollah launched an attack against a radar site in Shebaa Farms against its garrison and the technical and espionage equipment “with artillery shells and guided missiles, which led to a direct hit and the destruction of the targeted equipment.”
Hezbollah’s drone fleet has caused great damage to Israel’s northern settlements and military sites. The Israeli army has previously gone on record noting that sensitive sites in the north were targeted.
In a recent analysis, The Cradle contributor Indrajit Samarajiva details how Hezbollah has worn down Israeli defense and intelligence equipment and achieved dominance on the Lebanese front, saying, “The Iron Dome is not intercepting drones and Hezbollah has fire control of the whole region.”
Israeli missile barrage hits deep in northern Lebanon
The strikes came in response to Hezbollah's downing of an Israeli Hermes 900 drone
News Desk
JUN 11, 2024
An Israeli F-16 fighter jet en route to an exercise in Germany in an undated photograph. (Photo credit: Israel Defense Forces)
Israel carried out airstrikes in the Hermel District of northeastern Lebanon, in potentially the deepest strike inside the country since the start of the war with Hezbollah in October, Al Mayadeen reported on 11 June.
The Lebanese news outlet reported that the Israeli air raids targeted the Housh al-Sayyid Ali border area between northern Bekaa in Lebanon and the Qusair countryside in Syria with at least nine missiles, causing only material damage.
Al Mayadeen's correspondent confirmed that Israeli warplanes also launched a raid on the southern Lebanese town of Aitaroun on Monday night.
The Israeli attacks came in response to Hezbollah shooting down an Israeli drone flying over southern Lebanon on Monday.
The resistance statement confirmed that “while constantly monitoring the enemy's movement in Lebanese airspace, the Mujahideen of the Islamic Resistance ambushed a Hermes 900 drone armed with missiles to carry out attacks on our areas.”
The statement explained that “when the drone came within firing range, the Mujahideen targeted it with air defense weapons before carrying out its attack, and they directly hit it and it was shot down.”
The statement indicated that the downing of the drone came “in support of our steadfast Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip and in support of their valiant and honorable resistance.”
Also on Monday, Hezbollah targeted a building used by Israeli soldiers in the Even Menachem settlement in northern Israel and launched an air attack via a squadron of assault drones on the newly established command headquarters of the 146th Division, east of Nahariya.
Hezbollah and Israel have exchanged fire since 8 October, one day after the war in Gaza began. Israel has regularly threatened to invade Lebanon after Hezbollah attacks successfully destroyed significant Israeli military infrastructure and forced the evacuation of most settlers from the border area. Many have stated they will not return to the northern settlements even after the war ends, threatening Israel's effort to colonize its northern region further.
Increasingly sophisticated Hezbollah operations against qualitative Israeli targets have Tel Aviv flapping about a ‘war on Lebanon.’ But whichever way one examines the equation – manpower, capabilities, defenses, alliances – the Israeli state seems ill-prepared for this fight.
Ali Rizk
JUN 11, 2024
(Photo Credit: The Cradle)
As the war in Gaza lags on, cross-border exchanges on the Lebanese–Israeli front have intensified. Fighting between Hezbollah and the Israeli military has taken a heavy toll on both sides. The Lebanese resistance movement has lost over 300 fighters, with Israeli shelling resulting in the displacement of tens of thousands of Lebanese residents of the country’s southern villages.
Israel has not fared much better, with at least sixty thousand northern settlers forced to flee their homes. While the occupation army has confirmed the death of around a dozen of its soldiers in the exchanges with Hezbollah, the real number is estimated to be much higher.
In March, The Cradle gained intel that over 230 Israeli troops had been killed in combat since 8 October 2023.
The rising threat of a large-scale war
While the northern conflict currently remains within the boundaries of ‘controlled escalation,’ the prospects of a full-blown war between Hezbollah and Israel may be steadily increasing. Far-right members of the Israeli government, who are key to keeping Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition intact, have become noticeably more vocal in supporting escalation on the Lebanese front.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has called for launching an attack on Beirut, describing it as “the capital of terrorism.” Given these stances, it cannot be entirely dismissed that Netanyahu may opt to escalate against Lebanon.
Indeed, recent statements by the Israeli prime minister suggest that some form of wider escalation on the northern front may be in the making.
Speaking during a visit to the headquarters of the Israeli military’s Northern Command, Netanyahu referred to “surprising plans” being devised to deal with Hezbollah, aiming to “restore security to the north and to restore residents safely to their homes” without going into further detail.
Amid these developments, the Israeli military recently completed a drill that simulated a ground incursion into Lebanon.
A large-scale Israeli offensive on Lebanon in the near future would also be consistent with earlier assessments made by US officials, who, in late February, predicted a possible ground incursion into Lebanon by the late spring or early summer.
Hezbollah’s increasing capabilities
Hezbollah’s challenge to Israel appears to be on the rise, reflecting a failure of Tel Aviv’s current strategy of relying on precision surgical strikes. According to the Israeli institute Alma, which monitors developments on the Lebanese–Israeli front, 325 cross-border attacks were carried out by Hezbollah in May, the highest number of monthly attacks on this front since 7 October.
The resistance movement’s operations have also become more sophisticated, revealing capabilities it has introduced for the first time. Hezbollah managed to destroy an advanced surveillance balloon used to detect incoming attacks in an operation conducted via a kamikaze drone.
It has also upgraded its drone capabilities, recently launching a twin-kamikaze drone attack on the northern town of Hurfeish and conducting its first-ever air raid through an armed UAV equipped with S5 rockets. The operation targeted Israeli soldiers in the settlement of Metula and was the first time in which an Arab force had launched an airstrike on Israel.
Most recently, Hezbollah released footage on 6 June showing a guided missile attack on an Iron Dome platform in Israel’s Ramot Naftali barracks in the Galilee.
What to expect in a full-scale war
The increased sophistication of Hezbollah’s operations can also be seen as fueling Tel Aviv’s urgency to take decisive action against the resistance group. This was expressed by former Israeli war cabinet minister Benny Gantz, who described the Lebanese front as the most significant and pressing operative front in the current conflict, warning that the “moment of truth” was now close.
However, what the Lebanese movement has demonstrated since 7 October also serves as a warning of what awaits the occupation state if an all-out war were to erupt.
The Israeli military is expected to employ methods similar to 2006 in that it would carry out destructive air raids on ‘Hezbollah strongholds’ in southern Lebanon, Beirut, and the Bekaa region.
Speaking to The Cradle, retired Lebanese Brigadier General Elias Farhat explains:
There is no such thing as a limited full-scale war. A full-scale war will have to include all of Hezbollah’s strongholds.
However, any Israeli onslaught on par or exceeding what happened in 2006 is almost certainly going to be met, this time, with a much harsher response from Hezbollah.
The Lebanese movement has amassed a far larger rocket and missile arsenal, with estimates pointing to over 150,000 of these weapons now in its possession. Given this military build-up, Hezbollah is widely recognized today as the world’s heaviest armed non-state actor.
Perhaps even more importantly, its arsenal includes precision missiles such as the Fateh 110, enabling it to aim at strategic Israeli installations that could cause immense damage. Against this backdrop, Israeli experts have warned of a MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) scenario in the event of a full-scale war with Hezbollah.
It is also possible the Lebanese movement possesses military capabilities that could undermine Israel’s air power advantage. The group has already demonstrated its air defense capability against Israeli drones, having succeeded in shooting down several ‘Hermes’ UAVs in the current round of hostilities.
The bigger danger to Israel, however, would be Hezbollah’s possession of air defenses capable of shooting down not only drones but Israeli warplanes. Given the strengthening of military ties between Russia and Iran, the possibility of Hezbollah accessing Moscow’s enhanced anti-aircraft technology is increased.
The resistance movement has already announced that it launched surface-to-air missiles at Israeli warplanes that had broken the sound barrier and had hence forced the aircraft to retreat.
This marks the first development of its kind in the history of warfare between Hezbollah and Israel and could merely be a warning shot for what could transpire in the event of an all-out war.
That Hezbollah would unveil such weapons in a full-scale conflict is consistent with its strategy of saving its best for such confrontations. In 2006, it surprised the Israeli military by striking a warship in a missile attack.
Israel would also likely face superior offensive ground operations in a full-scale war with Hezbollah. The Lebanese movement gained valuable experience in such operations while fighting extremist groups in Syria.
As Hussein Ibish of the Arab Gulf States Institute recounts to The Cradle:
“The combination of Hezbollah ground fighters and Russian air and signals intelligence dominance was the ‘A-Team’ on behalf of the Assad [government] in the Syrian war.”
Given this experience and its ability to launch airstrikes via UAVs, Hezbollah likely retains the capacity to launch offensive infantry operations – importantly, with air cover.
Manpower and tactical advantages
Hezbollah will also likely enjoy an advantage in terms of reliable, tested, and highly motivated manpower. Due to its close ties with allied resistance factions in Iraq and Yemen, fighters from these countries are likely to come to Hezbollah’s aid in a full-scale conflict with Israel.
The Lebanese movement’s Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah alluded to this factor in a 2017 speech. Israel, by contrast, appears to be suffering from a shortage of manpower in its military ranks, not to mention tanking troop and commander morale, highlighted on Sunday by yet another high-level military resignation, this time Gaza Division Commander Brigadier-General Avi Rosenfeld.
Israeli defenses are also unlikely to succeed when facing large barrages of Hezbollah missiles and drones. Unlike Iran’s retaliatory attack on 13 April, where the US and allies shot down a large fraction of the incoming drones and missiles, similar-style attacks launched by Hezbollah would be far more difficult to deal with.
The closer geographical distance means much less time to intercept and shoot down such attacks. Hezbollah, which relies heavily on the element of surprise in its military tactics, will also certainly not telegraph its attacks beforehand as Iran did. As a result, Israel would likely remain exposed to immense attacks through surface-to-surface missiles, kamikaze drones, and airstrikes via UAVs.
Moreover, the Lebanese resistance has spent many months tirelessly disabling Israel’s “eyes and ears” in the north, reportedly destroying over 1,650 pieces of intelligence, surveillance, and target acquisition (ISR) equipment since the conflict’s onset.
Israel is increasingly operating blindly in that vital northern theater, allowing Hezbollah to repeatedly and successfully strike at qualitative targets, penetrate more deeply into the occupation state, and employ more advanced weaponry.
The US response
While it is likely that the US will rush to defend its Israeli ally, the bigger question is how far it is willing to go. As indicated above, defensive measures are unlikely to significantly undermine the severity of Hezbollah’s cross-border missile and drone operations.
Judging from its approach following the Iranian attack on Israel, Washington is unlikely to go beyond defensive support. Following Operation True Promise, the White House reportedly informed Tel Aviv that it would have no part in any offensive action against Tehran, effectively leaving its Israeli ally with little choice but to settle for a far less proportionate response to Iran’s significant military operation.
Given how that situation unfolded, it would be a risky gamble for Israel to pin its hopes on its US security guarantor assuming an offensive role in a major war with Hezbollah. Tensions are also rising between the US and rival superpowers, reinforcing this dynamic.
Speaking to The Cradle, Steven Simon, Senior Director for the Middle East and North Africa in the US National Security Council during the Obama administration, emphasizes that “a direct combat role beyond air defenses (in a full-scale war between Hezbollah and Israel) is highly unlikely.” This is especially the case, he adds, “given tensions with Russia and China.”
Nawaf al-Musawi, Hezbollah’s Resource and Border Affairs official and one of the movement’s strategic thinkers, offers this prediction:
The Israeli occupation needs weapons from Washington for any war it wishes to wage against Lebanon. After any war with Lebanon, the region will not be the same as it was before. The next war with Israel will be the final war.
‘There is a knife in our back’: Israeli reservists fume over Haredi Draft Law
Stretched thin after eight months of a genocidal war in Gaza and a growing conflict with Hezbollah in the north, Israeli reservists are blasting authorities for once again delaying the enlistment of ultra-Orthodox Jews
News Desk
JUN 11, 2024
(Photo Credit: Hannah McKay/Reuters)
Israeli reservists say they feel “betrayed” after lawmakers voted early on 11 June to revive the so-called Haredi Draft Law that has sought, since its introduction in 2022, to enable ultra-Orthodox Jews, for whom “Torah is their craft,” to serve in the Israeli army.
By approving its “continuity" in a 63-57 vote, the Israeli government is being accused of kicking the can down the road and keeping the issue of ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) enlistment out of the hands of the High Court of Justice – whose judges have repeatedly determined that the exemption should not stand.
“In the eyes of the government, we are not at all a nation that has an army with a country to protect,” reserve soldier Ronal Adani, who says he has served for more than 130 days in Gaza since 7 October, told Hebrew daily Yedioth Ahronoth. “We woke up this morning with a knife stuck in our back by the government that sent us to multiple and multiplying fronts.”
“In my eyes, it's a disgrace. I've been in the reserves for eight months, it's a hole in my heart. In the end, there won't be any people left here who will form an army at this rate if they're not recruited,” another Israeli reservist, who asked to remain anonymous, told the news outlet.
The Knesset's contentious vote followed a warning by Israeli Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi, who told political leaders on Monday that the army does not have enough battalions to meet its needs. Halevi highlighted that the army lacks nearly 5,000 troops and that this “burden” will fall on the shoulders of the reservists.
Last week, Tel Aviv announced it would raise the number of reservists that the military is authorized to call up from 300,000 to 350,000 to meet the “needs” of the genocidal war in Gaza's southernmost city of Rafah. The Israeli military has also suffered painful losses at the hands of the Hamas-led Palestinian resistance in Gaza and the continuous escalation by Lebanon's Hezbollah in the north.
Ultra-Orthodox Israeli Jews of military age have been able to avoid compulsory enlistment into the army for decades by enrolling in yeshivas (religious schools) and obtaining repeated one-year service deferrals until they reach the age of military exemption.
“The Haredim’s lack of contribution to the national economy and military, coupled with their extraordinary financial entitlements from the state’s coffers, has made them the ‘most hated people in Israel,’” The Cradle columnist Robert Inlakesh wrote in March as part of an analysis detailing the “widening schism between Israel’s secular and ultra-Orthodox communities.”
According to reports in Israeli media, the number of ultra-Orthodox male candidates for army enlistment each year is about 13,000. However, only about 1,200 are actually drafted on average.
“While [army] soldiers are fighting for the country, [Netanyahu and the coalition] are fighting to perpetuate the [Haredi] exemption from serving,” the National Unity party, led by former war cabinet minister Benny Gantz, said in a statement on Tuesday. “It is not too late to pass a broad and comprehensive outline that will satisfy the needs of security and society.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared his support for advancing the Haredi Draft Law last month after failing to come to an agreement with his ultra-Orthodox partners on the enlistment of members of their community. Critics accused the premier of trying to show the High Court of Justice that he is working on the enlistment crisis, buying time while keeping his Haredi coalition partners on board.
Back in March, Sephardic Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef declared that Haredi religious students must not be drafted “under any circumstances, no matter what” and that if they are forcibly enlisted, the Haredim would “go abroad.”
“Without the Torah, without the kollels, without the yeshivas, the army will have no success,” he declared.
After Tuesday's vote, the Haredi Draft Law will move to the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, chaired by Yuli Edelstein of Netanyahu's Likud party, ahead of two more debates in the Knesset plenum.
Hamas accepts UNSC Gaza resolution, demands Israel follow suit
Though the Security Council resolution states Israel has accepted the proposal, Israeli officials have not confirmed agreement to it
News Desk
JUN 11, 2024
(Photo credit: Seth Wenig/AP)
The UN Security Council voted on 10 June to support a US resolution backing a ceasefire plan for the war in Gaza. Hamas has accepted the resolution, according to a top official in the movement, while Israel has not.
The BBC reports that the proposal sets out conditions for a “full and complete ceasefire,” the release of Israeli captives held by Hamas, the return of dead captives' remains, and the release of Palestinians held captive in Israeli prisons.
Fourteen of the 15 Security Council members voted in favor of the US-drafted resolution. Russia abstained.
US President Joe Biden unveiled some aspects of the three-part plan in a televised statement on 31 May, describing it as an Israeli ceasefire proposal.
The resolution states that Israel has accepted the ceasefire proposal and urges Hamas to agree to it, too.
Senior Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri told Reuters the movement accepted the ceasefire resolution and was ready to negotiate over the details, adding that it was up to Washington to ensure that Israel abides by it.
“The US administration is facing a real test to carry out its commitments in compelling the occupation to immediately end the war in an implementation of the UN Security Council resolution,” Abu Zuhri stated.
Hamas also issued a statement saying, “The movement would like to emphasize its readiness to cooperate with the mediators to enter into indirect negotiations on the implementation of these principles that are in line with the demands of our people and our resistance.”
“We also affirm the continuation of our endeavor and struggle… to achieve [our] national rights, foremost of which is defeating the occupation and establishing an independent, fully sovereign Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital,” it added.
However, it is unclear if Israel has accepted the proposal as stated in the draft resolution and as claimed by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken in statements made earlier this week.
In responding to the UNSC vote, Israeli diplomat Reut Shafir Ben Naftali did not explicitly confirm that Israel indeed accepts the proposal but instead echoed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's criticisms of it over the past week.
In discussing Russia's abstention vote, Moscow's Ambassador to the UN, Vasily Nebenzya, said UNSC members were being told that Israel accepted the proposal, while Netanyahu has repeatedly insisted that the war will continue until Hamas has been defeated, implying that both cannot be true at the same time.
“Given the many statements from Israel on the extension of the war until Hamas is completely defeated ... what specifically has Israel agreed to?” Nebenzia asked.
The Russian ambassador also said that UNSC members were being asked to approve a proposal they had not seen in its entirety.
Despite voting in favor, China also expressed concerns over the text. The Chinese ambassador to the UN questioned whether the resolution would be implemented when three previous Security Council resolutions regarding the conflict were not implemented despite being legally binding.
A senior Israeli official said the resolution “restricts Israel's freedom of action.” According to him, “The US accepted very problematic formulations to prevent the Russians from vetoing, and the fact that Algeria supported the proposal tells the whole story.”
Algeria is a strong backer of the Palestinian cause, and many Israeli officials have stated they want the freedom to continue the war to ethnically cleanse Gaza, annex it to Israel, and build settlements for Jewish Israelis.
At the same time, the Times of Israel reported that a clause that stressed opposition to Israel's establishment of security buffer zones in Gaza was removed following pushback from Israel.
Israel months ago began work on a security buffer zone on the Gazan side of its southern border, which will see Israel illegally confiscate some 16 percent of Gaza's territory and maintain security control of the strip.
The US has publicly condemned the establishment of the buffer zone, but a senior Israeli official told the Times of Israel earlier this year that Washington's opposition has not been “as fierce behind closed doors.”
Hezbollah rains down rockets deep inside Israel after killing of top commander
After eight months of hostilities, the Lebanese resistance has succeeded in 'blinding' the Israeli army in the north by destroying vital intelligence facilities
News Desk
JUN 12, 2024
(Photo Credit: Ayal Margolin/Flash90)
Hundreds of Israeli settlers in the besieged northern region were sent fleeing into bomb shelters during the early hours of 12 June as Lebanese resistance movement Hezbollah launched several waves of rocket and missile salvos in retaliation for the overnight killing of top commander Talib Sami Abdallah.
Abdallah, also known as Abu Talib, was killed in the Israeli bombing of the town of Jwaya, southern Lebanon, which resulted in a total of 4 deaths. Local reports identified Abu Talib as the highest-ranking Hezbollah field commander to be killed by Israel since 7 October.
“As part of the response to the assassination carried out by the zionist enemy in the town of Jwaya and the injury of civilians, the fighters of the Islamic Resistance targeted the ‘Blasan’ factory for military industries specialized in armoring and protecting machinery and vehicles of the enemy army in the ‘Sasa’ settlement with guided missiles, hitting it directly,” Hezbollah said in a statement issued on Wednesday morning.
According to Israeli media, Hezbollah's retaliatory attack reached as far as the city of Tiberias and has so far involved at least 160 projectiles. Rocket sirens continued to blare into the morning across northern Israel as the Lebanese resistance kept up its wave of attacks.
Citing sources in the resistance, Israeli daily Haaretz said Wednesday's attack is the “most extensive” since the start of cross-border hostilities on 8 October. As a result of the impacts, several fires were sparked across the region.
The latest targeted assassination of a resistance commander inside Lebanon came just one day after Israeli airstrikes hit the Hermel District of northeastern Lebanon in what was described as the deepest strike inside the country since the start of the war.
Ongoing Hezbollah attacks in northern Israel have succeeded in “blinding” the Israeli army by destroying vital intelligence facilities.
Hezbollah and Israel have exchanged fire since 8 October, one day after the genocidal war in Gaza began. Israel has regularly threatened to invade Lebanon after Hezbollah attacks successfully destroyed significant Israeli military infrastructure and forced the evacuation of most settlers from the border area.
Many have stated they will not return to the northern settlements even after the war ends, threatening Israel's effort to colonize its north region further.
Israel guilty of 'extermination, torture, sexual violence' in Gaza: UN probe
The investigation also determined that Israeli leaders are responsible of 'weaponizing' starvation against Palestinians in Gaza and of 'instigating' a pattern of settler attacks in the occupied West Bank
News Desk
JUN 12, 2024
(Photo Credit: AP)
The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry (COI) on 12 June concluded that Israeli authorities are guilty of “war crimes and crimes against humanity” committed during the eight-month-long campaign of genocide in Gaza.
During its investigation, the COI found that Israeli authorities are responsible for "the war crimes of starvation as a method of warfare, murder or willful killing, intentionally directing attacks against civilians and civilian objects, forcible transfer, sexual violence, torture and inhuman or cruel treatment, arbitrary detention, and outrages upon personal dignity."
"The crimes against humanity of extermination, gender persecution targeting Palestinian men and boys, murder, [and] forcible transfer" were also committed, the commission found.
The COI was established by the UN Human Rights Council in 2021 to investigate widespread violations of international humanitarian and human rights law by Israel in the occupied Palestinian territories.
Wednesday's report details that the massive number of civilian casualties and destruction of civilian infrastructure in Gaza is "the inevitable result of a strategy undertaken with the intent to cause maximum damage, disregarding the principles of distinction, proportionality, and adequate precautions."
Furthermore, the probe determined that inflammatory statements by Israeli officials "amounted to incitement and may constitute other serious international crimes," adding that direct and public incitement to genocide is a crime under international law whenever perpetrated.
The COI also condemned Israel's continued attacks on civilian evacuation routes and “safe areas” and said top Israeli authorities have "weaponized the siege and used the provision of life-sustaining necessities, including by severing water, food, electricity, fuel, and humanitarian assistance, for strategic and political gains."
In the occupied West Bank, the COI found that Israel committed "acts of sexual violence, torture and inhuman or cruel treatment and outrages upon personal dignity, all of which are war crimes."
Moreover, the commission determined that Tel Aviv "permitted, fostered, and instigated" a pattern of settler aggression directed against Palestinian communities.
The COI finally urged the Israeli government to implement a ceasefire immediately, lift the blockade of Gaza, allow the unimpeded entry of humanitarian aid, cease attacks on civilians and infrastructure, and “comply fully” with the rulings of the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
"Israel must immediately stop its military operations and attacks in Gaza, including the assault on Rafah, which has cost the lives of hundreds of civilians and again displaced hundreds of thousands of people to unsafe locations without basic services and humanitarian assistance," Navi Pillay, chair of the commission, said in a press release.
Elsewhere in Wednesday's report, the COI accused the Palestinian resistance in Gaza of having "deliberately killed, injured, mistreated, took hostages, and committed sexual and gender-based violence" during the 7 October Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.
"[The] indiscriminate firing of thousands of projectiles towards Israeli towns and cities resulting in death and injury of civilians are also violations of international humanitarian and human rights law … Hamas and Palestinian armed groups must immediately cease rocket attacks and release all hostages. The taking of hostages constitutes a war crime," Pillay added in her statement.
Nevertheless, the COI probe into the events of 7 October also accused Israeli authorities of “[failing] to protect civilians in southern Israel on almost every front.”
In response to the damning accusations, Israel’s ambassador to the UN in Geneva, Meirav Eilon Shahar, accused the COI of long-standing “systematic anti-Israeli discrimination.”
The report, which is due to be presented to the UN Human Rights Council next week, comes just days after the UN secretary-general announced plans to include Israel in a blacklist of nations and extremist armed groups harming children in conflict zones.
Israel on UN Blacklist of Countries Harming Children: More Murderous Than ISIS
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on JUNE 10, 2024
Robert Inlakesh
The majority of Palestinians killed by Israel in Gaza are women and children. (Photo: via WAFA)
It is very possible that the Israeli government will react by completely barring most UN officials from entering the territory they control.
On June 7, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres informed Israel’s UN ambassador Gilad Erdan that “Israeli Security Forces” would be named in their annual report which names and shames States/groups that harm children.
This would place Israel on an infamous UN “blacklist” that includes the likes of ISIS and Al-Qaeda.
Responding to a courtesy notification call from the UN’s Secretary-General on June 7, the Israeli ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan, responded by condemning the United Nations and claiming it had sided with Hamas while maintaining the Israeli military was “the most moral army”.
The cartoonish video of the Israeli ambassador was widely shared throughout the international media, while fellow Israeli officials also doubled down on the alleged morality of their forces.
Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, responded by calling it “shameful” and stating that “the UN has put itself today on the blacklist of history when it joined those who support the Hamas murderers. The IDF is the world’s most moral army, and no absurd UN decision can change that.” Israeli opposition leader and member of the unity war government, Benny Gantz, called the UN’s decision a “historic low” for there to be criticism of Israeli forces.
The “world’s most moral army” is accused by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Israel’s own top rights group, B’Tselem, of administering an Apartheid system. This, as it has also committed actions that triggered the International Criminal Court (ICC) chief prosecutor to call for arrest warrants against the Israeli PM and his Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. In addition to this, Israel stands plausibly accused of Genocide at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the sheer volume of human rights reports, expert opinions at the UN and undeniably high child death toll, make it impossible to deny the conduct of this military.
The UN’s Global is included as part of a report on harm to children in armed conflicts that UN Secretary-General Guterres set out to present to the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) on June 14. It is said to not actually name “Israel” specifically, instead labeling “Israeli Security Forces” as having carried out the crimes, which could help Tel Aviv avoid some legally binding backlash. This is in addition to the fact that the United States consistently shelters the Israeli government at the UNSC.
The first time that the US didn’t veto an Israeli-related Security Council resolution, since the tail end of the Obama administration, was during the middle of Ramadan. The UNSC tabled a draft resolution that called for a temporary ceasefire in Gaza until the end of the Muslim Holy Month, which the US government abstained on. Immediately afterward, however, the US Biden administration gave the Israelis a green light to violate the UNSC resolution, by claiming that to their understanding it was “not binding”; a historic first as it is well understood that all UNSC resolutions are, by their nature, legally binding.
Where there may be immediate consequences, however, is in the UN itself. According to Israeli Foreign Minister, Israel Katz, “the Secretary-General’s measure will have consequences for Israel’s relations with the UN”, which he said after asserting that the decision taken was “further evidence of [Guterres’] hostility towards Israel, and his deliberate disregard – and not for the first time – Hamas’ attack of October 7”.
It is very possible that the Israeli government will react by completely barring most UN officials from entering the territory they control and using their connections with the US government to punish UN-related bodies further, both moves they have already taken during the course of this war.
While nations like the United Kingdom and United States are unlikely to even bat an eye at the UN placing Israel on its “blacklist” for murdering upwards of 15,000 children in Gaza, beyond dismissing it as an incorrect move, other countries, that place value on the opinion of the UN and international law, may choose to take action.
The move may end up placing pressure on some nations to take stronger steps against Israel, while the most impact may be on the conduct of corporations and companies in doing business with the Israeli regime. Possible legal baggage, widespread boycott campaigns and stains on the reputations of businesses working with a State registered on a “blacklist” for harming children may deter many working relationships and inflict further damage to the Israeli economy.
It is also not a good look to have your nation noted on a list, alongside ISIS, Al-Qaeda, Al-Shabab and Boko Haram. At the start of the Gaza war, the Israeli propaganda campaign tried desperately to connect Hamas with ISIS, so this represents another public relations blow.
In fact, when you look at the number of children killed by ISIS in total during its entire existence, it doesn’t even come close to the number of children murdered by the Israeli military in just over 8 months. For instance, during the first two years of the ISIS insurgency in Iraq, the UN reported that the group killed 18,800 civilians in total; these two years were the group’s most bloodthirsty and were truly shocking.
However, the Israeli military has murdered over 15,500 children alone in Gaza in a much shorter period of time and if you are to include those missing under the rubble, Israel has killed more children than the total ISIS civilian kill toll in its worst years of terror.
Adding Israel to the UN’s infamous blacklist may have small to no short-term impacts, but could be added to piling evidence presented against the Israelis at the ICJ and will forever remain as a stain on their record. This decision is one of many that make the situation in Gaza even more clear.
Israel has now been added to the UN’s infamous blacklist, of nations and groups that harm children during armed conflict.
It is time to take a look at what the Israeli army stands accused of.
Palestine Chronicle’s Robert Inlakesh explains what this means.
Ignoring Daily Massacres In Gaza While Still Babbling About October 7
We’re seeing new massacres every goddamn fucking day, but western politicians and media can’t stop babbling about one single massacre happening hundreds of days ago.
Caitlin Johnstone
June 11, 2024
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We’re seeing new massacres every goddamn fucking day, but western politicians and media can’t stop babbling about one single massacre happening hundreds of days ago.
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It’s a waste of breath trying to argue that it’s unjust to massacre over two hundred Palestinians rescuing four Israeli hostages; Israel supporters would have been happy if the number was over two million. They simply do not regard Palestinians as human beings. You may as well say they had to kill two hundred chickens to free four hostages. They don’t care.
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Ever since the Gaza onslaught began we’ve been seeing US officials play dumb about all the massacres and atrocities Israel has been committing, constantly telling the press “Yeah sorry we don’t have any further information about that incident, we’re talking to Israel, you should ask the Israelis.” But a recent New York Times report says US and UK intelligence operatives “have been in Israel throughout the war” collaborating with Israeli intelligence to facilitate its operations there, which means they’re clearly lying about how much information they have about these incidents.
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On one hand you’ve got the far right zealots who openly say Palestinians should be exterminated like vermin, and on the other you’ve got the mainstream liberals who effectively support the same actions as the rightists but pretend to be very concerned about human rights in Gaza.
And it’s actually hard to say which one is more disgusting. I mean, at least the rightists are being honest about who they are and what they’re doing.
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It really is that all criticism of Israel gets labeled antisemitism. It really, truly is that simple. The liberal Zionist will deny this and insist that it is possible to criticize Israel without being antisemitic, but if you ask them to name a prominent figure who forcefully and continuously criticizes the murderousness and tyranny of the Israeli regime without being antisemitic they won’t be able to. If you ask them for a list of things that are antisemitic to say when criticizing Israel, that list will always include items that are not at all hateful toward Jews.
So in effect the liberal Zionist’s position is, “Of course it’s not inherently antisemitic to criticize Israel, just make sure you don’t criticize Israel while doing so, because that’s antisemitic.” They have to perform these bizarre self-contradictory contortions because they understand that they require the antisemitism smear to defend their ideology since their ideology cannot be defended using facts and logic, but they also understand that it will discredit their ideology if they make this obvious by admitting that they always frame criticism of Israel as inherently antisemitic.
So they pretend there’s this perfect Goldilocks equation for criticizing Israel out there somewhere that’s just forceful enough to count as critical but not forceful enough that it’s antisemitic, and pretend the real problem is that too many people are failing to walk this tightrope correctly instead of that every criticism of the Zionist project will be branded as an evil hate crime no matter what.
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I’m working on a Star Wars script about people living under the Galactic Empire who sit around happily watching movies about fictional heroes defeating fictional evil empires while fully trusting their own government’s propaganda and supporting all its wars.
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Every random religion in the world must be gifted its own entire country, in which they have the right to displace, steal from, oppress and exterminate the people who were already living there. If you disagree with this, you are essentially a Nazi.
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A nation that will collapse without extreme and unceasing military violence, police brutality, propaganda, lobbying, and online info ops is like a person who’ll die if you ever stop performing CPR on them. At a certain point you must realize you’re just blowing air into a corpse.
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The more ideologically invested you are in denying the obvious fact that the world’s problems are caused by capitalism and western empire-building, the more likely you are to believe the world’s problems are caused by Jews, Muslims, immigrants, secret Satanic cabals, or wokeness.
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Nobody really supports Israel, they just support their own dopey political factions, their own dopey religious beliefs, and their own continued campaign donations from the Israel lobby. Everything about Israel is fake, right down to its network of public “support”.
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Opposing genocide means you hate Jews. Opposing nuclear brinkmanship means you love Vladimir Putin. Mainstream political discourse is so pervasively dominated by the imperial war machine that even the most basic and obvious moral positions get framed as immoral and outrageous.
Israel mulls ‘punitive measures’ against UN over blacklisting: Report
The UN placed Israel on a blacklist of nations and groups that harm children in war, alongside entities like Al-Qaeda and ISIS
News Desk
JUN 12, 2024
(Photo Credit: Anadolu Agency)
Israeli authorities are discussing “far-reaching” punitive measures against UN agencies operating in the Palestinian Territories and Israel, according to an 11 June report from the Financial Times (FT).
Citing five people familiar with the discussions, the business daily says some of these measures may include the expulsion of UN staff as tensions between Israel and international organizations fester.
“They need to be concerned,” one Israeli official said regarding the UN agencies.
The Israeli cabinet discussed a range of actions against the UN agencies on Sunday and Monday. While no final decision was made, some measures included the “slow-roll” or complete rejection of UN staff visa renewals, boycotts by the Israeli government of key UN officials, and the termination and expulsion of UN missions.
Tel Aviv's hostility towards the UN was made worse after Secretary-General Antonio Guterres announced the organization would add Israel to a blacklist of countries and entities harming children in conflict zones.
Israeli ambassador to the UN Gilad Erdan described the blacklisting as “shameful,” with other officials vowing to retaliate against UN bodies who have worked in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories for decades.
Potential targets for Israel's “punitive measures” include UNICEF, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), and the UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process (UNSCO), the main political arm of UN efforts in Palestine and Israel and a key figure in de-escalating tensions and securing ceasefires between the two.
“Who do they think will work with them to get aid into Gaza? Who do they think will rebuild Gaza after the war? If they want to do it themselves then let them,” one of the sources familiar with the discussions told FT.
Earlier this year, Israel publicly accused staffers from the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) of having direct ties with Hamas and the 7 October Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.
UNRWA staff members reported being tortured by Israeli soldiers into falsely admitting that they were involved in the Palestinian resistance’s operation.
In May, Guterres revealed that since the beginning of the war, more than 190 UN staff members had been killed in Gaza.
Blinken blasts Hamas for not accepting Israeli ceasefire deal 'as it is'
Israeli officials have repeatedly made it clear they will not accept stopping the genocidal war in Gaza until Hamas is fully ‘destroyed’
News Desk
JUN 12, 2024
(Photo Credit: Reuters)
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken addressed Hamas’ response to the Israeli ceasefire plan on 12 June, saying that some of the requests by the Palestinian resistance were “workable” while others were not.
“Hamas could have answered with a single word: yes. Instead, Hamas waited nearly two weeks and requested numerous changes,” the US official said, noting that more people “will suffer” because of the group’s actions.
Although Blinken did not provide details about Hamas's proposed amendments, he said mediators would continue to try to “close the deal” in the upcoming days.
“It’s not like the world stood still for those 12 days; people were suffering for those 12 days,” Blinken said, just a few days removed from Israel's latest massacre of hundreds of Palestinians in Gaza, conducted with the assistance of the US army.
“The longer this goes on, the more people will suffer. It’s time for the haggling to stop and for the ceasefire to start; it’s as simple as that. Israel accepted the proposal as it was and as it is, and Hamas didn’t,” Blinken claimed.
“If Hamas continues to say no, I think it will be clear to everyone around the world that it’s on them and that they made a choice to continue a war that they started,” the US official added, ignoring the multiple statements from top Israeli officials saying that the genocidal war in Gaza will not end under any circumstances until Hamas is “destroyed.”
Blinken also alleged that the proposal presented by Israel two weeks ago is virtually the same as the one accepted by the Palestinian resistance in early May. However, the terms of the agreement accepted by Hamas call for a permanent ceasefire and the end of the nearly 20-year-long Israeli siege of Gaza, while the Israeli proposal does neither.
"We are determined to try to bridge the gaps, and I believe those gaps are bridgeable. Doesn't mean they will be bridged because again, it ultimately depends on people saying yes," Blinken added.
Senior Hamas official Osama Hamdan recently revealed to Al Mayadeen the details of the Palestinian group’s response to the Israeli ceasefire plan.
“Our response is our commitment to what we previously committed to, a ceasefire and [complete] withdrawal from Gaza … I believe the American administration is trying to give Israel a chance and is aligned with it, and the disagreement is only tactical,” Hamdan said.
The Palestinian official added that Hamas welcomed a US resolution at the UN Security Council (UNSC).
“Hamas welcomed the UN resolution because it includes a ceasefire, relief for the Palestinians, and negotiations. I believe that the resistance fronts are harmonizing towards a single goal, and as Sayyed Nasrallah said, the outcome will be victory,” Hamdan said.
How western tourism giants illegally enrich Israeli settlements on stolen land
Before booking your summer vacation, be aware that major western tourism operators willfully fund and legitimize illegal Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian territories, actively contributing to human rights violations and war crimes.
Kit Klarenberg
JUN 12, 2024
Photo Credit: The Cradle
On 23 May, Netherlands-based European Legal Support Centre (ELSC) reportedly filed a criminal complaint against Booking.com in Holland. The company, known for providing short- and long-term vacation booking services, is accused of money laundering linked to Israeli war crimes and profiteering from the occupation state's illegal settlement expansion projects. Booking.com is alleged to advertise accommodations and “experiences” in illegally occupied Palestinian territories.
The complaint highlights Booking.com's alleged complicity in Israeli genocide, as detailed in a report by Don’t Buy Into Occupation (DBIO), a coalition of 25 European and Palestinian NGOs, including the ELSC.
The report exposes the involvement of European financial institutions in funding businesses that support and legitimize Israel’s illegal settlements and apartheid against Palestinians.
The report meticulously documents the various ways western companies “play a critical role in the functioning, sustainability, and expansion of illegal settlements.”
Among the companies mentioned is Caterpillar, a heavy machinery manufacturer whose armored bulldozers are used to demolish Palestinian homes and construct Jewish settlements. The company is notoriously linked to the death of young US peace activist Rachel Corrie in 2003. Another mentioned is Elbit Systems, Israel's largest arms manufacturer, which produces bullets, drones, combat vehicles, electronic warfare systems, and missiles for use during the ongoing genocide.
Implicated alongside these are a number of unexpected consumer-facing companies, including major tourism and leisure providers.
Impact on the Palestinian population
The findings expose how a major component of the modern western travel industry is intimately implicated in sustaining and furthering the Israeli occupation project, actively contributing to, profiting from, and complicit in crimes against humanity perpetrated against the Palestinian people. As ELSC's Daan de Grefte informs The Cradle:
“Settlements are illegal under international law, cause systematic human rights violations, constitute a war crime and are harmful to any prospect of justice and peace in Israel/Palestine. These settlements also form an integral part of a system of racial domination that amounts to apartheid. Several major online tourism companies offer services in the Occupied Territories, which contravene these companies’ own human rights commitments, while also legitimizing Israel’s clearly unlawful policy of colonizing the West Bank. By operating in the settlements, they exacerbate human rights harms to the local Palestinian population.”
Take Airbnb, for instance, the controversial “digital tourism company” that has sought to disrupt and replace the traditional hotel industry. It offers short and long-term rentals of private homes worldwide. Today, its website lists “a large number of Israeli settlements.” These properties are based in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Syria’s Golan Heights.
“In most cases,” DBIO observes, “the descriptions of the properties name the settlement location, but the properties are listed as being located in ‘Israel’ and do not inform potential visitors that the accommodation is located” in the Occupied Territories. In November 2018, Airbnb announced it would remove around 200 listings in settlements, “at the core of the dispute between Israelis and Palestinians.”
The decision was reversed just six months later due to multiple lawsuits in the US and Israel. In 2020, when the company was going public, it neglected to mention its commercial interest in stolen land in filings to the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
In a report two years earlier, Human Rights Watch noted how many Airbnb listings “are constructed on land that is acknowledged by the Israeli authorities to be privately owned by Palestinians who are not permitted to access it.” The report adds:
“[Airbnb] helps make West Bank settlements more profitable and therefore sustainable, thus facilitating Israel’s unlawful transfer of its citizens to the settlements."
Destination: Occupation
Airbnb is included in a UN database of companies “involved in the provision of services and utilities supporting the maintenance and existence of settlements.” So, too, is Booking Holdings, another US tourism giant, which claims to be the world’s leading provider of online travel and related services. DBIO’s report notes that the company’s Booking.com holiday rental subsidiary advertises hotels, guesthouses, and short-stay apartments in settlements throughout the Occupied Territories.
While some listings note the properties are located in “Palestinian Territory, Israeli settlements,” others are simply labeled “Jerusalem,” etc. According to a May 2022 Booking.com “Human Rights Statement,” customers are to be provided with transparent information on listings in Occupied Territories, but this hasn’t happened.
Instead, listings primarily feature disclaimers, inviting customers to review their government’s travel advisories before booking, as the area “may be considered conflict-affected.”
Spanish travel company eDreams and US-based Expedia Group, which operates portals like Hotels.com and Trivago, are also involved in advertising properties in illegal Jewish settlements without informing customers of their unlawful status. Customers are not informed about the settlements’ illegal status under international law. The company instead categorizes these listings as being “in line with applicable law” while claiming to manually remove “illicit” properties if they are identified by its staff, or flagged by website visitors.
Tripadvisor and its Viator subsidiary go further by promoting tours and activities in these settlements, including tours of wineries built on illegally appropriated Palestinian land, including one situated at Tel Shiloh, built on stolen Palestinian land and managed by a local settler council
Germany’s TUI Group, one of the world’s largest tourism companies, offers guided tours of these settlements, labeling them as part of “Israel and Jordan” or “Highlights of Israel.” These tours often involve visiting sites built on stolen land, which has displaced indigenous Palestinian Bedouin communities, such as the Qumran National Park — communities who are increasingly forcibly displaced from their ancestral lands, and suffer crippling restrictions on access to water, electricity, and more today.
These tours are labeled “Israel and Jordan” and “Highlights of Israel.” Another is titled “Back to the Beginning—Israel,” which comprises visits to Occupied Bethlehem, the occupied Golan Heights, and sights in occupied East Jerusalem.
DBIO charges that TUI Group’s activities are of particular concern “as they are supporting the existence of illegal settlements and contribute to their normalization.” ELSC’s Daan de Grefte tells The Cradle that online travel agencies, by offering properties on colonized land, afford a cover of normalcy to settlements and encourage unaware tourists to visit the settlements and spend their money there.”
“Palestinians are not allowed to enter the settlements, meaning that the accommodations listed on these websites are only open to foreigners and Israelis. The companies therefore operate in a highly discriminatory environment and enable the functioning of the illicit settlement economies. By being active in these illicit economies created on stolen Palestinian land, these OTAs run the risk of profiting from the war crimes that established the settlements. It’s high time that the climate of impunity surrounding these activities is challenged, especially now that Israel is taking unprecedented amounts of Palestinian land and repression of the civilian population is rising to new extremes.”
Economic consequences for Israel
As The Cradle has documented earlier, damage to the occupation state’s economy inflicted by the Palestinian resistance's Al-Aqsa Flood operation was immense. It has only been further wrecked since, with dire labor shortages in key industries, huge military expenditure straining already failing finances, and a collapse in foreign investor confidence.
In February, Moody’s downgraded Israel’s credit rating, warning that the country’s economic outlook was “negative”, and likely to worsen further if the war is protracted, which seems almost certain.
In the past six months, Israel’s tourism industry has been especially ravaged. Not long after Moody’s bleak appraisal, Yossi Fattal, director general of the Chamber of Inbound Tourism Organizers, a trade body representing travel agents, hoteliers, and other businesses in the sector, bemoaned how the occupation state “has become one of the most isolated countries in the world, like North Korea.”
Prior to 7 October, 250 airline companies flew to and from Tel Aviv – that number is now just 45. As Fattal reported:
“Eighty percent of flights today are operated by aircraft from Israel belonging to the [Israeli] El Al company… [This is] an unfortunate victory for Hamas over Israel. The war is harming Israel’s strategic image. Israel should have created a situation in which it found a way to facilitate and encourage tourists to come here despite the war…The insurance premiums required to travel to Israel are enormous.”
It is not merely “insurance premiums” deterring visitors, of course. On top of security concerns, the Gaza genocide has dealt a fatal, likely permanent, blow to Israel’s international public relations.
The brutal, murderous reality of Israeli occupation and settlement viscerally writ large on TV, computer, and smartphone screens the world over daily, Tel Aviv’s actions are producing global revulsion and boycott like never before.
Many high-profile western firms and brands that initially expressed solidarity with Israel have reported sizable dents in their incomes due to consumer backlash. Such admissions amply demonstrate the urgency felt by populations everywhere to hold any and all companies that support Israel’s erasure of the Palestinian people since 1948 to account.
It’s a criminal constellation spanning every conceivable industry and sector, with many offenders hiding their complicity and support in plain sight. But as global grassroots — and increasingly, government and institution-sanctioned — boycott and divestment efforts expand, there may never be a return to “normal” for Israel or its western backers at any level.
Position ( https://t.me/voiceofpalestine/30709 ) of Hamas on the progress of peace negotiations, the UN Security Council resolution and the prospects for ending the war.
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“Our response is our commitment to what we previously agreed upon, namely a ceasefire and the withdrawal of troops from the Gaza Strip.
“We provided the mediators with some comments on this proposal.
“I believe that the American administration is trying to give Israel a chance and supports it, and the differences are only tactical in nature.
— There are gaps in the UN resolution, and it should establish a zero hour for a ceasefire.
— Hamas welcomed the UN resolution as it includes a ceasefire, assistance to the Palestinians and negotiations.
— Talk about the “next day” is an illusion created by the “Israelis,” but for us the next day is clearly Palestinian.
- We cannot trust Israel; he concedes only when he feels that he cannot achieve victory.
“I believe that the resistance fronts are harmonizing for a common goal, and as Sayyed Nasr'Allah said, the result will be victory.”
“The resistance leadership in Gaza is leading the confrontation along with the tribes and the Palestinian people.
“The Hamas leadership does not give in to pressure and at the same time maintains a positive attitude.
— According to the estimates presented to the Americans, the war will last 6 weeks, but it has been going on for 8 months.
— The “Israelis” tried to create an image of achievement in Nuseirat, but in reality they were exposed, and three of their captives were killed.
— Racism revealed its true face when we see that the “Israelis” killed and injured a thousand Palestinians in Nuseirat.
“We have information that elements of the American Delta Force participated in Operation Nuseirat.
“The ongoing executions in the West Bank confirm one truth: the occupation is afraid of resistance.
As is not difficult to see, Hamas is determined to get peace on its own terms, and not on the terms of Israel and the United States.
If necessary, Hamas is ready to continue to fight in close coordination with the Iranian Axis of Resistance. The firmness of Hamas's position is due to Israel's inability to achieve at least one strategic goal + worsening internal instability in Israel and the growing political isolation of the Netanyahu regime. Therefore, Hamas, despite all the losses, radiates confidence in the result, as long as the enemy threatens to “destroy Hamas.”
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley): The state of New York should be given to the Mormons, since that’s where Joseph Smith founded Mormonism. All other faiths in the new nation which shall be known as Mormonland must either leave or accept the fact that their homes and property will…
Caitlin Johnstone
June 12, 2024
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The state of New York should be given to the Mormons, since that’s where Joseph Smith founded Mormonism. All other faiths in the new nation which shall be known as Mormonland must either leave or accept the fact that their homes and property will be taken by Mormons, that they will be displaced to undesirable parts of Mormonland, and that they will be treated as second-class citizens at best and as vermin in need of extermination at worst.
I’m sure this would be accepted by all the other groups who made their home in New York over the years, since it’s a perfectly reasonable and appropriate thing to do. After all, the Mormons deserve a homeland, and they deserve for that homeland to be the one their religion’s predecessors once inhabited.
One could argue that the Mormons already have places like Utah where they have made a home in which they are thriving and perfectly safe, but making such arguments would make one an evil Nazi who is guilty of religious persecution.
Anyone who resists the creation of a Mormon homeland should be treated like a terrorist, along with their families and their neighbors. Any amount of force necessary to maintain the Mormon state is fully justified, even if it means it must remain in a permanent state of war, violence and apartheid throughout its entire existence. If you disagree, you are evil, and are on the side of the terrorists.
This should be the mainstream position that is accepted by everyone. All western governments and their media should support it, and anyone who disagrees should lose their job. There is no amount of killing, ethnic cleansing, oppression, theft, injustice or police brutality that would be too excessive, because nothing is more important than making sure the Mormons have a homeland in which they rule over all other groups. Mormonland has a right to exist. Mormonland has a right to defend itself.
I am a very serious person whose opinions deserve to be taken seriously. Nobody laugh at anything I just said. It isn’t ridiculous. It is normal and smart.
Unpunished: how extremists took over Israel
June 13, 18:07
Unpunished: how extremists took over Israel
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Extremism has ceased to be a marginal ideology in Israel, writes NYT. Illegal Jewish settlements in Gaza turned out to be above the law and were able to crush the entire state under themselves. The authors of the special report revealed shocking details of the conspiracy.
In the half-century that the Israeli state has failed to curb the violence and terrorism of Jewish ultranationalists against Palestinians, lawlessness has become the new law.
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SEPARATION AND INEQUALITY
How did it happen that a young nation so quickly turned away from its democratic ideals - and at what cost? To answer these questions meaningfully, it is necessary to understand how half a century of acquiescence, largely unpunished, has brought radical nationalism to the forefront of Israeli politics. We tell this story in three parts. The first chronicles the origins of the religious movement that established Jewish settlements in the newly conquered Gaza and West Bank territories in the 1970s. The second part reveals how the most radical elements of the settler movement began to attack not only Palestinians, but also Israeli leaders who were trying to make peace with them. Finally, in Part Three, we show how the most powerful of the far right took advantage of permissiveness to gain political power in Israel even as a more radical generation of settlers vowed to destroy the Israeli state itself.
Many Israelis moved to the West Bank for reasons unrelated to ideology, and the vast majority of settlers do not commit violence against Palestinians or other illegal acts. And many in the Israeli government have tried to impose the rule of law in this territory - with some success. But in doing so, they faced not only intense opposition, but also serious personal consequences. In the 1990s, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's efforts to make peace with Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat after the First Intifada spawned a new generation of Jewish terrorists—and ultimately cost him his life.
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In theory, all West Bank settlers are subject to the same military law as Palestinians. But in practice they fall under the civil legislation of the State of Israel, which formally applies only to the territory within state borders. This means that when investigating two similar terrorist attacks in the West Bank (one carried out by Jewish settlers, the other by Palestinians), General Security may use completely different tools and methods.
In this system, even the question of what should in principle be considered a terrorist act is resolved differently for Jews and Arabs. For a Palestinian, the mere admission of Hamas membership is considered an act of terrorism, which allows the Israeli authorities to use brutal interrogation methods and prolonged detention. Moreover, most acts of violence by Arabs against Jews are classified as "terrorist attacks", and this gives the General Security Service and other intelligence agencies a free hand to use the most brutal methods.
The work of investigating Jewish terrorism is entrusted to a division of the General Security Service called the Department of Counterintelligence and Prevention of Subversive Activities in the Jewish Sector, better known as the "Jewish Section." In size and prestige, it is significantly inferior to the Arab department of the General Security Service, which is mainly engaged in the fight against Palestinian terrorism. In reality, most violence by Israeli settlers—the burning of vehicles, the cutting down of olive groves, and other acts—falls under the jurisdiction of the police, who tend to turn a blind eye to them. When the Jewish department investigates more serious terrorist threats, it often finds itself immediately powerless, its progress undermined by judges and politicians sympathetic to the settlers. This system, with all its gaps and obstacles, ensured immunity from prosecution for the founders of groups that promoted radical violence in the 1970s and 1980s, and today has woven a protective cocoon around their ideological descendants.
Some of these people now rule Israel. In 2022, just a year and a half after resigning, Benjamin Netanyahu regained his position as prime minister, forming an alliance with far-right leaders from the HaTziyonut HaDatit (Religious Zionism) and Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) parties. It was an act of political desperation on Netanyahu's part, and he brought to power a number of genuinely radical figures, including the aforementioned Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, who had been promising for decades to wrest the West Bank and Gaza from Arab hands. Just two months earlier, according to news reports, Netanyahu refused to share the stage with Ben-Gvir, who was repeatedly convicted of supporting terrorist organizations, and in 1995 made vague threats in front of television cameras against Yitzhak Rabin, who was assassinated a few weeks later. an Israeli student named Yigal Amir.
And so Ben-Gvir became Israel’s Minister of National Security, and Smotrich became Minister of Finance and the de facto curator of the main activities of the Israeli government in the West Bank. In December 2022, the day before the new government was sworn in, Netanyahu published a list of goals and priorities for the new cabinet, including a clear statement that the nationalist ideology of his newfound allies would now serve as its guiding light. “The Jewish people,” it said, “have an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the Land of Israel.”
Two months later, two Israeli settlers were killed in an attack by Hamas militants near Huwara, a West Bank city. The loud calls for retribution, so frequent after the Palestinian terrorist attacks, have now come from within the new Netanyahu government. Thus, Smotrich said that the village of Huvara should be “wiped off the face of the earth.”
And he added: “I am convinced that the State of Israel is obliged to do this.”
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THE SASSON REPORT
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However, like Judith Karp's secret report decades earlier, the Sasson report, released in March 2005, had virtually no impact. Because she received her mandate directly from the prime minister, Sasson may have believed that her investigation would lead to the dismantling of the illegal settlements that had metastasized throughout the Palestinian territories. But even Sharon, who held high office, found himself powerless against the machine created to protect and expand settlements in the West Bank - the very machine he helped create.
All this happened against the backdrop of a unilateral disengagement with Gaza. Sharon, who began overseeing the settlement withdrawal from Gaza in August 2005, became the third Israeli prime minister to threaten the Israeli settler dream of a Greater Israel, an attempt that drew fierce opposition not only from the settlers but also from a growing part of the political establishment. Netanyahu, who served his first term as prime minister from 1996 to 1999 and previously voted for disengagement, resigned as finance minister in Sharon's cabinet in protest while awaiting a new nomination for the top job.
The settlers themselves took more active measures. In 2005, the Jewish section of the Israeli General Security Service received information about a plot to slow down Israel's withdrawal from Gaza by using 700 liters of gasoline to blow up cars on a major highway. Acting on a tip, police arrested six people in central Israel. One of them was Bezalel Smotrich, the future minister who oversaw civil administration affairs in the West Bank.
Twenty-five-year-old Smotrich was detained and interrogated for several weeks. Yitzhak Ilan, one of the Israeli General Security Service officers present during the interrogation, says he was "silent as a fish" - "like a seasoned criminal." According to Ilan, he was released without charges, partly because the service knew that putting him on trial could expose its agents in Jewish extremist groups, and partly because they believed that Smotrich would not face much punishment anyway. "When we were fighting Palestinian terrorism, General Security got along very well with the courts, and we got the harsh penalties we wanted," he says. With Jewish terrorists it was exactly the opposite.
When Netanyahu triumphantly returned to the post of prime minister in 2009, he decided to roll back the Talia Sasson report, which he and his allies saw as an obstacle to accelerating the settlement campaign. He appointed his own commission of inquiry, headed by Supreme Court Justice Edmond Levy, who was known to support the settlers. But the contents of Levy's report, completed in 2012, not only did not contradict Sasson's conclusions, but in some ways reinforced them. Senior Israeli officials, the committee found, were fully aware of what was happening in the territories and simply denied it for reasons of political expediency. Such behavior, they wrote, was unbecoming of “a country that has proclaimed the rule of law as its goal.” And then Netanyahu came.
A NEW GENERATION
The rise to power of a far-right prime minister has done nothing to prevent the spread of dangerous anti-government sentiment among Israeli settlers. The new generation of Kahanists began to act even more radically, not only against Israeli politicians who might oppose them or who did not sufficiently patronize them, but also against the very concept of a democratic Israeli state. A group calling itself Hilltop Youth advocated the complete destruction of the Zionist state. Meir Ettinger, named after his grandfather Meir Kahane, was one of the leaders of Hilltop Youth, making his grandfather's views seem moderate.
Their goal was the destruction of Israeli institutions and the establishment of “Jewish rule”: anointing the kingdom, building a temple on the site of Jerusalem mosques, sacred to Muslims around the world, imposing a religious regime on all Jews. Ehud Olmert, who served as Israel's prime minister from 2006 to 2009, said in an interview that Hilltop Youth "sincerely, deeply and emotionally believes that this is right and necessary for Israel. This is its salvation. A kind of guarantee for the future for Israel."
A former member of Hilltop Youth, who wishes to remain anonymous because she fears she might be harmed for her words, recalls how she and her friends used an illegal hilltop settlement in the West Bank from which they threw rocks at Palestinian cars. "The Palestinians immediately called the police, and we knew that we had at least 30 minutes before they arrived, if they arrived at all. And if they did, they were unlikely to detain anyone. We did this dozens of times." According to the West Bank police, they were allegedly no less interested in stopping the violence. “When I was young, I thought that I could outsmart the police because I was smart. Later it became clear that the police either weren’t trying to do anything, or they weren’t smart enough to do it.”
The former Hilltop Youth member says she began to drift away from the group when it began to adopt more radical tactics and when Ettinger spoke openly about killing Palestinians. She offered herself as a police informant and, during a meeting with police intelligence officers in 2015, revealed the group's plans to commit murder to strike any Jews who stood in the way of the organization. She said she told police how she conducted reconnaissance in Palestinian homes to identify targets. The police could have started an investigation, says a former member of the group, but they did not even ask the names of the people who were planning the attack.
In 2013, Ettinger and other members of the Hilltop Youth formed a secret cell called "The Rebellion" to incite a rebellion against a government that was "preventing us from building a temple, blocking our path to true and complete redemption."
During a search of one of the group's hideouts, investigators from the Israeli General Security Service discovered the founding documents of the Uprising. “The State of Israel has no right to exist, and therefore we are not obliged to follow its rules of the game,” one of them states. The documents called for an end to the state of Israel, and also made it clear that the new state that would arise in its place would have no place for non-Jews and, in particular, for Arabs: “If these non-Jews do not leave, then their kill without distinguishing between women, men and children."
And this was not just empty talk. Ettinger and his comrades developed a plan that included deadlines and actions to be taken at each stage. One member even put together a training manual with instructions on how to create terrorist cells and burn down houses. “To prevent people in the house from running away,” the instructions advise, “you can put tires at the entrance to the house and set them on fire.”
In February 2014, the Uprising carried out its first attack, blowing up an empty house in the small Arab village of Silwad in the West Bank, and then carried out several more arson attacks, uprooting olive groves and destroying Palestinian granaries. Members of the group set fire to mosques, monasteries and churches, including the Church of the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes on the shores of Lake Tiberias. A policeman saw Ettinger attack a flock of sheep belonging to an Arab shepherd. He stoned a sheep and then slaughtered it in front of a shepherd, an officer later testified. “It was a shocking sight,” he said. “Just some kind of madness.”
According to an internal Israeli General Security memo, the Uprising group is defined as an organization whose goal is to "undermine the stability of the State of Israel through terror and violence, including bodily harm and bloodshed." Several of its members, including Ettinger, were tried to be placed under administrative detention, a measure often used against Arabs.
However, the state prosecutor did not approve the request. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs recorded 323 incidents of Israeli settler violence against Palestinians in 2014; in 107 of them, Palestinians were injured. The following year, the "Uprising" raised the bar of violence by openly advocating the killing of Arabs.
The Israeli General Security Service and the police established the identity of one of the prominent participants in the "Uprising" - Amiram Ben-Uliel (Amiram Ben-Uliel), establishing surveillance of him. But the service failed to prevent the wave of violence he unleashed. On the night of July 31, 2015, Ben-Uliel went on a killing spree to the village of Duma in the central West Bank. Ben-Uliel prepared a bag with two bottles of Molotov fluid, rags, a lighter, a box of matches, gloves and black spray paint. According to the indictment against him, Ben-Uliel looked for a house with clear signs of life, confirming that the object he set on fire was not abandoned. He eventually found the home of Reham and Sa'ad Dawabsheh, a young mother and father. He opened the window and threw a Molotov cocktail into the house. After that, he himself disappeared, and in the fire that broke out, his parents received injuries from which they later died. Their eldest son, Ahmad, survived, but their 18-month-old baby, Ali, was burned to death.
“It was immediately clear,” says Akerman, a former Israeli General Security Service official, “that these savages would move from abusing Arabs to damaging property and trees and eventually starting to kill people.” He is still furious at the way the service is “handling” Jewish terrorism. “The Israeli General Security Service knows how to fight such groups, using extreme measures, administrative detention and special interrogation techniques until they break,” he says. But while the service willingly uses these methods when investigating Arab terrorism, it behaves more restrainedly when dealing with Jews. "Such connivance instilled confidence in the members of the group, and they moved on to the next stage, starting to set fire to mosques and churches. As a result, remaining free, they entered the Duma and burned a family."
At first, the Israeli General Security Service claimed that they could not find the killers, although they were all supposed to be under constant surveillance. When Ben-Uliel and the other criminals were finally arrested, right-wing politicians made fiery speeches against the General Security Service and met with the families of the criminals to express their support. Ben-Uliel was sentenced to life imprisonment, and Ettinger eventually received administrative arrest, but the infection could no longer be stopped. In December 2015, Hilltop Youth released a video of Uprising members dancing in ecstasy with rifles and pistols while singing anti-Arab songs. At the same time, one of them stabs and burns a photograph of the murdered baby Ali Dawabshekh. Netanyahu, in turn, condemned the video, which he said reveals "the true face of a group that poses a danger to Israeli society and security."
AMERICAN FRIENDS
Israeli settlement expansion has long been an irritant in Israel's relations with the United States, and American officials have been careful for years to warn Netanyahu in both public and private meetings that he is supporting a dangerous enterprise. But the election of Donald Trump in 2016 put an end to that. Israel policy in the new administration was led largely by his son-in-law Jared Kushner, who had a long-standing personal relationship with Netanyahu, a friend of his father who stayed at the family home in New Jersey. Trump, pursuing a broader regional agenda that is entirely consistent with Netanyahu's own plans, also hoped to tear up the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by Barack Obama and forge diplomatic pacts between Israel and Arab countries in which the creation of a Palestinian state would remain unresolved and subject to further consideration.
If there were any questions about the new administration's position on Israeli settlements, they were put to rest once Trump chose his ambassador to Israel. His chosen one, David Friedman, was a bankruptcy lawyer who for years helped run an American nonprofit that raised millions of dollars for Beit El, one of the first Israeli settlements of the Gush Emunim (Union of the Faithful) movement. ) in the West Bank and the place where Bezalel Smotrich grew up and was educated. The organization, which was also supported by the Trump family, helped fund schools and other institutions in Beit El. When Trump became president, Friedman called Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories a "sham" and went against longstanding American policy by declaring that "these settlements are part of Israel."
Nor did Friedman listen to the regular warnings from Lt. Gen. Mark Schwartz, who arrived at the Jerusalem embassy in 2019 to coordinate security between the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority. A career Green Beret who served in combat in Afghanistan and Iraq and served as deputy commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, the military task force that oversees U.S. forces, Schwartz had no shortage of experience in the Middle East.
But he was immediately shocked by what was happening in the West Bank: Israeli settlers acted with impunity, police were virtually absent outside their settlements, and Israeli army operations only fanned the flames of tension. Schwartz recalls being outraged by what he called the army's "collective punishment" tactics, including destroying Palestinian homes, which he considered gratuitous and counterproductive. “I told them: “Guys, professional soldiers don’t act like that.” In Schwartz's view, the West Bank was in some ways the American South of the 1960s. However, the situation could become even more unstable at any moment, leading to another intifada.
Schwartz shows diplomacy as he recalls his interactions with Friedman, who was his boss. Friedman was a "good listener," the general said, but when Schwartz raised concerns about Israeli settlements, he often brushed it off, noting the Palestinian people's "lack of appreciation for what the Americans are doing for them." Schwartz also discussed his concerns about settler violence directly with officials from the Israeli General Security Service and the IDF, but Friedman did not, as far as he understood, contact political leadership. “I never had any reason to think that he even once discussed this issue with Netanyahu.”
Friedman sees things differently. "I guess I had a much broader view of the violence in Judea and Samaria" than Schwartz, he says now. “And it is clear that the violence coming from Palestinians against Israelis has been overwhelmingly more severe.” "I didn't care about the Palestinians' 'appreciation'. What bothered me was that their leadership supported terror and was unwilling to control the violence," Friedman said. He declined to discuss any conversations he had with Israeli officials.
A few weeks after Trump lost the 2020 election, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo traveled to Israel, where he gave several gifts to Netanyahu and Israeli settlers. He announced new rules requiring goods imported into the United States from West Bank areas to be labeled "Made in Israel." He flew by helicopter to Psagot, a winery in the West Bank, becoming the first American secretary of state to visit the settlement. One of the winery's major shareholders, the Falic family from Florida, has donated millions to various community projects.
During his lunchtime visit, Pompeo took a few minutes to sign the winery's guest book. “Let me not be the last Secretary of State to visit this beautiful country,” he wrote.
SETTLEMENT COALITION
Benjamin Netanyahu's determination to become prime minister for an unprecedented sixth term came at a cost: an alliance with a movement he once eschewed but which has become part of the political mainstream as Israel drifts steadily to the right. Netanyahu, who is currently on trial on charges of bribery and other corruption crimes, has repeatedly failed in attempts to form a coalition after most parties announced they were unwilling to join him. He personally participated in negotiations to form an alliance with Itamar Ben-Gvir's Jewish Power Party and Bezalel Smotrich's Religious Zionist Party, making them the most influential players in anyone trying to form a coalition government. In November 2022, the bet paid off: with crucial support from the far right, Netanyahu returned to power.
These two, who came to power as a result of the agreements reached, were among the most extreme figures ever to occupy such high positions in the Israeli cabinet. Israel's General Security Service monitored Ben-Gvir in the years following the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, and he was arrested on several charges, including incitement to racism and supporting a terrorist organization. In some cases, he achieved acquittals or dismissal of cases, but was convicted several times and served time in prison. During the Second Intifada, he led protests calling for extreme measures against Arabs and persecuted Israeli politicians who, in his opinion, were not strong enough.
Then Ben-Gvir made a radical change: he enrolled in law school. In addition, he got a job as an assistant to Michael Ben-Ari, a member of the Knesset from the National Union party, which had many followers of the Kach movement. In 2011, after long legal battles regarding the acts accused of him, he was admitted to the bar. He changed his hairstyle and clothes to look more respectable and began working internally, saying at one point that he represented "soldiers and civilians caught in legal entanglements due to the security situation in Israel." Netanyahu appointed him national security minister, who oversees the police.
Smotrich became involved in public activities after he was arrested by the Israeli General Security Service in 2005 on charges of plotting to block roads to stop the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza. He made the General Security Service's Jewish department a frequent target of criticism, complaining that it was wasting time and money investigating crimes committed by Jews when the real terrorists were Palestinians. His far-right allies sometimes called the Jewish department "hamahlaka hayehudit," the Hebrew name for the Gestapo unit that carried out Hitler's so-called Final Solution.
In 2015, while campaigning for a seat in the Knesset, Smotrich said that “every shekel invested in this department is minus a shekel from the amount used to save lives and fight real terrorism.” Seven years later, Netanyahu made him both finance minister and defense minister in charge of civilian affairs in the West Bank, and has continually pushed for the military to seize power in the territory. As part of the coalition agreement with Netanyahu, Smotrich now has the power to appoint one of the main administrative players in the West Bank to oversee road construction and enforcement of construction laws. The 2022 elections also brought into the Knesset Avi Maoz, a former Housing Ministry official whom Talia Sasson once described as the Israeli government's secret arm supporting illegal settlements. Maoz has since joined the far-right Noam party, using it as a platform for racist and homophobic policies. And he never forgot or forgave Sasson. On "International Anti-Corruption Day" in 2022, Maoz took to the Knesset podium and denounced Sasson's nearly two-decade-old report, saying it was written "with hatred of Israeli settlements and a desire to harm them." He said it was “public corruption of the highest order for which people like Talia Sasson must be held accountable.”
Within days of taking office, Ben-Gvir ordered police to remove Palestinian flags from public places in Israel, saying they "incite and encourage terrorism." Smotrich, for his part, ordered sharp cuts to payments to the Palestinian Authority, a move that led Israel's General Security Service and the IDF to express concern that the cuts would hamper the Palestinian Authority's own efforts to maintain order and prevent Palestinian terrorism.
A few weeks after the new cabinet was sworn in, the IDF office in Judea and Samaria distributed a training video to soldiers in a ground unit that was about to deploy to the West Bank. The video, titled "Operational Challenge: Farms," depicted Israeli settlers as peaceful farmers living a pastoral lifestyle, herding goats, sheep and cows in dangerous conditions. Illegal settlements, which are growing throughout the West Bank, are “small, isolated settlements, each containing a handful of people; few, if any, have weapons, and defenses are poor or non-existent ".
According to the video, it is the settlers who are under constant threat of attack, be it "a terrorist infiltrating a farm, attacking a shepherd in a pasture, arson" or "destruction of property" - threats from which IDF soldiers must protect them. The commanders of the army companies guarding each farm must, as the video says, “keep in touch with the person in charge of security”; soldiers and officers are encouraged to maintain close relations with the settlers. Informal communication, viewers are told in the video, is much more important than formal communication.
The video covers many aspects of safety, but does not address the issue of legality. When we asked the unit commander who produced the video, Brigadier General Avi Bluth, why the IDF was promoting military support for settlements that were illegal under Israeli law, he bluntly stated that the farms were in fact legal and offered to give us a tour according to some of them. An army spokesman later apologized for the general's remarks, admitted that the farms were illegal and announced that the IDF would no longer distribute the video. Despite this, in May of this year Blut was appointed head of Israel's Central Command, responsible for all Israeli troops in central Israel and the West Bank.
In August, Bluth will replace Maj. Gen. Yehuda Fuchs, who, in his final months leading the West Bank, witnessed the near collapse of law enforcement in his area of command. In late October, Fuchs wrote a letter to his superiors, Israel's chief of military staff, saying that a surge in Jewish terrorism in retaliation for the October 7 attacks "could set the West Bank on fire." With the IDF being the highest security authority in the West Bank, senior military commanders placed the blame squarely on the police, who ultimately report to Ben-Gvir. Fuchs said he had created a special task force to combat Jewish terrorism, but the investigation and arrest of the perpetrators was "entirely in the hands of the Israeli police."
And, as he wrote, she is not doing her job.
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American officials are deeply uncomfortable when asked whether the US government's actions are simply symbolic measures taken by a jaded American president who is losing support for his Israel policy at home. They say it won't end the violence, but it is a signal to the Netanyahu government about the United States' position: The West Bank could implode and become the latest front in the widening regional war in the Middle East that began on October 7, 2023.
But war may simply be the goal. As former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said, in his opinion, many representatives of the far-right forces in Israel “want war.” "They want an intifada," he says, "because it is definitive proof that there is no way to make peace with the Palestinians. There is only one way forward - to destroy them all."
Authors of the article: Ronen Bergman and Mark Mazzetti
Mossad and its Network of Helpers, the Sayanim
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on JUNE 13, 2024
David Miller
Perhaps the most famous Sayan was the media tycoon Robert Maxwell who worked for Mossad for years, and was buried with full state honours on the Mount of Olives. (Al Mayadeen English; Illustrated by Zeinab El-Hajj)
The Mossad have been exposed as targeting the International Criminal Court, including directly threatening its personnel and their families. What else does the Mossad get up to?
Zionist intelligence agencies launched a war on the International Criminal Court in January 2015. This was when it was confirmed that Palestine would join the court after it was recognised as a state by the UN general assembly.
“Israel’s” intelligence agencies routinely surveilled the ICC’s current chief prosecutor Karim Khan, his predecessor Fatou Bensouda, and dozens of other ICC and UN officials. Israeli intelligence also monitored materials that the Palestinian Authority submitted to the prosecutor’s office, and surveilled employees at four Palestinian human rights organizations whose submissions are central to the probe.
Multiple agencies including the Mossad, Shin Bet, and “National Security Council” were involved, in addition to the occupation military. “Israel’s” Ministry of Strategic Affairs, under Gilad Erdan, was involved in the surveilling of Palestinian human rights organizations that were submitting reports to the ICC.
It is reported that “a large whiteboard in an Israeli intelligence department contained the names of about 60 people under surveillance – half of them Palestinians and half from other countries, including UN officials and ICC personnel.”
Mossad, the foreign intelligence agency of the Zionist colony was involved in attempting to recruit senior ICC officials.
The former head of the Mossad, Yossi Cohen, allegedly threatened the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in a series of secret meetings in which he tried to pressure her into abandoning a war crimes investigation.
Cohen’s covert contacts with the ICC’s then prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, took place in the period leading up to her decision to open a formal investigation into alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Palestine.
Cohen, is alleged to have told her: “You should help us and let us take care of you. You don’t want to be getting into things that could compromise your security or that of your family.”
Mossad also took a keen interest in Bensouda’s family members and obtained transcripts of secret recordings of her husband. Regime officials then attempted to use the material to discredit the prosecutor.
Cohen met with Bensouda on a number of occasions, including “ambushing” her during a meeting with Joseph Kabila, the then president of the Democratic Republic of Congo. It appears he was a Mossad agent of influence.
Mossad also targeted Bensouda’s successor, the current chief prosecutor Karim Khan. The ICC confirmed there had been “several forms of threats and communications that could be viewed as attempts to unduly influence its activities”.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is said to have taken a keen interest in the operation, even sending intelligence teams “instructions” and “areas of interest” regarding their monitoring of ICC officials. One source stressed that Netanyahu was “obsessed, obsessed, obsessed” with finding out what materials the ICC was receiving.
The Sayanim
Mossad has carried out a wide range of operations all over the world. They have involved deception, theft, extortion and blackmail, torture, assassinations, and even false flag bombings. The role of Mossad is often overlooked when the role of the so-called Israel lobby is discussed, but it is an integral part of the strategy of the Zionist movement.
They created a fake terror group in Lebanon – the FLLF and used it to claim credit for a series of bombings of civilian targets, killing hundreds. Remi Brulin has documented this in detail.
In Egypt in 1954, the Mossad bombed Egyptian- and Western-owned civilian targets in an attempt to blame Muslims or the Left.
Secretive intelligence agency Nativ created a vast international campaign claiming Soviet Jewry faced a “new red antisemitism”. The real objective was the demographic imperative to recruit settler colonists. A book titled The New Red Antisemitism: A Symposium, was part of that campaign, published in 1953 by Commentary, the flagship Neoconservative journal published by a Zionist group, the American Jewish Committee. Many British Zionists worked directly with Nativ. They included the academic Colin Shindler and Mike Whine of the Board of Deputies, who was their first full-time Soviet Jewry officer. Later, he was an aide of the convicted fraudster Gerald Ronson in the Community Security Trust (CST).
Whine also co-operated in a Mossad operation when the agency was in global charge of attempting to institutionalise the idea that anti-Zionism was Judeophobic – a process that ended with the creation of the so-called “working definition” of “antisemitism.
Mossad effectively kidnapped hundreds of Jewish kids in Morocco to recruit further settlers. It owed its success in part to the fact that Mossad had previously set up the Moroccan intelligence services and they were consequently penetrated by the Zionists. Mossad’s David Littmann and wife Gisele ran the op. David even wrote a book about the op code-named Operation Mural. His wife Gisele is better known as the arch-Islamophobe Bat Ye’or. She popularised the racist theory of Eurabia.
Mossad used a honeytrap in 1986 to lure Mordechai Vanunu the heroic nuclear whistleblower from the UK to Italy so they could kidnap him. He is still not free.
Mossad assassinated famous Palestinian cartoonist and activist Naji Al ali – whose most famous creation was the widely known character Handala – on the streets of West London in 1987. Margaret Thatcher expelled a Mossad operative, who was the handler of the assassin – Arie Regev – as a result.
Mossad used British, French, and Irish passports to fly a team of assassins to Dubai in 2010 to torture and kill a Palestinian leader. Foreign Secretary David Miliband expelled a Mossad officer as a result.
Intelligence operative Shai Masot was famously filmed in 2017 bragging about his intent to “take down” UK Conservative minister Alan Duncan
Mossad officers, referred to as “Katsas”, operate with the aid of a worldwide network of helpers called “Sayanim”. Even the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) admits that the Sayanim exist. Rebecca Federman, an “antisemitism” analyst at the ADL says, “There is a system of sayanim. That’s a reality. There are people who help Israeli intelligence assets around the world.”
Former Mossad operative Victor Ostrovsky has claimed that there are several thousand Sayanim in the UK alone.
Perhaps the most famous Sayan was the media tycoon Robert Maxwell who worked for Mossad for years, and was buried with full state honours on the Mount of Olives [Jabal al-Zaytoun].
Observers might be forgiven for thinking that the whole Maxwell family has been Mossad adjacent, given the role of many of his nine children.
His sons Ian and Kevin Maxwell set up a very spooky looking, relentlessly Zionist, yet obscure think tank in London, Combating Jihadist Terrorism and Extremism (CoJiT).
Isabel, writes Alan Macleod, “another of the nine Maxwell siblings, [was] described by investigative journalist Whitney Webb as ‘Israel’s back door into Silicon Valley,’ Isabel used Robert’s connections to strike deals with some of the tech world’s biggest players, including Microsoft co-founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen. She told Israeli newspaper Haaretz that she saw her work in tech as an opportunity to ‘continue her father’s commitment to the country’. In 2001, Isabel vowed to ‘work only on things involving Israel.’ In a more overtly political move, she also accepted a position as the governor of the Peres Centre for Peace.”
Another daughter, Ghislaine, of course worked very closely with Jeffery Epstein in his Kompromat gathering and sex trafficking operation, widely regarded as run on behalf of the Mossad.
Make no mistake, the Mossad is active today in the UK and elsewhere, aiming to subvert democracy and ensure that the political culture of the West is wholly colonised by Zionists or their little helpers.
Hamas Statement on Ceasefire Proposal Requests Russia, China and Turkey Stand as Guarantors
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on JUNE 12, 2024
In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful
The Hamas Movement has demonstrated, in all stages of the negotiations to stop the aggression, the positivity required to reach a comprehensive and satisfactory agreement based on the just demands of our people for a final cessation of aggression, a complete withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, the return of the displaced, reconstruction and the conclusion of a serious prisoner exchange deal.
Below, we clarify the Movement’s positions towards proposals to stop the aggression:
First: Hamas has dealt positively and with national responsibility with the latest proposal and all proposals to reach a ceasefire agreement and release the detainees.
Second: The proposal that Hamas received from the mediators on May 5th was approved in announcement the very next day, as we delivered our response on May 6th, which was considered by the mediators and all parties to be positive and encouraging, while Netanyahu’s response to Hamas‘s agreement was to attack Rafah and escalate its aggression against our people throughout the Gaza Strip.
Third: The Movement clearly expressed its positive position on what was included in US President Joe Biden’s speech on 31/5/2024 in which he called for a permanent ceasefire, the withdrawal of the occupation forces from the Gaza Strip, reconstruction and an exchange of prisoners, while we only heard from the occupation government, led by the terrorist Netanyahu, emphasizing the continuation of the genocide war and attacking the proposal that came from President Biden, in contrast to the claim that the occupation had agreed to it.
Fourth: The Movement welcomed the Security Council resolution and its emphasis regarding a permanent ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, complete withdrawal from it, the exchange of prisoners, reconstruction, the return of the displaced to their areas of residence, the rejection of any demographic change or reduction of the area of the Gaza Strip, and the introduction of the necessary aid to our people in the Strip. The Movement confirmed its readiness to cooperate with the mediator brothers to enter into indirect negotiations on the implementation of these principles in line with the demands of our people and our resistance.
Fifth: In return for that, the world did not hear any welcome or approval from Netanyahu and his Nazi government to the Security Council resolution, but rather they continued to emphasize the rejection of any permanent ceasefire, in clear contradiction of the Security Council resolution and President Biden’s initiative.
Sixth: While Blinken continues to talk about “israel’s” approval of the latest proposal, we have not heard any “israeli” official speak of this approval.
Seventh: We consider the positions issued by US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, through which he attempted to exonerate the zionist occupation, wash his hands stained with the blood of innocent children, women and the elderly, and hold the Movement responsible for obstructing reaching an agreement a continuation of the American policy of complicity in the brutal genocide war against our Palestinian people, which allows the occupation to continue its crime with full American political and military cover.
In this context, we call on Mr. Blinken and the administration of President Biden to direct pressure on the fascist occupation government, which is determined to complete the mission of killing and genocide, in flagrant violation of all international laws and treaties.
Islamic Resistance Movement – Hamas
Wednesday: 06 Dhu al-Hijjah 1445 AH
Corresponding to: June 12, 2024 AD
Hamas Public Relations Officer in Lebanon, Mahmoud Taha, to Al-Aqsa TV:
The legendary steadfastness of the resistance and its tactics in the war, causing continuous losses to the enemy for 9 months, strengthens and reinforces the position of the resistance. The resistance is the only asset of the Palestinian people and the only solution for imminent liberation.
The amendments presented by Hamas in the negotiation proposal are neither difficult nor impossible. They are in the interest of the Palestinian people after those horrific massacres.
The international community and the Security Council are facing a test in their decision to ceasefire, open crossings, and allow aid entry, provided they exert significant pressure on the Zionist entity.
We consider the United States biased towards the zionist side, and if it wanted to pressure to stop the war, it would have done so earlier.
Our reliance in this war is not on regimes and governments, but rather on the peoples who have taken to the streets in demonstrations worldwide to support Gaza. The protests continue in the United States and many Western countries, as well as some Arab countries like Yemen. We rely on the support fronts for the resistance in Yemen and Lebanon.
Rising Concerns U.S. Pier Will Be Used for Forced Displacement of Palestinians
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on JUNE 12, 2024
Ahmed Omar
A ship transporting international humanitarian aid is moored at the US-built Trident Pier near Nuseirat in the central Gaza Strip on May 21, 2024. (Photo: Stringer/APA Images)
Critics warn the U.S.-constructed pier off Gaza’s coast is being used for military purposes. Now a source in the Gaza resistance says there are indications it will be used to facilitate the forced displacement of Palestinians.
In March 2024, U.S. President Joe Biden announced in his State of the Union address that the U.S. would be building a temporary “floating pier” on the Gaza shoreline to deliver humanitarian aid to the starving population in Gaza. “No U.S. boots will be on the ground,” he promised.
Since then, however, critics have raised concerns that the pier is not only being used for “humanitarian” purposes but is being employed for military activities that aid in the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza.
An intelligence source from within the resistance in Gaza, who spoke to Mondoweiss under conditions of anonymity, says there are mounting signs the U.S. pier could also be used to forcibly displace Palestinians. This would provide an alternative to the original Israeli plan of forcing Palestinians into the Sinai, which was rejected by Egypt early on in the war.
“The floating pier project is an American solution to the displacement dilemma in Gaza,” the source said. “It goes beyond both the Israeli solution of displacing Gazans into Sinai…and the Egyptian suggestion of displacing [Gazans] into the Naqab [desert].”
Instead, the source said, the U.S. pier would be used to facilitate the displacement of Gazans to Cyprus, and then eventually to Lebanon or Europe.
These concerns have been brought into sharp relief after the Israeli army committed a massacre in Nuseirat refugee camp last weekend, killing at least 274 Palestinians in order to retrieve four Israeli captives.
The U.S. pier was at the center of coverage of the massacre, as multiple news sources, videos, and eyewitness accounts from Gaza indicated that U.S. forces may have been involved in the operation and that humanitarian trucks entering Nuseirat were hiding the Israeli soldiers that carried out the massacre. Live Aljazeera footage depicted what appeared to be a humanitarian truck driving through the camp accompanied by two armored military vehicles, while other videos circulated showing Israeli soldiers using a helicopter allegedly in the area of the U.S. floating pier as an evacuation point, taking advantage of U.S. air defenses.
The claim was quickly dismissed by U.S. Central Command, but Palestinian factions such as the Popular Resistance Committees said it would be treating the pier as a military target moving forward. Following the accusations and the threats, the UN’s World Food Programme has suspended aid deliveries through the pier, citing concerns over the security of the WFP team.
‘Humanitarianism’ covering up ethnic cleansing
The anonymous resistance source told Mondoweiss that “according to our intelligence, the pier will be used to displace Palestinians to Cyprus through evacuation ships and then to Lebanon after undergoing a screening process.”
The source asserted that this plan has already been discussed with Lebanese authorities, and that “it was agreed with Najib Mikati, the Lebanese Prime Minister, to receive $1 billion in aid to Lebanon to be paid through the European Union, with an additional $250 million to be paid to his own companies.”
In exchange, Lebanon would receive “between 100,000 and 200,000 Gaza residents through the floating pier via Cyprus, which is expected to take place during the fall this year,” the source said.
According to the source, the background to this alleged arrangement is part of a broader “pressure cooker” strategy being enacted on the people of Gaza, “starting with the halting of money transfers as of last Ramadan and continuing with the current Israeli control over and closure of the Rafah crossing until such a time that an American company can take over, as well as the demoralization of the resistance through continuous operations, which is to be followed by allowing an acceptable number of people into Egypt through the Rafah crossing via the Hala Consulting and Tourism company, in order to be naturalized in accordance with the new Egyptian citizenship law.”
The next step in this process would then supposedly follow, in which a few hundred thousand Gazans would be transferred from Gaza to Cyprus. Notably, the U.S. is already using Cyprus to load humanitarian aid into cargo ships and transport it to the pier.
“They are expected to leave for Cyprus in waves and to mix with other illegal immigrants from Syria, after which they will either be assisted in making the journey of illegal migration to Europe — which is opposed by the European Union — or they will be sent to Tripoli and replace the Syrian refugees there, in accordance with the wishes of the Lebanese government,” the source continued. “They would then be resettled in northern Lebanon or Lebanon’s Sunni areas, far away from areas of Hezbollah influence and control.”
The source emphasized that such a scenario is not without precedent, as previous waves of Palestinian immigrants tied to Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan, a rival of PA president Mahmoud Abbas, have been settled in Lebanon in the past.
“Previously, there has been animosity between newer waves [of immigrants] and previous Palestinian groups loyal to the resistance,” the source explained. “This has led to conflict in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon in the past.”
Finally, the source also stated that alleviating the Syrian crisis and striking a deal with Bashar al-Asad to ease punitive measures for potential Syrian returnees who may have been part of the opposition would help make the prospect of an influx of Gaza refugees more palatable for the Lebanese government, especially if it is tied to an influx of monetary assistance to Lebanon’s faltering economy. Notably, several reports have already emerged that many Syrian refugees are at imminent risk of forcible deportation, and hundreds have already returned amid anti-refugee sentiment in Lebanon.
Mondoweiss has been unable to verify the claims relayed by the anonymous source regarding the potential plan.
Notably, however, Lebanon has been used in the past on a smaller scale for receiving political exiles from Palestine, as in the case of the deportation of 415 Palestinian men affiliated with political factions such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad in 1992, when they were exiled to a no-man’s-land in between northern Palestine and southern Lebanon called Marj al-Zuhur.
Mounting widespread concern
Regardless of whether such a plan comes to pass, different political factions in Gaza have expressed concern regarding the intentions behind the pier, while others have cautiously welcomed it despite reservations.
Hamas welcomed the U.S. project and the efforts to aid Palestinians, but it also emphasized that the pier would not be a reliable alternative to aid through land-based crossings, which is more efficient. Many international organizations have also echoed these concerns, confirming that aid through land crossings remains the most reliable and efficient option. Hamas has also rejected the presence of any foreign military force as part of the pier’s operations.
Other Palestinian political parties such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) have come out more strongly against the pier, raising alarms about its potential misuse for the forced displacement of Palestinians or protecting Israeli forces occupying Gaza. The PFLP warned Arabs, internationals, and Palestinians from working on the pier and asserted any troops deployed with the pier would be dealt with as an occupying force.
Likely due to these fears, the pier has already been subject to mortar shell attacks. This is likely a message sent by Palestinian resistance factions that they are ready to deal with the pier militarily if it is used for military purposes rather than for delivering aid.
Since its introduction, the pier has experienced a series of challenges and setbacks. Part of it came loose due to sea conditions, and some of its staff were injured while operating it in unclear circumstances. The pier had to be taken for maintenance just weeks after it was deployed and was relocated back off Gaza a few days ago.
Once fully operational and at full capacity, the pier is expected to deliver 150 trucks into Gaza daily. However, as of this writing, the World Food Programme has continued suspending aid delivery due to the aforementioned safety concerns for WFP teams.
While the U.S. has continuously reasserted its purely “humanitarian” aims, the circumstances surrounding the pier’s creation, including the exclusion of Palestinians from its management, the involvement of Israel in its security, and now the recent suspected U.S. role in the Nuseirat massacre, has all reinforced suspicions among Palestinians concerning the true intentions behind the pier.
Israel inflicts acute malnutrition in 8,000 children under five: WHO
Up to 3,000 children are at risk of “dying before their families’ eyes” as they are deprived of access to food and treatment in southern Gaza alone
News Desk
JUN 13, 2024
(Photo Credit: Getty Images)
The World Health Organization (WHO) reported on 13 June that Israel's genocidal war on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip has resulted in over 8,000 children under the age of five suffering from severe malnutrition.
Among the 8,000 children under the age of five identified and provided treatment for acute malnutrition, 1,600 were afflicted with severe acute malnutrition, commonly referred to as severe wasting, which is the most fatal form.
At a press briefing held in Geneva on 12 June, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that a significant segment of Gaza's population faces near-famine conditions due to the devastation caused by the Israeli war. Ghebreyesus also went on to specify that “there have already been 32 deaths attributed to malnutrition, including 28 among children under five years old.”
UNICEF announced on 11 June that up to 3,000 children are at risk of “dying before their families’ eyes” as they continue to be deprived of access to food and treatment in southern Gaza.
The conditions in Rafah, where over a million were displaced and had sought shelter since the start of the war, have significantly worsened since Israel's operations on the southernmost city over the past month, forcing the displaced to flee yet again and complicating efforts for aid and humanitarian services.
Earlier this month, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) revealed that it had ceased operations at all its shelters and most services for Palestinians in Rafah due to the escalating Israeli assault.
Israel is on fire. In response to Israel’s burning of olive trees in Lebanon with white phosphorus, Hezbollah is burning the Israeli settlements in the north. If we burn.. you burn with us 
