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Israel deliberately targeted captives in Gaza to ‘get rid of them’: Hamas

Press TV – December 14, 2024

The Israeli military has recently pounded a location in the Gaza Strip “deliberately and repeatedly” to eliminate regime soldiers held captive by resistance groups, according to a statement by Hamas’s armed wing.

Al-Qassam Brigades spokesman Abu Obeida said on Saturday that the regime’s forces “targeted a location where some enemy captives were held, bombing it multiple times to ensure that they were killed.”

He said they bombed the place “with the intent to kill the captives and their guards.”

According to the statement, the resistance fighters “made attempts to rescue the Israeli prisoners, successfully extracting one of them, but his fate remains unknown.”

In a separate post on Telegram, Qassam Brigades released a footage showing a wounded Israeli captive, who was struggling to move amid the rubble most probably caused by the regime’s airstrike.

In a message along the footage, it said that prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli military’s chief of staff Herzi Halevi “are seeking to get rid of their captives in Gaza by all means.”

Hamas held captive around 250 people during its unprecedented operation against the occupied territories on October 7, 2023. The resistance released 105 of the captives during a week-long truce last November.

Six captives were killed in an Israeli airstrike on the southern Gaza Strip in September.

Hamas said at the time that Netanyahu “is directly responsible for the killing of dozens of captives due to bringing the ceasefire efforts to a failure.”

It has repeatedly said that there is no alternative other than “a ceasefire, the withdrawal of the occupation forces, and the implementation of a prisoner exchange agreement” in exchange for the release of the Israeli captives.

Netanyahu has long been obstructing mediation for a truce and a deal to release the captives still held by Palestinian groups in Gaza.

December 14, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | , , , | 1 Comment

Ceasefire with Hezbollah ends Israel’s illusion of reshaping West Asia by force: Hamas

Press TV – November 27, 2024

The Palestinian resistance movement Hamas says the ceasefire Israel eventually clinched with Hezbollah has shattered Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s “illusion” of reshaping West Asia by force.

On Tuesday, Netanyahu finally accepted the deal, which is expected to end the regime’s months-long deadly escalation against Lebanon.

It came after a meeting of his “security cabinet” to discuss a proposal put forward by the United States and France.

“The enemy’s acceptance of the agreement with Lebanon without fulfilling the conditions it set is an important milestone in shattering Netanyahu’s illusions of changing the map of the Middle East by force,” Hamas said in a statement published on its Telegram channel on Wednesday.

It said Netanyahu’s “illusions of defeating the Resistance forces or disarming them” were also sent to the oblivion.

The Israeli regime has killed more than 3,700 people in Lebanon, including 42 who perished across the country on Tuesday, besides wounding nearly 15,700 others.

“We commend the pivotal role played by the Islamic Resistance in Lebanon, in support of the Gaza Strip and the Palestinian resistance, and the great sacrifices made by Hezbollah and its leadership, led by the late Secretary-General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah.”

“We appreciate the steadfastness of the brotherly Lebanese people and their constant solidarity with the Palestinian people in confronting the Zionist occupation and its brutal aggression, asking God Almighty to protect Lebanon and its people from all harm and evil,” Hamas said.

Israeli military commanders had pledged to eradicate Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. However, they were ultimately compelled to accept the ceasefire agreement without achieving any of those goals.

“We affirm that this agreement would not have been achieved without the steadfastness of the Resistance and the popular support around it. We are confident that the Resistance Axis will continue to support our people and back their battle with all possible means,” Hamas said in its statement.

Hezbollah has been responding to the Israeli aggression with hundreds of successful retaliatory strikes against various sensitive and strategic military targets across the occupied territories.

The Lebanese resistance movement recently announced killing more than 100 Israeli troops and injuring upwards of a thousand others during the strikes.

November 27, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Solidarity and Activism | , , , , , | 3 Comments

Israel chief of staff calls for end to Gaza war, prisoner exchange deal with Hamas

MEMO | November 6, 2024

Israel’s Chief of Staff, General Herzi Halevi, has said that it’s time to end the war in Gaza and reach a prisoner swap deal with Hamas, Sama news agency has reported, citing Israeli Channel 12. The Hebrew-language channel revealed details of a meeting between Halevi and families of hostages held by Palestinian resistance forces in the Gaza Strip.

According to Channel 12, sources said that the general recently met with relatives of Israeli prisoners and informed them that, “The time has come to work towards a deal that could bring an end to the war.” He assured the families that he had no concerns over concluding the conflict through a prisoner exchange deal with Hamas.

“We have achieved numerous accomplishments,” explained Halevi. “We are strong enough, and we must also be brave enough to reach an agreement.”

Meanwhile, Israeli sources noted that, during a brief meeting held on Sunday evening with security officials and several ministers, the coordinator for prisoners and missing persons in the Israeli army, Major General Nitzan Alon, made it clear that without a shift in Israel’s approach to Gaza, no agreement would be reached and Hamas would not alter its stance.

November 6, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism | , , , | Leave a comment

Hamas says it will judge new US president on his stances towards Palestinians

Palestinian Information Center – November 6, 2024

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM – The Hamas Movement has said that it will judge the new US administration on its actions and policy towards the Palestinian people and their national cause.

“Our position on the new US administration depends on its positions and practical behavior towards our Palestinian people, their legitimate rights and their just cause,” Hamas said in a statement on Wednesday.

“The new US administration must realize that our Palestinian people will continue to confront the abominable occupation and will not accept any trajectory that detracts from their legitimate rights to freedom, independence, self-determination, and the establishment of their independent state with Jerusalem as its capital,” Hamas underlined.

“Unfortunately, all the successive US administrations, since the occupation of Palestine in 1948, have had negative positions on the Palestinian cause and have always been the biggest supporter of the [Israeli] occupation in all fields and situations,” Hamas said.

“The previous US administration took a supportive path towards the occupation and its aggression by granting its war criminals political and military cover to help them persist in the most heinous wars of extermination known in modern history, which confirmed its role as a full partner in the killing of tens of thousands of our people, including children, women and elderlies,” Hamas added.

Hamas called for ending the blind bias in favor of the occupation state and working seriously on putting an end to the genocidal war on the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

The Movement urged the US president-elect “to listen to the American community’s voices that have been resounding for over a year in rejection of the Israeli aggression against the Gaza Strip” and their country’s support for the occupation state.

Donald Trump was elected the 47th president on Wednesday, four years after his defeat by outgoing president Joe Biden.

November 6, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

Israel’s Deadly Miscalculation: Consequences of Attacking Iran & Hezbollah

Dialogue Works | October 29, 2024

Seyed Mohammad Marandi is a Professor of English Literature and Orientalism at the University of Tehran and advisor to Iran’s nuclear negotiations team: (https://x.com/s_m_marandi​)

October 30, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Video, War Crimes | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Hamas confirms martyrdom of leader Yahya Sinwar

MEMO | October 18, 2024

Hamas today confirmed that its chief, Yahya Sinwar, was killed in fighting in Gaza, a statement issued on the group’s social media channels said.

“Hamas leader Khalil Al-Hayya announces the martyrdom of the great leader, President of the Hamas Political Bureau, the hero of Al-Aqsa Flood, Yahya Sinwar, who sought martyrdom and attained it after clashing with a zionist force alongside other fighters in the #Gaza Strip,” the movement said.

“Hamas will remain until a Palestinian state is established on all historic Palestine with Jerusalem as its capital,” Al-Hayya continued, adding that Sinwar’s martyrdom, like that of his predecessors including Hamas founders Ahmed Yassin and Abdel Aziz Al-Rantisi, will only “empower the resistance” and “will be a curse on the occupiers”.

Israel’s prisoners, he continued, “will not be returned without a complete ceasefire, Israeli withdrawal from the Strip and the release of Palestinian prisoners from the occupation’s prisons.”

Israel announced yesterday that Sinwar was killed after a firefight with occupation forces in the southern Rafah governorate on Wednesday. It later released drone footage of his last moments showing him fighting against the occupation until the end. He was wearing a keffiyeh to conceal his face and army fatigues.

Sinwar was  appointed leader of Hamas’ political bureau in August, a week after the assassination of his predecessor Ismail Haniyeh in a “Zionist raid” while he was on an official visit to Iran.

October 18, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , | 1 Comment

US says can’t continue supplying Ukraine, Israel together as Tel Aviv faces munitions shortage

Press TV – October 15, 2024

Israel is scrambling to supply interceptor missiles amid a looming shortage as the regime is bracing for more retaliatory attacks from the regional resistance, more than a year after it launched the genocidal war on Gaza, a report says.

The report by the the Financial Times came as the United States on Sunday confirmed that its military is sending an anti-missile system operated by American troops to aid the Israeli forces following the Tel Aviv regime’s failure to defend itself against Iran and as Tel Aviv has threatened it will attack Iranian sites.

“Israel’s munitions issue is serious,” the Financial Times cited Dana Stroul, a former senior Pentagon official with responsibility for the West Asia, as saying on Tuesday.

“If Iran responds to an Israel attack [with a massive air strike campaign], and [Lebanon’s] Hezbollah joins in too, Israel air defenses will be stretched,” she said, noting that US stockpiles were not limitless.

“The US can’t continue supplying Ukraine and Israel at the same pace. We are reaching a tipping point.”

Boaz Levy, chief executive of Israel Aerospace Industries, which makes the Arrow interceptors used to down ballistic missiles, said he was running triple shifts to keep production lines running.

“Some of our lines are working 24 hours, seven days a week. Our goal is to meet all our obligations,” Levy said.

While Israel does not disclose the size of its stockpiles, he said “it is no secret that we need to replenish stocks.”

Since early October 2023, Israel has been waging brutal two-front aggression that has killed more than 42,000 people in the Gaza Strip and at least 2,306 others in Lebanon so far.

Over the same period, the usurping regime has also assassinated several resistance leaders, including Hamas’s political bureau chief Ismail Haniyeh and Hezbollah Secretary General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah.

In support of Palestinians in Gaza, resistance groups have launched retaliatory attacks on Israeli targets and vowed to keep fighting until the Gaza onslaught ends.

In response to Israel’s barbaric acts of assassination against the resistance front’s top leaders, Iran carried out Operation True Promise 2 earlier this month.

During the operation, Iran launched some 200 high-speed ballistic missiles at the Zionist entity’s military, espionage and intelligence bases, sending almost 10 million settlers into bomb shelters. Ninety percent of the fired Iranian missiles hit their targets.

Despite Israel’s intensified strikes on Lebanon, Hezbollah managed to conduct the deadliest strikes on the occupied territories in the past year over the weekend.

“We are not seeing Hezbollah’s full capability yet. It has only been firing at around a tenth of its estimated prewar launching capacity, a few hundred rockets a day instead of as many as 2,000,” Assaf Orion, a former Israeli brigadier general and head of strategy at the Israeli military, said.

“Some of that gap is a choice by Hezbollah not to go full out, and some of it is due to degradation by the IDF [Israeli military]. . . But Hezbollah has enough left to mount a strong operation,” Orion added.

“Haifa and northern Israel are still on the receiving end of rocket and drone attacks almost every day.”

Amid the rising retaliatory operations, the report cited analysts as saying “defense planners and Israel’s AI-powered air defenses were having to choose which areas to protect over others.”

“It’s only a matter of time before Israel starts to run out of interceptors and has to prioritize how they are deployed,” said Ehud Eilam, a former researcher at Israel’s ministry of military affairs.

October 15, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism | , , , , , , | 1 Comment

The Zionist regime cannot fight Hamas and Hezbollah at the same time

By Robert Inlakesh | Al Mayadeen | October 12, 2024

The war that the Israeli regime has opened will not close until it is dealt a strategic defeat, one from which it will not likely recover.

After all of its gloating, the Zionist entity appears to have fallen for its own propagandistic bravado and is sleepwalking into the abyss. Having failed to defeat Hamas in Gaza, the Israelis appear to have lulled themselves into a belief that they had already crushed Hezbollah with their initial blows of the war.

When the Israelis detonated thousands of pagers on September 17, a day later detonating walkie-talkie devices, inflicting dozens of deaths and hundreds of serious injuries, this represented a momentary tactical victory for the settler project. What followed, with the assassination of countless Hezbollah officials, culminating in the martyrdom of the party’s Secretary-General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, made the Israelis appear as if they were then in the driver’s seat of the conflict.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu grew so confident and emboldened that he decided to record a video message to the people of Iran, indicating that he would soon aid in carrying out a regime change. The Zionist leaders ordered large-scale airstrikes against thousands of targets across Lebanon, devastating civilian infrastructure and inflicting over 2,000 deaths. The Israelis repeatedly pounded the Southern Suburb of Beirut with hundreds of tons of explosives, while expanding the nature of their strikes against Syrian territory too.

While the Arab and Muslim World entered a stage of collective mourning over the repeated attacks on Lebanon, processing the loss of one of its most cherished leaders in recent memory, the Israelis also decided to declare a ground incursion into South Lebanon. Terrorist tactics and assassinations have served as propaganda victory in the media battle of the optics, in addition to a temporary tactical victory, which certainly inflicted a blow.

Yet, the strategic initiative was suddenly recovered on October 1, with the Islamic Revolution Guard Corps (IRGC)’s unprecedented response to the repeated assassinations – including the murder of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran – firing 180 ballistic missiles at Israeli military sites. Despite countless attempts to deflect, cover up, and downplay the effectiveness of the Iranian response, dubbed “Operation True Promise II,” the impact was felt throughout the entire region.

What also happened following this, with the repeated successful strikes against Israeli targets by Yemen’s Ansar Allah and the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, combined with repeated Hezbollah’s successes in repelling the Zionist forces’ attempts at penetrating Lebanese land, all worked at changing the direction of the tide. On October 7, Hamas demonstrated its ability to hit “Tel Aviv” with M90 rockets, which was followed by strikes on “Tel Aviv” by Ansar Allah and then Hezbollah.

After repeated costly failures along the Lebanese border, the Israelis then decided to invade Jabalia Refugee Camp in northern Gaza and begin a terror bombing campaign across northern Gaza, also carrying on its assassinations of journalists and educators in the besieged territory. However, despite the terror that they inflicted, when their forces entered on the ground and besieged Jabalia Refugee Camp, the Palestinian Resistance factions began executing sophisticated and daring ambush operations, exacting a significant price on their soldiers.

The al-Qassam Brigades – the armed wing of Hamas – then began firing drones at troop formations and even one toward Israeli settlements, indicating that their capabilities were much greater than they were previously believed to be by the enemy. Suddenly, the Israelis were in a position where the Palestinian Resistance was killing and injuring their soldiers in Gaza, while Hezbollah was doing the same from South Lebanon.

Although the Israelis dealt significant blows to the Axis of Resistance, it is now in an even more difficult position than it previously found itself in prior to its assaults on Lebanon. Hezbollah has replaced its military leadership and has had the time to plan, rid itself of potential security breaches, and take the initiative on the battlefield. We see that Hezbollah is today intensifying its rocket strikes against the Israelis, dealing significant blows and putting the Zionist entity in a position of embarrassment before its own public once again.

The Israelis now must mount significant offensive actions across all fronts and fight on, managing a battle with Lebanon, Gaza, the West Bank, Yemen, Iraq, and even Iran. Benjamin Netanyahu envisioned himself as the Israeli Prime Minister to inflict a 1967-style defeat on the regional resistance, yet he has dragged the entire entity into something very different. We are no longer in the days of Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser or the PLO in the 1980s, Hezbollah and the regional Axis of Resistance axis are not an alliance that can be broken through assassinations of senior leaders, in addition to this, they are ready for the fight.

Hezbollah undoubtedly enjoys superiority on the ground, in face-to-face combat, while the Zionist military has only proven capable of pulling off sophisticated terrorist plots and assassinations, in combination with their elite video-game warriors who specialize in using advanced weapons from a distance. The reality is that typing on a keyboard or commanding controllers, while sitting in a fortified position, may deliver some tactical victories, but it will not win a war that requires immense physical courage, which the Israelis simply do not possess.

Even in the West Bank, where the Israelis frequently raid refugee camps and face off against poorly trained teenagers and men in their young twenties, armed with no more than light weapons, their special forces units have to call in backup and end up using air support. Even against the weakest link in the chain of Resistance groups, they struggle to hold ground in confrontations and never do so in a fair way. In Lebanon, they face committed, well-trained, and well-prepared fighters who do not fear death and crave the opportunity to confront them.

The Israeli regime may well pull off more trickery and terrorism on a grand scale, as it will turn to more assassinations, attempts to stir unrest, and perhaps special force operations deep into Lebanese or Syrian territory. There cannot be any doubt that there will be more challenges ahead, that the Israelis have many more tricks up their sleeves, and that the terror they plan to inflict will be painful, primarily to civilians. Yet, they do not possess the capability to win a multi-front confrontation and will be bled to death, so long as the Axis of Resistance continues to seize the initiative and respond forcefully to each escalatory violation of international law that the Israelis commit.

Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, in his first speech issued during the Gaza Genocide, spoke of “scoring points” and that the “knockout blow” had not yet been delivered against the Israeli regime. What has happened during the past month is that the Israelis were being beaten on points and decided to begin throwing haymaker punches with the intent of ending the fight abruptly, taking a chance at victory. Some of those punches landed and knocked down the Axis of Resistance, yet they got back on their feet, dealt blows back to the Israelis, and are now fighting with even more intensity. Both sides have been hit and hurt, so this fight now looks like it will end with a KO.

The war that the Israeli regime has opened will not close until it is dealt a strategic defeat, one from which it will not likely recover. It is also a war that the United States has enabled and backed in every way. In today’s world, the Palestinians and Lebanese people are taking on not only the Zionists, but the US too.

October 12, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , , , , | 2 Comments

The Anniversary of October 7th

Twelve Months That May Have Doomed Both Israel and Global Jewish Power

By Ron Unz • Unz Review • October 7, 2024

Today marks the one year anniversary of the remarkably successful Hamas raid on Israel, in which some 1,500 lightly-armed Islamic militants from Gaza so greatly humiliated the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his country’s entire national security establishment. The consequences of these last twelve months have been enormous, not merely for the Jewish State and the rest of the Middle East, but also for America and the entire world.

For many fatal diseases the cause of death is less the result of the infection itself than that of the defensive immune system, whose massive over-reaction destroys vital tissue, killing the entire organism. And I think that the Hamas raid of October 7, 2023 and the Israeli response may eventually be seen in this light.

Some 1,200 Israelis died that day, probably many or most of them killed by their own country’s panic-stricken and trigger-happy IDF forces, whose Apache helicopters were ordered to blast anything that moved. Although such losses were hardly insignificant in a Jewish population of some 7.2 million and the national humiliation was enormous, if the Israeli government had merely been content to launch a few weeks of punitive bombing attacks against Gaza and then grudgingly accept an exchange of prisoners with its Hamas adversaries, I doubt the results would have been too serious.

Israel had held many thousands of Palestinians without charges or trial and often under brutal conditions, so releasing these in exchange for the 200-odd Israelis Hamas had carried back to Gaza would have meant a huge loss of face for the Jewish State, but hardly a threat to the country’s survival. The Israelis could have merely fired a few of their complacent and incompetent local military commanders and strengthened their Gaza defenses, and matters would have probably gone on much like before.

Israel had been riding high at that point, on the very verge of accomplishing its decades-long project of fully normalizing relations with Saudi Arabia, the most powerful Arab state. Israel’s close friends totally dominated the Biden Administration and Donald Trump promised to do even more for that country if he somehow managed to regain the White House. The country had just celebrated the 75th anniversary of its founding, and its international strategic position seemed better than it had been in many years, so it could have easily taken its Hamas debacle in stride.

But after the events of the last twelve months, I tend to doubt that the country will survive much longer in anything like its existing form, and its collapse may also take down with it the entire political structure of organized Jewry worldwide, which today so heavily dominates both America and much of the rest of the world. While Israel may face very serious risks from the major regional war its government seeks to ignite, I think the greatest threat to its existence comes from the massive distribution of devastating information that has taken place during this last year.

If the Israeli government had cut its losses and exchanged prisoners with Hamas, the country might have been humiliated but Netanyahu would have been utterly destroyed. So partly because of his own desperate political situation, he reacted in very different fashion, unleashing massive, relentless attacks against Gaza’s helpless couple of million civilians, clearly hoping to save his own political skin by using the Hamas raid as an excuse to kill or expel all the Palestinians in that enclave and afterwards in the West Bank. This would have allowed him to establish his name in history as Israel’s second founding father, finally creating the Greater Israel that all of his predecessors had failed to achieve. This bold project was certainly spurred on by the small extremist political parties upon whom the political survival of his government depended, whose ideological leadership regarded those territories as their God-given heritage under the fierce version of the religious Judaism that they followed.

Unfortunately for Netanyahu’s plans, despite all his massive bombing attacks, Gaza’s Palestinians refused to leave, perhaps remembering how their parents or grand-parents had previously been expelled by Zionist militants in 1948 from their homes in Haifa and other cities of what became Israel, as I had discussed in a long December article:

Moreover, despite massive financial lures, over-populated Egypt was adamant that it would not accept a couple of million displaced Gazans, who would likely become a source of social instability and future border clashes with Israel. So with the Gazans refusing to leave and the Egyptians refusing to take them, this left little choice but for the Israelis to keep bombing them in hopes they might change their minds, perhaps further assisted by the pressure of famine as the entrance of food supplies to the besieged enclave was blocked by mobs of angry Israelis.

Hamas and its determined fighters were hidden in their heavily-fortified network of tunnels and during the year that followed IDF troops had little success in rooting them out, suffering continuing casualties along the way and freeing only a tiny number of the Israelis held prisoner.

Angry, frustrated armies naturally tend to take revenge against the entire civilian population of their enemies, and in an August article I’d summarized the unspeakable war crimes that IDF troops were regularly committing against helpless Palestinian civilians, with some of these incidents finally starting to receive coverage in mainstream American media outlets.

According to American physicians interviewed by Politico Magazine and CBS News Sunday Morning, Israeli military snipers have regularly been executing Palestinian toddlers with precisely aimed shots to the head and the heart; indeed, for many years Israelis have proudly marketed tee-shirts boasting of their success in killing pregnant women and children. An article in the New York Times also reported that IDF forces have seized and tortured to death leading Palestinian surgeons and other medical doctors, with some of the survivors describing the horrific torments they endured at the hands of their brutal Israeli captors.

All of these barbaric atrocities have been justified and encouraged by the sweeping public statements of top Israeli leaders. For example, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has publicly identified the Palestinians with the tribe of Amalek, whom the Hebrew god commanded must be exterminated down to the last newborn baby. Just a few days ago, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich declared that it would be “just and moral” for Israel to totally exterminate all two million Palestinians in Gaza, but he emphasized that world public opinion was currently preventing his government from taking that important step.

Although this officially-stated Israeli goal of eradicating all Palestinian men, women, and children has not yet been achieved, more than ten months of bombs, bullets, and famine have made significant progress in that direction. The Lancet is one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious medical journals and a few weeks ago it published a short piece conservatively estimating that relentless Israeli attacks and the complete destruction of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure may be responsible for nearly 200,000 civilian deaths, a figure many times larger than any previous total mentioned in the media.

The massive, ongoing slaughter of Palestinian civilians together with these widespread, explicit public statements by top Israeli leaders led the esteemed jurists of the International Court of Justice to issue a series of near-unanimous rulings that Israel appeared to be undertaking a campaign of genocide against Gaza’s Palestinians. By late July even the notoriously pro-Israel editors of the English-language Wikipedia had finally endorsed the same conclusion.

In addition to these ongoing massacres, many thousands of Palestinian civilian captives have been seized, none of whom have ever been tried or convicted of anything. But with Israeli prison space overflowing, National Security Minister Itomar Ben-Gvir proposed summarily executing all of them by shooting each one in the head, thereby freeing up their prison space for new waves of captives.

Although the militaries of many countries have occasionally committed massacres or atrocities during wartime, sometimes even with the silent approval of their political leadership, it seems quite unusual to have the latter publicly endorse and advocate such policies, and no similar examples from recent centuries come to mind. I don’t doubt that if television journalists had interviewed Genghis Khan while he was ravaging all of Eurasia with his Mongol hordes, he might have casually made such statements, but I’d always assumed that standards of acceptable international behavior had considerably changed over the last thousand years.

When top leaders regularly issue such wholesale sanguinary declarations, some of their more enthusiastic subordinates may naturally decide to partly implement those same goals on a retail basis. These horrible recent Israeli atrocities merely continued the pattern from earlier this year, which had often been documented on social media by Israelis themselves, eager to emphasize the terrible punishment they were successfully inflicting upon their hated Palestinian foes. As I wrote a few months ago:

Indeed, the Israelis continued to generate an avalanche of gripping content for those videos. Mobs of Israeli activists regularly blocked the passage of food-trucks, and within a few weeks, senior UN officials declared that more than a million Gazans were on the verge of a deadly famine. When the desperate, starving Gazans swarmed one of those few food delivery convoys allowed through, the Israeli military shot and killed more than 100 of them in the “Flour Massacre” and this was later repeated. All these horrific scenes of death and deliberate starvation were broadcast worldwide on social media, with some of the worst examples coming from the accounts of gleeful Israeli soldiers, such as their video of the corpse of a Palestinian child being eaten by a starving dog. Another image showed the remains of a bound Palestinian prisoner who had been crushed flat while still alive by an Israeli tank. According to a European human rights organization, the Israelis had regularly used bulldozers to bury alive large numbers of Palestinians. UN officials reported finding mass graves near several hospitals, with the victims found bound and stripped, shot execution-style. As Internet provocateur Andrew Anglin has pointed out, the behavior of the Israeli Jews does not seem merely evil but “cartoonishly evil,” with all their blatant crimes seeming to be based upon the script of some over-the-top propaganda-film but instead actually taking place in real life.

I also suggested that the near-stranglehold that pro-Israel Jews had gradually gained across American society, especially including politics, academia, and media, was having very fateful consequences. For example, Netanyahu’s deliberate slaughter of tens or even hundreds of thousands of Gazan civilians actually prompted his recent invitation to address a joint session of Congress for an unprecedented fourth time, with his bombastic speech interrupted by 58 standing ovations, coming at a rate of more than once each minute.

Meanwhile, American students had been heavily indoctrinated for generations with an absolute horror of genocide, war crimes, Apartheid, and racial oppression. But when they reacted against full American government support for the worst example of these seen anywhere in the world in many decades, their peaceful protests at elite colleges were brutally suppressed by harsh police crackdowns. This problem arose because their moral instructors had failed to properly emphasize that all those sweeping prohibitions actually included the key exclusionary phrase “except when committed by Jews”…

In one of the highest-profile and most grotesque recent incidents, Israeli doctors reported that a Palestinian captive had been severely injured after being brutally gang-raped and sodomized by nine IDF soldiers. Israeli military leaders have been facing the threat of arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court, so they decided to demonstrate their adherence to international law by having the soldiers arrested and tried, but a huge, violent mob of Jewish activists invaded the army base to free them, and the government later ordered them released. Israeli TV has widely broadcast footage of Palestinian prisoners being raped and sodomized by IDF soldiers, with claims that these brutal scenes were sometimes even live-streamed for the edification of gleeful Israeli political leaders…

Mike Whitney had summarized much of the shocking early evidence in late July when the story first broke in the Israeli media and a more recent article by journalist Jonathan Cook collected together a great deal of the background information. Cook noted that according to human and legal rights groups, Israeli soldiers and police have a very long history of raping and sexually assaulting Palestinians, including children, and such behavior has been endorsed by the country’s highest religious authorities:

In 2016, for example, the Israeli military appointed Colonel Eyal Karim as its chief rabbi, even after he had declared Palestinians to be “animals” and had approved the rape of Palestinian women in the interest of boosting soldiers’ morale.

I’ve always been interested in the Middle East conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, and I’m sure that I’ve followed it much more closely than the vast majority of people. But over the last twelve months I’ve probably devoted more attention to the topic than I had during the previous fifty years combined, and I’d expect that the same may be true for all but those who have long specialized in the subject. Billions around the world who had previously remained totally unaware or had only known of the Palestinians in the vaguest terms have now watched scenes of enormous suffering displayed on their smartphones.

In past decades all of these horrific Israeli crimes might have remained hidden away, kept from the sight of the American public and the rest of the world by the staunchly pro-Israel gatekeepers of the Western mainstream media. But the existence of the Internet drastically changed the informational landscape, especially the relatively uncensored social media platforms of TikTok and Elon Musk’s Twitter, which allowed the rapid dissemination of shocking images. Meanwhile, YouTube channels such as those of Judge Andrew Napolitano gradually brought together a critical mass of highly-credentialed academics, national security experts, and journalists who could share their analysis of events with large audiences around the world.

Two of Napolitano’s regular guests are Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate, earnest young Jewish progressives who run the Grayzonea webzine and YouTube channel of their own. I noted their lengthy discussion of how the pro-Israel donor class had recently crushed any political dissent within the Democratic Party, despite the overwhelming views of its voter base.

In that same livestream, Blumenthal and Maté also focused on the methods used to keep American elected officials in line on this issue, noting that a few days ago Zionist billionaires spent an almost unprecedented $8 million to defeat Rep. Cori Bush in her own Democratic primary, angry that the black progressive member of “the squad” had called for a ceasefire in Gaza. Just a few weeks earlier, roughly twice as much money had been spent by similar individuals for very similar reasons to successfully eliminate her close political ally Rep. Jamaal Bowman.

Those two primary races were by far the most expensive in American history, and in their aftermath most members of Congress must surely realize that they only remain in office at the sufferance of AIPAC and its ideological allies. Although leading progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez denounced the role of big money in those primary races, she was obviously too fearful of pro-Israel donors to even mention whose big money had been involved. The Grayzone editors were far more candid and accurately characterized the dollars as being deployed by “the foreign agents of an Apartheid state.”

Both Blumenthal and Mate had long focused on the plight of the Palestinians, and a couple of years ago I’d read Goliath, the former’s fine 2013 book reporting his personal experiences during his visit to the region.

But despite their previous coverage of the conflict, I do not think that either of them had ever imagined the horrors currently being inflicted upon the suffering Palestinians, nor the total slavish support for Israel expressed by the entire Biden Administration. These developments had ideological consequences and in May I’d described some ironic statements they had made in an earlier podcast:

This massive suppression of all political opposition to Zionism through a mixture of legal, quasi-legal, and illegal means has hardly escaped the notice of various outraged critics. Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate are young Jewish progressives very sharply critical of Israel and its current attack on Gaza, and in their most recent livestream video a day or two before that Congressional vote, they agreed that Zionists were the greatest threat to American freedom and that our country was “under political occupation” by the Israel Lobby.”

They may or may not have been aware that their angry denunciation closely paralleled one of the most notorious Far Right phrases of the last half-century, which condemned America’s existing political system as nothing more than ZOG, a “Zionist Occupation Government.” Over time, obvious factual reality gradually becomes apparent regardless of ideological predispositions.

By August, I noticed that incendiary term had actually been explicitly used in their most recent podcast:

That particular article of mine proved quite popular so it’s possible that my remarks may have directly or indirectly found their way to those individuals. Whether or not that was the case, in their current podcast they mentioned that although they’d always dismissed “ZOG” as some ridiculously antisemitic expression, recent events had demonstrated its reality, and Americans were obviously now living in “one nation under ZOG.” I think this marked an important step forward in their understanding of our world.

Soon afterward, their Grayzone channel was temporarily banned from YouTube, and when it returned a week later, the two hosts nervously joked about the acronym they must carefully avoid uttering, using several rhyming words to enlighten their audience. I suspect that just like them, many other thoughtful Americans have recently begun entertaining ideas that they would have never previously considered possible.

Nearly all of us, members of the media included, live our lives in the media-bubbles that constitute our understanding of the world. When real-life events puncture such a bubble, we are forced to take stock and reassess our view of reality.

Those two young journalists were deeply concerned about America’s current situation, in which so much of the basic democratic system they always assumed seemed to be lost, with political control of our country now being exercised by obvious agents of a ruthless and bloodthirsty foreign power.

Yet oddly enough, although America’s current political predicament might have alarmed some knowledgeable individuals from the first half of the last century, it might not have greatly surprised them. Five or six years ago I read a fascinating book by Prof. Joseph Bendersky, an academic historian specializing in Holocaust Studies and the history of Nazi Germany. As I wrote at the time:

Bendersky devoted ten full years of research to his book, exhaustively mining the archives of American Military Intelligence as well as the personal papers and correspondence of more than 100 senior military figures and intelligence officers. The “Jewish Threat” runs over 500 pages, including some 1350 footnotes, with the listed archival sources alone occupying seven full pages. His subtitle is “Anti-Semitic Politics of the U.S. Army” and he makes an extremely compelling case that during the first half of the twentieth century and even afterward, the top ranks of the U.S. military and especially Military Intelligence heavily subscribed to notions that today would be universally dismissed as “anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.”

Put simply, U.S. military leaders in those decades widely believed that the world faced a direct threat from organized Jewry, which had seized control of Russia and similarly sought to subvert and gain mastery over America and the rest of Western civilization.

In these military circles, there was an overwhelming belief that powerful Jewish elements had financed and led Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution, and were organizing similar Communist movements elsewhere aimed at destroying all existing Gentile elites and imposing Jewish supremacy throughout America and the rest of the Western world. While some of these Communist leaders were “idealists,” many of the Jewish participants were cynical opportunists, seeking to use their gullible followers to destroy their ethnic rivals and thereby gain wealth and supreme power. Although Intelligence officers gradually came to doubt that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was an authentic document, most believed that the notorious work provided a reasonably accurate description of the strategic plans of the Jewish leadership for subverting America and the rest of the world and establishing Jewish rule.

Although Bendersky’s claims are certainly extraordinary ones, he provides an enormous wealth of compelling evidence to support them, quoting or summarizing thousands of declassified Intelligence files, and further supporting his case by drawing from the personal correspondence of many of the officers involved. He conclusively demonstrates that during the very same years that Henry Ford was publishing his controversial series The International Jew, similar ideas, but with a much sharper edge, were ubiquitous within our own Intelligence community. Indeed, whereas Ford mostly focused upon Jewish dishonesty, malfeasance, and corruption, our Military Intelligence professionals viewed organized Jewry as a deadly threat to American society and Western civilization in general. Hence the title of Bendersky’s book.

Let us take a step back and place Bendersky’s findings in their proper context. We must recognize that during much of the era covered by his research, U.S. Military Intelligence constituted nearly the entirety of America’s national security apparatus—being the equivalent of a combined CIA, NSA, and FBI—and was responsible for both international and domestic security, although the latter portfolio had gradually been assumed by J. Edgar Hoover’s own expanding organization by the end of the 1920s.

Bendersky’s years of diligent research demonstrate that for decades these experienced professionals—and many of their top commanding generals—were firmly convinced that major elements of the organized Jewish community were ruthlessly plotting to seize power in America, destroy all our traditional Constitutional liberties, and ultimately gain mastery over the entire world.

I have never believed in the existence of UFOs as alien spacecraft, always dismissing such notions as ridiculous nonsense. But suppose declassified government documents revealed that for decades nearly all of our top Air Force officers had been absolutely convinced of the reality of UFOs. Could I continue my insouciant refusal to even consider such possibilities? At the very least, those revelations would force me to sharply reassess the likely credibility of other individuals who had made similar claims during that same period.

Israel’s leaders may be confident that they can successfully estimate the risks of a military conflict with Hezbollah or Iran, and their calculations might be correct. But I think that the greater danger they face comes in the widening ripples of knowledge that their brutal actions have now spread across much of the American population and the rest of the world.

During the last few months the Israelis have unleashed an unprecedented wave of assassinations against the leaders of their regional adversaries, making absolutely no pretense of respecting national sovereignty, diplomatic immunity, or the basic laws of warfare. In one of the earliest examples, they used a missile-strike to kill the chief Hamas peace negotiator in his Beirut office and later employed similar means to assassinate the Hamas political chief who had replaced him at the negotiating table. That latter assassination took place in Tehran while he was attending the inauguration of the new Iranian president, whose own predecessor had died together with Iran’s finance minister in a highly-suspicious helicopter crash. A few months earlier another Israeli missile-strike had destroyed part of Iran’s embassy compound in Syria, killing several important Iranian generals. An apparent Israeli false-flag attack had killed a dozen Druze children playing soccer in the occupied Golan Heights, and Netanyahu’s government then used that atrocity as an excuse to assassinate a top Hezbollah military official in Beirut.

In September, this campaign of Israeli assassinations massively escalated, as many thousands of booby-trapped electronic pagers and other devices were used to kill or severely maim enormous numbers of Lebanese civilians who were associated with Hezbollah. This was soon followed by the use of some eighty-odd huge bunker-buster bombs to level an entire city block of southern Beirut, successfully assassinating the longtime leader of that organization, whose successor was similarly killed a few days ago under a wave of equally large bombs in that same city. Israeli leaders have regularly declared that they feel free to kill anyone, anywhere in the world whom they consider hostile to their national interests.

The obvious immediate intent of this wave of Israeli assassinations was to provoke Iran into the sort of military retaliation that could bring in a compliant America to destroy that powerful regional rival. Iran’s large retaliatory missile-strike of a few days ago may lead to this result. But whether or not it does, the Israeli assassinations may have other consequences, perhaps far more damaging to the future of the Jewish State.

Although the successful killing of those enemy leaders may have enhanced Israel’s reputation for the ruthless effectiveness of its intelligence services and achieved the tactical result of at least temporarily weakening their opposing organizations, I think there are great strategic risks in undertaking so many high-profile assassinations in such a short period of time. More and more outside observers have probably now become aware of crucial historical matters, long concealed or de-emphasized by our overwhelmingly pro-Israel mainstream media. The reality is that the State of Israel and its Zionist predecessor organizations have a record of bold assassinations almost totally unrivaled in world history. As I originally wrote in 2018:

Indeed, the inclination of the more right-wing Zionist factions toward assassination, terrorism, and other forms of essentially criminal behavior was really quite remarkable. For example, in 1943 Shamir had arranged the assassination of his factional rival, a year after the two men had escaped together from imprisonment for a bank robbery in which bystanders had been killed, and he claimed he had acted to avert the planned assassination of David Ben-Gurion, the top Zionist leader and Israel’s future founding-premier. Shamir and his faction certainly continued this sort of behavior into the 1940s, successfully assassinating Lord Moyne, the British Minister for the Middle East, and Count Folke Bernadotte, the UN Peace Negotiator, though they failed in their other attempts to kill American President Harry Truman and British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin, and their plans to assassinate Winston Churchill apparently never moved past the discussion stage. His group also pioneered the use of terrorist car-bombs and other explosive attacks against innocent civilian targets, all long before any Arabs or Muslims had ever thought of using similar tactics; and Begin’s larger and more “moderate” Zionist faction did much the same.

A very useful source for much of this material, though hardly a complete one, is Rise and Kill First, Ronen Bergman’s fully authorized 2018 history of Mossad assassinations, which runs 750 pages and served as the starting point for my own very lengthy January 2020 analysis of the same subject.

As I described its contents:

The sheer quantity of such foreign assassinations was really quite remarkable, with the knowledgeable reviewer in the New York Times suggesting that the Israeli total over the last half-century or so seemed far greater than that of any other nation. I might even go farther: if we excluded domestic killings, I wouldn’t be surprised if Israel’s body-count greatly exceeded the combined total for that of all other major countries in the world. I think all the lurid revelations of lethal CIA or KGB Cold War assassination plots that I have seen discussed in newspaper articles might fit comfortably into just a chapter or two of Bergman’s extremely long book.

As a very useful supplement to Bergman’s magisterial work, I’d strongly recommend State of Terror, published in 2016 by Thomas Suarez, which I only finally read a couple of weeks ago. Most of the author’s material was based upon declassified British government documents as well as the major newspaper archives of the period he covers, and he provides an enormous wealth of information not available elsewhere.

Although his primary focus was Zionist terrorism, political assassinations are a closely related topic, and he discussed many of these as well. As an example, he explained how the Zionists pioneered the technology of deadly letter-bombs, ruthlessly lacing these with cyanide to increase their effectiveness, and employing them to target a very long list of their perceived enemies, notably including all of Britain’s senior political leaders and America’s president, though those latter efforts proved unsuccessful. Suarez demonstrated that all of Israel’s early leaders were supporters of these policies, and they continued running that country for decades, even into the 1990s.

Suarez’s book is long out of print and used copies on Amazon are exorbitantly priced, but fortunately it is also available on Archive.org, including in PDF and ePub⬇ formats, and I would highly recommend it to those who seek to deepen their understanding of Israel’s creation.

Our word “assassin” comes from the Ismaili sect founded almost a thousand years ago that for nearly two centuries terrorized the entire Middle East with its successful killings of important Muslim and Christian leaders. But with the possible exception of that one non-state organization, I am not aware of any other political entity during the last two thousand years whose record of major political assassinations remotely approaches that of the Israeli state and its Zionist predecessor groups.

For obvious reasons, Bergman’s book had avoided discussing many of the high-profile killings of American or pro-Western leaders that can probably be attributed to Zionist or Israeli forces, notably that of James Forrestal, America’s first secretary of defense and the leading public opponent of Israel’s creation.

American presidents have hardly been immune to such attacks, with repeated Zionist attempts made on the life of President Truman and Mossad defector Victor Ostrovsky revealing the plot to assassinate President George H.W. Bush.

Max Blumenthal grew up in elite Democratic circles in DC, with his father Sydney being a prominent former journalist and influential political operative very close to Hillary Clinton. Presumably based upon the personal knowledge he had picked up in such circles, in a podcast earlier this year he flatly declared that President Barack Obama was extremely fearful that the Israelis might try to assassinate him for his Middle East peacemaking efforts, something I’d occasionally suspected but had never previously heard stated by any knowledgeable insider.

But the highest-profile example of all would certainly be the case of the Kennedy brothers. Our president and his younger brother had made vigorous efforts to block Israel’s nuclear weapons development program and break the power of the growing Israel Lobby by forcing its main organization to register as a foreign agent, and there exists very strong perhaps even overwhelming evidence that the Israeli Mossad played a central role in eliminating them. I’ve discussed that issue at considerable length and would also strongly recommend the 2018 article by French researcher Laurent Guyénot or his more recent short book, which very helpfully summarizes the evidence and can be easily read within just a day or two.

Many patriotic Americans may take in stride the Israeli killing of foreign leaders whom our dishonest pro-Israel media has often falsely portrayed as enemies of the United States. But if those same individuals come to believe that the Israelis have also had a very long record of killing our own American leaders in order to subvert our political system and gain control of our country, the reaction might be far more serious. For decades, such ideas and the supporting evidence have been entirely confined to only the most marginal and isolated of conspiratorial circles, but there now seem quite a few indications that recent events may have propelled them into much more mainstream venues.

Consider Anya Parampil, another young journalist who has spent many years focused on Palestinian issues. Married to Max Blumenthal, she works with him at the Grayzone, and in her many video appearances there and on Napolitano’s channel, I’ve never seen any sign of her support for implausible conspiratorial beliefs. Instead, she has always struck me as someone of very mainstream if strongly progressive views on public policy matters.

Yet in a remarkable half-hour interview last week, she explicitly described Israel as America’s “greatest enemy,” expressing outrage that her country seemed to have lost its political sovereignty to the agents of that murderous foreign state. She went on to suggest that the crucial turning point in our national subjugation had probably come with the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, whose vigorous efforts to prevent Israel from acquiring nuclear weapons had been suddenly ended by his violent death. She also noted that his brother Robert had led the efforts to severely curtail the power of the Israel Lobby, and he too had soon died by an assassin’s hand. I think that her very self-confident public statements on such extremely controversial matters may represent a bellwether, indicating that many of those same ideas are now rapidly but quietly circulating within important mainstream segments of the American population.

Video Link

The JFK Assassination might easily rank as the single most famous incident of the twentieth century and it has been the subject of countless books, articles, and documentaries.

Those Americans who conclude that the Israeli Mossad played a central role in that killing, successfully subverting our entire political system, will naturally consider the implications of that revelation. If a matter of such gigantic magnitude could remain almost totally concealed for more than six decades, they may begin to grow very suspicious about the true nature of other major events as well.

The most obvious and important of these would be the 9/11 Attacks, which killed thousands of Americans. Pro-Israel elements within our national government immediately used these as an excuse to launch a series of wars that destroyed most of Israel’s leading regional rivals, wars that cost our country thousands of additional lives and many trillions of dollars, while killing or displacing millions of Muslim civilians.

As I’ve discussed at considerable length, Israel’s record of international terrorism, quite often of the false-flag variety, is just as unmatched as its record of assassinations, with an Israeli Prime Minister even publicly boasting that he had been the founding father of terrorism across the world.

One of history’s largest terrorist attacks prior to 9/11 was the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem by Zionist militants dressed as Arabs, which killed 91 people and largely destroyed the structure. In the famous Lavon Affair of 1954, Israeli agents launched a wave of terrorist attacks against Western targets in Egypt, intending to have those blamed on anti-Western Arab groups. There are strong claims that in 1950 Israeli Mossad agents began a series of false-flag terrorist bombings against Jewish targets in Baghdad, successfully using those violent methods to help persuade Iraq’s thousand-year-old Jewish community to emigrate to the Jewish state. In 1967, Israel launched a deliberate air and sea attack against the U.S.S. Liberty, intending to leave no survivors, killing or wounding over 200 American servicemen before word of the attack reached our Sixth Fleet and the Israelis withdrew.

The enormous extent of pro-Israel influence in world political and media circles meant that none of these brutal attacks ever drew serious retaliation, and in nearly all cases, they were quickly thrown down the memory hole, so that today probably no more than one in a hundred Americans is even aware of them. Furthermore, most of these incidents came to light due to chance circumstances, so we may easily suspect that many other attacks of a similar nature have never become part of the historical record.

Once the circumstances of those 2001 terrorist attacks are carefully considered, the evidence that the Israeli Mossad once again played the central role seems extremely strong, even stronger than the case for Mossad’s role in the killing of the Kennedys several decades earlier. No other organization around the world possessed anything like the same set of skills and experience in carrying out such a massive operation, and the FBI quickly rounded up some 200 Mossad agents, many of whom had been located in the immediate vicinity of the destruction and were behaving in very suspicious ways, including five who were caught red-handed, gleefully celebrating the successful attack on the WTC towers.

Although it has been almost totally ignored for more than two decades by our fervently pro-Israel mainstream media, 9/11 researchers have amassed an enormous quantity of compelling evidence implicating Israel and its domestic American collaborators. Much of that evidence has been summarized in a number of our major articles:

  • Israel Did 9/11
    Wyatt Peterson • The Unz Review • September 12, 2024 • 13,300 Words
  • 9/11 Was an Israeli Job
    How America was neoconned into World War IV
    Laurent Guyénot • The Unz Review • September 10, 2018 • 8,500 Words

The greatest terrorist attack in the history of the world took place on 9/11 and it was the worst hostile blow our nation has ever endured. As the true facts of what actually happened on that fateful day quietly circulate in the wake of Israel’s very high-profile assaults on other Middle Eastern countries, I think that the existential risks that country faces may become far greater than anything associated with retaliatory strikes from Iranian ballistic or hypersonic missiles.

Related Reading:

October 7, 2024 Posted by | Book Review, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, Video, Wars for Israel | , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

BBC interview with Hamas deputy chief is a case study in state propaganda

By Jonathan Cook | October 4, 2024

The BBC no longer bothers to hide the fact that its news service acts as nothing more than the British state’s willing propaganda channel.

Last night on the News at Ten, Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen secured a rare interview with Hamas’s deputy political chief, Khalil al-Hayya.

Anchor Clive Myrie introduced the segment by warning: “Many will find his comments abhorrent.” But the only person making abhorrent assertions was Myrie himself, observing that, in the interview, the Hamas leader “claims the Palestinian people have faced violence at the hands of Israel for several decades”.

No, Clive. The world’s highest court, the International Court of Justice, as well as every major human rights organisation, has concluded that Israel’s belligerent military occupation of the Palestinians’ territory is illegal and violent – not as a claim, but as an indisputable fact.

Israel’s refusal to recognise a Palestinian state and allow Palestinians self-determination; Israel’s building of hundreds of illegal settlements on Palestinian land and the transfer of Israeli Jews, often militia groups, into those settlements; Israel’s 17-year siege of Gaza; and Israel’s collective punishment of the Palestinian people to force them to submit to these indignities, are all forms of structural violence. Again, that is not a claim. It is how international law judges what Israel has done and is doing.

Next, Myrie required Bowen to justify at length why the BBC was allowing a Hamas political leader – not a military leader – to be given air time. Note, al-Hayya’s boss, Ismail Haniyeh, was assassinated by Israel while he was involved in negotiations to bring about a ceasefire. Like some kind of gangster, Israel murdered the man on the other side of the table it was supposed to be talking to.

The BBC provided none of that as context, of course, for its interview. It was too busy placating Israel and the British government by issuing apologies and warnings before it offered a rare insight into Hamas’ side of the story.

So what did al-Hayya say that was so “abhorrent”? Here are the main points al-Hayya raised in the interview – you can listen to his precise wording via this link – under Bowen’s mainly hostile questioning:

1. Hamas launched its attack on October 7 because the world had forgotten about Gaza even as Israel was slowly strangling the tiny territory to death through its 17-year siege. Hamas wanted to put Gaza back on the international community’s radar, and had decided it could do so only through military action.

2. Hamas fighters had been told not to target Israeli civilians on October 7, only Israeli occupation soldiers. Hamas does not endorse harming civilians. However, there were failings by individuals in sticking to that plan.

3. Israel, not Hamas, is the party responsible for destroying Gaza as evidenced through its bombardments of schools, shelters and hospitals. Hamas’ killing of 1,200 people could not be used to justify Israel killing more than 50,000 people in Gaza. Israel is “motivated by the lust to destroy”.

4. The accusation that Hamas uses the people of Gaza as “human shields” is not true. “They [Israel] destroyed mosques on the heads of their owners when there were no fighters. They destroyed houses and high-rise buildings when no one was in them… It is all Israeli propaganda.”

5. Netanyahu is the one obstructing a ceasefire. Even if Hamas surrendered today, Gaza’s next generation would take up the struggle because the Palestinian people want their freedom and have a legitimate right to resist the occupation. “People need to understand that Israel wants to burn the whole region.”

6. The Palestinians need a state and self-determination, and the Palestinian refugees a right to return to their homeland, if the region is ever to calm down.

7. It is Israel trying to eliminate the Palestinian people, not the Palestinians destroying Israel. “Give us our rights, give us a fully sovereign Palestinian state… Israel does not recognise a one-state solution or a two-state solution. Israel rejects it all.”

8. [Responding to a question about whether he considers himself a terrorist] “I’m seeking freedom and defending my people. To the occupation, we are all terrorists – the leaders, the women and the children. You heard what Israeli leaders called us: we are all animals.”

Now, one can debate whether al-Hayya’s statements are accurate or truthful, or whether he is being sincere. But nothing at all he says here can be viewed as “abhorrent” – unless you are shilling for Israel. He deplores attacks on civilians, he accuses Israel of bringing about Gaza’s destruction, he blames Netanyahu for blocking a ceasefire, and he appears to be ready to settle for a two-state solution, though he doesn’t believe Israel will agree to it.

In fact, his comments are far, far more moderate and far less inflammatory than statements regularly made by Netanyahu and most of the Israeli political and military leadership. Netanyahu, remember, is being sought by the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity, while the country he leads is on trial for what its sister court, the ICJ, considers a “plausible genocide” Netanyahu has incited and overseen. Not that the BBC ever mentions either fact.

And yet the state broadcaster never prefaces remarks from Netanyahu or other Israeli leaders – such as the self-declared fascist finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich – with any kind of warning, let alone one that many viewers may find their remarks “abhorrent”.

And while we are at it, if al-Hayya’s remarks are the yardstick, how was Keir Starmer’s comment that Israel had a right to deprive Palestinian civilians of food, water and fuel – that is, to collectively punish them by starving them to death – not also deemed “abhorrent” by the BBC?

What becomes ever harder to deny is that the BBC isn’t reporting what is happening in the Middle East. It is aggressively framing it in such a way as to present Israel as the victim of events, and thereby assist it in carrying out a genocide in Gaza and beginning a second slaughter in Lebanon.

October 5, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , , , | 3 Comments

General Qassem Soleimani wins: Israel falls into the trap of the Axis of Resistance

The strategy of prolonged war against the Zionist regime is generating positive fruits for the Resistance

By Lucas Leiroz | Strategic Culture Foundation | October 4, 2024

In 2020, the U.S. military assassinated Iranian General Qassem Solemani in a terrorist attack with drones in Iraq. The purpose of the operation was simply to eliminate one of the greatest military thinkers in history – the man largely responsible for creating the trap that Israel has just fallen into, four years after his death.

Much more than a mere military officer, Soleimani was a strategist and negotiator – perhaps it would not be an exaggeration to even call him a “war diplomat”. An expert in clandestine operations, intelligence and special forces’ tactics, Soleimani was responsible for enabling the network of anti-Zionist organizations known as the “Axis of Resistance”.

Overcoming religious, ethnic and ideological differences between the various Islamic and anti-Zionist movements, Soleimani united different factions in a joint strategy against Israel. Obviously, this strategy was centered on Iran and gave the Islamic Republic the leading role in the fight against the Israeli occupation and its regional proxies. However, one of the keys to the success of the Axis is precisely its largely decentralized nature, guaranteeing autonomy of action for its members, without tight Iranian control over all the acts of the coalition.

The Axis of Resistance was victorious in Syria, where several militias, with the support of Hezbollah and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), defeated ISIS and other Israeli proxies. At the time, Soleimani’s military diplomatic success was so great that even a dialogue with the Kurdish militias (historically supported by the West) was possible at a time of confrontation against more dangerous groups – such as ISIS itself.

Soleimani’s survival was perceived as an existential threat by Israel, encouraging the Zionist lobby in the U.S. to push for a targeted assassination operation. The main problem, however, is that targeted assassinations are rarely effective against highly ideological groups and countries with well-defined war strategies. Soleimani’s death did not dismantle the Axis, but rather further united the militias around Iran – including the Palestinian Sunni militias, which have historically suffered a struggle for influence between Shiites and Wahhabis.

Today, no one can deny Iran’s great influence over the Palestinian Resistance. What few people know, however, is that this process is precisely the result of the diplomatic alliances achieved by Soleimani. By killing Ismail Hannyeh, the Hamas leader closest to Iran in the entire history of the Palestinian party and responsible for the peace between the Palestinian jihadists and the Syrian government, Israel also hoped to destabilize the Axis – reducing Iranian influence and expanding the pro-Wahhabi lobby in Palestine, which, as we know, did not happen.

In the same vein, by killing Hassan Nasrallah, then head of Hezbollah, Israel planned to once again destabilize the Axis, liquidating the leadership of the main Shiite paramilitary organization and thus possibly fomenting an institutional crisis within the group. Contrary to Zionist expectations, Hezbollah did not show any shock from the assassination of its leader, except to become even more organized and confident in its engagement against the occupation.

Tel Aviv will not stop carrying out targeted assassinations. It is quite possible that the response to Iran’s recent attack will be through assassination attempts against other Iranian public figures. This Israeli method is due to a specific characteristic of the regime that was acutely perceived by General Soleimani: Israel’s inability to go to all-out war.

Contrary to the myth of “Israeli invincibility” commonly propagated in the West, Tel Aviv has a natural weakness due to its own geographical limitations. The policy of targeted killings was developed by Israel to try to destabilize its enemies psychologically and institutionally, avoiding prolonged military engagements. Without the capacity for continuous replenishment of troops and resources and having a very small territory with very exposed targets, Israel fears a large-scale war – and this was precisely Soleimani’s assessment.

By creating the Axis of Resistance, the Iranian general has condemned Israel to perpetual war. There will be no peace at any time. If Israel defeats Hamas and the other Palestinian militias, there will still be Hezbollah and the Syrian militias in the north. On the naval front, Yemen will continue to capture ships and strike on strategic targets throughout occupied Palestine. In Iraq, the Resistance will not stop its operations at any time. And in the end, even if it defeats all these enemies, Tel Aviv will still have to face Iran itself – the largest military power in the Middle East, which, unlike Israel, has a large population and a gigantic territory, rich in resources and protected by a complex mountainous geography.

In other words, the existence of the Axis of Resistance is Israel’s death sentence. Soleimani’s strategy was focused on creating a prolonged war, wearing down the Zionist regime to the point of no return of its own state structure. The time will come when Israel becomes unviable as a country and will have to accept negotiating terms to create a demilitarized and non-ethnic state (joint between Jews and Palestinians), putting an end to apartheid. Otherwise, years of war will destroy all the country’s resources and create an irreversible migration crisis, leading millions of citizens to flee the Middle East forever.

Realizing that targeted assassinations had not worked and that the Resistance organizations were politically mature enough to overcome any impact generated by these crimes, Israel, after the humiliation suffered by the Iranian attack, took the decision to finally invade Lebanon by land – just as Hezbollah wanted. The first reports show a true strategic disaster, with Shiite militiamen ambushing and killing dozens of invaders. In parallel, attacks by Yemenis, Palestinians and other resistance groups continue, and Netanyahu keeps being pressured about Iran, knowing that if he responds, Israel will suffer an even more incisive attack, the consequences of which could lead to the collapse of the regime.

Israel has fallen into the Soleimani’s trap. The Zionist regime has entered into perpetual war, from which it can only escape by ceasing to exist as a state.

October 4, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

The weakness of Zionist air power

By Robert Daly | Al Mayadeen | October 1, 2024

What we have seen in the Zionist conduct of war since October 7, 2023, is a flashy, noisy exhibition but no seizure and holding of territory.

The murder of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah and the destruction of six high-rise apartment buildings with multiple airstrikes make Zionist air power appear triumphant over Hezbollah. But nothing could be further from the truth. It is not air power that defeats enemies in war. Rather, it is infantry—conquering, seizing, and holding territory that defeats an enemy. The Soviet Union defeated Nazi Germany not through air power but through the ground battles of Stalingrad and Kursk and then by pushing the Nazi troops back into Germany as the Soviets liberated one occupied state after another from Ukraine and Belarus to Hungary and Czechoslovakia. The West at the time bombed Dresden and other cities, but that effort had little effect in defeating the Nazis. So, Zionist bombings of Lebanon’s cities kill citizens and wreck their homes but do not occupy territory or defeat Hezbollah.

It is beyond the capability of air power to seize enemy territory and hold it. Air power is only a form of contemporary artillery. In the past 100 years, humankind has ‘progressed’ from mere cannons and tanks delivering artillery shells onto an enemy’s positions to warplanes dropping them from above. What we have seen in the Zionist conduct of war since October 7, 2023, is a flashy, noisy exhibition but no seizure and holding of territory. Today, Hamas has retaken all of Gaza and continues to manage the territory as the Zionists have admitted in press briefings though they attacked Gaza by air. The Zionists responded to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack by bombing and destroying civilian residential buildings, but that did not destroy Hamas, which took advantage of the situation and the changed terrain to prepare positions from behind wrecked buildings to attack Zionist tanks and armored personnel carriers, which they have destroyed by the dozen. In this way, we have seen the contrast between ground fighters and air power in Gaza, where the Zionists are effective at killing women and children from the sky above with bombs, but cannot occupy and hold the territory that that population lived in.

If air power is an effective way to defeat one’s enemy and win a war, why is Hamas still ruling Gaza? Yedioth Ahronoth, a leading ‘Israeli’ newspaper, citing Israeli security sources wrote this past week that:

○ Hamas is working to consolidate its authority again in the areas of Gaza that the IOF left.

○ No one in Gaza stands against Hamas, and no one challenges its rule.

This is not new. In June, after eight months of Zionist bombing, the Guardian wrote “Hamas still strong in areas ‘cleared’ by Israel in northern Gaza.” How is that possible? Zionist warplanes far above do not provide much competition with Palestinian freedom fighters on the ground. Zionist armored vehicles full of scared reservists are easy targets for Gazan patriots who destroy those vehicles one after another. The Guardian concludes, “Hamas’s ability to return to areas from which it was earlier forced to retreat threatens ‘forever war’.” The paper explains, “There may be more Hamas militants in the north of Gaza, supposedly cleared by Israeli forces months ago, than in Rafah, the southern city in the territory described by Israeli officials as the extremist Islamist organization’s “last stronghold”. “We do have to remember there are more Hamas armed people in the north of Gaza in the places that the IDF has already moved out of than … in Rafah … Those are the IDF’s numbers. This is why the IDF had to go back into Jabaliya and … Zeitoun. Hamas is controlling all those areas,” Eyal Hulata, the head of “Israel’s” “national security council” from 2021 to last year, told reporters last May. Zionist air power and fragile armor have failed to conquer Gaza. They only wrecked it.

One can expect an even better outcome for the domestic national liberation army in Lebanon, where Hezbollah has the advantage of better and more artillery and soldiers experienced in fighting ISIS and Al-Qaeda on the ground in Syria.

One of the most disgusting Zionist air war practices is their cowardly war by assassination. Zionists will swoop down in aircraft of various sorts to kill someone on a motorcycle, a family in a car, or a leader of the national liberation movement in a building. To do that, they do not hesitate to murder hundreds of others in the area, as when the fascists murdered Sayyed Hassan. For if the Nazi abandoned his air vehicle and fought a fair fight on the ground, he would surely lose.

Moreover, it is an embarrassment to an American with a memory to hear Hezbollah or Hamas referred to as “terrorists” for defending their own land from Zionist invaders. Does not anyone remember Washington’s crossing of the Delaware on Christmas 1776, when they and their makeshift army slaughtered British-hired Hessian mercenaries drunk from celebrating the holiday? If Hamas is “terrorist”, then why isn’t George Washington?

So, we have it: “Israel” has not won in Lebanon. Rather, “the enemy must wait for us by air, land, and sea. We repeat: If war is imposed on Lebanon, the Resistance will fight without rules, controls, or ceilings,” Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah once said. “Storming the Galilee is a possibility that remains present within the framework of any war that the occupation may launch against Lebanon,” he added, referencing his 12-year-old promise that Hezbollah will invade “Israel’s” north if Tel Aviv chooses to attack.

October 1, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , , , , | Leave a comment