U.S. Backing Has Given Israel License to Kill & Maim

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Death and Donations: Did the Israeli Volunteer Group Handling the Dead of October 7 Exploit Its Role? The Zaka volunteer group began collecting bodies in the devastated communities of southern Israel immediately after the Hamas attack, while the IDF sidelined soldiers trained to retrieve remains. An investigation reveals cases of negligence, misinformation and a fundraising campaign that used the dead as props.
by Aaron Rabinowitz
Haretz
Jan 31, 2024
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/202 ... 7bdb670000

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Zaka volunteers at Be'eri in October. The subjects have no connection to the content of this article. Credit: Olivier Fitoussi. Graphic: Masha Zur Glozman

A group of people sit around a plastic table, taking shelter under the branches of a tree on a hot day. The atmosphere is relaxed, and the conversation flows. Some smoke cigarettes, while others sip soft drinks and nibble on snacks. A young woman is perched on a nearby bench, engrossed in her phone. The environment is pastoral in God's little acre.

Even the body on the ground next to them, wrapped in a white plastic bag, doesn't disturb the scene. It's not external to the story; it's a part of it.

This moment took place in Kfar Azza early in the second week of the war against Hamas. The group sitting among the burned houses and devastation consists of some 10 volunteers from the Jerusalem branch of Zaka, the ultra-Orthodox organization that retrieves human remains after attacks and disasters. The white body bag is marked with the organization's logo.

"It was just bizarre that there was a corpse right there next to them, and they were sitting around, eating, and smoking," said one of two volunteers from a different organization who were present. "It's unbelievable."

The non-Zaka volunteers asked them why they weren't transferring the body into an ambulance or the refrigerated truck parked across the road. They replied indifferently that it would be taken care of later and returned to their diversions.

Approaching the group a little more closely revealed that three of the Zaka volunteers were making video calls and videos for fundraising purposes. According to the non-Zaka observer, the body was part of a staged setting – an exhibit designed to attract donors, just when the race against time to gather and remove the bodies of victims of the massacre was most urgent.

"They opened a war room for donations there," said another witness to the event, who has worked throughout the war in the Gaza border communities attacked on October 7. "Two weeks later, I saw them acting similarly in Be'eri as well – sitting and making videos and fundraising calls inside the kibbutz."

Zaka responded to this description with a statement saying that "No fundraising calls were made on the ground on behalf of the organization, and if any specific incident is brought to our attention, we will examine and deal with it."

A Haaretz investigation raises several questions about procedures during the retrieval of the bodies. It is based on the accounts of military personnel present at the body retrievals and the Shura military base (which was made a body identification center), as well as volunteers from Zaka and other rescue organizations who worked in the border communities.

It's clear that hundreds of Zaka Jerusalem volunteers did important work by collecting victims' bodies under challenging conditions. At the same time, some of the organization's activities – which, on the eve of the war, was entangled in debts of millions of shekels – were directed towards fundraising, public relations, media interviews, and tours for donors.


Zaka volunteers work on fundraising as a body lies nearby.

In the first and critical days of the war, the IDF decided to forego the deployment of hundreds of soldiers specifically trained in the identification and collection of human remains in mass casualty incidents. Instead, the Home Front Command chose to use Zaka, a private organization, alongside soldiers in the Military Rabbinate's search unit, known by the acronym Yasar, for the south.

More personnel were necessary, but when the soldiers of the Military Rabbinate's search unit in the north and the Home Front Command's unit for collecting fallen soldiers reported for reserve duty on October 7, they were told they had to wait.

"I have no explanation for why they didn't deploy [the Home Front Command's unit] and our people from the north," says an officer in Rabbinate's southern search unit.

Officers at the Shura base were also unable to explain why the military didn't deploy the personnel who had already been called up, all of them combat soldiers who knew how to operate under fire. An officer in the Home Front Command's unit said that his commanders "begged" senior leadership for their deployment but were rebuffed. It wasn't until the second week of the war that these soldiers began to operate in the area – and even then, not fully.

In the meantime, Zaka volunteers were there. Most of them worked at the sites of murder and destruction from morning to night. However, according to witness accounts, it becomes clear that others were engaged in other activities entirely. As part of the effort to get media exposure, Zaka spread accounts of atrocities that never happened, released sensitive and graphic photos, and acted unprofessionally on the ground.

There was a price for choosing Zaka, say sources at Shura. "We received bags of theirs without documentation, and sometimes with body parts that were unrelated to one another," says an officer in the camp. Such problems made the identification process very difficult, he says. Some bags came many days after the outbreak of the war, he adds.

One of the volunteers who worked at Shura says: "There were bags with two skulls, bags with two hands, with no way to know which was whose."


Zaka volunteers clean a home in southern Israel after it was attacked. Someone who toured the area with Zaka says he saw remains in buildings marked as cleared.Credit: Zaka

In the following weeks, several hundred cases remained: bags with body parts that had been collected belatedly and which needed to be matched to victims. Some were still unknown as of the time of writing this article. A volunteer from Zaka Jerusalem who serves in the Military Rabbinate says there was a noticeable difference between the professionalism of the soldiers and the Zaka volunteers.

"We arrived at the scene at the beginning of the war, and there was not a body or find in the field that we did not properly document," he says. "Zaka barely wrote anything on the bags, and you can forget about any documentation." The same soldier-volunteer pointed an accusing finger at the military, which assigned the task to Zaka.

However, it wasn't only Zaka personnel who caused problems. An officer in the Military Rabbinate's search unit said that initially, his personnel also failed to record where each body was taken from, which further delayed identification.

"At first, it wasn't possible to document [everything] because the workload and the pressure were immense," he says. "But we worked systematically, and later we were asked to do a retrospective reconstruction of our work."

Later, when bags from the military arrived, the difference was obvious, says a volunteer who worked at the base. "It was obvious that more thorough work was done there," they say.

Home Front Command soldiers and volunteers from other organizations described negligent work by Zaka in other aspects as well. According to them, on numerous occasions, they approached vehicles and houses with a Zaka sticker stating that the place had been cleared of body parts when that wasn't the case.


Body removal in Ofakim on October 8. Hundreds of Zaka volunteers did important work by collecting remains under difficult conditions.Credit: Ilan Assayag

"Zaka took part of a body and left the other part in the same house," says a volunteer at Shura. Someone who toured the kibbutzim of the area with Zaka said that, together with members of the organization, he entered houses that had been labeled as cleared, yet he saw human remains in them.

There are more examples. In the parking lot that was set up in the moshav of Tkuma, where vehicles that were damaged in massacres on roads and near the music festival in Re'im, uncollected body parts were found. "We found parts of bones and other parts there," a Home Front Command soldier says. "A lot of people here are angry, [asking,] 'Why did you train us for this, and on the day of reckoning, you didn't let us do the job?"

Even when the soldiers began working, during the second week of the war, they were sent to collect the bodies of terrorists and transport them to the Sde Teiman base in Be'er Sheva. They were also tasked with handling the scenes of attacks on military facilities.


Zaka personnel handle a destroyed vehicle after the Hamas attacks. According to a soldier, remains were found that Zaka had failed to locate. Credit: Zaka

"We asked the commanders why they weren't letting us enter, and each time we got a different answer," says a soldier. "One time they told us, 'You've been trained for earthquakes.' Another time, they said they didn't want to risk the lives of soldiers, and yet another time they explained to us that the commanding general gave [the mission] to the IDF's national rescue team, one of whose members is also a senior member of Zaka."

He adds: "Had we worked the way they taught us, we could have spared many people unnecessary suffering [and] bring [the victims] to burial much sooner." Several Zaka volunteers admitted to Haaretz that the work would have been better, faster, and more precise had the soldiers worked alongside them.

The power of the vest

Throughout the first days of the war and afterward, uniformed soldiers from the Home Front Command appeared repeatedly in the media. But over their uniforms, they wore non-IDF vests on which the name "Zaka" was emblazoned. Military officers who were informed about this blaring detail could not account for it.

Haim Outmezgine, head of Zaka's "special forces," serves in the reserves in the Home Front Command's rescue unit and is one of the senior officials who appeared in this outfit frequently – and not only on the screen. Toward the end of October, with the organization's members still working in the kibbutzim, he starred in a staged, elaborate music video in which he was recorded out in the field.


The Shura military base, where bodies were gathered for identification purposes, in October. A volunteer says that in one case, Zaka collected part of a body and left the rest at the scene. Credit: Naama Grynbaum

In the video, he and his son sing a song he wrote himself. The video is accompanied by subtitles that aim to tug at the heartstrings as well as the pocket.

"Hundreds of Zaka volunteers left behind a supportive family and went out devotedly, and were exposed to the terrible atrocities that took place in the south, and they return home with a sack overflowing with emotions. You are welcome to salute them," reads the video description, alongside a link for donations.

Speaking with Haaretz, Outmezgine said that he produced the music video privately and that the organization later decided to use it for the fundraising campaign. He said that filming and producing the music video did not take much time: "I wrote it on Friday, I recorded it in the studio on Saturday night, and a day or two later the music video was filmed."

Outmezgine wasn't just part of Zaka Jerusalem's media campaign. According to some sources, he also played a central role in the association between the organization and the IDF and was in command of several sites starting from the evening of the attacks – mainly in the area of the party in Re'im, Kfar Aza, and Be'eri. About a month after the start of the war, Outmezgine blocked a volunteer from a rival organization from entering Be'eri, even though the volunteer had received orders from an officer.

Last edited 7:38 AM · Nov 3, 2023

Outmezgine confirmed that he blocked him, saying he had thought he was an impostor. A source at Zaka Tel Aviv (another competitor) also said that members were blocked by Zaka officers when they tried to reach the area. "They specifically told us that Haim [Outmezgine] said they didn't need us there," says the source.

This raises the question: What is the relationship between the Home Front Command's rescue unit and Zaka Jerusalem? The answer, it appears, is Outmezgine, who is not only a reservist in the unit but also considered very close to its commanders.

A Zaka volunteer who is closely acquainted with him says it was Outmezgine who was behind the unit taking command of the attack sites – and behind the use of Zaka. "He is the one who has the power to tell the commanders, 'This is our case,'" says the volunteer. He adds with a half-smile: "The other volunteers couldn't enter because it's a closed military zone."


A house in Kfar Azza about a month after it was burned on October 7. Some Zaka volunteers admit the work would have gone better had they worked alongside the military.Credit: Eyal Toueg

Outmezgine describes the matter similarly. "I understood that we were in a race against time," he said in an interview with Arutz Sheva, a settler radio station. "I called my commander, Col. Golan Vach, and I said that this was our mission."

Indeed, the Home Front Command officially took control of the attack areas, and its operational arm, especially during the first week, was Zaka. Outmezgine says an agreement exists between the IDF and Zaka that allows the operation of the organization in the field.

A clue to Outmezgine's personal operating procedures may be found in at least one incident in which he took a bag of materials collected at an attack scene and brought its contents to the courtyard of his home for "private examination." Military sources who were informed of this saw it as a grave matter and couldn't say who had authorized it. Outmezgine, for his part, says this was a one-off incident that he's proud of. "That was a bag with garbage that I could have left in the field, but I took responsibility," he says.

Historical rivalry

Generally, conflict between organizations working to gather human remains from the sites of attacks, accidents, and disasters in Israel is nothing new. Neither is what stands behind it: money, and a lot of it. Tens of millions of shekels are allocated to this mission through donations and financial support from the state.

Today, there are three main organizations in the field: Zaka Jerusalem, Zaka Tel Aviv, and the 360 Unit organization. Over the years, competition between them has caused more than a few problems in operations – for example, distributing graphic photos that failed to respect the dignity of the deceased. This reached the point that two years ago, the police introduced a new directive on the procedure for collecting remains to regulate the process.



According to the procedure, only those who volunteer with the police and wear a police vest are allowed to work at the scene of an incident. As part of this regulation, volunteers are required to undergo training, are subject to a clear hierarchy with the police, are prohibited from being interviewed without authorization, and are barred from releasing details or images from the scenes.

It appears that all the rules have been broken since October 7. Videos and graphic photos from the horrific sites filled Zaka Jerusalem's social media accounts: rows of bodies in bags, bloodstains, and much more. These posts had a common denominator: pleas for fundraising.

The timing was critical. Before October 7, the organization faced insolvency. In the time since, says a source at Zaka, they have raised over 50 million shekels ($13.7 million).


Haim Outmezgine receives a commendation from the IDF in 2022. He says there is an agreement between Zaka and the military allowing it to work. Credit: Zaka

Meanwhile, throughout the duration of the war, and despite the race against time to collect bodies, volunteers from the organization have arranged private tours for donors. Civilians, however, haven't been allowed to enter the border areas, defined as closed military zones.

Someone who organized such a tour says a senior Zaka volunteer organized it and took the participants into Be'eri. "He met us at a nearby gas station, gave us and the donors Zaka vests, and that's how we entered, with two vehicles," he says. Haaretz has obtained a recording in which a Zaka volunteer coordinates a similar tour.

Zaka says all the tours were coordinated with the relevant authorities and were done with permission. "Many donors request guidance and explanation from Zaka personnel in order to connect to the terrible disaster," read a statement from the organization.

"The Zaka organization was asked by the National Information Directorate [in the Prime Minister's Office] to take part in informational activity for both donors and opinion leaders worldwide and sees these tours as part of the country's efforts to achieve victory in public opinion, too. The Zaka organization also accompanies donor tours for the benefit of the kibbutzim and their reconstruction, seeing it as a privilege and an honor."

The fundraising issue

The fundraising started on October 8. A tweet on the organization's account the day after the attacks in the south read: "Our volunteers in the field are surrounded by slain bodies and artillery fire and urgently need protection and equipment." The statement was, of course, true – Zaka personnel did indeed work under fire, needed additional equipment, and were surrounded by bodies.

Although raising funds for an organization is a completely legitimate act, its timing and how it was done raise concerns. These concerns are certainly not diminished by the fact that Zaka hired the services of a public relations office that, already in the first weeks of the war, accompanied and photographed the volunteers.


Volunteers from the 360 Unit and Zaka organizations on October 7. The rivalry between organizations has caused problems for years.

From the second week of the war, Zaka began to be paid by the Defense Ministry, alongside the appeals for public donations. An agreement had been reached between the ministry and the organization, according to which Zaka would receive 500,000 shekels for cleaning houses, vehicles, and public bomb shelters damaged in the attacks.

According to the ministry, the organization committed to cleaning 500 structures. Zaka says that this payment financed only part of the expenses and that "it is a unique assignment that required the purchase of dedicated equipment for the sake of the mission… [and] the transportation and mobilization of hundreds of volunteers."

The fundraising campaign has continued to escalate. An October 29 post on X showed family photos stained with blood from one of the scenes, along with the caption: "The voice of my brothers' blood cries out to me from the ground."

This was just part of the activity that went on while many body parts still awaited identification and burial, a process that was mostly completed only about 50 days after the start of the war. Even now, findings and body parts are still being discovered.

7:29 AM · Oct 8, 2023

At the attack scenes, the question was not only what to photograph but also what exactly to show. In some cases, volunteers from Zaka were seen wrapping bodies already wrapped in IDF bags. The new bag prominently displayed the Zaka logo.

"We wrapped the body in a body bag, and a few minutes later, a Zaka team arrived," a volunteer from another organization says. "The team leader, a senior member of the organization, wrapped the body in a Zaka bag. Why did they do that? Everyone knows that there are public relations matters here."

Several officers and volunteers who worked at the Shura base told Haaretz that many bodies arrived wrapped in two bags – the military one and a Zaka one covering it. According to an officer in the Military Rabbinate, this was the case for dozens of bodies, which complicated the work.

https://twitter.com/zakaHQ/status/17119 ... 7bdb670000

"The second we saw a Zaka bag, we transferred the body to the civilian unit at Shura," he says, "but they would open it there and would then have to transfer it to the military unit." According to Outmezgine, these actions were taken because the military bags were defective. Officers in the Military Rabbinate denied that there were problems with IDF's bags. "It's interesting that we didn't have any problems," they said.

It's not unprecedented for Zaka personnel to have switched bags or added their own. Haaretz has a string of documentation and accounts of similar activities by the organization's volunteers who arrive at the scene of a murder, accident, or suicide. Zaka denied the claim of changing or covering bags and said that double bags had been used only when the first one was damaged.

Tales of imagination

"We saw a woman, around 30 years old, [and] she was lying on the floor in a large puddle of blood, facing the ground," said a Zaka volunteer tearfully in an account posted on Zaka's social media accounts. "We turned her over in order to place her into the bag.

"She was pregnant," he added and stopped to take a breath. "Her stomach was swollen, and the baby was still attached by the umbilical cord when it was stabbed, and she was shot in the back of the head. I don't know if she suffered and saw her baby murdered or not."

6:36 AM · Oct 29, 2023

This horrific incident, which the Zaka volunteer alleged occurred in Be'eri, simply didn't happen, and was one of several stories that have been circulated without any basis. There is no evidence for this incident, and no one in the kibbutz has heard of this woman. A Zaka senior official admitted in a conversation with Haaretz that the organization knows the incident didn't occur.

In another video, which features the same volunteer, he describes, weeping, how he found the burnt and mutilated bodies of 20 children in one of the kibbutzim. He told Haaretz that this was behind the dining hall in Kfar Azza, while in another instance, he said it was in Be'eri.

However, the children who were killed in Kfar Azza are Yiftach Kutz, 14, and his brother, Yonatan, 16. Ten children were killed in Be'eri, but at least some were known to have been with a parent and were killed in their homes.

The organization has been accused of spreading false information before. In December 2022, Haaretz reported that Zaka had inflated its stated number of volunteers for years in order to receive more funding.

In response to a request for comment, Zaka said: "Collaboration between Zaka and emergency agencies takes place in usual times and in emergencies, based on the coordination of expectations and early planning. Zaka volunteers operated in close and full coordination with the responsible bodies in the field. Collaboration is not a conflict of interests but a joint effort.

"Zaka is a voluntary organization funded by donations, and the war has led Zaka to have massive expenditures for equipment and supplies," the organization continued. "The presence of Zaka personnel on the front lines … provided an opportunity for the public to be shown the organization's activities, which are also carried out during non-emergency times, privately."


Body retrieval in Be'eri. Zaka volunteers have organized private tours for donors while the site is a closed military zone. Credit: Zaka

For its part, the military said in response to a request for comment: "Following the events of October 7, an operational system was established, headed by an officer with the rank of colonel, to lead the search and retrieval mission in the Gaza border region. Due to the complexity of the mission and the scope of the casualties, the Defense Ministry contacted Zaka to receive assistance and reinforcements for this mission.

"Among the units that participated in the military effort was the search unit of the Military Rabbinical Corps. [Home Front Command] units were recruited in full in the first two weeks of the war. The IDF will conduct a detailed and thorough investigation, including regarding the mobilization of personnel, to clarify the details completely when the operational situation permits and will publish its findings to the public."

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Family of key case in New York Times October 7 sexual violence report renounces story, says reporters manipulated them. A New York Times story claiming a pattern of gender-based violence on October 7 hinged on the story of Gal Abdush. But the Abdush family says there is no proof she was raped, and that Times reporters interviewed them under false pretenses.
by the Short String
mondoweiss.net
January 3, 2024

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

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On December 28, the New York Times published an “investigative” report on gender-based violence allegedly committed by Palestinians during the October 7 attack. The newspaper says the story was based on over 150 interviews conducted by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Jeffrey Gettleman, along with Anat Schwartz and Adam Sella. The story concludes that Hamas fighters engaged in systematic rape and sexual violence against Israeli women.

The story itself repeats October 7 testimonies that have been previously published and already debunked and discredited, but the Times investigation hinges predominantly on one central story, the story of the rape of “Gal Abdush,” who is described by the Times as “The Woman in the Black Dress.”

Although claiming its story proves that “the attacks against women were not isolated events but part of a broader pattern of gender-based violence on Oct. 7” the veracity of the New York Times story was undermined almost as soon as it was published, including from the Abdush family itself who says there is no proof Gal Abdush was raped and that the New York Times interviewed them under false pretenses.

The New York Times version of events

A heartbreaking photo of Gal Abdush’s family — a working-class Mizrahi Jewish family who lost their daughter and son-in-law, Nagi Abdush — appeared on the newspaper’s cover. The newspaper devoted a third of its report to the Abdush story. The report centered around a video that was captured on October 8 by a woman called Eden Wessely, which was published on her social media accounts. According to the Times, “The video went viral, with thousands of people responding, desperate to know if the woman in the black dress was their missing friend, sister or daughter.” The newspaper did not link to the video but released a distant, indistinct image from it that revealed nothing. It’s unclear how the Times confirmed the existence of these responses since Wessely’s Instagram account has been banned, and she created a new account in mid-December.

The newspaper narrates the tragedy of the family, how they learned about their daughter’s fate, and how the video and their daughter became known as “the woman in the black dress.” The Times states that her husband, Nagi Abdush, who was also killed, sent his last message at precisely 7:44 a.m., asking the family to take care of their children. What the newspaper omitted, and the family later confirmed, is that the husband contacted them at 7:00 a.m. and reported his wife’s death.

The Times says the family saw the video recording and “feared that she might have been raped” based on the body’s condition. The Times also states that the Israeli police used the video as evidence that rape occurred: “The videos caught the eye of Israeli officials as well — very quickly after Oct. 7 they began gathering evidence of atrocities. They included footage of Ms. Abdush’s body in a presentation made to foreign governments and media organizations, using Ms. Abdush as a representation of violence committed against women that day.”

There is currently no trace of the video on the internet despite the Times claim that it “went viral.” Moreover, the Israeli press, despite reporting on hundreds of stories about the October 7 victims, never mentioned “the woman in the black dress” even once previous to the December 28 story. It does not appear that the video had, in fact, become the widely circulated symbol the Times claimed it had. But regardless, within a day of the report being published, facts that undermined the Times story began to emerge.

‘The media invented it’

On December 29, the Israeli website ‘YNET’ published an interview with Etti Brakha, Gal Abdush’s mother. In the interview, the mother says that the family knew nothing about the sexual assault issue until the piece in the Times was published: “We didn’t know about the rape at all. We only knew after a New York Times journalist contacted us. They said they matched evidence and concluded that she had been sexually assaulted.”

Then, on January 1, Nissim Abdush, Nagi’s brother, appeared in an interview on Israeli Channel 13. During the 14-minute interview, Nissim repeatedly denied that his sister-in-law was raped. He explained that his brother Nagi had called him at 7:00 in the morning, saying his wife was killed, and he was next to her body. Then, he continued to communicate until 7:44 and never mentioned anything related to sexual assault. Nissim also stated that no official party informed them of these doubts or this investigation, neither the police nor forensic experts. In the interview, Abdush reiterated that his brother’s wife was not raped and that “the media invented it.”

Gal’s sisters also denied allegations of rape. Her sister, Tali Barakha, posted on Instagram, “No one can know what Gal went through there! Also, what Nagi went through, but I can’t cooperate with those who say many things that are not true. I plead with you to stop spreading lies, there is a family and children behind them, no one can know if there was rape or if she was burned while alive. Have you gone mad? I spoke to Nagi personally! At 7 o’clock, Gal was killed by those animals, and they shot her in the heart. Nagi was alive until quarter past eight…”

talia_bracha
Tali Barakha Instagram post.

Likewise, Miral Altar, Gals’ sister, wrote a comment on Instagram in response to a video of a hasbara account. Altar said, “I can’t understand all these reports. There were many difficult stories, why this story in particular? It’s based on only one video published without the family’s knowledge…It is true that the scenes in the video are not easy, but it’s clear that the dress is lifted upwards and not in its natural state, and half her head is burned because they threw a grenade at the car. I don’t want to be understood as if I’m justifying what they did; they are animals, they raped and beheaded people, but in my sister’s case, this is not true. At 6:51, Gal sent us a message on WhatsApp saying ‘we are at the border, and you can’t imagine sounds of explosions around us.’ At 7 o’clock, my brother-in-law called his brother and said they shot Gal and she’s dying. It doesn’t make any sense that in four minutes, they raped her, slaughtered her, and burned her?”

Miral Altar Instagram comment

Other comments from Abdush family friends and relatives (whose relationships have been confirmed through social media connections) also suggest that the “Woman in the Black Dress” video itself lacks enough information to support the claim of rape.

Shiran Maluka, Miral’s friend, wrote: “Based on what does Eden Wessely conclude that she was raped? Based on the video she took, there is no evidence, it’s not true that half of her body was burned, only her face, and there is nothing but a dress pulled up.” Another friend, Almog Peretz Hemo, wrote a similar comment.

Many of the comments from those in and around the Abdush family point to the role of Eden Wessely in pushing the rape allegations. Although Wessely’s quotes in the Times didn’t contain a graphic description, her following statements to the Israeli media were very explicit and clearly stated that Abdush was raped, burned, and murdered. Those pushed back on the story seem to believe that it was, in fact, Eden Wessely’s testimony and personal interpretation that initially raised these allegations of sexual violence rather than the video itself. They argue that Wessely’s testimony is inaccurate, and does not match with what’s seen in the video.

A look at Eden Wessely’s Facebook account reveals extreme right-wing opinions.

For example, in the early days of the war, Wessely posted fake news, debunked by the Israeli media, about “Israeli traitors who supported Hamas fighters during the attack on October 7th.” Wessely also shared many posts by the extreme right-wing organization, Im Tirtzu, and posts by the far-right rapper, Hatzel, considered a symbol of Israeli fascist racism. In another post, Wessely shared a picture of the Israeli human rights lawyer Lea Tsemel, calling her “the devil incarnate.”

Weaponizing ‘the woman in the black dress’

The family’s testimonies unmistakably confirm that the Israeli authorities did not have the decency to inform the family about the investigation into their family member’s rape. But, three months following her death, Israeli authorities and the Israeli police are weaponizing her case and using the death of Gal Abdush as propaganda material to garner support for and justify the genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza.

Likewise, the New York Times also joined in exploiting the family in a highly unethical manner. Despite mentioning the element of rape to the family, the Times reporters did not make clear this was the focus of the story and evidently got them to agree to participate by saying they wanted to cover the family’s tragedy. According to Abdush’s sister, Miral Alter, this is why the family agreed to speak to the reporter. As Alter explains in the Instagram comment above, the Times reporters “mentioned they want to write a report in memory of Gal, and that’s it. If we knew that the title would be about rape and butchery, we’d never accept that.”

In the end, it appears that the New York Times manipulated a working-class Mizrahi family in the service of Israeli hasbara in order to score a journalistic achievement, which in reality is nothing more than a repetition of fake news and government propaganda.

Editor’s note: this article was edited for minor typographical errors on January 30, 2024.

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New York Times Puts "Daily" Episode On Ice Amid Internal Firestorm Over Hamas Sexual Violence Article. As the Times faces scrutiny for its coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza, it has capitulated to the pro-Israel media watchdog CAMERA.
by Daniel Boguslaw, Ryan Grim
The Intercept
January 28 2024, 8:00 p.m.

THE NEW YORK Times pulled a high-profile episode of its podcast “The Daily” about sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas on October 7 amid a furious internal debate about the strength of the paper’s original reporting on the subject, Times newsroom sources told The Intercept. The episode had been scheduled for January 9 and was based on a prominent article led by Pulitzer Prize-winner Jeffrey Gettleman, claiming that Hamas had systematically used sexual violence as a weapon of war.

The Times report was initially heralded in an email sent to the newsroom, conveying praise from Executive Editor Joe Kahn, who described the story as an example of the best kind of enterprise reporting the paper is capable of.

In the past couple of weeks, as the year drew to a close and many of us were on holiday, we published several signature pieces of enterprise on the Israel-Hamas war from different teams in the newsroom. Joe spotlighted some of them:

…

Jeffrey Gettleman, Anat Schwartz and Adam Sella spent several weeks and conducted 150 interviews to report on how Hamas weaponized sexual violence during the October 7th attack. The topic is a highly politicized issue and a delicate one to report, and Joe noted how the team, including photographs by Avishag Shaar-Yashuv, did it in a sensitive and detailed way.

But that message came roughly at the same time as another staff missive urging Times employees not to criticize each other on the company’s internal Slack. Many reporters and editors understood that directive to be a reference to an intense internal debate unfolding over the story — a rolling fight that is revived on a near-daily basis over the tenor of Times coverage of the war in Gaza. (A Times spokesperson, Charlie Stadtlander, said those assumptions were inaccurate, and that the email was “a release of a company-wide policy, the deliberate and measured development of which began in the beginning of 2023.”)

As criticism of Gettleman’s story grew both internally and externally, producers at “The Daily” shelved the original script and paused the episode, according to newsroom sources familiar with the process. A new script was drafted, one that offered major caveats, allowed for uncertainty, and asked open-ended questions that were absent from the original article, which presented its findings as definitive evidence of the systematic use of sexual violence as a weapon of war.

That new draft remains the subject of significant controversy and has yet to be aired on the flagship podcast. The producers and the paper of record find themselves in a jam: run a version that hews closely to the previously published story and risk republishing serious mistakes, or publish a heavily toned-down version, raising questions about whether the paper still stands by the original report. Meanwhile, sources at the Times say Gettleman has been assigned a follow-up to gather evidence supporting his original reporting. (On January 29, he and his co-reporters published a follow-up story addressing questions raised “on social media by critics” about Times sourcing on claims of sexual violence.)

Internal critics worry that the article is another “Caliphate”-level journalistic debacle. “There seems to be no self-awareness at the top,” said one frustrated Times editorial staffer. “The story deserved more fact-checking and much more reporting. All basic standards applied to countless other stories.”

The critics have highlighted major discrepancies in the accounts presented in the Times, subsequent public comments from the family of a major subject of the article denouncing it, and comments from a key witness seeming to contradict a claim attributed to him in the article.

Stadtlander said the paper doesn’t comment on ongoing reporting and, that no piece of its journalism is final until it’s been published:

As a general matter of policy, we do not comment on the specifics of what may or may not publish in The New York Times or our audio programs. Just like our print report, The Times’s audio editorial process is a result of independent consideration of newsworthy topics, and not in response to any criticisms. The Daily’s production team is constantly looking at the scope of The Times’s news report, with many efforts in various stages of development at any given time. There is only one “version” of any piece of audio journalism: the one that publishes.

The dissent within the Times comes as the paper is also facing serious external scrutiny for its coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza. Since October 7, the New York Times has shown deference to Israel Defense Forces sources while diminishing the scale of death and destruction in Palestine. An Intercept analysis found that in the first six weeks of the war, the New York Times, alongside other major publications, consistently delegitimized Palestinian deaths and cultivated “a gross imbalance” in coverage to pro-Israeli sources and voices. The paper’s coverage of South Africa’s charges of genocide at the International Court of Justice played down severity of the case at the outset and downplayed Israel’s defeat on Friday. Just last week, the Times ran a headline touting the “Decline in Deaths in Gaza,” even as Israel continues to kill Palestinians in shocking numbers on a daily basis.

“Since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war, The Times’s journalists have reported with sensitivity, independence and unflinching detail on destructive events that have generated strong reactions, including the piece of journalism from Dec. 28 about allegations of sexual violence committed by Hamas,” the Times spokesperson wrote. “We continue to report on this matter as part of our broader coverage of the conflict, capturing both the global implications and deeply personal stories of those affected by the ongoing fighting.”

New York Times leadership has long taken a reflexively pro-Israel stance, and it is no surprise that the paper’s coverage has not been swayed by the criticism. Yet it’s done more than double down on its existing reporting: The Times has also succumbed to pressure campaigns by a pro-Israel media watchdog to change or soften its coverage of Israel.


Executive editor of the New York Times, Joe Kahn, during an interview session at the annual Texas Tribune Festival in Austin, Texas, on Sept. 24, 2022. Photo: Alamy

Pressure From CAMERA

The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis, or CAMERA, was founded in 1982 in response to what it claims was anti-Israel bias in the Washington Post’s reporting on the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Since its inception, CAMERA has successfully lobbied for hundreds of corrections in major media outlets, seeking to streamline a pro-Israel line in news reports and editorials. It has smeared journalists whose work it disagrees with and launched boycott campaigns against news organizations it believes are not responding with enough deference to its requests.

In the past few months, the group has forced at least two changes in the New York Times, which sometimes responds to CAMERA with quiet edits and sometimes with formal corrections. The Times removed the use of the term “occupation” from a description of Israeli military forces and made a correction to language describing Palestinian deaths in Gaza.

Emblematic of CAMERA’s influence at the Times is the fact that Kahn’s father, Leo Kahn, was a longtime member of CAMERA’s board — though before Kahn rose to prominence at the paper. By the time Leo Kahn joined the group as a board member in 1990, it was already famous for its aggressive pursuit of corrections and wording changes in the media to reflect a more pro-Israel stance. And, according to the Times’s profile of Kahn when he was elevated to his current post in 2022, he and his father often “dissected newspaper coverage” together.

CAMERA, which boasts more than 65,000 members, campaigns against coverage in a wide variety of U.S. news outlets, but it has been particularly aggressive in its targeting of the paper of record. For over a decade, CAMERA has paid for billboards across the street from the Times headquarters criticizing the paper for its allegedly biased coverage. At times, it has even used its billboards to equate the paper of record with Hamas. All that pressure has had an impact. Dating back to 2000, CAMERA’s website records dozens of successful corrections issued by Times editors after concerted harassment campaigns.

Kahn began his career at the Times in 1998 after making a name for himself as a China correspondent for the Wall Street Journal. He reported on Wall Street for the Times before returning to China, where he won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting on China’s legal system. In 2008, Kahn returned stateside to work for the Times as a foreign editor, quickly rising to oversee the entire foreign desk by 2011, where he managed all aspects of foreign reporting, including the Middle East. In 2016, he was promoted to managing editor before finally ascending to the newspaper’s top role in 2022.

Leo Kahn studied journalism at Columbia University before building his fortune as a business owner. He was a co-founder of Staples and multiple New England grocery chains, in addition to a brief stint as a co-owner of SuperOffice, a major office supplies retailer in Israel. As late as 2008, the year Joe Kahn was promoted to editor on the foreign desk, Leo Kahn was listed on CAMERA’s board of directors.

Stadtlander, the New York Times spokesperson, denied that CAMERA gets special treatment. “The Times handles all requests for correction from outside sources through discussion among our Standards team and the relevant editors familiar with the reporting in question. Feedback from any group, including CAMERA, is not treated any differently nor would it warrant any unique involvement from masthead editors,” he wrote in an email to The Intercept. “Joe Kahn has worked at The Times for more than 25 years, during which time he had — and still has — no relationship whatsoever with CAMERA. His father’s role on their board ended before Joe held any editing role at The Times.”

The Times’s record of acquiescing to CAMERA’s relentless requests, however, is striking in contrast to its historic resistance to correcting its stories.

“It has always been extremely difficult to get corrections placed in the Times, and it’s even harder since they got rid of their public editor, which was a way of taking complaints to a person whose job it was to respond,” Jim Naureckas, senior editor at the media oversight organization Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, told The Intercept. “You didn’t need to have a friend inside because you had a person whose job it was to take your complaint. With that position gone, it’s much more of a black box. It’s hard to get a hearing for your complaint. You can send an email, but it’s often like dropping a stone down a well. You might hear a splash, or you might not.”

CAMERA did not respond to a request for comment.

While there is no evidence that Kahn himself has changed the paper’s overall handling of requests from CAMERA, between 2011 and 2016, when Kahn oversaw the foreign desk, CAMERA successfully initiated more than a dozen corrections on issues ranging from Israeli settlements to the blockade of Gaza. And in 2012, he quickly made a minor, but telling, correction at the group’s request, according to CAMERA’s website.

In March 2012, the New York Times published an article interrogating the way the Arab Spring uprisings had undermined support and attention to the plight of Palestinians. The piece drew CAMERA’s attention because it included a photograph depicting Israel Defense Forces soldiers firing on Palestinians, and the photo caption did not specify that they were using rubber bullets. While rubber bullets are less deadly than live ammunition, they can result in serious injury and even death.

According to CAMERA’s account, they quickly notified Kahn, then an international desk editor, who “agreed the caption needed correcting.” The Times soon issued a correction: “A picture caption on Thursday with an article about the increasing marginalization being felt by Palestinians in the West Bank referred incompletely to the action of the Israeli soldiers shown. While the soldiers, whose activity was not recounted in the article, were indeed firing rifles at stone throwers in the West Bank town of Al Ram last month, the rifles contained rubber bullets.”

A Softer Tone

Long before the Hamas attack on October 7, critics have voiced concerns over the New York Times’s approach to covering Israel, as well as family connections between New York Times employees and the Israel Defense Forces. Over the past 20 years, the children of three Times reporters enlisted in the IDF while the parents covered issues related to the Israel–Palestine conflict. In addition, Times Israel reporter Isabel Kershner was scrutinized for citing work from an Israeli security think tank where her husband worked, without disclosing the connection.

CAMERA’s criticism, meanwhile, comes from the perspective that the Times is not sufficiently deferential to Israel. Taken together, many of the changes the Times has made following lobbying by CAMERA do not fundamentally alter the premise of the reporting. With some exceptions, they instead alter the tone and tenor of the reports, steering coverage toward CAMERA’s preferred perspective.

Over the past few years, the Times made a CAMERA-inspired change to an article describing Jesus as living in Palestine, a change to an article that failed to describe the Western Wall as the holiest site in Judaism, and a correction for conflating property seizure with violence.

CAMERA scored an editor’s note for an article on Gaza’s ailing fishing industry in 2022 that omitted certain statistics about the annual catch of Gaza fishermen operating under Israel’s yearslong blockade.

The group secured one of its most substantial changes in 2021, when Kahn was serving as managing editor. In response to a demand by CAMERA, the Times appended a lengthy explanatory editor’s note to the top of an article, a type of alteration that almost always has to pass through a member of the masthead leadership.

The article in question was a profile of the celebrated Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer. According to CAMERA, the piece, written by correspondent Patrick Kingsley, described Alareer in too positive a light. The Times was quick to agree, appending a 267-word note that described comments that Alareer had made about Israeli poetry in 2019, when he took a tone much more critical of Israeli literature than he had in Kingsley’s presence. The note concluded:

In light of this additional information, editors have concluded that the article did not accurately reflect Mr. Alareer’s views on Israeli poetry or how he teaches it. Had The Times done more extensive reporting on Mr. Alareer, the article would have presented a more complete picture.

Almost exactly two years later, Alareer was killed in what the human rights group Euro-Med Monitor deemed a targeted strike by the Israeli Defense Forces. He had received direct threats by phone before his apartment was bombed. Pinned to his Twitter profile was a post with his now-famous poem: “If I must die, let it be a tale.”

Update: January 30, 2024
This article was updated to note that on January 29, the New York Times published a follow-up story about claims of sexual violence by Hamas.

[admin]

The Black Time
by Ronen Bergman and Yoav Zitun
Published by Yedioth Ahronoth’s weekend supplement 7 Days,
12 January 2024.

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.

Translation by Dena Shunra for The Electronic Intifada, based on the print edition.

On the morning of October 7th some of the most impressive tales of heroism and self-sacrifice in the history of the country were written, but so too was a long series of failures, mishaps, and chaos in the army. This 7 Days investigation sketches the first hours of the Black Sabbath and exposes: the command bunker underneath the Kirya [in Tel Aviv] were in the blind and had to obtain their updates from the Hamas Telegram channels. The Southern Command published antiquated and irrelevant orders. The IDF decided to apply a directive similar to the Hannibal Directive, in the course of which they also shot at vehicles that may have been carrying captives. Commando fighters went out into the field without sights on their weapons and without bullet-proof vests. And that’s only the beginning. The IDF Spokesman: “The IDF will conduct a detailed in-depth investigation.”

* * *

On the night of October 7th, while Hamas was already doing last minute preparations for the attack planned for the morning, senior figures in the Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet) and the IDF were having a few conference calls. The main reason for these calls was that a short time after midnight, the Israeli intelligence community started picking up some significant indications. These indications came after some earlier indications that had started blinking in the days and weeks beforehand.

The problem with these indications was that none of them constituted a clear alert for war: they might mean battle footing, but they also might mean training that simulates battle footing. Some of these signals had already been received in the past, and had indeed led to training maneuvers.

-- The Women Soldiers Who Warned of a Pending Hamas Attack – and Were Ignored: Over the past year, the Israel Defense Forces’ spotters situated on the Gaza border, all women, warned that something unusual was happening. Those who survived the October 7 massacre are convinced that if it had been men sounding the alarm, things would look different today, by Yaniv Kubovich

But the accumulation of all of these together evoked a certain degree of concern in the high echelons of the security apparatus, and the heads of the military and the Shin Bet called each other for consultation. The head of the Shin Bet, Ronen Bar, came to its headquarters in person, and the Commander of the Southern Command abandoned a weekend getaway and started driving south. At around three or four in the morning, Bar instructed the Tequila Squad, a special intervention force of the Shin Bet and the Yamam counter terror unit, to head south. This was a highly exceptional step, meant for a scenario of an infiltration by several individual squads of terrorists via one or two breakthrough points for the purpose of murdering or capturing citizens and soldiers.

Le Nouvel Observateur: Former CIA director Robert Gates states in his memoirs: The American secret services began six months before the Soviet intervention to support the Mujahideen [in Afghanistan]. At that time you were president Carter's security advisor; thus you played a key role in this affair. Do you confirm this statement?

Zbigniew Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version, the CIA's support for the Mujahideen began in 1980, i.e. after the Soviet army's invasion of Afghanistan on 24 December 1979. But the reality, which was kept secret until today, is completely different: Actually it was on 3 July 1979 that president Carter signed the first directive for the secret support of the opposition against the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And on the same day I wrote a note, in which I explained to the president that this support would in my opinion lead to a military intervention by the Soviets.

Le Nouvel Observateur: Despite this risk you were a supporter of this covert action? But perhaps you expected the Soviets to enter this war and tried to provoke it?

Zbigniew Brzezinski: It's not exactly like that. We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would do it.

Le Nouvel Observateur: When the Soviets justified their intervention with the statement that they were fighting against a secret US interference in Afghanistan, nobody believed them. Nevertheless there was a core of truth to this...Do you regret nothing today?

Zbigniew Brzezinski: Regret what? This secret operation was an excellent idea. It lured the Russians into the Afghan trap, and you would like me to regret that? On the day when the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote president Carter, in essence: "We now have the opportunity to provide the USSR with their Viet Nam war." Indeed for ten years Moscow had to conduct a war that was intolerable for the regime, a conflict which involved the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet Empire.

Le Nouvel Observateur: And also, don't you regret having helped future terrorists, having given them weapons and advice?

Zbigniew Brzezinski: What is most important for world history? The Taliban or the fall of the Soviet Empire? Some Islamic hotheads or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?

Le Nouvel Observateur: "Some hotheads?" But it has been said time and time again: today Islamic fundamentalism represents a world-wide threat...

Zbigniew Brzezinski: Rubbish! It's said that the West has a global policy regarding Islam. That's hogwash: there is no global Islam. Let's look at Islam in a rational and not a demagogic or emotional way. It is the first world religion with 1.5 billion adherents. But what is there in common between fundamentalist Saudi Arabia, moderate Morocco, militaristic Pakistan, pro-Western Egypt and secularized Central Asia? Nothing more than that which connects the Christian countries...

-- Zbigniew Brzezinksi's Interview with Le Nouvel Observateur, by Le Nouvel Observateur

The Afghan mujahideen were backed primarily by Pakistan, the United States, Saudi Arabia, and the United Kingdom.

-- Soviet–Afghan War, by Wikipedia

Two months before September 11 Osama bin Laden flew to Dubai for 10 days for treatment at the American hospital, where he was visited by the local CIA agent...

Intelligence sources say that another CIA agent was also present; and that Bin Laden was also visited by Prince Turki al Faisal, then head of Saudi intelligence, who had long had links with the Taliban, and Bin Laden....

The American hospital in Dubai emphatically denied that Bin Laden was a patient there.

Washington last night also denied the story.

Private planes owned by rich princes in the Gulf fly frequently between Quetta and the Emirates, often on luxurious "hunting trips" in territories sympathetic to Bin Laden. Other sources confirm that these hunting trips have provided opportunities for Saudi contacts with the Taliban and terrorists, since they first began in 1994....[or 1979?]

-- CIA Agent Alleged to Have Met Bin Laden in July [2001, and Prince Turki al Faisal, Long-linked to Bin Laden. Bin Laden later ordered Mobile Dialysis Machine Be Delivered to His Base in Kandahar.], by Anthony Sampson

But despite the concerns, a senior intelligence figure determined at 3:10 am that “we still believe that Sinwar is not pivoting towards an escalation,” in other words, this is apparently another Hamas training.

These signals also caused concern to the commander of the Gaza Division, the military unit in charge of protecting the frontline at the border between Israel and the Gaza Strip, Brigadier General Avi Rosenfeld, who was the division’s commander on duty that weekend. He decided to alert his senior commanders, including the commanders of the two regional brigades – northern and southern – and the division’s intelligence office, its military engineering officer, and others. When they arrived at their command center at the Re’im base, they started taking some steps to heighten the level of alertness on the border.

According to some of the senior figures in the Southern Command, the division commander and his officers were planning to take additional steps to increase alertness in the division’s bases and outposts along the border and near the settlements that they were supposed to protect, but due to the information that had initially evoked the concerns, They were asked by figures at IDF command headquarters not to take “noisy” steps. On the other hand, other figures in the security apparatus say the division command could have taken many steps that would not have been registered on the other side.

Deep underneath the Kirya building in Tel-Aviv, in a place that is officially called Mizpeh (IDF Supreme Command Position) but which everyone just calls “the Pit,” first updates about the indications were received. Consequently, the head of the Southern Arena in the Operations Department was urgently summoned to the Pit, in order for a senior officer to be present with the authority to give significant orders. Around 4:00 am, this officer instructed the Air Force to get one more “Zik” [Elbit Hermes 450] unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) into a state of readiness. But this was an unarmed Zik, solely for reconnaissance purposes, and this step also indicated concern only about localized intrusion.

But the concerning signals kept piling up, and eventually, a few minutes before 6:30 am, a decision was made in a conversation between the Shin Bet and the IDF to call the encrypted phone of the Prime Minister’s military secretary, Major General Avi Gil, to inform him about developments and propose that the Prime Minister be woken up. Gil told the senior intelligence officer who had contacted him that he would call Netanyahu immediately, but while they were still talking, alarm sirens started to be heard around Israel. The clock at the Pit showed 6:26 am Gil and the senior intelligence officer immediately realized that given the hour and the extent of the attack, this was an event of a different order of magnitude, different and more aggressive, since Hamas knew that shooting thousands of missiles and rockets would lead to an Israeli response. None of them knew just how different and aggressive this would be.

Prime Minister Netanyahu was informed of the events while the sirens were sounding, and it was decided that he would come to the Kirya immediately. At the Pit, the following and most critical hours were very confused, shrouded in fog of war and lack of information. “An overview of the situation is the most important element for a war room like the Pit,” said a senior figure, who has spent years with products coming from the IDF command bunker. “The Pit itself was functioning and gave an almost immediate order to many forces to head out, but when you don’t know exactly where to send them or with what equipment and who and where and how large the enemy is that they will meet at the other side, you are doomed to pay dearly for your blindness.”

And indeed, no one in the Pit actually knew much at all. So there was an almost total shock in the Pit when a senior officer said a few words, the likes of which had not been heard since the “Yom Kippur” [October] War [of 1973]: “The Gaza Division was overpowered.”

Silence fell in the room that was filled with technology and giant blinking screens. “These words still give me the chills,” said a person who heard them then and there. “It is unimaginable. It’s like the Old City of Jerusalem in the War of Independence or the outposts along the Suez Canal during the Yom Kippur War. We thought that this could never happen again, and this will remain a scar burnt into our flesh forever.”

* * *

In those hours, in the burning security rooms of Nir Oz and Be’eri and in the outdoor shelters at the Re’im party, in the locked homes in Sderot and Ofakim, on blood-stained road 232, and in fact, throughout the country, one questioned echoed everywhere: where is the IDF?

And this is the question at the heart of this investigation: where was the Israel Defense Force in the first hours of the morning of October 7th?

Over the past months we have spoken to dozens of officers and commanders, some of whom hold very senior positions in the IDF. We tried to use their stories and internal security documents to sketch out what really happened in the first hours of that morning, to draw a timeline of the hours that changed the country forever.

We will say it straight away: On this Black Sabbath there was a lot of initiative, a lot of courage, a lot of self-sacrifice. Civilians, soldiers and officers, police and Shin Bet personnel leaped into battle arenas at their own initiative; they acquired weapons, received partial information, engaged in complex warfare, and sometimes gave their lives. They wrote some of the most beautiful and heroic chapters in the history of Israel. But the 7 Days investigation exposes the fact that along with these, in those same hours, some of the hardest, most embarrassing and infuriating chapters in the history of the army were also written. This includes a command chain that failed almost entirely and was entirely blindsided; orders to open fire on terrorist vehicles speeding towards Gaza even as there was a concern that they contained captives – some sort of renewed version of the Hannibal Directive; fighters who – due to lack of communications – had to direct aerial support using their cell phones; war reserve stores that sent fighters into battle with weapons that lacked gunsights and without bullet-proof vests; outdated and inappropriate orders that were copy-pasted and sent out to the battlefield; warplanes roaming the air in the critical moments of the attack without guidance; officers coming to the conclusion that there was no alternative to acquiring helicopters in a roundabout way in order to move their forces from place to place; and even unmanned aircraft operators who had to join the kibbutz WhatsApp groups in order to let besieged civilians help them to build a list of targets. And everything was so crazy, chaotic, improvised, and haphazard that you have to read it to believe that this is what actually happened. And no, we don’t have to wait for an official commission of inquiry that will surely be established and will surely deal with everything that we have laid out here: some things need to be corrected here and now.

This is what it looked like, hour by hour, on that terrible morning:

6:26

Massive shooting of missiles and rockets. The Hamas attack begins.

6:30

Other than Iron Dome, which was put into action immediately, the first military response by the IDF was to mobilize a pair of F-16I (Sufa) planes from combat squadron 107 at the Hatzerim air base, which was on interception alert that Saturday. Quite a few complaints were heard about the sparse and confused Air Force response in the morning of Black Sabbath. Some complaints are appropriate: the 7 Days investigation finds that even the force that is considered the most orderly and best organized in the IDF had a very hard time understanding the magnitude of the event, and the response given, at least in the first few hours, was partial and sparse.

On their way, the pilots and navigators of the Sufa planes saw the contrails of the many rockets on their way into Israel, but under the orders, the role of the first interceptors rising into the air is to protect strategic military and civilian assets. In the first few hours there was no one to change that order and direct the planes to the attacked regions where they were truly needed, and from 20,000 feet high it is almost impossible to identify targets without ground assistance. Thus it happened that for about 45 critical minutes, armed fighter planes flew circles in the sky without taking any action. It was only around eight o’clock, when the pilots landed and received reports from the ground, that they learned what had happened just a few kilometers away. Their frustration and rage were immense. “If they knew, they could at least have flown at low elevation in order to scare the Hamas terrorists by flying loudly over their heads,” said a senior flight squadron officer. “But they just did not know what was happening.” One way or another, these pilots took off again, with their peers, primarily in order to attack targets in Gaza.

A few minutes after the F-16 planes took off, a pair of Squadron 140 F-35 (Adir model) stealth planes took off from Nevatim base that had been on call as well. Their pilots did not know what was happening on the ground either, despite the fact that in their case, they managed to fly at a lower altitude and identify fires in the Gaza Envelope region. In response, the pilots acted in accordance with a contingency plan for attacking targets in Gaza. There was no one to tell them that these attacks were ineffective now and that they were needed somewhere completely different at this time.

6:37

Two armed Zik UAVs were taken from Squadron 161 at the Palmachim base, which was on alert that Saturday. This was in direct response to the “Code Red” sirens a few minutes after they were sounded. In the subsequent hours, the Zik operators had to improvise and operate independently. Neither they nor the Air Force Central Command were able to understand the full picture. One way or the other, as happened a lot that Saturday, officers on the ground initiated steps on their own, and the squadron did not wait for a proper order and instructed three more armed Ziks to take to the skies and go into battle.

6:50

A little before 7:00 am, the first pair of Apache helicopters was also sent to the Gaza Envelope. The two Apache gunboats belong to Flight Squadron 190, whose home base is Ramon, a 20-minute flight from the Gaza Strip. However, due to budget cuts in previous years, the helicopters were at the Ramat David base in the north near Lebanon that Saturday, a flight distance that left many minutes without air cover in the Gaza Envelope region.

In recent years, the Air Force has diluted its helicopter gunship inventory under the theory that against Iran, Israel would need more stealth planes and fewer of these “flying tanks.” October 7th is supposed to change this understanding, too.

7:00

Around 6:45 am, the first conversation was held between the Pit and a Southern Command operations officer, in which the General Staff was first informed that this was not only rocket fire but that there were also breaches of the fence, and that some of the observation infrastructure was damaged. This was one of the reasons that the Pit was left de facto blindsided: the three large observation balloons that were supposed to provide observation points towards the southern, central, and northern Gaza Strip, had fallen during the days prior to the attack. Hamas also directly targeted cameras and other observation infrastructure, among other things using “suicide UAVs.”

But it was not only the observation infrastructure that was impacted. A preliminary investigation held in the last few days about the communication capacity of the Gaza Division exposed the fact that some 40 percent of the communication sites such as towers with relay antennas that the Telecommunications Department had deployed in recent years near the Gaza Strip border were destroyed by Hamas on the morning of the invasion. Thus, the [Hamas] Nukhba Force [Editor’s note: “nukhba” is Arabic for “elite”] did not only directly damage the “see and shoot” Raphael tower systems and the observation infrastructure along the fence, but also attempted to tamper with the basic radio communication capabilities. The terrorists also placed explosive devices near the tower bases at the lower part of the antennas, places that were apparently unprotected against this type of attack. These explosions were partially successful: some of the towers fell, others just tilted.

In the Pit at the Kirya, attempts were made to obtain reports from the Gaza Division war room, but as previously mentioned, that war room was almost entirely blind, and furthermore, just before 7:00 am, a fierce attack was launched in Re’im by terrorists who had entered the Division’s Command Base. The Division’s war room was staffed and operational, but found it very difficult to fulfill its primary purposes: to receive information about the current situation on the ground, to mobilize forces accordingly, and to inform the Southern Command and the Pit at the Kirya about new developments.

The result was that a short time after the attack began, the Pit at the Kirya put into operation some permanent preliminary orders for the event of a suspected infiltration from Gaza. These procedures still reflected the thought that the attack was occurring at one or at a few spots, and that it was of limited scope. A military officer who was present at the Tel Aviv command bunker during those hours relates that it was understood in the Pit that a much more significant event was occurring than a spot infiltration, but that due to the blindness on the ground, they turned to television and to social media feeds, primarily to Telegram, to Israeli channels, but primarily to Hamas channels, which included texts, pictures, and videos of the events. From these they came to the understanding that the incident was expansive, but they still had difficulty forming an overall picture of everything that was happening. This moment, in which the Pit, the holy of holies of Israeli security, remained clueless and resorted to surfing Hamas Telegram feeds in order to understand what was happening inside the State of Israel, is a moment that will not soon be forgotten.

One may learn just how complete the mess was, for example, from the experiences of the Duvdevan fighters during those hours. On that weekend, Duvdevan was actually on alert for a hostage-taking situation, but they were doing so far away in the Judea and Samaria Region [the West Bank]. Around 7:00 am, the commander of Duvdevan, Lieutenant Colonel D, received a phone call. The call was not an official call, but rather a call from a friend, an officer at Southern Command, who told him with some alarm about what was going on in his sector. D. did not waste time and called his company from the Judea and Samaria Region and instructed them to arm themselves, get into the unit’s vehicles, and hurry toward the Gaza Envelope region. No new information arrived while they were on their way about being ambushed at road intersections, simply because there was no one to provide such information. But by sheer good luck, D. identified a Savannah vehicle of an unarmored variety belonging to the Tequila unit, which had previously been sprayed with bullets, and he halted the convoy. He instructed his people to leave all regular vehicles, converge into the armored jeeps, circumvented the intersection, and entered the battle at Kfar Azza.

They did not leave until 60 consecutive hours and dozens of killed terrorists later. Incidentally, the commander of another Duvdevan company, who was trying to find a way to get his men to the Gaza Envelope region and did not get any responses from the command, simply called a good friend in the Air Force and finagled a helicopter that would transport his men to combat at Nir Yitzchak.

7:14

The Gaza Division managed to convey a request to the Zik squadron: to attack at the Erez Crossing. The UAV operators saw unbelievable images on their screens: the crossing had become a bustling highway for terrorists. Operators told us that at least in the first two hours, their feelings were of loss of control, and in many cases they independently took decisions to attack. By the end of that accursed day, the squadron performed no fewer than 110 attacks on some 1,000 targets, most of which were inside Israel.

Throughout this entire mess, the operators were required to be on increased alert: 7 Days was informed of at least one critical instance when an officer fighting near the Nir Am kibbutz identified five terrorists on their way from a nearby grove of trees, heading toward Sderot. The officer managed to make contact with the Zik operators and directed them to the squad. The UAV operator had already locked in on the target, but from his portable at Palmachim he identified that these were not terrorists in disguise but rather five IDF soldiers, surveying the place. They were the press of a button away from a certain death.

7:30

The two Apache helicopters that had taken off from Ramat David arrived in the Be’eri region and reported to the squadron about a mess and mushroom clouds of smoke. The commander of Squadron 190, Lieutenant Colonel A, decided to call his second in command and ordered all pilots to arrive quickly from their homes, even before he was ordered to do so by the operations headquarters of the Air Force. The pair of Apache helicopters over Be’eri started to perform fire for isolation outside the kibbutzim in order to prevent the arrival of additional terrorists.

Meanwhile, the battle for the Re’im Base, where the headquarters of the Gaza Division is located, continued in full force, and dozens of terrorists were attacking the compound. The Division commander, Brigadier General Avi Rosenfeld, managed to enter the fortified war room with many of his soldiers, from where he attempted to direct both the division’s battle and the battle for the base, concurrently. According to the testimony of a female officer, Rosenfeld himself wished to leave the war room and attack. But outside, the Nukhba’s advance fire teams were everywhere. Only at 1:00 pm would fighters from “Shaldag” Unit 5101 and other units manage to reoccupy the base, with assistance of a helicopter gunship.

All this made what the IDF calls a “command and control” very difficult. If the Division Headquarters is blindsided and under attack, the Southern Command Headquarters does not receive sufficient information either, nor does the command bunker at the Kirya. The result was that commanders who had already learned from the media or from friends that something was going on and had scrambled to get to the Gaza Envelope, received no response from their superiors. “I came with my private vehicle to the Yad Mordechai junction after I saw on the news at home the video of the Nukhba terrorists on a pick-up truck in Sderot,” relates a brigade commander in regular service. “During the entire drive I tried to get in touch with my friends at the Gaza Division and at the Southern Command in order to understand where it would be best for me to go first, and to hear from them what was happening on the ground and where I should send my soldiers. When they finally picked up, I heard mostly shouting on the other side of the line, and when I asked for something as elementary as a description of the current situation, the Gaza Division told me: ‘we do not have a description of the current situation. Find a focal point of fighting and you tell us what the situation is.’ And here I am, coming from home, my brigade is dispersed throughout other sectors or is exercising in the north, and like many others, I can already see terrorists at Erez crossing, and I am certain that the incident is right where I am.” By the way, that feeling, that every commander thought that the focal combat was happening right where he was without knowing that a few kilometers away, his colleague was fighting a similar battle, was common to many of the officers we spoke with. None of them knew that in fact, in those hours, there were some 80 different points of combat.

7:43

According to a Southern Command officer, it was only around 7:30 am, more than an hour after the attack began, that the Commander of the Gaza Division, Brigadier General Avi Rosenfeld called the Pit in Tel Aviv and reported that the Division’s base in Re’im and the entire area were under heavy attack. He reported that he could not yet describe the scope and details of the attack, and asked the commander on call to send him all available IDF forces.

At 7:43 the Command in Tel Aviv issued the Pleshet Order: The first order to deploy forces, according to which all emergency forces and all units near the Gaza border region must head south immediately. [Translator’s note: Pleshet – פלשת – is a play on words. It is the Biblical name of Palestine, and uses the verb root for invasion: פ.ל.ש.] However, the order did not mention what was not clear at all, neither at the Southern Command nor in the Pit in Tel Aviv, that this was a broad invasion, whose goal was to occupy parts of the south of the country and included taking over junctions for ambushes and to neutralize reinforcements. The result was that a significant part of the forces that headed out did not know that there was a risk of running into enemy forces while they were still on their way to the settlement or base that they were sent to.

There was another problem with the Pleshet Order: it was actually intended to protect Israel from a completely different type of incursion. Until the establishment of “the barrier,” the main threat had been the intrusion of terrorists into Israel via a network of penetrative tunnels, from which they would attempt to reach the settlements. The Pleshet Order was phrased to protect against this type of threat, and it focused on regions inside Israel, such that terrorists who would emerge from tunnels inside Israel would be neutralized. In other words, the order did not focus on protecting the border fence against infiltration by Hamas terrorists who would have to operate above ground, nor on the threat of thousands of terrorists flowing into Israel almost freely, through more than 30 breakthrough points. The IDF had not imagined such a scenario, and did not prepare orders for it. This failure is even stranger, as the IDF had obtained Hamas’ “Jericho Wall” battle plan that described exactly this kind of attack, and yet did not cancel the Pleshet order or update its defense plans.

8:00

The General Staff gathered around 8:00 am in the new operations pit at the Kirya in Tel Aviv, and Chief of Staff Herzl “Herzi” Halevi arrived. No one understood that for an hour and a half already, Israel had been under a full-blown attack by Hamas.

8:10

The officers of the UAV squadron understand that there is no point for them to wait for orders from the Air Force Command or from the Gaza Division. They manage to get in touch with the Division and essentially ask that all procedures, orders, and regulations be tossed in the trash. “You have authority to fire at will,” the Zik operators were told by the Division. In other words: shoot at anything that looks threatening or like an enemy.

But whom to attack? Without an orderly command, the UAV operators tried to build a “target bank” on their own. Improvisation swiftly took over here, too: most operators are young officers who have friends and relatives fighting on the ground at that very moment. It was decided to trash another iron rule: never let a cell phone into the operations portable. The operators made regular phone calls with their peers on the ground: “You see that building with the dark roof? So, the tower next to it” to guide them. And at the most extreme, other operators joined the Whatsapp groups of Kibbutz Kfar Azza and other settlements and were told what to target by besieged civilians.

8:32

The two lone Apache helicopters in the air, which were operating on their own initiative until now, managed to make initial radio contact with the commander of one of the companies on the ground. This contact, which is so necessary for the air forces to receive a situation update from the ground forces and be directed to the target, only formed about an hour and a half from the beginning of the attack. The company commander asked for fire for his benefit, and received it. After the shooting, the Apache pilots pointed the helicopters to the west, and an alarming sight becomes visible: a tremendous river of human beings, flowing through the gaps toward the settlements of the south. It would later become clear that this was the second wave of invaders – the first wave had consisted mostly of Nukhba and Palestinian Jihad terrorists – and this second wave also included armed civilians and tens of thousands of looters.

The pilot decided to shoot two missiles at the armed persons, as well as dozens of shells from the helicopter’s cannon, indiscriminately, in order to chase them back to Gaza. Later the helicopters noticed a large gap in the border fence near Nahal Oz and attacked the multitudes who were crossing through it. In both cases the success was limited, simply because there were too many terrorists and two few shells: each helicopter carries six missiles and 500 cannon shells. The two helicopters were forced to leave in order to rearm themselves, and returned to the base around 10:20 am.

8:58

Additional Apache helicopters took flight, this time from Ramon base, and operated mostly in the regions where there were breaches of the fence. This would be their primary activity until noon. The Air Force was still confused and affected by the fog of war. “Shoot anyone who intrudes in our space, without [waiting for] authorization,” squadron commander Lieutenant Colonel A told his subordinates in the air, while he himself took off for the Gaza Envelope. One of the helicopters was damaged by small arms fire, but continued fighting.

9:00

Ronen Bar, the director of Shin Bet, instructed his people: anyone who can carry a weapon must go south. During the previous night, as mentioned, Bar had received several signals of an event happening in the Gaza Strip region, but he thought that even if Hamas was planning something, it would be a limited and localized action, so he only sent the Tequila Force. The Tequila Force fighters were some of the first to encounter the infiltrating terrorists, fought them bravely, and managed to report to Shin Bet headquarters. But even at that time, neither the Shin Bet nor [the generals] in the Pit under the Kirya understood that the attack was, in fact, extensive. It was only around 9:00 am, when reports from his subordinates were confirmed by other reports and by media coverage, that Bar instructed all employees with combat training who had weapons to go south and help in the fighting. According to a person familiar with the events of that morning, people who went down to the ground included coordinators, combat school trainers, security detail bodyguards, people who secure facilities and people who secure on-the-ground actions. In total, dozens of Shin Bet employees were involved, who killed dozens of terrorists and rescued hundreds of residents of the Gaza Envelope region. Shin Bet combatants who live in the settlements in the south went out to fight even before the instruction was given, and thereafter joined the other forces who arrived in the area. In the course of the fighting, 10 of the organization’s people were killed.

9:30

While many reinforcements were flowing south, it was not yet understood at the Gaza Division, at the Southern Command and at the Pit in Tel Aviv that the Nukhba terrorists had foreseen these reinforcements and took over the strategic junctions such as Gama, Magen, Ein Habesor, and Shaar Hanegev, where they awaited the forces. The expected order to secure the intersections before the arrival of reinforcements had not yet come down, and a lot of blood was shed at those junctions, both of soldiers and of civilians.

But there were some who had understood. Battalion 450 of the platoon commander training school was on call for the Gaza Division that Saturday, and battalion commander Lieutenant Colonel Ran Canaan mobilized his fighters from the base near Yerucham relatively early in the morning. The battalion was told that it was going to the Gaza Envelope region, but it was not alerted about intersections on the way having become places for deadly ambushes. Some 50 fighters got onto a regular bus with full equipment and headed out. Suddenly, between Tze’elim and Kerem Shalom, the driver slammed his brakes for an emergency stop. Some policemen approached the bus, waving their hands. Some were injured. They told the company commander with great alarm that at the next junction, about three kilometers away from them, terrorists were waiting for them, with a heavy machine gun and anti-tank weapons. The force commander understood that a machine gun volley against the sides of the unarmored bus would make it a death trap for his soldiers. “The Nukhba deployed squads at the junctions on the way to the Gaza Envelope, with RPG teams, snipers, machine guns, and immense amounts of ammunition, for long hours of combat,” said Lieutenant Colonel Canaan, who was wounded in the battles and returned to combat after some days had passed. “The company commander took a decision: continue toward the Gaza Envelope region on foot and leave the bus behind. Everyone went off and proceeded on foot, so the bus was not hit by an anti-tank missile or by machine gun fire. The fighters went around the intersections and secured them, cleared the bridge over the Besor creek that the terrorists had taken over, and they did all this on foot, for kilometers on end.”

Around 9:30, the besieged Gaza Division eventually managed to man and operate the Hupat Esh [Fire Canopy] attack cell. [Editor’s note: This is a secretive mobile command room according to Israeli press reports.] This is a system established by Chief of Staff Kohavi and which operates in the division. The idea is that one place will hold intelligence about targets, control and planning about attacking them, and the corresponding operation of aerial forces. Thus, a single Hupat Esh attack cell could, for example, shoot down an incendiary balloon or execute an aerial attack on a mortar shell launching unit. But the Hupat Esh system was never designed to cope with such an insane amount of targets simultaneously.

The officers faced dilemmas of life and death: where should they direct the helicopter gunships and the Zik first? To the dozens of breaches in the fence, through which the terrorists continued to arrive? To the posts currently occupied by the Nukhba terrorists, where they were killing hundreds of soldiers and taking others as captives back into Gaza? Or should it be in the direction of Sderot, or the Kibbutzim, where the civilians were being brutalized? Eventually, the Hupat Esh attack cell commanders, some of whom were 22 years old, sent the Apache pilots a command that has never appeared in any standing order: “You have permission until further notice – and throughout the entire area.”

A similar mechanism of deploying firepower was also started in the course of the morning at the Southern Command headquarters in Beer Sheva. An experienced officer, in the sixth decade of his life, arrived at the command from his home in the north around sunset, and stood shocked before the screens, flickering with targets. “We prepared and exercised for many scenarios of infiltration from Gaza,” he told 7 Days. But if the officer from the training administration at headquarters would have written a scenario like the one that happened on October 7th for an upcoming exercise, we would have hospitalized them at a psychiatric institute immediately.”

10:00

The fighting on the ground intensified and drew casualties. In many cases the fighters had to collect intelligence on their own in order to get their bearings. The commander of Division 36, Brigadier General Dado Bar Khalifa, for instance, did not wait for orders and rushed directly from his home to the site and arrived at Netiv Haasara around 10:00 am. He took a gun, a bullet-proof vest and a helmet from one of the injured policemen. Then he photographed some of the Nukhba terrorists that he had neutralized in order to send these photographs to the intelligence entities and refrained from killing some of them intentionally. Bar Khalifa caught two of them veritably by physically beating them in the fields between Yad Mordechai and the occupied Erez Post, undressed them to ascertain that they were not carrying explosive charges, and started interrogating them on the spot. From this interrogation, which was done under fire, Bar Khalifa learned about the directions of the Nukhba invasion, where some of their people were hiding in ambush, and in general, about the scope of the event, at least in the northern part of the sector, near Sderot. Apparently, at this point he knew a lot more than what they knew in the Pit.

11:30

Like other combat brigades, Brigade 890 also mobilized from its Nabi Mussa base near Jerusalem at 7:00 am and headed in the direction of the Gaza Envelope. Some of the brigade fighters arrived for the fighting at Kibbutz Be’eri. Meanwhile brigade commander Lieutenant Colonel Yoni Hacohen managed to finagle a Sikorsky CH-53 Sea Stallion “Yasur” helicopter to bring a few dozen of his fighters to the area. At 11:30, a moment before landing near Kibbutz Alumim, the helicopter was directly hit by an RPG from the ground – quite a rare occurrence – but before it went up in flames, the pilot managed to land it safely, and the warriors disembarked and directly entered the battle in the kibbutz.

The battles they took part in, some of which were in the constructed area, made the 890 unit fighters very much regret that they had arrived without fragmentation grenades. Other brigades also did not receive this important weapon. The reason: the IDF has a policy of storing grenades in bunkers for sound reasons of safety. When do they distribute them? Only during relevant exercises or for operations in enemy territory. When forces are mobilized on short notice, their chance of receiving grenades is not high.

Lack of combat equipment or inappropriate equipment was a complaint made by many of the officers and ground personnel that we talked to. It may be understandable why the emergency reserve storehouses were not ready to equip fighters in the south who had arrived from the north, but here is a story of a reservist battalion from Division 98, a select commando unit. One might have assumed that for this sort of battalion, which would clearly spearhead any fighting, everything would be prepared in advance. But no. Fighters who managed to reach the emergency reserve storehouses late in the morning commented about missing equipment. “Of course the weapons had not been calibrated, and for a few hours we were shooting in the Gaza Envelope region without hitting any terrorists,” one of the fighters related. “Our marksmen went without the sights assembled onto the weapons, and then there were the bullet-proof vests. At least one of the guys was killed that Saturday when a bullet hit his stomach because he didn’t have such a vest.”

And, by the way, the infantry fighters were not the only ones suffering a lack of equipment. The armored corps also discovered this very quickly. For example, the reservists from Division 252 were mobilized relatively early on Saturday morning, but when they reached their supply center in Tze’elim, where they found that the first tanks available to them were Merkava III tanks – and even these were not in an impressively well-maintained condition, some of them being more than 20 years old. But they did not have many choices, so they got into the Merkava tanks, prayed that the engines would start, and raced along the roads towards the Gaza Envelope. These tanks were some of the first to report what no one in the command centers had managed to understand yet: that the Nukhba terrorists had built ambushes at key points in order to attack reinforcement units.

11:59

The chaos and confusion continued for many long hours. In the status evaluation coming up to noon, the Southern Command already understood that their assessment up until that morning, according to which Hamas did not have the capacity to penetrate “the barrier” except maybe at one or two points, had entirely collapsed, and that Hamas had managed to penetrate at more than 30 points (see the map of penetration points on these pages.) [Editor’s note: The map shows 48 red dots on the fence around Gaza with the legend: “breakthrough location in the fence/gate broken.”]

Even almost six hours after the fact, the fog covering that status evaluation was immense. Headquarters did not understand what Hamas’ goals were, where their forces were deployed and how they operate, the control of intersections, the concurrent attacks on posts and on civilian settlements. At that time, Headquarters believed that they could regain control over the entire south of the country by dark. In practice this would take another three days, and even then, the area would not be fully cleared of Hamas people.

But in the meanwhile, the first videos about captives started coming in, and Headquarters also understood that at least in this respect, this was now a completely different event. This was the moment at which the IDF decided to return to a version of the Hannibal Directive.

In 1986, after the capture and murder of two IDF soldiers by Hizballah, the IDF introduced a new, secret, and controversial directive. Under the “Task” section, it included the statement that “Immediate location of a ‘Hannibal’ incident, delay/halt the capturing force at any price and release the captives.” The original command stated that “In the course of a capture, the main task becomes rescuing our soldiers from the captors, even at the price of hitting or injuring our soldiers.” According to publications, the order was changed in 2016, softened, and had its name changed. Its current language has not been published, but a clarification was introduced that actions must be avoided that would be highly likely to endanger the captive’s life.

The 7 Days investigation shows that at midday of October 7th, the IDF instructed all its fighting units to perform the Hannibal Directive in practice, although it did so without stating that name explicitly. The instruction was to stop “at any cost” any attempt by Hamas terrorists to return to Gaza, using language very similar to that of the original Hannibal Directive, despite repeated promises by the defense apparatus that the directive had been canceled.

In practice, the meaning of the order is that the primary goal was to stop the retreat of the Nukhba operatives. And if they took captives with them as hostages, then to do so even if this means the endangerment or harming of the lives of civilians in the region, including the captives themselves.

According to several testimonies, the Air Force operated during those hours under an instruction to prevent movement from Gaza into Israel and return from Israel into Gaza. Estimates say that in the area between the Gaza Envelope settlements and the Gaza Strip, some one thousand terrorists and infiltrators were killed. It is not clear at this stage how many of the captives were killed due to the operation of this order on October 7th. During the week after Black Sabbath and at the initiative of Southern Command, soldiers from elite units examined some 70 vehicles that had remained in the area between the Gaza Envelope settlements and the Gaza Strip. These were vehicles that did not reach Gaza because on their way they had been hit by fire from a helicopter gunship, a UAV or a tank, and at least in some of the cases, everyone in the vehicle was killed.

12:30

Around noon that Saturday, about six hours after the Hamas attack began, due to the partial information, the IDF still estimated that only about 200 Nukhba terrorists had infiltrated into Israel, while the actual number was nearly ten times larger. 7 Days has discovered that at this stage the IDF was still using the status evaluations in the battle plan prepared at Southern Command, although it was clear that it was no longer relevant. Embarrassingly, they continued to recycle and copy the content of the plan, including the categorical statement that Hamas had a “very low” capacity to pass the fence.

Israel had access to the Hamas “Walls of Jericho” invasion plan, which turned out to be almost entirely realistic on October 7th. But no one thought that maybe orders should be prepared in advance for this scenario. The result: six hours into the attack, as the south was awash with over 2,000 terrorists, the only available order is the one based on the assumption that the capacity of Hamas to even cross the fence was “very low.”

13:00

The Air Force focused since the morning on the primary task: to stop the incursions across the fence. At noon they also expanded the aerial attacks on the settlements and camps that had been occupied, at the request of elite units such as Flotilla 13 and the Nahal commando. Since no continuous contact had been made with the Air Force command, the pilots conducted themselves via direct telephone conversation with officers and fighters on the ground, and were directed to attack the gym and fitness room of the Gaza Division at the Re’im camp, after seven of the Nukhba terrorists had entrenched themselves there. Later, they also attacked the dining hall in the besieged Sufa outpost.

At the time there were 10 helicopter gunships in the air (out of 28 that participated in the battles that morning, by rotation), but even at that stage, the communication with the aerial forces was mostly improvisational, as mentioned. Thus, for example, the second in command of Division 80, Colonel A, who had wished to storm the citrus groves near Kerem Shalom, personally called the commander of the helicopter gunship squadron, Lieutenant Colonel A, and requested massive fire towards the citrus grove. Generally, the safety range in such incidents between the ground forces and the aerial bombardment is approximately 300 meters. This time the range was just a few dozen meters. A few days later, an intelligence officer would tell squadron commander A that the Nukhba terrorists were instructed not to run that morning, knowing that the pilots would think that these were Israelis walking, not escaping, and then would hesitate to shoot at them. That’s what it is like when the enemy knows much more about you than you know about them.

Response by the IDF Spokesperson: “The IDF is currently fighting the murderous Hamas terror organization in the Gaza Strip. The IDF will hold a thorough, detailed, and in-depth investigation into the matter to fully clarify the details when the operational situation permits this, and will publish its findings to the public.”

[admin]

BIDEN'S PONTIUS PILATE MOMENT

If there is anyone here, who follows this thread, reading this, and not having previously heard of it, and in case for every random person, we should WRITE TO JOE BIDEN -- TONIGHT -- AND TELL HIM TO GET GOING!! HOW MANY MORE PEOPLE DEAD CAN YOU HANDLE? GET MOVING! PEOPLE ARE DYING! A VERY, VERY, VERY LOT OF THEM!

And send it to your congressmen and women, and anyone you can think of.

It's time for us Palestinian-lovers to get moving ourselves.

Sincerely,

Tara Carreon

Biden reportedly fed up with Netanyahu, calling him ‘asshole’ over management of war: NBC News reports that US president is telling confidants he is frustrated by prime minister’s refusal to change tactics in Gaza and agree to Saudi normalization framework
by Lazar Berman
Times of Israel
12 February 2024, 4:52 pm
https://www.timesofisrael.com/biden-rep ... -gaza-war/



File: US President Joe Biden (right) is greeted by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at Ben Gurion International Airport, October 18, 2023. (Evan Vucci/AP Photo)

Amid reports of growing frustration in the White House with Benjamin Netanyahu, NBC News reported on Monday that US President Joe Biden has been expressing his exasperation with the prime minister in private conversations — even calling him an “asshole” — but is not about to make any major policy changes.

Citing “five people directly familiar with his comments,” the report said that Biden has expressed frustration to confidants, including campaign donors, over his “inability to persuade Israel to change its military tactics in Gaza.”

He is also flummoxed by Netanyahu’s rejection of deals that the US president thinks are a win for Israel, like Saudi normalization in exchange for movement toward a Palestinian state.

In January, Netanyahu reportedly rejected a proposal from US Secretary of State Antony Blinken that would have seen Saudi Arabia normalize relations with Israel in exchange for Jerusalem agreeing to provide the Palestinians with a pathway toward statehood.

Biden reportedly said he is trying to get Israel to agree to a ceasefire with Hamas, but Netanyahu is “giving him hell.”

The president called Netanyahu an “asshole” in at least three recent instances, according to three of the anonymous sources.


Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks to FOX News on February 11, 2024 (Screenshot)

“He just feels like this is enough,” one of the sources told NBC, regarding Biden’s thoughts on Netanyahu’s behavior. “It has to stop.”

Biden, the report also said, believes that Netanyahu wants to extend the war to stay in power.

However, the sources said Biden thinks it would be counterproductive to be too critical of Netanyahu in public.

Disagreements between the two leaders have become more public in recent weeks.

In a phone call on Sunday, Biden told Netanyahu that Israel should not go ahead with a military operation in the densely populated Gaza border town of Rafah without a “credible” plan to protect civilians.

Netanyahu has declared in recent interviews that Israel will provide “safe passage for the civilian population” ahead of the expected assault on Hamas in the city, and dismissed fears of a “catastrophe.”

About half of Gaza’s population of over 2 million has fled to Rafah to escape fighting in other areas, packed into sprawling tent camps and United Nation-run shelters near the border.


People stand around craters caused by Israeli bombardment in Rafah on the southern Gaza Strip on February 12, 2024(SAID KHATIB / AFP)

On Thursday, Biden called the conduct of Israel’s military campaign against Hamas “over the top.”

The two also discussed on Sunday “ongoing efforts to secure the release of all remaining hostages held by Hamas,” along with increasing the “throughput and consistency” of humanitarian aid to Gaza civilians, according to the White House.

Biden and other US officials continue to stand behind Israel’s right to defend itself against Hamas. The White House readout of the Biden-Netanyahu call on Sunday began with the statement: “The President reaffirmed our shared goal to see Hamas defeated and to ensure the long-term security of Israel and its people.”

Still, the president and his officials have expressed increasing concern over the civilian death toll, suffering and humanitarian crisis in the Strip, and the lack of clarity from Israel regarding the “day after” the war in Gaza.

Visiting Israel last week, Blinken bitterly criticized Israel’s Gaza campaign, warning that the horrors of October 7 did not give Israel “a license to dehumanize others.”

Last week, a top White House official said he does not have “any confidence” in Netanyahu’s government, specifically regarding its readiness to take “meaningful steps” toward the creation of a Palestinian state, The New York Times reported.

In January, Netanyahu said in a number of prepared messages that he would not give up full security council west of the Jordan River, pushing back against calls from the Biden administration for a pathway toward a Palestinian state.


IDF troops operate inside the Gaza Strip in this undated handout photo release on February 11, 2024. (Israel Defense Forces)

An NBC report also cited three administration officials who claimed the administration was looking past Netanyahu to try and achieve its goals in the region, with one of them telling the network that the premier “will not be there forever.”

Despite the disagreements, Netanyahu has made sure not to disparage the US president publicly. Asked on Sunday about a US government report that portrayed US President Joe Biden as suffering from memory loss, Netanyahu told ABC’s “This Week” that he’s “found him very clear, and very focused.”

War erupted when Hamas-led terrorists stormed southern Israel on October 7 to kill nearly 1,200 people, mainly civilians, while taking 253 hostages of all ages, committing numerous atrocities, and weaponizing sexual violence on a mass scale.

The Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza said on Monday that 28,340 people have been killed inside the Palestinian enclave since the start of the war, while 67,984 others have been injured. These figures cannot be independently verified, however, and are believed to include both civilians and Hamas members killed in Gaza, including as a consequence of terror groups’ own rocket misfires.

The IDF says it has killed over 10,000 terror operatives in Gaza since the start of the war, in addition to some 1,000 terrorists inside Israel on October 7.

[admin]

Commander-in-Chief President Joe Biden
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.
Washington, DC 20500

February 12. 2024

URGENT

Subject: “Netanyahu is an A-hole.”

Dear President Biden:

Having heard that you have expressed the opinion quoted in the subject line of this letter, I wish to congratulate you on your perspicacity. Granted that it required no great powers of vision to discern this fact; however, engulphed as you are in the smoky swirls of policy and the fog of war, it is in fact to your credit that you are able to see what every clear-eyed American can already see – America’s unquestioned military might is being employed to extinguish Palestinian people. This cannot be. The horrific stain on our national honor of not merely standing by, but supplying the means for genocide, will never be expunged from our national history. You cannot be the Commander-in-Chief who allowed this massacre of the innocent, who supplied the immensely destructive high-tech munitions that have obliterated all sign of human habitation in Gaza, all the way to the Egyptian border, until the last strangulation of this oppressed people. To quote the young boy who confronted Babe Ruth, his childhood hero, at the moment when he was discovered to have taken a bribe to throw a game: “Say it ain’t so, Joe!”

Sincerely,

Charles & Tara Carreon

Cc:

Martin Heinrich, US Senator from New Mexico (D)
709 Hart Senate Office Building
Washington DC 20510
(202) 224-5521

Ben Ray Luján, , US Senator from New Mexico (D)
498 Russell Senate Office Building
Washington DC 20510
(202) 224-6621

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Dutch appeals court orders Netherlands to stop exporting F-35 parts to Israel amid humanitarian concerns
by PBS
Feb 12, 2024 6:43 PM EST

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — An appeals court ordered the Dutch government on Monday to halt the export of F-35 fighter jet parts to Israel, citing a clear risk of violations of international law.

A trio of human rights organizations brought a civil suit against the Netherlands in December, arguing authorities needed to reevaluate the export license in light of Israeli military action in the Gaza Strip.

“It is undeniable that there is a clear risk that the exported F-35 parts are used in serious violations of international humanitarian law,” Judge Bas Boele said in reading out the ruling, eliciting cheers from several people in the courtroom.

The exports must cease within seven days.

The decision came as Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte traveled to Israel to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to discuss the conflict. Rutte was also expected to separately meet with Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs said the government would appeal. “It is up to the state to shape its foreign policy,” Geoffrey van Leeuwen, the minister for foreign trade and development said in a statement. In the meantime, van Leeuwen said his office would abide by the export ban.

“We are extremely grateful that there is justice and that the court was willing to speak out on justice,” lead lawyer Liesbeth Zegveld told reporters after the hearing.

Oxfam Novib, Pax Nederland and The Rights Forum filed the case in December. They argued the continued transfer of the aircraft parts makes the Netherlands complicit in possible war crimes being committed by Israel in its war with Hamas.

In January, a lower court sided with the government, allowing the Dutch to continue sending U.S.-owned parts stored at a warehouse in the town of Woensdrecht to Israel. The Netherlands is home to one of three F-35 European regional warehouses.

Other countries are also considering restricting weapons sales to Israel. Human rights groups in the United Kingdom have brought a similar suit against their government, attempting to block weapons exports to Israel.

In the United States, Democrats in the Senate are pushing a bill that would require President Joe Biden to get congressional approval before greenlighting weapons sales to Israel.

Late last month, the U.N. top court ordered Israel to do all it can to prevent death, destruction and any acts of genocide in Gaza. Although that decision was made after the appeal in the Dutch case was heard, the groups’ lawyers say judges likely considered the legally binding order from the International Court of Justice.

The decision left some room for Dutch authorities to export parts of the aircraft being used in operations other than Gaza.

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Drone Strike Kills 3 U.S. Troops in Jordan; Risk Grows of Regional War over Israeli Assault on Gaza
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
January 29, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/1/29/ ... transcript

The Pentagon is accusing Iranian-backed militants of killing three U.S. soldiers in a drone strike at a base in Jordan along the Syrian border, making the troops the first U.S. armed forces killed by enemy fire in the region since October 7. A group called the Islamic Resistance in Iraq has claimed responsibility for the attack and said attacks would escalate if the U.S. continues to support Israel during the latter’s destruction of Gaza. President Biden vowed the U.S. would respond. “There will be more of these attacks, for sure,” says Palestinian American journalist Rami Khouri, who lays out the simmering regional conflict and questions U.S. foreign policy running counter to American opinion and strategic goals. “All these actions, are they for the sake of Israel? … Or is this really about U.S. strategic interests?”

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: The first U.S. troops have been killed by enemy fire in the Middle East since Hamas attacked Israel October 7th. The Pentagon is accusing Iranian-backed militants of killing three U.S. soldiers in a drone strike at a base in Jordan along the Syrian border. The attack reportedly also injured 34 other U.S. troops. On Sunday, President Biden vowed the U.S. would respond, quote, “at a time and in a manner of our choosing,” unquote. The attack comes less than a month after a U.S. drone strike in Baghdad killed the head of an Iranian-backed militia.

A group called the Islamic Resistance in Iraq has claimed responsibility for the attack and released video of the attack it says shows the group attacking the American military base. In a statement, the group said, quote, “If the U.S. keeps supporting Israel, there will be escalations. All U.S. interests in the region are legitimate targets, and we don’t care about U.S. threats to respond,” they say.

For more, we’re joined by Rami Khouri, Palestinian American journalist, senior public policy fellow at the American University of Beirut, his recent piece for Al Jazeera headlined “Watching the watchdogs: The 5 Ds of US Middle East policy: Washington’s delusion, denial, dishonesty, distortion, and diversion have had disastrous consequences for the region.”

Rami, welcome back to Democracy Now! So, if you can talk about this latest attack, three U.S. soldiers dead, 34 wounded, the wounded being medevaced back to the United States? Talk about the significance of who’s claimed responsibility and what this means for a possible escalating regional conflict.

RAMI KHOURI: Thank you. Glad to be with you again, and great to see a show like yours doing such a wide range of coverage of important issues. It’s rare on American TV. I’m happy to be with you.

So, I would say that the significance here is severalfold. First of all, the people who did this attack, the Americans blame a certain group in Iraq funded or backed by Iran. There’s dozens of these groups all over the region. There’s almost as many of these groups around the region as there are American military bases around the region. I think there’s something like 30 or 35 American military bases, with something like 30-40,000 troops. And, of course, when you add the ones that come in on the aircraft carriers, it’s more than that.

So, what you have to see this — you have to see this in the context of a regional situation with many American military installations, some of them killing and attacking Arabs and others, some of them not. And you have to see the groups from Arab countries, official state groups and nonstate actors, like Hezbollah and Hamas and Ansar Allah. That’s the context in which we have to see this.

There are so many potential people who could have done this attack, which should make us wonder about why are there so many people who are potential attackers. It’s because they see the American presence linked very close to what Israel is doing in Palestine. They see this as a threat. And they come right out and say it. The thing about the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, like the Resistance Axis, which is the broader Middle East coalition of Hezbollah, Hamas, Ansar Allah in Yemen, the Islamic groups in — resistance groups in Syria and Iraq, their significance is that they come right out — and they’ve said it so many times — “We’re not scared of being attacked. We’re not put off by the U.S. and Israeli threats. We’re defending our territory. And if we’re aggressed against, we are going to fight back.” This is unusual in this region, but it’s going on all the time.

The Ansar Allah in Yemen have been saying the same thing. The U.S. went in there with — and the U.K., the two great colonial powers in the Middle East of the last century. Both have been attacking Ansar Allah targets in Yemen, and the Ansar Allah people say, you know, “Go ahead. Attack. We don’t care.” And they keep attacking back and hitting ships and trying to fire at other places, as well.

So, that’s the context that we have to look at. And some of it is linked to Gaza. Some of it was there before Gaza, which is another important thing. And the Ansar Allah in Yemen and others have said, “Look, if the U.S. stops actively supporting the genocidal, savage moves of Israel in Gaza, we will stop attacking American targets.” It is significant that this is the first direct strike that killed three Americans, but that’s not as significant as the broader picture that we have to look at.

AMY GOODMAN: Rami Khouri, can you talk about the other countries and their response and where they stand vis-à-vis the United States and Israel? For example, Jordan. I listened to the Jordan deputy prime minister yesterday saying this did not happen on Jordanian soil, it happened in Syria. But, in fact, it looks like it did happen in Jordan. And why that was relevant — because, of course, they’re all very close right there on the border — is he said if it happened on Jordanian soil, they would consider it an act of war.

RAMI KHOURI: Yeah. Jordan tries to stay out of these big conflicts. It’s a small country. It has quite a sophisticated military capability. They spend a lot of money and attention on their security services, both internally and regionally, their intelligence services, their technical capabilities, special forces, things like that. And they try to not get directly involved in large-scale warfare, but to do a little, you know, strategic, pinpoint actions when necessary either to protect themselves or to help their allies, like the U.S. and others.

It’s hard to know exactly where this attack came from. If the U.S. intelligence agencies have the information, they should make it public so people stop speculating. But Jordan is a country with a huge territory on the borders with three, four countries, and it’s very hard to patrol it. By the way, I know that area in northeastern Jordan quite well. I spent many, many days there years ago when I was writing books on archaeology and I lived in Jordan.

And there’s two things I think people should recognize about this area. First of all, if you look at that aerial photograph which you showed of the camp, of Tower 2, I think it’s called — if you look at that photograph and then you go back into the archaeological journals and look at pictures, aerial photographs of Roman and Byzantine camps that archaeologists have mapped in surveys, you find exactly the same thing. And this is a sign that these kinds of foreign military installations inside the region, especially on peripheral border areas, don’t have a long lifestyle, and they will be abandoned, because the local people don’t want them there.

So, the second thing I’d say, that area is really fascinating, because, you know, people call it a desolate desert area. It’s a desert area now because of climate change and overgrazing and things like that, but this was a strategically important region in the beginning of modern civilization as we know it in the Bronze Age. There’s people who think that the Abraham’s Path came through here on his way into what’s known as the promised land, that this is an area developed early urbanism in the Bronze Age, walled large towns, sophisticated water systems, showing the human capabilities that have been in this area for about 5,000 years. So, those are just two little side points I’d like to throw in there.

AMY GOODMAN: I have a last question. Trita Parsi, one of the heads of the Quincy Institute, a well-known Iranian American author and analyst, talking about the U.S. soldiers who died, said, “They didn’t die defending US interests, they died defending Biden’s refusal to press Israel for a ceasefire. Their lives were put at risk by Biden to defend Israel’s ability to continue its carnage in Gaza.” If you could respond to that and, among other things, a thousand Black pastors, across the political spectrum, representing hundreds of thousands of congregants in the Black community in the United States, calling on Biden — who are normally mainly constituents of Biden, supporters of Biden — for a ceasefire? This issue of rather than doing what the Republicans, like Lindsey Graham and Senator Cornyn, are calling for — bomb Iran — are saying, “Go the other way,” as a result of this?

RAMI KHOURI: Yeah, those are two really important points. On the point of the Black pastors — and they represent, I think, around a couple hundred thousand parishioners — they’ve now joined the Arab American and Muslim American groups, located all over the country, with the epicenter in Michigan, who are also telling Biden the same thing, that we’re not going to vote for you if you keep being a part of the genocide in Gaza that Israel is performing. So, this is significant because it’s showing us that American politicians really don’t care about morality or the law. They care about electoral incumbency and staying in power, which is probably what all politicians do, to be fair. Americans are no different.

So, this is a question now that is raised with the death of the three Americans and, I think, 24 injured. And there will be more of these attacks, for sure, because, keep in mind, the Axis of Resistance and these groups, the Islamic Resistance in Iraq and Syria, openly say, “Attack us. We don’t care. You’re not going to frighten us.” And this is unusual.

So, the question is: Are American troops now in the Red Sea, in Iraq, possibly in other places dying for the sake of Israel? Israel wants an American-Iranian confrontation. They’ve openly tried to do it, and the Americans have been thoughtful, unusually, in the Middle East by resisting a full-scale war with Iran. But the question becomes: All these actions, are they for the sake of Israel — and not just Israel, but a right-wing, fascist majority that now has been said by the U.N.'s highest court, the world's highest court, to be involved in genocide? Or is this really about U.S. strategic interests?

U.S. strategic interests have not been well served by the 35, 40 military bases the U.S. has around the region. And remember, this Islamic Resistance in Iraq and Syria, it emerged out of the destruction that happened in Iraq after the American invasion of Iraq that toppled Saddam Hussein, the chaos that happened after that. It created a lot of these groups. Some of them were tribal, some of them were ideological, some of them were Iranian-linked, and some of them were American-supported. They’re all — you know, they have all kinds of patrons. But all of this goes back to what the U.S. did in Iraq, to a very large extent, and therefore the U.S. really needs to listen to people like Trita Parsi and others, to look at what are we doing in the Middle East.

Is this really the best thing for America’s well-being, or are we serving the interests of Israelis? And if we are, why are we doing that? Is it — and as the Black pastors are suggesting, is it maybe for electoral purposes? Is it for selfish political reasons in the U.S.? These linkages now are becoming much more clear. They’re controversial. They’re sensitive. But they have to be addressed.

And there is a possibility to stop all this militarism, which is the ceasefire that can be installed now quickly, if the U.S. wants, and then moving quickly to a permanent peace negotiation, which will require new leaders in Israel and in Palestine and other places, more credible leaders, but a negotiated peace that resolves the fundamental Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the wider Arab-Israeli conflict, which will not need 35, 40 American bases and constant, never-ending warfare. And this process is going to go on. It’s going to keep expanding, if we’re not careful. I don’t think we’re going to get a full-fledged war with Iran and Hamas and Hezbollah and others fighting against the U.S. and Israel. That would be a catastrophe for the whole region. I don’t think we’re going to get there. But what we have now is low-intensity, diversified regional warfare, and I think that’s going to continue.

AMY GOODMAN: Rami Khouri, I want to thank you for being with us, Palestinian American journalist, senior public policy fellow at American University of Beirut, speaking to us from Boston.

Up next, hours after the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to prevent genocide in Gaza, another genocide case was brought against the Biden administration. It was heard in Oakland, California. Stay with us.

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Palestinians Charge Genocide in U.S. Court; Biden, Blinken Sued for Backing Israel’s War on Gaza
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
January29, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/1/29/ ... transcript

The Biden administration is on trial in the United States for failure to prevent the “unfolding genocide” in Gaza. On Friday, lawyers for the Biden administration argued the court lacks the proper jurisdiction to decide the case, while Palestinians and Americans testified about atrocities committed by Israel with American support. “I can’t think of another time where, in a U.S. federal court, Palestinians have been on the witness stand, one after the other after the other, describing their experiences under Israeli occupation,” says Diala Shamas, senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, which filed the case against President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in November. “Being Palestinians in America necessitates our involvement in this case,” says Laila El-Haddad, a Palestinian writer who testified in court about her family’s experience under Israeli assault. “It obligates us to do everything we can to take every possible recourse, including legal recourse, to try and put an end to this, since it’s our tax dollars.”

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

Just hours after the International Court of Justice in The Hague ordered Israel to take all measures to prevent genocide in Gaza, but stopped short of calling for a ceasefire, a hearing in another genocide case began here in the United States. The Center for Constitutional Rights first filed the case in November against President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.

For three hours on Friday in a federal courtroom in Oakland, California, Palestinians and Americans testified, in person and by phone from Gaza, about the Biden administration’s failure to prevent what they called the, quote, “unfolding genocide” in Gaza. Lawyers for the Biden administration say the court lacks proper jurisdiction to decide the case, which they argue is a matter of foreign policy. The judge said, quote, “This probably is the most difficult case factually that this court has ever had.”

For more, we’re joined by two guests. Laila El-Haddad is a Palestinian writer and journalist from Gaza who testified in court Friday, author of Gaza Mom: Palestine, Politics, Parenting, and Everything in Between and co-editor of the book Gaza Unsilenced with Refaat Alareer, the Palestinian academic and activist killed in December by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza, along with his brother, his sister and her four children. Also joining us is Diala Shamas, senior staff attorney for the Center for Constitutional Rights.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Diala, why don’t you start off by laying out the case?

DIALA SHAMAS: Thank you for having me, Amy.

Yeah, so, we filed this case in November, laying out all of the ways in which the U.S. government, this Biden administration, in particular, President Biden, Secretaries Blinken and Austin, have failed in their duty to prevent an unfolding genocide in Gaza, but also are complicit in a genocide in Gaza. And we, a couple of days after filing our complaint, sought a preliminary injunction, which is essentially an emergency order, saying to the court, you know, the stakes here are so high, the harms to our plaintiffs, the Palestinians, who are plaintiffs in this case — and we have two human rights organizations with staff in Gaza that are plaintiffs, along with a number of individuals, some of whom are Palestinian Americans with families in Gaza, many of whom have been killed and displaced and are suffering all of the conditions that we have all come to know all too well, and we also have plaintiffs in Gaza, Palestinians who are, you know, currently displaced and who have also suffered injuries and loss of relatives. And in our motion for preliminary injunction, we essentially tell the court, unless the court intervenes now and issues an urgent — some urgent relief, the harm to these people, these Palestinians, will be so irreparable, and so we need some urgent action, pending the sort of resolution of the litigation, which always, of course, takes a much longer time. And so, the hearing — and the government filed a motion to dismiss, as well as an opposition to our motion seeking that urgent relief. And we had that hearing on Friday, which you were just describing, a really remarkable hearing.

In many ways, I think, in large part, you know, one of the most remarkable aspects was, as far as I can tell, as far as I’m aware of, we’ve been litigating Palestine-related cases and just been a student of them for decades, and I can’t think of another time where in a U.S. federal court Palestinians have been on the witness stand, one after the other after the other, describing, you know, their experiences under Israeli occupation, uninterrupted, in a way that offers a holistic, complete and complicated accounting of what has been happening to Palestinians, and in this case, not just over the course of the last 16 weeks since the latest assault and this unfolding genocide started, but really kind of placing it in a broader context. Every single one of our plaintiffs got up there and, in order to explain the impact to the court, to the judge, of the current moment and Israeli calls for Nakba now, had to explain the history of the Nakba. I’ve never heard the word “Nakba” be said in federal court so many times. And it was an important part of their telling, because they were there to — they were tasked with, you know, describing the urgency and the harm and the injury that they are experiencing. And it is, of course, a multilayered harm. And in order to explain how they even got to Gaza in the first place, they have to explain their families’ history as a refugee population, the fragmentation of Palestinians. So, there was so much that was really remarkable about the hearing, but that really stands out to me as one of the major aspects.

AMY GOODMAN: And, Diala, if you can quickly say: How did the preliminary judgment of the International Court of Justice in The Hague weigh in and inform the case that you brought, because it happened right after, on Friday, as they said Israel has to prevent a genocide in Gaza? And also, the significance of the judge saying this is the most difficult case he’ll ever have to decide?

DIALA SHAMAS: Yeah, so, as you said, mere hours after the ICJ, the International Court of Justice, issued its order, we — you know, it was 4 a.m. California time. Our hearing started at 9 a.m. We reviewed it as fast as we could, submitted it to the court, because it was, of course, relevant, and hadn’t really had the time to fully process it. But walking into that hearing with the sort of validation, in many ways, although we all, I think, knew exactly — in some ways, we didn’t need the validation, but that the International Court, that the World Court had found that there was a plausible case of genocide, that required the order that it issued with the provisional measures, was significant. The judge took note of it.

And in many ways, we’re in similar postures in our federal court proceeding as that International Court of Justice proceeding, which is the provisional measures at the International Court level also just sought to get these urgent provisional measures at a showing of plausibility. So, we don’t have time to have the full litigation on the merits, because by the time we come around, the damage will be done, and there will be nobody left to save. And so, that’s why we got that order from the ICJ. And we’re making the similar arguments to the court here. We just need this preliminary injunction now, and then we can litigate this down the line.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to bring — I want to bring in Laila El-Haddad. You’re a Palestinian writer and journalist from Gaza. You are the co-editor of a book with Refaat Alareer, who was killed in Gaza only recently, well-known, acclaimed writer and academic in Gaza. You are the author of Gaza Mom: Palestine, Politics, Parenting, and Everything in Between, speaking to us, though, from near Baltimore today. What did you testify in court on Friday, Laila?

LAILA EL-HADDAD: Good morning. Thank you so much for having me, Amy.

I and other plaintiffs, who spoke in a personal capacity, not the organizational plaintiffs, about how this ongoing genocide, and particularly U.S. complicity in it, has impacted our families in Gaza and, of course, our families here, as well. So, I started off by introducing myself — excuse me. As you can see, it’s been a long weekend. My voice is completely gone. I spoke about my family both in Gaza City and in the south of Gaza, in Khan Younis. And I started off by talking about how Israel had killed multitudes of them — on my mother’s side, I believe the number is now 86, and five of my immediate family members in Gaza City — and had displaced the rest of them to multiple locations, and how Israel was responsible for starving them and depriving them of basic human needs and so on, all with active U.S. support, with U.S. weapons and with U.S. financial support and with U.S. diplomatic support.

I spoke about my aunt and my adult cousins and my cousin’s wife in Gaza City. I had finally had a chance, after three months, to get the full details from the surviving brother, who is now — I mean, even his whereabouts now are unknown after a heavy night of Israeli bombardment on Gaza City. But he was telling me how he had to, on his own, retrieve his sister’s body parts, half of his mother, because he couldn’t retrieve the other half, how he had to bury them himself with his own hands in a mass grave, how his sister’s body, my cousin, is still unaccounted for under the rubble, and how he himself was severely injured, and how his brother, my other cousin, bled to death because he couldn’t even access medical care. They couldn’t get paramedics to the area.

So, it was very heavy, very heavy and very painful, but also very urgent. And that was part of the point, is to speak about how we have not had the luxury, as Palestinians, and particularly Palestinians from Gaza, to grieve. We have not had that luxury. And we recognize how being Palestinians in America necessitates our involvement in this case, how it obligates us to do everything we can to take every possible recourse, including legal recourse, to try and put an end to this, since it’s our tax dollars who are being put to work, and American weaponry, as I said, and so on.

AMY GOODMAN: And this latest attack on Khan Younis, as you have any family members there, so many of the people now who are being told to leave Khan Younis, they have moved repeatedly, thinking that each next place was a safe zone, now being forced to Rafah, to the border, to the sea. Where are your family members? And what do you hope will come out of this?

LAILA EL-HADDAD: They are, without exaggeration, everywhere, like everyone else. And I hate to keep saying that, but I sometimes — not to trivialize, but I feel like you look at someone else, and then you say, “Well, at least their situation is a little better,” but truth be told, the entire situation is just beyond description, horrific. And every morning, when I, you know, look at my feed and my WhatsApp and communicate with family members, I try not ask even how they’re doing, but I know that they derive hope from knowing that we are all doing something here to speak out about what’s happening. And that, again, was one of the main motivating factors behind being involved in this lawsuit.

But my family, several of them are actually still in Gaza City. They haven’t left since the very beginning. I have two direct cousins there, and their husbands and all of their children are — one of them is in front of the Nasser Hospital in Gaza City. The others are in Rimal. My one cousin was in the Shifa compound and then decided to go into another neighborhood in Rimal with his family, I don’t even know where, on the street somewhere, because his home was destroyed. My eldest uncle, who’s blind and deaf, with his son and family, are in central Gaza, in Zawayda, near the Maghazi refugee camp. And my mother’s family were in Khan Younis, as you mentioned, and then are now in Mawasi. And so, I haven’t been able to communicate with them for a while. But one of the cousins, I was, and her home in Qarara was destroyed, and she’s now with her four children, literally under a nylon tarp, because they couldn’t even find a tent. And her husband, who has cancer and — yeah, it’s a little — I mean, for those who aren’t familiar, Mawasi is literally a sandy enclave, almost like sand dunes, directly adjacent to the beach, so there’s — I mean, there’s nothing there, beyond the seawater and whatever tents you might have access to.

And now, of course, with aid being cut by several countries, including the United States, which, as it’s been said, Blinken did not hesitate, within a matter of seconds, to shut that aid off. And yet, for more than three months, Palestinians have been enduring an ongoing genocide, which the United States not only has refused to stop, but is actively aiding and abetting, and, despite overwhelming evidence, including President Biden himself acknowledging the attacks have been indiscriminate, or some of the bombings have been indiscriminate, despite overwhelming evidence about — despite the intent by — stated intent by Israeli leaders that there are no innocents in Gaza, that this was intended to make Gaza unlivable —

AMY GOODMAN: Laila —

LAILA EL-HADDAD: — still has not ended that.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to talk about that cutting off of aid to UNRWA in our next segment. I want to thank you so much for being with us, Laila El-Haddad, Palestinian writer, journalist from Gaza, and Diala Shamas, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights.

Next up, we speak to an emergency room physician just back from Khan Younis and with the head of the Norwegian Refugee Council, Jan Egeland. Norway is saying it will not cut off aid to UNRWA, despite the fact U.S. and 12 other countries are doing so. Stay with us.

[break]

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Chicago ER Doctor Just Back from Gaza Says Patients, Medical Staff Face Catastrophic Conditions
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
January 29, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/1/29/ ... transcript

We get an update on conditions in southern Gaza’s Khan Younis area, where displaced Palestinians who fled there to seek refuge are reporting heavy aerial and tank fire as Israel intensifies its ground offensive around two main hospitals there. Dr. Thaer Ahmad is an emergency room physician who spent three weeks volunteering at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis. “I thought, 'This can't be real.’ This is not something that I would expect in 2024,” says Ahmad, who worked alongside doctors who have been volunteering without pay for months as waves of Gazans, including their own families, seek help and safety at the remaining hospitals. “They assume that the hospital can be a sanctuary, and time and time again that has been proven incorrect in Gaza.”

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman.

We turn now to conditions in southern Gaza’s Khan Younis area, where displaced Palestinians who fled there to seek refuge are reporting heavy aerial and tank fire as Israel intensifies its ground offensive around two main hospitals there.

We’re joined in Chicago by Dr. Thaer Ahmad, an emergency room physician just back after spending three weeks in Gaza volunteering at Al-Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, board member for MedGlobal, which has an office in Gaza, is working with the World Health Organization. Dr. Ahmad just returned to Chicago Thursday, where he’s the global health director of his hospital, also an assistant professor of emergency medicine at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

Dr. Ahmad, thank you so much for joining us. Tell us what you experienced in Khan Younis at the hospital.

DR. THAER AHMAD: [inaudible] hospitals that has surgical capabilities. You have thousands of people sheltering inside of the hospital, families sheltering right around the hospital in the area of the medical complex.

And what I saw was relentless bombing that was taking place, day and night. You saw many people who were injured, many of whom were children. Many were people who were just trying to go about their regular day, looking for where their next meal would come from, looking for where they could obtain water. And in the process of doing so, they were hit by tank shells or by airstrikes or by sniper fire. It was really horrific and overwhelming. I mean, I work at a Level I trauma center in Chicago, and the South Side of Chicago is no stranger to trauma or to gang violence. This was something that was on a level that I don’t think many people in America have ever experienced. Every aspect of life in Gaza has been affected, has been disrupted, has been made harder. And you really felt that while you were in the hospital.

The physicians that I was working alongside have been working nonstop for nearly four months. They also are hungry. They also are concerned about where they can get clean water from. Their families have been displaced multiple times. And they’re being asked to take care of waves and waves of people who are coming in as victims of bomb strikes or tank shellings.

You saw children walking around the complex barefoot. They looked like they were hungry looking for food. They were trying to just find some sort of refuge. They’re not going to school. They’re not getting vaccinated. They’re not going to their regular appointments.

And what we saw on the nights when it was really intensifying is a mass migration of people. I remember looking outside of the hospital window and seeing a 4-year-old girl holding onto her pillow and her dad hurriedly trying to grab whatever he could, and they were going to flee on foot further south, probably would have to walk five or six miles in the middle of the night, 3 or 4 a.m., as you heard F-16s above-head and the relentless bombing taking place. And I thought, “This can’t be real.” This is not something that I would expect in 2024 something to be happening. And I think that part of what we’re seeing is, you know, that these people are consistently being dehumanized and retraumatized.

So, it’s very simple to just say people are being asked to evacuate, people are being asked to go to a safer place. But what I realized very quickly, and what the doctors in Gaza told me, is that there is no place in Gaza that’s safe. There’s nowhere that you can take refuge. No place has been spared from bombing. And just because there might be an intense military campaign taking place in Khan Younis like there was, it doesn’t mean that Rafah, which is further south, would be any safer and wouldn’t be subject to any sort of bombing, and that the people in the north of Gaza were also suffering immensely.

I mean, I was there in the midst of an eight-day telecommunications blackout. And I remember the doctors there who were asked to work these 24-hour shifts, thinking about their families and not knowing what was going to take place, not knowing if they were OK, not knowing if they had eaten for the day. And so, that’s something that I think was traumatizing to really experience secondhand, and I was only there for less than three weeks. This is what they’ve had to deal with for four months.

AMY GOODMAN: Reports are, from the U.N., at least 300 healthcare workers have been killed in Gaza. Also, Al Jazeera, speaking to a doctor at Nasser Hospital, where you were, Dr. Ahmad, in Khan Younis, said 95% of staff fled to Rafah as Israeli forces, quote, “bomb anything in front of them.” So, how many people are taking refuge in Nasser in addition to the wounded? How many dead bodies are piling up? And how many medical staff are left?

DR. THAER AHMAD: Yeah, I mean, that’s something that was noticeably thinning every single day that the military assault was taking place in Khan Younis, that more and more staff had to leave the hospital to go take care of their families and make sure their families were safe. You can say that there was probably two dozen, in terms of medical staff and doctors, as well as nurses.

I just want to point out that none of these physicians or nurses have been paid also for the last four months. They received one payment of $200 in November. They otherwise are volunteering, essentially, and just trying to serve their people. And in the process of that, as you mentioned, many of them have been subjected to violence, have been killed. Many have been arrested, as well.

And so, that was one of the concerns, that when we were in Khan Younis and there was some serious, intense bombing taking place, is you saw that there was this sort of tension that existed. And I remember trying to say, “You know, I think the hospital should be safe.” And they very quickly said, “What would make you think that Al-Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis is any different than Shifa in Gaza City or Al-Indunisi Hospital or any of the other hospitals that have been attacked?”

What happens is, while these attacks are taking place, as you mentioned, people who have been killed, their bodies are left in the street. And it’s very dangerous for any sort of first responder to be able to go and try to retrieve the body or to try to bring somebody who’s wounded, so many people may die in the process. And so, you see healthcare workers digging mass graves to be able to bury some of the wounded there.

And there are thousands of people sheltering in the hospital. Amy, if you were to walk in Nasser Hospital, to go to any floor, you see people in every inch and every corner. They may have this small, thin mattress or a blanket over them, families congregating together, because they assume that the hospital can be a sanctuary. And time and time again, that has been proven incorrect in Gaza.

And so, again, people have no choice. They have nowhere left to go. And the hospital staff are overworked. And I understand that there’s this notion that, you know, the people of Gaza are different. I experienced that. They are so resilient, and they are so impressive, from every single corner or every single angle. They’re able to do so much with so little resources. And they are phenomenal physicians and healthcare workers. But why are we insisting that we keep pushing them to their limit, to the maximum limit? Why do we keep trying to test their superhuman capabilities? That’s something that I found really disturbing while I was there.

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Thaer Ahmad, we’re going to ask you to stay after the show, and we’re going to continue our conversation with your eyewitness report on the ground in Gaza, now just back in Chicago, emergency room physician, volunteered at Al-Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis.

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Despite Looming Gaza Famine, U.S. Halts UNRWA Funding After Israel Claims 12 U.N. Staff Aided 10/7 Attack
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
January 29, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/1/29/ ... transcript

On the same day the U.N.'s highest court accepted South Africa's case alleging genocide in Gaza, Israel accused 12 employees with the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, or UNRWA, of taking part in the Hamas attack on October 7. The United States and at least 10 other nations have now suspended funding to the agency, which retains a staff of over 13,000 and provides essential aid to most of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents. “It’s the worst possible reaction to these allegations,” says Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council. He calls for an investigation but says donors must continue to support aid groups, with UNRWA being the most important. “All of us combined other groups are not even close to being what UNRWA is for the people of Gaza,” says Egeland. UNRWA has responded to the allegations by announcing the group will “immediately terminate the contracts of these staff members and launch an investigation.”

Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman.

Palestinian officials and human rights groups are denouncing the move by the United States and at least 12 other countries to temporarily suspend funding to UNRWA — that’s the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees — after Israel accused 12 UNRWA employees of helping Hamas stage the October 7th attack. Nine of the employees have been fired. UNRWA said two of the accused employees are dead.

UNRWA is one of the largest employers in Gaza, with a staff of over 13,000. It provides aid to most of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents. The agency has long been targeted by Israel. Since Israel’s assault on Gaza began, over 150 UNRWA staffers have been killed.

Francesca Albanese, U.N. special rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, said on social media, quote, “The day after @ICJ concluded that Israel is plausibly committing Genocide in Gaza, some states decided to defund UNRWA, collectively punishing millions of Palestinians at the most critical time, and most likely violating their obligations under the Genocide Convention,” unquote.

Meanwhile, UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini condemned the freezing of funds at a time when famine looms in Gaza. He said, quote, “Palestinians in Gaza did not need [this] additional collective punishment. This stains all of us,” he said. And the U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres has urged donor nations to continue supporting UNRWA.

For more, we’re going to Oslo, Norway, where we’re joined by Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council. Norway has decided to continue its funding of UNRWA.

Jan, thanks so much for being with us. Can you start off by responding to the cutting off of funding at a time when, among other things, Gaza is under bombardment and is on the edge of famine?

JAN EGELAND: Yeah, it’s the worst possible reaction to these allegations that some — I mean, maybe a dozen — of the 13,000 UNRWA aid workers betrayed our humanitarian principles of neutrality and independence and participated in the horrific attacks on Israel. That, however, was met immediately with the response of UNRWA by, as you said, firing these staff and now having an independent investigation. What the donors did — the U.S., the U.K., Germany, Italy, Finland, Netherlands, Australia and some others did — was to cut all aid to the children of Gaza, to the women in Gaza, to the completely innocent there. It’s the worst possible move, at a time when this trapped population is under bombardment. Do not punish the many innocent for the sins of the few who did very wrong, it seems.

AMY GOODMAN: Now it will be interesting to see if Israel hands over the evidence for the U.N. to investigate this situation, because we’re talking about an immediate cutoff by many of these nations, suspending weapons. I wanted to read you a clip of the former Israeli official Noga Arbell, who said, “It will be impossible to win the war if we do not destroy UNRWA, and this destruction must begin immediately.” The Prime Minister Netanyahu said there will be no UNRWA in postwar Gaza. Your response, Jan Egeland? And talk about the — you’re the head of large humanitarian aid group. How important is UNRWA to all of the groups, not to mention the people on the ground?

JAN EGELAND: UNRWA is completely essential. I mean, it’s true that I lead the NRC, Norwegian Refugee Council. We’re a large humanitarian group, across the world. We’re on all sides of all conflict lines, for the displaced and the refugees. And we’ve been in Gaza for two decades. We’ve been funded all over the world by the United States and by 40 other donor nations and international agencies.

In Gaza, we have to recognize that all of us combined other groups are not even close to be what UNRWA is for the people of Gaza. UNRWA was the response to the creation of Israel and the 1948 War that displaced so many of the original Palestinian population to Gaza, to the West Bank and elsewhere. UNRWA was then created to give them relief and works. Since then, there has not been a political, peaceful settlement. And that is because the international community has not been able to force the parties, Israel and the Palestinians, to settle this conflict, and thereby we end up by having humanitarian groups like, first and foremost, UNRWA provide for the population.

So, to undermine and undercut UNRWA as extremists, which the Israeli government are doing, is basically to say, “We’re going to punish the women and children, the innocent, on the other side for what some extremists have done, in a situation of utter turmoil and perpetuous conflict, that we’re not ourselves willing to try to settle with talks on a future.” It’s very wrong.

And the international donors must stay with the humanitarian organizations, like Norway did. Norway is a large donor, giving much more per capita to Palestinians than any other donor. We stay with UNRWA, and we say, “Good that you terminated all of those contracts and fired these people, and good that there is an investigation, and then we’ll draw the conclusions what we should do for the future.”

AMY GOODMAN: Jan Egeland, what evidence is there of Israel’s charges? Have they handed over the evidence?

JAN EGELAND: As far as I know, it’s not been received by UNRWA or by the U.N. investigators. I hope they will be received, so that they can do a thorough investigation of this, very serious allegations. I read about them in The New York Times. And if it’s true, again, they betrayed all of our principles, really — neutrality, impartiality, etc. — that is so important for us, who are unarmed humanitarian workers in the crossfire around the world.

But, of course, no one who’s working across the Middle East can guarantee that there are not people within our midst that may, in the end, have hidden agendas. Palestinians cannot do that. Israelis cannot do that. We know of many Israelis who have done very bad things in Gaza, shooting at people with white flags. It’s documented and detailed. They’ve even shot their own people with white flags. They have settler organizations, Mafia-style settler organizations, displacing unarmed women and children and families across the West Bank. Many of these are recruited to the Israeli Defense Forces. They belong in jail, but they are in the Israeli Defense Forces. No one can guarantee that there are not problems. Therefore, they have to be investigated, and there has to be action taken every time something happens. But don’t cut funding to people in great need. It’s the worst possible response.

AMY GOODMAN: Jan Egeland, I want to thank you for being with us, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, speaking to us from Oslo. I’m Amy Goodman. This is another edition of Democracy Now!

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Biden’s Middle East Policy “Leading Us into a War Whose Aims We Have Not Defined”
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
January 31, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/1/31/ ... transcript

President Biden says he holds Iran responsible for the drone killing of three U.S. soldiers at a base in Jordan and that he has decided on a U.S. response. Tehran has denied any involvement in the attack and threatened to “decisively respond” to any U.S. retaliation. Responsibility for the strike was claimed by the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, a term used to describe a loose coalition of militias that oppose U.S. support for Israel’s assault on Gaza. “This is leading us into a war whose aims we have not defined, whose exit we cannot envision,” says Trita Parsi, the executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, who warns that “continued warfare in Gaza by the Israelis is a direct threat to U.S. national interests.”

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: Iran has threatened to, quote, “decisively respond” to any U.S. attack on Iran following President Joe Biden’s linking of Tehran to the drone attack on Sunday that killed three U.S. soldiers and wounded 40 at a military base in Jordan. President Biden announced Tuesday he had decided how to respond to the drone attack, though he did not say what that response would be. Outside the White House, Biden responded to a reporter’s question on whether he holds Iran responsible for the deaths of the three U.S. soldiers.

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: I do hold them responsible in the sense that they’re supplying the weapons to the people who did it. … I don’t think we need a wider war in the Middle East. That’s not what I’m looking for.

AMY GOODMAN: Iran has denied any involvement in the attack, which targeted Tower 22, a secret U.S. base in northeastern Jordan near the Syrian border. Responsibility for the strike was claimed by the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, a term used to describe a loose coalition of militias that oppose U.S. support for Israel’s assault on Gaza.

Meanwhile, a U.S. Navy destroyer in the Gulf of Aden shot down an anti-ship cruise missile on Tuesday launched by the Houthis in Yemen, the latest attack targeting U.S. forces in the region.

For more, we’re joined in Washington, D.C., by Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He’s authored three books on U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, with a particular focus on Iran and Israel.

Trita, welcome back to Democracy Now!

TRITA PARSI: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: If you can talk about what took place at this remote base, the killing of the three U.S. soldiers, injuring of about 40 others, and the drumbeat by Republicans, as well as Democrats, as well as the media in the United States, for President Biden to militarily respond? What would this mean?

TRITA PARSI: It obviously depends on how Biden responds. If Biden is thinking about responding in terms of attacking Iran on Iranian soil, then, as the warning came from Tehran, it’s very, very likely that there will be a forceful response by the Iranians, which will bring the United States right into a shooting war with Iranians, which is something that the administration says that they have been seeking to avoid. They have been repeating that message several times in the last couple of days.

I think it is important to note that all of this was predicted. From the very beginning, it was clear. As long as there was no material pressure on Israel to cease its bombardment in Gaza, this eventually would lead to a situation in which the United States would be faced with an attack that actually had left Americans killed. If you take a look at the statistics, there were about 60 attacks by these Iraqi militias against U.S. troops and bases during the first two-and-a-half years of Biden’s presidency. Since October 17th, however, when Israel went into Gaza, there’s been more than 160 attacks just in these last 100 days. At some point, one of those attacks was going to kill Americans. And the president has essentially accepted this risk, continued to allow Israel to bombard Gaza, in his own words, indiscriminately, knowing very well that the game of statistic was simply such that at some point the Iraqi militias would succeed and Americans would die.

Now we are in that situation, instead of raising questions about this entire strategy as to why we are putting U.S. troops at risk in order for Israel to continue to indiscriminately bomb and kill and slaughter people in Gaza. Instead, there’s been this frenzy about pushing us further into war. And this is how these endless wars begin, tactical responses to attacks by the other side that in the moment may come across as legitimate because, of course, these attacks against U.S. troops are unacceptable, without any recognition, however, that this is leading us into a war whose aims we have not defined, whose exit we cannot envision.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: But, Trita, when you say that these are legitimate questions of attacks on U.S. troops, but what the heck are U.S. troops continuing to do — be in these countries? This Tower 22, for instance, the U.S. troops in Syria clearly have no authorization from Congress to be there. And importantly, in Iraq, the Iraqi government has been calling for the United States to withdraw the few troops it still has in Iraq from the country, but the U.S. is not disposed to even listen to the government of the country in which its troops are located.

TRITA PARSI: You’re absolutely right. These are the moments where these questions should be asked, which is: Why are we there in the first place? As you noted, the troops in Syria do not have any legal authorization to be there by the U.S. Congress. The troops in Iraq, you know, for such a long time we’ve said that they should be pulled out. Nothing has happened yet. And the essential pretext for keeping them there, which is to fight ISIS, has long expired, because ISIS has been weakened. It’s not been completely eliminated, but these countries, who have far greater stake in the defeat of ISIS, are now capable of handling that on their own, without direct U.S. involvement, and certainly direct U.S. presence, in that fight.

So, we have to really ask ourselves: Why do we continue to have a broader policy in the Middle East, in which we are positioning more than 50,000 American troops in various places in the region right now, in which they’re essentially made to be sitting ducks? And tripwires and a single attack against them can lead to several deaths, which then, again, immediately will cause the rise of these calls for a broader war in the region. This is to the detriment of our own interests.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And this whole issue of blaming Iran as directly responsible for these attacks? Every time we hear of one of these resistance groups, it’s always with the adjective the “Iran-backed” or the “Iran-financed” group. Is it your sense that these groups have their own independent life, or is the Biden administration correct in ascribing all of the real motivation coming from Iran?

TRITA PARSI: I think there’s two exaggerated narratives here. One is the Iranian one, in which they’re essentially claiming that they have no control over these groups at all and that they’re completely independent. That is not true. But also the other narrative, the Washington narrative, is not true, one that claims that the Iranians completely control these different groups and that they have no agency of their own. Clearly, they do have agency of their own. On numerous occasions they have acted against the express wishes of the Iranians, particularly in the case of the Houthis. And even in the case of these Iraqi militias, what has happened just in the last 48 hours is that, clearly, there’s been a lot of back-door diplomacy between the Iranians and the United States, and now the Iraqi militias have come out and said that they’re ceasing their attacks on the U.S. troops at this point. And it’s clear that the Iranians have put some pressure on them to essentially deescalate.

I would suspect that the option that the president is considering right now is to do some form of attack inside of Iraq or Syria, probably give the other side ample heads-up in order to evacuate those specific buildings, nevertheless be able to say that he has responded, make sure that it’s not too damaging, but sufficiently strong to be able to calm some of the voices in Washington, but then leave it at that and ensure that there’s some deescalation afterwards. In the short run, that may work, and it might not be a bad plan. In the longer run, however, as long as there is no ceasefire in Gaza, it is really difficult to foresee that these attacks against U.S. troops will end indefinitely. As long as there’s no ceasefire, I suspect that they will resume at some point, which means then that a continued warfare in Gaza by the Israelis is a direct threat to U.S. national interests because of the manner that it puts U.S. troops at risk in the region.

AMY GOODMAN: Trita Parsi, your colleague at Quincy, Bill Hartung, wrote on X, quote, “On the question of Iran’s role in the deaths of three U.S. servicemen, President Biden said 'I do hold them responsible in the sense that they're supplying the weapons to the people who did it.’ Does he feel the same way about the 26,000 deaths caused by U.S. weapons in Gaza?” Bill Hartung asked. Your response, Trita?

TRITA PARSI: Well, I think Bill is absolutely correct. And I think, whether we agree or not with that argument, we have to recognize that is the sentiment throughout the Middle East right now, and probably throughout the larger part of the world, in which the United States is held responsible for what Israel is doing, not just because providing all of these weapons — more than 10,000 tons of weapons have been shipped since October 7th; president has bypassed Congress twice to get them to Israel even faster — but also because of the very active effort by the Biden administration to block a ceasefire. That has twice happened in the Security Council. That means that the large part of the world do see the United States as directly responsible for this. And that, again, is to the very severe detriment of U.S. interest itself and of U.S.’s global standing.

AMY GOODMAN: Trita Parsi, we want to thank you for being with us, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

Coming up, a shocking raid on a Jenin hospital in the occupied West Bank by undercover Israeli forces dressed as doctors and Muslim women in headscarves kills three Palestinians. We’ll speak with Dr. Mustafa Barghouti in Ramallah. Stay with us.

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“An Act of Assassination”: Mustafa Barghouti Slams Undercover Israeli Raid on Jenin Hospital
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
January 31, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/1/31/ ... transcript

In a shocking raid on a hospital in Jenin in the occupied West Bank on Tuesday, three Palestinians were killed by undercover Israeli assassins disguised as Muslim women and doctors. Citing no evidence, the Israeli military claimed the three men it targeted were involved in planning an imminent attack and were using the hospital as a hideout. Hospital officials said there was no exchange of fire and that the three men were asleep. One of the men had been receiving treatment at the hospital since being injured in an Israeli drone attack on October 25 and was partially paralyzed. Our guest, Dr. Mustafa Barghouti of the Palestinian National Initiative, decries the silence of Western governments in the face of the incident’s brazen and multipronged “violation of international humanitarian law.” It’s part of an extensive pattern of Israeli impunity on the world stage, says Barghouti, while “all the condemnation, all the collective punishment, is directed only at one people: the Palestinians.”

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

Thousands of Palestinians took part in a funeral procession Tuesday in the occupied West Bank for three Palestinians killed by Israeli assassins in a shocking undercover raid on a hospital in Jenin. Surveillance footage from the Ibn Sina Hospital shows around a dozen undercover Israeli forces storming the hospital, guns raised, wearing white doctor’s coats or hospital scrubs and dressed as Muslim women wearing headscarves. One of the undercover troops carried a rifle in one arm and a folded wheelchair in the other.

The Israeli military claimed the three men it targeted were involved in planning an imminent attack and were using the hospital as a hideout, without providing evidence. Hospital officials said there was no exchange of fire and that the three men were asleep, indicating the raid was a targeted killing. One of the three men killed had been receiving treatment at the hospital since being injured in an Israeli drone attack on October 25th and was partially paralyzed.

This is Naji Nazzal, medical director at Ibn Sina Hospital.

NAJI NAZZAL: [translated] They killed the three youth — Basel and Mohammed Ghazawi and Mohammed Jalamneh — in their room while they were sleeping on their beds in the room. They were killed in cold blood with direct gunshots to the head.

AMY GOODMAN: Israeli soldiers and settlers have killed more than 380 Palestinians in the West Bank since October 7th, while more than 6,300 people have been arrested.

For more, we go to Ramallah, where we’re joined by the Palestinian physician, activist, politician Mustafa Barghouti. He serves as general secretary of the Palestinian National Initiative.

Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Dr. Barghouti. If you can start off by laying out exactly what you understand about this assault on the Jenin hospital? Who was killed? Who were these undercover assassins who moved in dressed as Muslim women in headscarves, dressed as doctors and hospital staff?

DR. MUSTAFA BARGHOUTI: Well, it is clear that those who assassinated the three Palestinians in the hospital are a Israeli military group, a special security group that is called the Arabists here. They usually act and dress as Palestinians in various places, and this is not the first crime they committed. But, by the way, this same group was taking photographs with the minister of internal security, the fascist, Ben-Gvir, recently, and he published that photo, and he praised them as heroes.

What they’ve done is really unacceptable and represents a very serious violation of international humanitarian law in four different issues. First of all, they dressed as doctors, as nurses, as health professionals. And they put one of them, one of the assassins, on a wheelchair and dragged him into the hospital. This way, they are endangering actually all medical personnel, because from now on nobody will be sure that he’s dealing with a doctor or somebody who’s disguising as a doctor.

Second, they penetrated the hospital in an illegal manner, very early, in the very early hours of the morning. And they have no right to enter the hospital without even notification and without any alarm. And in principle, they are not allowed to enter the hospital.

Third, they attacked a patient who was handicapped, who was paralyzed, in his bed, while he was sleeping, and shot him in the head, and shot two others who were accompanying him in the same room — three Palestinians — in an act that can only be called as an act of assassination and illegal execution of Palestinians.

In every aspect of international humanitarian law, they have violated the law. They are continuing that. They are proud about it. They’re praising themselves for doing it. And that is all happening because the world is allowing Israel to be impunitive to international law and impunitive to any law, as a matter of fact.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Dr. Barghouti, I also wanted to ask you what’s going — in terms of what’s going on in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, more than 380 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli soldiers and civilians, and supposedly there is no Israeli military activity going on in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. But could you talk about that other war, that the rest of the world is not paying any attention to?

DR. MUSTAFA BARGHOUTI: Yes. Actually, Israel is reoccupying the whole of the West Bank. I mean, since the 7th of October, not only they’ve killed 380 people, but more than that. They are allowing settlers to wander around with guns, and these settlers are behaving as terrorists, terrorizing Palestinian people. And in addition to that, the Israeli army has arrested, since the 7th of October, 6,300 Palestinians in the West Bank, including no less than 200 children, including women. They kidnap people, and they put them in jail without trial, without any legal process, without even charges. And in addition to that, they have divided the country in 224 small islands, with 650 military checkpoints, each of which has become a point of harassment for people and a very dangerous spot, because Palestinians could be killed for no reason. And the Palestinian Authority has lost any authority. Practically, Israel took over all of the West Bank, although West Bank is not under the government of Hamas, as they claim and regard in Gaza.

But that’s not the only thing. All these violations happen, and instead of punishing Israel or blaming Israel for its violations of international law, we see many Western governments, including United States of America, punishing the Palestinians. And if you’ll allow me to speak about that, I think the whole case of UNRWA was used by Israel to distract attention from the ICJ resolution, which indicted Israel for a plausible genocide. Instead of punishing Israel, they took up this case where Israel is claiming that some workers in UNRWA have been engaging in military actions, without any proof, without investigation. And then you found 12 European countries and United States of America and Canada and Japan cut off support to the only organization that is providing humanitarian aid to Gaza, that is the only bridge to humanitarian aid in Gaza. We are subjected to collective punishment. Palestinians, who are the victims of the Israeli aggression, of the possibility of a genocide, are subjected to collective punishment by these governments, none of whom have condemned this Israeli attack on the hospital.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to turn to a clip of the U.S. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller at a briefing on Tuesday. He was being questioned about the Israeli raid on the Jenin hospital by the Associated Press reporter Matt Lee.

MATT LEE: This operation that the Israelis launched in Jenin, the hospital today, what — do you have any comment on that? Is this something that you think is problematic, or is it something that you look at with envy, like this is some kind of great Mission: Impossible mission that we wish that we could also do?

MATTHEW MILLER: So, I’d say that we strongly urge caution whenever operations have the potential to impact civilians and civilian installations. That, of course, includes hospitals. We do recognize the very real security challenges Israel faces, and its legitimate right to defend its people and its territory from terrorism. Israel, of course, has the right to carry out operations to bring terrorists to justice, but those operations need to be conducted in full compliance with international humanitarian law.

MATT LEE: Well, do those operations include going into hospitals and murdering people in their beds, regardless of whether they’re —

MATTHEW MILLER: So —

MATT LEE: — you know, they are suspected or even known terrorists? Is that OK with you guys?

MATTHEW MILLER: So, there was a lot in the premise of that question. Obviously, they — we did know that they went into —

MATT LEE: Well, you don’t think that they went in —

MATTHEW MILLER: We — well, hold on. We —

MATT LEE: — and killed complete — people who were completely innocent, do you?

MATTHEW MILLER: So, let me say that this —

MATT LEE: Because if you did think that, then you would be condemning it, right?

MATTHEW MILLER: We certainly would, but I would say that Israel has said that these were Hamas operatives. They have said that one of them was carrying a gun at the time of the operation. So, I’m not able to speak to the facts of the operation. You’d have to pass some kind of legal judgment, know all of the facts of the operation. But as a general matter, they do have the right to carry out operations to bring terrorists to justice, but they need to be conducted in full —

MATT LEE: Including in hospitals?

MATTHEW MILLER: So, we want them to conduct their operations in compliance with international humanitarian law.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s U.S. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller being questioned by the AP’s Matt Lee. Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, if you can respond to what he’s saying specifically here? And also, overall, then, talk about the attacks in West Bank and Gaza on the healthcare system, going right to Nasser Hospital, which is the largest hospital after Al-Shifa. It’s in southern Gaza, and it has been under siege for the last few days. But start with the spokesperson.

DR. MUSTAFA BARGHOUTI: There are many things to say here, but let me start by what he said about the proper legal process. Israelis should not have entered the hospital. They should not have disguised as doctors and nurses. This is all violation of international humanitarian law. But even if they wanted, they could have arrested these three guys and charged them and give them a due legal process, instead of executing them on the spot, just on the basis of their suspicion. What is the legal here? What is the legal system here? Israel now can say about anybody that he’s a Hamas terrorist or a terrorist or anything else and then kill him in the street, and nobody will condemn that. United States of America has no right not to condemn this action.

And it is unacceptable that they continue to use double standard because they don’t want to criticize Israel. Why? Because they know that they are participating with Israel in what could be perceived or condemned as an act of genocide by supplying Israel with weapons, by supplying Israel with soldiers even. They’re supplying Israel with advisers in its terrible attacks on Gaza.

And on the other hand, Gaza — Israel has been continuously persistent in attacking all hospitals, not only in Gaza, but also in the West Bank. They have subjected Tulkarem hospitals to attacks. They’ve subjected Jenin hospitals to attacks. They’ve subjected hospitals in Nablus to attacks. And they continue to do that in Gaza, where they’re bombarding the hospitals, bombarding the hospitals, killing patients, killing doctors, killing nurses. And add to that the fact that Israel has killed in Gaza, up to now, 304 of our colleagues, medical doctors, nurses, first aid providers. In addition, they injured 300 others while they were performing their medical duties. And they have arrested 90 of these health workers, including the director of Shifa Hospital, who is subjected now to torture in Israeli concentration camp in the Negev near Be’er Sheva.

This is the exact behavior of Israel. Do we hear any condemnation from the United States of America or from the United Kingdom? No. All the condemnation, all the punishment, all the collective punishment, is directed only at one people, which are the Palestinian people. We don’t understand how could these countries that claim that they are struggling — that they claim they support human rights, they claim they support democracy, they claim they support international law, and at the same time not only they are allowing these crimes to happen against the Palestinians, but they are actually participating in them.

That’s what’s happened in Jenin, like what’s happening now in Gaza, where, by the way, 32,000 Palestinians have been killed so far, if we include the 7,000 under the rubble, and more than 65,000 people have been injured. That is more than 4% of the population of Gaza. Had this happened in the United States of America, you would be talking about 12 million people killed or injured in less than three months. Proportionally, the number of Palestinians killed in Gaza after three months is more than all Americans killed in all America’s wars since the 18th century. Is that acceptable? Is that allowable? That is the question that should be directed to Biden administration and to the American administration. How could they continue to allow Israel to be so impunitive to international law? And how could they allow this act of collective punishment against the Palestinian population when it comes to UNRWA and other health, humanitarian services?

By the way, the International Court of Justice decided there should be support to providing humanitarian supplies to Palestinians, and Israel should be responsible for that. What do we see in reality now in Gaza? I’ve been talking to our 30 medical teams working there. They say there is a decline in the amount of support that is coming, in an unprecedented manner. What they get is absolutely not enough, less than 100 trucks daily, while what they need is 1,000 trucks daily, considering the terrible situation. We have people in the north and in the center of Gaza who are calling us, saying they are starving. They have no food. They have no medical supplies. Our colleagues have to operate on people, injured people, without anesthesia. And 600,000 people, according to the World Food Programme now, 600,000 Palestinians now in Gaza are starving. What does the United States of America do about that? Do they do anything, or just protect Israel and provide protection for this Israeli aggression?

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, we want to ask if you can stay with us 'til after break. We're going to talk about that conference that took place in Israel. Almost a third of the Israeli Cabinet was there. A number of the Cabinet members addressed the conference, calling for the Israeli resettlement of Gaza. We’re talking to Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, Palestinian physician, activist and politician, who serves as general secretary of the Palestinian National Initiative. We’ll also be joined by a reporter for +972 Magazine. Oren Ziv will join us from Tel Aviv. He covered the conference of thousands of Israelis. Back in 20 seconds.

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Israeli Cabinet Members Join Settler Event of Thousands Calling for Ethnic Cleansing of Gaza
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
January 31, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/1/31/ ... transcript

We speak with an Israeli reporter who covered a major conference in Jerusalem calling for Palestinians to be removed from Gaza in order to rebuild Jewish settlements. The conference was attended by about a third of the Israeli Cabinet, including Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, both of whom have long been involved in the extremist settler movement in the West Bank. Conference-goers were greeted by a huge map of planned illegal settlements in Gaza, and the atmosphere was joyful and celebratory, in contrast to what Israeli journalist Oren Ziv with +972 Magazine says is a somber atmosphere in Israeli public life following the October 7 Hamas attack. “This is not just a bunch of extremists; it’s the government,” adds Palestinian physician and activist Mustafa Barghouti in Ramallah.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

Thousands of Israelis gathered in Jerusalem Sunday for a major conference calling for Palestinians to be removed from Gaza in order to rebuild Jewish settlements. The conference, organized by the settler group Nahala, was dubbed “Settlement Brings Security in Victory,” was attended by almost a third of the Israeli Cabinet. Among the most high-profile speakers was Israel’s Public Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.

ITAMAR BEN-GVIR: [translated] Today everyone already understands that fleeing brings war and that if you don’t want another 7th of October, you have to return home to control the territory.

AMY GOODMAN: Speakers at the conference called for the Israeli settlement of Gaza and the continued expansion of settlements in the West Bank. Another prominent speaker on Sunday’s conference was Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.

BEZALEL SMOTRICH: [translated] We were settling our land from width to length, controlling it and fighting terror always and bringing, with God’s help, security to all of Israel. You know what the answer is: Without settlement, there is no security.

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we go to Tel Aviv, where we’re joined by Oren Ziv, a reporter and photographer for +972 Magazine who covered the settler conference in Jerusalem on Sunday. His piece is headlined “Turning Zeitoun into Shivat Zion: Israeli summit envisions Gaza resettlement.” Staying with us is Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, speaking to us from Ramallah.

Oren, why don’t you start off by just describing this conference, the significance of it, and what shocked you most as you covered it?

OREN ZIV: Thank you for having me, first of all.

I have to say this is the last event in a series of events and protests of the settler movement calling to what they say is going back to Gaza, returning to the settlements that were evicted by Israel in the 2005 disengagement.

This event was significant because thousands of people took part in it in West Jerusalem. They gathered in a big hall. I could say half of the participants were youth or college students. And you had mostly religious right-wing settlers.

There at the entrance, you had a big map, a huge map, showing the different settlements they plan to establish in the Gaza Strip, some of them literally on top of Palestinian villages and towns that exist and, of course, unfortunately, were destroyed by the Israeli aggression in the recent months.

Inside the hall, we had speeches of, as you said, ministers, parliament members. Four out of five of the — representatives of four out of five of the parties that are in the coalition of Netanyahu’s government were there, 11 ministers and 15 parliament members, so a big support from the government, and also settlers’ leaders and activists.

For me, personally, the most shocking thing was not only the plan to establish the settlements, but the fact that people there were dancing and singing, being happy and joyful. And this is important to understand that in the Israeli public atmosphere, this is something you barely see since the attack of 7 of October. You don’t see public events where people are joyful, not because, you know, most of the Israeli public ignore the horrific reality in Gaza, but because of the war, because of the attack of 7th of October, because Israeli soldiers are being killed every day in the war. You don’t see many of those events. And it shocked even mainstream Israelis to see ministers and people who take those decisions regarding the war dancing, was very shocking for many people. And I think this is because while the vast or big parts of the Israeli public is still in shock, the settler movement see this war as an opportunity to expand their plans to settle in Gaza.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Oren, I wanted to ask you — apparently, the British Foreign Minister David Cameron, I think some reports are saying, reacting to this conference over the weekend, reaffirmed Britain’s position that there must be a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I’m wondering your thoughts about how some of these Western countries continue to support the war in Gaza while maintaining a two-state solution that they know the Israeli government has made clear it has no intention of following through on.

OREN ZIV: Yes, I think this conference made it very clear, because ahead of the hearing in The Hague, the ICJ hearing, official Israel, Netanyahu and other members of more the center kind of part of the government, tried to portray a picture that Israel will not stay in Gaza, will not settle in Gaza, this is a temporary war. And this event and the participant of senior members of the government makes it very clear that, A, they don’t want any two-state solution — but this we’ve seen over the years — but, more importantly, that they don’t care about the international law. They don’t care about the ICJ procedure. It doesn’t threaten them to continue to express those opinions.

One could think that after ministers and the prime minister himself were quoted in the South African appeal to the court — this were the evidence, actually, what the Israeli politician, the genocidal discourse they were promoting in the beginning of the war — one could think they will be a bit more careful. But the opposite. This was not — it’s important to mention this was not only a conference talking about settling in Gaza. It was very clear, and most of the speakers talked about what they call is the encouraging immigration or forcing people from Gaza. So it’s very clear that the settlement movement is on the account of the residents of Gaza.

Daniella Weiss, one of the settlers’ leader who was leading the conference, when we asked her, “What would happen to the Palestinians if your plans come true?” she said, “They would leave. They would have to leave. We don’t give them food. We don’t give them water.” She was talking about the siege. And she said, “They would leave. They would have to spread around the world.” Also, Minister Ben-Gvir, who was a bit more careful in his language, said, “We have to encourage immigration from Gaza.” So this was a consensus in the conference.

AMY GOODMAN: Oren, we just played a clip of Bezalel Smotrich, who’s a Cabinet member. I’m looking at a Times of Israel article that says — from a few years ago — that the former Shin Bet deputy chief, Yitzhak Ilan — he was the former deputy head of Shin Bet security service — “reportedly told a political gathering that Smotrich was a 'Jewish terrorist,' who planned to blow up cars on a major highway during the 2005 Gaza disengagement,” when the Israeli settlers were forced out, by Israel, of Gaza. Can you talk about the significance of this today, what, almost 20 years later, who Smotrich is? He was held for three weeks, questioned by Shin Bet, ultimately wasn’t charged. Apparently, they didn’t want to endanger their sources, who talked about him being found with massive amounts of gasoline.

OREN ZIV: Yes, this is true. Smotrich was a security prisoner. He was suspected in that but not convicted. But this shows us, together with Ben-Gvir, that — I personally documented and saw him attacking Palestinians, attacking Israeli left-wing activists along the years, before he became a parliament member and a minister. So, these are people that are well known from the right-wing extreme activities. And unfortunately, today, they decide the policies. They lead Israel.

And I think this is why also Netanyahu and kind of the more center-right part of the government cannot say this is not official Israel, this is not the official line, because we’ve seen Netanyahu, ahead of the ICJ, and we’ve seen other speakers of Israel saying, “Well, they’re ministers, they’re parliament members, but they’re not in the war cabinet. They don’t take the decision.” This is, of course, just rhetoric to protect Israel from being accountable, I think, when we see such a big number of ministers, senior ministers, and parliament members taking part in this conference, that is callingly open to transfer, to displace Palestinians from Gaza.

And maybe more important, I think this discourse, it’s important to say, also encourages soldiers on the ground, right-wing soldiers, settler soldiers, or just ordinary soldiers that hear this rhetoric on Israeli mainstream media, on social media. It encourages them to carry out war crimes. The war itself is horrific enough, but I’m afraid that this rhetoric by members of the government encourages or gives the feeling to the soldiers on the ground they can do anything, because if Israel, according to this conference, will eventually control the Gaza Strip, it means soldiers on the ground — and we’ve seen that on TikTok, on Instagram, on social media — can do whatever they want, because it belongs to Israel. So they can explode houses. They can vandalize. They can steal property. They can do whatever they want, because this eventually will be Israeli property.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I’d like to bring Dr. Mustafa Barghouti back into the conversation. Doctor, your reaction to this conference and to these post-invasion plans of the Israeli — of a good portion of the Israeli government?

DR. MUSTAFA BARGHOUTI: Ben-Gvir and Smotrich are known to be fascists, of course, and sometimes they are described as psychopaths. But they are not really only psychopaths. They are the ones who are deciding the Israeli government policy. And none of their statements, fascist statements, was ever negated by Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel. And these guys are representing what can be called Jewish religious extreme fundamentalism combined with Jewish supremacy thinking. And they believe that the whole of the land of Palestine and Jordan, as well, and parts of Saudi Arabia and Syria are supposed to be Jewish land.

And these guys are practically repeating — confirming, actually, what had happened in 1948, when Israel, as a settler colonial project, committed 50 massacres against Palestinians and evicted people from 520 communities and then razed them to the ground. They want to repeat what Israel did in 1948, another Nakba against Palestinian people. And they are speaking openly about three war crimes simultaneously: the war crime of ethnic cleansing, the war crime of collective punishment and the war crime of genocide. They want to evict everybody from Gaza. And that’s, by the way, what Netanyahu himself called for in the very first days of this war. That’s what Gallant called for when he said that Palestinians are “human animals” and should be treated as such.

And what you’ve seen in this conference, this is not just a bunch of extremists; it’s the government, the Israeli government. Twelve ministers of the Israeli government attended that meeting and supported it. Fifteen members of the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, attended it. So you are talking here practically about the official Israeli policy, which is directed at ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and then settlements, not only in Gaza. As a matter of fact, also in the West Bank, we are now subjected to settler terror — settlers’ terror, which has evicted already 30 Palestinian communities from their land, from their homes in the West Bank. Sixty percent of the West Bank is now practically forbidden for Palestinians and is allocated to the Israeli settlers.

And we don’t have to go far. All we need — all you need to do is to show the map that Netanyahu has shown in the United States or in the United Nations two weeks before the war in Gaza. He showed the map of Israel including the annexation of all of the West Bank, all of Gaza Strip and all of the Golan Heights. What everybody must understand, that this is the Israeli official government policy. And that’s why it has to be punished. That’s why it has to be sanctioned. And that’s why it has to be exposed. And Israel cannot be allowed to continue to be absolutely unaccountable to international law and absolutely impunitive to international law.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you both for being with us, Mustafa Barghouti, Palestinian physician, activist and politician. We also want to thank Oren Ziv in Tel Aviv, a reporter and photojournalist with +972 Magazine.

[admin]

“The Houthis Are Not Iranian Proxies”: Helen Lackner on the History & Politics of Yemen’s Ansar Allah
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
February 01, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/2/1/y ... transcript

The U.S. continues to launch airstrikes on Yemen in response to the campaign of missile and drone attacks on commercial ships along key global trade routes through the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden led by Ansar Allah, also known as the Houthis. The Houthi strikes have expanded from targets connected to Israel, in protest of the siege and bombing of Gaza, to ships affiliated with the U.S. and U.K. in what the group calls acts of self-defense. “The Houthis have been extremely explicit and repeat on an almost daily basis that their attacks on ships in the Red Sea will stop as soon as the Gaza war ends,” says Helen Lackner, author of several books on Yemen, who describes the history of the Houthis, the political landscape in Yemen, and debunks the idea the group is controlled by Iran. “The Iranian involvement has become greater, but it’s very important to know that the Houthis are an independent movement. The Houthis are not Iranian proxies. … They make their own decisions.”

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: The U.S. military carried out new airstrikes in Yemen today, targeting 10 drones and a ground control station that it said, quote, “presented an imminent threat to merchant vessels and U.S. Navy ships in the region.” The airstrikes are the latest targeting the Houthis. The group, also known as Ansar Allah, has waged a campaign of attacks on commercial ships in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden since November 19th in response to Israel’s assault on Gaza.

On Tuesday, U.S. Central Command said its forces shot down an anti-ship cruise missile. According to CNN, the missile came within a mile of a U.S. destroyer before it was shot down, marking the closest a Houthi attack has come to a U.S. warship.

Meanwhile, the Houthis said they would stage more attacks on U.S. and British warships in the Red Sea in what they called acts of self-defense. This is Houthi military spokesperson Yahya Sarea on Wednesday.

YAHYA SAREA: [translated] The Yemeni Armed Forces will confront the American-British escalation with escalation and will not hesitate to carry out comprehensive and effective military operations in retaliation to any British-American foolishness against beloved Yemen.

AMY GOODMAN: The Houthi campaign targeting shipping has affected a key route for global trade between Asia, the Middle East and Europe, with several shipping companies suspending transit through the Red Sea. On Thursday, Italy’s defense minister warned the shipping disruptions threaten to destabilize Italy’s economy. This comes as the European Union’s Foreign Minister Josep Borrell said on Wednesday the EU plans to launch a naval mission of its own within three weeks to help defend cargo ships in the Red Sea.

For more, we’re joined by Helen Lackner, the author of several books on Yemen, including Yemen in Crisis: The Road to War and Yemen: Poverty and Conflict. She’s been involved with Yemen for over half a century, lived there for a total of more than 15 years between the '70s and the 2010s. She's joining us from Oxford, England.

Helen Lackner, welcome to Democracy Now! Can you tell us who the Houthis are and explain what their demands are, the significance of what’s happening in the Red Sea?

HELEN LACKNER: Well, thank you very much for inviting me.

Yes, I think I’ll start with the second half of your question, which relates directly to what has been happening and the various announcements you’ve just made. And the Houthis have been extremely explicit and repeat on an almost daily basis that their attacks on ships in the Red Sea will stop as soon as the Gaza war ends and humanitarian and other supplies are allowed into Gaza, and therefore the Palestinians will no longer be under the threat and the horrors that you’ve earlier described and that most of us have seen on our screens for many, many weeks. So, the important thing is that although the U.S. and the U.K. claim that they’re only defending free movement in the Red Sea and refuse to accept any connection between this and the war in Gaza, for the Houthis it’s absolutely straightforward and explicit that, number one, they’re only targeting ships that have any connection with Israel — whether they’re going to Israel, coming from Israel, delivering stuff owned by Israelis, or whatever, any connection whatever — and that other ships are not targeted — except, of course, now. Since the U.S. and U.K. strikes have started, they are also targeting U.S. and U.K. ships. So, they’re absolutely explicit that all other ships are welcome to travel through the Red Sea and that there is — you know, there is complete freedom of movement for any ship other than an Israeli- or U.K.- or U.S.-connected one. And I think that’s extremely important.

And the reason the Houthis have taken this action in support of Palestine is that one of the very fundamental policy issues or ideological positions that the Houthis have is the support for Palestine and, more directly, being anti-Israelis. The Houthis are — the Houthis’ foreign policy is quite clearly summarized in their basic slogan of “death to America and death to Israel.” They are absolutely — you know, their positions are absolutely straightforward on these points. So, although they are willing to allow other ships through, they are actually, up to a certain point, not displeased at the fact that the Americans and the U.S. are now actually targeting their various launch positions.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Helen, could you give us some background, though? What are the origins of this movement? And how is that they came to play such a prominent role in Yemen?

HELEN LACKNER: Yeah. So, the Houthi movement started in the 1980s, 1990s. I think what you need to understand is that, in terms of religious sects, Yemen is divided into two basic sects: a Sunni sect of — called al-Shafi’is, who basically live in the majority of the country, and a branch of Shi’ism called the Zaydis, who live basically in the mountainous highlands of Yemen. And the Houthis are al-Zaydis. And in that sense — and again, within the Zaydi movement, there’s a certain variety, in the sense that the Houthis, I would say, are extremist Zaydists, and they’ve developed their ideology and their policies to strengthen their own branch of Zaydism. And they basically emerged in response to the rise of Sunni Salafi fundamentalism within their own area in the far north of Yemen. And so there have been conflicts and problems, you know, arising since the 1990s.

Between 2004 and 2010, there was a series of six wars between the Houthis facing and fighting the then-regime of President Ali Abdullah Saleh. And this ended, basically — each one ended with a ceasefire which was promptly broken. The reason the last one in 2010 was not broken was as the result of the uprisings in 2011 of the — you know, known as the Arab Spring in various places. And that was a moment when the Houthis joined with the revolutionaries and basically took a position against — you know, they continued their position against the regime. So, they then were for — during what was a transition — supposedly, a transition period between the Saleh regime and what should have become a more democratic regime in 2014, the Houthis then changed their alliances, and indeed Saleh changed his alliance, so they operated together against the transitional government. And then, eventually, that allowed them to take over the capital Sana’a in 2014 and then to oust the existing transitional government in early 2015.

And that’s when, really, the war started, which was then internationalized from March 2015 with the intervention of what was known as the Saudi-led coalition, which was basically a coalition led by the Saudis and the Emiratis, with a few other states with minor roles, but supported actively by the U.S., the Europeans and the British and others.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And what was the point at which —

HELEN LACKNER: So, those are really —

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Sorry, just to clarify, what was the point at which the Iranians started backing the Houthis? Was it in the moment when the Saudi-led bombing began, in 2015, or was it prior to that? And if you could also clarify the distinction between — as you said, the Yemenis are Zaydi Shias, and to what extent Zaydis are ideologically or theologically aligned with the dominant form of Shi’ism in Iran, and what that has to do with Iran’s complicity or support for Houthis, whether or not now they do as Iran says?

HELEN LACKNER: Yeah. Thank you for these, for bringing up these points. The Iranian role at the time, in 2015, when we’re in the internationalized civil war started, was minimal. The Iranian involvement with the Houthis, and prior to that and since then, has always been connected with, partly, theological connections, but differences. So, in that sense, the Houthis are differentiating themselves from other Zaydis by having adopted a number of the rituals and activities and approaches of the Iranian Twelvers. It’s all a matter of how many imams they trust or they believe in after the Prophet Muhammad. But in practice, the Houthis are getting closer to the Iranians in — to the Iranian Shi’ism over the last decades, but they are still — sorry, the last decade, but they are still, you know, quite distinct. So the alliance is much more a political alliance.

And the Iranian involvement, which was really very, very insignificant at the beginning of this war, has increased over time, and is primarily — you know, has been, for a while, mainly financial and of providing fuel and things like that to the Houthis, but more recently has been much more focused on military activities and primarily on the supply of advanced technology. If you look at the Houthi weaponry — and I’m no military expert — but the Houthi weaponry originally was basically a lot of Scuds and other Russian-supplied materials and also some American-supplied materials to the Saleh regime. And these have been upgraded and improved and changed, to some extent, thanks to Iranian support. So, in that sense, you have more — the Iranian involvement has become greater.

But it’s very important to note that the Houthis are an independent movement. The Houthis are not Iranian proxies. They are not Iranian servants. They don’t do what the Iranians tell them to do. They make their own decisions. If their decisions and their policies coincide with those of Iran, then, you know, there’s no issue. But if they don’t, they don’t do it. So it’s very important, I think, to destroy this myth of Iran-backed Houthis in a single word as if it’s kind of a conglomerate. That is not the case.

AMY GOODMAN: Helen, if —

HELEN LACKNER: I hope that briefly answered your point.

AMY GOODMAN: Yes, and we don’t have much time, but I did want to ask you about the Houthi support in Yemen, whether it’s increased, and the Houthi human rights record.

HELEN LACKNER: Yeah, great. Well, yeah, as you said, we haven’t got much time. Basically, the Houthi — the support for the Houthis in Yemen has increased, has multiplied. I can’t even imagine — find a suitable terminology to say it. The Houthis, you know, who run an extremely authoritarian and autocratic regime, which is not a pleasant regime for people to live under, you know, and was lacking support — and you have to remember that the Houthis actually rule and run the lives of two-thirds of the population of Yemen, so, you know, about 20 million people live under Houthi rule, and it’s not a pleasant place to be. There’s no freedom of expression. You know, women are oppressed. All kinds of negative features connected with Houthi rule.

But the Yemeni population are extremely supportive of Palestine. And therefore, this action of the Houthis has, you know, really, really increased their support. If you take a look and you maybe show on your screen some of the demonstrations that happen every Friday in Sana’a and in other cities, they’ve become absolutely massive, because although people may not like living under Houthi rule, they agree with the Houthi actions in support of Palestine. And so, that has increased and improved their popularity an enormous amount, not only in the area they rule, but also in the rest of Yemen, which is, you know, not ruled by them.

AMY GOODMAN: Helen Lackner, we want to thank you so much for being with us, author of a number of books on Yemen, including Yemen in Crisis: The Road to War and Yemen: Poverty and Conflict. She’s been involved with Yemen for over 50 years, has lived there for about 15.

Coming up, an investigative report by the BBC reveals new details of how American mercenaries were hired by the United Arab Emirates to run an assassination campaign in Yemen. Back in 60 seconds.