2024-02-02 ‘We Are Shocked’ – Belgium Summons Israeli Ambassador following Agency Bombing in Gaza Israel has destroyed more than half of Gaza, claiming that it is destroying ‘terrorist infrastructure’. The destruction, however, is clearly indiscriminate, according to reports. The EU country of Belgium has declared it would summon the Israeli ambassador after the office building housing the Belgian Agency for Development Cooperation (Enabel) in Gaza was bombed and destroyed by Israeli airstrikes. The decision was communicated via X by Belgian Foreign Minister Hadja Lahbib. “Targeting civilian buildings is unacceptable,” she said in a post on X.https://www.palestinechronicle.com/we-are-shocked-belgium-summons-israeli-ambassador-following-agency-bombing-in-gaza/
2023-11-27 Israel has summoned the ambassadors for Belgium and Spain Meanwhile, Israel has summoned the ambassadors for Belgium and Spain after their countries’ leaders spoke at the Rafah border crossing between Egypt and Gaza Friday condemning Israeli attacks against Palestinian civilians. This is Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez.
2023-12-01 Israel’s AI-Aided Targeting Creates Massacre ‘Factory’ in Gaza “This is the first AI-facilitated genocide in history,” said one observer. As Israel on Friday resumed bombarding Gaza following a weeklong pause, a joint investigation by a pair of progressive Israeli media outlets sheds new light on the Israel Defense Forces’ use of artificial intelligence to select targets, essentially creating what one former Israeli officer called a “mass assassination factory.”
The Israeli sites +972 Magazine and Local Call interviewed seven current and former Israeli intelligence officials including participants in the current war on Gaza, who spoke under condition of anonymity. Their testimonies—as well as official statements by Israeli officials, interviews with Palestinians, documentation from the besieged strip, and data—show how Israeli leaders know roughly how many Palestinian civilians are likely to be killed in each of its attacks, and how the use of AI-based systems is accelerating a noncombatant casualty rate that more resembles the indiscriminate bombing of World War II than the modern era of codified civilian protection under international humanitarian law.
“Nothing happens by accident,” another source stressed. “When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed—that it was a price worth paying in order to hit [another] target.”https://www.commondreams.org/news/gaza-civilian-casualties-2666414736
2023-12-01 “Mass Assassination Factory”: Israel Using AI to Generate Targets in Gaza, Increasing Civilian Toll We look at a new report that reveals how Israel is using artificial intelligence to draw up targets in its military assault of Gaza. The report’s author, journalist Yuval Abraham, has found that the IDF’s increasing use of AI is partly a response to previous operations in Gaza when Israel quickly ran out of military targets, causing it to loosen its constraints on attacks that could kill civilians. In other words, the “civilian devastation that is happening right now in Gaza” is the result of a “war policy that has a very loose interpretation of what a military target is.” This targeting of private homes and residences to kill alleged combatants means that “when a child is killed in Gaza, it’s because somebody made a decision it was worth it.” It has turned the Israeli military into a “mass assassination factory,” with a “total disregard for Palestinian civil life,” continues Abraham, who also notes that, as an Israeli journalist, his reporting is still subject to military censors. We also discuss another recent report revealing that Israel may have received intelligence about Hamas’s planned attack more than a year in advance of October 7, but ignored it. https://www.democracynow.org/2023/12/1/israel_gaza_war_gospel_artificial_intelligence
2023-11-30 ‘A mass assassination factory’: Inside Israel’s calculated bombing of Gaza The Israeli army’s expanded authorization for bombing non-military targets, the loosening of constraints regarding expected civilian casualties, and the use of an artificial intelligence system to generate more potential targets than ever before, appear to have contributed to the destructive nature of the initial stages of Israel’s current war on the Gaza Strip, an investigation by +972 Magazine and Local Call reveals. These factors, as described by current and former Israeli intelligence members, have likely played a role in producing what has been one of the deadliest military campaigns against Palestinians since the Nakba of 1948. https://www.972mag.com/mass-assassination-factory-israel-calculated-bombing-gaza/
2023-11-27 Thousands leave behind American lives to join Israel’s war in Gaza The Isseroffs are among thousands of Americans with ties to the Israeli military as it prosecutes a fierce, divisive retaliatory war in Gaza. Weeks of aerial bombardment and an ensuing ground offensive — both now temporarily paused to enable an exchange of hostages and prisoners — have killed thousands of children and other civilians in the Palestinian enclave. With neighborhoods leveled, hospitals crippled, and food, fuel and medical supplies scarce, the crisis has torn at some families, and those directly involved have pondered difficult questions about the cause they have joined.
About 10,000 people living in the United States have reported for Israeli military duty after receiving draft notices, part of a larger mobilization of 360,000 troops, Israeli officials told The Washington Post. At least eight U.S. citizens have been killed while serving in Israeli security forces since the war began, according to the State Department.
The rush of U.S. citizens willing to take up arms for Israel resembles, in ways, the early days of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, whose government appealed to Americans and other foreign nationals to help repel the incursion now nearing the start of its third year. But there are differences, too.
Most important in bursting the bubble of U.S. leadership in international affairs is its tragic, morally suicidal complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The Biden administration has gone to extraordinary lengths to enable Israel to murder tens of thousands of innocent, defenseless Palestinian civilians, most of them women and children. It has provided—and dramatically increased—economic subsidies. It has rush-shipped tens of thousands of tons of weapons and ammunition to Israel, even bypassing Congress to do so. It has provided military cover in the form of two aircraft carrier battle groups to prevent other nations from intervening to stop the slaughter. It has exercised its veto power at the U.N. Security Council to prevent a cease-fire, even for humanitarian reasons. The U.S. is all in on the massacre of tens of thousands of defenseless Palestinian civilians.
As a result of the U.S.’ help, Israel is able to bomb, with impunity, working hospitals, refugee camps, schools, churches, mosques, relief agencies, anything where civilians shelter to try to escape the apocalyptic destruction. And it is doing this, knowing that civilians are the main casualties, thus making it not just “killing” innocent, defenseless women and children, but murdering them. And this is still just the beginning of the depraved degeneracy.
The World Food Program says that as many as 750,000 civilians are now being intentionally starved. This, by a supposedly civilized nation. And, with no hospitals, no medicines, no water, and no sewerage, it is only a matter of time before epidemic diseases emerge and spread and kill hundreds of thousands. It is undisguised mass murder for the undeniable purpose of ethnic cleansing, which has always been Israel’s agenda, since even before it was founded. It is genocide, pure and simple, and all in public view of the world’s 8 billion people.
In Gaza, the U.S. returns to its roots, albeit vicariously. It, too, was founded in genocide, in its case, of the 50+ million native Americans who once populated the North American continent. It too, used vastly disproportionate force, the mechanized tools of an industrial-age civilization systematically exterminating a stone-age one. It, too, bolstered its commitment to ethnic cleansing with its self-flattering myths of racial superiority and its carefully cultivated conceits of cultural supremacy. The difference is that then, all the world was not watching the daily depravity. And it had not formed its present-day revulsion and international prohibitions against such state-sponsored barbarism. Now it is, and has. The damage to the U.S.’ reputation is palpable, undeniable, stunning, and irreversible.
The U.S. has defiled itself, humiliated itself, as no other nation could possibly do. It has destroyed goodwill that has taken centuries to acquire and that will never be recovered. If Ukraine exemplifies yet another iconic U.S. military failure, and BRICS the changing of the guard in the economic realm, the sadistic savagery in Gaza repudiates the moral right of the U.S. to lead… anything. No nation will ever again be intimidated by its hypocritical tut-tutting about human rights or its sanctimonious finger wagging about the responsibility to protect. It is, more than anything else, the world’s leading purveyor of death and all the nations of the world can see it.
The combination of these three events signal the 2023 bursting of the bubble of U.S. global leadership. The year will be remembered as the pivot point, the turning away from the post-Cold War unipolar era, and the ushering in of the post-unipolar, post-Western-centric multipolar world. Five hundred years of Western domination of the world order are ending. There will be no going back. https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/2023-us-leadership-bubble-burst
2023-11-27 Is Gaza the Start of World War III or Simply the Peaking of U.S. Empire? As important as declining U.S. economic and military power are to collapsing American influence in the world, declining U.S. diplomatic power is equally important. Is Gaza the Sarajevo on the Sinai or the U.S.’ Suez? That is, is it the starting point of World War III, or the apex of U.S. empire, signaling irreversible decline? The difference could not be more important.
Everything in past 75 years of Israeli history is but a footnote to these two vestigial sins: colonization and ethnic cleansing. The present war is simply Netanyahu’s seizing the pretext of war, as Ben-Gurion commended, to carry out the Final Solution. The world sees this. It is as unmistakable as it is despicable, something no civilized nation could sanction. Yet, the U.S. claims impunity, for both itself and Israel, in supporting Israel’s destruction and rape of the Palestinian people. It is important to understand why this is so abhorrent to most of the people of the world, and, therefore, so damaging to longer-term U.S. interests.
Most of the nations of the world were at one time in the not-too-distant past colonies of Western imperial powers. They carry in their cultural consciousness, their historical narratives, the obloquy, the shame and disgrace, of having been dominated and humiliated by white Western powers for decades, in some cases for centuries.
They see Israel and Palestine as simply an updated version of the same predation they suffered themselves before their struggles for national independence, beginning right after World War II. This is what the Wars for National Liberation were about in the 1950s and 1960s. More than 90 nations fought their Western imperial occupiers to achieve independence.
Four billion people are witnessing daily the unthinkable horrors inflicted by the Israelis on the Palestinians, and the U.S.’ breathless support for it: the murder of thousands of innocent, defenseless children; the intentional destruction of hospitals, schools, churches, mosques, relief agencies, escape convoys, water and power stations; the shutting off of food, water, electricity, medicine, and fuel, in the certainty that this will render Gaza uninhabitable, i.e., to complete the ethnic cleansing that has always, since the beginning of the enterprise, in the Zionists’ own words, been the goal.
It is impossible to overstate the collapse of U.S. influence and prestige in the world, especially in the Middle East. That is why Suez might be the right analogy for how the U.S. empire has peaked and is now destroying itself. It bumbles along, intoxicated with the childish delusion of its “exceptionalism” and its rosy remembrance of its once-great, glorious past. It is, instead, like a snowball, careening down a mountainside, oblivious of its path, heedless of its destructive, out-of-control nature, and picking up mass and momentum as it hurtles to its own demise. What lies at the bottom is impossible to know. But it will not be pretty. https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/gaza-world-war-iii
2024-04-27 Will AI Fight Wars Autonomously in the Future? Or Are We Already There? rtificial intelligence is expected to impact human life in every aspect of its existence, but the most concerning one that experts fear the most is its application in warfare, and they are not wrong here. The US military has conducted the first dogfight between a human controlled aircraft and an AI controlled jet fighter.
On the other hand, AI is already deciding who to target in the real war zones, like Gaza and Ukraine. Where Israel is being said to have deployed an AI algorithm called Lavender to identify potential targets by an Israeli publication +972 Magazine research and is said to have minimal human decision application, which resulted in a huge number of civilian casualties. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/will-ai-fight-wars-autonomously-in-the-future-or-are-we-already-there/ar-AA1nM0cE?
2024-04-11 The Rise of Autonomous Drones in Modern Military Operations Some of the Air Force’s commonly used unmanned aircraft, such as the MQ-9 Reaper and RQ-4 Global Hawk, are technologically advanced and costly, primarily suitable for operations in less contested airspace. Furthermore, they require regular inspections and maintenance to ensure mission readiness. This is where XQ-58A flies in… This unmanned aircraft showcases remarkable performance and human-machine teaming is now more effective than ever before as this unmanned combat aircraft conducts test flights alongside manned fighter aircraft. The X-47B is a revolutionary unmanned combat air vehicle (UCAV) that was developed as part of the US Navy’s Joint Unmanned Combat Air Systems (J-UCAS) program. This program aimed to develop a new generation of autonomous unmanned aircraft that could perform a variety of missions, including intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and strike operations. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/the-rise-of-autonomous-drones-in-modern-military-operations/vi-BB1luE0j?
2023-12-09 The Pentagon’s Rush To Deploy AI-Enabled Weapons Is Going To Kill Us an unusually bitter fight between those company officials who favor unrestricted research on advanced forms of artificial intelligence (AI) and those who, fearing the potentially catastrophic outcomes of such endeavors, sought to slow the pace of AI development.
At approximately the same time as this epochal battle was getting under way, a similar struggle was unfolding at the United Nations in New York and government offices in Washington, D.C., over the development of autonomous weapons systems—drone ships, planes, and tanks operated by AI rather than humans. In this contest, a broad coalition of diplomats and human rights activists have sought to impose a legally binding ban on such devices—called “killer robots” by opponents—while officials at the Departments of State and Defense have argued for their rapid development.
“In terms of both potential upsides and downsides, superintelligence will be more powerful than other technologies humanity has had to contend with in the past,” AI whiz Sam Altman and his top lieutenants wrote in May. “We can have a dramatically more prosperous future; but we have to manage risk to get there.”
For Altman, as for many others in the AI field, that risk has an “existential” dimension, entailing the possible collapse of human civilization—and, at the extreme, human extinction. “I think if this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong,” he told a Senate hearing on May 16. Altman also signed an open letter released by the Center for AI Safety on May 30 warning of the possible “risk of extinction from AI.” Mitigating that risk, the letter avowed, “should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war.” https://www.activistpost.com/2023/12/the-pentagons-rush-to-deploy-ai-enabled-weapons-is-going-to-kill-us-all.html
2023-12-08 Artificial Intelligence and the Law: Where’s the Line? With every new incident, questions arise regarding whether the use of AI is ethical or legal. “There are arguments on both sides of the ledger in that AI can overcome or avoid human biases by taking a data-driven approach. But also, that AI itself can produce biased or inappropriate outcomes or outputs, for a host of different reasons,” said Dr. Felicity Bell, Research Fellow for the Law Society at the University of New South Wales.
The July 2020 essay, entitled “Is Human Judgment Necessary? Artificial Intelligence, Algorithmic Governance, and the Law,” warns that “even promising AI systems designed to enhance human judgment involve subtle forms of displacement.” The essay calls for preserving the “conditions of human judgment in appropriate domains of social and legal action.”
mankind must be careful with the tools we use, especially, “if you don’t want to hurt yourself with them.” “Where I see the trap would be on getting used to letting this thing do the thinking and the creating for you. Perhaps, this could become compulsive or addictive just like social media is.” https://www.activistpost.com/2023/12/artificial-intelligence-and-the-law-wheres-the-line.html
The Israeli sites +972 Magazine and Local Call interviewed seven current and former Israeli intelligence officials including participants in the current war on Gaza, who spoke under condition of anonymity. Their testimonies—as well as official statements by Israeli officials, interviews with Palestinians, documentation from the besieged strip, and data—show how Israeli leaders know roughly how many Palestinian civilians are likely to be killed in each of its attacks, and how the use of AI-based systems is accelerating a noncombatant casualty rate that more resembles the indiscriminate bombing of World War II than the modern era of codified civilian protection under international humanitarian law.
“Nothing happens by accident,” another source stressed. “When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed—that it was a price worth paying in order to hit [another] target.”https://www.commondreams.org/news/gaza-civilian-casualties-2666414736
2023-12-01 “Mass Assassination Factory”: Israel Using AI to Generate Targets in Gaza, Increasing Civilian Toll We look at a new report that reveals how Israel is using artificial intelligence to draw up targets in its military assault of Gaza. The report’s author, journalist Yuval Abraham, has found that the IDF’s increasing use of AI is partly a response to previous operations in Gaza when Israel quickly ran out of military targets, causing it to loosen its constraints on attacks that could kill civilians. In other words, the “civilian devastation that is happening right now in Gaza” is the result of a “war policy that has a very loose interpretation of what a military target is.” This targeting of private homes and residences to kill alleged combatants means that “when a child is killed in Gaza, it’s because somebody made a decision it was worth it.” It has turned the Israeli military into a “mass assassination factory,” with a “total disregard for Palestinian civil life,” continues Abraham, who also notes that, as an Israeli journalist, his reporting is still subject to military censors. We also discuss another recent report revealing that Israel may have received intelligence about Hamas’s planned attack more than a year in advance of October 7, but ignored it. https://www.democracynow.org/2023/12/1/israel_gaza_war_gospel_artificial_intelligence
2023-11-30 ‘A mass assassination factory’: Inside Israel’s calculated bombing of Gaza The Israeli army’s expanded authorization for bombing non-military targets, the loosening of constraints regarding expected civilian casualties, and the use of an artificial intelligence system to generate more potential targets than ever before, appear to have contributed to the destructive nature of the initial stages of Israel’s current war on the Gaza Strip, an investigation by +972 Magazine and Local Call reveals. These factors, as described by current and former Israeli intelligence members, have likely played a role in producing what has been one of the deadliest military campaigns against Palestinians since the Nakba of 1948. https://www.972mag.com/mass-assassination-factory-israel-calculated-bombing-gaza/
2023-10-10 Automated Warfare – KPFA – Against the Grain Many U.S. military establishment bigwigs are pushing the development of automated and autonomous weapons systems. Roberto González questions whether this robo-fanaticism, as he calls it, is justified. He also describes efforts to address human warfighters’ distrust of machines. (Encore presentation.) Roberto J. González, War Virtually: The Quest to Automate Conflict, Militarize Data, and Predict the Future University of California Press, 2022 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/automated-warfare/id78900506?
[MEK Note: While clearly biased toward Palestinians, they also bring you information and viewpoints that corporate media ignores or distorts. They don’t answer to the Big Money that controls corporate media]
Israeli girl Liel Hatsroni, 12, was killed after Israeli forces used a tank to shell a house in Kibbutz Be’eri on 7 October, according to an Israeli who survived the violence. (via Twitter)
An Israeli child completely incinerated at Kibbutz Be’eri was killed by two tank shells shot by Israeli forces at the end of an hours-long gun battle, a survivor of the same carnage told the Israeli state broadcaster Kan earlier this month.
Yasmin Porat, taken captive with at least a dozen other Israeli civilians on 7 October, told Kan radio that a fellow captive, 12-year-old Liel Hatsroni, survived to the end of the battle and only died when Israeli forces fired two tank shells at the house where they were held hostage by Hamas fighters.
Hatsroni’s obliteration by Israeli tank fire emerged this month after her family decided to mourn her with a public funeral, even though the government had not officially pronounced her dead.
Although Hatsroni’s 69-year-old grandfather Aviyah and twin brother Yanai were buried two weeks after their deaths on 7 October, her 73-year-old aunt and guardian Ayala was only buried on 15 November, the day after Israel officially declared her dead.
On that day the Hatsroni family also held funeral rites for Liel, though the state still listed her as missing because “to this day they have not found any of her remains,” Yasmin Porat told Kan on 15 November.
You can listen to Porat speak in that interview in this video, with English subtitles:
Three days later, the Hatsroni family was informed that archaeologists working with the Kahanist-run Israel Antiquities Authority had finally identified Liel’s remains at the house, Ynet, an Israeli news site, reported.
Although at least 50 people died in that particular bloodbath – and at least 10 of them were Israeli civilians – Porat herself left the battle intact, when one Hamas commander, out of a force that numbered about 40 fighters, surrendered.
Israeli forces called to the scene instructed the Hamas commander to come out with Porat, effectively turning her into a human shield.
“Two big booms”
In her 15 November interview on Kan’s Kalman Liberman program, Porat recounts how, of the dozen or so Israelis she was held captive with on 7 October, only one other person – Be’eri resident Hadas Dagan – survived the ordeal.
The two tank shells fired into the house at the very end of the battle killed both women’s partners, the young Liel Hatsroni and everyone else in the house who was still left alive up to then, she said.
At around 7:30 pm, after some four hours of crossfire consisting of “hundreds of thousands of bullets,” Porat peered from behind Israeli lines and observed an Israeli tank firing two shells into the small kibbutz house.
“I thought to myself, why are they shooting tank shells into the house,” Porat told Kan. “And I asked one of the people who was with me, why are they shooting? So they explained to me that it was to break the walls, in order to help purify the house.”
At the time, the captive Hadas Dagan was caught for hours in the crossfire between the two sides, lying face down on the grassy lawn. When the Israeli tank shells hit, Dagan felt their impact throughout her whole body, she told Porat after finally emerging from the combat zone in tatters.
“Yasmin, when the two big booms hit, I felt like I flew in the air,” Porat recalls a disheveled Dagan telling her minutes after the battle ended. Dagan was still covered in her husband’s blood, her hair standing on end, full of dust and styrofoam. “It took me two or three minutes to open my eyes, I didn’t feel my body. I was completely paralyzed,” Dagan told her, Porat says.
Upon regaining consciousness, Dagan realized that the captives who had been lying on either side of her – her husband Adi Dagan and Porat’s partner, Tal Katz – had just died from tank shell shrapnel. “When I opened my eyes, I saw that my Adi is dying,” Porat recalls Dagan saying. “Your Tal also stopped moving at that point.”
Though neither Porat nor Dagan witnessed the moment that fellow hostage Liel Hatsroni was incinerated by Israeli tank shells, they both immediately understood that she had died in the explosions, because after screaming for hours on end, since the beginning of the battle, she suddenly went silent.
“I remember, when I was there for the first hour, she did not stop screaming,” Porat told Kan, and noted that her recollections of Hatsroni dovetailed with what Hadas Dagan told her.
“The girl [Liel Hatsroni] did not stop screaming all those hours. She didn’t stop screaming,” Porat recalls Dagan telling her. “Yasmin, when those two shells hit, she stopped screaming. There was silence then.”
“So what do you glean from that? That after that very massive incident, the shooting, which concluded with two shells, that is pretty much when everyone died,” Porat told Kan.
Six weeks after the ordeal of 7 October, Porat concludes that Liel Hatsroni’s remains had yet to be recovered because Israeli tank shelling totally incinerated her and most of the house, finishing off many Hamas fighters and any other surviving captives.
“Part of the house is torched. The house of Hadas and Adi [Dagan] no longer exists. I don’t know how that happened,” Porat said. “If you ask me, I estimate, based on what happened in other houses, she [Liel Hatsroni] apparently burned completely.”
That Israel confirmed the death of Liel’s aunt Ayala only 38 days after 7 October suggests that she, too, was likely burned beyond recognition by Israeli tank shells.
A day after Porat’s revelation on live radio that Liel Hatsroni had been torched to death by tank fire, an Israeli official confirmed that she was not nearly the only person incinerated by Israel on 7 October and in the days that immediately followed.
Israeli government spokesperson Mark Regev inadvertently admitted in a 16 November MSNBC interview that some 200 bodies Israel had claimed for weeks were those of Israelis burned to death by Palestinians were now known to be the bodies of Palestinian fighters burned to death by Israel.
“We originally said, in the atrocious Hamas attack upon our people on October 7th, we had the number at 1,400 casualties and now we’ve revised that down to 1,200 because we understood that we’d overestimated, we made a mistake. There were actually bodies that were so badly burnt we thought they were ours, in the end apparently they were Hamas terrorists,” Regev told MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan.
Meanwhile, Hatsroni’s death is being used by Israeli politicians to incite and justify Israel’s vengeful slaughter of thousands of Palestinian children in Gaza.
Cracks in official narrative
After burning the bodies of some 200 Palestinian fighters, 12-year-old Israeli Liel Hatsroni, and an unknown number of other Israeli civilians, then lying to the world about who burned them and using their deaths and suffering as a pretext to destroy Gaza and annihilate more than 14,000 Palestinians there so far, Israel is finally starting to come clean about its actual contribution to the death toll on that horrific day.
Last week, Israeli daily Haaretzreported that a police investigation into the events of 7 October “indicates that an IDF [Israeli military] combat helicopter that arrived to the scene and fired at terrorists there apparently also hit some festival participants” at the Supernova rave held near the Gaza boundary that day.
Another police source criticizedHaaretz and appeared to row back the statement the following day, but did not deny that Israel had killed some Israelis.
The first cracks in the official Israeli narrative about 7 October came from testimony by Yasmin Porat, a 44-year-old mother of three who fled the Supernova rave with her partner Tal Katz and found temporary shelter at Kibbutz Be’eri with local residents Adi and Hadas Dagan – until mid-afternoon. At that point, Hamas fighters captured all four and took them next door, pooling them with another group of eight or more kibbutz residents.
In her initial interview with Kan on 15 October, first reported in English by The Electronic Intifada the following day, Porat revealed that at least some of the dozen-plus Israelis held hostage with her at Be’eri died as a result of Israeli gunfire.
Asked by Kan radio host Aryeh Golan if some of the Israeli casualties of that battle had died by friendly fire, Porat answered “undoubtedly.”
Porat also told Kan and other Israeli media outlets that she and the other Israelis were not mistreated while held by Hamas fighters on 7 October. “They did not abuse us. They treated us very humanely,” Porat told Kan. “They give us something to drink here and there. When they see we are nervous they calm us down. It was very frightening but no one treated us violently.”
The goal of her Hamas captors was to trade captives for Palestinian prisoners incarcerated by Israel, Porat insists.
The 40 or so Hamas fighters who held the Israelis captive for six hours intended to take Porat and the other Israelis back to Gaza – and indeed, they could easily have done so, she said.
The fighters mistakenly assumed, however, that Israeli forces caught by surprise at dawn would have already regrouped by midday and encircled their position by the afternoon. “They could have left with us back and forth 10 times,” said Porat.
There is an increasing body of evidence that either through recklessness or by design, Israeli forces were responsible for killing a not insignificant number of Israelis on and after 7 October.
Yasmin Porat has, by now, been interviewed by just about every Israeli mainstream media outlet, but it still seems as if Israel isn’t listening to her.
Porat and Hadas Dagan, the only survivors from their group of captives, affirm that two Israeli tank shells set the house they were held in on fire and killed at least three of the people in their group: both of their partners and 12-year-old Liel Hatsroni.
In announcing Hatsroni’s death last week , Ynet nevertheless concluded that Hamas fighters “murdered everyone. Afterwards, they torched the house.”
Ali Abunimah is executive director of The Electronic Intifada.
Yasmin Porat: We come out and suddenly there was a very tense ceasefire. All of the weapons were pointed at us. All the Hamas were pointing at me and him. He begins disrobing while walking, he removes underwear, socks and undershirt, leaving him naked as the day he was born. That’s how we start walking in front of everyone, with him naked and me in front of him as a human shield. At that time, when we pass the living room and the porch with the dining area, where we were previously, then I go out to the yard. And there I recognize my [partner] Tal, Hadas, Adi Dagan and another Tal, the son of one couple, and another elderly couple, lying on the ground, the lawn, you can’t imagine what it looked like. Just spread out there. And full of shrapnel. Endless shooting and they are lying on the lawn, like corpses, but they were all still alive, you can see it. I managed while leaving to ask my Tal, “Tal are you okay?” and he lifted his head, and he was very frightened, because they didn’t even realize that I came out, because their heads were to the ground. Everyone put their heads to the ground to protect themselves.
Kalman Liebskind (Host): You go outside with him, and where do you go?
Yasmin Porat: And we walk the length of the yard, we reach the two rocks of the terraces, we climb them like so, and then we’re standing right on the road. We’re just across the street from the YAMAM [Israeli forces] and it’s a small road, a narrow road. Lots of police aiming their guns at us. They are shouting at him on the megaphone what I imagine was, “Let her go! Let her go!” We approach them a little more, he gives me a push, I quickly run to the police, they quickly arrest him. That’s the story of how I was saved. That’s where I was saved and held by the police. I stay with them for another three hours of battle. I simply crossed to the side of the police, but I stayed on the scene at Be’eri and at that incident until 8:30 PM.
Asaf Liberman (Host): And the terrorist that released you, what did they do to him?
Yasmin Porat: They arrested him. They arrested him and interrogated him. And by the way, today I know from the people who were there with me that he gave up lots of information, they got lots and lots of information from him that, in retrospect, saved many people, which we can say is heartening.
Kalman Liebskind (Host): When you are saved, he crosses over to the side of the police, everyone you left behind, our people, are alive?
Yasmin Porat: They stay in exactly the same situation, They are all alive. You know I didn’t count. If you had about 40 terrorists, you’re still left with 40 terrorists, because only one surrendered out of the 40. So it doesn’t change the balance of power. You stay in the same situation.
Kalman Liebskind (Host): But there were about 15 of our people.
Yasmin Porat: Great. So now they’re 14 with 39 terrorists, only two people left. And it was masses of people. And then I cross over to the police. And right away I tell them that I am able to talk, and that they can interrogate me and ask me whatever they want. And I did actually sit there with the commander of the unit, and I describe to him what the house looks like and where the terrorists are and where the hostages are. I actually draw for him: “Look, here, on the lawn there are four hostages that are lying this way on the lawn. Here are two that are lying under the terrace. And in the living room there is a woman lying like this, and a woman lying like this.” And I tell them about the twins [Yanai and Liel Hatsroni] and [their guardian and aunt Ayala Hatsroni], I didn’t see them. You know what, really, when I leave, they are the only ones I don’t see. I heard Liel the whole time, so I know for certain that they were there. I believe they were to my left – never mind. I tried to explain to them that from somewhere near the kitchen is where I heard the screams coming from. I don’t see her, but I hear her, and I hear where the screams are coming from. I tried to explain to them where all the hostages were. Obviously there were more terrorists in the house than hostages. The terrorists were in the reinforced safe room, they were in the bathroom, they were spread out under the whole terrace, under a living room window that gave protection. There was a window that protected from bullets, so lots of terrorists sat under it. Let’s say they grabbed the better spots to hide.
I remain there during those three hours, they interrogate me at least three to four times to understand what the house looks like and what to do, and how many hostages there are. And you see that they just don’t understand the scale of it. The first time I tell them that there are about 40 terrorists, they tell me, “It can’t be. It seems like you’re exaggerating.” They don’t say it [disparagingly]. “Look here at us, we are forty,” I tell them. “There’s more of them than you.’ They didn’t believe me! Our army was also still naive.
Kalman Liebskind (Host): So even at that stage, the police did not grasp the magnitude of the event.
Yasmin Porat: It did not grasp the magnitude of the event. When I say 40, they think maybe I’m exaggerating a little, that I’m hysterical.
Asaf Liberman (Host): Wow.
Yasmin Porat: That’s it. And now I’m connecting you to a little bit of the testimony of Hadas Dagan. It was not a testimony, I mean that I spoke to her personally, to understand what happened to my partner. Because in the end he was killed next to her, and I wanted to understand. And then through that story I also heard the answer about Liel, more or less. In any case, I leave. Understand, everyone [else] stays there. A battle takes place. Now they know more details than me. And the battle doesn’t end. There were attempts at a negotiation. Even that terrorist that surrendered spoke on the megaphone with his friends, in order to try to maybe convince them.
Kalman Liebskind (Host): For the [Israeli] police, this time.
Yasmin Porat: Yes, for the [Israeli] police, he speaks on the megaphone in Arabic, while naked. He screams at them. It was really … you know. And they aren’t convinced.
Kalman Liebskind (Host): Can I say something here in parentheses, Yasmin? We must assume that had this large group that was with you, this group of terrorists, known how good its position was on the kibbutz – were it elsewhere on the kibbutz, this story would have ended differently, right?
Yasmin Porat: You mean if they had known…
Kalman Liebskind (Host): That they could have just taken you and kidnapped you!
Yasmin Porat: Ah yes, yes, yes.
Kalman Liebskind (Host): They don’t have to negotiate with anyone, they don’t have to call 100 for the police. Nothing!
Yasmin Porat: Look, the first … Today we see the whole kidnapping story. You see that most of the kidnappings occurred in the morning, at 10, 11, 12 o’clock. By 3 [pm], like every [Israeli] citizen could, they think that the army is already everywhere. They could have left with us back and forth 10 times. But they didn’t believe that was the situation, so they asked for the police. In any case, I’ll cut it short for you. For another three hours, I am at a very intense battle. But now I am on the side of the so-called good guys. But everyone else is under very, very heavy crossfire, with terrorists who I understood were not cooperating, and were saying, “if you don’t let us leave alive, then everyone dies.” And at a certain point, a tank arrives opposite the house. I think it was 7 or 7:30 pm. Understand, it was still daylight saving time, and it was starting to get dark. And I thought to myself, why are they shooting tank shells into the house. And I asked one of the people who was with me, why are they shooting? So they explained to me that it was to break the walls, in order to help purify the house. I will now turn for a bit to my conversation with Hadas. I know Hadas Dagan, who as I explained was one of four people lying down outside next to each other. And another two lay down under the terrace.
Kalman Liebskind (Host): I remind you that Hadas was the lady of the house [where they were originally caught by Hamas fighters].
Yasmin Porat: Yes. The lady of the house Hadas Dagan. She believes there were two booms. I know there were the two shells shot by the tank. She didn’t even know that, because again, they can’t see anything. They are flat on the ground. She told me in these words: “Yasmin, when the two big booms hit, I felt like I flew in the air.” She felt that she died and came back to life. Briefly she feels she flew in the air and landed, though I don’t think that occurred. She told me, “It took me 2-3 minutes to open my eyes, I didn’t feel my body. I was completely paralyzed. When I opened my eyes, I saw that my Adi [Dagan] is dying.” His main artery was cut and he’s bleeding all over. She tells me she put her thumb on his main artery, but he was already dead. And then she told me, “Your Tal also stopped moving at that point,” because they lay on either side of her. Today I believe that they were human shields for her, naturally. They were two big guys and she is a small woman. They lay on her sides, and they just…
Asaf Liberman (Host): Yasmin, there are two things that require clarification for a moment.
Yasmin Porat: Yeah.
Asaf Liberman (Host): At what stage, and how did all the hostages still held in the house die? And how does Hadas get out of there alive?
Yasmin Porat: Right.
Kalman Liebskind (Host): The only one. It must be said, from that whole event, only you and Hadas came out alive.
Yasmin Porat: True. Understand the whole incident – I left there at 8:30 pm. I leave [the house], at 5:30 pm I am with the police. And I stay until 8:30 pm while there is a crazy battle. Hours of battle between the two sides. They’re all there! Understand. There were 4 people lying next to each other on the lawn in the garden. So they are always there, vulnerable to hundreds of thousands of bullets and shrapnel in the air there. There is no way to avoid damage from that. To tell you in the end who died by whose bullet? There is no way to know. It was from the crossfire. To my understanding. Because Hadas got out alive. And she says there were no executions, or anything like that. At least not the people with her. Because she tells me that after she got up from the two explosions, she lifted her head, or something like that, she felt that her husband was bleeding on her. She was covered in his blood. I also met her afterwards. And she also told me that my Tal who was lying down – he stopped moving by that point. And then, as I recall, she tells me this, she tells me: “The girl [12-year-old Liel Hatsroni] did not stop screaming all those hours. She didn’t stop screaming.” So I said, “I remember, when I was there for the first hour, she did not stop screaming.” And then she told me, “Yasmin, when those two shells hit, she stopped screaming. There was silence then.” So what do you glean from that? That after that very massive incident, the shooting, which concluded with two shells, that is pretty much when everyone died. At least that is what I know from my conversation with Hadas, who describes it. And she, for some reason, maybe because she is a small woman, and all the shrapnel flew at her husband and my partner, somehow she – listen, she did not look normal when she got out. She looked – I met her in the morning, and if you would have seen how she looked in the evening, it’s not the same person. But somehow she survived it. No shrapnel hit her. She was also hit by shrapnel, but no shrapnel hit her where –
Asaf Liberman (Host): So all the terrorists were simply killed there?
Yasmin Porat: They were all killed. All the hostages and all the terrorists. A house full of bodies. Understand…
Asaf Liberman (Host): And Hadas somehow…
Yasmin Porat: Somehow, out of all that killing, it’s like God wanted her to be with us and saved her. She walks away from all that inferno. When I saw her, she was– understand, when I met her in the morning, she was dressed nicely, her hair was combed, you know, a normal person. When she walked out of there, all her hair was on end, full of dust, with styrofoam in it.
Asaf Liberman (Host): Do you understand why there was no determination that Liel died until yesterday?
Yasmin Porat: I understood that to this day they have not found any of her remains. I think that some of the explosives there, they threw grenades and – I don’t know much about ammunition. Some of it was bigger than rifle bullets. I know they catch fire – and I also see now in photographs, part of the house is torched. The house of Hadas and Adi no longer exists. I don’t know how that happened. I can’t describe what these houses look like. Okay, you see it. If you ask me, I estimate, based on what happened in other houses, she apparently burned completely. She [Liel] did not flee from there. They did not kidnap her. I’m telling you, they did not get out of there. It was no longer the stage that anyone got out of there. No. We’re talking about 8:30 pm, total darkness, the house is burned, full of – at that point there was a lot of army there. YAMAM and MATKAL and they surrounded the house. That means that Liel could not have gotten out of there. And Hadas, who was there for all four hours of the battle, recalls that she didn’t stop screaming, the girl [Liel Hatsroni]. And suddenly she stops.
Asaf Liberman (Host): Okay.
Kalman Liebskind (Host): Yasmin Porat. Yasmin, thanks a lot for the–
Yasmin Porat: Thanks to you.
Kalman Liebskind (Host): -for sharing with us this really crazy story.
Yasmin Porat: [Sighs]. Yes. Thank you, and may we only know better days.
Kalman Liebskind (Host): Only better days.
Asaf Liberman (Host): Thank you Yasmin. Thank you very much.
Disability in the State of Palestine – Wikipedia Disability affects 2.1% of the population of the State of Palestine, a total of 92,710 people, according to the 2017 Population, Housing and Establishments Census. The majority (47,109 people) are affected by mobility impairments, while a fifth are under 18 years old. Geographic distribution is almost evenly split between the West Bank (48%) and the Gaza Strip (52%). 75% live in urban areas, 13% in rural areas, and 12% live in the camps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disability_in_the_State_of_Palestine
2023-11-19 ‘Where will I leave these children, on the street?’ The struggle for survival faced by disabled Palestinians in Gaza Since Israel’s complete siege on Gaza began, Hazem Saeed Al-Naizi, the director of an orphanage in Gaza City, had been gripped with fear, worried about when food, water and other basic necessities might run out for the dozens of children and young people in his care, most of whom are living with disabilities.
For Palestinians trying to escape the fighting, living with a disability can be its own effective death sentence. People who are deaf or blind are less likely to know about evacuation orders and cannot hear or see the strikes, disability advocates and aid organizations told CNN. Others with intellectual disabilities may be unable to communicate their whereabouts to relatives or rescue workers, while people with physical disabilities who rely on wheelchairs and other assistive devices are unable to navigate rubble, let alone walk miles south.
2023-11-19 Israel-Palestine war: Disabled man among two Palestinians killed in West Bank by Israeli raids More than 200 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank have been killed by Israeli forces since war broke out. Issam al-Fayed, 45, a disabled Palestinian man, was killed after being shot by Israeli forces during a raid on Jenin that has been described by residents as the largest in the city since 7 October.
The Palestinian Red Crescent said its medical teams had received Fayed before transferring him to Jenin Government Hospital, where he was pronounced dead. In Bethlehem, another Palestinian was shot and killed by Israeli forces in the Dheisheh refugee camp. Wafa news agency identified the man as Omar Ali al-Laham, who was shot in the head during an overnight Israeli raid on the camp. https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-palestine-war-disabled-man-killed-west-bank-raids
2023-11=18 Israel-Palestine war: The harsh reality of disabled people trying to survive war For nearly seven kilometres, Rewaa Moeen had carried her six-year-old paralysed brother Ahmed on foot, fighting exhaustion and an intense fear that she and her family could be bombed at any moment before they reach the southern areas of the Gaza Strip. But the long journey to “safety” has been made even more arduous by the rubble of flattened buildings for the hundreds of thousands of people who had been ordered by the Israeli military to move to the south of the blockaded strip, using a so-called “safe corridor” while only carrying their ID cards with them. Knowing that they could not take anything, Moeen’s family did not risk taking Ahmed’s wheelchair, fearing that he might be targeted.
“At the beginning of the war when many families evacuated their homes, we refused to evacuate and head to the south. Part of the reason was that moving my brother is not easy, he needs a special environment and a place to be able to do his daily activities easily,” Moeen, 27, told Middle East Eye. https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-palestine-war-gaza-disabled-people-trying-survive
2023-10-27 People with disabilities not spared by Israel’s war machine on Gaza Strip Bombs, lack of electricity and roads damaged by Israeli offensive make life impossible for disabled people in Gaza. In 2022, the Palestinian Center for Human Rights said the number of Palestinians with disabilities in the occupied territories was about 93,000, constituting 2.1 percent of the total population. Some 52 percent of that number, or 48,360, live in the Gaza Strip, while the rest reside in the occupied West Bank. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/27/people-with-disabilities-not-spared-from-israels-war-machine-on-gaza-strip
2023-05-14 Family with disabled children among hundreds of Gaza’s homeless after latest fighting with Israel When Najah Nabhan learned that her home was about to be bombed by Israel, she knew she had to get out quickly. What she didn’t know was how she would get her four children with special needs out of the building in time.
With the help of neighbors, her children, who are unable to walk on their own, were carried to safety. But the airstrike flattened the three-story building, leaving 42 members of Nabhan’s extended family homeless and leaving her children without the wheelchairs, crutches and medical equipment they need to move about.
2019-03-29 ‘Shoot to maim’: How Israel created a generation on crutches in Gaza Doctors tell MEE that Palestinian protesters’ crippling injuries, especially to lower limbs, were inflicted deliberately.
Israeli snipers have intentionally maimed Palestinians protesting in Gaza over the past year, creating a generation of disabled youth and overwhelming the territory’s already crippled medical system, frontline doctors tell Middle East Eye. According to a United Nations inquiry released this month, over 80 percent of the 6,106 protesters wounded in the first nine months of the Great March of Return were shot in the lower limbs.
Israeli soldiers intentionally shot civilians and may have committed war crimes in their heavy-handed response to the protests, which have been held regularly across Gaza since 30 March 2018, the report concluded. Healthcare providers say the pattern of wounds shows that Israeli soldiers are purposefully shooting to maim protesters, most of whom are in their 20s and now require long-term medical care. “The soldier knows exactly where he’s putting the bullet. This is not random. This is very intimate. This is very planned,” said Ghassan Abu Sitta, professor of surgery at the American University of Beirut (AUB), who treated injured protesters for three weeks at Gaza’s Al-Awda Hospital last May. https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/shoot-maim-how-israel-created-generation-crutches-gaza
2023-11-17 NATO Member’s Pro-Palestine Move; Chaos At Biden’s Party HQ; South Korea’s ‘Shoe’ Stir | Israel War US ally and NATO nation Norway’s parliament adopts a resolution calling on the government to be ready to recognise an “independent” Palestinian state. The resolution, brought by the ruling coalition, was passed after eight out of the 10 parties in parliament voted in favour of it. Another US key partner in East Asia, South Korea, witnessed symbolic protests against war in Gaza. About 2000 shoes were put on display to honour the deaths in Gaza, the occupied West Bank, and Israel. Anti-Israel protests also erupted in the US, Spain, Mexico, and the Netherlands. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYTdcf1ud7o
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