Hamas Military Attack Not Terrorism
Updated 2023-12-31
2023-12-06 Freed Israeli Hostages TEAR INTO Netanyahu For Incompetence In Leaked Audio Freed Israeli hostages are furious at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for his handling of their captivity. Ana Kasparian discusses on The Young Turks. Freed hostage says Israel bombing terrorized them and caused injuries to some hostages and that IDF helicopter fired on them as they were taken to Gaza on Oct 7. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAixhJUi4AU
2023-12-04 Israeli Peace Activists Face Reckoning After Hamas Attack [MEK Note: IDF probably killed most of the people in the Kibbutz. Maybe those “progressive” Kibbutz were the reason the IDF didn’t care about them alive or as hostages!]
The Oct. 7 attacks that Israeli authorities say killed more than 1,200 people, mostly civilians, are prompting a reckoning in parts of southern Israel that bore the brunt of the violence, and that for decades have been home to scores of activists who sought to promote coexistence and greater rights for Palestinians. The region, home to many collective communities known as kibbutzim, has also been far more supportive of pursuing negotiations for a two-state solution with Palestinians than the rest of Israeli society, which has moved sharply to the right since the failure of peace talks more than two decades ago.
In Nir Oz, Be’eri and Kfar Aza—three of the kibbutzim that were among the hardest hit in the Hamas attacks—right-wing parties garnered on average less than 10% of the vote in last year’s elections, which resulted in what analysts consider the most right-wing, religious and ultranationalist government in Israel’s history. Among Israelis who identified as left-wing, 83% were in favor of a two-state solution, in contrast with 16% on the right, according to a recent poll.
“The kibbutzim were bastions of the left. You’ll find in the kibbutzim people who went out of their way to cooperate with Arabs,” said Benny Morris, a historian of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “I fear that Oct. 7, with the mass killing of civilians, has further undermined the left in Israel.” https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/israeli-peace-activists-face-reckoning-after-hamas-attack/ar-AA1kWXw5
2023-11-25 Israeli child “burned completely” by Israeli tank fire at kibbutz [MEK Note: Ret entire article] 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. https://electronicintifada.net/content/israeli-child-burned-completely-israeli-tank-fire-kibbutz/41706, https://progressiveissuesblog.com/2023/11/27/2023-11-25-israeli-child-burned-completely-by-israeli-tank-fire-at-kibbutz/
2023-11-24 U.S. Marine Makes Undeniable Case For Hamas! Former United States Marine Kenneth O’Keefe has become an outspoken critic of Israeli policy toward Palestine, announcing that if he were Palestinian he would likely fight back against the occupation by any means necessary. In a clip dating from more than 10 years ago O’Keefe even compares Hamas to the African National Congress and Nelson Mandela. Jimmy and Americans’ Comedian Kurt Metzger discuss efforts by certain non-profit groups to label O’Keefe an anti-semite. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kuRZ2FcRaU
2023-11-22 The evidence Israel killed its own citizens on 7 October Army major admits Israel killed Israeli civilians. On Saturday, it was revealed that an official Israel source had concluded for the first time that Israeli fire hit at least some Israelis. This growing body of evidence undermines the official Israeli narrative of savage Palestinian terrorists invading Israel bent on slaughtering civilians. Hamas maintains that its targets were military and that it did not intentionally kill civilians.
The Israeli officer’s admission came in a series of videos about 7 October posted by Legacy Conversations, an obscure YouTube channel run by military and police veterans of South Africa’s apartheid regime. In a video posted only one week after 7 October, Major Graeme said that Israeli detainees in Palestinian custody were “possibly killed by Israeli airstrikes when the Israeli Air Force attacked vehicles that were returning into Gaza.”https://asawinstanley.substack.com/p/the-evidence-israel-killed-its-own
2023-11-21 US OK’s Bombing Children as Hamas Fights for Their Freedom from Illegal Israeli Military Occupation Israel maintains an illegal air, sea and land blockade on Gaza, not allowing anyone, including children, to escape being bombed to death. The US government, providing Israel with warplanes, missiles, weapons, ammunition and political and diplomatic backing, is complicit in this ongoing genocide of bombing to death thousands of militarily confined civilians, mostly women and children . The Israeli government claims the right to bomb its illegally occupied and captive Palestinians and kill all the members of their Hamas government.
As to Israel’s using the Israelis killed in the Hamas Oct 7th attack to justify the Israeli response of murdering already 12, 500 Palestinian civilians, resent investigations find that a large fraction of the bodies recovered had been charred beyond all recognition, making it very difficult to distinguish between Israelis and Hamas attackers. Since the Hamas fighters had only been carrying rifles and other small arms, all those victims must have been killed by explosive tank shells and Hellfire missiles. Indeed, newly released video footage revealed that hundreds of Israeli cars had been incinerated by such munitions, suggesting that many or most of the Israelis killed fleeing the dance festival had probably died at the hands of trigger-happy Apache pilots, who reported that they had blasted anything that moved. https://countercurrents.org/2023/11/us-oks-bombing-children-as-hamas-fights-for-their-freedom-from-illegal-israeli-military-occupation/
2023-11-19 IDF combat helicopter targeting Hamas fighters at Nova festival massacre shot some partygoers by mistake, says Haaretz An Israeli police investigation into the music-festival massacre on October 7 indicates that the IDF mistakenly shot some festival attendees while firing at Hamas, a report suggested. The alleged debacle was reported by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, citing an unnamed police source. The source told Haaretz that their police investigation said an IDF combat helicopter fired at Hamas fighters after arriving on the scene. While targeting the perpetrators, the helicopter also hit some festivalgoers, the source said.
After Haaretz published its report, Israel Police released a statement pushing back. It said, per The Times of Israel, that the actions of the IDF were beyond the remit of the investigation the source was speaking about. It also asked that media outlets only report information from government officials.
364 people were killed at the festival, a third of the fatalities from Hamas militants’ coordinated terrorist attacks on Israel on October 7, per The Times of Israel. Israeli security’s assessment is that Hamas did not have advance knowledge of the Nova music festival next to Kibbutz Re’im, and targeted it spontaneously after infiltrating Gaza’s border, Haaretz reported. https://www.businessinsider.com/idf-mistakenly-hit-festival-attendees-while-targeting-hamas?
2023-11-13 The October 7 Hamas Assault on Israel The Most Successful Military Raid of this Century. Israel has characterized the attack carried out by Hamas on the various Israeli military bases and militarized settlements, or Kibbutz, which in their totality comprised an important part of the Gaza barrier system, as a massive act of terrorism, likening it to the September 11, 2001 terror attacks against the United States. Israel supports this characterization by citing the number of persons killed (some 1,200, a downward revision issued by Israel after realizing that 200 of the dead were Palestinian fighters) and detailing a wide variety of atrocities it claims were perpetrated by Hamas, including mass rape, the beheading of children, and the wonton murder of unarmed Israeli civilians.
The problem with the Israeli claims is that they are demonstrably false or misleading. Nearly a third of the Israeli casualties consisted of military, security, and police officers. Moreover, it turns out that the number one killer of Israelis on October 7 wasn’t Hamas or other Palestinian factions, but the Israeli military itself. Recently released video shows Israeli Apache helicopters indiscriminately firing on Israeli civilians trying to flee the Supernova Sukkot Gathering held in the open desert near Kibbutz Re’im, the pilots unable to distinguish between the civilians and the Hamas fighters. Many of the vehicles that the Israeli government has shown as an example of Hamas perfidy were destroyed by the Israeli Apache helicopters.
Likewise, the Israeli government has widely publicized what it is calling the “Re’im massacre,” citing a death toll of some 112 civilians it claims were murdered by Hamas. However, eyewitness accounts from both surviving Israeli civilians and military personnel involved in the fighting show that the vast majority of those killed died from fire from Israeli soldiers and tanks directed at buildings where the civilians were either hiding or being held hostage by Hamas fighters. It took two days for the Israeli military to recapture Re’im. It only did so after tanks fired into the civilian residences, collapsing them onto their occupants, and often setting them ablaze, causing the bodies of those inside to be consumed by fire. The Israeli government has publicized how it has had to make use of the services of forensic archeologists to identify human remains at the Kibbutz, implying that Hamas had burned the occupants’ home. But the fact is it was Israeli tanks that did the destruction and killing. https://www.scottritterextra.com/p/the-october-7-hamas-assault-on-israel
2023-10-31 THE LABYRINTH WAR Hamas still holds more than 230 Israeli hostages it seized on that murderous Saturday, when scarcely any Israeli forces appeared on the scene for as long as ten hours.
The Israeli death count for the Hamas attack of October 7 now stands at 1,400 and includes 317 members of the Israeli military—some of those victims may be military contractors—and 58 policemen. At least thirty Americans, according to the State Department, many of them working for NGOs, were also killed, and thirteen Americans are still unaccounted for. Dozens of those captured by Hamas—among them the very young and the very old—never made it to its tunnel system because they fell or, more likely, were flung off the bicycles or motorcycles that were carrying them and were immediately executed.
The Hamas tunnels “were dazzling in their ingenuity,” I was told by an official who helped Israel map the tunnels and come to grips with the threat posed by easy citywide access for Hamas fighters. “There were administrative tunnels, command-and-control tunnels, and storage tunnels throughout Gaza City.” he said, with hundreds of entry points. It was decided after the October 7 attack that “all buildings with terminal exits and entry points had to be bombed.”
The amount of dirt and debris removed for the underground construction in Gaza City, the official said, was estimated to amount to 75 million cubic feet—a total whose disposal would require 140,000 dumpsters. The official used an analogy to describe the project, which was closely monitored for years by outside experts working with Israeli intelligence: enough material was removed to build the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt.
In my recent reporting, I’ve been told that at the time of the October raid as many as 15,000 to 20,000 fighters were living and training in the vast system, which included heat, light, and ventilation, even air-conditioning. The citywide access made it possible for many to come and go to their families in Gaza City.
The many thousands of Gazan workers who held jobs inside Israel are now understood by Israeli intelligence to have provided the Hamas planners with a core of data and photographs, many sent on mobile phones via WhatsApp, about the Israeli kibbutzim and local villages that were attacked on October 7
https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/the-labyrinth-war
2023-10-24 What really happened on 7th October? [MEK Note: Recommend reading full article] Evidence is now emerging that up to half the Israelis killed were combatants; that Israeli forces were responsible for some of their own civilian deaths; and that Tel Aviv disseminated false ‘Hamas atrocities’ stories to justify its devastating air assault on Palestinian civilians in Gaza.
In the interim, two weeks of blanket western media reporting that Hamas allegedly killed around 1,400 Israeli civilians during its 7 October military attack has served to inflame emotions and create the climate for Israel’s unconstrained destruction of the Gaza Strip and its civilian population. Accounts of the Israeli death toll have been filtered and shaped to suggest that a wholesale civilian massacre occurred that day, with babies, children, and women the main targets of a terror attack.
Now, detailed statistics on the casualties released by the Israeli daily Haaretz paint a starkly different picture. As of 23 October, the news outlet has released information on 683 Israelis killed during the Hamas-led offensive, including their names and locations of their deaths on 7 October. Of these, 331 casualties – or 48.4 percent – have been confirmed to be soldiers and police officers, many of them female. Another 13 are described as rescue service members, and the remaining 339 are ostensibly considered to be civilians. https://new.thecradle.co/articles/what-really-happened-on-7th-october, https://progressiveissuesblog.com/2023/11/25/2023-10-24-what-really-happened-on-7th-october/
2023-10-24 THE MYSTERIES OF OCTOBER 7 We in the media do not know the full story. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is saying nothing about Israel’s failure to defend its citizens, although a number of leading generals have publicly apologized for their lapse, and Hamas has insisted that the mission it authorized was solely aimed at the capture of a few Israeli soldiers to be used for a possible prisoner exchange. Hamas operatives began the operation early on the morning of October 7 by blowing up the unguarded fences separating Gaza from Israel.
Hamas also has claimed that the bulk of the mayhem was caused by other terrorist groups and the aggrieved citizens of Gaza who flooded across the downed gates and fences, with no Israeli soldiers to stop them. It has been widely reported that Israel, at the instigation of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, was financing Hamas, via funds supplied by Qatar, in the belief that a strong Hamas would make a two-state solution, long sought by some in Washington, unlikely.
A well informed American official told me that the Israeli leadership is known to be considering flooding Hamas’s vast tunnel system before sending in its troops, many of whom have had only a few weeks of training in the maneuvers and coordination required for the invasion. Such an act could mean that Israel was prepared to write off the hostages still in jeopardy. Where the estimated two hundred-plus hostages are is an open question. Israel is only talking about the end of the Hamas regime, and Hamas has so far released four hostages. Two elderly Israelis were released yesterday, with no known demands.
One serious complication that has not been publicly discussed since the October 7 attack is that the Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, were not the sole attackers or collectors of hostages on a day in which there was no Israeli Army presence in the kibbutzim and villages under attack for at least eight hours.
“Was the attack a surprise to the Hamas civilian leadership? No. It was long in the planning and coordinated. The other crazies with a history of terrorism were enlisted to join forces. Did they expect success? No. Did the attacking force commit egregious atrocities? Yes. Was it unanticipated by Hamas? No. All involved proclaimed their intention and proved it in their tactics over the past twenty years. Will Israel react and destroy Hamas? Yes. Are they justified? Was the creation of a Jewish state justified? One person’s answer to the second question answers the first.” He went on: “Will the refugees die of starvation? No. Public sympathy for their genuine suffering will save the day.”
“The goal of the Palestinian operation,” he told me, “was exactly what happened—a shocking and inspired military operation that humiliated the Israelis and shook them to their foundation. Hamas military commanders had a map of bases [inside Israel] and wanted to take computer servers with all of the potentially compromising information they contained and would probably have sent them to Iran for analysis.” Another Hamas goal, I was told, was to take Israeli Army prisoners and force Israel to trade for the release of thousands of Gazan and West Bank prisoners, break the siege of Gaza, and continue to compete with the Palestine Liberation Organization that was initially designated by the 1993 Oslo Accords to control the West Bank and Gaza. “A further bonus of a successful attack,” the expert said, “would have been to stifle the ongoing normalization talks between Saudi Arabia and Israel.” https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/the-mysteries-of-october-7
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