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killing their own jewish people......

Israel’s military received orders to shell Israeli homes and even their own bases as they were overwhelmed by Hamas militants on October 7. How many Israeli citizens said to have been “burned alive” were actually killed by friendly fire?

Several new testimonies by Israeli witnesses to the October 7 Hamas surprise attack on southern Israel adds to growing evidence that the Israeli military killed its own citizens as they fought to neutralize Palestinian gunmen.

 

BY MAX BLUMENTHAL

 

Tuval Escapa, a member of the security team for Kibbutz Be’eri, set up a hotline to coordinate between kibbutz residents and the Israeli army. He told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that as desperation began to set in, “the commanders in the field made difficult decisions – including shelling houses on their occupants in order to eliminate the terrorists along with the hostages.”

A separate report published in Haaretz noted that the Israeli military was “compelled to request an aerial strike” against its own facility inside the Erez Crossing to Gaza “in order to repulse the terrorists” who had seized control. That base was filled with Israeli Civil Administration officers and soldiers at the time.

These reports indicate that orders came down from the military’s high command to attack homes and and other areas inside Israel, even at the cost of many Israeli lives.

An Israeli woman named Yasmin Porat confirmed in an interview with Israel Radio that the military “undoubtedly” killed numerous Israeli noncombatants during gun battles with Hamas militants on October 7. “They eliminated everyone, including the hostages,” she stated, referring to Israeli special forces.

As David Sheen and Ali Abunimah reported in Electronic Intifada, Porat described “very, very heavy crossfire” and Israeli tank shelling, which led to many casualties among Israelis.

While being held by the Hamas gunmen, Porat recalled, “They did not abuse us. We were treated very humanely… No one treated us violently.”

She added, “The objective was to kidnap us to Gaza, not to murder us.”

According to Haaretz, the army was only able to restore control over Be’eri after admittedly “shelling” the homes of Israelis who had been taken captive. “The price was terrible: at least 112 Be’eri residents were killed,” the paper chronicled. “Others were kidnapped. Yesterday, 11 days after the massacre, the bodies of a mother and her son were discovered in one of the destroyed houses. It is believed that more bodies are still lying in the rubble.”

Much of the shelling in Be’eri was carried out by Israeli tank crews. As a reporter for the Israeli Foreign Ministry-sponsored outlet i24 noted during a visit to Be’eri, “small and quaint homes [were] bombarded or destroyed,” and “well-maintained lawns [were] ripped up by the tracks of an armored vehicle, perhaps a tank.”

Apache attack helicopters also figured heavily in the Israeli military’s response on October 7. Pilots have told Israeli media they scrambled to the battlefield without any intelligence, unable to differentiate between Hamas fighters and Israeli noncombatants, and yet determined to “empty the belly” of their war machines. “I find myself in a dilemma as to what to shoot at, because there are so many of them,” one Apache pilot commented.

Video filmed by uniformed Hamas gunmen makes it clear they intentionally shot many Israelis with Kalashnikov rifles on October 7. However, the Israeli government has not been content to rely on verified video evidence. Instead, it continues to push discredited claims of “beheaded babies” while distributing photographs of “bodies burned beyond recognition”to insist that militants sadistically immolated their captives, and even raped some before torching them alive.

The objective behind Tel Aviv’s atrocity exhibition is clear: to paint Hamas as “worse than ISIS” while cultivating support for the Israeli army’s ongoing bombardment of the Gaza Strip, which has left over 7000 dead, including at least 2500 children at the time of publication. While hundreds of wounded children in Gaza have been treated for what a surgeon described as “fourth degree burns” caused by novel weapons, the Western media’s focus remains trained on Israeli citizens supposedly “burned alive” on October 7.

Yet the mounting evidence of friendly fire orders handed down by Israeli army commanders strongly suggests that at least some of the most jarring images of charred Israeli corpses, Israeli homes reduced to rubble and burned out hulks of vehicles presented to Western media were, in fact, the handiwork of tank crews and helicopter pilots blanketing Israeli territory with shells, cannon fire and Hellfire missiles.

Indeed, it appears that on October 7, Israel’s military resorted to the same tactics it has employed against civilians in Gaza, driving up the death toll of its own citizens with the indiscriminate use of heavy weapons.

Israel bombs its own base, nerve center of the Gaza siege

Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) launched Operation Al-Aqsa Flood at 6 AM on October 7, quickly overwhelming the military bases from which Israel maintain its siege of the Gaza Strip. Chief among the objectives outlined by Hamas and PIJ was the release of Palestinians imprisoned by Israel, including as many as 700 children and 1117 Palestinians held without charges.

The 2011 swap for Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier captured five years prior and released in exchange for 1027 prisoners, provided clear inspiration for Al-Aqsa Flood. By storming military bases and kibbutzes, the Palestinian militants aimed to capture as many Israeli soldiers and civilians as possible, and bring them back to Gaza alive.

The lighting assault immediately overwhelmed Israel’s Gaza Division. Video recorded from GoPro cameras mounted on the helmets of Palestinian fighters shows Israeli soldiers cut down in rapid succession, many still dressed in underwear and caught off guard. At least 340 active soldiers and intelligence officers were killed on October 7, accounting for close to 50% of confirmed Israeli deaths. The casualties included high ranking officers like Col. Jonathan Steinberg, the commander of Israel’s Nahal Brigade. (Many first responders and armed Israeli civilians were also killed).

The Erez Crossing is the home of a massive military and Coordination of Government Activities in the [Occupied] Territories (COGAT) facility which functions as the nerve center of Israel’s siege on Gaza. When it was overrun by Palestinian fighters on October 7 with droves of army bureaucrats inside, the Israeli military flew into a panic.

According to Haaretz, the commander of the Gaza Division, Brig. Gen. Avi Rosenfeld, “entrenched himself in the division’s subterranean war room together with a handful of male and female soldiers, trying desperately to rescue and organize the sector under attack. Many of the soldiers, most of them not combat personnel, were killed or wounded outside. The division was compelled to request an aerial strike against the [Erez Crossing] base itself in order to repulse the terrorists.”

Video released by Israel’s COGAT ten days after the battle – and the Israeli airstrike – shows severe structural damage to the roof of the Erez Crossing facility.

 

READ MORE:

https://thegrayzone.com/2023/10/27/israels-military-shelled-burning-tanks-helicopters/

 

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war for cash....

10/25/2023

The alarming events taking place in the Middle East are growing worse and have more than a small potential to entangle the United States in another foreign war. Hamas’s well-coordinated, surprise attack on Israel from Gaza clearly blindsided Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. However, Israel is now responding with overwhelming force—as it has to previous, smaller-scale attacks over the decades. The bombing of civilian neighborhoods in Gaza, along with an utterly impractical order to evacuate the 1 million people living in the northern portion of the territory within little more than a day is now threatening to greatly eclipse the suffering that Hamas forces have inflicted.

Worse, the Biden administration already is making moves that could trigger a wider, regional war. The United States has dispatched an aircraft carrier battle group to the eastern Mediterranean to show solidarity with Israel, and a second carrier group is now on the way. The usual flock of American hawks are accusing Iran of using Hamas as a proxy to attack Israel, even though the Israeli government itself concedes that it has no evidence that Tehran was the mastermind. Such an inconvenient detail has not deterred dedicated hawks from advocating a U.S. military assault on Iran. Some even insist that the fighting between Israel and the Palestinians cannot stop as long as the current Iranian government remains in power.

One might think that the Cato Institute, as the largest libertarian think tank, would be producing an abundance of op-eds and policy statements that examine the deeper causes of the latest bloody episode in the Middle East. It also should be a natural assumption that libertarian analysts would assess the degree of culpability between Israel and Hamas for the ongoing tragedy in a balanced fashion. One especially would expect the Institute’s foreign policy scholars to be in the forefront of intellectual efforts to counter outspoken hawks and help prevent the United States from attacking Iran—a move that would trigger an even more dangerous regional war.

However, the performance of Cato scholars regarding this crisis has been squishy at best. The first significant statement took the form of an October 14 blog post on the “Cato at Liberty” website, a full week into the war. The author was Justin Logan, the Institute’s director of defense and foreign policy studies. The most surprising and disappointing feature was that it regurgitated many of the biased, pro-Israel myths that one could find in any establishment media outlet. 

Unfortunately, such a perspective appears to gaining strength at Cato on multiple foreign policy issues. Several analysts, most notably Senior Fellow Tom Palmer, have been strident partisans of Ukraine throughout that country’s war with Russia. Logan’s initial comment on Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine not only was a full-throated condemnation of the Kremlin’s aggression, it also endorsed economic sanctions against Russia, with no apparent exceptions. Such a stance was disturbing, since decades of scholarship have shown that sanctions are both ineffectual and cruel. They typically devastate the lives of ordinary people in the targeted country who have little or no ability to influence their government. At the same time, sanctions are notoriously ineffective at compelling the targeted regime to capitulate to Washington’s policy demands. 

Logan’s October 14 blog post exhibited a blatant pro-Israel bias from the outset. He described how he woke up at 5:00 a.m. on October 7 and “saw image after image that turned my stomach. Terrorism, and the targeting of civilians, especially children, cannot be justified. Civilized people across the world were horrified by it.” He added that “Israel has every right to defend itself and, speaking for myself here, it has every right to be in a frothing rage, too.”

His subsequent take on Israel’s military response, which has killed more than 1,000 (and perhaps as many as 3,000 civilians in Gaza, was far more vague and ambivalent. Indeed, he implicitly placed the bulk of the blame for civilian casualties in Gaza on Hamas, not the Israeli military that was conducting air strikes and other assaults. “All civilized people were horrified by the targeting of Israeli men, women, and children by Hamas terrorists, just as they have concerns for the innocent people in Gaza, who are suffering as a result of the war Hamas started.” [Emphasis added.]

The closest Logan comes to admonishing Israel can be found in 2 vague comments. One was an observation that Israel already had dropped more bombs on Gaza than the United States and its allies did in the war against ISIS. The other item stated that “I hope, for Israel’s sake but also for the sake of innocent civilians in Gaza—and, as an American, for the prevention of escalation in the region that would risk U.S. involvement—that Israel makes better decisions than we Americans did in our rage after 9/11.”

What was especially notable was the lack of context about Israel’s longstanding mistreatment of Palestinians. There was not a single word about the systemic human rights abuses in Gaza that have led respected human rights organizations to describe the territory as the “world’s largest open-air prison.” Nor was there a word about the brazen theft of Palestinian land by Israeli governments and settlers on the occupied West Bank over the decades, which Amnesty International condemns as a form of apartheid. .

Such bias and negligence is deeply troubling. It takes very little courage to denounce Hamas for its conduct—especially its capture, abuse, and outright murder of civilian hostages. Establishment policy wonks and journalists already had initiated a tsunami of justifiable criticism about such atrocities. One might hope, though, that a Cato Institute scholar would present a more balanced and worthwhile analysis. 

Cato once had a well-deserved reputation for speaking unpopular truths regarding foreign policy issues. The positions that Institute scholars took with respect to the Persian Gulf War, the Balkan wars, the unjustified U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, NATO’s disastrous air war to oust Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, and Washington’s shameful support of Syrian jihadists against Bashar al-Assad’s government, were all pertinent examples. The behavior in response to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a sad departure from that legacy.

Author: 

Ted Galen Carpenter

Ted Galen Carpenter is a former senior fellow for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute. Carpenter served as Cato’s director of foreign policy studies from 1986 to 1995 and as vice president for defense and foreign policy studies from 1995 to 2011

 

https://mises.org/wire/cato-institutes-belated-squishy-stance-latest-middle-east-crisis

 

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defund israel.....

Israel’s claims that it is only bombing Gaza to eliminate Hamas are “insane,” political analyst Jackson Hinkle said in an interview with RT on Thursday. He argued that Israeli forces appear to be focusing on targeting the civilian population of Gaza in their ongoing campaign.

“They’ve bombed everything but Hamas inside of Gaza,” the host of ‘The Dive with Jackson Hinkle’ said, accusing Israel of targeting various civilian infrastructure, including hospitals, schools, UN and Red Crescent facilities, mosques, churches, homes, and even evacuee convoys.

The analyst suggested that this is because Israel does not want a Palestinian state, and that the true purpose of its operation in Gaza is not to defeat Hamas, but rather to force Palestinians out and take over the enclave “once and for all.” 

“The reason why they’re doing all of this is that they know they can’t defeat Hamas. That’s why they haven’t gone into Gaza. They know that if they will, they’ll probably have a response from many Arab states, and maybe Iran as well. They know that in a war of that magnitude they wouldn’t win,”Hinkle claimed. 

He argued that while Israeli authorities have attempted to paint Hamas as being aligned with or comparable to Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS), Israel’s own actions in Gaza seem to closely resemble terrorist tactics. 

Commenting on Washington’s announcement that it will “stand forever” with Israel and President Joe Biden’s proposal of a $14 billion package of military aid to the Jewish state, Hinkle called to “defund Israel” and “defund Ukraine” as well. 

“Why is it that US taxpayer dollars are going to nations like this? Or more importantly, nations that are committing such horrific war crimes on a daily basis,”Hinkle questioned. He stated that the US is currently experiencing a crisis on its own southern border and is dealing with over 500,000 homeless people, 60,000 of which he claimed are veterans. 

“It makes no sense to me that we’re doing this and Joe Biden just sent about 900 US Marines to Israel,” Hinkle said, adding that he believes “we’re about to see a very big war.” 

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have been relentlessly bombarding Gaza for almost three weeks, following the October 7 surprise attack on Israel by Hamas, which claimed 1,400 lives. The Gaza Health Ministry has since reported that Israeli strikes have killed over 7,000 people. On Friday, the ministry published the names of 6,747 people, including 2,665 children, it claims have been killed by the IDF. It noted that the list is incomplete as many bodies remain unidentified or missing.

https://www.rt.com/news/585948-israel-forcing-palestinians-out-hinkle/

 

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