The missions, as is often the case, had been scheduled to last two weeks before a fresh group of aid workers would rotate in with new supplies. But after Israel seized and closed the Rafah border crossing into Egypt, nothing could get in or out, neither supplies nor people. 

Among the three Americans who refused to leave is Adam Hamawy, a New Jersey doctor and Army veteran who insisted on remaining behind to protect and serve his patients.

“There is a palpable gloom and foreboding that had set in at the hospital. The children and staff are asking for everyone by name. All the Americans and Brits left. That can’t be a good sign,” said Hamawy.

“A decision for some of us to stay was consistent with our American values. We came in as a team and we do not leave anyone behind. If all and only the Americans left at once, what would that say about us as a nation?”

Related

American Medical Missions Trapped in Gaza, Facing Death by Dehydration as Population Clings to Life

While serving in the Iraq War, Hamawy was the doctor who treated now-Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., when her helicopter was shot down. Duckworth credits Hamawy for saving her life and put pressure on Israel and the State Department to find a way to free the medical workers.

Hamawy said that the mission staff had been put in an impossible position.

“Although we feel we are abandoning our patients we all understood that this was going to happen from day one,” he said, given the short-term nature of the mission. “We would have to turn over our patients to a fresh team. Unfortunately we have to leave this burden on our overworked, burnt out Palestinian colleagues. The three Americans that stayed behind opened the opportunity for three Brits to leave.”

Sixteen medical workers remain at the hospital, Hamawy said. That includes nationals of Egypt, Ireland, Australia, and Jordan — countries with less political sway than the United States. Other missions, some staffed with Americans, remain active elsewhere in Gaza.

The staff and patients fear that without Americans in the hospital to serve as political shields against the Israel Defense Forces, the hospital will be destroyed, as the IDF has done to every other hospital in Gaza.

“It was a grueling trip and very bitter departure,” said Monica Johnston, a nurse who initially held out against leaving without new aid worker replacements but eventually agreed to go. “The politics and injustice in it enrages me.” Johnston said the bombing around the hospital had ramped up in recent days.

Rotating in a new mission has taken on additional importance given the blockade of medical supplies, as each new mission arrives with their own supplies. “The refusal to allow in basic humanitarian aid,” said Hamawy, “is a failure of the international community.” 

Dr. Mosab Nasser, who led the FAJR Scientific mission to the hospital, took a more upbeat approach in a statement issued after he arrived safely in Jerusalem. “I am thrilled to announce that the FAJR team (comprising 12 Americans and 3 British nationals) has been successfully picked up by both the US and UK embassies from the KS crossing near Gaza,” Nasser wrote, going on to reference Hamawy and another volunteer. “The team will spend a day in Jerusalem before flying back to the US and UK on Sunday. Two of our FAJR volunteers have remained in Gaza, continuing their life-saving work. They will soon exit Gaza as part of the UN rotation of EMTs, in collaboration with the WHO.” (The third American to stay behind was part of a separate mission, as was Johnston, at the same hospital.)

“This achievement highlights the remarkable coordination FAJR Scientific has accomplished with international entities, including the Department of State, the US embassy in Jerusalem and Cairo, the UK embassy in Tel Aviv, the US embassy in Muscat, Oman, the WHO, OCHA, CLA, and others,” he went on. “Yes, we left Gaza, but Gaza has left an indelible mark on us, and it will remain with us forever. We promise we will be back again and very soon.”

The statement rankled some staff who stayed behind there and at other medical facilities. 

Dorotea Gucciardo, an aid worker in Rafah with the medical solidarity organization Glia Equal Care, said that the international focus on Western doctors risked obscuring the reason they are there: Israel’s ongoing occupation and assault on Gaza. “We have international organizations, we have national governments all working together to open the borders for this already privileged group of people,” she said. “Our main objective is not that we are stuck here and we need to get out. Our main objective is to ensure that the patients are being taken care of. I think that the focus should be put back onto once again the reason why these humanitarian workers are here to begin with, and that’s the occupation. And this ongoing siege and war against Gaza.”

Related

“Man-Made Hell On Earth”: A Canadian Doctor on His Medical Mission to Gaza

“I’m hearing some international aid workers saying, ‘Oh, it can’t get worse than this,’” she said. “And yet, if we actually take a look at context and if we take a look at history, we see that it can get worse. It has gotten worse and it’s continuing to get worse. And so we can do the best that we can while we are here to support our Gazan hosts and our colleagues. But what we need is for this war to end. We need this siege to end, this blockade to end, the occupation to end, so that we can finally have aid too.”

Dr. Haleh Sheikholesami, an American physician from California also volunteering with Glia, said the situation put the perilous prospects of the Palestinians in stark relief: “You know that hopefully this will end and we can go home. But, unfortunately, the Gazans don’t have such predictions.”

The post Medical Workers Evacuated From Gaza, but 3 Americans Refuse to Leave appeared first on The Intercept.

The attack — and the looming full-scale invasion of Rafah being threatened by Israel despite heavily qualified White House objections — leaves Palestinian civilians bearing the brunt of the relentless assault. Israel quickly closed the Rafah border crossing. The closing leaves the trickling spigots of aid to Gaza virtually shut off.

“They’re exhausted, traumatized, sick, hungry, and their ability to safely evacuate is limited.”

Residents of Gaza are once again being forced into a dystopian game show where they must scramble to comprehend maps the Israelis created, marking which squared-off area they must move to in order to avoid certain death. Images relayed on social media by the Israeli military’s Arabic language spokesperson instructed civilians in Rafah to move back toward central Gaza to Khan Younis, a territory left in ruins after sustained Israeli air and ground attacks.

The United Nations Children’s Fund, or UNICEF, is pleading with the Israeli government and its backers to ceasefire and reverse course on plans for a full-scale Rafah invasion.

“There’s 600,000 children that are seeking shelter in Rafah and that many of them have been displaced multiple times already,” UNICEF’s Tess Ingram, who recently returned from Gaza, told The Intercept. “They’re exhausted, traumatized, sick, hungry, and their ability to safely evacuate is limited.”

“The area that they’re being directed to evacuate to is not safe. It’s not safe because there aren’t the services there to meet their basic needs, water, toilets, shelter,” she said in an interview. “But it’s also not safe because we know that that area has been subject to strikes despite being a so-called safe zone. So we’re really concerned about that impact of a ground offensive on one of the most densely populated areas in the world.”

Prior to the onset of Israel’s scorched-earth war on Gaza, Rafah was a city of approximately 250,000 people. As a result of Palestinians fleeing Israeli attacks, the population is currently estimated at 1.4 million.

“The reality for kids living there is shocking, honestly. People are living in really squalid conditions,” Ingram said. “It’s just incredibly crowded space. Everywhere you walk, you’re almost shoulder to shoulder with another person. Makeshift shelters expand from buildings across the sidewalk onto the road. People are living wherever they can find space in, you know, under bits of tarpaulin or blankets. And this expands as far as the eye can see.”

Ingram said UNICEF has been unable to get supplies or fuel into Gaza since Sunday.

“We are really scraping the bottom of the barrel now with the fuel that we have left in Gaza. We haven’t been able to get more in,” she said. “And that fuel is the lifeblood of the humanitarian aid operations in Gaza. And without it, important systems like [desalination] plants, hospitals, food delivery and trucks, they’ll all cease to exist.”

State Department spokesperson Matt Miller confirmed Ingram’s claim, saying at a press briefing Wednesday afternoon that no fuel had entered through either the Rafah crossing or Karem Shalom, despite U.S. urging. He added that the U.S. has told Israel that by taking control of the crossing, they now have the responsibility to open it swiftly. Even if aid trucks begin entering Gaza again, he added, aid can’t be distributed without fuel.

Israel Won’t Back Down

The onset of the dire conditions came as Israeli forces continued to bomb Rafah and move forces into the environs, both strategically seizing territory like the border crossing and amassing troops in preparation for an all-out invasion.

Over the past seven months of unrelenting attacks against the civilian population of the Strip, during which more than 35,000 Palestinians have been killed, Israeli officials and spokespeople have told the world Israel has no intention to occupy Gaza. The seizure of Rafah is a powerful reminder that this was and remains a lie.

Even without its tanks positioned at the crossing, Israel wields supreme authority of what crosses into the beleaguered territory; Israel already had security inspections set up on the Egyptian side, which have been delaying the delivery of aid since last year. The presence of tanks on the Gaza side only serves to publicly militarize that reality.

The Biden administration has spent weeks pushing a narrative in the media that Rafah represents a red line for the administration. Yet when President Joe Biden spoke to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ahead of the operation, a senior Israeli official said, “Biden didn’t pull the hand [brake] on the capture of the Rafah crossing.”

The White House expressed some mild concerns about the seizure of the border once the tanks rolled in, but National Security Council spokesperson Adm. John Kirby defended the Israeli move, saying the administration had received assurances from the Israelis that it would not be “a major ground operation.”

While the U.S. symbolically delayed one weapons shipment, American officials made clear they intend to continue arming Israel. Israel downplayed the significance of the weapons delay and said the longtime allies are working out the issues behind closed doors.

Some of the behind-the-scenes tensions burst into public this week, as Likud official Tali Gottlieb, a member of the Knesset, lashed out at the U.S., threatening to ramp up war crimes in response to the weapons pause. “The US is threatening not to give us precise missiles. Oh yeah?” she said. “Well, I got news for the US. We have imprecise missiles. I’ll use it. I’ll just collapse ten buildings. Ten buildings. That’s what I’ll do.”

Asked by The Intercept about Gottlieb’s threat, the State Department spokesperson denounced it. “Those comments are absolutely deplorable and senior members of the Israeli government should refrain from making them,” Miller said.

Biden went further on Wednesday, telling CNN’s Erin Burnett that if Israel invades Rafah, the U.S. will cut off supplies of artillery shells, bombs, and other offensive weapons.

The Israeli government has offered a potpourri of justifications for the Rafah incursion: to defeat four Hamas battalions, to shut down smuggling routes, to put pressure on Hamas to sign a deal to release Israeli hostages. The families of Israeli hostages, for their part, have been holding large demonstrations demanding Netanyahu sign a deal immediately to free the captives.

Such a deal was on the table when Israel took the border crossing, but Israeli officials have redoubled their vows to conquer Rafah with or without an agreement. 

UNICEF estimates that people in Rafah have approximately 3 liters of safe water per day and must use that for drinking, cooking, cleaning, and bathing. The agency says that a minimum of 15 liters per person, per day is recommended for populations in an emergency. There is currently one toilet per 850 people. Diarrhea is rampant, women and girls do not have consistent access to sanitary products, and diapers for babies are scarce.

“People can’t wait hours to use a bathroom or they don’t feel safe doing so. And so people have to resort to other methods, like open defecation,” said Ingram, the UNICEF official. “When you walk through Rafah, you often see and smell and have to move around leaking sewage because the sanitation systems are not working properly, people don’t have other options.”

If Israel expands its operations in Rafah, causing a mass exodus of people, the areas they are being directed to flee to do not have even the fragile, inadequate infrastructure.

“It’s hard to fathom that a situation that is already so bad can become worse, but it can become worse for these people if they are forced to evacuate to an area that is unsafe, that has no basic services that they need to survive. And Rafah was already lacking both of those things,” Ingram said.

“When we’re talking about vulnerable children who have survived seven months of war and who are bearing the scars of that war, either physically or psychologically, their ability to move to these sorts of areas and survive there is impacted because they’re exhausted and they’re traumatized, and they need greater support, not less.”

Update: May 8, 2024, 6:48 p.m. ET
This story has been updated to include comments from Biden and the State Department.

The post 600,000 Palestinian Kids in Rafah Can’t “Evacuate” Safely, UNICEF Official Says appeared first on The Intercept.

“You see, my father’s family is originally from Gaza, so they are a big family. And they are not only in Gaza City, but also in Deir al Balah and Khan Younis, other parts,” Al-Arian told me. Recently, the trickle of horrors became a flood: “It started with like 27, and then we lost count until I received this message from my relative who said at least 200 had died.”

The catastrophe was the backdrop for Al-Arian’s visit last week to Columbia University in New York City.

Al-Arian has five children, four of whom are journalists or filmmakers. On April 25, two of her daughters, Laila and Lama, both award-winning TV journalists, visited the encampment established by Columbia students to oppose the war in Gaza. Laila, an executive producer at Al Jazeera English with Emmys and a George Polk Award to her name, is a graduate of Columbia’s journalism school. Lama was the recipient of the prestigious 2021 Alfred I. duPont–Columbia Award for her reporting for Vice News on the 2020 explosion at the port of Beirut.

The two sisters traveled to Columbia as journalists to see the campus, and Nahla joined them.

“Of course, I tagged along. You know, why would I sit at the hotel by myself? And I wanted to really see those kids. I felt so down,” she said. “I was crying every day for Gaza, for the children being killed, for the women, the destruction of my father’s city, so I wanted to feel better, you know, to see those kids. I heard a lot about them, how smart they are, how organized, you know? So I said, let’s go along with you. So I went.”

Nahla Al-Arian was on the campus for less than an hour. She sat and listened to part of a teach-in, and shared some hummus with her daughters and some students. Then she left, feeling a glimmer of hope that people — at least these students — actually cared about the suffering and deaths being inflicted on her family in Gaza.

“I didn’t teach them anything. They are the ones who taught me. They are the ones who gave me hope,” she recalled. “I felt much better when I went there because I felt those kids are really very well informed, very well educated. They are the conscience of America. They care about the Palestinian people who they never saw or got to meet.”

Her husband posted a picture of Nahla, sitting on the lawn at the tent city erected by the student protesters, on his Twitter feed. “My wife Nahla in solidarity with the brave and very determined Columbia University students,” he wrote. Nahla left New York, inspired by her visit to Columbia, and returned to Virginia to spend time with her grandchildren.

A few days later, that one tweet by her husband would thrust Nahla Al-Arian into the center of a spurious narrative promoted by the mayor of New York City and major media outlets. She became the exemplar of the dangerous “outside agitator” who was training the students at Columbia. It was Nahla’s presence, according to Mayor Eric Adams, that was the “tipping point” in his decision to authorize the military-style raids on the campus.

USA vs. Al-Arian

On February 20, 2003, Nahla’s husband, Sami Al-Arian, a professor at the University of South Florida, was arrested and indicted on 53 counts of supporting the armed resistance group Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The PIJ had been designated by the U.S. government as a terrorist organization, and the charges against Al-Arian could have put him in prison for multiple life sentences, plus 225 years. It was a centerpiece case of the George W. Bush administration’s domestic “war on terror.” When John Ashcroft, Bush’s notorious attorney general, announced the indictment, he described the Florida-based scholar as “the North American leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Sami Al-Arian.”

Among the charges against him was conspiracy to kill or maim persons abroad, specifically in Israel, yet the prosecutors openly admitted Al-Arian had no connection to any violence. He was a well-known and deeply respected figure in the Tampa community, where he and Nahla raised their family. He was also, like many fellow Palestinians, a tenacious critic of U.S. support for Israel and of the burgeoning “global war on terror.” His arrest came just days before the U.S. invaded Iraq, a war Al-Arian was publicly opposed to.

The Al-Arian case was, at its core, a political attack waged by Bush’s Justice Department as part of a wider assault on the rights of Muslims in the U.S. The government launched a campaign, echoed in media outlets, to portray Al-Arian as a terror leader at a time when the Bush administration was ratcheting up its so-called global war on terror abroad, and when Muslims in the U.S. were being subjected to harassment, surveillance, and abuse. The legal case against Al-Arian was flimsy, and prosecutors largely sought to portray his protected First Amendment speech and charitable activities as terrorism.

The trial against Al-Arian, a legal permanent resident in the U.S., did not go well for federal prosecutors. In December 2005, following a six-month trial, a jury acquitted him on eight of the most serious counts and deadlocked 10-2 in favor of acquittal on the other nine. The judge made clear he was not pleased with this outcome, and the prosecutors were intent on relitigating the case. Al-Arian had spent two years in jail already without any conviction and was staring down the prospect of years more.

In the face of this reality and the toll the trial against him had taken on his family, Al-Arian agreed to take a plea deal. In 2006, he pleaded guilty to one count of providing nonviolent support to people the government alleged were affiliated with the PIJ. As part of the deal, Al-Arian would serve a short sentence and, with his residency revoked, get an expedited deportation. At no point during the government’s trial against Al-Arian did the prosecution provide evidence he was connected to any acts of violence.

For the next eight years following his release from prison in 2008, Al-Arian was kept under house arrest and effectively subjected to prosecutorial harassment as the government sought to place him in what his lawyers characterized as a judicial trap by compelling him to testify in a separate case. His defense lawyers alleged the federal prosecutor in the case, who had a penchant for pursuing high-profile, political cases, held an anti-Palestinian bias. Amnesty International raised concerns that Al-Arian had been abused in prison and he faced the prospect of yet another lengthy, costly court battle. The saga would stretch on for several more years before prosecutors ended the case and Al-Arian was deported from the United States.

“This case remains one of the most troubling chapters in this nation’s crackdown after 9-11,” Al-Arian’s lawyer, Jonathan Turley, wrote in 2014 when the case was officially dropped. “Despite the jury verdict and the agreement reached to allow Dr. Al-Arian to leave the country, the Justice Department continued to fight for his incarceration and for a trial in this case. It will remain one of the most disturbing cases of my career in terms of the actions taken by our government.”

That federal prosecutors approved Al-Arian’s plea deal gave a clear indication that the U.S. government knew Al-Arian was not an actual terrorist, terrorist facilitator, or any kind of threat; the Bush administration, after all, was not in the habit of letting suspected terrorists walk. Al-Arian and his family have always maintained his innocence and say that he was being targeted for his political beliefs and activism on behalf of Palestinians. He resisted the deal, Nahla Al-Arian said.

“He didn’t even want to accept it. He wanted to move on with another trial,” Nahla said. “But because of our pressure on him, let’s just get done with it [because] in the end, we’re going leave anyway. So that’s why.”

Sami and Nahla Al-Arian now live in Turkey. Sami is not allowed to visit his children and grandchildren stateside, but Nahla visits often.

NYPD Smear Campaign

The night of the raids on Columbia, police and other city officials began leaking to journalists that the wife of a convicted terrorist was on the campus, cavorting with the student protesters who had seized Hamilton Hall.

A reporter for CBS News tweeted the allegation, citing City Hall sources. During a broadcast on CNN late that night, the network showed Sami Al-Arian’s tweet with Nahla’s picture. “We’re learning tonight that the wife of an indicted terrorist was on the campus,” said host Laura Coates, adding that “a source” had tipped off CNN about Al-Arian’s tweet. (CNN and Coates, a former federal prosecutor, did not respond to requests for comment.)

Nahla was asleep in Virginia when the raids at Columbia unfolded and was unaware that she was becoming a figure in the emerging New York Police Department and media narratives. In the middle of the night, she checked her family’s WhatsApp group where her daughter had posted the since-deleted tweet from the CBS reporter and a clip from the CNN segment showing her photo.

“I woke up at 2 a.m. And, unfortunately, I took my phone and I looked. I was shocked. I couldn’t sleep for two or three hours,” she said. “I stayed awake feeling very depressed and feeling very shocked. I don’t care about myself. I care about those students that I admired. I didn’t want any harm to happen to them because of me or anyone else. And I felt betrayed by the authorities who resort to using these kinds of tricks, illegitimate, illegal tricks, shameful, shameful methods to attack those students. So I felt betrayed and angry. Is that the America that we believe in, the democracy?”

In a blitz of interviews the next two mornings, Adams, the New York mayor, repeatedly mentioned Al-Arian’s presence at Columbia and said it was a crucial part of his decision to authorize the military-style raid on the building. As evidence of “outside agitators” directing the protests, Adam cited Al-Arian as the one specific example to make his case.

“One of the individuals’ husband was arrested for and convicted for terrorism on a federal level,” Adams said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “I knew that there was no way I was going to allow those children to be exploited the way they were being exploited, and many people thought that this was just a natural evolution of a protest. It was not. These were professionals that were here.”

Adams echoed the tone and tenor of his remarks on “CBS Mornings,” but on NPR’s “Morning Edition,” Adams went further, saying Nahla’s presence at Columbia was the impetus for the raid.

“What really was a tipping point for me was when I learned that one of the outside agitator’s, professional’s husband was arrested for federal terrorism charges,” he said. “I knew I could not sit back and state that I’m going to allow this to continue to escalate. That is why I made that determination” — to raid the campus. (The mayor’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

“The mayor’s inflammatory comments about my mother’s brief visit to Columbia are being used to justify the heavy-handed and repressive police raid of the student protest,” said Laila Al-Arian, Nahla’s daughter. “It’s equally shameful that some journalists are simply regurgitating these sensationalist claims that are intended to smear students protesting Israel’s daily killing and maiming of Palestinians in Gaza.”

In a press conference on May 1, the NYPD acknowledged that Nahla Al-Arian was not on the campus during the raids, but continued to use her visit the previous week as a justification for the police assault on the protests. “Last week there was the wife of somebody who had been convicted for material support to terrorism on campus,” said Rebecca Weiner, the NYPD deputy commissioner of intelligence and counterterrorism. “We have no evidence of any criminal wrongdoing on her part, but that’s not somebody who I would want necessarily influencing my child if I were a parent of somebody at Columbia.”

The smear campaign against Nahla went far and wide online, particularly in the right-wing media and social media ecosystem. The Israeli actor Noa Tishby posted a video featuring the picture of Nahla’s visit to Columbia and falsely said she had been “convicted with connections to terrorism financing.” Nahla has never been convicted or charged with any crimes.

The New York Post ran an article with the headline: “Wife of convicted terrorist Sami Al-Arian was hanging out at Columbia encampment before dramatic raid.”

For Nahla and the Al-Arian family, none of this is shocking. They have endured more than 20 years of surveillance and trials that have displaced and scattered the family, continuing a long history of what happened to them and other Palestinians throughout the past 75 years. The Al-Arians themselves are descendants of Palestinians expelled from their homes during the 1948 Nakba.

“They just distract people so people will not think about what’s happening in Gaza.”

Even as they express outrage at how Nahla was smeared, the Al-Arian family is quick to point out that their suffering pales in comparison to the Palestinians of Gaza, including the scores of their own family members who have died in an Israeli war fueled by the U.S. government.

“I just feel angry because I am being used to hurt those students, to find an excuse to invade their place and to arrest those students. And I feel so terrible,” Nahla said. “It’s also a distraction from the genocide that’s happening in Gaza. Just focusing on a stupid thing like this — they just distract people so people will not think about what’s happening in Gaza. The killing that’s still happening every day, every minute, that destruction. I can’t believe it. They focus on my story and they ignore the most depressing story, which is the killing of innocent people. This is shameful.”

The post NYC Mayor Smeared a Grandmother as an “Outside Agitator” to Justify NYPD Assault on Columbia appeared first on The Intercept.

Published on December 28, the story, headlined “Screams Without Words,” instantly served as a powerful reference in a mounting campaign waged by Israel and its supporters to convince the world that Hamas had implemented a systematic rape campaign against Jewish women on October 7. The article by Jeffrey Gettleman, Anat Schwartz, and Adam Sella also was met with skepticism by independent journalists and other analysts who combed through each line of the story highlighting inconsistencies and credibility issues with people presented as witnesses and experts.

Since the story’s publication, the internal dispute led to the shelving of an episode of “The Daily,” the paper’s flagship podcast, that was to be based on “Screams Without Words.” The fight over the podcast episode spilled into the pages of The Intercept, prompting a far-reaching leak investigation that the New York Times’s union alleged was carried out in a manner that singled out and discriminated against reporters of Middle Eastern and North African extraction. A Times spokesperson denied that it engaged in racial targeting.

On Monday, executive editor Joe Kahn told staff the leak probe was ending. “We did not reach a definitive conclusion about how this significant breach occurred. We did identify gaps in the way proprietary journalistic material is handled, and we have taken steps to address these issues,” Kahn wrote on a Times Slack channel message seen by The Intercept. “The breach that occurred should upset anyone who wants to have transparency in our editorial processes and to encourage candid exchanges. We work together with trust and collegiality everyday on everything we produce, and I have every expectation that this incident will prove to be a singular exception to an important rule.”

In weeks leading up to the announcement that the probe was over, however, top officials in the Times newsroom justified the investigation and its conduct, according to newsroom sources and remarks at an April 4 meeting reviewed by The Intercept.

Internal concerns about the “Screams Without Words” article have been borne out by subsequent reporting from several media outlets, including The Intercept and the New York Times itself. The Times has not appended any major corrections to the December 28 story. Instead, the paper took the unusual step of inserting a bracketed “update” within the body of the story, with a link to a recent Times news article that undermines the original reporting.

Defending Leak Probe

Roughly 20 Times staffers were interviewed in the probe, which was led by Charlotte Behrendt, the chief of the paper’s internal investigations unit. Initially, Times leadership said, “The inquiry is focused narrowly on how internal materials were shared with outsiders.” In a March 5 statement, however, the New York Times Guild said this was not true and filed a grievance with the newspaper for discrimination against employees of Middle Eastern or North African background.

“Members faced extensive questions about their involvement in MENA ERG” — employee resource group — “events and discussions, and about their views of the Times’s Middle East coverage,” the union said. “Group leaders were asked to turn over the group’s membership list, as well as the names of all New York Times colleagues who had ‘raised concerns’ — in private discussions — about a published New York Times article.”

Times spokesperson Charlie Stadtlander said, “The claim that anyone was singled out based on ethnicity or associations is completely untrue.” (The New York Times Guild did not respond to a request for comment about whether the grievance process was ongoing.)

Related

Leaked NYT Gaza Memo Tells Journalists to Avoid Words “Genocide,” “Ethnic Cleansing,” and “Occupied Territory”

In the weeks leading up to the closing of the probe, the intensity of the internal debate over Gaza coverage in the newsroom calmed, several Times staffers have told The Intercept, and interviews that were supposed to take place as part of the leak investigation never did. This led some employees to speculate that the investigation was winding down.

In an April 4 meeting, however, staffers were left with the impression the leak probe was continuing, according to three newsroom sources. During the all-staff meeting, Kahn, the executive editor, was asked for an update on the investigation and whether any staffers had been disciplined.

“There is nothing really concrete that we can say about it right now beyond the fact just to re-emphasize that this inquiry was very narrowly focused just on one issue which was making sure that we can protect the confidentiality of the journalistic process,” Kahn said. “It’s just very important that we be able to have that process unfold with the full confidence that that will remain internal to our staff and not be revealed or leaked externally. So that’s really the focus of it.”

Times managing editor Carolyn Ryan told staffers at the meeting that the internal probe was more than a simple leak investigation.

“It doesn’t really capture the gravity of what occurred here and the kind of extraordinary nature of it,” she said. “You’re talking about sharing pre-publication, pre-broadcast materials that were clearly internal, confidential, and sensitive.”

Times editorial leaders alluded to new internal policy initiatives aimed at stanching leaks and external criticism of the paper by staffers. They also emphasized that criticism and attacks on colleagues or the journalism of the Times was prohibited “outside of the proper channels.”

The day Kahn announced the probe was over, The Intercept published a story on a leaked Times style memo that instructed its journalists covering Israel’s war on Gaza to restrict the use of the terms “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” and to “avoid” using the phrase “occupied territory” when describing Palestinian land.

Cutting Ties

At the same April 4 meeting, Times international editor Philip Pan told the staff that the paper had cut ties with Schwartz, an Israeli filmmaker who freelanced with the paper. Hired by the Times to work with Gettleman, one of its marquee reporters, Schwartz did much of the on-the-ground reporting and interviews for “Screams Without Words,” which purported to show a systematic pattern of rape and other sexual violence by Hamas on October 7.

“Anat was a freelancer that we worked with in Israel,” Pan said. “She made valuable contributions to our report. We didn’t see anything amiss with her work for us, but we learned about social media activity that predated her time working with us that was unacceptable and she’s not working with us right now.” (Neither Pan nor Schwartz responded to requests for comment.)

Schwartz’s social media history intensified the controversy around the “Screams” story. Following October 7, Schwartz liked a post on the platform X, saying that Israel needed to “turn the Strip into a slaughterhouse.” Another post on X liked by Schwartz repeated a since-debunked viral claim about beheaded babies in the October 7 attack and she also liked a post called for creating a narrative that would support Israel’s war aims.

After the posts were brought to light, the Times announced it was reviewing Schwartz’s social media activity. “Those ‘likes’ are unacceptable violations of our company policy,” said a Times spokesperson in February.

The Times had previously stood by Schwartz’s reporting publicly. “Ms. Schwartz was part of a rigorous reporting and editing process,” Pan said in a statement provided to The Intercept for a late-February story about the controversy. “She made valuable contributions and we saw no evidence of bias in her work. We remain confident in the accuracy of our reporting and stand by the team’s investigation. But as we have said, her ‘likes’ of offensive and opinionated social media posts, predating her work with us, are unacceptable.”

On March 5, according to chat records reviewed by The Intercept, Times Jerusalem bureau chief Patrick Kingsley removed Schwartz from the WhatsApp group used by the paper’s journalists for communicating about Gaza coverage. (Kingsley directed questions to the Times communications team.)

Related

Kibbutz Be’eri Rejects Story in New York Times October 7 Exposé: “They Were Not Sexually Abused”

The day before Schwartz was removed from the group, The Intercept published a story challenging one of the central allegations of sexual assault featured in “Screams Without Words.” In its article, the Times had cited an anonymous Israeli special forces paramedic who claimed that two teenage girls were sexually assaulted in Kibbutz Be’eri, offering a graphic description of the scene.

A spokesperson for the kibbutz, however, told The Intercept that, based on the information they had been provided, the story was flatly false. Family members of the two girls also disputed they were sexually assaulted. A spokesperson for the Times told The Intercept the paper continued to stand by its reporting.

Schwartz would only author one more story for the paper after “Screams”: a co-byline with the “Screams” team on a January 29 story about the arrival of a United Nations team in Israel to draft a report about sexual violence on October 7.

“Screams” Falls Apart

When the U.N. report finally arrived on March 4, the Times story about it wasn’t written by any of the “Screams” reporters. What the U.N. had found seemed to undermine the December story: Two high-profile cases sexual assault alleged to have happened at Kibbutz Be’eri were “unfounded.”

Yet the Times stuck by its reporting. The paper’s story on the U.N. report said the special forces paramedic’s account in “Screams” was not in question: “First responders told The New York Times they had found bodies of women with signs of sexual assault at those two kibbutzim, but The Times, in its investigation, did not refer to the specific allegations that the U.N. said were unfounded.”

The newspaper never explained the basis for its assertion that the U.N. had not actually debunked the paper’s reporting on the incident, but evidence soon came to light indicating that the reporting was false: There was video. On March 25, the Times itself reported that it had reviewed video taken by an Israeli soldier of the scene’s aftermath, showing three fully clothed bodies with no signs of sexual violence — making clear the paramedic’s description offered in “Screams Without Words” was false.

The Times’s new article on the video did not feature Gettleman’s byline. “New video has surfaced that undercuts the account of an Israeli military paramedic who said two teenagers killed in the Hamas-led terrorist attack on Oct. 7 were sexually assaulted,” the paper reported. “The unnamed paramedic, from an Israeli commando unit, was among dozens of people interviewed for a Dec. 28 article by The New York Times that examined sexual violence on Oct. 7.”

The Times, after submitting its article for a prestigious George Polk Award — and winning — suddenly began looking to share credit for its erroneous reporting. “The Associated Press, CNN, and the Washington Post reported similar accounts from a military paramedic who spoke on condition of anonymity,” reported the Times. (Eylon Levy, who at the time was an Israeli government spokesperson, had publicly offered to connect the paramedic with Western media outlets.)

The Times also walked back its claim that the previous U.N. report had not referred to its reporting. The Times article on the video said: “The report said the U.N. team was unable to establish whether sexual violence occurred in Be’eri and that at least two Be’eri cases reported in the news media were determined to be ‘unfounded,’ but it did not explicitly specify a military paramedic’s account.” It was a departure from its previous claim of certainty that the U.N. wasn’t referencing the account reported in the paper.

Instead of issuing a correction, the Times simply updated its “Screams Without Words” with the bracketed revelation that an entire section of its article was incorrect.

An official with the George Polk Awards confirmed to The Intercept that “Screams Without Words” was part of the Times package that won in the category for best foreign reporting. Gettleman, however, did not attend the Times’s private reception celebrating the award last week, nor did he appear at the awards luncheon on Friday.

“A number of our team members, including Jeffrey, were invited to attend but could not due to other commitments,” said a Times spokesperson. “The Times stands behind the reporting he and our entire team have done and is supportive of their earned accolades.”

The Polk committee said it stands by its citation and the award.

The post New York Times Brass Moves to Stanch Leaks Over Gaza Coverage appeared first on The Intercept.

The memo also instructs reporters not to use the word Palestine “except in very rare cases” and to steer clear of the term “refugee camps” to describe areas of Gaza historically settled by displaced Palestinians expelled from other parts of Palestine during previous Israeli–Arab wars. The areas are recognized by the United Nations as refugee camps and house hundreds of thousands of registered refugees.

The memo — written by Times standards editor Susan Wessling, international editor Philip Pan, and their deputies — “offers guidance about some terms and other issues we have grappled with since the start of the conflict in October.”

While the document is presented as an outline for maintaining objective journalistic principles in reporting on the Gaza war, several Times staffers told The Intercept that some of its contents show evidence of the paper’s deference to Israeli narratives.

“It’s the kind of thing that looks professional and logical if you have no knowledge of the historical context of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.”

“I think it’s the kind of thing that looks professional and logical if you have no knowledge of the historical context of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict,” said a Times newsroom source, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal, of the Gaza memo. “But if you do know, it will be clear how apologetic it is to Israel.”

First distributed to Times journalists in November, the guidance — which collected and expanded on past style directives about the Israeli–Palestinian conflict — has been regularly updated over the ensuing months. It presents an internal window into the thinking of Times international editors as they have faced upheaval within the newsroom surrounding the paper’s Gaza war coverage.

“Issuing guidance like this to ensure accuracy, consistency and nuance in how we cover the news is standard practice,” said Charlie Stadtlander, a Times spokesperson. “Across all our reporting, including complex events like this, we take care to ensure our language choices are sensitive, current and clear to our audiences.”

Issues over style guidance have been among a bevy of internal rifts at the Times over its Gaza coverage. In January, The Intercept reported on disputes in the Times newsroom over issues with an investigative story on systematic sexual violence on October 7. The leak gave rise to a highly unusual internal probe. The company faced harsh criticism for allegedly targeting Times workers of Middle East and North African descent, which Times brass denied. On Monday, executive editor Joe Kahn told staff that the leak investigation had been concluded unsuccessfully.

WhatsApp Debates

Almost immediately after the October 7 attacks and the launch of Israel’s scorched-earth war against Gaza, tensions began to boil within the newsroom over the Times coverage. Some staffers said they believed the paper was going out of its way to defer to Israel’s narrative on the events and was not applying even standards in its coverage. Arguments began fomenting on internal Slack and other chat groups.

The debates between reporters on the Jerusalem bureau-led WhatsApp group, which at one point included 90 reporters and editors, became so intense that Pan, the international editor, interceded.

“We need to do a better job communicating with each other as we report the news, so our discussions are more productive and our disagreements less distracting,” Pan wrote in a November 28 WhatsApp message viewed by The Intercept and first reported by the Wall Street Journal. “At its best, this channel has been a quick, transparent and productive space to collaborate on a complex, fast-moving story. At its worst, it’s a tense forum where the questions and comments can feel accusatory and personal.”

Pan bluntly stated: “Do not use this channel for raising concerns about coverage.”

Among the topics of debate in the Jerusalem bureau WhatsApp group and exchanges on Slack, reviewed by The Intercept and verified with multiple newsroom sources, were Israeli attacks on Al-Shifa Hospital, statistics on Palestinian civilian deaths, the allegations of genocidal conduct by Israel, and President Joe Biden’s pattern of promoting unverified allegations from the Israeli government as fact. (Pan did not respond to a request for comment.)

“It’s not unusual for news companies to set style guidelines. But there are unique standards applied to violence perpetrated by Israel.”

Many of the same debates were addressed in the Times’s Gaza-specific style guidance and have been the subject of intense public scrutiny.

“It’s not unusual for news companies to set style guidelines,” said another Times newsroom source, who also asked for anonymity. “But there are unique standards applied to violence perpetrated by Israel. Readers have noticed and I understand their frustration.”

“Words Like ‘Slaughter’”

The Times memo outlines guidance on a range of phrases and terms. “The nature of the conflict has led to inflammatory language and incendiary accusations on all sides. We should be very cautious about using such language, even in quotations. Our goal is to provide clear, accurate information, and heated language can often obscure rather than clarify the fact,” the memo says.

“Words like ‘slaughter,’ ‘massacre’ and ‘carnage’ often convey more emotion than information. Think hard before using them in our own voice,” according to the memo. “Can we articulate why we are applying those words to one particular situation and not another? As always, we should focus on clarity and precision — describe what happened rather than using a label.”

Despite the memo’s framing as an effort to not employ incendiary language to describe killings “on all sides,” in the Times reporting on the Gaza war, such language has been used repeatedly to describe attacks against Israelis by Palestinians and almost never in the case of Israel’s large-scale killing of Palestinians.

In January, The Intercept published an analysis of New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times coverage of the war from October 7 through November 24 — a period mostly before the new Times guidance was issued. The Intercept analysis showed that the major newspapers reserved terms like “slaughter,” “massacre,” and “horrific” almost exclusively for Israeli civilians killed by Palestinians, rather than for Palestinian civilians killed in Israeli attacks.

The analysis found that, as of November 24, the New York Times had described Israeli deaths as a “massacre” on 53 occasions and those of Palestinians just once. The ratio for the use of “slaughter” was 22 to 1, even as the documented number of Palestinians killed climbed to around 15,000.

The latest Palestinian death toll estimate stands at more than 33,000, including at least 15,000 children — likely undercounts due to Gaza’s collapsed health infrastructure and missing persons, many of whom are believed to have died in the rubble left by Israel’s attacks over the past six months.

Touchy Debates

The Times memo touches on some of the most highly charged — and disputed — language around the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The guidance spells out, for instance, usage of the word “terrorist,” which The Intercept previously reported was at the center of a spirited newsroom debate.

“It is accurate to use ‘terrorism’ and ‘terrorist’ in describing the attacks of Oct. 7, which included the deliberate targeting of civilians in killings and kidnappings,” according to the leaked Times memo. “We should not shy away from that description of the events or the attackers, particularly when we provide context and explanation.”

The guidance also instructs journalists to “Avoid ‘fighters’ when referring to the Oct. 7 attack; the term suggests a conventional war rather than a deliberate attack on civilians. And be cautious in using ‘militants,’ which is interpreted in different ways and may be confusing to readers.”

In the memo, the editors tell Times journalists: “We do not need to assign a single label or to refer to the Oct. 7 assault as a ‘terrorist attack’ in every reference; the word is best used when specifically describing attacks on civilians. We should exercise restraint and can vary the language with other accurate terms and descriptions: an attack, an assault, an incursion, the deadliest attack on Israel in decades, etc. Similarly, in addition to ‘terrorists,’ we can vary the terms used to describe the Hamas members who carried out the assault: attackers, assailants, gunmen.”

The Times does not characterize Israel’s repeated attacks on Palestinian civilians as “terrorism,” even when civilians have been targeted. This is also true of Israel’s assaults on protected civilian sites, including hospitals.

In a section with the headline “‘Genocide’ and Other Incendiary Language,” the guidance says, “‘Genocide’ has a specific definition in international law. In our own voice, we should generally use it only in the context of those legal parameters. We should also set a high bar for allowing others to use it as an accusation, whether in quotations or not, unless they are making a substantive argument based on the legal definition.”

Regarding “ethnic cleansing,” the document calls it “another historically charged term,” instructing reporters: “If someone is making such an accusation, we should press for specifics or supply proper context.”

Bucking International Norms

In the cases of describing “occupied territory” and the status of refugees in Gaza, the Times style guidelines run counter to norms established by the United Nations and international humanitarian law.

On the term “Palestine” — a widely used name for both the territory and the U.N.-recognized state — the Times memo contains blunt instructions: “Do not use in datelines, routine text or headlines, except in very rare cases such as when the United Nations General Assembly elevated Palestine to a nonmember observer state, or references to historic Palestine.” The Times guidance resembles that of the Associated Press Stylebook.

The memo directs journalists not to use the phrase “refugee camps” to describe long-standing refugee settlements in Gaza. “While termed refugee camps, the refugee centers in Gaza are developed and densely populated neighborhoods dating to the 1948 war. Refer to them as neighborhoods, or areas, and if further context is necessary, explain how they have historically been called refugee camps.”

The United Nations recognizes eight refugee camps in the Gaza Strip. As of last year, before the war started, the areas were home to more than 600,000 registered refugees. Many are descendants of those who fled to Gaza after being forcibly expelled from their homes in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, which marked the founding of the Jewish state and mass dispossession of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.

The Israeli government has long been hostile to the historical fact that Palestinians maintain refugee status, because it signifies that they were displaced from lands they have a right to return to.

“It’s like, ‘Oh let’s not say occupation because it might make it look like we’re justifying a terrorist attack.’”

Since October 7, Israel has repeatedly bombed refugee camps in Gaza, including Jabaliya, Al Shati, Al Maghazi, and Nuseirat.

The memo’s instructions on the use of “occupied territories” says, “When possible, avoid the term and be specific (e.g. Gaza, the West Bank, etc.) as each has a slightly different status.” The United Nations, along with much of the world, considers Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem to be occupied Palestinian territories, seized by Israel in the 1967 Arab–Israeli war.

The admonition against the use of the term “occupied territories,” said a Times staffer, obscures the reality of the conflict, feeding into the U.S. and Israeli insistence that the conflict began on October 7.

“You are basically taking the occupation out of the coverage, which is the actual core of the conflict,” said the newsroom source. “It’s like, ‘Oh let’s not say occupation because it might make it look like we’re justifying a terrorist attack.’”

The post Leaked NYT Gaza Memo Tells Journalists to Avoid Words “Genocide,” “Ethnic Cleansing,” and “Occupied Territory” appeared first on The Intercept.

Warning: This article contains graphic images.

Throughout the past five and a half months, Israel has waged a full-spectrum war against the civilian population of the Gaza Strip. The United States and other Western nations have supplied not only the weapons for this war of annihilation against the Palestinians, but also key political and diplomatic support.

The results of the actions of this coalition of the killing have been devastating. Conservative estimates hold that more than 31,000 Palestinians have been killed, including 13,000 children. More than 8,000 people remain missing, many of them believed to have died in the rubble of buildings destroyed in Israeli attacks. Famine conditions are now present in large swaths of the Gaza Strip. The fact that the International Court of Justice has found grounds to investigate Israel for plausible acts of genocide in Gaza has not deterred the U.S. and its allies from continuing to facilitate Israel’s war.

The massive scale of human destruction caused by the attacks would pose grave challenges to well-equipped hospitals. In Gaza, however, many health care facilities have been decimated by Israeli attacks or evacuated, while a few remain open but severely limited in the care and services they offer. Israeli forces have repeatedly laid siege to hospital facilities, killing hundreds of medical workers and taking captive scores of others, despite thousands of internally displaced Palestinians sheltering in the health care complexes. This week, Israel again launched raids on Al-Shifa Hospital, reportedly killing more than 140 people.

For months, doctors across Gaza have performed amputations and other high-risk procedures without anesthetics or proper operating rooms. Antibiotics are in short supply and often unavailable. Communicable diseases are spreading, as hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are forced to live in makeshift shelters with little access to toilets or basic sanitary supplies. Many new mothers are unable to breastfeed and infant formula shortages are common. Israel has repeatedly blocked or delayed aid shipments of vital medical supplies to Gaza. Basic preventative medical care is nearly nonexistent, and medical experts predict that malnutrition will condemn a new generation of young Palestinians to a life of developmental struggles.

The result of the onslaught against medical facilities is that there is only one fully functional hospital remaining in the territory, the European Hospital in Khan Younis. Dr. Yasser Khan, a Canadian ophthalmologist and plastic surgeon, just left Gaza where he spent 10 days at the hospital performing eye surgeries on victims of Israeli attacks. It was his second medical mission to Gaza since the war began last October.

What follows is a transcript of a lightly edited interview with Khan.

Jeremy Scahill: Before we talk about your latest medical mission to Khan Younis in Gaza, I wanted to ask you a bit about your background and your medical practice.

Yasser Khan: Well, I’m from the greater Toronto area here in Canada, and I’ve been in practice for about 20 years. I’m an ophthalmologist, but I specialize in eyelid and facial plastic and reconstructive surgery.

So that’s my sub-specialty and that’s what I’ve been doing for about 20 years. And I’m a professor. I’ve been to over 45 different countries on a humanitarian basis where I’ve taught surgery, I’ve done surgery, I’ve established programs. And so I’ve been to many types of areas and zones in Africa, Asia, and South America.

JS: And Dr. Khan, tell us about how you ended up going to Gaza for the first time. I think you went on your first mission over the winter period, but talk about how you ended up even getting on an airplane to go into a war zone where the Israelis were raining scorched earth down on the Palestinians of Gaza.

YK: Well, you know, all these things, you never plan for them. You never plan to go to an area like Gaza. And I was on the first North American mission. It was about eight of us that went, seven or eight of us that went, surgeons from both the U.S. and Canada, and you can never plan for these and it was just a random conversation with one of my surgical colleagues, who’s a thoracic surgeon, by a scrub sink. And, you know, we’ve been watching this mass killing or slaughter for the last — at that point in time for about three months — livestreamed for the first time ever, I think. And so I think a lot of us were suffering, and he caught me in my down moments. He goes, “Listen, I’m going to Gaza.” And I said, “What? How? I mean, how are you getting in? Nobody’s going there, right?” He [says] they’ve been trying for six weeks, and finally the WHO [World Health Organization] gave them the green light and so everything’s fine. “You may not be approved. I know it’s probably too late, but let me send your information in. I mean, who knows? I need your passport, your medical degree, and your blood type.” And to be honest, I didn’t even know what my blood type was. I just guessed AB, and at the time I just sent it to him right away. And two days later, miraculously, I was approved. To get into Gaza, first of all, nobody but a health care worker or a physician or a team can get in, and to get in you have to be approved by the WHO, by the Israeli authorities, and the Egyptian authorities. So that’s how I got in first.

JS: Describe that journey of how you then go from Canada to Gaza. What is it like? How do you end up getting into Gaza?

YK: Well, I had one day to book my flight. I booked my flight. I got as many supplies as I could together, and I flew into Cairo. And from Cairo, you meet a U.N. convoy that leaves every Monday and Wednesday, nowadays, at about 5 a.m., and it’s about an eight, nine-hour journey through the Sinai Desert. It’s long because you go through multiple checkpoints. It’s a demilitarized zone and so there’s Egyptian army checkpoints all the way through. And then we get to the Rafah border, which is right now controlled by Egypt and has been forever. And then you go through your immigration and then you get to the Gaza side and that’s controlled by the Palestinians.

JS: What was your first impression on that first trip once you crossed over from Egypt into Palestinian territory, into Gaza?

YK: I got there at about 6:30 p.m. at night and nobody travels at night. In fact, the U.N.’s time limit is 5:00 p.m. because anything moving at night, the Israeli forces attack through drones or other missile attacks. But, you know, the two guys that came to pick me up from the hospital said, “It’ll be fine. Don’t worry about it. Trust God.” And so I still went.

So just to describe to you, my first 20 minutes were when I was driving through at night. We were the only car on the road. And it was dark because there’s no fuel, there’s no electricity, so it’s dark, and the road was empty. And I mean, that was quite scary. I basically made my peace with God, and was ready to go at any point in time. But, I’ve never been more happy to see the emergency sign at a hospital, and that’s [when] I knew I’d arrived. The first thing I noticed at the time — this was in Khan Younis — Nasser Hospital and European Gaza Hospital were the only hospitals left in the Gaza Strip, fully functioning hospitals at that point in time.

Khan Younis was still a city, an intact city, but there’s battles going on. So when I exited the car, I could hear the 24-hour buzzing of drones, and it was quite loud, 24 hours, it never went away. I never saw the drones myself because they’re high up, but it’s Israeli drones: There’s either spy drones or there’s a quadcopter, which is the weaponized drone that can fire missiles and gunfire. And so they’re humming around. The other thing that I heard was bombs. And like a “boom” of bombs, basically every hour, every two or three hours; there was like bombs that would shake everything up. So that’s the first images I had.

But the other images I had was like a mass refugee camp. So basically at that point in time, two months ago, about 20,000 people had sought refuge both in the hospital and outside the hospital. And these weren’t tents. They’re still not tents. They’re makeshift shelters with bed sheets or plastic bag sheets. The ones outside sleep on the floor. They’re lucky [if] they get a carpet or a mat. There was one bathroom at the time for about 200 people that they have to share. And inside, the hallways of the hospital were also made into shelters. There was hardly any room to walk, and there’s children running around everywhere. It’s important to remember all these people were not homeless. They all had homes that were destroyed. They’re all displaced people that took shelter in the hospital.

“What we’d been seeing livestreamed on Instagram, on social media or whatever, I actually saw myself and it was worse than I can imagine.”

So that’s the kind of mass chaos that I encountered initially, and then I was told that every time there’s a bomb, give it about 15 minutes and the mass casualties come. That was the other thing that at the time shocked me: What we’d been seeing livestreamed on Instagram, on social media or whatever, I actually saw myself and it was worse than I can imagine. I saw scenes that were horrific that I’d never witnessed before and I never want to see again. You have a mother walking in holding her 8, 9-year-old, skinny — because they’re all starving — boy who’s dead, he’s cold and dead and [the mother is] screaming, asking for someone to check his pulse and everybody’s busy in the mass chaos. So that was kind of my initial welcoming scene when I entered Khan Younis the first time.

JS: You’ve just come out now from your second medical mission. You were in Gaza for 10 days. Describe the scenes that you witnessed this time in Gaza, but also specifically in the hospital.

YK: Well, I must admit the first time I went there it was partially getting used to what’s going on, seeing the mass casualties, seeing the hospital, meeting the doctors and the nurses and health care workers, getting familiarized with the surroundings, and also doing the operations. This time, I was over all that introduction.

It was quite demoralizing. You’ve gotta be on the ground to see how bad it is. In two months, things were not only the same in a bad way, but they’re much, much worse because now, two months later, Khan Younis has literally been destroyed as a city. It was an active, hustling, bustling city. The Nasser Hospital, as you know, it’s destroyed now. It’s basically a death zone. And there’s decomposing bodies in the hospital now. It’s been evacuated. And I will add one thing: As a health care worker, I know fully well that to build a major, fully functioning hospital takes years to perfect and build and process, right? So it’s a sheer tragedy that it’s destroyed in mere hours, so it’s really unfortunate.

So now [at European Gaza Hospital] instead of 20,000 people, there’s about 35,000 people seeking shelter in a hospital that’s already beyond capacity. And so now, both outside and inside, there’s a mass of people. There’s no place to move now in the hallways. The sterility of the hospital has significantly decreased. The European Gaza Hospital, all you have to do is go online and look at their pictures before. It was a beautiful, gorgeous hospital. Well-built, well-run, good quality control — and now it’s reduced to a place that is a mess. It’s a mess. There’s people cooking inside the hospital hallways, there’s the bathrooms, there’s people mixed in with the people who are sick, with major orthopedic injuries, post op. There’s no beds. So sometimes people go and just sleep in their little makeshift shelters. And so infection is, if you can imagine, infection is rampant. So if you don’t die the first time or if your leg or arm is not amputated the first time, it is for sure with infection. So then they have to amputate it to save your life. So it’s much, much worse.

“They’re doing sometimes 14, 15 amputations, mostly on children, per day, and they’ve been doing it for six months now.”

The other thing I noticed was now, more so than even before, the health care workers and nurses and the doctors, they’re just burnt out. I mean, they’re just spent. They’ve witnessed so much in almost six months now. They’ve seen so much on a regular, hourly, daily basis. When I operate [at a hospital in Canada], typically speaking, I’ve got a few mostly elective lists, elective kind of not urgent problems that you gotta fix. And then there’s some trauma, or something that comes in that’s a bit more urgent once in a while, right? That’s my usual list. But [Palestinian medical workers], they are working on a daily basis on the most horrific, explosive trauma that you’ve ever seen. They’re doing sometimes 14, 15 amputations, mostly on children, per day, and they’ve been doing it for six months now.

The thing I try to emphasize to people is that it’s not only the actual medical trauma, it’s the other trauma associated with it in that these patients come in, if you’ve been involved in an explosive injury, and you come in injured, guaranteed you’ve lost loved ones. Guaranteed. So you’ve either lost a father, a mother, a child, all your children, all your family, your uncle, aunt, grandparents, your house, whatever. You’ve lost something. So every patient that comes in, not only is severely injured, is dealing with this trauma.

I had one girl who basically lost all her siblings, 8-year-old beautiful girl, lost her siblings. She came in for a leg fracture, was under the rubble for 12 hours. And her mother died, all her siblings gone. And all her family [were] gone, her aunts and uncles. As you know, it’s a generational killing, like slaughter. Generations. There’s about 2,000 families that have been erased now completely, are gone. Nonexistent. So it’s generational trauma or death or slaughter, and so her father was out burying his wife and his killed children while she was by herself getting her leg fracture repaired. And while she was under there for 12 hours, this 8-year-old girl, next to her was her grandmother and her aunt, dead, lying next to her for 12 hours.

I saw this one guy who had his face split open, and he was under the bubble for eight days. I don’t know how he survived, and they were able to get him out. He lost both his eyes, but they were able to put his face back together again, and he survived. So, they’re dealing with this, all this.

So two months ago it was bad, and two months later, it’s even worse. I could see, actually feel the burnout [among Palestinian medical workers], but they’re superhuman. They keep on going when the rest of us will lose our crap, the rest of us lose it. But they keep on going because it’s their steadfastness and it’s their faith. And they still consider their mere survival as their resistance. You know, they will survive the Israeli bombing no matter what because that’s their form of resistance. No matter what they tried, no matter how much they try to kill them, basically is their attitude.

JS: Dr. Khan, as I’m listening to you, I’m also recalling over these past five-plus months all of the episodes where Israeli forces have attacked or laid siege to hospitals and other medical facilities in Gaza. And I’m specifically thinking of the medical staff at Nasser Hospital, which was raided on February 15 by Israeli forces, and scores of medical personnel were snatched, taken prisoner by the Israelis. And the BBC recently did an exposé documenting what I think can clearly be called the torture of these medical workers, including holding them for prolonged periods in stress positions, dousing them with cold water, using muzzled dogs to menace them, blindfolding them, and leaving them in isolation.

And I’m thinking of the testimony you’re offering about the steadfastness of the doctors and then imagining after months and months of just amputating limbs from children, sometimes without any anesthesia, then having this occupation force come in; snatch doctors, nurses, other medical workers; and then subject them to torture under interrogation aimed at getting them to confess that somehow Hamas is using their hospital as a Pentagon, basically, to plot attacks against the Israeli occupation forces. What kinds of stories did you hear from Palestinian colleagues about these types of raids and actions by the Israelis against medical facilities, doctors, nurses, et cetera?

YK: This has been a systematic, intentional attack on the health care system. The bizarre thing of all of this is that the Israeli politicians have not hidden it. They have said open statements about creating epidemics. There’s been tons of open statements about what they intend to do. So you can’t even make this stuff up. It’s bizarre how they have openly said this, right? But having said that, I think over 450 health care workers have been killed — doctors, nurses, paramedics, over 450 — when they’re not supposed to be a target, right? They’re protected by international law. Doctors have been kidnapped, specific doctors who are of unique specialties have been targeted and killed.

Doctors have been kidnapped, and, yes, they have been tortured. They dehumanize the doctors and health care workers when they capture them. We’ve seen pictures of them, so we know this happens, and it does indeed happen. A few of the doctors went through torture, and one doctor that came back, he’s a general surgeon, he came back, I was speaking to his wife, and he’s not the same anymore. He was tortured and he still has torture marks over his body, and he’s a general surgeon. That’s it, just a medical professional. The assistant director of the hospital was basically declothed and beat up in front of all the other hospital workers just to kind of insult and degrade him because he’s their boss. And they’re beating him up and kicking him and swearing at him, and everybody witnessed this, and they did it purposely in front of his workers. So, it’s a further dehumanization of a human being. These doctors when they come back, the few that are released, there’s still a lot that are under custody with the Israeli forces, they’re not the same anymore. For me, as a surgeon, it’s really heartbreaking for me to see that. As a surgeon, we have people’s lives in our hands and we heal. And then to see them mentally reduced to nothing is hard to take. Yeah. It’s hard to stomach.

JS: I wanted to ask you about an op-ed that a colleague of yours wrote. It was an American doctor, Irfan Galaria, who penned an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times on February 16 after returning from Gaza, and I believe that doctor was at the European Gaza Hospital and described a scene and I’ll just read from their experience at the hospital:

“I stopped keeping track of how many new orphans I had operated on. After surgery they would be filed somewhere in the hospital, I’m unsure of who will take care of them or how they will survive. On one occasion, a handful of children, all about ages 5 to 8, were carried to the emergency room by their parents. All had single sniper shots to the head. These families were returning to their homes in Khan Yunis, about 2.5 miles away from the hospital, after Israeli tanks had withdrawn. But the snipers apparently stayed behind. None of these children survived.”

This should be shocking to the soul of everyone who hears those words from an American doctor describing children between the ages of 5 to 8, arriving in that emergency room with, according to the doctor, single sniper shots to the head. Talk about the kinds of injuries or fatalities that you witnessed during your time there.

YK: Yeah. I know Irfan, and he’s a really good guy and he saw a lot there and I spoke to him when he got back. I myself did not see, when I was there, what he described. But definitely the doctor spoke about it for sure, and it was well known that that indeed was happening on the ground. We hear reports from the West Bank as well, where 12-year-olds or 13-year-olds are shot for nothing really, for no reason at all, just for the sake of being shot. So, it’s not something which is far-fetched, and it is going on.

What I saw — I’m an eye surgeon, an eye plastic surgeon, and so I saw the classic, what I penned “the Gaza shrapnel face,” because in an explosive scenario, you don’t know what’s coming. When there’s an explosion, you don’t go like this [cover your face], you kind of actually, in fact, open your eyes. And so shrapnel’s everywhere. It’s a well-known fact that the Israeli forces are experimenting [with] weapons in Gaza to boost their weapon manufacturing industry. Because if a weapon is battle-tested, it’s more valuable, isn’t it? It’s got a higher value. So basically they’re using these weapons, these missiles that purposely, intently create these large shrapnel fragments that go everywhere. And they cause amputations that are unusual.

Dr. Khan performed surgeries to remove eyes of multiple children wounded in Israeli strikes, calling the injuries “the Gaza shrapnel face.”

Most amputations occur at the weak points, the elbow or the knee, and so they’re better tolerated. But these [shrapnel fragments] are causing mid-thigh, mid-arm amputations that are more difficult, more challenging, and also the rehabilitation afterward is also more challenging. Also these shrapnels [are] unlike a bullet wound. A bullet wound goes in and out; there’s an entry and exit point. Shrapnel stays there. So you gotta take it out. So the injuries I saw were — I mean, I saw people with their eyes blown apart. And when I was there, and this is my experience, I treated all children when I was there the first time. It was kids that [were aged] 2, 6, 9, 10, 13, 15, and 16, and 17 were the ones that I treated. And their eyes unfortunately had to be removed. They had shrapnel in their eye sockets that I had to remove and, of course, remove the eye. There’s many patients, many children who had shrapnel in both their eyes. And you can only do so much because right now, because of the aid blockade and because of the destruction of most of Gaza, there’s no equipment available to take shrapnel that’s in the eye out. And so we just leave them alone and they eventually go blind.

And so I saw these facial injuries, I saw limbs of children just kind of hanging off, barely connected. I saw abdominal wounds where you had, of course, the intestines exposed. And the thing is that the emergency does not have room, so they’re all over the floor. So you have these massive trauma, and [the patients] are on the floor. And sometimes they get forgotten in the mass chaos.

There was a 2-year-old baby who came in from a fresh bombing. He lost his aunt and his sibling, and his mother was in the OR being amputated. And she was actually a U.N. worker, by the way, a Palestinian U.N. worker. So he was just forgotten on the floor somewhere with major, major head trauma. Fortunately, after about two hours, they found him. And, because he had no — I mean, his mother wasn’t there, his father wasn’t there, there’s no family there — and fortunately, they found him. And they took him up to neurosurgery, but I don’t know what happened to him because that was on my last day that I was leaving. So I remember that very well. So it was just injuries that you have never seen before and the degree to it was amazing.

UNICEF said in December — and this was a low number — that there was over 1,000 children that had either double amputation or single amputation. This is only in December. It’s a very conservative estimate. Some people have said about 5,000 children. This is in January. So if you look at two months later, it must be 7,000, 8,000 now, either double amputees or single amputee, like arm, leg, both legs, both arms, mostly children. The thing is that in any normal amputation, in a normal circumstance, a child who gets amputated goes through about eight or nine operations until they’re adults, to revise the stump and fix the stump. Who is going to do that now? Not only have they lost their supports, their entire family structure, they don’t have the family structure or the infrastructure to do that because it’s all been destroyed.

JS: Were you just in one hospital, or did you go to multiple hospitals?

YK: No, so I stayed in European. The first time I was going to go to Nasser, but it got too dangerous and I think the fear was that the Israelis would just close off the road and then I’d be stuck in Nasser Hospital, so I didn’t go, but I went to European. And now there’s only one hospital, really, left, which is the European Hospital. One fully functional hospital exactly. They have these clinics across the city — I mean, they call them hospitals sometimes, like the Indonesian field hospital, things like that, but they really aren’t fully functioning hospitals. They’re clinics that have one or two services that kind of are more than just a clinic, but they’re mostly just clinics. So there’s really only one fully functioning hospital now, which is the European hospital, and therefore the impending invasion of Rafah is quite worrisome for me.

JS: At the European Hospital, are there sufficient supplies to manage the influx of patients? You’re describing an apocalyptic scene, particularly with these amputations among children. Are there adequate supplies to handle the demand in that hospital where you were?

YK: Definitely two months ago there weren’t. On my last day when I was leaving, they ran out of morphine, and morphine is needed in a lot of orthopedic and major trauma. You need morphine for pain control. So they ran out of morphine, and they ran out of a lot of the antibiotics as well, about two months ago. Now, two months later, supplies have come in. So they do have supplies that are running out pretty fast and they do run out. So, they’re coming in, but their equipment is rusted, new equipment is harder to come in, because anything that’s dual purpose, for example, the Israelis stop from coming.

So a lot of medical equipment is not coming in, unfortunately, and as a result a lot of equipment is rusted and it’s old, and it needs to be replaced, but these Palestinian doctors are very innovative and they’re geniuses, all of them are. What they’re going through, what they’ve done is amazing. I mean, hats off to them for sure. But yeah, it’s a mess. I mean, even the ORs are a mess. They’re a disorganized mess. People are frustrated. There’s a lot of frustrations, and I don’t blame them.

JS: Talk about the conversations you were having with Palestinian colleagues. You described a bit of this, but you are coming from Canada. You had colleagues that also came from the United States, and you’re going for these 10-day periods or so. I know there are some doctors that have stayed longer, but relatively short periods of time. And we all have to remember the Palestinian doctors and nurses and medical workers that are there, they’re simultaneously doing their job and many of them have lost their families, their spouses, their children, their grandchildren. This is their reality. They don’t leave. And I’m wondering as a medical professional from Canada, what that’s like to talk then to your Palestinian colleagues and what impression it has left on your heart?

YK: It’s left a huge impression, Jeremy, especially this time. This time I felt the emotional burden more than I did the last time. But, you know, I’ll tell you one thing. I know we talk about the death and the disease and all that, but one thing that we also need to more talk about — and this relates to how they’re doing is the death of their culture and their civilization, which is a genocide or plausible — that’s part of the definition of a genocide, is it not? Every single playground, hangout place, café, restaurant, 500-year-old ancient mosque, 500-year-old ancient church, destroyed. There’s schools destroyed, there’s stadiums, sports facilities destroyed, their hospitals destroyed, their cinemas destroyed, museums destroyed, archives, where they kept their archives, erased, destroyed, burnt, their homes, 80 percent of homes, are all gone now. And even though the homes are empty, they do not need to be destroyed. They’ve been TikToked on for the whole world to see. The Israeli forces have TikToked this and have shown destruction of these homes, of these beautiful people, and then dedicated destruction to their spouses or their children or whatever.

We’ve seen all this. You can’t make this stuff up. It’s all out there that we’ve seen. So they’ve witnessed all this. What the Israeli forces have also done is that once they’ve come in, they’ve depaved the roads. Even in Khan Younis, many of the roads have been depaved. So there’s no roads left. So they’ve seen a complete destruction of their culture and their civilization and their lives, a complete erasure of their culture. And so that by itself is a tremendous tragedy. If we all look at ourselves and see if that happens to us, how would we feel?

So in the backdrop, despite that, they remain hopeful. They really do. There are some that have lost hope and want to get out. There’s a lot of patients that come in, and they may have like a dry eye, and they want a referral to be referred out, like a medical referral, because that’s one way to get out. But first of all, even people with serious medical conditions are not getting out so easily, but they’re all trying to leave just to save their lives, but they all say that they want to leave and come back. They all want to come back, right? Because there’s something magical about the land. Palestinians have been there for thousands and thousands of years, Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Palestinians. They have a very strong connection to their land, and they don’t want to leave. They’d rather die than leave, but at this point in time, they want to leave, be safe. So that’s their philosophy. In the end, I think what holds them together is their faith. They have faith in God. They have faith in justice. God’s justice. They have no faith in humanity’s justice at all. And I don’t blame them. We have really abandoned them. Not us, as in the average person who’s been protesting and advocating for them. But at an elitist or governmental level. They’re encouraged and touched by everybody in the world who has fought for them and advocated for them. They know this, and they are touched by this. But at the other hand, they don’t know what to do. There’s no certainty. So they don’t know how to plan for the future because they don’t know whether there’ll be a Rafah invasion.

“Being wounded in this environment with no health care system, completely collapsed, is a death sentence.”

I was on the ground, I toured the refugee camps, I went around Rafah, I saw, and if there’s an Israeli invasion, I can’t emphasize enough how catastrophic it’s going to be. It’ll be mass killing, mass destruction, because all these figures come in, 50 dead, 100 wounded. But what people don’t realize is, being wounded is a death sentence. Being wounded in this environment with no health care system, completely collapsed, is a death sentence. And the wounded often will lose everybody, like all family members, so they have no supports, especially children, have nobody left to take care of them, not even aunts and uncles. It will be catastrophic. I don’t know what to say to the world to stop an impending invasion. You’ve got to rein this prime minister of Israel in. You got to do something to stop this stupid invasion that he still wants to do, because it’ll be catastrophic.

JS: I was just thinking back to your description of having to remove eyes from children or adults who’ve been hit with shrapnel. I think any of us who’ve ever had an operation or surgery, or we’ve helped a loved one that went into surgery, knows that the path to recovery is often a long one where you have to have physical therapy, you have to come to terms with a body part that you’ve lost and are going to have to live your life without. What’s your understanding of what happens to the patients you operated on who now are entering a reality where they no longer can see? They don’t have eyes, or children that no longer have a leg. What happens to those people after the acute situation is dealt with, that the surgery happens, the amputation happens, the eyes are removed?

YK: Well, Jeremy, that’s what keeps me up at night, and that’s what bears on me a lot. The overall simple answer is, I don’t know. The reason I don’t know is because they’re living in tents and structures. Many of them have lost their family and support, especially children have lost their family and support. Even adults.

I had one young man, about 25 years old, he lost one eye that I took out myself. He spent about five, six, or seven years, basically spent thousands and thousands of dollars in IVF treatment because he got married young and they wanted to have a child and they couldn’t have one. So he spent years on IVF treatment and finally had a baby that was 3 months old. And there was a missile attack by Israel at his home. He lost his entire family, including his baby and his wife and his parents and family. He’s by himself, single guy. I took his one eye out, and he has nobody in this world. He just kind of walks around the tent structures, just kind of walking around with no home and trying to sleep wherever he can.

There’s tons of children like this as well. So what happens to them? I don’t know. What’s going to happen to the double amputee child who has no home, no parents and no uncles and aunts or grandparents left, no siblings left either? What’s going to happen to them? Then there’s some kids who have an older sibling that’s 11 years old and they’re like 5 years old. I saw one girl who lost an arm and the only living relative she has is an 11- or 12-year old sibling who’s taking care of her. So I don’t know what’s going to happen because in the current infrastructure, there is no infrastructure, there is no care for these stumps. Many of them are getting infected, these stumps are, after they’ve been amputated — and where are they discharged to? Usually when they’re discharged, because the hospital is trying to discharge them to make room for more people to come in, they’re discharged out to the shelters or tents. That’s where they’re discharged. It’s not like they’re discharged home where there’s proper care.

I will emphasize this, Jeremy, that Palestinians were in an open-air concentration camp for decades. This is not new. It was a struggle, but they were still able to make their life. And because they couldn’t go anywhere, because they’re restricted by Israel and by Egypt on the other side, they couldn’t go anywhere, they put everything into their homes. So their homes were their castles, were their life, were their center of their life and their universe, and they really took a lot of care and attention to their homes. And so now all these people who are homeless, their homes are gone. So, it’s a tremendous effect, and they’re living in tents, and I can only imagine what they must go through. Only a year ago, life was normal so to speak, even though you’re in a concentration camp, but life was still normal. It was their normal, right? And they’re living and they make the best of things. They’re very grateful and gracious people, and steadfast people, and they make the best of every scenario, and they did make the best of even being in a concentration camp. They made the best of it. But now it’s heartbreaking.

JS: I’m thinking of this too, and like anyone who’s a parent, imagine that terror when you lose your kid, you’re at a theme park or you’re out somewhere. And all of a sudden, you can’t see your child and all the thoughts that go through your head and then imagine your child alone in the world, completely alone. And, by the way, they’ve lost their sight. Or they’re a double amputee. I haven’t been to Gaza and seen what you’ve seen, but I have these thoughts all the time, and I think everyone who really has internalized this as a human catastrophe that was preventable, that didn’t need to happen, you think about those children and what does it mean to be alone in this world as a child? But then on top of it, to be alone in this world and it’s hell on earth. It’s bombs. It’s everyone trying to survive. It’s starvation. It’s famine. It’s people fighting over the morsels of food that get dropped from the sky along with the bombs. And as I listen to you, it just punctuates how unconscionable this is to the core of humanity, how unconscionable it is. What is your message to the world right now?

YK: Well, Gaza is basically a man-made hell on earth right now, is what it is, and I think that it’s never too late. If the Israeli invasion of Rafah occurs, it’ll be catastrophic. We have to do all that we can to stop that from happening, put all the pressure we can on our politicians, on the powers that be, to stop this from happening because the health care and the human toll will be unimaginable. The fact is that it’s been 75 years of occupation. In the end, out of all of this death and destruction that’s happened, they need to have their independence, and they need to have their independent state so that they can live their lives with dignity and freedom.

And I’ll tell you one thing: I’ve been to 45 different countries, and Palestinians are among the best people that I’ve ever met in my entire life. They’re the most generous, gracious, kind-hearted, intelligent, and wise people that I’ve ever met. And so they’re worth fighting for. I think it’s an issue of humanity. I will side on the side of humanity anytime. And they are worth fighting for. So I want us all to continue the fight and continue advocating for them until this war stops and they are free.

The post “Man-Made Hell On Earth”: A Canadian Doctor on His Medical Mission to Gaza appeared first on The Intercept.

The rejection of the Times reporting in the kibbutz by Be’eri spokesperson Michal Paikin further undermines the credibility of the paper’s controversial December article “‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7.”

The Times article described three alleged victims of sexual assault for whom it reported specific biographical information. One, known as the “woman in the black dress,” was Gal Abdush. Some of her family members have contested the claims made by the Times. The other two alleged victims were unnamed teenage sisters from Kibbutz Be’eri whose precise ages were listed in the New York Times, making it possible to identify them. 

According to data from the Israeli government’s public list of the victims who died at the kibbutz during the October 7 attacks, as well as a memorial page established by the community itself, the victims in Kibbutz Be’eri matching the description in the New York Times article were sisters Y. and N. Sharabi, ages 13 and 16. (The Intercept has identified the girls but is not printing their first names.)

“No, they just — they were shot. I’m saying ‘just,’ but they were shot and were not subjected to sexual abuse.”

When asked about the claims made by the New York Times, Paikin independently raised their name. “You’re talking about the Sharabi girls?” she said. “No, they just — they were shot. I’m saying ‘just,’ but they were shot and were not subjected to sexual abuse.” Paikin also disputed the graphic and highly detailed claims of the Israeli special forces paramedic who served as the source for the allegation, which was published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and other media outlets. “It’s not true,” she told The Intercept, referring to the paramedic’s claims about the girls. “They were not sexually abused.”

“We stand by the story and are continuing to report on the issue of sexual violence on Oct. 7,” Times spokesperson Danielle Rhoades Ha told The Intercept.

A spokesperson for the Israeli government, Eylon Levy, played a lead role in connecting the anonymous paramedic with international media outlets.

As The Intercept previously reported, Anat Schwartz — an Israeli filmmaker who, before joining the Times, appeared to have no prior experience reporting the news — was hired by the paper to investigate sexual violence on October 7. She worked under Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent Jeffrey Gettleman, and alongside Adam Sella, who was contracted shortly after October 7 to work for the Times; Sella’s own journalism experience was mostly writing about food and culture. Ben Smith, the editor-in-chief of Semafor and the former media columnist for the New York Times, reported Sunday that Sella recommended his uncle’s partner, Schwartz, to the Jerusalem bureau chief, and she was brought on board for the investigation. Schwartz told Israeli Army Radio she had personally conducted over 150 interviews for the story.

In a podcast interview produced by Israel’s Channel 12 in January, Schwartz described in detail how she sought to confirm that the girls had been sexually assaulted. She said she first learned of the case when she saw an interview with a man identified as a paramedic from an elite Israeli military unit. The Israeli government coordinated media interviews with the paramedic, who did them with his back turned to the camera to avoid being identified.

In her podcast interview, Schwartz said that she had been unable to find a second source to confirm the paramedic’s account. “I don’t have a second source … for the paramedic with the girls in Be’eri,” she said. “This stage of [getting the] second source, it took a very long time.” While she mentions the second source, in the interview Schwartz does not mention any specifics about actually finding one, and the Times report does not cite any other corroborating witness for its portrayal of the condition in which the girls were allegedly discovered by the paramedic.

In the report, the Times presents unnamed “neighbors” at Kibbutz Be’eri who “said their bodies had been found alone, separated from the rest of their family.” According to the family, however, not even that detail is accurate.

A recent interview in the Israeli media with the Sharabi sisters’ grandparents offers details that directly contradict the Times reporting that the girls at Kibbutz Be’eri were sexually assaulted on October 7. “They were just shot — nothing else had been done to them,” their grandmother Gillian Brisley told Channel 12. (A U.K.-based lawyer for the Brisley family did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) The family also gave several interviews to international news outlets before “Screams Without Words” was published that provided information that undercuts the assertions in the Times article, raising questions about why the paper did not include these publicly available details.

The Brisley family and relatives in Israel who lived with the Sharabis at Kibbutz Be’eri have never asserted that the girls were sexually assaulted. In numerous interviews, the Brisleys have maintained the girls were killed alongside their mother.

According to the Times report, “Screams Without Words”: 

A paramedic in an Israeli commando unit said that he had found the bodies of two teenage girls in a room in Be’eri.

One was lying on her side, he said, boxer shorts ripped, bruises by her groin. The other was sprawled on the floor face down, he said, pajama pants pulled to her knees, bottom exposed, semen smeared on her back.

Because his job was to look for survivors, he said, he kept moving and did not document the scene. Neighbors of the two girls killed — who were sisters, 13 and 16 — said their bodies had been found alone, separated from the rest of their family.

The Israeli military allowed the paramedic to speak with reporters on the condition that he not be identified because he serves in “an elite unit.”

On February 29, Israel’s Channel 12 broadcast a feature story on the grandparents, who traveled from Britain to the kibbutz to view the home where their loved ones died and to meet with neighbors, family members, and officials. In the interview, the Brisleys’ description of the deaths of their daughter, Lianne, and their granddaughters contradict virtually every detail, outside of the Be’eri girls’ ages and that they were killed, presented in the Times article.

“They were found between the ‘mamad’” — the house’s safe room — “and the dining room and it’s an awful thing to say, they were just shot — nothing else had been done to them. They were shot,” said Gillian Brisley. “A soldier said he saw our daughter” — the girls’ mother — “but she was covering the two girls and they were shot,” added her husband, Pete, the girls’ grandfather. “The seventh of October was the saddest day of my life.” 

Months before the Times story was published on December 28, the Brisleys had already given an interview to the BBC offering details contradicting the depiction that would later appear in the Times, including the assertion the girls were found alone in a room. Gillian Brisley told the BBC on October 30 that the teenage girls were “found all cuddled together with Lianne doing what a mother would do — holding her babies in her arms, trying to protect them at the end.” Brisley said it was a “small comfort but a comfort nevertheless.”

On October 24, the Israeli news site Walla published a story about the family, which also said the girls were killed alongside their mother. Sharon Sharabi, whose brother Eli was the father of the two girls and was kidnapped that day and reportedly taken to Gaza, said that Palestinian fighters entered the family home, broke into their safe room, and killed Lianne and the two girls. “Lianne and [Y] were only identified through dental records, and [N] by DNA,” he said. He did not specify where the forensic examinations had taken place. N was initially reported missing for two weeks because her body had yet to be formally identified.

“I’ve heard all the versions. What’s the truth? I don’t know.”

Sharon Sharabi told The Intercept that his family has not been provided with any specific details about his nieces’ deaths that would allow him to draw a firm conclusion about what happened to them that day. “To tell you concretely what happened in Be’eri, or what happened at the house of the Sharabi family, I don’t have an answer for you,” he said. “There is certainly no credible information I can give you, only testimonies of ZAKA” — private rescue workers — “or of military personnel who arrived at the scene first and saw the atrocities. So any information I might give you is information that I’m not confident about, and therefore I would rather not give it [at all].” 

He added, “I’ve heard all the versions. What’s the truth? I don’t know.” Sharabi emphasized that he firmly believes there was widespread sexual violence committed during the attacks of October 7.

Before the Times published its exposé, the Israeli military paramedic claimed in interviews with the Washington Post, CNN, and an Indian news channel to have seen evidence that two girls had been sexually assaulted at a kibbutz. “One was on the bed. Her arm was dangling from the bed frame. Her legs were bare, with bruises, and she had a bullet hole in the chest-neck area,” he told the Post. The details of the recollection closely matched those the paramedic gave to the Times. 

The paramedic’s story was met with skepticism by the news site Mondoweiss. In his first interview, on October 25, with an Indian news channel, the paramedic said he witnessed the scene at Kibbutz Nahal Oz, not Be’eri.

According to the official records of October 7 deaths at Kibbutz Nahal Oz, there were no victims that matched the age estimates offered by the paramedic. The closest possible match would have been sisters who were 18 and 20 years old, who were killed at their home at the kibbutz along with their parents. 

When Levy, the Israeli government spokesperson, promoted the Indian TV interview on social media that day, he posted an edited portion of the interview which removed reference to Nahal Oz. Instead, Levy wrote in a tweet that it had occurred at Kibbutz Be’eri, where official records indicated two teenage sisters roughly matching the paramedics description had been killed. “Israeli special forces paramedic describes the aftermath of the brutal rape and execution of Israeli girls in Be’eri during the October 7 Massacre,” Levy tweeted October 25. In a subsequent post, he wrote, “If media want to interview this special forces paramedic about the horrors he saw in the kibbutzim on October 7, drop me a message in my DMs.” When the paramedic was later interviewed on CNN, on November 18, he maintained he had seen the two girls at Kibbutz Be’eri. In his tweet, Levy implied that the paramedic had been to multiple kibbutzim.

By the time Schwartz met the paramedic, the location of the scene was fixed at Be’eri. Schwartz said during her podcast interview that she put extensive effort into trying to confirm the paramedic’s story. “I said, if I want information about the rapes, I have to call the kibbutzim — and nothing,” she said. “No one saw or heard anything.”

Eventually, she reached the unit 669 paramedic, identified in some media interviews as “G.” He relayed the same story he had told other media outlets. Schwartz cited this incident as a central reason she concluded there was organized sexual violence on October 7. “I say, ‘OK, so it happened, one person saw it happen in Be’eri, so it can’t be just one person, because it’s two girls. It’s sisters. It’s in the room. Something about it is systematic, something about it feels to me that it’s not random,” Schwartz concluded on the podcast.

Schwartz does not mention the unnamed neighbors who allegedly saw the two girls alone in the podcast. 

It is unclear why the Times did not include the well-publicized statements from the Be’eri girls’ family members. Several of them have done interviews with Israeli media and international newspapers and TV networks, including the BBC, the Daily Mail, and the Daily Telegraph.

The case received significant media attention in the U.K. because Lianne was a British citizen who emigrated to Israel, and her children were dual citizens. The family has also been outspoken in pressuring the British government to put greater effort into freeing Lianne’s husband, Eli Sharabi, the father of the two girls, who is believed to be a hostage in Gaza. The Times article does not mention the fact that there are conflicting details and instead airs the single-sourced assertions offered by the paramedic. If Times reporters had other sources for this story, aside from neighbors who allegedly told the Times the girls were found alone, the readers were not given any indication of it.

On Monday, United Nations Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict Pramila Patten reported that her team found information indicating sexual violence took place. “In the context of the coordinated attack by Hamas and other armed groups against civilian and military targets throughout the Gaza periphery, the mission team found that there are reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence occurred in multiple locations during the 7 October attacks, including rape and gang-rape in at least three locations, namely: the Nova music festival site and its surroundings, Road 232, and Kibbutz Re’im,” the report release said, calling for a full investigation. The special representative wrote, “Overall, the mission team was unable to establish whether sexual violence occurred in kibbutz Be’eri.”

The special representative found two high-profile cases of sexual assault alleged to have happened at Kibbutz Be’eri to be “unfounded.” In its coverage of the U.N. report, the Times sourcing on the alleged assaults in Be’eri moves from a singular first responder to plural, and claims that the sexual assault it identified was a separate incident than the two described by the U.N. “First responders told The New York Times they had found bodies of women with signs of sexual assault at those two kibbutzim, but The Times, in its investigation, did not refer to the specific allegations that the U.N. said were unfounded,” the Times reported. (“The plural ‘first responders’ is accurate,” said the Times spokesperson, without elaborating.)

The controversy around the Times coverage gained momentum last week after X user Zei Squirrel highlighted Schwartz’s social media activity, which included “liking” a post that expressed genocidal incitement against Palestinians in Gaza, calling to “turn the strip into a slaughterhouse.” The Intercept then published excerpts of an interview in which Schwartz offered revelatory details about the Times’s reporting process. For months, independent news outlets such as Mondoweiss, The Grayzone, and Electronic Intifada, as well as the independent research collective October 7 Fact Check, have been documenting a variety of problems with the Times story and highlighting inconsistencies.

On January 5, Laila Al-Arian, an Emmy and Polk Award-winning executive producer for Al Jazeera English, sent an email to New York Times international editor Phil Pan, as well as Jerusalem bureau chief Patrick Kingsley and the Times standards department, posing detailed questions about the veracity of the Times report. She received no response.

Amid mounting public scrutiny, the Times assigned its reporters to effectively re-report their story. The resulting article was published on January 29, and the paper has since maintained it stands by the original report.

Meanwhile, the Times newsroom is facing a serious internal conflict over its coverage of the war against Gaza. Shortly after the December 28 “Screams Without Words” article was published, the paper’s flagship podcast “The Daily” was tasked with converting it into an episode. After a review by producers, the original script, drafted to hew closely to the original article, was shelved, with a more circumspect and caveated script written.

The new script raised problems for the masthead. Running a watered-down version of the article would raise questions as to whether the paper was standing by its reporting amid criticism, including, most prominently, from the family of Gal Abdush. No episode of “The Daily” on the December 28 story has run to date.

The Intercept reported on the internal dispute at the Times in late January. The paper’s masthead responded not by reviewing its reporting, as it did after the debacle over weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but instead by launching a highly unusual leak investigation. The Times union denounced the probe this weekend for racially profiling journalists with Middle Eastern and North African backgrounds. The probe, the union said, also focused on journalists who used proper Times channels to critique the reporting, as reporters are encouraged to do.

Times Executive Editor Joe Kahn responded to criticism of the internal probe Saturday in a companywide email, arguing that the leak investigation was proper because the whistleblowers had revealed details about an unpublished episode of “The Daily.” That argument, however, elides the reality that the dispute was not about something the Times did not publish, but rather about something that it did.

“They know better than anyone that leaks are desperate measures when people want to expose grave failures without any safe or efficient internal mechanisms,” said one Times source. “Trying to crush the messenger won’t make the basic fact that the story is a journalism failure go away.”

The post Kibbutz Be’eri Rejects Story in New York Times October 7 Exposé: “They Were Not Sexually Abused” appeared first on The Intercept.

“Violate any norm, on the way to victory,” read the post. “Those in front of us are human animals who do not hesitate to violate minimal rules.”

The New York Times, however, does have rules and norms. Schwartz had no prior reporting experience. Her reporting partner Gettleman explained the basics to her, Schwartz said in a podcast interview on January 3, produced by Israel’s Channel 12 and conducted in Hebrew.

Gettleman, she said, was concerned they “get at least two sources for every detail we put into the article, cross-check information. Do we have forensic evidence? Do we have visual evidence? Apart from telling our reader ‘this happened,’ what can we say? Can we tell what happened to whom?”

Schwartz said she was initially reluctant to take the assignment because she did not want to look at visual images of potential assaults and because she lacked the expertise to conduct such an investigation.

“Victims of sexual assault are women who have experienced something, and then to come and sit in front of such a woman — who am I anyway?” she said. “I have no qualifications.”

Nonetheless, she began working with Gettleman on the story, she explained in the podcast interview. Gettleman, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, is an international correspondent, and when he is sent to a bureau, he works with news assistants and freelancers on stories. In this case, several newsroom sources familiar with the process said, Schwartz and Sella did the vast majority of the ground reporting, while Gettleman focused on the framing and writing.

The resulting report, published in late December, was headlined “‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7.” It was a bombshell and galvanized the Israeli war effort at a time when even some of Israel’s allies were expressing concern over its large-scale killing of civilians in Gaza. Inside the newsroom, the article was met with praise from editorial leaders but skepticism from other Times journalists. The paper’s flagship podcast “The Daily” attempted to turn the article into an episode, but it didn’t manage to get through a fact check, as The Intercept previously reported. (In a statement received after publication, a Times spokesperson said, “No Daily episode was killed due to fact checking failures.”)

The fear among Times staffers who have been critical of the paper’s Gaza coverage is that Schwartz will become a scapegoat for what is a much deeper failure. She may harbor animosity toward Palestinians, lack the experience with investigative journalism, and feel conflicting pressures between being a supporter of Israel’s war effort and a Times reporter, but Schwartz did not commission herself and Sella to report one of the most consequential stories of the war. Senior leadership at the New York Times did.

Schwartz said as much in an interview with Israeli Army Radio on December 31. “The New York Times said, ‘Let’s do an investigation into sexual violence’ — it was more a case of them having to convince me,” she said. Her host cut her off: “It was a proposal of The New York Times, the entire thing?”

“Unequivocally. Unequivocally. Obviously. Of course,” she said. “The paper stood behind us 200 percent and gave us the time, the investment, the resources to go in-depth with this investigation as much as needed.”

Shortly after the war broke out, some editors and reporters complained that Times standards barred them from referring to Hamas as “terrorists.” The rationale from the standards department, run for 14 years by Philip Corbett, had long been that Hamas was the de facto administrator of a specific territory, rather than a stateless terror group. Deliberately killing civilians, went the argument, was not enough to label a group terrorists, as that label could apply quite broadly.

Corbett, after October 7, defended the policy in the face of pressure, newsroom sources said, but he lost. On October 19, an email went out on behalf of Executive Editor Joe Kahn saying that Corbett had asked to step back from his position. “After 14 years as the embodiment of Times standards, Phil Corbett has told us he’d like to step back a bit and let someone else take the leading role in this crucial effort,” Times leadership explained. Three newsroom sources said the move was tied to the pressure he was under to soften coverage in Israel’s favor. One of the social media posts that Schwartz liked, triggering the Times review, made the case that, for Israeli propaganda purposes, Hamas should be likened at all times to the Islamic State. A Times spokesperson told The Intercept, “Your understanding about Phil Corbett is flatly untrue.” In a statement received after publication, “Phil had asked to change roles before Joe Kahn even became executive editor in June 2022. And it had absolutely nothing to do with a dispute over coverage.”

Since the revelations regarding Schwartz’s recent social media activity, her byline has not appeared in the paper and she has not attended editorial meetings. The paper said that a review into her social media “likes” is ongoing. “Those ‘likes’’ are unacceptable violations of our company policy,” said a Times spokesperson.

The bigger scandal may be the reporting itself, the process that allowed it into print, and the life-altering impact the reporting had for thousands of Palestinians whose deaths were justified by the alleged systematic sexual violence orchestrated by Hamas the paper claimed to have exposed.

Another frustrated Times reporter who has also worked as an editor there said, “A lot of focus will understandably, rightfully, be directed at Schwartz but this is most clearly poor editorial decision making that undermines all the other great work being tirelessly done across the paper — both related and completely unrelated to the war — that manages to challenge our readers and meet our standards.”

“A lot of focus will understandably, rightfully, be directed at Schwartz but this is most clearly poor editorial decision.”

The Channel 12 podcast interview with Schwartz, which The Intercept translated from Hebrew, opens a window into the reporting process on the controversial story and suggests that The New York Times’s mission was to bolster a predetermined narrative.

In a response to The Intercept’s questions about Schwartz’s podcast interview, a spokesperson for the New York Times walked back the blockbuster article’s framing that evidence shows Hamas had weaponized sexual violence to a softer claim that “there may have been systematic use of sexual assault.”

Times International editor Phil Pan said in a statement that he stands by the work. “Ms. Schwartz was part of a rigorous reporting and editing process,” he said. “She made valuable contributions and we saw no evidence of bias in her work. We remain confident in the accuracy of our reporting and stand by the team’s investigation. But as we have said, her ‘likes’ of offensive and opinionated social media posts, predating her work with us, are unacceptable.”

After this story was published, Schwartz, who did not respond to a request for comment, tweeted to thank the Times for “standing behind the important stories we have published.” She added, “The recent attacks against me will not deter me from continuing my work.” Addressing her social media activity, Schwartz said, “I understand why people who do not know me were offended by the inadvertent ‘like’ I pressed on 10/7 and I apologize for that.” At least three of her “likes” have been the subject of public scrutiny.

In the podcast interview, Schwartz details her extensive efforts to get confirmation from Israeli hospitals, rape crisis centers, trauma recovery facilities, and sex assault hotlines in Israel, as well as her inability to get a single confirmation from any of them. “She was told there had been no complaints made of sexual assaults,” the Times spokesperson acknowledged after The Intercept brought the Channel 12 podcast episode to the paper’s attention. “This however was just the very first step of her research. She then describes the unfolding of evidence, testimonies, and eventual evidence that there may have been systematic use of sexual assault,” the spokesperson asserted. “She details her research steps and emphasizes the Times’s strict standards to corroborate evidence, and meetings with reporters and editors to discuss probing questions and think critically about the story.”

The question has never been whether individual acts of sexual assault may have occurred on October 7. Rape is not uncommon in war, and there were also several hundred civilians who poured into Israel from Gaza that day in a “second wave,” contributing to and participating in the mayhem and violence. The central issue is whether the New York Times presented solid evidence to support its claim that there were newly reported details “establishing that the attacks against women were not isolated events but part of a broader pattern of gender-based violence on Oct. 7” — a claim stated in the headline that Hamas deliberately deployed sexual violence as a weapon of war.

Schwartz began her work on the violence of October 7 where one would expect, by calling around to the designated “Room 4” facilities in 11 Israeli hospitals that examine and treat potential victims of sexual violence, including rape. “First thing I called them all, and they told me, ‘No, no complaint of sexual assault was received,’” she recalled in the podcast interview. “I had a lot of interviews which didn’t lead anywhere. Like, I would go to all kinds of psychiatric hospitals, sit in front of the staff, all of them are fully committed to the mission and no one had met a victim of sexual assault.”

The next step was to call the manager of the sexual assault hotline in Israel’s south, which proved equally fruitless. The manager told her they had no reports of sexual violence. She described the call as a “crazy in-depth conversation” where she pressed for specific cases. “Did anyone call you? Did you hear anything?” she recalled asking. “How could it be that you didn’t?”

As Schwartz began her own efforts to find evidence of sexual assault, the first specific allegations of rape began to emerge. A person identified in anonymous media interviews as a paramedic from the Israeli Air Force medical unit 669 claimed he saw evidence that two teenage girls at Kibbutz Nahal Oz had been raped and murdered in their bedroom. The man made other outrageous claims, however, that called his report into question. He claimed another rescuer “pulled out of the garbage” a baby who’d been stabbed multiple times. He also said he had seen “Arabic sentences that were written on entrances to houses … with the blood of the people that were living in the houses.” No such messages exist, and the story of the baby in the trash can has been debunked. The bigger problem was that no two girls at the kibbutz fit the source’s description. In future interviews, he changed the location to Kibbutz Be’eri. But no victims killed there matched the description either, as Mondoweiss reported.

After seeing these interviews, Schwartz started calling people at Kibbutz Be’eri and other kibbutzim that were targeted on October 7 in an effort to track down the story. “Nothing. There was nothing,” she said. “No one saw or heard anything.” She then reached the unit 669 paramedic who relayed to Schwartz the same story he had told other media outlets, which she says convinced her there was a systematic nature to the sexual violence. “I say, ‘OK, so it happened, one person saw it happen in Be’eri, so it can’t be just one person, because it’s two girls. It’s sisters. It’s in the room. Something about it is systematic, something about it feels to me that it’s not random,” Schwartz concluded on the podcast.

Schwartz said she then began a series of extensive conversations with Israeli officials from Zaka, a private ultra-Orthodox rescue organization that has been documented to have mishandled evidence and spread multiple false stories about the events of October 7, including debunked allegations of Hamas operatives beheading babies and cutting the fetus from a pregnant woman’s body. Its workers are not trained forensic scientists or crime scene experts. “When we go into a house, we use our imagination,” said Yossi Landau, a senior Zaka official, describing the group’s work at the October 7 attack sites. “The bodies were telling us what happened, that’s what happened.” Landau is featured in the Times report, though no mention is made of his well-documented track record of disseminating sensational stories of atrocities that were later proven false. Schwartz said that in her initial interviews, Zaka members did not make any specific allegations of rape, but described the general condition of bodies they said they saw. “They told me, ‘Yes, we saw naked women,’ or ‘We saw a woman without underwear.’ Both naked without underwear, and tied with zip ties. And sometimes not zip ties, sometimes a rope or a string of a hoodie.”

Schwartz continued to look for evidence at various sites of attack and found no witnesses to corroborate stories of rape. “And so I searched a lot in the kibbutzim, and apart from this testimony of [the Israeli military paramedic] and additionally, here and there, Zaka people — the stories, like, didn’t emerge from there,” she said.

As she continued to work the phones with rescue officials, Schwartz then saw interviews that international news channels began airing with Shari Mendes, an American architect who serves in a rabbinical unit of the Israel Defense Forces. Mendes, who was deployed to a morgue to prepare bodies for burial after the October 7 attacks, claimed to have seen voluminous evidence of sexual assaults.

“We saw evidence of rape,” Mendes stated in one interview. “Pelvises were broken, and it probably takes a lot to break a pelvis … and this was also among grandmothers down to small children. This is not just something we saw on the internet, we saw these bodies with our own eyes.” Mendes has been a ubiquitous figure in the Israeli government and major media narratives on sexual violence on October 7, despite the fact that she has no medical or forensic credentials to legally determine rape. She had also spoken about other violence on October 7, telling the Daily Mail in October, “A baby was cut out of a pregnant woman and beheaded and then the mother was beheaded.” No pregnant woman died that day, according to the official Israeli list of those killed in the attacks, and the independent research collective October 7 Fact Check said Mendes’s story was false.

“I kept wondering all the time, whether if I just hear about rape and see rape and think about it, whether that’s just because I’m leading toward that.”

After Schwartz saw interviews with Mendes, she was further convinced that the systematic rape narrative was true. “I’m like — wow, what is this?” she recalled. “And it feels to me like it’s starting to approach a plurality, even if you don’t know which numbers to put on it yet.”

At the same time, Schwartz said that she felt conflicted at times, wondering if she was becoming convinced of the truth of the overarching story precisely because she was looking for evidence to support the claim. “I kept wondering all the time, whether if I just hear about rape and see rape and think about it, whether that’s just because I’m leading toward that,” she said. She pushed those doubts aside. By the time Schwartz interviewed Mendes, the IDF reservist’s story had ricocheted around the world and been conclusively debunked: No baby was cut from a mother and beheaded. Yet Schwartz and the New York Times would go on to rely on Mendes’s testimony, as well as those of other witnesses with track records of making unreliable claims and lacking forensic credentials. No mention was made of questions about Mendes’s credibility.

How Schwartz landed in such an extraordinary position at a crucial moment in the war is not entirely clear. Prior to joining the Times as a stringer last fall, Sella was a freelance journalist covering stories on issues ranging from “food, photography, and culture to peace efforts, economics, and the occupation,” according to his LinkedIn profile. Sella’s first collaboration with Gettleman, published on October 14, was a look at the trauma experienced by students at a university in southern Israel. For Schwartz, her first byline landed on November 14.

“Israeli police officials shared more evidence on Tuesday of atrocities committed during the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attacks, saying they had collected testimonies from more than a thousand witnesses and survivors about sexual violence and other abuses,” Schwartz reported. The story went on to quote Israel’s police chief, Kobi Shabtai, explaining a litany of evidence of gruesome killings and sexual assaults on October 7.

“This is the most extensive investigation the State of Israel has ever known,” Shabtai said in the Schwartz article, promising ample evidence would soon be provided.

When the Times later produced its definitive “Screams Without Words” investigation, however, Schwartz and her partners reported that, contrary to Shabtai’s claim, forensic evidence of sexual violence was non-existent. Without acknowledging the past statements by Shabtai in the Times, the paper reported that quick funerals in accordance with Jewish tradition meant evidence was not preserved. Experts told the Times that sexual violence in wars often leaves “limited forensic evidence.”

On the podcast, Schwartz said her next step was to go to a new holistic therapy facility established to address the trauma of October 7 victims, particularly those who endured the carnage at the Nova music festival. Opened a week after the attacks, the facility began welcoming hundreds of survivors where they could seek counseling, do yoga, and receive alternative medicine, as well as acupuncture, sound healing, and reflexology treatments. They called it Merhav Marpe, or Healing Space.

In multiple visits to Merhav Marpe, Schwartz again said in the podcast interview that she found no direct evidence of rapes or sexual violence. She expressed frustration with the therapists and counselors at the facility, saying they engaged in “a conspiracy of silence.” “Everyone, even those who heard these kinds of things from people, they felt very committed to their patients, or even just to people who assisted their patients, not to reveal things,” she said.

In the end, Schwartz came away with only innuendo and general statements from the therapists about how people process trauma, including sexual violence and rape. She said potential victims might be ashamed to speak out, experiencing survivors’ guilt, or were still in shock. “Perhaps also because Israeli society is conservative, there was some inclination to keep silent about this issue of sexual abuse,” Schwartz speculated. “On top of this, there is probably the added dimension of the religious-national aspect, that this was done by a terrorist, by someone from Hamas,” she added. “There were lots and lots of layers that made it so that they didn’t speak.”

According to the published Times article, “Two therapists said they were working with a woman who was gang raped at the rave and was in no condition to talk to investigators or reporters.”

Schwartz said she had focused on the kibbutzim because she had initially determined it was unlikely sexual assaults had occurred at the Nova music festival. “I was very skeptical that it happened at the area of the party, because everyone I spoke to among the survivors told me about a chase, a race, like, about moving from place to place,” she recalled. “How would they [have had the time] to mess with a woman, like — it is impossible. Either you hide, or you — or you die. Also it’s public, the Nova … such an open space.”

Schwartz watched interviews given to international media outlets by Raz Cohen, who attended the Nova festival. A veteran of Israel’s special forces, Cohen did multiple interviews about a rape he claimed to have witnessed. A few days after the attacks, he told PBS NewsHour that he had witnessed multiple rapes. “The terrorists, people from Gaza, raped girls. And after they raped them, they killed them, murdered them with knives, or the opposite, killed — and after they raped, they — they did that,” he said. At an appearance on CNN on January 4, he described seeing one rape and said the assailants were “five guys — five civilians from Gaza, normal guys, not soldiers, not Nukhba,” referring to Hamas’s elite commando force. “It was regular people from Gaza with normal clothes.”

In Cohen’s interview with Schwartz for the Times:

He said he then saw five men, wearing civilian clothes, all carrying knives and one carrying a hammer, dragging a woman across the ground. She was young, naked and screaming.

‘They all gather around her,’ Mr. Cohen said. ‘She’s standing up. They start raping her. I saw the men standing in a half circle around her. One penetrates her. She screams. I still remember her voice, screams without words.”

“Then one of them raises a knife,” he said, “and they just slaughtered her.”

It was this interview that gave the Times its title: “‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7.” That Cohen had described alleged assailants as not being members of Hamas undermines the headline, but it remains unchanged. The Times did not address Cohen’s earlier claims that he witnessed multiple rapes.

Schwartz said in the podcast interview that, since the Times insisted on at least two sources, she asked Cohen to give her the contact information of the other people he was hiding with in the bush, so she could corroborate his story of the rape. She recalled, “Raz hides. In the bush next to him lies his friend Shoam. They get to this bush. There are two other people on the other side looking to the other direction, and another, fifth, person. Five people in the same bush. Only Raz sees all the things he sees, everyone else is looking in a different direction.”

Despite saying on the podcast that only Cohen witnessed the event and the others were looking in different directions, in the Times story Shoam Gueta is presented as a corroborating witness to the rape: “He said he saw at least four men step out of the van and attack the woman, who ended up ‘between their legs.’ He said that they were ‘talking, giggling and shouting,’ and that one of them stabbed her with a knife repeatedly, ‘literally butchering her.’” Gueta did not mention witnessing a rape in an interview he did with NBC News on October 8, a day after the attack, but he did describe seeing a woman murdered with a knife. “We saw terrorists killing people, burning cars, shouting everywhere,” Gueta told NBC. “If you just say something, if you make any noise, you’ll be murdered.” Gueta subsequently deployed to Gaza with the IDF and has posted many videos on TikTok of himself rummaging through Palestinian homes. Cohen and Gueta did not respond to requests for comment.

The independent site October 7 Fact Check, Mondoweiss, and journalists Ali Abunimah of Electronic Intifada and Max Blumenthal of The Grayzone have flagged numerous inconsistencies and contradictions in the stories told in the Times report, including the account of Cohen, who had initially said “he chose not to look, but he could hear them laughing constantly.”

Related

New York Times Puts “Daily” Episode on Ice Amid Internal Firestorm Over Hamas Sexual Violence Article

Under pressure internally to defend the veracity of the story, the Times reassigned Gettleman, Schwartz, and Sella to effectively re-report the story, resulting in an article published on January 29. Cohen declined to speak to them, they reported: “Asked this month why he had not mentioned rape at first, Mr. Cohen cited the stress of his experience, and said in a text message that he had not realized then that he was one of the few surviving witnesses. He declined to be interviewed again, saying he was working to recover from the trauma he suffered.”

In addition to Cohen’s testimony, Schwartz said on the Channel 12 podcast that she also watched video of an interrogation of a Palestinian prisoner taken by the IDF whom she said described “girls” being dragged by Palestinian attackers into the woods near the Nova festival. She was also moved, she said, by a clip of an interview she watched in November at a press conference hosted by Israeli officials, the one that became the focus of her first Times article.

An accountant named Sapir described a lurid scene of rape and mutilation, and Schwartz said she became fully convinced there was a systematic program of sexual violence by Hamas. “Her testimony is crazy, and hair-raising, and huge, and barbaric,” Schwartz said. “And it’s not just rape — it’s rape, and amputation, and … and I realize it’s a bigger story than I imagined, [with] many locations, and then the picture starts to emerge, What is going on here?”

The Times report states they interviewed Sapir for two hours at a cafe in southern Israel, and she described witnessing multiple rapes, including an incident where one attacker rapes a woman as another cuts off her breast with a box cutter.

At the press conference in November, Israeli authorities said they were collecting and examining forensic materials that would confirm Sapir’s specifically detailed accounts. “Police say they are still gathering evidence (DNA etc) from rape victims in addition to eyewitnesses to build the strongest case possible,” said a correspondent who covered the press event. Such a scene would produce significant amounts of physical evidence, yet Israeli officials have, to date, been unable to provide it. “I have circumstantial evidence, but in the end, it’s my duty to find supporting evidence for her story and discover the victims’ identities,” said Superintendent Adi Edri, the Israeli official leading the investigation into sexual violence on October 7, a week after the Times report went online. “At this stage, I have no specific bodies.”

In the Channel 12 podcast, Schwartz is asked if firsthand testimonies of women who survived rape on October 7 exist. “I can’t really speak about this, but the vast majority of women who have been sexually assaulted on October 7 were shot immediately after, and that’s [where] the big numbers [are],” she replied. “The majority are corpses. Some women managed to escape and survive.” She added, “I do know that there is a very significant element of dissociation when it comes to sexual assault. So a lot of times they don’t remember. They don’t remember everything. They remember fragments of the events, and they can’t always describe how they ended up on the road and [how they were] rescued.”

In early December, Israeli officials launched an intensive public campaign, accusing the international community and specifically feminist leaders of standing silent in the face of the widespread, systemic sexual violence of Hamas’s October 7 attack. The PR effort was rolled out at the United Nations on December 4, with an event hosted by the Israeli ambassador and the former Meta executive Sheryl Sandberg. The feminist organizations targeted by the pro-Israel figures were caught flat-footed, as charges of sexual violence had not yet circulated widely.

Sandberg was also quoted attacking women’s rights organizations in a December 4 New York Times article, headlined “What We Know About Sexual Violence During the Oct. 7 Attacks on Israel” and whose publication coincided with the launch of the PR campaign at the U.N. The article, also reported by Gettleman, Schwartz, and Sella, relied on claims made by Israeli officials and acknowledged the Times had not yet been able to corroborate the allegations. A revealing correction was subsequently appended to the story: “An earlier version of this article misstated the kind of evidence Israeli police have gathered in investigating accusations of sexual violence committed on Oct. 7 in the attack by Hamas against Israel. The police are relying mainly on witness testimony, not on autopsies or forensic evidence.”

Israel promised it had extraordinary amounts of eyewitness testimony. “Investigators have gathered ‘tens of thousands’ of testimonies of sexual violence committed by Hamas on Oct. 7, according to the Israeli police, including at the site of a music festival that was attacked,” Schwartz, Gettleman, and Stella reported on December 4. Those testimonies never materialized.

“I’m also an Israeli, but I also work for New York Times. So all the time I’m like in this place between the hammer and the anvil.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hammered on the theme in a December 5 speech in Tel Aviv. “I say to the women’s rights organizations, to the human rights organizations, you’ve heard of the rape of Israeli women, horrible atrocities, sexual mutilation? Where the hell are you?” The same day, President Joe Biden gave a speech in which he said, “The world can’t just look away — what’s going on. It’s on all of us — the government, international organizations, civil society, individual citizens — to forcefully condemn the sexual violence of Hamas terrorists without equivocation — without equivocation, without exception.”

The two-month-long Times investigation was still being edited and revised, Schwartz said in the podcast, when she started to feel concerned about the timing. “So I said, ‘We’re missing momentum. Maybe the U.N. isn’t addressing sexual assault because no [media outlet] will come out with a declaration about what happened there.’” If the Times story doesn’t publish soon, she said, “it may no longer be interesting.” Schwartz said the delay was explained to her internally as, “We don’t want to make people sad before Christmas.”

She also said that Israeli police sources were pressuring her to move quickly to publish. She said they asked her, “What, does the New York Times not believe there were sexual assaults here?” Schwartz felt like she was in the middle.

“I’m also in this place, I’m also an Israeli, but I also work for New York Times,” she said. “So all the time I’m like in this place between the hammer and the anvil.”

The December 28 article “Screams Without Words” opened with the story of Gal Abdush, described by the Times as “the woman in the black dress.” Video of her charred body appeared to show her bottomless. “Israeli police officials said they believed that Ms. Abdush was raped,” the Times reported. The article labeled Abdush “a symbol of the horrors visited upon Israeli women and girls during the October 7 attacks.” The Times report mentions WhatsApp messages from Abdush and her husband to their family, but doesn’t mention that some family members believe that the crucial messages make the Israeli officials’ claims implausible. As Mondoweiss later reported, Abdush texted the family at 6:51 a.m., saying they were in trouble at the border. At 7:00, her husband messaged to say she’d been killed. Her family said the charring came from a grenade.

“It doesn’t make any sense,”said Abdush’s sister, that in a short timespan “they raped her, slaughtered her, and burned her?” Speaking about the rape allegation, her brother-in-law said: “The media invented it.”

Another relative suggested the family was pressured, under false pretenses, to speak with the reporters. Abdush’s sister wrote on Instagram that 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 its follow-up story, the Times sought to discredit her initial comment, quoting Abdush’s sister as saying she “had been ‘confused about what happened’ and was trying to ‘protect my sister.’”

The woman who filmed Abdush on October 7 told the Israeli site YNet that Schwartz and Sella had pressured her into giving the paper access to her photos and videos for the purposes of serving Israeli propaganda. “They called me again and again and explained how important it is to Israeli hasbara,” she recalled, using the term for public diplomacy, which in practice refers to Israeli propaganda efforts directed at international audiences.

At every turn, when the New York Times reporters ran into obstacles confirming tips, they turned to anonymous Israeli officials or witnesses who’d already been interviewed repeatedly in the press. Months after setting off on their assignment, the reporters found themselves exactly where they had begun, relying overwhelmingly on the word of Israeli officials, soldiers, and Zaka workers to substantiate their claim that more than 30 bodies of women and girls were discovered with signs of sexual abuse. On the Channel 12 podcast, Schwartz said the last remaining piece she needed for the story was a solid number from the Israeli authorities about any possible survivors of sexual violence. “We have four and we can stand behind that number,” she said she was told by the Ministry of Welfare and Social Affairs. No details were provided. The Times story ultimately reported there were “at least three women and one man who were sexually assaulted and survived.”

When the story was finally published on December 28 Schwartz described the flood of emotions and reactions online and in Israel. “First of all, in the paper, we gave it a very, very prominent place, which is, apropos all my fears — there is no greater show of confidence than being put on the front page,” she said. “In Israel, the reactions are amazing. Here I think I was given closure, seeing that all the media treat the article and treat it as something of [a] thank you for putting a number on it. Thank you for saying there were many cases, that it was a pattern. Thank you for giving it a title which suggests that maybe there is some organizing logic behind it, that this is not some isolated act of some person acting on his own initiative.”

Related

A U.S. Journalist Took Thousands of ISIS Files Out of Iraq, Reigniting a Bitter Dispute Over the Theft of Iraqi History

Times staffers who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity for fear of professional reprisal described the “Screams Without Words” article as the product of the same mistakes that led to the disastrous editor’s note and retraction on Rukmini Callimachi’s podcast “Caliphate” and print series on the Islamic State group. Kahn, the current executive editor, was widely known as a promoter and protector of Callimachi. The reporting, which the Times determined in an internal review was not subjected to sufficient scrutiny by top editors and fell short of the paper’s standards on ensuring accuracy, had been a finalist for a 2019 Pulitzer Prize. That honor, along with other prestigious awards, was rescinded in the wake of the scandal.

Margaret Sullivan, the last public editor for the New York Times to serve a full term before the paper discarded the position in 2017, said that she hopes such an investigation will be launched into the “Screams Without Words” story. “I sometimes joke ‘it’s another good day not to be the New York Times public editor’ but the organization could *really* use one right now to investigate on behalf of the readers,” she wrote.

At some story meetings, Schwartz said on the Channel 12 podcast, editors with Middle East expertise were there to offer probing questions. “We had a weekly meeting, and you bring out the status of your work on your project,” she said. “And Times writers and editors who are concerned with Middle Eastern affairs coming from all kinds of places in the world, they ask you questions that challenge you, and it’s excellent that they do that, because you yourself, all the time, like — you don’t believe yourself for a moment.”

Those questions were challenging to answer, she said: “One of the questions you get asked — and it’s the hardest ones to not be able to answer — if this has happened in so many places, how can it be that there is no forensic evidence? How can it be that there is no documentation? How can it be that there are no records? A report? An Excel spreadsheet? You are telling me about Shari [Mendes]? That’s someone who saw with her own eyes, and is now speaking to you — is there no [written] report to make what she’s saying authoritative?”

The host interjected. “And you went at that stage to those official Israeli authorities, and asked that they give you — something, anything. And how did they respond?”

“‘There is nothing,’” Schwartz said she was told. “‘There was no collection of evidence from the scene.’”

But broadly, she said, the editors were fully behind the project. “There was no skepticism on their part, ever,” she claimed. “It still doesn’t mean I had [the story], because I didn’t have a ‘second source’ for many things.”

A Times spokesperson pointed to this portion of the interview as evidence of the paper’s rigorous process: “We have reviewed the wider transcript and it’s clear you’re persisting in taking quotes out of context. In the portion of the interview you refer to, Anat describes being encouraged by editors to corroborate evidence and sources before we’d publish the investigation. Later, she discusses regular meetings with editors where they would ask ‘hard’ and ‘challenging’ questions, and the time it took to undertake the second and third stages of sourcing. This is all part of a rigorous reporting process and one which we continue to stand behind.”

In her interview with the Channel 12 podcast, Schwartz said she began working with Gettleman soon after October 7. “My job was to help him. He had all kinds of thoughts about things, about articles he wanted to do,” she recalled. “On the first day, there were already three things on [his] lineup, and then I saw that at number three was ‘Sexual Violence.’” Schwartz said that in the initial aftermath of the October 7 attacks, there was not much focus on sexual assaults, but by the time she began working for Gettleman, rumors began spreading that such acts had taken place, most of it based on the commentary of Zaka workers and IDF officials and soldiers.

After the article was published, Gettleman was invited to speak on a panel about sexual violence at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. His efforts were lauded by the panel and its host, Sandberg, the former Facebook executive. Instead of doubling down on reporting that helped win the New York Times a prestigious Polk Award, Gettleman dismissed the need for reporters to provide “evidence.”

“What we found — I don’t want to even use the word ‘evidence,’ because evidence is almost like a legal term that suggests you’re trying to prove an allegation or prove a case in court,” Gettleman told Sandberg. “That’s not my role. We all have our roles. And my role is to document, is to present information, is to give people a voice. And we found information along the entire chain of violence, so of sexual violence.”

Gettleman said his mission was to move people. “It’s really difficult to get this information and then to shape it,” he said. “That’s our job as journalists: to get the information and to share the story in a way that makes people care. Not just to inform, but to move people. And that’s what I’ve been doing for a long time.”

One Times reporter said colleagues are wondering what a balanced approach might look like: “I am waiting to see if the paper will report in depth, deploying the same kind of resources and means, on the United Nations’ report that documented the horrors committed against Palestinian women.”

Update: February 29, 2024
This story has been updated to include comments tweeted after publication by Anat Schwartz. This story has also been updated to include a statement from the Times, received after publication, that standards editor Phil Corbett planned to leave as of June 2022 and regarding an episode of “The Daily” that never aired.

Correction: February 29, 2024
This story has been corrected to remove an errant reference to unnamed experts in a New York Times article; the Times named one expert. A reference to guests at a Times editorial meeting, made due to a translation error, has been removed; the attendees were editors. This story has been corrected to reflect that Adam Sella is the nephew of Anat Schwartz’s partner, not Schwartz.

The post The Story Behind the New York Times October 7 Exposé appeared first on The Intercept.

As the conservative death toll in Gaza nears 30,000 — with more than 13,000 children confirmed dead — the White House spin doctors are worried about the 2024 U.S. election. They are desperately trying to project a public image of compassion for the people of Gaza and to sell the public on the idea that Biden has reached the end of his patience with his great friend of nearly 50 years, Benjamin Netanyahu. Confronted with a disastrous series of public statements by Biden where he claimed to have recently met with long-deceased world leaders and a special counsel’s assertions about his mental acumen, the president’s re-election campaign has been thrust into a scramble to stabilize their public narrative.

Since the International Court of Justice formally ruled that South Africa’s genocide suit against Israel should proceed and issued a series of emergency orders directing Israel not to engage in genocidal actions, Tel Aviv has intensified its military operations, laying siege to hospitals and bombing civilian sites as it prepares for a possible full-scale ground invasion of Rafah. The city, which is on the border with Egypt and has been subjected to intense Israeli bombardment in recent days, creating an unsecured 25-square-mile death cage in which 1.4 million Palestinians are now trapped — after being told by Israel to flee there for safety.

Israel claims it is working on an “evacuation” plan for the entrapped mass of people in Rafah. The use of that word to describe the further forced expulsion of Palestinians under threat of death is grotesque — implying that they are being saved rather than terrorized. The Biden administration is on record as saying it won’t support an Israeli ground offensive in Rafah, but with a glaring caveat: According to a White House readout of Biden’s recent call with Netanyahu, the administration’s position is “that a military operation should not proceed without a credible and executable plan for ensuring the safety of and support for the civilians in Rafah.”

So what does this actually mean?

The Wall Street Journal reported, “Israel is proposing the creation of sprawling tent cities in Gaza as part of an evacuation plan to be funded by the U.S. and its Arab Gulf partners ahead of an impending invasion” of Rafah. Citing Egyptian officials, the paper said Egypt would establish 15 campsites across southwestern Gaza, each containing roughly 25,000 tents, as well as a field hospital. Satellite images indicate such facilities are being constructed, though Egypt has been circumspect in responding to questions about its position on the issue. These developments indicate the White House understands that Israel will likely launch its large-scale ground operation in Rafah. The invasion could create an intense diplomatic crisis between Israel and Egypt at a time when the White House hopes Cairo can play a key role in brokering a deal to exchange captives as part of a deal for a 6- week temporary truce.

Throughout the past four and a half months, the White House has issued similar milquetoast declarations expressing heavily couched concerns about impending Israeli operations, including attacks on hospitals in Gaza, but then publicly supporting Israel when it carries them out. In the Rafah case, the Biden administration has reportedly told Israel it would support targeted strikes in the border city but does not want to see a full–spectrum ground campaign.

Biden’s Cynical Spin

It is possible — given the world of crass, cynical politics that permeates Washington — that the Biden administration views opportunity in the Rafah situation. If Netanyahu proceeds against the White House’s stated position, it could potentially offer Biden an opportunity to escalate the spin campaign at the heart of the monthslong drama about supposedly “losing patience” with Netanyahu. This, in turn, would help reenforce the fictitious story the president’s reelection campaign has been crafting: Biden did everything to support Israel’s right to self- defense, but he will draw a line when Netanyahu wants to take it too far. On the other hand, history is a strong guide and suggests Biden will support an Israeli ground campaign with some expression of disappointment over tactics, while also claiming victory in convincing Israel to protect civilians. The White House has regularly given itself credit for encouraging Israel to be a bit less murdery in its operations, even as the Israeli military continues to kill large numbers of Palestinian civilians.

A similar dynamic is playing out with the dance Biden and Netanyahu are performing around the issue of Palestinian statehood or a two-state solution. The administration understands that this issue is the linchpin of any deal with Saudi Arabia to fully normalize relations with Israel and moves toward that end could allow the White House to claim a pyrrhic political victory even as Gaza lies in ruins.

Administration officials are increasingly focusing on a strategy to link a roadmap for Palestinian statehood with an end to the war, while Netanyahu has militantly rejected any such notion. “Israel will continue to oppose the unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state,” Netanyahu said in a statement issued after a 40-minute call with Biden on February 15. “Such recognition in the wake of the October 7 massacre would give a huge reward to unprecedented terrorism and prevent any future peace settlement.”

Focusing on this issue, as with illegal settlements, is a safe battle for Biden to wage against a politically vulnerable Netanyahu. It has been clear for months that part of the Biden plan on Gaza messaging in the U.S. election campaign is to try to load his own central role in a genocidal war onto Netanyahu’s political ship in the hopes it sinks in time to serve the re-election narrative.  

Numerous media leaks about Biden’s mounting frustration with Netanyahu are little more than a re-election campaign ploy.

A recent U.S. intelligence estimate indicated that Israel’s current weapons stockpiles only enables it to wage war against Gaza for an additional 19 weeks, unless Washington sends more ammunition. The fact that Biden has outright refused to use his leverage as Israel’s arms dealer is a stark indication that the occasional public platitudes, offered by U.S. officials and numerous media leaks about Biden’s mounting frustration with Netanyahu, are little more than a re-election campaign ploy.

Whatever “off-ramp” Biden world eventually chooses to extricate himself politically from the Gaza war will never obviate the innumerable moments over the past 134 days when Israel’s murderous actions could have provided an instant justification to threaten to end military support and weapons sales to Israel. There has been a deliberate and conscious choice by Biden and company to keep the munitions flowing even as the massacres continue in full view of the world. The president was warned very early on in the war by Arab and Muslim leaders in the U.S. that his support for a gratuitous Israeli war against civilians would cost him politically, and he chose to stay the course in his fueling of Israel’s mass killing campaign.

The reason Gaza has become a domestic electoral problem for Biden is because of activism, especially from Palestinian Americans. The White House seems to believe it can still salvage the Arab American vote and desperately hopes the specter of another Donald Trump term will tilt the balance in Biden’s favor regardless of his atrocious role in an ongoing genocide. Whatever happens in the November election, it should never be forgotten that it was Biden, not those Americans who oppose Israel’s war and the U.S. facilitation of it, that bolstered Trump’s chances. That is entirely on Biden and the Democratic Party establishment.

The post With Netanyahu Threatening Rafah Invasion, Biden Prepares to Send Israel More Bombs appeared first on The Intercept.

“What a historic change for my country! You see, the land of Israel is situated on the crossroads between Africa, Asia, and Europe,” Netanyahu bellowed at a handful of spectators in the large hall, nearly all of whom were his loyalists or underlings. “For centuries, my country was repeatedly invaded by empires passing through it in their campaigns of plunder and conquest elsewhere. But today, as we tear down walls of enmity, Israel can become a bridge of peace and prosperity between these continents.”

During that speech, Netanyahu portrayed the full normalizing of relations with Saudi Arabia, an initiative spearheaded under the Trump administration and embraced by the Biden White House, as the linchpin of his vision for this “new” reality, one which would open the door to a “visionary corridor that will stretch across the Arabian Peninsula and Israel. It will connect India to Europe with maritime links, rail links, energy pipelines, fiber-optic cables.”

He was speaking on the grand stage of the U.N. General Assembly, but no world leaders bothered to attend. Outside, some 2,000 people, a mixture of American Jews and Israeli citizens, protested his attacks on the independence of the Israeli judiciary system. The scene served as a reminder of how deeply unpopular his far-right governing coalition, not to mention Netanyahu himself, had become in Israel. At that moment, it seemed that Netanyahu was pushed against the ropes, in a losing battle to continue his political reign.

Netanyahu is using the horrors of October 7 to wage the crusade he’s been preparing for his entire political career.

Just days later, as Hamas commandos penetrated the barriers encircling Gaza and embarked on their deadly raids targeting several military installations as well as kibbutzim, everything changed in an instant. Everything, that is, except the primary agenda that has been at the center of Netanyahu’s long political career: the absolute destruction of Palestine and its people.

Just as the Bush administration exploited the 9/11 attacks to justify a sweeping war in which it declared the world a battlefield, Netanyahu is using the horrors of October 7 to wage the crusade he’s been preparing for his entire political career. With his grip on power fading last fall, the October 7 attacks provided him with just the opportunity he needed, and he hitched his political survival to the war on Gaza and what could be his last chance to eliminate Israel’s Palestinian problem once and for all.

In that sense, Bibi was saved by Hamas.

Intelligence Failures

Four months in, Netanyahu’s war of annihilation against Gaza has become a guerrilla war of attrition. Not a single Israeli hostage has been freed through military force, and Hamas has shown an enduring resilience and ability to pick off Israel Defense Forces soldiers. The Israeli public, outside of the ideological true believers intent on occupying and settling Gaza, is showing signs of fatigue and desperation. Many family members of captives are growing louder in their demands for an immediate deal with Hamas that centers the lives of their loved ones over the political agenda laid out by Netanyahu and his clique. Some have demanded new elections or Netanyahu’s resignation. Protests against the war, though small, are beginning to grow inside Israel, with some demonstrations echoing global calls demanding a humanitarian ceasefire and an end to Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory.

As the death toll in Gaza surpasses a conservative estimate of 27,000 lives, many of the core narratives deployed by the Israeli and U.S. governments to justify the slaughter are coming under increased scrutiny; some have been definitively debunked. In Israel, this is a delicate line of inquiry. That Hamas killed large numbers of Israelis is not in doubt. But how they managed to do so while living under the lauded and vigilant eyes of the Mossad, Shin Bet, the Israeli Security Agency, and the IDF is the subject of mounting public attention.

There have been several credible reports that Israeli intelligence analysts warned that Hamas operatives appeared to be training for raids into Israel. The New York Times and other outlets have reported on the existence of a 40-page internal Hamas document code-named “Jericho Wall.” Purportedly obtained by Israeli intelligence, it is said to lay out detailed plans by Hamas to conduct precisely the type of assault against Israeli military installations and villages that occurred on October 7.

While warnings from Israeli analysts who reviewed the document were reportedly brushed aside by senior officials, last July a signals intelligence officer urged the chain of command to take it seriously. Noting a recent daylong training exercise by Hamas in Gaza, the analyst asserted that the training precisely mirrored the operations laid out in the document. “It is a plan designed to start a war,” she pleaded. “It’s not just a raid on a village.”

The night before Hamas’s raid, intelligence analysts began reporting significant evidence suggesting that Hamas might be preparing for an attack inside Israel. The head of Shin Bet traveled to the south and orders were issued to deploy a special counterterror force to confront any potential incursions, according to an investigative report in the Israeli publication Yedioth Ahronoth.

Shortly after 3 a.m. on October 7, a senior intelligence official concluded the activity in Gaza was likely another Hamas training exercise, saying, “We still believe that [Hamas leader Yahya] Sinwar is not pivoting towards an escalation.”

A few hours later, as Israeli officials gathered in a command center chaotically scrambling to deploy forces to respond to the multipronged attacks led by Hamas, a senior officer silenced the room: “The Gaza Division was overpowered.”

Early on in the war against Gaza, Netanyahu sought to deflect blame for failing to foresee Hamas’s attacks onto his intelligence services. “Contrary to the false claims: Under no circumstances and at no stage was Prime Minister Netanyahu warned of Hamas’s war intentions,” read a tweet posted on Netanyahu’s official Twitter account. “On the contrary, all the security officials, including the head of military intelligence and the head of the Shin Bet, assessed that Hamas had been deterred and was looking for a settlement. This assessment was submitted again and again to the prime minister and the cabinet by all the security forces and intelligence community, up until the outbreak of the war.”

But serious questions lingered over how Hamas was able to lay siege to large sections of what Israel calls the “Gaza envelope” and whether Netanyahu had knowledge that an attack of this very nature was being planned in full view of Israel’s extensive surveillance systems and spy networks. There is also a mounting body of evidence to indicate that Israeli forces were given orders on October 7 to stop Hamas’s attacks at all costs, including the killing of Israeli civilians taken captive by Palestinian fighters. The Israeli military has indicated that it plans to conduct an “uncompromising” investigation into the intelligence failures, drawing the ire of some far-right members of Netanyahu’s government.

Under fire from his own ministers and supporters for impugning Israeli military and intelligence agencies, Netanyahu apologized for his comments, deleted the tweet, and then shifted to the stance he now repeats: There will be a time for such inquiries — but only after Israel achieves total victory in Gaza and eliminates Hamas. “The only thing that I intend to have resign is Hamas,” he said in November. “We’re going to resign them to the dustbin of history.”

Information Warfare

The violent ethnonationalist ideology at the center of Netanyahu’s reign was born before his tenure and will endure when he’s gone. But his rule has embodied the most extremist and destructive version of the Israeli state project.

Netanyahu understands the power of defining and dominating the narrative, particularly when targeting it to U.S. audiences. For decades, he has advanced the Israeli propaganda doctrine of hasbara — the notion that Israelis must be aggressive about “explaining” and justifying their actions to the West — to manipulate his adversaries and allies, domestic and international, into serving his objectives.

Netanyahu’s “vision of himself as the chief defender of the Jewish people against calamity allowed him to justify almost anything that would keep him in power,” observed former President Barack Obama in his 2020 memoir.

In the aftermath of October 7, Netanyahu cast Israel’s siege of a tiny strip of land the size of Philadelphia as a war of the worlds in which the very fate of humanity was at stake. “It’s not only our war. It’s your war too,” Netanyahu said in his first interview on CNN after the October 7 attacks. “It’s the battle of civilization against barbarism. And if we don’t win here, this scourge will pass. The Middle East will pass to other places. The Middle East will fall. Europe is next. You will be next.”

The Israeli government rapidly deployed a multipronged propaganda strategy to win unprecedented support from the U.S. and other Western governments for a sweeping war against the entire population of Gaza. To oppose Israel’s war is antisemitic; to question its assertions about the events of October 7 is akin to Holocaust denial; to protest the mass killing of Palestinian civilians is to do the bidding of Hamas.

At the center of Israel’s information warfare campaign is a tactical mission to dehumanize Palestinians and to flood the public discourse with a stream of false, unsubstantiated, and unverifiable allegations.

“We were struck Saturday by an attack whose savagery I can say we have not seen since the Holocaust,” Netanyahu told President Joe Biden in a phone call on October 11. “They took dozens of children, bound them up, burned them and executed them.” He added: “We have never seen such savagery in the history of the state. They’re even worse than ISIS and we need to treat them as such.”

“We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly,” said Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on October 9.

The message of these statements and others like them was clear: Israel is confronting monsters, and no one has any business telling the Jewish state, established in the aftermath of World War II under the mantra of “Never again,” how to respond to an attempted genocide. Israeli officials routinely invoke the Holocaust, compare Hamas to the Nazis or to ISIS, and portray the events of October 7 as evidence of an organized effort to commit genocide against the Jewish people.

On October 10, three days after the attacks, the Israeli military organized a tour for international journalists to view the scene at Kfar Aza Kibbutz. As they guided reporters and camera crews through the community, IDF officials spread rumors that as many as 40 babies had been murdered by Hamas, some of them beheaded. “It’s something I never saw in my life. It’s something I used to imagine of my grandmother and my grandfather in Europe and other places,” an Israeli general told reporters. “We got very, very disturbing reports that came from the ground that there were babies that had been beheaded,” said IDF spokesperson Jonathan Conricus in a briefing for international journalists. “I admit it took us some time to really understand and to verify that report. It was hard to believe that even Hamas could perform such a barbaric act.”

Lt. Col. Guy Basson, deputy commander of the Israeli army’s Kfir Brigade, claimed that he saw the aftermath of eight babies who were executed in a nursery at Kibbutz Be’eri. Among the victims, Basson asserted, was also a survivor of the Auschwitz death camp. “I see the number engraved on her arm, and you say to yourself, she went through the Holocaust in Auschwitz and ended up dying on Kibbutz Be’eri.” Another Israeli soldier told a journalist that “babies and children were hung on a clothes line in a row.”

Three weeks after the October 7 attacks, Eli Beer, the head of a volunteer EMS squad in Israel, traveled to the U.S. and addressed a gathering at the convention of the Republican Jewish Coalition in Las Vegas. “I saw in my own eyes a woman who was pregnant, four months pregnant,” he said. “They came into her house, in front of her kids, they opened up her stomach took out the baby, and stabbed the little, tiny baby in front of her and then shot her in front of her family and then they killed the rest of the kids.”

Beer offered graphic descriptions of other horrors he claimed to have witnessed. “These bastards put these babies in an oven and put on the oven. We found the kid a few hours later,” he told the U.S. audience on October 28. “I saw little kids who were beheaded. We didn’t know which head belonged to which kid.” Beer, whose stories were widely reported in the international media, also met with Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Israel soon after the attack.

But there is a problem with the gut-wrenching narratives that have bolstered the underlying justification for the slaughter of Gaza: They are either complete fabrications or have not been substantiated with a shred of evidence. Many have been thoroughly disproven by major Israeli media outlets.

In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, Netanyahu and other Israeli officials presented U.S. and international leaders with a range of graphic images and videos along with unverified narrative explanations for what they allegedly depicted. “It’s simply depravity in the worst imaginable way,” Blinken said after first viewing the photos. “Images are worth a thousand words. These images may be worth a million.”

In a coup for Netanyahu’s hasbara campaign, Biden and other leaders have laundered many of Israel’s obscene lies.

In a coup for Netanyahu’s hasbara campaign, Biden and other leaders have laundered many of Israel’s obscene lies. Beginning just days after October 7, Biden repeatedly claimed that he personally saw photographs of beheaded babies and more atrocities. Even after the White House admitted Biden had seen no such photos, he continued to make the allegation, including after visiting Netanyahu and other Israeli officials in Tel Aviv. “I saw some of the photographs when I was there — tying a mother and her daughter together on a rope and then pouring kerosene on them and then burning them, beheading infants, doing things that are just inhuman — totally, completely inhuman,” Biden said at a campaign event in December.

Blinken told the U.S. Senate another harrowing story about how Hamas terrorists had tortured a family in their living room while intermittently taking breaks to eat a meal their victims had placed on the dining table before the horrors began that morning. “A young boy and girl, 6 and 8 years old, and their parents around the breakfast table. The father’s eye gouged out in front of his kids. The mother’s breast cut off, the girl’s foot amputated, the boy’s fingers cut off before they were executed,” Blinken said. “And then their executioners sat down and had a meal. That is what this society is dealing with.”

The story Blinken told about terrorists eating a meal while torturing an Israeli family, as well as some of the assertions about decapitated babies, was based on the speculative fiction invented by Yossi Landau, an official from the scandal-plagued private Israeli rescue organization Zaka, who has repeatedly spread wildly false stories.

There was no Holocaust survivor killed at Kibbutz Be’eri that day. There were no mass beheadings of babies, no group executions in a nursery, no children hung from clotheslines, and no infants placed in ovens. No pregnant woman had her stomach cut open and the fetus knifed in front of her and her other children. These stories are entirely fictional, a set of audacious lies weaponized to generate the type of collective rage used to justify the unjustifiable.

According to major Israeli media outlets that have worked diligently to identify all the victims of the October 7 attacks, there was one infant killed that day: a 9-month-old named Mila Cohen who was shot dead at Kibbutz Be’eri as her mother held her in her arms. Cohen’s mother, who was wounded by gunfire, survived. Among the other civilians killed on October 7, seven of them were between the ages of 2 and 9 years, and 28 were between the ages of 10 and 19. Fourteen of these children died in Hamas rocket attacks, not at the hands of the armed commandos who stormed the kibbutzes.

There is no doubt that widespread atrocities and war crimes were committed during the Hamas-led attacks of October 7. It is also true that Israeli military, government, and rescue officials have engaged in a deliberate misinformation campaign about the nature of many deaths that occurred that day.

These stories are a set of audacious lies weaponized to generate the type of collective rage used to justify the unjustifiable.

Israeli officials have toured the world with a film produced at the direction of the IDF. The 47-minute “Bearing Witness to the October 7 Massacre” features video allegedly seized from Palestinian attackers equipped with GoPro cameras and cellphones, according to Israeli officials. The movie has not been released to the public and has only been available via special invitation from the Israeli government. Its audiences have included Hollywood celebrities, dozens of U.S. lawmakers and government officials, journalists, and global luminaries; it has screened at various international venues, including museums established in memory of the Holocaust. While hours of footage of the attacks and their aftermath are available online, including video shot by Palestinians who participated in the raids, the Israeli government has said the footage is too sensitive to be publicly released.

An IDF official, in uniform, personally delivers the professionally produced Digital Cinema Package for the screenings, and viewers are required to sign nondisclosure agreements affirming they will not record or distribute the footage. “It will change the way you view the Middle East and the way you view the war in Gaza,” said Gilad Erdan, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, at the Los Angeles premiere of the footage last November. The film was characterized in media accounts as depicting “murder, beheadings, rapes and other atrocities against Jewish adults and children.”

The event, at the Museum of Tolerance, was organized by Israeli actor Gal Gadot, star of the “Wonder Woman” movies, for film executives and other members of the Hollywood industry. “Hamas must be eradicated. This is the only way to prevent another massacre,” Erdan added. “If Israel doesn’t eradicate this evil, mark my words: The West is next.”

While Israel has emphasized how incendiary the footage is, British journalist Owen Jones, who attended an IDF screening in the U.K., said a “significant amount” of the video is already in the public domain. He said that while there was footage of one IDF soldier who had apparently been decapitated, as well as the already public footage of an unsuccessful attempt to behead a migrant Thai worker with a garden tool, there was no footage substantiating allegations of torture, sexual violence, and mass beheadings, including of babies or other children. “Clearly this footage hasn’t been selected at random. You would expect it to be the worst material that they have,” Jones said. “This isn’t to say none of this happened, it’s just not in the footage, which has been provided by the Israeli authorities.”

Israel’s hasbara campaign is reminiscent of the Bush administration’s monthslong carnival of lies, sanitized and promoted by major media outlets, about alleged weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. And Biden directly participated in President George W. Bush’s campaign as well. In his October 2002 Senate floor speech endorsing war against Iraq, Biden declared that Saddam Hussein “possesses chemical and biological weapons and is seeking nuclear weapons.”

Allegations of Systematic Rape

The Israeli propaganda machine is well oiled. Anyone can look back at Israel’s four-month war against Gaza and trace a pattern: Israel chooses an issue and demands global attention to its agenda at the expense of any other matter.

When news organizations began reporting on the civilian toll of Israel’s initial airstrikes against Gaza, the government accused photographers for major news organizations of being Hamas members or sympathizers who had foreknowledge of the October 7 attacks. Netanyahu said the journalists were “accomplices in crimes against humanity.” Israel then portrayed Gaza’s hospitals as secret Hamas command centers, an allegation that the Biden administration bolstered as the IDF prepared to lay siege to Al-Shifa Hospital last November.

Throughout the war, Israel has sought to direct media and global attention to various new smoking-gun narratives. And in nearly every case, it succeeds in getting the U.S. on board to launder and promote the talking points.

In late November, as the civilian death toll in Gaza climbed, Israel was struggling to retain its dominance of the narrative. Global demands for a ceasefire were mounting, and even some of Israel’s allies were expressing horror at the indiscriminate killing of women and children and the worsening humanitarian catastrophe.

A weeklong truce, during which captives were exchanged, raised hopes that a more enduring peace deal could be on the horizon, despite Israeli insistence that that was out of the question. “A prolonged ceasefire that allows more hostages to be released, and that evolves towards a permanent ceasefire linked to a political process, is something we have consensus on,” said the EU’s top foreign policy official Josep Borrell.

Days earlier, the prime ministers of Spain and Belgium traveled to the Rafah border to push for such a deal and drew the fury of the Israeli government when they publicly condemned the indiscriminate killing of Palestinian civilians. Eli Cohen, then the Israeli foreign minister, accused the leaders of offering “support [for] terrorism,” while Netanyahu released a statement condemning them because they “did not place total responsibility on Hamas for the crimes against humanity it perpetrated.”

Anyone can look back at Israel’s four-month war against Gaza and trace a pattern: Israel chooses an issue and demands global attention to its agenda at the expense of any other matter.

It was at this moment that the Israeli government decided it needed to remind the world of Israel’s victimhood and launched a new phase of the hasbara campaign. It began accusing the international community of standing silent in the face of what Israeli officials described as a widespread campaign of rape and sexual violence aimed at Jewish women and orchestrated by Hamas on October 7. By early December, the issue had become a major focus of conservative media and Israel’s allies.

“I say to the women’s rights organizations, to the human rights organizations, you’ve heard of the rape of Israeli women, horrible atrocities, sexual mutilation? Where the hell are you?” Netanyahu said in a December 5 speech in Tel Aviv.

That day, on the other side of the globe, Biden was at a campaign fundraising event in Boston. “Over the past few weeks, survivors and witnesses of the attacks have shared the horrific accounts of unimaginable cruelty: reports of women raped — repeatedly raped and their bodies being mutilated while still alive, of women corpses being desecrated, and Hamas terrorists inflicting as much pain and suffering as — on women and girls as possible and then murdering them. And it’s appalling,” Biden said. “The world can’t just look away — what’s going on. It’s on all of us — the government, international organizations, civil society, individual citizens — to forcefully condemn the sexual violence of Hamas terrorists without equivocation — without equivocation, without exception.”

From the earliest moments following the October 7 attacks, Israel charged that women had been raped by Hamas fighters, though it was often an allegation made in sequence alongside other alleged atrocities. But in mid-November, those assertions began evolving into a sustained public blitz, accusing Hamas of instituting a plan to “systematically rape women.” Israel government spokesperson Eylon Levy spoke of a “Hamas rapist machine.”

“Hamas used rape and sexual violence as weapons of war,” charged Erdan, the U.N. ambassador. “These were not spur-of-the-moment decisions to defile and mutilate girls and parade them while onlookers cheered; rather, this was premeditated.”

To date, there has been no credible evidence presented publicly that such a campaign took place, and Hamas has vehemently denied that its fighters committed any acts of rape or sexual assault. The fact that Israel has not produced forensic evidence for individual rapes does not prove that no such deeds took place. Rape investigations are often complex, particularly when the crime occurs amid a chaotic scene of mass violence. Sexual violence is common in warfare, and it often takes years for the full story of such crimes to emerge.

But there is a difference between making specific allegations of rape or sexual assault and charging that organized mass rape was a central component of an operation meticulously planned over the course of years. Israel’s evidence of the latter comes nowhere near to measuring up to its claims.

Israeli rescue workers as well as civilian and military medical officials have described evidence of dead women who were naked or had clothing removed, as well as women who were subjected to genital mutilation, though they have not released documentary or forensic evidence.

But many of the most graphic allegations of mass rapes have been offered by Israeli military or rescue officials who acknowledge they have no training or expertise in forensics. Some of them, whose claims have been featured in many media accounts, also spread false stories about other alleged atrocities.

Shari Mendes, an architect serving in the IDF reserves in a rabbinical unit, was deployed to a morgue to prepare bodies for burial after the attacks. An American originally from New Jersey, Mendes did multiple TV and print interviews about her experiences. “We have seen women who have been raped, from the age of children through to the elderly,” she told reporters, emphasizing, “This is not just something we saw on the internet, we saw these bodies with our own eyes.”

For months, Mendes has served as one of the most visible witnesses bolstering Israel’s allegations of systematic rape. But few media outlets featuring her claims have mentioned the valid concerns about her credibility and her history of promoting a false story. She told the Daily Mail last October, “A baby was cut out of a pregnant woman and beheaded and then the mother was beheaded.”

On December 5, as Israel engaged in a global media push around its allegations that Hamas had committed mass rapes, Mendes was a featured speaker at an event in New York organized by Israel’s mission to the U.N. on sexual violence and the October 7 attacks. The Times of Israel reported that Mendes “is not legally qualified to determine rape.”

The observations of first responders or members of religious burial units, particularly those without relevant scientific credentials, are not a replacement for forensic documentation of an uncontaminated crime scene. Israeli authorities have said evidence that would typically be taken in cases of suspected sexual assault was not recovered in the aftermath of the attacks, attributing this failure to a combination of the magnitude of the deaths, the charred nature of some bodies, and to Jewish burial practices.

Some of the evidence publicly cited by Israeli officials is testimony provided by Zaka, the private Israeli rescue organization whose members have been widely documented to have spread false allegations. Haaretz published an exposé documenting Zaka’s role in the rampant mishandling of forensic evidence that day and its subsequent campaign of misinformation.

The Israeli government has maintained that it possesses evidence that has not been made public and has enlisted international teams of forensic and other crime scene experts. Israel’s Ministry of Welfare and Social Affairs told the New York Times there are “at least three women and one man who were sexually assaulted and survived.”

But other Israeli officials have stated that there are no known living victims of rape that day, while some have described the challenge of identifying potential victims.

Related

New York Times Puts “Daily” Episode on Ice Amid Internal Firestorm Over Hamas Sexual Violence Article

On December 28, the New York Times published what instantly became the most widely circulated news story purporting to document a widespread campaign of sexual violence orchestrated by Hamas. That story has come under intense scrutiny, including within the Times newsroom.

The family of Gal Abdush, whose alleged rape was at the center of the Times article, disputed the article’s assertion she was raped. One relative also suggested the family was pressured, under false pretenses, to speak with the reporters. Abdush’s sister wrote on Instagram that 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.” A woman who filmed Abdush on October 7 told YNet that Israeli journalists working for the Times had pressured her into giving the paper access to her photos and videos. “They called me again and again and explained how important it is to Israeli hasbara,” she recalled. This series of events was documented extensively by Mondoweiss.

Critics of the Times story also pointed to the inconsistencies of the accounts of some of the alleged witnesses featured, as well as to its use of information provided by members of Zaka.

Several Israelis who survived the October 7 attacks have publicly claimed that they witnessed rapes by Palestinian assailants, but Israeli investigators have said they are still searching for supporting evidence. Authorities also say they must match alleged victims with specific eyewitness testimony in order to bring potential charges.

What often goes unmentioned in Israel’s sweeping allegations is an important fact: Hamas was not the only Palestinian group to attack Israelis on October 7. Many individuals who had no knowledge of Hamas’s plans poured across the border and committed acts of violence in what has been referred to as an unplanned “second wave.” Some of these non-Hamas Palestinians also took Israeli hostages back to Gaza.

One survivor of the Nova music festival massacre, a veteran of Israel’s special forces, has given multiple interviews to major media outlets, including the New York Times, about a rape he claims to have witnessed. During an appearance on CNN, Raz Cohen described the assailants as “Five guys — five civilians from Gaza, normal guys, not soldiers, not Nukhba,” referring to Hamas’s elite commando force. “It was regular people from Gaza with normal clothes.” Cohen, it must be noted, has told varying, sometimes contradictory, versions of what he witnessed.

Israel has painted all actions on October 7 as being committed by Hamas and its fighters. That storyline obviously serves Israel’s military and political objectives, but the truth is more complicated.

In light of Israel’s well-documented campaign of lies and misinformation about other events on October 7, incendiary allegations, such as claims that Hamas engaged in a deliberate campaign of systematic rape, should be viewed with extreme skepticism.

Friendly Fire

As many U.S. media outlets and politicians have promoted and laundered Israel’s claims, spreading them far and wide, there have been strong voices among the Israeli public and media that have exhibited skepticism. This is especially true regarding the actions taken by Israeli forces as they responded to the October 7 attacks. Calls are growing inside Israel, led by survivors and victims’ families, for the Israeli government to provide a factual explanation of precisely how their loved ones died: Were they killed by Palestinian militants or by the Israeli military?

Israeli media outlets have aired interviews with survivors and IDF personnel describing what they refer to as “friendly fire” incidents, including the shelling of a house where Hamas commandos were holding Israeli civilians hostage. Families of some Israelis killed at Kibbutz Be’eri have cited witnesses who said that an Israeli tank fired on a house filled with Israeli civilians held hostage on October 7. A dozen hostages, including 12-year-old twins, died inside the house after Israeli forces began shelling it.

“According to the evidence, the shooting of the tank was fatal and killed many hostages in addition to the terrorists,” the families wrote in a January 4 letter to the IDF’s chief of staff. Given the “seriousness of the incident, we do not think it is right to wait with the investigation until after the end of the war.” They demanded a “comprehensive and transparent investigation into the decisions and actions that led to this tragic outcome.” Israeli military Brig. Gen. Barak Hiram has since admitted he ordered the shelling that day. “The negotiations are over,” he recalled saying. “Break in, even at the cost of civilian casualties.”

Yasmin Porat, who had escaped the horrors at the Nova music festival and sought refuge in a home at Be’eri, offered extensive details on this incident, as Electronic Intifada reported. In a series of interviews on Israeli media, Porat described how Palestinian commandos entered the home and told the Israeli civilians they intended to take them hostage and, after moving them to a location with other hostages at the kibbutz, ultimately used their Israeli captives to contact the police to negotiate. “Their objective was to kidnap us to Gaza. Not to murder us,” she told Israeli network Kan News. “And after we were there for two hours with the abductors, the police arrive. A gun battle takes place that our police started.”

Porat, who said her captors “treated us very humanely,” described how she managed to escape the house by convincing one of the gunmen to exit with her. After using her as a “human shield” to exit the house, the Palestinian was taken into custody, and Porat remained on the scene as Israeli forces laid siege to the house. “They eliminated everyone, including the hostages. There was very, very heavy crossfire,” she said. “Everyone was killed there. Just horrible.”

Other witnesses at Be’eri have described how Israeli forces were able to retake the kibbutz from Palestinian fighters only after the IDF shelled houses where hostages were being held.

There is also evidence indicating that Israeli forces responding to the attacks at the Nova music festival, where 364 people died, may have killed Israeli civilians as they attacked Palestinian militants, including with munitions fired from Apache helicopters. Yedioth Ahronoth and other major Israeli media outlets have published reports detailing the massive fire from combat helicopters and drones unleashed against the gunmen who violently stormed the festival. Military sources described the difficulty in distinguishing civilians from attackers, particularly in the early phases of the Israeli counterstrike.

Most Read

Conservative Organizations Are Quietly Scurrying Away From Project 2025

Shawn Musgrave

The Local Police Department Responding to Trump Shooting Has No Chief

Akela Lacy

How Clarence Thomas Cleared Trump’s Path in Classified Docs Case

Shawn Musgrave

In the most sweeping journalistic account to date of the events surrounding the Israeli military’s operations on October 7, Ronen Bergman and Yoav Zitun — two well-connected and prominent Israeli journalists —wrote about the state of chaos and panic within the security establishment. They described “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.”

The Hannibal Directive, which dates back to 1986 and has been the subject of great controversy in Israel, authorized military forces to stop the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers at all costs, even if it meant shooting or injuring the captives. In a 2003 investigation, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported the broadly held understanding of the directive: “From the point of view of the army, a dead soldier is better than a captive soldier who himself suffers and forces the state to release thousands of captives in order to obtain his release.”

The Hannibal Directive was allegedly rescinded in 2016. But Bergman and Zitun report that by midday on October 7, the IDF issued a similar order, instructing all units to stop Hamas from bringing hostages back to Gaza and to do so “at any cost.” They describe Israeli helicopter gunships, drones, and tanks firing on any and all cars en route to Gaza, burning them and in some cases killing everyone inside the vehicles. Haaretz reported on an IDF commander, locked in a subterranean bunker, calling in a strike against his own bases “in order to repulse the terrorists.”

The truth is that we do not know how many of their own people Israeli forces killed during the counteroffensive on October 7. Nor do we know what happened in the firefights when armed Israelis, including kibbutz private security and military personnel, sought to defend their settlements.

How many Israelis — soldiers and civilians — were killed in the chaos and had their deaths recorded as killed or sadistically burned alive by Hamas?

Beyond the deadly shelling of the house at Be’eri, the public has been given very few details of what exactly transpired when official Israeli military forces deployed to confront the commandos from Gaza. Israeli military and police forces engaged in prolonged standoffs and shootouts with Palestinian gunmen holed up in houses, police stations, military installations, and other buildings, often holding hostages. In some cases, these battles went on for days.

In November, Netanyahu senior adviser Mark Regev was asked by MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan about some of the lies told by Israeli officials and soldiers about the events of October 7. Regev remarked that when a claim has been proven false, Israel retracts or clarifies it. “We originally said, in the atrocious Hamas attack upon our people on October 7, 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,” Regev said. He then added: “There were actually bodies that were so badly burnt we thought they were ours; in the end, apparently they were Hamas terrorists.”

Israel’s social security agency has stated that the death toll from October 7 is 1,139 people. It has identified 695 Israeli civilians killed that day, along with 71 foreigners, most of whom were migrant laborers. Some 373 members of Israeli military and security forces were reported dead.

Israel has estimated that between 1,000 and 1,500 Palestinian fighters were killed that day, many of them during assaults launched with advanced weapons fired from tanks, helicopters, and drones. How many Israelis — soldiers and civilians — were killed in the chaos and had their deaths recorded as killed or sadistically burned alive by Hamas? How many Israeli lives were sacrificed under Hannibal-style orders to prevent them from being taken hostage at all costs?

The answers to these questions will bring no absolution to those who initiated the carnage on October 7. No civilians would have died in those Israeli communities had Hamas not launched its operations. It is also true that if Israel had not engaged in a 75-year campaign of ethnic cleansing and apartheid, there would not have been an October 7. The illusion promoted by the Israeli state that its people could live a bucolic life in the “Gaza envelope” while their government enforced the caging and repression of 2.3 million Palestinians next door was shattered.

The families of the dead deserve to have answers. The specifics of what happened that day also matter because of how these events have shaped the public attitude toward Israel’s war, with its horrifying death toll, particularly among Palestinian children.

Faulty Justifications

Cynical manipulation of the truth has been a hallmark of Netanyahu’s career. He has long advocated for Hamas to achieve and maintain power in Gaza precisely because he believed it was the single best path to achieving his own colonial agenda.

Related

Before They Vowed to Annihilate Hamas, Israeli Officials Considered It an Asset

“Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,” Netanyahu told his Likud confederates in 2019. The logic was clear: The world will never give the Palestinians a state while Hamas remains in power. That’s why, since at least 2012, Netanyahu has facilitated the continued flow of money to Hamas.

By January 18, with the horrors in Gaza intensifying, U.S. and European diplomats were telling anyone who would listen that they were deep into planning for a “day after” scenario that would pave the way for a two-state solution. Netanyahu responded to this chatter by giving a televised speech in Hebrew. “I clarify that in any arrangement in the foreseeable future, with an accord or without an accord, Israel must have security control over the entire territory west of the Jordan River,” Netanyahu said. “That’s a necessary condition. It clashes with the principle of sovereignty but what can you do?”

While it was reported as a defiant rebuke of his U.S. and European allies, there was nothing new in Netanyahu’s position. It has been the Likud party’s official stance since its 1977 charter. “Between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty,” the document reads. “A plan which relinquishes parts of western Eretz Israel, undermines our right to the country, unavoidably leads to the establishment of a ‘Palestinian State,’ jeopardizes the security of the Jewish population, endangers the existence of the State of Israel, and frustrates any prospect of peace.”

The hospitals are Hamas, the U.N. is Hamas, journalists are Hamas, European allies are Hamas, the International Court of Justice is antisemitic.

The lies that were spread in the immediate aftermath of the October 7 attacks did not end there. Nearly every week, sometimes every day, the Israeli government and military have unloaded a fresh barrage of allegations intended to justify the ongoing slaughter. The hospitals are Hamas, the U.N. is Hamas, journalists are Hamas, European allies are Hamas, the International Court of Justice is antisemitic. The tactic is effective, particularly because the U.S. and other major allies have consistently laundered Israel’s unverified allegations as evidence of the righteousness of the cause.

The latest example is Israel’s campaign to destroy UNRWA, the single most important humanitarian organization in Gaza, which was established in 1949 specifically to protect Palestinians violently expelled from their homes and land by the creation of the Israeli state. Almost immediately after the ICJ ruled against Israel in the genocide case brought by South Africa in The Hague, Israel accused 12 of the organization’s 30,000 employees of participating in the October 7 attacks.

Israel then presented the U.S. and other governments with “intelligence” it claimed to have obtained from the interrogations of Palestinian captives, documents recovered from the bodies of dead Palestinians, seized cellphones, and signals intercepts. Israel charged that 10 percent of UNRWA’s 12,000-person local staff in Gaza had some form of “links” to Hamas. “The institution as a whole is a haven for Hamas’ radical ideology,” an anonymous senior Israeli official told the Wall Street Journal in a widely cited article penned by a former IDF soldier.

The innuendo-laced allegation of UNRWA staff having undefined “links” to Hamas and Islamic Jihad, or “close relatives” who belong to the groups is a risible charge given that Hamas is not just an armed militia, but also the governing civil authority in Gaza.

The U.S. responded to Israel’s allegations by immediately announcing it was suspending all funding to UNRWA. “We haven’t had the ability to investigate [the allegations] ourselves,” Blinken admitted on January 30. Nonetheless, he declared: “They are highly, highly credible.”

But journalists from Sky News reviewed the so-called dossier and reported, “The Israeli intelligence documents make several claims that Sky News has not seen proof of and many of the claims, even if true, do not directly implicate UNRWA.” Britain’s Channel 4 also obtained the document and determined it “provides no evidence to support its explosive new claim that UNRWA staff were involved with terror attacks on Israel.” The Financial Times, which also reviewed the materials, reported there were specific allegations of direct participation in the October 7 attacks against four Palestinians employed by UNRWA, not 12 as originally asserted.

This was a transparent attempt by Israel to distract from the rulings in the ICJ genocide case and to obliterate a U.N. agency that Israel has long viewed as an impediment to its goal of denying Palestinians the right to return to the homes and territory from which Israel expelled them. It was also an action that explicitly violated the orders issued by the world court, which directed Israel to “take immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance.” Based on Israel’s sweeping and unverified allegations alone, the U.S. led scores of Western nations to denounce the U.N. agency and pull their funding at the moment it is needed most.

From weapons and intelligence to political, diplomatic, and legal support, Israel has wanted for nothing from the Biden administration. The mounting pile of Palestinian civilian corpses and their surviving family members, meanwhile, are relegated to the workshopped afterthoughts uttered by Western politicians who have been told they should occasionally squeeze a line or two into their speeches about death and suffering in Gaza.

Propaganda and weaponized lies can only obscure the dead bodies, the forced starvation, the mass killing of children, and the utter destruction of an entire society for so long. Over time, it becomes increasingly difficult to conceal the nexus between the actions taken by Israel after October 7, the mendacious narratives it deployed, and Netanyahu’s desperate struggle to retain political power and his personal liberty. The 1,200 Israeli and international victims of October 7, and the more than 27,000 Palestinians whose deaths were justified in their names, deserve an unvarnished rendering of the truth.

The post Israel’s Ruthless Propaganda Campaign to Dehumanize Palestinians appeared first on The Intercept.

It found that there is a basis to proceed with the case against Israel for genocide and that South Africa had solid foundation to bring its case before the world’s highest court. The ICJ’s chief judge, Joan Donoghue, said provisional measures against Israel were necessary because “the catastrophic humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip is at serious risk of deteriorating further before the court renders its final judgement.” The full proceedings against Israel will take many years to complete.

At the same time, the court did not go as far in its rulings as South Africa wished and did not explicitly order Israel to immediately halt its military attacks against Gaza or to lift its state of siege. Instead, it ordered Israel to “take all measures within its power to prevent the commission of all acts within the scope of Article II of the Genocide convention.”

Both the Biden administration and the Israeli government seized on this aspect of the court’s ruling to argue that this amounted to a green light for Israel to continue its military assault on Gaza. “The court’s ruling is consistent with our view that Israel has the right to take action to ensure the terrorist attacks of October 7 cannot be repeated, in accordance with international law,” a State Department spokesperson said. “The court did not make a finding about genocide or call for a ceasefire in its ruling.”

This mischaracterization of the court’s ruling is a clear effort by the U.S. government to spin what was actually a very specific set of orders the court issued to Israel. Moreover, the court did not issue a finding on genocide, not because it concluded Israel’s actions do not constitute genocide, but because that determination would be made following a multi-year legal process, which the judges have now said should proceed.

In a 15-2 ruling, the ICJ judges ordered that Israel must prevent the following actions against the protected “group,” which the court defined as the Palestinians of Gaza: “(a) killing members of the group; ( b ) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; and ( d ) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.” While the specific word “ceasefire” was not mentioned in the order, the ruling could not be clearer about the court’s intent. It literally ordered Israel to stop killing Palestinians in Gaza “with immediate effect.”

In issuing its provisional measures, the court upheld “the right of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip to be protected from acts of genocide and related prohibited acts” under the Genocide Convention. It found that “the catastrophic humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip is at serious risk of deteriorating further before the Court renders its final judgment.”

“Israel must take immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance to address the adverse conditions of life faced by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip,” the court said. It also ordered Israel to halt and punish incitement to genocide, to preserve any evidence of violations of the Genocide Convention by its forces or personnel, and to submit a report on its compliance with the court’s orders within one month.

Donoghue read aloud several statements made by Israeli officials, which South Africa contended indicated “genocidal intent.” Among these was the statement by Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announcing there would be “no electricity, no food, no fuel” allowed into Gaza and saying, “We are fighting human animals.” She also read a statement from Israeli President Isaac Herzog saying of the people of Gaza, “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible.”

Donoghue, the president of the ICJ, is an American who worked as a top legal adviser at the State Department under President Barack Obama. She voted in favor of every order the court issued against Israel. While judges do not officially operate as agents of their home governments, it was nonetheless striking that Donoghue ruled against Israel at a time when the U.S. has officially denounced the accusations leveled by South Africa and continues to fuel Israel’s military onslaught.

The ruling at the court is undoubtedly important in a symbolic sense: It found that the Palestinians of Gaza are a protected group under the provisions of the Genocide Convention and that South Africa had proven that there is a reasonable basis to litigate whether Israel’s military onslaught constitutes a genocide.

But it also represents a technical coup for Israel, which has already argued it is not committing genocidal acts. The bottom line is that the court has ruled that Israel should stand trial on charges of genocide in Gaza and ordered it to stop killing Palestinians in Gaza. But the U.S. and Israel clearly believe the court’s ruling contains a significant loophole that Israel can exploit to continue its war against Gaza. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed that no one will stop the war against Gaza, including The Hague. The court’s rulings, which did not explicitly order an immediate cessation of the military assault, is already being emphasized in Tel Aviv.

While generally denouncing the ICJ ruling, Netanyahu asserted that the court “rightly rejected the outrageous demand” for an immediate halt to the military attacks on Gaza. “The very claim that Israel is carrying out genocide against Palestinians is not only false, it’s outrageous, and the willingness of the court to deliberate it at all is a mark of disgrace that will not be erased for generations,” Netanyahu, reacting to the ruling, said.

He also vowed Israel will keep fighting “until total victory, until we defeat Hamas, return all the captives and ensure that Gaza will not again be a threat to Israel.”

Gallant, whose statements were cited as evidence of genocidal intent, added that Israel “does not need to be lectured on morality in order to distinguish between terrorists and the civilian population in Gaza.”

He said Israel will continue its war. “Those who seek justice, will not find it on the leather chairs of the court chambers in The Hague — they will find it in the Hamas tunnels in Gaza, where 136 hostages are held, and where those who murdered our children are hiding.”

“Hague Shmague,” tweeted Netanyahu’s minister of national security, Itamar Ben-Gvir.

Naledi Pandor, South Africa’s minister of international relations, said outside the court that she was grateful for the court’s ruling, but wished it had ordered an explicit halt to Israel’s attacks. She argued that the court’s orders would not be enforceable if Israel does not actually cease its military attacks and state of siege. “Without a ceasefire, the order doesn’t actually work,” she said.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said in speech that, with the ICJ ruling, “Israel stands before the international community, its crimes against the Palestinian people laid bare.”

The U.S. government has long shielded Israel from international legal consequences for its actions against the Palestinians in both Gaza and the West Bank. The only enforcement mechanism for rulings from the ICJ reside at the U.N. Security Council, where the U.S. regularly wields its veto power. 

The State Department has refused to answer whether the Biden administration will abide by the ICJ’s provisional orders, but its statement after the ruling indicates it is already aggressively spinning an alternative interpretation of a clear set of orders imposed on Israel. This proceeding may herald the intensification of the global debate over whether international law and courts have relevance, or whether the U.S. will remain the ultimate judge over which nations must face the consequences for their violations of the laws and conventions.

Update: January 26, 2024, 1:40 p.m. ET
This piece was updated to include the State Department response to the ICJ’s ruling and to add additional context about the specific provisional orders issued against Israel.

The post ICJ Ruling on Gaza Genocide Is a Historic Victory for the Palestinians That Israel Vows to Defy appeared first on The Intercept.

“At around 4 p.m., an RPG was fired by gunmen at a tank securing the forces, and simultaneously, an explosion occurred in two two-story buildings. The buildings collapsed due to this explosion, while most of the forces were inside and near them,” said Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, the Israel Defense Forces spokesperson. “One of the missiles apparently hit a mine, which exploded and caused the buildings to collapse with the soldiers inside them.”

The Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, released a statement Tuesday describing an attack that was consistent with the time and nature of the Israeli military’s description. While the IDF statement was unclear about the exact cause of the explosion inside the buildings, the Qassam Brigades said its operatives “targeted” the structure, leading to the “explosion of the [IDF’s] ammunition and engineering equipment,” “completely blowing [it] up.”

Such controlled demolitions have become an increasingly common tactic used by Israeli forces in Gaza. The Israeli military has justified its destruction of civilian housing and other infrastructure by claiming it houses Hamas facilities or leaders or to gain access to subterranean tunnels. In Monday’s incident, however, Hagari said the buildings were marked for demolition because they were situated in an area of Gaza that Israel unilaterally declared a “buffer zone” between Gaza and Israel. He said the purpose was to protect an Israeli kibbutz located a half mile from Gaza against possible future attacks.

This appears to be the first time the Israeli military has publicly admitted that its systematic destruction of whole areas of eastern Gaza are not entirely aimed at destroying tunnels or other Hamas infrastructure, but at depopulating more areas of Gaza in the name of security for nearby Israeli settlements. “The IDF systematically demolishes Palestinian buildings that enable surveillance and firing capabilities toward Israel, leading to the destruction of hundreds of buildings to date,” the IDF said in a statement.

Controlled demolitions against the property within an occupied territory are generally prohibited under international humanitarian law unless they are “imperatively demanded by the necessities of war.” 

But IDF soldiers have posted multiple videos on TikTok and other social media sites of themselves gleefully hitting the trigger button sparking massive controlled explosions in Palestinian neighborhoods, as well as educational, cultural, and government institutions. In a TikTok video showing a military bulldozer knocking down houses in Khan Younis, an Israeli soldier jokes that he and his colleagues are setting up a real estate company. “This field is definitely worth investing in,” he says. “For those who have money, this is the time to invest. Make an offer.”

On January 17, Israeli forces blew up Al-Isra University, reportedly rigging it with more than 300 mines before conducting a triggering strike that leveled the entire campus. “The explosion occurred 70 days after the Israeli military transformed the school into barracks and, later, into a temporary detention facility,” according to the humanitarian organization Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor.

State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller told reporters he had seen the video of the demolition of the privately owned school, but refused to comment on the legality or justification for the operation. 

“It looks like a controlled demolition,” said Associated Press correspondent Matt Lee during the briefing. “It looks like what we do here in this country, when we’re taking down an old hotel or a stadium. And you have nothing to say? You have nothing to say about this?” 

Miller responded that the Biden administration had made inquiries with the Israeli government about the bombing, “But I’m not able to characterize the actual facts on the ground before hearing that response.” Echoing Israeli inferences that Hamas used the university for military purposes or had an underground facility, Miller added, “I don’t know what was under that building. I don’t know what was inside, inside that building.”

Monday’s mass casualty incident among the ranks of the IDF comes as Israel has become increasingly mired in a morass in its military battle against Hamas and other Palestinian guerrillas. Israel has, to date, confirmed the deaths of 219 soldiers in Gaza ground operations. Significantly, major U.S. and Israeli media outlets have begun to raise questions about the prospects of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu decisively achieving any of the stated goals of the war. “Israel’s limited progress in dismantling Hamas has raised doubts within the military’s high command about the near-term feasibility of achieving the country’s principal wartime objectives,” reported the New York Times on January 20. Haaretz’s defense correspondent Amos Harel penned a January 19 column warning of “clear signs that Israel is getting bogged down in the Gaza quagmire” and saying Netanyahu’s government is increasingly “delusional.”

Netanyahu responded to the deaths of the 21 soldiers killed in the attempted demolition operation, and an additional three IDF soldiers killed Monday, with a pugilistic declaration. “While we bow our heads in memory of our fallen, we are not relenting — even for a moment — in striving for the goal that has no alternative — achieving total victory,” he said. “We are in the midst of a war, the justification of which is without parallel.” Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant echoed those sentiments, saying, “This is a war that will determine the future of Israel for decades to come. The loss of these soldiers is an imperative for achieving the goals of this war.”

While Israel is struggling in its stated aims of eliminating Hamas and freeing the Israeli hostages, the IDF continues to prove murderously adept at killing large numbers of Palestinian civilians. Its ground operations in Khan Younis has seen IDF forces attack numerous shelters, including those run by the U.N., where the Israeli government had instructed Palestinians to flee to remain safe. It has also laid siege to more hospitals and medical facilities. A mass grave has now been dug on the grounds of Nasser Hospital to bury Palestinians killed in the intense Israeli attacks on Khan Younis.

This week, the conservative death figures published by the Gaza health ministry reported that the number of fatalities in the enclave had surpassed 25,000 Palestinians, with another 63,000 wounded. These numbers only include cases where deaths have been officially recorded by Gaza’s hospital and mortuary system. They do not include the thousands of Palestinians unaccounted for and trapped under rubble caused by Israeli bombardment and fighting.

Israeli media outlets are focused on the loss of lives of their nation’s soldiers in Monday’s incident, displaying photographs of the dead and describing the efforts to retrieve any possible survivors. “Rescue forces described the scene as reminiscent of the aftermath of an earthquake,” reported The Times of Israel. “For several hours, a large number of troops from the IDF’s search and rescue units, as well as members of the Israel Fire and Rescue Services, worked to extract the casualties from the collapsed buildings.”

The estimated 7,000 Palestinians trapped under the rubble of their former homes and other structures receive no such media coverage. They are simply nameless statistics often omitted from the descriptions of the carnage in Gaza, a mass destruction enabled primarily by U.S.-supplied and manufactured bombs. The vast majority of these victims have no official search-and-rescue operation and no fire department to respond to their desperate, muffled pleas for help. Often their only hope is that their neighbors might somehow claw their way through the heavy concrete wreckage using whatever tools they can find. Or they are left, trapped, spending their last moments desperately scraping their own hands raw and bloody in an effort to dig their way out.

Correction: January 23, 2024, 1:45 p.m. ET
Al-Isra University in Gaza was blown up on January 17, not January 18, as previously reported. The piece was also updated to include more details from Hamas’s statement on the incident.

The post 21 Israeli Troops Killed While Planting Explosives for a Controlled Demolition in Gaza appeared first on The Intercept.

Biden’s statement is emblematic of the lip service the president has paid to “humanitarian” needs while at the same time facilitating Israel’s every move. The White House knew from the beginning exactly how gratuitous and barbaric Israel’s war of annihilation would be in Gaza, yet Biden made sure that his “great, great friend” Benjamin Netanyahu would have U.S. weapons to carry it out, would enjoy the full support of America’s extensive intelligence and targeting capabilities, and receive the political backing of Washington with no “red lines.” Biden and company ensured that Israel’s lies, no matter how grand or obscene, would be embraced and promoted from the podium at the State Department and White House every single day. Over the past 100 days, the administration has watched the carnage wrought on the people of Gaza, yet officials admit they have “taken great pains to avoid calling for a ceasefire.”

The attempts by the administration over the past months to plant stories in the media — about how Biden is “losing patience” with Netanyahu, how Antony Blinken is concerned about the mounting pile of Palestinian corpses, how the White House seeks no wider regional war — indicates a cynical amorality that permeates the souls of those in power. “At every juncture, Netanyahu has given Biden the finger,” Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen told Axios, characterizing what he hears from senior administration officials. “They are pleading with the Netanyahu coalition, but getting slapped in the face over and over again.” 

“What we’re seeing every single day in Gaza is gut-wrenching,” Blinken told New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman at an event in Davos, Switzerland, as though he has not been one of the premiere enablers of the destruction of Gaza. “The suffering we are seeing among innocent men, women, and children breaks my heart.” He then adopted the tone of an analyst at a think tank, not the top U.S. diplomat: “The question is, what is to be done?”

These sentiments, expressed as part of a barely concealed political spin campaign, are not being promoted because they are sincerely held reservations or concerns; rather they are the linchpin of a crass effort to scatter bread crumbs the White House can later point to, including during the 2024 election, in an effort to make it seem as though they were powerless observers who just wanted to help the Israelis defend themselves but that dastardly Netanyahu took it too far. The actual scandal, in this narrative, will not be the mass murder of the Palestinians of Gaza in a genocidal campaign armed by the White House, but how Bibi and his band of rogues, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, used the just war to push their “extremist” agendas. 

“If this really goes bad, we want to be able to point to our past statements,” a senior U.S. official told NBC News in early November when the White House intensified its stealth political messaging. “The official said the administration is particularly worried about a narrative taking hold that Biden supports all Israeli military actions and that U.S.-provided weapons have been used to kill Palestinian civilians, many of them women and children,” NBC reported. In other words, the White House was concerned that the cold truths about its actions could not be washed away.

When this is all said and done, this is going to be a central component of the Biden administration’s off-ramping strategy: pile all the evils of this war, including Biden’s crucial support for Israel’s actions as it rained mass destruction on Gaza’s civilians, onto the Bad Ship Netanyahu and then try to sink it. It is a classic Biden maneuver deployed throughout his 50-year career — including during the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq, a war that Biden facilitated and later claimed to have opposed — to make sure he can have it both ways when politically convenient.

The emerging narrative is this: Biden’s effort to do right by the victims of October 7 and defend Israel’s “right to exist” from the hordes of bloodthirsty Hamas terrorists was exploited by a few bad apples atop the Israeli government. It’s a convenient plan given that Bibi’s hold on power on October 6 was already swirling around the drain because of his domestic policies, and he will certainly face domestic confrontation for what is being characterized in Israel as the intelligence failures leading up to October 7, as well as his preventable failures to bring home Israeli hostages outside of the negotiated November truce with Hamas. Despite its claims that rescuing the hostages is a top objective in the destruction of Gaza, Israel has not rescued a single hostage, though it has killed at least three of its own people and may well have killed more in the Israel Defense Forces’s attacks on Gaza, as Hamas has alleged.

When Blinken and other officials make statements like “this could end tomorrow” if Hamas releases the hostages and surrenders, it is instructive to clarify what they mean by “this.” “This” ending does not mean the apartheid will end, it does not mean the collective punishment of Palestinians will end, it does not mean the blockade will be lifted or the Gaza concentration camp will be dismantled and its people freed. What Blinken and other U.S. officials really mean when they say “this” could end is that Washington would actually use its unparalleled leverage to end the full-spectrum military assaults on Gaza. Then — and only then — would any meaningful humanitarian relief be permitted to reach a population that is now starving, lacks clean water, and is experiencing the rapid spread of preventable diseases. This stance — conditioning basic human necessities for a civilian population on the decisions of Hamas, a group Washington also accuses of repressing “innocent” Palestinians — is sociopathic. 

The truth is that ending “this” does not guarantee that Israel won’t continue to heavily strike whenever it pleases in Gaza in the name of “eliminating” Hamas, as it has done for decades. The Israelis call it “mowing the grass.” The U.S. is effectively lying to the Palestinians and the world about “this” all ending. Nothing short of an entire people, not just Hamas commandos, bending the knee to Israel’s domination and never daring to resist again would end any of “this” on Israel’s terms. And that would mean the end of the aspirations for a Palestinian state, not to mention basic human rights or dignity.

As the slaughter in Gaza continues, a panel of judges at the International Court of Justice in The Hague continues its deliberations in the initial phase of South Africa’s suit against Israel, alleging violations of the Genocide Convention. Netanyahu responded to the meticulously documented charges against his government by issuing a preemptive declaration to flout a ruling ordering Israel to cease its attacks on Gaza. “Nobody will stop us — not The Hague, not the axis of evil, and not anybody else,” he said. “We are continuing the war until the end — until total victory, until we achieve all of our goals.” Unsurprisingly, this promise to defy international justice and law resulted in no condemnation from the Biden administration or Israel’s other major allies.

The White House spin masters are working to give Biden the political flexibility to pretend he really tried to limit the mass slaughter — and fought passionately to reign in Bibi — heading into the 2024 election campaign. But the truth is the administration has stayed the course in supporting the genocidal campaign. And not just with deliveries of bombs and offering support for pernicious lies promoted by Tel Aviv. As Ken Klippenstein reported, the U.S. has been flying drones over Gaza and, in late November, deployed a U.S. Air Force team to assist Israel in targeting. One source told The Intercept the likely role of these Americans is “to provide satellite intelligence to the Israelis for the purpose of offensive targeting,” not just to assist in hostage rescue operations. A recent analysis by the Associated Press of Israeli strikes in Gaza found that “the vast majority of bombs dropped on the besieged enclave are U.S.-made.”

The U.S.-backed Israeli military is killing an average of 250 Palestinians a day in Gaza. It has displaced 90 percent of the enclave’s 2.3 million residents. Conservative estimates indicate that some 24,000 Palestinians have died over the past 100 days, the vast majority women and children, and more than 60,000 have been wounded. In the West Bank, Israel is expanding its assaults with government-backed settlers and official Israeli forces killing more than 330 Palestinians, at least 84 of whom were children. Nearly 6,000 Palestinians living there have been detained or imprisoned since October 7.

While the White House is driving the no-holds, no-restrictions agenda for supporting Israel’s war of annihilation in Gaza, it does so with the support of the vast majority of U.S. politicians. On Tuesday, a Senate resolution introduced by Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders and based on legal restrictions that bar the U.S. from giving support to any state “which engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights” was brought to the floor for a vote. It would have required Blinken’s State Department to submit a report to Congress about Israel’s human rights violations, any U.S. role in those violations, and how the administration responded. Depending on the State Department response, U.S. aid to Israel could have been frozen. 

The White House publicly opposed Sanders’s resolution, calling it “unworkable.” National Security Council spokesperson Adm. John Kirby, one of the most ardent defenders of Israel over the past three months, said, “We don’t think now is the right time.” He repeated a claim the administration has been making repeatedly for many weeks about Israel supposedly “transitioning” to less murderous operations in Gaza. “We believe that that transition will be helpful both in terms of reducing civilian casualties as well as increasing humanitarian assistance,” he said.

By a whopping 72-11 bipartisan majority, senators voted to kill Sanders’s resolution.

While the vote should come as no surprise to anyone who has followed U.S. politics on support for Israel, it offered a morbid clarity: There appears to be no Israeli crime grave enough for U.S. lawmakers to consider pausing, let alone stopping, the U.S. role in facilitating the mass killing of Palestinians even to review whether the White House is abiding by U.S. laws. Despite the common Republican characterization of Biden as running a lawless administration, only one Republican, Sen. Rand Paul, voted in favor of a resolution aimed at investigating whether Biden is actually breaking the law.

Next week, lawyers from the Center for Constitutional Rights will test the principles of the judicial branch of the U.S. government as they present arguments in a lawsuit filed on behalf of Palestinians in Gaza charging that Biden, Blinken, and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin violated U.S. and international law. One of the laws Biden and his underlings are accused of violating was actually sponsored by then-Sen. Biden in 1988, which officially made U.S. law consistent with the obligations under the 1948 Genocide Convention, imposing criminal penalties for committing, assisting, or inciting genocide. The suit charges “that these U.S. officials have failed to prevent genocide and are aiding and abetting genocide.” Similar to South Africa’s requests at The Hague, the U.S. lawyers are asking a federal court in California to “order an end to U.S. military and diplomatic support to Israel” while the case is being adjudicated.

“The Biden administration knows what the law is internationally and it knows what the law is domestically,” said Katherine Gallagher, a senior attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights and one of the lead attorneys litigating the suit. In an interview, she pointed to volumes of U.S. statements and legal assertions addressing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, including filings submitted to the International Court of Justice in support of prosecuting Russia, and argued those apply to the war against Gaza. “When the victims are Palestinian and the perpetrators are Israeli, we see the United States do a 180 and absolutely ignore its obligations to not provide the means by which a genocide is being carried out.”

Regardless of court rulings or the specific legal terms ultimately attached to the conduct of Israel’s war against Gaza — or the role of Biden, et al., for that matter — there remain basic facts that cannot be credibly denied. This has been an unrestrained slaughter unleashed against a civilian population with the full support of the U.S. and a small clique of other powerful nations. Even if Israel beats the genocide rap at The Hague, the inevitable backslapping among the ranks of the coalition of the killing cannot erase the fact that the world has witnessed what they did and continue to do in Gaza.

Over the course of the past 100 days of Israel’s bloody rampage in Gaza, Biden has had an infinite series of events that each could have justified ceasing U.S. political and military support for Israel’s explicitly offensive war. There is no nation on Earth that wields more influence over Israel and no politician who holds more sway than Biden. The U.S. is the arms dealer and defender of this entire enterprise. If Biden was truly as dissatisfied or impatient or whatever other terms are being fed to the media about his supposed handwringing over Bibi’s war, he could have acted. But he didn’t.

Instead, the White House made sure no ceasefire took hold, offered a public defense of Israel’s conduct in the face of clear evidence of its genocidal intent submitted before the world court, circumvented Congress to keep the arms flowing, and then publicly opposed a resolution that sought to uphold U.S. law aimed at ensuring U.S. weapons and other aid are not used to commit human rights abuses. Those are the relevant facts. There is no need for media outlets to serve as conveyor belts for the administration’s disingenuous posturing. Biden’s actions are the only evidence that matters. And that evidence is damning.

The post Joe Biden Wants You to Believe He Is Opposed to Genocide in Gaza appeared first on The Intercept.

Israel benefitted greatly from the fact that there was no cross examination permitted or debate allowed during these proceedings. It embarked on a bold mission to do in a court of international law what its military and political officials have done day and night throughout the course of this war against Gaza: unleash a deluge of what was known within the Trump administration as “alternative facts.” 

Israel’s defense was the inverse of South Africa’s case yesterday, and as weak in offering documented facts as South Africa’s was powerful. History began on October 7, the Israelis seemed to say, South Africa is Hamas, South Africa did not give Israel a chance to meet up and chat about Gaza before suing for genocide, and actually the Israel Defense Forces is the most moral entity on Earth. As for the voluminous public statements by senior Israeli officials indicating genocidal intent, those were just “random assertions” by some irrelevant underlings. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s statements invoking a murderous story from the Bible about killing the women, infants, and cattle of your enemies? The South Africans just don’t understand theology and presented Netanyahu’s words out of context.

While Israel’s lawyers made legal arguments that the genocide charges leveled against it are invalid, their primary strategy was to appeal to the court on jurisdictional and procedural matters, hoping that they could form the basis for the panel of international judges to dismiss South Africa’s case. Aware of the global audience, Israel also sought to reinforce its claims of righteousness and self-defense in fighting the war in Gaza. 

Israel’s representative Tal Becker opened his government’s rebuttal by telling the judges at the ICJ that South Africa’s case “profoundly distorted the factual and legal picture,” claiming it sought to erase Jewish history. He charged that the legal arguments made by South Africa’s team were “barely distinguishable” from Hamas’s rhetoric and accused them of “weaponizing” the term “genocide.”

Becker called October 7 “the largest calculated mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust” and pleaded with the court to factor in the “brutality and lawlessness” of the enemy Israel says it is fighting in Gaza. Israel, he said, has a lawful right to use all available means to respond “to the slaughter of October 7 which Hamas has vowed to repeat.”

He repeatedly attacked the South African government, accusing it of doing Hamas’s bidding and alleging that its true agenda was to “thwart” Israel’s right to defend itself. “South Africa enjoys close relations with Hamas,” Becker said. “These relations have continued unabated even after the October 7 atrocities.” He said that South Africa, not Israel, should be subjected to provisional measures by the ICJ for its alleged support of Hamas. Becker neglected to mention the fact that Netanyahu himself long advocated for Hamas to retain power in Gaza and worked to ensure the flow of money to the group from Qatar continued over the years, believing it to be the best strategy to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state. 

Becker rejected South Africa’s characterization of the historical scale of civilian destruction in Gaza — which has now killed over 10,000 children — arguing that what is actually “unparalleled and unprecedented” in this war is Hamas “embedding its military operations throughout Gaza within and beneath” densely populated areas. Becker spoke as though many of Israel’s most outlandish claims about Hamas’s underground operations have not been proven false or shown to be greatly exaggerated, such as the Israeli claim that there was essentially a Hamas Pentagon under al-Shifa Hospital. 

While Israel’s lawyers made legal arguments that the genocide charges leveled against it are invalid, their primary strategy was to appeal to the court on jurisdictional and procedural matters.

Becker also alleged that South Africa’s lawyers had failed to mention how many of the buildings blown up and destroyed in Gaza over the past three months of sustained Israeli bombing were actually “boobytrapped” by Hamas rather than destroyed by Israel. It was a risible claim given not only the scale of the Israeli bombardment of entire neighborhoods, but also because Israeli soldiers have posted videos of themselves gleefully hitting the detonate button to obliterate whole neighborhoods. He dismissed civilian death and injury figures provided by Gaza health authorities, saying that South Africa’s lawyers had failed to mention how many of the dead Palestinians were actually Hamas operatives. It was a striking point given that Israeli officials have openly and repeatedly said that there are no innocents in Gaza, and that United Nations workers and journalists killed by Israel are actually secret Hamas agents. 

“The nightmarish environment created by Hamas has been concealed by” South Africa, Becker charged. “Israel is committed to comply with the law, but it does so in the face of Hamas’s utter contempt for the law.” Becker did not bother to address any of the scores of U.N. resolutions over the decades condemning the illegality of Israel’s apartheid regime and its illegal occupations, not to mention its own well-documented use of Palestinian children as civilian shields and the intentional killing and maiming of nonviolent protesters. 

Becker also claimed that Israel was complying with international law in all of its operations in Gaza. “Israel does not seek to destroy a people, but to protect a people — its [own] people,” he said, adding that Israel is engaged in a “war of defense against Hamas, not the Palestinian people.” There could “hardly be a charge more false and more malevolent than the charge of genocide.” He accused South Africa of abusing the world court and turning it into an “aggressor’s charter.”

Malcolm Shaw, a British lawyer representing Israel, opened his argument by attacking South Africa’s reference on Thursday to what it described as Israel’s 75-year Nakba against the Palestinians. Shaw called this characterization as “outrageous” and said the only relevant historical “context” were the events of October 7, which he termed “the real genocide in this situation.” Given the civilian death toll caused by Israel in Gaza — upward of 23,000 as of this week — it was a stunning statement. By Israel’s own official count, some 1,200 people were killed on October 7. Of these, 274 were soldiers, 764 were civilians, 57 were Israeli police, and 38 were local security guards. It has still not been determined how many Israelis were killed in “friendly fire” incidents by Israeli forces who responded to the Hamas attacks that day.

Shaw and other lawyers representing Israel acknowledged that civilians had been killed during Israel’s military operations, though Shaw contended that “armed conflict, even when fully justified and conducted lawfully, is brutal and costs lives.” But, he said, Israel was engaged in a lawful and proportionate military campaign and said the ICJ was not an appropriate venue to review the Gaza war. “The only category before this court is genocide. Not every conflict is genocidal,” Shaw asserted. “If claims of genocide were to become the common currency of our conflict … the essence of this crime would be diluted and lost.” 

Shaw spent much of his time arguing that South Africa had failed to follow the mandated procedures for bringing a third-party genocide charge before the world court. He accused South Africa’s government of failing to sufficiently engage in direct communications with Israel to inform it that there was a conflict between the two states. South Africa “seems to believe that it does not take two to tango,” he said. South Africa “decided unilaterally that a dispute existed” between Israel and South Africa, despite what Shaw called Israel’s “conciliatory and friendly” offers to meet with South Africa to discuss its concerns about the Gaza war. This defies common sense, given that in November, Pretoria publicly accused Israel of genocide and called for the International Criminal Court to issue a warrant for Netanyahu’s arrest. Israel responded by withdrawing its ambassador.

Shaw then addressed the voluminous statements made by Israeli officials introduced in court by South Africa as evidence of “genocidal intent.” Shaw dismissed these statements as “random assertions” that failed “to demonstrate that Israel has or has had the intent to destroy” the Palestinian people. He contended that none of those statements constituted an official policy of the Israeli government and said the only relevant factor for the court to consider is whether such statements reflected official decisions or directives made by the Israeli leaders and its war Cabinet. Shaw declared they did not, citing several official Israeli statements directing armed forces to comply with international laws and to make efforts to protect civilians from harm or death. He neglected to respond to the direct connections drawn, including through video evidence, by South Africa’s legal team showing how Israeli forces on the ground echoed Israeli officials’ statements about destroying Gaza as they laid siege to the strip. 

The British lawyer directly addressed Netanyahu’s invocation of the biblical story of the destruction of Amalek, in which God ordered the Israelites to “attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.” Shaw argued there was “no need here for a theological discussion.” South Africa, he charged, took Netanyahu’s words out of context and failed to include the portion of his statement where he emphasized that the IDF was the “most moral army in the world” and “does everything to avoid harming the uninvolved.” The implication of Shaw’s argument is that Netanyahu’s platitudes about the nobility of the IDF somehow nullified the significance of invoking a violent biblical edict to describe a military operation against people Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant described as “human animals.”

After offering a litany of public Israeli statements about protecting civilians and offering humanitarian aid to the Palestinians, Shaw quipped, “Genocidal intent?” as though these words and claims somehow erase the actual actions the entire world has watched daily for more than three months. With no sense of shame, Shaw characterized Israel’s statements directing Palestinians in Gaza to immediately evacuate their homes as a humanitarian gesture. Yesterday, South Africa called the evacuation order for over a million people on short notice an act of genocide in and of itself. 

In a moment of supreme gaslighting, Shaw concluded his presentation by accusing the government of South Africa of “complicity in genocide” and failing in its “duty to prevent genocide.” He charged, “South Africa has given succor and support to Hamas at the least.” He said the allegations against Israel “verge on the outrageous” and argued that Hamas’s conduct, not Israel’s, meets the “statutory definition of genocide.” Unlike Hamas, he continued, Israel has made “unprecedented efforts at mitigating civilian harm … as well as alleviating hardship and suffering” to its own detriment. 

Galit Rajuan, another Israeli lawyer, argued that Israel was operating within the rules of law in its attacks on Gaza. She spent considerable time accusing Hamas of using hospitals and other civilian sites to operate militarily and to hold Israeli hostages. South Africa, she said, pretended “as if Israel is operating in Gaza against no armed adversary” and said the civilian deaths and destruction caused by Israel’s operations is “the desired outcome” Hamas wants. “Many civilian deaths are caused by Hamas,” she alleged. 

She repeated claims that have been debunked about Hamas using hospitals for military operations and holding hostages, claiming that any damage Israel had done to hospitals in Gaza was “always as a direct result of Hamas’s abhorrent method of warfare.”

Responding to South Africa’s assertion that Palestinians were given just 24 hours to flee their homes and hospitals, Rajuan claimed Israel had given the warnings weeks in advance through leaflets, online maps, and social media accounts. She did not mention that Israel has frequently shut down the internet in areas of Gaza and has repeatedly struck areas to which it told people to flee.

After describing what she characterized as Israel’s extensive efforts to deliver aid to the people of Gaza, Rajuan said it was evidence that the charge of genocide is “frankly untenable.” She said she had only told the court of a “mere fraction” of the efforts Israel had made to warn civilians to leave their homes and to deliver aid but that it “is enough to demonstrate … that the allegation of the intent to commit genocide is baseless.” Her portrayal of Israel as a beneficent humanitarian moving mountains to alleviate the suffering Palestinians would be laughable if it wasn’t so deadly. But such statements are easy to offer when your official policy is to portray aid organizations and U.N. workers as Hamas operatives. 

For months, international aid organizations have condemned Israel, which functions as the overlord of what goes in and out of Gaza, for obstructing humanitarian aid deliveries into Gaza. Just this week, U.N. officials said that Israel is blocking it from getting aid to northern Gaza, while the World Health Organization said it is facing “insurmountable” challenges in delivering aid. Nonetheless, Omri Sender, another lawyer for Israel, claimed that Israel is delivering large quantities of aid daily to Gaza, despite “Hamas constantly stealing it.” He told the judges that “Israel no doubt meets the legal test of concrete measures aimed specifically … at ensuring the rights of the Palestinians in Gaza to exist.”

Christopher Staker closed Israel’s legal arguments by charging that South Africa was trying to force a unilateral ceasefire by Israel and that this would allow Hamas to be “free to continue attacks, which it has a stated [intent] to do.” He said that the civilian carnage and destruction in Gaza cited by South Africa do not inherently constitute genocide and that it is “not within the court’s power” to order provisional measures directing Israel to cease all military operations under the Genocide Convention. He contended that Israel has a legitimate right to engage in military conduct in Gaza that South Africa is seeking to restrain, and that an ICJ order to cease all operations would cause “irreparable prejudice” to the rights of Israel. South Africa, in its argument on Thursday, contended that by refusing to cease its operations, Israel was ensuring that the pile of Palestinian corpses would continue to grow alongside the amputations of limbs without anesthesia and babies dying of treatable illnesses. 

Staker took a page from Netanyahu’s well-worn propaganda playbook and compared the Gaza war to World War II, saying an international court ordering Israel to cease operations in Gaza would be akin to a court in the 1940s forcing the Allies in World War II to surrender to the Axis powers in Europe. He said a suspension of military operations would “deprive Israel of the ability to contend with the security threat against it” and allow Hamas to commit further atrocities. Such measures by the ICJ, he alleged, would assist Hamas. He also said the orders requested by South Africa were too broadly framed and, if enforced by the world court, would incapacitate Israeli operations in Palestinian territories other than Gaza. He said this as though Israel is protecting a country club in the West Bank from robbers and vandals rather than presiding over an illegal apartheid regime where Palestinians are subjected to conditions not unlike those found in South Africa decades ago.

Staker also said that South Africa’s request that the court order Israel to preserve evidence of potential crimes had no basis in fact and that no proof was offered that Israel was destroying evidence in Gaza. He said such an order would be an “unprincipled and unnecessary tarnishing of [Israel’s] reputation.” Staker may want to peruse the list of Palestinian libraries, archives, cultural sites, monuments, historic churches, and mosques that Israel has destroyed. Not to mention the academics, poets, storytellers, and historians its forces have erased from the earth.

Israel’s representative Gilad Noam closed his government’s defense by claiming that South Africa portrayed Israel as a “lawless state that regards itself as beyond and above the law. … in which the entire society” has “become consumed with destroying an entire population.” This was remarkable in that it represented an accurate characterization of precisely what South Africa argued in its presentation. Of course, Noam assured the court that this characterization was “patently false.” 

South Africa, Noam said, “defames not only the Israeli leadership but also [Israeli] society.” Returning to the statements made by Israeli officials that South Africa’s lawyers said constituted proof of genocidal intent, Noam claimed that some of these “harsh” statements by Israel’s leaders were in response to the “destruction of Jews and Israelis.” He said that Israel’s courts take incitement seriously and are currently investigating such cases. 

Noam accused South Africa of engaging in a “concerted and cynical effort to pervert the term ‘genocide’ itself.” He asked the judges to reject the requests to order a halting of Israeli military operations in Gaza and to dismiss South Africa’s case in full. The president of the court, U.S. Judge Joan Donoghue, adjourned the hearing, saying the judges would rule as soon as possible.

During its presentation before the court, Israel made no arguments to defend its conduct in Gaza that it—and its backers in the Biden administration for that matter—has not made repeatedly in the media over the past three months as part of its propaganda campaign to justify the unjustifiable. Each day that passes, more Palestinians will die at the hands of U.S. munitions fired by Israeli forces and the already dire humanitarian situation will deteriorate further. Should the court take Israel’s side and dismiss South Africa’s claims, Israel will point to that as evidence of the justness of its cause. If the judges approve South Africa’s request for an order to halt Israel’s military attacks, the question will be called on whether Israel and its sponsors in Washington, D.C., will respect international law. If history offers any insight on that matter, the future remains grim for the Palestinians of Gaza.

The post At The Hague, Israel Mounted a Defense Based in an Alternate Reality appeared first on The Intercept.

With those words, Vusimuzi Madonsela, South Africa’s ambassador to the Netherlands, opened his government’s historic suit at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands, charging the state of Israel with multiple violations of the Genocide Convention during its three-month siege of Gaza.

South Africa, a nation whose population suffered for decades under an apartheid regime backed by the U.S., has embarked on its historic effort to prosecute Israel for its genocidal war against the people of Gaza. Its 84-page filing at the ICJ is a harrowing document. In meticulous detail, it offers an overview of a murderous campaign waged against a civilian population under the fraudulent cover of “self-defense.” It lays out the horrifying scope of Israel’s destruction in Gaza of human life, civilian infrastructure, history, and culture, and paints a devastating picture of the grave conditions faced by those Palestinians who have managed to survive.

The charges describe “an exceptionally brutal military campaign by Israel in Gaza, which is extensive and ongoing, and which Israel intends to intensify further still,” South Africa’s lawyers argued. “Israel has engaged in and failed to prevent or to punish acts and measures which are genocidal, constituting flagrant violations of Israel’s obligations” under the Genocide Convention.

South Africa’s filing cites scores of genocidal statements made by Israeli government and military officials, lawmakers, and former officials describing Israel’s intentions in Gaza since October 7. It spans some nine pages. It is difficult to imagine an honest argument that the sum of these statements — including Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu invoking the biblical tale of the Israelites’ collective killing of the men, women, children, and livestock of Amalek — do not constitute an announcement of genocidal intent. 

Yet that is precisely what U.S. officials want the public to believe. “Yes, I read the indictment,” said National Security Council spokesperson Adm. John Kirby. “We find it without merit. We find it counterproductive. And I’ll leave it there.”

If we lived in a just society, one which was governed by a rule of law applied evenly and fairly to all nations, U.S. officials would be appearing in international war crimes tribunals alongside the Israeli leaders whose criminal actions they are facilitating in every measurable manner. But that will never happen. Since the end of World War II, the U.S. government has operated as an emperor on matters of international law, issuing edicts about who can and cannot be held accountable for the gravest of crimes. There is even a law, known as the Hague Invasion Act, that authorizes the U.S. president to use force to liberate any American or allied personnel brought before an international court on war crimes charges. 

On matters related to Israel, the U.S. has functioned as its rogue defender as a matter of bipartisan orthodoxy, vetoing or blocking any and all efforts — often supported by the vast majority of the world’s nations — to hold Israel responsible for its crimes against the Palestinians.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, during his latest visit with the gangsters in Tel Aviv, Israel, on Tuesday, continued his monthslong kabuki performance, simultaneously playing the role of a dedicated propagandist and facilitator of Israel’s rampage and that of an observer who hopes that Israel might consider killing a few less civilians and letting in more humanitarian aid. “We’re working urgently to forge a path toward lasting peace and security in this region,” Blinken said as he stood alongside Israel’s president. “We believe the submission against Israel to the International Court of Justice distracts the world from all of these important efforts. And moreover, the charge of genocide is meritless.”

It has become a macabre ritual for Blinken to feign sorrow for the dead children of Gaza while simultaneously circumventing Congress to expedite the “emergency” shipment of weapons to a government whose public officials and lawmakers have spent the past three months openly declaring their intent to annihilate Gaza as a Palestinian territory. 

As Israel’s war of annihilation against the people of Gaza enters its fourth month, the Biden administration has cemented its legacy as the mass-murder campaign’s chief political and military sponsor. No amount of empty platitudes offered by Blinken and other senior U.S. officials for the civilians of Gaza will wipe the blood from the administration’s hands.

A trial of Israel for genocide, if the judges at the ICJ decide the case has merit, could take years. But South Africa has also argued that the court should issue emergency provisional measures to protect the Palestinians of Gaza against ongoing attacks, citing voluminous evidence that Israel is engaged in ongoing violations of the Genocide Convention. “Israel has engaged in, is engaging in and risks further engaging in genocidal acts against the Palestinian people in Gaza,” South Africa argued in its suit. The ICJ should order Israel to “immediately suspend its military operations in and against Gaza.” Based on previous cases, such orders could be issued within weeks. 

South African lawyer Adila Hassim charged that Israel has engaged in a “systematic pattern of conduct from which genocide can be inferred.” She said that Israel had subjected the people of Gaza to “one of the heaviest conventional bombing campaigns in the history of modern warfare” by sea, land, and air. “The level of Israel’s killing is so extensive that nowhere is safe in Gaza,” she added. “Israel has killed an unparalleled and unprecedented number of civilians with the full knowledge of how many lives each bomb will take. The devastation is intended to and has laid waste to Gaza.”

Beyond the citations of the vast civilian deaths and injuries caused by Israel in Gaza, South Africa’s lawyers argued effectively that Israel’s initial “evacuation” orders were in and of themselves genocidal, demanding the immediate flight of a million people, including patients in hospitals. Hassim cited U.N. statistics indicating that Israel has forced the displacement of 85 percent of Palestinians in Gaza. The order issued by Israel on October 13, which called for more than a million Palestinians to flee their homes and hospitals, was itself genocidal, she said.

Hassim presented evidence of Israel’s alleged specific violations of Articles 2A, 2B, 2C, and 2D of the Genocide Convention, which prohibit the killing, maiming, and destruction of the way of life and ability to give birth of any racial, ethnic, or religious group, simply for being members of that group. “All of these acts individually and collectively form a calculated pattern of conduct by Israel indicating a genocidal intent,” Hassim said.

Beyond the clearly genocidal actions taken by Israel, Tembeka Ngcukaitobi, another lawyer for South Africa, addressed the issue of genocidal intent. “What state would admit to a genocidal intent?” Ngcukaitobi asked. The distinctive feature of this case has not been the silence of Israel, he argued, but the repetition of genocidal speech throughout every sphere of Israeli society, led by its prime minister, president, minister of defense, and other senior officials. 

Ngcukaitobi played video of statements by Netanyahu and other senior officials and observed that one “extraordinary” element to Israel’s war against Gaza is that Israeli officials and leaders have systematically and publicly declared their desire to eliminate Palestinians from Gaza.

Ngcukaitobi said the statement by Netanyahu early in the war, invoking the biblical tale of the destruction of Amalek by the Israelites, was embraced by Israeli soldiers on the ground in “directing their actions and objectives.” “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our holy Bible,” Netanyahu said. “And we do remember.” The verse from the Book of 1 Samuel describes a command from God to Israel: “Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.” 

The statements from Israeli officials as evidence of genocidal intent have been widely reported. But having them recited and at times played on video in an international war crimes court makes clear that Netanyahu and other officials felt comfortable uttering such shocking statements believing that they would never be held accountable. Indeed, Israel is well aware that the U.S. has already preemptively dismissed the veracity of South Africa’s charges. 

John Dugard, a South African lawyer and former U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights Situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, presented South Africa’s argument for legal jurisdiction. “What more evidence could be required?” Dugard asked. “It is precisely because of a situation of this kind affecting the international community as a whole” that the ICJ has jurisdiction to provisionally order a halt to suspected genocidal actions.

“What is happening in Gaza now is not correctly framed as a simple conflict between two parties,” argued another South African lawyer, Max du Plessis. Du Plessis presented the legal argument that the ICJ must issue provisional orders to Israel to halt its operations on the basis of suspicion that genocide may be occurring in Gaza, which is the standard under the court’s mandate. He said that the ICJ must issue provisional measures to halt Israel’s attacks against Gaza on the basis that Israel may eventually be convicted of genocide and that failure to stop it now would represent a grave breach of the rights of the Palestinians still alive. 

Israel, he charged, has “subjected the Palestinian people to an oppressive and prolonged violation of their rights to self-determination for more than half a century. Those violations occur in a world where Israel has for years regarded itself as beyond and above the law.” 

Irish lawyer Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh, also representing South Africa, offered a brutal description of the extent of ongoing human suffering and destruction, declaring bluntly that “huge swathes of Gaza … are being wiped from the map.” Each day, she said, citing figures from Save the Children, 10 Palestinian children will have one or more limbs amputated, often without anesthesia; more mass graves will be dug, cemeteries bombed, and bodies exhumed. People will be bombed in places they have been told to evacuate to; whole families will be obliterated. 

The ICJ has historically issued provisional orders to nations, including Russia and Serbia, to halt past military operations, she pointed out. “This is occurring in Gaza on a much more intensive scale [against] a besieged, trapped, terrified population that has nowhere safe to go,” she said.

“Israel continues to deny that it is responsible for the humanitarian crisis it has created, even as Gaza starves,” Ní Ghrálaigh said, warning the ICJ judges that a failure to order a provisional halt to Israel’s attacks against Gaza would be grave. “The very reputation of international law, its ability and willingness to bind and to protect all peoples equally, hangs in the balance.” 

In an impassioned closing to her argument, she declared, “Despite the horror of the genocide against the Palestinian people being livestreamed from Gaza to our mobile phones, computers, and TV screens — the first genocide in history where its victims are broadcasting their own destruction in real time in the desperate, so far vain, hope that the world might do something — Gaza represents nothing short of a moral failure.”

Israel, which has accused South Africa of “blood libel,” will present its defense on Friday. The final lawyer in South Africa’s line-up, Vaughan Lowe, was tasked with anticipating Israel’s likely arguments. The veteran British barrister preemptively addressed Israel’s attempt to shift focus to Hamas and October 7: This case concerns Israel’s attacks in Gaza, he said. “Hamas is not a state and cannot be a party to the Genocide Convention.” There are other legal processes to be taken against Hamas and other actors, he said. 

Lowe dismissed Israel’s claims to be acting in “self-defense” and cited U.N. rulings that Gaza remains an occupied territory because of the substantial control Israel continues to wield over its land, air, sea, and access to basic life necessities. “No matter how monstrous or appalling an attack or provocation, genocide is never a permitted response,” Lowe said. “Every use of force, whether in self-defense or enforcing an occupation or policing operations, must stay within the limits set by international law.”

Arguing, too, for the ICJ to order an immediate halt to Israel’s attacks against Gaza, Lowe said, “If any military operation — no matter how carefully it’s carried out — is carried out pursuant to an intention to destroy a people, in whole or in part, it violates the Genocide Convention and it must stop.” Israel cannot sidestep rulings of the court, he said, by simply unilaterally declaring that it is following international law, citing “Israel’s apparent inability to see that it has done anything wrong in grinding Gaza and its people into the dust.”

Madonsela, South Africa’s ambassador to the Netherlands, closed the hearing by reading South Africa’s demands for the ICJ to order a halt to Israel’s attacks on Gaza. “South Africa has come to this court to prevent genocide,” he said. He asked the court to provisionally order Israel to halt its military operations in Gaza and to preserve evidence for a potential future trial.

While the U.S is not named in South Africa’s case, it has openly and enthusiastically supported and armed Israel’s campaign and should be viewed as an unnamed co-conspirator to Israel’s actions. While the ICJ proceedings may do nothing to halt Israel’s murderous rampage in Gaza, a ruling in South Africa’s favor would increase pressure on countries across the world to make their positions clear. It would also serve as an important test of whether nations, namely U.S. allies in Europe, believe in upholding international laws and conventions or whether they accept the U.S. as the ultimate overlord enforcing its own set of unevenly applied rules.

The post In Genocide Case Against Israel at The Hague, the U.S. Is the Unnamed Co-Conspirator appeared first on The Intercept.

Confronted with an endless list of well-documented Israeli war crimes, the Biden administration has responded with overwhelming support for a genocidal war of annihilation against the Palestinians of Gaza. For more than two months, the White House has engaged in a public campaign of gaslighting as it has feigned concern over the fate of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents while simultaneously maintaining the flow of weapons, intelligence, and political cover to an Israeli regime that has made clear its intent to “flatten” Gaza and force its intentionally dehumanized survivors into an ever-shrinking killing cage.

President Joe Biden, facing historically low popularity heading into the 2024 election, reportedly now wants Israel to move to a “less kinetic” phase of its war by early next year. This is simply the latest effort by the administration to recast the public narrative about its consistent support for slaughter.

State Terrorism

Ten weeks into this industrial-scale rampage, more than 25,000 Palestinians are dead, including nearly 10,000 children. Two dozen hospitals have been attacked by the U.S.-backed Israeli forces and some 300 health workers have been killed. Nearly 100 journalists have died under Israel’s bombs and attacks. Not even the Catholic Church in Gaza has been spared from Israel’s war crimes. On December 16, according to the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem, Israeli snipers shot dead two Christian women taking shelter in the Holy Family church in Gaza, spurring Pope Francis to state bluntly that Israel is committing acts of terrorism.

Gazans have been systematically denied the most minimal vital necessities. International aid organizations, warning of starvation and the spread of infectious disease, have repeatedly begged for an immediate ceasefire. And it has been the U.S., and the U.S. alone, that has insured that this would not happen. “The United States and Israel have never been more determined and aligned in our shared values, our shared interests and our shared goals,” said Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant as he stood alongside U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin this week in Tel Aviv. “Our common enemies around the world are watching, and they know that Israel victory is the victory of the free world, led by the United States of America.”

A few days earlier, Gallant publicly preempted his private discussions with national security adviser Jake Sullivan, forcing him to stand, jaw clenched, before news cameras as Gallant portrayed the war as a joint U.S.–Israeli operation. “Thank you for being side by side with us in this effort,” Gallant told a stone-faced Sullivan in Tel Aviv, a visit the White House had portrayed, in part, as an effort to get Israel to wind down its large-scale operations in Gaza. “It will take and require a long period of time,” Gallant advised Sullivan in what looked like a forced reeducation session. “It will last more than several months.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded to Sullivan’s visit by publicly thanking the U.S. for delivering more tank rounds for the war in Gaza and vetoing a U.N. ceasefire resolution. “Nothing will stop us,” he declared. “We are going on to the end, until victory, nothing less.” The whole affair, which came on the heels of Biden labeling Israel’s bombing of Gaza “indiscriminate,” played out like an Israeli-orchestrated public daring of the White House to pull support for the war.

Israel is well aware that if the White House truly wanted Israel to stop, it could do so by withholding all additional military assistance until the carnage ends. But the rationale for Biden’s refusal to demand a ceasefire, which a firm majority of Democrats want him to do, is not just born of total disregard for the lives of Palestinian civilians who are cannon fodder for the big lie about this being an Israeli act of “self-defense.” Though the U.S. is likely to frame any “winding down” or temporary pause in the Israeli attempt to erase Gaza as a humanitarian endeavor, the reality is more complicated.

Military Failures

Both Biden and Netanyahu know what they dare not say in public: On a military level, things are not going well. Israel, a nuclear-armed nation state with modern weapons systems and intelligence capabilities and fully backed by the most powerful nation on Earth, is desperately struggling to achieve a meaningful tactical victory over the armed Palestinian guerrilla forces in Gaza.

Despite the vast resources Israel has dedicated to its propaganda effort, it is also flailing in its effort to defeat Hamas on that front. On a daily, sometimes hourly, basis, the Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s military wing, and their allies in arms release videos showing successful attacks on Israeli armored vehicles and troop positions. The short films offer a glimpse into another side of this war, the one that Israel and the U.S. do not want the public to see. And the picture that emerges stands in stark contrast to the official Israeli narrative. Fighters from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad are engaged in urban combat and close-quarters firefights with Israeli forces, and they are inflicting heavy losses on them. They have also published a close-up video of Israeli soldiers in a makeshift tent camp inside Gaza that Hamas fighters filmed by discreetly popping up from tunnel hatches.

The spokesperson for the Qassam Brigades, known by his nom de guerre Abu Obeida, has regularly released audio messages outlining his assessment of the ground war and challenging Israeli narratives. “The whole world sees how our fighters destroy and burn the enemy’s armored vehicles, killing the invading soldiers inside them,” he said in a recording released December 15. “The official figures of the dead and injured announced by the enemy’s army are undoubtedly untrue.” He praised his fighters for waging a battle against an enemy armed and supported “by the American administration, which is airlifting support to this entity as if it were fighting a great power among the world’s poles.”

The Israeli military recently published a video that purportedly depicts the work of a Hamas engineering team’s construction of a 4-kilometer section of underground tunnel near the Erez Crossing. It also published a video of what it said was Mohammed Sinwar, the brother of Hamas’s leader, driving in a car through the tunnel network. While Israel clearly released the videos in an effort to unmask the devious evil of Hamas, it actually revealed a level of tactical sophistication and preparedness seldom seen since the days of the Viet Cong. The IDF-published videos also inadvertently dramatized the dubiousness of Israel’s claims that it can flush with seawater hundreds of kilometers of tunnels equipped with massive water-sealed and blast-proof doors — not to mention the viability of engaging in close-combat tunnel warfare with Hamas.

The day after Israel published the tunnel videos, Hamas released its own video response. The group stated that the tunnel had been constructed exclusively for the October 7 attacks against the Israeli military installation near Erez. It featured clips of Gallant, the defense minister, touring the tunnels with Israeli soldiers, juxtaposed with footage from Hamas’s raid on the base two months ago. “You arrived late. … Mission had already been completed,” read a caption in English, Arabic and Hebrew.

Stories are beginning to appear more frequently in the Israeli press expressing concern about the steadily mounting death and injury toll of Israeli soldiers. These sentiments have intensified over the past week, following an ambush in Shujaiyeh that reportedly killed nine Israeli soldiers, as well as the revelation that IDF soldiers shot dead three Israeli hostages who were shirtless, waving a white flag, and speaking Hebrew. “The consensus of public support for Israel’s war is beginning to wane, as the two conditions on which it rests fade away: a clear purpose for the war and the understanding that victory is attainable,” wrote Israeli military analyst Amos Harel in Haaretz. “Broad public support for a ground incursion, which was strong in the aftermath of the Hamas massacre, is now being gradually mixed with concern and skepticism. Despite the expanding offensive and the enemy’s losses, we are approaching a dangerous phase of incremental advances,” he added. “The continued fighting in the current format will mean a steady trickle of news about soldiers dying.” As of December 19, Israel has officially acknowledged the deaths of 130 of its soldiers in Gaza.

There is no doubt that both Washington and Tel Aviv underestimated the military capacity of the Hamas-led armed resistance. It is one thing to snatch Palestinians off the streets of the West Bank and disappear them into a military court system, a practice Israel has perfected over the decades. It is quite another to defeat a well-armed insurgency that has spent decades building vast underground infrastructure beneath its own territory and training for this very moment.

Bankrupt Strategies

Killing or capturing Hamas leader Yehia Sinwar or the head of the Qassam Brigades, Mohammed Deif, may give Israel political cover to declare a false victory, scenarios the Biden administration is eager to seize upon. Last week, a senior U.S. official hinted that the U.S. is actively participating in the hunt for these high-value targets, declaring that it is “safe to say” that Sinwar’s “days are numbered.” But the idea that armed resistance will be extinguished by killing top leaders of Hamas betrays the same pattern of wishful thinking that has permeated U.S. strategic thinking since 9/11. All of this suggests that rather than trying to end the suffering of Gazans, Biden is instead looking for an off-ramp that avoids solidifying the image of Israel as waging a gratuitous war that utterly failed to achieve its stated objectives.

The idea that armed resistance will be extinguished by killing Hamas leaders betrays the same pattern of wishful thinking that has permeated U.S. strategic thinking since 9/11.

The Washington Post’s David Ignatius, in a column based on conversations with his insider circle of the D.C. elite, wrote that the U.S. has been contemplating a “day after” scenario that would see the deployment of a security force “composed primarily of Palestinians who aren’t affiliated with Hamas and are willing to cooperate with the Israeli troops still ringing the border. Ideally, this policing force would be bolstered by foreign troops, operating under a U.N. mandate.” Ignatius added, “Israeli commandos might stage raids back into the center of Gaza when they receive intelligence about high-value targets.”

This bankrupt thinking illustrates how little the U.S. cares about what, to Palestinians, is the central issue of the 75-year conflict: ending Israeli apartheid and achieving statehood. The fact that the administration is contemplating a plan to Palestinianize the occupation by using collaborators with the Israeli regime’s forces is straight out of the bankrupt “home-grown counterinsurgency” strategy the Bush administration sought to use to extract itself from the catastrophe it manufactured through its own invasion and occupation of Iraq. It is also reminiscent of the utterly failed Obama-era COIN strategy in Afghanistan.

The notion that the Palestinian Authority, a deeply unpopular pseudo-government that has utterly failed to defend the Palestinians who live under its area of responsibility in the occupied West Bank, could somehow operate with any credibility in Gaza is precisely the type of intellectual sludge that persistently oozes from Washington think tanks into the corridors of power. It has no more legitimacy than the farcical Dick Cheney-led plan two decades ago to install the discredited exile Ahmed Chalabi as the leader of a post-Saddam Iraq.

Such discussions about Gaza’s future, which exclude the actual residents of Gaza, dramatize the near-religious fervor that drives what can only be described as a firm American commitment to doing everything possible to avoid addressing the legitimate grievances of the Palestinian people and their rights to self determination and self-defense.

Biden made his choice — and has continued to double down on it in the face of every fresh horror that has unfolded in Gaza. Whatever tale of victory he and Netanyahu want to spin when the intense period of wanton death and destruction “winds down,” Biden should never be permitted to escape the cold fact that he served as the arms dealer and most consequential public propagandist for a war of choice against an overwhelmingly defenseless civilian population. The responsibility for the blowback that will inevitably sprout from the killing fields of Gaza should be firmly affixed to Biden’s legacy.

The post Industrial Killing of Civilians in Gaza Won’t Defeat the Armed Insurgency appeared first on The Intercept.

It was a jarring statement. And it was false.

Biden had seen no such pictures, nor received any such confirmation. He made those comments after Nicole Zedeck, a journalist for Israel’s i24 News, reported that 40 babies had been decapitated, citing Israeli soldiers at the scene of the attacks at Kfar Aza. A spokesperson for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu subsequently stated that babies and toddlers had been found with their “heads decapitated.”

Three hours later, Biden promoted the claim to the world and asserted he personally saw pictures of the horrifying scene, giving the story supreme legitimacy.

Hamas denied the allegation, and other Israeli journalists at the scene began reporting they had not seen evidence such beheadings had occurred nor had they been told it had happened by any of the Israeli soldiers they spoke with. Zedeck, the reporter from i24 News who was first to spread the allegation, later tweeted that “soldiers told me they believe 40 babies/children were killed. The exact death toll is still unknown as the military continues to go house to house and find more Israeli casualties.”

An anchor at the network defended the reporter and said that three separate Israel Defense Forces officials had told i24 News “that around 40 babies & small children were murdered in Kfar Aza, some burned, some beheaded.” CBS News and CNN also spread Israeli assertions that babies and toddlers had been decapitated.

Eventually, the Israeli government was forced to admit it had no evidence to support the claim, though it continued to imply that it might be true. A military spokesperson said that the IDF would not further investigate the beheading charges because it would be “disrespectful for the dead.”

White House officials then “clarified” what they claimed Biden was actually referring to. “U.S. officials and the president have not seen pictures or confirmed such reports independently,” reported the Washington Post. “The president based his comments about the alleged atrocities on the claims from Netanyahu’s spokesman and media reports from Israel, according to the White House.” The purpose of such graphic descriptions, according to National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby, was “to underscore the utter depravity and the barbaric nature with which these terrorists murdered and butchered innocent Israeli civilians.” Kirby, who dodged direct questions about whether Biden had personally seen any photos, added, “And that further underscores why — and this is what the President’s specific point was yesterday — that we got to stay with Israel. We’ve got to continue to make sure they have the support that they need.”

Biden has never publicly retracted the incendiary claims. And the Washington Post reported that the president had been urged by staffers not to make that allegation in his speech on October 11, “because those reports were unverified.”

Despite the Israeli government’s comments, warnings about the veracity of the claims from his own advisers, and the extensively documented lists of people killed on October 7 during the Hamas raids, Biden has inexplicably and repeatedly doubled down on the claim that he saw pictures of decapitated babies.

At a November 16 press conference in Woodside, California, after meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Biden first promoted another debunked charge, that Hamas had what amounted to its own version of a Pentagon under Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza. “Here’s the situation: You have a circumstance where the first war crime is being committed by Hamas by having their headquarters, their military hidden under a hospital. And that’s a fact. That’s what’s happened,” Biden said. He then declared, “Hamas has already said publicly that they plan on attacking Israel again like they did before, to where they were cutting babies’ heads off to burn — burning women and children alive.”

The allegation that Hamas beheaded babies continues to spread across the internet and social media. In a post on Israel’s official X account, readers were invited to “Listen to the eyewitness accounts of the 8 burned babies and one beheaded baby which were butchered by Hamas terrorists on October 7th.” It featured a video of Israeli Col. Golan Vach purporting to describe what he witnessed. On November 26, an Israeli journalist posted an interview with an IDF soldier who claimed that babies had been hung from clotheslines. The reporter later apologized to his readers and said the story was false. “Why would an army officer invent such a horrifying story?” he wrote. “I was wrong.”

There is evidence to suggest that Biden, in addition to absorbing the most sensational claims made in Israeli media in the immediate aftermath of the October 7 attacks, was fed other unverified claims directly from Netanyahu, his close friend of many decades. Israel released a video of phone call between Netanyahu and Biden on October 11, the first time Biden publicly made the beheading claim. “We were struck Saturday by an attack whose savagery I can say we have not seen since the Holocaust,” Netanyahu told Biden. “Since we last spoke, the extent of this evil, it’s only gotten worse. They took dozens of children, bound them up, burned them, and executed them.” He added, “They’re even worse than ISIS and we need to treat them as such.” Significantly, Netanyahu does not appear to have alleged that Hamas beheaded babies, though he did claim that soldiers were decapitated. In an appearance with Biden on October 18 in Tel Aviv, Netanyahu made no mention of babies being beheaded. “They beheaded soldiers,” he said. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who was shown extensive graphic images of the aftermath of the attacks during a visit to Israel, also did not mention any beheaded babies.

There is no doubt that widespread atrocities and war crimes were committed during the Hamas-led attacks on October 7 and that children were killed. Yet in many narratives, the burned or beheaded babies story still forms one of the most harrowing details of the October 7 massacres. According to major Israeli media outlets that have worked diligently to identify all of the victims of the October 7 attacks, there was one infant killed that day: a 9-month-old named Mila Cohen who was shot dead at Kibbutz Be’eri as her mother held her in her arms. Cohen’s mom, who was shot in the arm, survived.

None of these facts have altered Biden’s commitment to making the debunked beheading claim a key detail in his impassioned defense of the legitimacy of Israel’s mass killing campaign, during which more than 18,000 Palestinians have been killed, including more than 7,000 children. On December 12, at a reelection campaign event at the Salamander hotel in Washington, D.C., Biden said, “I saw some of the photographs when I was there — tying a mother and her daughter together on a rope and then pouring kerosene on them and then burning them, beheading infants, doing things that are just inhuman — totally, completely inhuman.”

Biden is the president of the most powerful nation on Earth, not a random poster on social media. He supposedly has access to the best intelligence in the world. If he actually has evidence to support this beheading claim — apparently evidence that his closest advisers have not seen — then he should produce it. 

This allegation is one of the most gut-wrenching and horrifying charges to be made about the events of October 7. It is not some insignificant detail that can be explained away by Biden’s age or his tendency to exaggerate or stumble into gaffes. It was a detail that fueled the rage and quest for revenge, and was cited when Biden declared that Israel is fighting subhumans in Gaza. “They’re animals. They’re animals,” Biden said on December 12 when he repeated the beheading claims. “They exceeded anything that any other terrorist group has done of late that I — in memory.”

The verified facts, as we currently understand them, are horrifying enough. So why does Biden feel the need to bolster his defense of Israel’s indiscriminate war against Gaza by spreading debunked allegations? The latest estimations of the death toll on October 7 are as follows: Israel has officially identified approximately 1,200 Israelis or Israeli residents killed. Of these, 274 were soldiers, 764 were civilians, 57 were Israeli police, and 38 were local security guards. Among the civilians killed, in addition to 9-month-old Mila Cohen, 12 of them were between the ages of 1 and 9 years, and 36 were between the ages of 10 and 19. There are reportedly still bodies that have not been officially identified.

It also must be noted that multiple Israeli media outlets have reported on “friendly fire” incidents in which Israeli military forces responding to the attacks killed Israeli citizens, though there has been no definitive calculation of the number of such deaths and may never be one.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz has done extensive work trying to confirm the actual events of October 7 and published an important story debunking some of the most shocking false claims made in the aftermath of the Hamas attacks. Biden should read it.

The post Joe Biden Keeps Repeating His False Claim That He Saw Pictures of Beheaded Babies appeared first on The Intercept.

The events of the past week should obliterate any doubt that the war against the Palestinians of Gaza is a joint U.S.–Israeli operation. On Friday, as the Biden administration stood alone among the nations of the world in vetoing a United Nations Security Council resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire, Secretary of State Antony Blinken was busy circumventing congressional review to ram through approval of an “emergency” sale of 13,000 tank rounds to Israel. For weeks, Blinken has been zipping across the Middle East and appearing on scores of television networks in a PR tour aimed at selling the world the notion that the White House is deeply concerned about the fate of Gaza’s 2.2 million residents. “Far too many Palestinians have been killed; far too many have suffered these past weeks, and we want to do everything possible to prevent harm to them,” Blinken declared on November 10. A month later, with the death toll skyrocketing and calls for a ceasefire mounting, Blinken assured the world Israel was implementing new measures to protect civilians and that the U.S. was doing everything it could to encourage Israel to employ a tiny bit more moderation in its widespread killing campaign. Friday’s events decisively flushed those platitudes into a swirling pool of blood. 

Over the past two months, Benjamin Netanyahu has argued, including on U.S. news channels, “Our war is your war.” In retrospect, this wasn’t a plea to the White House. Netanyahu was stating a fact. From the moment President Joe Biden spoke to his “great, great friend” Netanyahu on October 7, in the immediate aftermath of the deadly Hamas-led raids into Israel, the U.S. has not just supplied Israel with additional weapons and intelligence support, it has also offered crucial political cover for the scorched-earth campaign to annihilate Gaza as a Palestinian territory. It is irrelevant what words of concern and caution have flowed from the mouths of administration officials when all of their actions have been aimed at increasing the death and destruction.

The propaganda from the Biden administration has been so extreme at times that even the Israeli military has suggested they tone it down a notch or two. Biden falsely claimed to see images of “terrorists beheading children” and then knowingly relayed that unverified allegation as fact — including over the objections of his advisers — and publicly questioned the death toll of Palestinian civilians. None of this is by accident, nor can it be attributed to the president’s propensity to exaggerate or stumble into gaffes. 

Everything we know about Biden’s 50-year history of supporting and facilitating Israel’s worst crimes and abuses leads to one conclusion: Biden wants Israel’s destruction of Gaza — with more than 7,000 children dead — to unfold as it has. 

Israel’s Dystopian Game Show

The horrifying nature of the October 7 attacks led by Hamas do not in any way — morally or legally — justify what Israel has done to the civilian population of Gaza, more than 18,000 of whom have died in a 60-day period. Nothing justifies the killing of children on an industrial scale. What the Israeli state is engaged in has far surpassed any basic principles of proportionality or legality. Israel’s own crimes dwarf those of Hamas and the other groups that participated in the October 7 operations. Yet Biden and other U.S. officials continue to defend the indefensible by rolling out their well-worn and twisted notion of Israel’s right to “self-defense.”

If we apply that rationale — promoted by both the U.S. and Israel — to the 75 years of history before October 7, how many times throughout that period would the Palestinians have been “justified” in massacring thousands of Israeli children, systematically attacking its hospitals and schools? How many times would they have been acting in “self-defense” as they razed whole neighborhoods to rubble, transforming the apartment buildings Israeli civilians once called home into concrete tombs? This justification only works for Israel because the Palestinians can enact no such destruction upon Israel and its people. It has no army, no navy, no air force, no powerful nation states to provide it with the most modern and lethal military hardware. It does not have hundreds of nuclear weapons. Israel can burn Gaza and its people to the ground because the U.S. facilitates it, politically and militarily. 

Despite all the airtime consumed by Blinken and other U.S. officials playing make-believe on the issue of protecting Palestinian civilians, what has unfolded on the ground is nothing less than a corralling of the population of Gaza into an ever-shrinking killing cage. On December 1, Israel released an interactive map of Gaza dividing it into hundreds of numbered zones. On the Israel Defense Forces’ Arabic language website, it encouraged Gaza’s residents to scan a QR code to download the map and to monitor IDF channels to know when they need to evacuate to a different zone to avoid being murdered by Israeli bombs or ground operations. This is nothing short of a dystopian Netflix show produced by Israel in which its participants have no choice to opt out and a wrong guess will get you and your children maimed or killed. On a basic level, it is grotesque to tell an entrapped population that has limited access to food, water, health care, or housing — and whose internet connections have repeatedly been shut down — to go online to download a survival map from a military force that is terrorizing them.

Throughout Blinken’s one-man parade proclaiming that the U.S. had made clear to Israel that it needs to protect civilians, Israel has repeatedly struck areas of Gaza to which it had told residents to flee. In some cases, the IDF sent SMS messages to people just 10 minutes before attacking. One such message read: “The IDF will begin a crushing military attack on your area of residence with the aim of eliminating the terrorist organization Hamas.” U.N. Secretary General António Guterres said Palestinians were being treated “like human pinballs – ricocheting between ever-smaller slivers of the south, without any of the basics for survival.” Blinken attributed the continuously mounting pile of Palestinian corpses to “a gap” between Israel’s stated intent to lessen civilian deaths and its operations. “I think the intent is there,” he said. “But the results are not always manifesting themselves.”

National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby got visibly irritated when asked on December 6 about Israel’s widespread killing of civilians. “It is not the Israeli Defense Forces strategy to kill innocent people. It’s happening. I admit that. Each one is a tragedy,” he said. “But it’s not like the Israelis are sitting around every morning and saying ‘Hey, how many more civilians can we kill today?’ ‘Let’s go bomb a school or a hospital or a residential building and just—and cause civilian casualties.’ They’re not doing that.” One problem with Kirby’s rant is that attacks against civilians, schools, and hospitals are exactly what Israel is doing—repeatedly. It is irrelevant what Kirby believes the IDF’s intent to be. For two months, numerous Israeli officials and lawmakers have said that their intent is to collectively strangle the Palestinians of Gaza into submission, death, or flight. 

Kirby’s claims are also decimated by the revelations in a recent investigative report by the Israeli media outlets 972 and Local Call. The story, based on interviews with seven Israeli military and intelligence sources, described in detail how Israel knows precisely the number of civilians present in buildings it strikes and at times has knowingly killed hundreds of Palestinian civilians in order to kill a single top Hamas commander. “Nothing happens by accident,” one Israeli source said. “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. We are not Hamas. These are not random rockets. Everything is intentional. We know exactly how much collateral damage there is in every home.”

As Israel ratchets up its killing machine, giving lie to all of Blinken’s pronouncements, it continues to wage a propaganda war that is consistent with its overarching campaign of mass killing. No lie is too obscene to justify the wholesale slaughter of people that Israel’s defense minister has called “human animals.” According to this campaign, there are no Palestinian children, no Palestinian hospitals, no Palestinian schools. The U.N. is Hamas. Journalists are Hamas. The prime ministers of Belgium, Spain, and Ireland are Hamas. Everything and everyone who dissents in the slightest from the genocidal narrative is Hamas.

Israel has quite understandably grown accustomed to many Western media outlets accepting its lies — no matter how outrageous or vile — when they are told about Palestinians. But even news outlets with a long track record of promoting Israel’s narrative unchecked have inched toward incredulity. Not because they have had a change of conscience, but because the Israeli propaganda is so farcical that it would be embarrassing to pretend it is otherwise.

Israeli forces have distributed multiple images and videos in recent days of Palestinian men stripped to their underwear — sometimes wearing blindfolds — and claimed they are all Hamas terrorists surrendering. These claims, too, fell apart under the most minimal scrutiny: Some of the men have been identified as journalists, shop owners, U.N. employees. In one particularly ridiculous piece of propaganda, a video filmed by IDF soldiers and distributed online depicted naked Palestinian captives laying down their alleged rifles. 

Government spokesperson Mark Regev defended the practice of stripping detainees. “Remember, it’s the Middle East and it’s warmer here. Especially during the day when it’s sunny, to be asked to take off your shirt might not be pleasant, but it’s not the end of the world,” Regev told Sky News. “We are looking for people who would have concealed weapons, especially suicide bombers with explosive vests.” Regev was asked about this clear violation of the Geneva Conventions’s prohibition against publishing videos of prisoners of war. “I’m not familiar with that level of international law,” he said, adding (as though it matters) that he did not believe the videos were distributed by official Israeli government channels. “These are military aged men who were arrested in a combat zone,” he said. 

Despite Israeli claims of mass surrenders by Hamas fighters, Haaretz reported that “of the hundreds of Palestinian detainees photographed handcuffed in the Gaza Strip in recent days, about 10 to 15 percent are Hamas operatives or are identified with the organization,” according to Israeli security sources. Israel has produced no evidence to support its claim that even this alleged small pool of the stripped prisoners were Hamas guerrillas.

So what we have here is both a violation of the Geneva Conventions and an immoral production in which Palestinian civilians are forced at gunpoint to play Hamas fighters in an Israeli propaganda movie.

No Path of Resistance

It has become indisputably clear over these past two months that there are not actually two sides to this horror show. Without question, the perpetrators who meted out the horrors against Israeli civilians on October 7 should be held accountable. But that is not what this collective killing operation is about. And journalists should stop pretending it is.

Any analysis of the Israeli state’s terror campaign against the people of Gaza cannot begin with the events of October 7. An honest examination of the current situation must view October 7 in the context of Israel’s 75-year war against the Palestinians and the past two decades of transforming Gaza first into an open-air prison and now into a killing cage. Under threat of being labeled antisemitic, Israel and its defenders demand acceptance of Israel’s official rationale for its irrational actions as legitimate, even if they are demonstrably false or they seek to justify war crimes. “You look at Israel today. It’s a state that has reached such a degree of irrational, rabid lunacy that its government routinely accuses its closest allies of supporting terrorism,” the Palestinian analyst Mouin Rabbani recently told Intercepted. “It is a state that has become thoroughly incapable of any form of inhibition.”

Israel has imposed, by lethal force, a rule that Palestinians have no legitimate rights of any form of resistance. When they have organized nonviolent demonstrations, they have been attacked and killed. That was the case in 2018-2019 when Israeli forces opened fire on unarmed protesters during the Great March of Return, killing 223 and wounding more than 8,000 others. Israeli snipers later boasted about shooting dozens of protesters in the knee during the weekly Friday demonstrations. When Palestinians fight back against apartheid soldiers, they are killed or sent into military tribunals. Children who throw rocks at tanks or soldiers are labeled terrorists and subjected to abuse and violations of basic rights — that is, if they are not summarily shot dead. Palestinians live their lives stripped of any context or any recourse to address the grave injustices imposed on them.

You cannot discuss the crimes of Hamas or Islamic jihad or any other armed resistance factions without first addressing the question of why these groups exist and have support. One aspect of this should certainly probe Netanyahu’s own role — extending back to at least 2012 — in propping up Hamas and facilitating the flow of money to the group. “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,” Netanyahu told his Likud comrades in 2019. 

But in the broader sense, a sincere examination of why a group such as Hamas gained popularity among Palestinians or why people in Gaza turn to armed struggle must focus on how the oppressed, when stripped of all forms of legitimate resistance, respond to the oppressor. It should be focused on the rights of people living under occupation to assert and defend their self-determination. It should allow Palestinians to have their struggle placed in the context of other historical battles for liberation and independence and not relegated to racist polemics about how all Palestinian acts of resistance constitute terrorism and there are not really any innocents in Gaza. Israel’s president said as much on October 13. “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible,” Isaac Herzog declared. “It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true. They could have risen up. They could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza in a coup d’etat.” 

The notion that the Palestinians of Gaza could end all of their suffering by overthrowing Hamas is just as ahistorical and false as the oft-repeated claims that the war against Gaza would end if Hamas surrendered and released all Israeli hostages. “Look, this could be over tomorrow,” Blinken said December 10. “If Hamas got out of the way of civilians instead of hiding behind them, if it put down its weapons, if it surrendered.” That, of course, is a crass lie. With or without Hamas, Israel’s war against the Palestinians would endure precisely because of Blinken and his ilk in elite bipartisan U.S. foreign policy circles. 

Throughout the years of U.S. support for Israel’s apartheid regime, it has consistently facilitated Israel’s “mowing the grass” in Gaza. This is not a series of periodic assaults on Hamas — it is a cyclical campaign of terror bombings largely aimed at civilians and civilian infrastructure. The Biden administration is not — and Biden personally has never been — an outside observer or a friend encouraging moderation during an otherwise righteous crusade. None of this slaughter would be occurring if Biden valued Palestinian lives over Israel’s false narratives and its bloody ethnonationalist wars of annihilation repackaged as self-defense. We should end the charade that this is an Israeli war against Hamas. We should call it what it is: a joint U.S.–Israeli war against the people of Gaza.

The post This Is Not a War Against Hamas appeared first on The Intercept.

The Israeli government narrative surrounding the Palestinian prisoners being released during this temporary ceasefire is both insidious and dishonest. Interior Minister Itamar Ben Gvir has banned Palestinians from celebrating their release. “My instructions are clear: there are to be no expressions of joy,” he said. “Expressions of joy are equivalent to backing terrorism, victory celebrations give backing to those human scum, for those Nazis.” He told Israeli police to deploy an “iron fist” to enforce his edict.

The Netanyahu government and its supporters have promoted a narrative that these prisoners are all hardened terrorists who committed violent crimes. This assertion relies on a farcical “Alice in Wonderland”-inspired logic of convicting them by fiat in public before any trial, even the sham trials to which Palestinians are routinely subjected. Israel released a list of the names with alleged crimes they committed. And who is making these allegations? A military that acts as a brutal occupation force against Palestinians in the West Bank.

The vast majority of the 300 Palestinian prisoners proposed for release by Israel are teenage boys. According to the list, 124 of the prisoners are under the age of 18, including a 15-year-old girl, and many of the 146 who are 18 years old turned so in Israeli prisons. According to the definitions laid out in the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, these Palestinians were children when they were arrested by Israel. 

Of the 300 names Israel proposed for potential release, 233 of them have not been convicted of any crimes; they are categorized simply as “under arrest.” Police and prosecutors all over the world make allegations later proven false during a fair trial. The Israeli narrative promotes the fiction that these Palestinians are in the middle of some sort of fair judicial proceeding in which they will eventually be tried in a fair and impartial process. This is a complete, verifiable farce. Palestinians are not prosecuted in civil courts; they are tried in military courts. They often are denied access to lawyers and to purported evidence against them, and are regularly held in isolation for extreme periods and subjected to other forms of abuse. Israel is the only “developed” country in the world that routinely tries children in military courts, and its system has been repeatedly criticized and denounced by major international human rights organizations and institutions.

Palestinians are not prosecuted in civil courts; they are tried in military courts.

If, as Israel alleges, these people have committed violent crimes, particularly against civilians, then Israel should give them full rights to due process, to see the alleged evidence against them, and they should be tried in civilian courts with the same rights afforded Israeli defendants. That would also mean allowing Palestinians who do commit acts of political violence, particularly against the military forces of a violent occupation, to raise the context and legality of the Israeli occupation as part of their defense. Israel is asking the world to believe that these 300 people are all dangerous terrorists, yet it has built a kangaroo military court system for Palestinians that magically churns out a nearly 100 percent conviction rate. All of this from a country that constantly promotes itself as the only democracy in the Middle East.

Palestinians on this list are from the occupied West Bank and have lived their entire lives under an apartheid regime. Palestinians taken by Israel, including some on the list of prisoners proposed for release, have certainly committed violent acts. But to pretend that the context of this violence is irrelevant is as absurd as it is unjust, given the appalling conditions Palestinians have lived under for decades. Contrast this to the widespread impunity that governs the actions of violent Israeli settlers who mercilessly target Palestinians in an effort to expel them from their homes.

All nations should be judged by how they treat the least powerful, not the most powerful or only those from a certain religion or ethnicity. This is why many leading civil liberties lawyers in the U.S. opposed the use of Guantánamo Bay prison and military tribunals and continue to oppose U.S. laws or rules that deny the accused a fundamental right to a proper defense.

The post Israel’s Insidious Narrative About Palestinian Prisoners appeared first on The Intercept.

Both Israel and the White House, including President Joe Biden personally, have staked their credibility on the claim that there is a massive smoking gun lying below Al-Shifa Hospital. The U.S. said publicly it was not relying exclusively on Israel to back up its own assertions. Leaving aside the fact that both the U.S. and Israel have track records as long as the Gaza Strip of lying about the alleged crimes of their adversaries, the key question is not whether a tunnel or rooms exist under Al-Shifa, but whether they were being used for a clear military or combat purpose by Hamas, as the U.S. and Israel have alleged.

Since the October 7 raids led by Hamas in Israel that resulted in the deaths of more than 845 Israeli civilians, along with some 350 soldiers and police, and saw more than 240 people taken as hostages, the IDF has placed an intense focus on Hamas’s underground infrastructure. Israel’s allegation that Hamas’s main headquarters was housed in or under the sprawling Al-Shifa Hospital compound is not new. But the zealous focus on it is an indication that Israel wants to make it the central issue in its case to push back against critics of its indiscriminate campaign of civilian death and destruction in Gaza. Israel has sought to make Al-Shifa a Rorschach test in its narrative war, and Israel has accused journalists, the United Nations, doctors, and nurses of being part of the conspiracy to hide Hamas’s use of the hospital as a military command center from the world.

To date, this propaganda campaign has not gone well.

After initially claiming that Al-Shifa Hospital was effectively Hamas’s Pentagon — a narrative publicly bolstered by the Biden administration — the IDF released its first round of purported evidence, which more or less consisted of a smattering of automatic rifles, some nestled behind an MRI machine, and a conveniently placed combat vest with a Hamas logo on it. With the exception of Israel’s most die-hard supporters, this effort appeared to convince almost no one of the sweeping assertions about Al-Shifa’s importance to Hamas’s current operations. After all, the IDF had already shown the public a slick 3D video model purporting to be a depiction of an advanced underground command and control lair used by Hamas. So Israel’s first effort at selling the case fell flat.

Several other efforts to produce videos of what Israel claimed to be evidence of a significant Hamas base at hospitals have been met with widespread derision and skepticism, including from Western media outlets that historically report Israeli military assertions about its operations against Palestinians as fact. The IDF videos have been mocked across social media and compared to Geraldo Rivera’s much-hyped — and utterly disastrous — live 1986 nationally televised special promising to reveal the secrets hidden in Al Capone’s underground vault.

Al-Shifa staff, as well as a European doctor who worked there for years, vehemently deny that the hospital is used by Hamas for any military purpose. For what it’s worth, Hamas also denies it.

On Sunday, Israel released two new videos that it claimed document a 55-meter fortified tunnel 10 meters below Al-Shifa. The camera footage, presumably filmed using a remotely piloted vehicle, ends with what Israel said is a blast-proof door equipped with a shooting hole allowing Hamas to attack IDF forces should they seek to breach the purported Hamas command and control center. “The findings prove beyond all doubt that buildings in the hospital complex are used as infrastructure for the Hamas terror organization, for terror activity. This is further proof of the cynical use that the Hamas terror organization makes of the residents of the Gaza Strip as a human shield for its murderous terror activities,” the IDF said in a statement.

It’s no secret that Gaza houses extensive underground tunnels. Over the past two decades, Israel has repeatedly conducted operations aimed at destroying parts of the underground tunnel networks and has often boasted of its successes in doing so. Tunnels stretching from southern Gaza into Egypt served as smuggling lines for many years. Israel claimed their primary purpose was to move weapons, while other observers portrayed them as a lifeline to smuggle in food and other supplies to the blockaded population of Gaza. It’s likely that both assertions are true. In recent years, both Israel and Egypt have taken measures to block or flood tunnels that penetrated their territory, and Israel reportedly installed underground concrete walls and subterranean sensors around its border with Gaza to stop Hamas or other militants from using them to enter Israel to conduct operations. In 2006, Hamas operatives used such a tunnel to take IDF soldier Gilad Shalit back to Gaza after capturing him. Shalit was freed as part of a prisoner exchange in 2011.

Al-Shifa’s Tunnels Were Built by Israel

It’s also well known that there are, in fact, tunnels and rooms under Al-Shifa. We know that because Israel admits that it built them in the early 1980s. According to Israeli media reports, the underground facilities were designed by Tel Aviv architects Gershon Zippor and Benjamin Idelson. “Israel renovated and expanded the hospital complex with American assistance, in a project that also included the excavation of an underground concrete floor,” according to Zvi Elhyani, founder of the Israel Architecture Archive, writing in Israel’s Ynetnews.

The underground infrastructure was part of a modernization and expansion effort at Al-Shifa commissioned by Israel’s Public Works Department. “The Israeli civil administration in the territories constructed the hospital complex’s Building Number 2, which has a large cement basement that housed the hospital’s laundry and various administrative services,” according to a report in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. The room and tunnels under Al-Shifa were reportedly completed in 1983. Tablet magazine described the space as “a secure underground operating room and tunnel network.” Zippor’s son Barak, who began working at his father’s architecture firm in the 1990s, said that during the construction at Al-Shifa in the 1980s, the Israeli construction contractors hired Hamas to provide security guards to prevent attacks on the building site.

“You know, decades ago we were running the place, so we helped them — it was decades, many decades ago, probably four decades ago that we helped them to build these bunkers in order to enable more space for the operation of the hospital within the very limited size of this compound,” former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak told a visibly stunned CNN host Christiane Amanpour.

Israel has claimed that following Hamas’s consolidation of power in Gaza in 2006, the group took over the Israeli-built facilities beneath Al-Shifa and modernized and expanded them into a full-fledged command and control operations center. During this period, some international journalists have described being called to meetings with Hamas officials on the hospital grounds, and Israel has long referred to it as a vital Hamas headquarters. During the 2014 war in Gaza, the Washington Post’s William Booth asserted that Al-Shifa “has become a de facto headquarters for Hamas leaders, who can be seen in the hallways and offices.” Assuming these claims are true, it is both shameful and logical that Hamas would choose to meet journalists at a civilian hospital given Israel’s well-known campaign to systematically assassinate them. Shameful as it may be, this is quite different than using a secret facility buried beneath the hospital as a military command and control center.

The fact that Israel built tunnels and rooms under Al-Shifa does not prove anything. Many modern hospitals, especially in war zones, have underground infrastructure, including Israeli hospitals. Nor do past reports about Hamas members being spotted inside the hospital. Israel will need to present much more convincing evidence, particularly to back up its claim that the site was of immense military and operational significance during this specific war.

The standard for such evidence should be extremely high, particularly because of the extent of civilian death and suffering caused by Israel’s operations. The Biden administration made allegations about Al-Shifa Hospital to offer preemptive cover for Israel to raid it, and the onus is on the administration to provide irrefutable, clear evidence to support its specific claims.

Propaganda vs. International Law

As Israel wages its propaganda war over Al-Shifa, it is simultaneously laying siege to yet another medical facility, the Indonesian Hospital, which is now the sole remaining medical facility in northern Gaza. Israeli artillery fire has killed at least 12 people at the hospital, according to local officials. Indonesia’s foreign minister, Retno Marsudi, has accused Israel of violating international law. “All countries, especially those that have close relations with Israel, must use all their influence and capabilities to urge Israel to stop its atrocities,” she said Monday.

International humanitarian law is clear that in case of any doubt as to whether the hospital is being used as a party to a conflict to “commit an act harmful to the enemy,” then it remains a protected site. Even if there were clear evidence that the hospital’s protected status had been abused, there are a range of rules governing any military action against the hospital — and the civilian patients would remain protected individuals.

“Even if the building loses its special protection, all the people inside retain theirs,” said Adil Haque, the Judge Jon O. Newman scholar at Rutgers Law School, in an interview with the Washington Post. “Anything that the attacking force can do to allow the humanitarian functions of that hospital to continue, they’re obligated to do, even if there’s some office somewhere in the building where there is maybe a fighter holed up.”

The staff at Al-Shifa have directly accused Israel of causing the deaths of civilians at the hospital, including several babies in the neonatal intensive care unit whose incubators were rendered useless after electricity was severely restricted as a result of the Israeli siege. On November 18, a U.N. humanitarian team led by the World Health Organization visited Al-Shifa. According to the WHO, its staff on the delegation described the hospital as a “death zone,” saying in a statement, “Signs of shelling and gunfire were evident. The team saw a mass grave at the entrance of the hospital and were told more than 80 people were buried there.”

Israel has also released what it says is CCTV footage from within Al-Shifa recorded in the immediate aftermath of the October 7 Hamas raid into Israel. It claims that the video depicts armed fighters entering the hospital with two international hostages, one Thai and one Nepali. The footage shows one of the alleged hostages injured on a stretcher.

Assuming that this footage is genuine and armed Hamas militants brought a wounded hostage in for treatment, what does Israel believe the hospital staff should have done in this case? Doctors have an ethical obligation to treat all wounded individuals, and it is not their job to serve as police or intelligence operatives.

“Given what the Israeli occupation reported, this confirms that the hospitals of the Ministry of Health provide their medical services to everyone who deserves them, regardless of their gender and race,” Gaza’s Ministry of Health said in a statement after the videos were released. The ministry added that it could not verify the videos. Hamas spokesperson Izzat Al-Rishq said that Hamas had previously acknowledged that it had taken wounded hostages to Al-Shifa on October 7. “We have released images of all that and the [Israeli] army spokesman is acting as if he has discovered something incredible,” he said. Rishq also claimed some of the hostages Hamas took to Al-Shifa had been wounded in Israeli strikes. Israel has also claimed, without evidence, that some hostages were murdered by Hamas inside the hospital grounds, though the IDF’s own maps indicate their bodies were recovered from locations outside Al-Shifa’s campus.

The onus is on both the Israeli government and its sponsors in the Biden administration to prove the sweeping claims about Hamas’s alleged use of Al-Shifa Hospital. This evidence should be strong enough to irrefutably prove that all of the suffering and death inflicted on the patients, doctors, and nurses at Al-Shifa was justifiable under the law, as well as basic principles of proportionality and morality. Such a conclusion is unfathomable when placed in the context of the civilian suffering caused by Israel’s siege on the hospital.

If Hamas is decisively proven to have intentionally abused the hospital’s protected status and did, in fact, actively operate a command center hidden beneath it, then it should face war crimes charges for having done so. Hamas, not innocent civilians, should be held accountable for these actions.

At the same time, if it is proven that Israel perpetrated fraud in its relentless campaign to portray the most important hospital in Gaza as a secret Hamas military base, then the world should hold Israeli officials accountable for this grave and lethal propaganda. So, too, should the Biden administration — including the president himself — be made to answer for the U.S. role.

Israel is seeking to justify its industrial-scale killing of civilians in Gaza with accusations that Hamas is hiding among civilians and using them as shields. Yet Israel’s leading human rights group B’Tselem has documented how the IDF has engaged in this very activity for decades. “Since the beginning of the occupation in 1967, Israeli security forces have repeatedly used Palestinians in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip as human shields, ordering them to perform military tasks that risked their lives,” according to a 2017 report. 

In the bigger picture, the controversy around Hamas and Al-Shifa has served mostly as a distraction from the overarching, indisputable facts about Israel’s war against Gaza: Using U.S. weapons, financing, and political support, Israel has waged a campaign of violent collective punishment against the civilians of Gaza.

The post Al-Shifa Hospital, Hamas’s Tunnels, and Israeli Propaganda appeared first on The Intercept.