Palestine Information Center – November 18, 2023
GAZA – The International Criminal Court (ICC) announced that it received referrals from five states seeking an investigation into Israeli war crimes in Gaza.
ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan disclosed that South Africa, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Comoros, and Djibouti submitted the referrals.
Khan confirmed in a statement that the ICC is already investigating the situation in Gaza.
“In accordance with the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, a State Party may refer to the Prosecutor a situation in which one or more crimes within the jurisdiction of the Court appear to have been committed requesting the Prosecutor to investigate the situation for the purpose of determining whether one or more specific persons should be charged with the commission of such crimes,” he said.
Khan mentioned the establishment of a specialized team upon assuming his term in June 2021, aimed at advancing the investigation in Palestine.
The prosecutor emphasized that the team will probe crimes suspected to be committed during the Israeli aggression on Gaza.
South Africa declared that it had submitted the referral request with “other countries that share the same concerns”, demanding that the International Criminal Court would urgently pay “attention to the seriousness of the current situation.”
The South African Ministry of Foreign Affairs stressed in a statement that Pretoria “urges other signatory states to the Rome Statute to join this referral request, or to submit their referral requests independently.”
The ICC opened an investigation in 2021 into war crimes suspected to be committed by the Israeli occupation forces in Palestine.
Since October 7, Israel has been waging a bloody aggression on the Gaza Strip, resulting in the martyrdom of more than 12,000 Palestinian civilians, most of whom are children and women.
Strategic Culture Foundation | November 17, 2023
Despite the hype in the U.S. media about their much-anticipated summit in California this week marking a putative return to normal bilateral relations, the Biden administration continues pushing unprecedented aggression towards China.
Just like San Francisco’s notorious Third World-like homelessness and squalor being hurriedly cleaned up (swept under the rug, more like it) for the media spectacle, all the signs point to no return to decent U.S.-China relations in the longer term. It’s all a duplicitous facade for a passing moment on a path of enmity.
Biden held a four-hour summit with Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping on Wednesday in San Francisco ahead of the annual conference for the 21-nation Association of Pacific and Economic Cooperation (APEC).
It was highly notable that Biden and Xi did not hold a joint press conference following their lengthy discussions. Nor did the two leaders issue a joint statement. So much for a new beginning!
Almost comically, the supposed positive meeting was later thrown into disarray when Biden at the end of his solo press conference made a hallmark embarrassing gaffe by repeating an earlier epithet for Xi. Asked by a reporter if he still considered the Chinese president “a dictator”, Biden responded, “Yes”.
Antony Blinken, the U.S. Secretary of State, was visibly perplexed by his tone-deaf boss’s remarks, sensing that all the effort to create an apparent amiable reset in relations was in danger of collapsing in farce.
Chinese media tended to overlook Biden’s undiplomatic gaucheness. Surprisingly, China’s foreign ministry and media appeared to talk up the presidential summit as bearing prospects of more friendly bilateral relations. Global Times reported in an upbeat mood on a “strategic summit” for “greater stability in the world”.
The American and Chinese media spinning or wishful thinking about a seeming turnaround in positive relations is misplaced.
As Biden’s foolish and gratuitous remark about Xi being a “dictator” shows, the U.S. rulers have nothing but contempt for China. Biden may have held out a friendly hand to Xi, but the American president and the U.S. establishment are harbouring endemic and growing hostility towards Beijing.
The two presidents last met a year ago during the G20 gathering in Bali, Indonesia. Since that encounter there has been a worrying downturn in U.S.-China relations with many commentators in the U.S. and China, as well as around the world, fearing a possible outbreak of war between the two global nuclear powers.
Frankly, the belligerence stems from one side: the United States. It’s not just the administration of President Joe Biden that espouses aggression by deploying contrived economic sanctions against China. There is a preponderance of irrational hostility in Congress towards Beijing as well as among the U.S. military. Only a month ago, the Pentagon once again labelled China as a growing military threat to American global interests. The alleged threats that Washington traduces are baseless or, ironically, a projection of its own intimidatory actions, such as sending countless naval and aviation patrols near China’s borders on the cynical pretext of “freedom of navigation”.
The Biden White House has continually provoked China with false claims of Chinese expansionism in the Asia-Pacific while the U.S. relentlessly builds up its own military power in the region. Washington is also assiduously recruiting regional allies to gang up on China in the event of war. The AUKUS coalition with Australia and Britain armed with nuclear submarines is a particularly tendentious development. So too is the Quad group involving the U.S., Japan, South Korea and India which arrogantly denigrates China as a hemispheric threat, thereby turning reality completely on its head.
Biden is merely continuing an escalation in hostility that began ramping up under the Obama administration (2008-16) more than a decade ago. Trump maintained the belligerence during his four years (2016-20), which Biden has redoubled. The latter was vice president when Obama launched the so-called Pivot to Asia in 2011.
The trajectory unmistakably shows a systematic policy of U.S. power to confront China, and that policy prevails regardless of who sits in the White House, and no matter whether the president is a Democrat or Republican. So much for democratic choice!
As American hegemonic dominance goes into rapid decline owing to inherent economic and societal failure under sclerotic late U.S. capitalism, it has become all the more imperative for Washington to try to scale up military aggression towards perceived geopolitical rivals. It’s a desperate gambit to offset an historic decline.
China, being the world’s ascendant second largest economy after the U.S., is logically seen as the Number One threat. So too are Russia and other nations that advocate a multipolar world order free from arbitrary U.S. and Western privileges. This is the geopolitical context for why the NATO axis is waging a proxy war in Ukraine against Russia, and why the United States seems hellbent on fomenting chaos and conflict in the Middle East. The would-be hegemon needs violence, chaos and tension like a drug addict craving a narcotic fix.
The deterioration in U.S.-China relations has caused many observers to be apprehensive of a looming war. Pentagon commanders remark openly about an anticipated armed conflict breaking out between the two nuclear powers, especially in relation to tensions over Taiwan.
One reason why Biden seems to be seeking a belated easing of tensions with China is precisely because Washington has stoked the war tendency too much and therefore needs to dampen it, albeit for short-term practical reasons.
Another reason for seemingly engaging with President Xi this week is Biden’s electioneering. He faces a tight presidential race next year and no doubt is looking for something positive to show American voters. Significantly, Biden chose to prioritize his top achievement from discussions with Xi as “counter-narcotics policy”. Over 70,000 Americans die every year from opioid overdosing, more than from gun violence or road accidents. It is a major national scandal in the U.S. China is blamed as a source of fentanyl precursor chemicals. Biden boasted this week that the U.S. and China would cooperate more on controlling illicit drug trade. It seems that Biden was looking more at scoring favour with the U.S. electorate than to genuinely restoring normal bilateral relations with China based on principles of ensuring global peace.
Under Biden, the U.S. has recklessly intensified military and political interference in Taiwan, an island province of China. The Biden administration has proliferated weapons sales to Taiwan in flagrant defiance of China’s warnings to desist.
High-level political delegations from the U.S. to Taiwan have gone hand-in-hand with the increasing American militarization of the island, which is only some 130 kilometres from China’s southeast mainland. The provocation is similar to how the U.S. and NATO weaponized Ukraine to antagonize Russia.
The breakdown in military communications between the U.S. and China was instigated by the visit to Taiwan in August 2022 by Nancy Pelosi, the then Speaker of the House of Representatives, which is the third most senior political office in the U.S. after the president.
This week’s summit between Biden and Xi declared a resumption in military communications between the U.S. and China.
We’ll see how long the supposed detente lasts. Not for long, one suspects going by past form.
After Biden met with Xi in Bali at the end of last year, there were similar professions from the U.S. side of tamping down tensions and resuming normalcy. A couple of months after that supposed “reset”, the Biden administration sparked a crisis when it shot down a Chinese weather balloon that had been blown off course.
The notion that the U.S. can easily repair relations with China is naive. All the signals indicate that Washington is on a collision course with China. Provocative name-calling of China as a threat, the relentless arming of Taiwan and the pursuit of aggressive trade war policies all spell out confrontation.
That dire direction is, unfortunately, unavoidable because the U.S. sees itself as the indispensable sole superpower that will not tolerate any global arrangement other than its hegemonic dominance. That zero-sum mindset of the United States is intrinsic to its imperialist power. That is why the U.S. as it is currently formulated as a state is destined to be a warmonger. World peace is anathema to U.S. imperial power.
China, Russia and other nations aiming for a new multipolar world must be cognizant of that nefarious reality. Aspiring to have normal relations with the U.S. as a global hegemonic power is like trying to have normal relations with a psychotic predator.
President Teddy Roosevelt (1900-10) once jocularly described the practice of U.S. foreign policy as speaking softly while carrying a big club. That’s the essence of a global bully. U.S. power always relies on wielding a military club. The only difference now under Biden is that instead of speaking softly, the U.S. stutters over its lies and deceptions.
Sputnik – 17.11.2023
WASHINGTON – Cordial talks between US President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping were immediately undermined by the rhetoric of the American leader himself and US hubristic policies and sermonizing, experts told Sputnik.
The two men held their talks on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in San Francisco on Wednesday. Biden said important progress was made during his talks with Xi as both sides agreed to open direct military-to-military communications and begin to cooperate on AI.
However, within a few hours, Biden outraged the Chinese by describing Xi in public as a “dictator.” His comments drew an immediate furious response from Beijing. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning responded by calling Biden’s comment “wrong and irresponsible.”
“Our policies and rhetoric continue to increase tension versus easing tension,” retired US Army Lieutenant Colonel Earl Rasmussen, political commentator and former vice president of the Eurasia Foundation told Sputnik.
“Until we come out of our cave and realize that the world is changing and take on a cooperative view… not much will improve in relations and the world will move past the United States and their close allies.”
“Based on the US readout, we continue to continual virtue signaling and that we are the all-powerful. Hitting all the buzz areas: Free and open Indo-Pacific; defense of Indo-Pacific allies; Freedom of navigation; Adherence to international law; maintaining peace and stability and not to forget support for Ukraine and Israel,” Rasmussen said.
Former CIA analyst and station chief Philip Giraldi said Biden’s decision to call Xi a dictator explains why the United States is in decline. Moreover, he added, there is nobody in Washington sensible enough to reverse the trajectory.
‘Outdated’ World Order
Canadian historian, political commentator and Canadian Patriotic Review editor Matthew Ehret agreed that Biden’s comments were the expression of a collapsing US political society in the American capital.
“The Xi-Biden meeting involved a glimpse into a senile and outdated primitive world order melting down under its own self-contradictions and trying desperately to stay relevant when placed into close proximity with a sane 21st century paradigm,” he said.
Biden’s political naivete and incompetence in his extreme old age went unchallenged because almost everyone else in the US political and media establishment thought and felt exactly the same way, Ehret explained.
“Biden represents the perfect embodiment of corruption, self-deceit and self-centeredness characteristic of the liberal intelligentsia of baby-boomers that have taken control of western policy making for the past 60 years while offering nothing approximating authenticity to the rest of the world,” he said.
Xi, on the other hand, expressed the confidence and philosophical as well as political strength of China as she emerged on the world scene, Ehret pointed out.
The Chinese leader “is coming from a place of well-reasoned confidence and strength in embodying the ancient traditions of Chinese civilization, Confucian values and the largest rate of industrial and scientific progress in the world, which he knows presents the greatest salvation not only for the Chinese people, but the world at large,” he said.
The United States needed to work constructively in cooperation with China to build a genuine new world order favorable to all, Ehret advised.
“If the United States itself is to survive the storms of war and economic collapse which it has largely brought on to itself, then it will be largely because of the creative efforts made by China to build a new system premised around cooperation, industrial growth and peace,” Ehret said.
By Kenneth Richard | No Tricks Zone | November 9, 2023
IPCC models rooted in assumptions that we humans can and do control the Atlantic Ocean’s circulation with our daily-activity CO2 emissions have been wrong since the mid-1980s. Why should we still believe in them?
The latest IPCC report continues to say it is “very likely” the Atlantic Meridional Ocean Circulation (AMOC), a fundamental climate parameter, will weaken (and unleash cooling, catastrophic storms, drought, floods) in the 21st century.
But, as the authors of a new study note, since the mid-1980s the 84 (CMIP5) and 56 (CMIP6) AMOC models have been contradicted by observations in both magnitude and sign. The AMOC has not been declining in response to increases in atmospheric CO2. There is even evidence of trend increases.
“[W]e find that neither the CMIP5 nor the CMIP6 ensemble mean are successful at representing the observational AMOC data. … We show that both the magnitude of the trend in the AMOC over different time periods and often even the sign of the trend differs between observations and climate model ensemble mean, with the magnitude of the trend difference becoming even greater when looking at the CMIP6 ensemble compared to CMIP5.”
So, as the scientists ask, why should we trust future modeled predictions?
“[I]f these models cannot reproduce past variations, why should we be so confident about their ability to predict the future?”
Sputnik – 16.11.2023
ROME – The Italian parliament on Thursday passed a law prohibiting production and sale of synthetic food and feed, making Italy the first EU country to introduce such a ban.
The law was supported by 159 members of the Italian lower house, while 53 voted against the measure and 34 abstained. The upper house of the parliament approved the law, which was developed at the initiative of the Italian Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Forestry and the Ministry of Health, back in June.
The new regulation prohibits the use in production, sale, import, export manufacturing and distribution of “food or feed consisting of, separated out or produced from cell cultures or tissues derived from vertebrate animals.” Violators face a fine ranging from 10,000 euros ($10,858) to 60,000 euros. However, if the law is violated by a large-scale enterprise, the fine may be increased to up to 10% of the company’s annual turnover and confiscation of the produced goods.
By Linnea Lueken | Climate Realism | October 24, 2023
A recent Washington Post (The Post) story, “Where Malaria is Spreading,” claims that climate change could put over 5 billion people at risk of malaria by 2040, primarily due to expanding seasons where mosquitoes can spread the disease, migrating mosquitoes, and increased populations and stagnant water caused by unusual flooding. This is false. Malaria already has a wide distribution, with many areas only avoiding it being endemic due to past suppression efforts. Population growth in areas where the disease remains common may lead to more instances of the disease unless available preventative and prophylactic measures are taken. However, there is no evidence malaria will spread geographically, due to either modestly rising temperatures or increased moisture.
The Post’s article, written by authors Rachel Chason, Kevin Crowe, John Muyskens, and Jahi Chikwendiu, mainly focuses on malaria’s increase in Mozambique. It has seen a 10 percent increase in malaria cases over the past six years. The Post than ties Mozambique’s malaria increase to claims made in a Lancet study, “Projecting the risk of mosquito-borne diseases in a warmer and more populated world: a multi-model, multi-scenario intercomparison modelling study,” which used climate and mosquito-borne disease models to estimate how the transmission seasons and population densities might change with global warming.
The study’s authors say their modelling shows malaria suitability may increase by 1-6 months in tropical highlands in Africa, the Eastern Mediterranean, and the Americas. Dengue sees similar results, with suitability increasing in lowlands in the Western Pacific and the Eastern Mediterranean by 4 months.
Shamefully, like many studies making misleading and alarming claims attributed to climate change, the Lancet study uses the climate modelling scenario RCP8.5 (RCP meaning representative concentration pathway), which climate scientists admit runs way too hot. Any research that built upon that scenario is going to produce extremely skewed results, because RCP8.5 involves an amount of released carbon dioxide that is actually impossible, even if all the fossil fuels on the planet were burned.
While the Lancet study is suspect, it may still seem logical to assume that the modest warming of the past hundred or so years has and will continue to expand the range of mosquitoes, as well as the number of days during the year in which they are active and biting. However, a large body of research refutes this assumption.
A chapter in Climate Change Reconsidered II: Fossil Fuels, discusses the results of more than a dozen peer-reviewed studies which demonstrate that temperature alone is not enough to guarantee migration or longer survival of mosquitoes or mosquito-borne illnesses like malaria. There are far more factors that come into play, including human interventions, that outweigh temperature alone.
The report explains:
Gething et al. (2010), writing specifically about malaria, may have put it best when they said there has been “a decoupling of the geographical climate malaria relationship over the twentieth century, indicating that non-climatic factors have profoundly confounded this relationship over time.
More examples from Climate Change Reconsidered are discussed in a Climate Realism post, “Environment Journal Wrong About Climate Change Increasing Malaria,” including papers by a vector-borne disease expert, Paul Reiter, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) which explain that while reemergence of malaria and similar diseases in some regions is concerning, “it is facile to attribute this resurgence to climate change.”
The Post admits that endemic malaria “was eliminated in North America and Europe in the mid-1900s, with a better understanding of how to control it.” This is true, and what’s more, a 2010 Nature study (Gething et al.) found that malaria was probably endemic on 58 percent of the world’s surface in 1900, before the period of modern warming, and only 30 percent by 2007, after decades of modest warming.
Almost every credible study, not based on biased computer models, rejects the myopic causal view of the relationship between climate and malaria.
Extreme weather, The Post claims, like flooding are causing cases to rise in places like Mozambique, with “experts” telling them that the frightening trend is likely to continue. While The Post suggests the trends are mostly due to climate change, they also admit that other factors like “increased resistance of mosquitoes to insecticides and of the parasite to drugs” and improved disease reporting and tracking have played a role in the reported increase.
Flooding is unlikely to cause an increase in mosquito-borne illness, because even the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports only low confidence that there is even any sign climate change has impacted flooding. Mozambique, a South-East African nation, has suffered some flooding in recent years, but as discussed in Climate Realism, here, any link to long-term climate change lacks evidence. Flooding is a regular occurrence in many parts of southern Africa, and population increases means that during the rainy season more people are living near mosquito-friendly standing water.
Before running this alarming story, The Washington Post should have examined the wider body of research available concerning mosquito-borne illnesses. There is no evidence that warming is currently causing, or will lead to, an increase in malaria cases or deaths. Facts, not fearmongering, should guide The Post’s and other legitimate news outlets’ coverage of climate and disease issues.
Climate tipping points are much more fantasy than science
By P Gosselin | No Tricks Zone | November 11, 2023
Austrian AUF 1 has posted posted a video interview with prominent German geologist and Sahara expert Dr. Stefan Kröpelin,
Dr. Kröpelin is an award-wining geologist and climate researcher at the University of Cologne and specializes in studying the eastern Sahara desert and its climatic history. He’s been active out in the field there for more than 40 years.
In the Auf 1 interview, Dr. Kröpelin contradicts the alarmist claims of growing deserts and rapidly approaching climate tipping points. He says that already in the late 1980s rains had begun spreading into northern Sudan and have since indeed developed into a trend. Since then, rains have increased and vegetation has spread northwards. “The desert is shrinking; it is not growing.”
Kröpelin confirms that when the last ice age ended some 12,000 years ago, the eastern Sahara turned green with vegetation, teemed with wildlife and had numerous bodies of water 5000 – 10,000 years ago (more here).
Later in the interview Kröpelin explains how the eastern Sahara climate was reconstructed using a vast multitude of sediment cores and the proxy data they yielded. According to the German geology expert: “The most important studies that we conducted all show that after the ice age, when global temperatures rose, the Sahara greened” … “the monsoon rains increased, the ground water rose”. This all led to vegetation and wildlife taking hold over thousands of year.
Then over the past few thousands of years, the region dried out. It didn’t happen all of a sudden like climate models suggest.
Modelers don’t understand climate complexity
When asked about dramatic tipping points (8:00) such as those claimed to be approaching by the Potsdam Institute (PIK), Kröpelin says he’s very skeptical and doesn’t believe crisis scenarios such as those proposed by former PIK head, Hans-Joachim Schellnhuber. He says people making such claims “never did any studies themselves in any climate zone on the earth and they don’t understand how complex climate change is.”
Except for catastrophic geological events, “it’s not how nature works,” Kröpelin says. “Things change gradually.”
The claims that “we have to be careful that things don’t get half a degree warmer, otherwise everything will collapse, is of course complete nonsense.”
“I would say this concept [tipping points] is baseless. Much more indicates that they won’t happen than that they will happen.”
Late last year in Munich, he called the notion of CO2-induced climate tipping points scientifically outlandish. He also called the prospect of the Sahara spreading into Europe preposterous.
By Chimausem Nwosu – Sputnik – 15.11.2023
Germany’s automotive, mechanical engineering, and industrial goods companies are prioritizing moving less complex processes overseas to secure their business futures. Berlin’s chances of reversing such a trend are in doubt, as companies have expressed disappointment in the current government’s actions to forestall their departure.
Consultancy firm Deloitte reports that two out of three German companies have partially relocated their operations abroad due to ongoing energy issues in Germany.
Previous reports indicated that nearly half of the country’s small-to-midsized companies were considering moving abroad or ceasing operations. According to Deloitte, 67 percent of German companies have moved some operations abroad, and every third industrial company plans to relocate high-quality areas such as production and preassembly.
Investments in infrastructure, digitalization, and cost-effective energy pricing are essential for securing business locations. The situation is particularly acute in Germany’s mechanical engineering, industrial goods, and automotive sectors, where 69 percent of companies report moderate to large-scale relocation.
Currently, companies are primarily moving less complex aspects like component manufacturing abroad. Florian Ploner, a partner at Deloitte and industry sector expert, remarked, “Deindustrialization is already taking place on a considerable scale here. If the general conditions remain the same, it is very likely that more companies will follow and more and more important parts of the value creation will migrate.”
When considering relocation, one-third of respondents focus on high-value areas like general production (33 percent) and preassembly (34 percent). Currently, companies are relocating evenly across the EU, Asia, and the US, with only 10 percent of companies planning to move to other Asian countries and eight percent considering returning to Europe from Asia.
Germany’s prospects for reversing this trend seem slim. Companies suggest that increased subsidies and reduced bureaucracy might encourage them to stay, but they have little faith in the current government’s actions to prevent their departure. While this trend concerns Berlin, it offers some positives for Brussels, as companies plan to move their manufacturing processes within the European Union.
From the companies’ perspective, reducing bureaucracy and ensuring competitive energy prices are practical measures to enhance location attractiveness, with 69 percent in favor. In contrast, state support for key technologies (45 percent) or simplified immigration of qualified specialists (43 percent) are less critical.
Dr. Jurgen Sandau, a Deloitte partner and supply chain expert, notes that, “The pressure on companies is enormous… Nevertheless, a hasty move rarely makes sense. Companies in this country are well advised to make their capacities flexible over the next five years with the help of platforms and networks. After all, factors such as legal certainty and stability in Germany as a business location are essential for entrepreneurial success.”
Companies not currently relocating are focusing on alternative suppliers and expanding multisourcing. They rely on comprehensive supplier management, collaboration, cross-supply chain data exchange, and risk analyses.
Meanwhile, it should be recalled that the government led by Olaf Scholz, in coordination with the EU and the US, has imposed sanctions on Russia since 2022 due to the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. This action prompted the German government to cease purchasing Russian energy, which had been the bedrock of its industrial boom. The sanctions also exacerbated the fuel crisis worldwide, with Europe becoming its primary victim.
The situation further deteriorated after the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline system, built to provide gas from Russia to Europe, allowing German industry to use cheap energy.
In addition, the future of European industrial companies is even more bleak considering the US course towards protectionism. The US Inflation Reduction Act, which provides massive subsidies to US businesses in a bid to concentrate manufacturing sites in North America, caused major concerns in the EU, with French President Emmanuel Macron saying it may lead to the deindustrialization of Europe.
By Gareth Porter | Ron Paul Institute | November 17, 2023
The Israeli military has attacked and is occupying parts of al-Shifa hospital in an ongoing operation in northern Gaza. It is the biggest and most modern hospital in Gaza, which has ceased to function normally because of a lack of power, while tens of thousands of displaced Gazans take shelter in it.
An attack on a hospital is normally considered a clear violation of the rules of war. The Israeli Defense Forces is justifying it by claiming that Shifa has long served as civilian medical cover for the command center of the entire Hamas war operations and weapons storage.
That IDF claim has been cited constantly in Israeli propaganda as an argument that Shifa — and other hospitals in Gaza — should not be accorded the normal legal hospital immunity from attack.
Israeli forces closed in on Shifa while demanding for the last few days that the staff and patients remaining in the hospital be evacuated immediately. CNN reported Monday night that “the Biden administration has now signaled that it supports the Israeli position, as National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan declared on CNN’s State of the Union Sunday: ‘You can see even from open-source reporting that Hamas does use hospitals, along with a lot of other civilian facilities, for command-and-control, for storing weapons, for housing its fighters.’”
Those Sullivan remarks were an obvious green light for the IDF to press on for complete evacuation of the hospital.
The problem with that “open source reporting” is that it is never anything more than unsupported claims based on mere supposition. In fact, when the history of supposedly damning revelations about Shifa hospital providing cover for Hamas military activities are examined more carefully it becomes clear that it has been no more than a thinly veiled excuse for the IDF to attack and close down Gaza’s most important provider of medical care for the population of Gaza.
A History of Deception
The Israeli claim that Shifa hospital was providing such a cover for an Hamas military presence there is in fact the longest running theme in Israeli war propaganda on Gaza, dating back nearly 15 years to the first days of the Gaza war of January 2009.
That was when Yuval Diskin, the head of Israel’s domestic intelligence service Shin Bet, told Amos Harel of Haaretz newspaper that “many” senior Hamas officials were “believed” to be hiding in the “basements” of Shifa hospital, and that the Israelis knew all about those underground levels of the hospital, because they had originally been been built by the Egyptians before 1967 and extensively refurbished by the Israelis themselves in the mid-1980s.
Diskin also explained to Harel that Hamas was confident that it wouldn’t be attacked, because of the patients on the upper floors.
Apart from the fact that Israel’s intelligence service had admitted that it only suspected Hamas’ military presence under the hospital rather than having actual knowledge, Harel was, however, honest enough to report that his Palestinian contacts were telling him senior Hamas leaders never stayed in the same location but constantly moved from one location to another — a revelation that obviously made far more sense than the claim that those same senior Hamas officials were hanging out in a basement that was obviously well known to the Israelis.
Harel’s report also included a revelation — apparently from a Palestinian source — that raised problems for the nascent official Israeli propaganda line: “Some of the bunkers they are using,” Harel wrote, “were linked by tunnels Hamas built in recent years.”
The existence of numerous bunkers that could be used for command were thus independent of Shifa hospital, which the Israelis would always be able to invade. That reality clearly implied that it would make no sense for Hamas to depend on Shifa hospital for that purpose.
IDF Tale Resurfaces in Washington Post
Nevertheless, during the next Israeli-Palestinian war in July 2014, the IDF tale of the Hamas leaders’ secret hideaway in the basement of Shifa hospital re-emerged as if it were an unassailable fact that justified IDF threats to attack the hospital.
In a story published July 15, The Washington Post reported as unassailable fact that Shifa “has become the de facto headquarters for Hamas leaders, who can be seen in the hallways and offices.”
Post reporter William Booth clearly did not see Hamas leaders in Al Shifa himself. Had he done so, he would have described the scene and identified one or two Hamas figures who had been pointed out to him at the hospital. So he was apparently passing on the self-interested claim of his Israeli interlocutors without informing Post readers that the information in question was far less reliable than it was made to appear.
The IDF became fixated on closing up another Gaza hospital in July 2014 Just two days after that initial appearance of the Shifa-Hamas theme in the 2014 war, Israeli airstrikes bombed Al Wafa Rehabilitation and Geriatric Hospital in Gaza City and forced its closure.
The IDF specialists created a video distributed three weeks later aimed at defending the destruction of Wafa hospital as a necessary response to Hamas using the hospital for military operations. But they had resorted to multiple levels of trickery to make their political point, as this writer discovered in investigating the video.
The IDF propagandists had spliced together videos from five years earlier and from different times of day so as to suggest that firing from an unused building more than 100 yards away from the hospital was a recent Hamas rocket attack on IDF forces. Then they spliced in an audio clip from an entirely different incident in which the IDF returned fire to try to show that the IDF bombing of Wafa hospital was justified.
At the end of July 2014, the Post reaffirmed its support for Israel’s primary propaganda theme in that six-week war. Terrence McCoy reported from Washington that Shifa Hospital had “become a de facto headquarters” of Hamas. That reporting reflected in turn the general readiness of much of the national press in Washington to accept the word of the Israelis as all they needed to know on that pivotal issue.
Eight years later, the same Israeli propaganda line immediately resurfaced after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, as the Israelis mounted a new propaganda offensive. On Oct. 27, IDF Spokesman Adm. Daniel Hagari, briefed the International press on the main lines of Israel’s position regarding Shifa hospital and Hamas operations: He repeated the line that a bunker underneath Shifa is Hamas’ main base of operation, and that Hamas operates “several tunnels inside and under” the hospital.
Maximum Suffering
But Hamas’ tunnels outside Shifa could obviously be used for the same function of command of military operations without having to bother with Shifa hospital.
So the drumbeat of Israeli concern about the alleged Hamas command bunker underneath Shifa appears to have been a phony issue from the start, aimed merely at bringing pressure to bear on the medical system, namely to close down Shifa as the largest, most modern and most effective hospital in Gaza to create the maximum amount of suffering to the people of Gaza.
As of Tuesday, Shifa Hospital had ceased to function, as it had no electricity, having run out of fuel. The Israelis gallantly offered the hospital 300 liters of fuel — enough to function for about six minutes according to the hospital’s calculation.
They thus failed to take any emergency action to save 36 babies facing possible death from the non-functioning incubators after three had already died.
The scene at Shifa hospital early on Wednesday was eerie, as Israel tanks rumbled into the hospital grounds and Israeli troops entered the darkened main hospital building.
IDF spokesman Hagari would say only that Israeli forces were carrying out an operation “based on intelligence information and an operational necessity” and that it was in a “specified area in Shifa hospital”.
Later Wednesday the IDF’s Peter Lerner told CNN that the operation at al-Shifa hospital was “ongoing” and would say only that it had not found any sign of hostages in the hospital.
The Gazans who have been staying in Shifa have been afraid to take the approved routes away from the hospital because of relentless Israeli attacks on civilians trying to do so. The IDF will no doubt continue to use force against the hundreds of thousands huddled there to make them leave.
And now that Israel has control over many thousands of military age males in the hospital, it is doubtful that they will be allowed to go free, since they are considered as potential Hamas fighters.
The time has come for a reckoning on the long-running IDF propaganda ploy of claiming that Shifa has been used to hide Hamas’s command center.
Unless the IDF can show journalists convincing evidence of that long-claimed Hamas command presence under the hospital, they should stand for the truth and denounce that massive Israeli deception about Gaza.
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Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
Lies are Unbekoming | October 20, 2026
Butchered by “Healthcare” is Robert Yoho’s plain-spoken account of how American medicine stopped being a profession and became an industry. 341 pages. Over a thousand references. Thirty-eight chapters.
“Screening Tests Are Useless”, on tests that find diseases that would never have hurt you. “The FDA Protects the Big Drug Companies”, on an agency funded by the companies it regulates. “The Journals’ Sins Are the Editors’ Sins”, on ghostwritten studies and captured peer review. “Opioids and ‘Pain Management’”, on how a generation was prescribed its way into addiction. “Prozac and Relatives” and “Antipsychotics Are Disastrous”, on what psychiatry does to adults and children. “Surgery: Money Before Patients”. “Failed Cancer Treatments”. “Futile CPR and Overprescribing”. “Billing Scams & Specialty Warfare”. “Hospitals Are Sharks”. Each with a Patient Tips section at the end on how to survive it.
If you have ever walked out of a doctor’s office with a prescription you didn’t ask for, or watched a parent put through a treatment that made them worse, this is the book you want on your shelf before the next appointment. … Full review
Butchered by “Healthcare” is available on Lulu now.
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