Palestinians detained by Israeli Occupation Forces in Gaza ‘disappearing into the unknown’
Al Mayadeen | May 25, 2024
The Palestinian Ministry of Detainees and ex-Detainees Affairs in Gaza warned that the vast majority of Palestinians detained from the Strip during the war by Israeli forces “disappear into the unknown” within the occupation’s prisons, camps, and detention centers.
In a press statement, the Ministry confirmed that the detainees are held in secret detention centers, such as the infamous Sde Teman detention center in the occupied Negev, where they are subjected to brutal and severe abuse and systematic torture, especially at the beginning of their detention.
It added that Israeli security agencies conduct investigation sessions using various forms of torture in order to “extract confessions and information by any means necessary.”
Meanwhile, the Israeli occupation refuses to engage with any institution or entity, especially the International Committee of the Red Cross, requesting information or visits to any detainee.
The interrogation of a large number of detainees has been concluded, but the occupation still refuses to release them, the statement continued.
The Ministry emphasized that what the detainees endure in the occupation’s prisons constitutes “an intended, deliberate crime and a compound crime against our people and prisoners.” It highlighted that the occupation practices “killing, execution, and sadism against the prisoners,” imposing extremely harsh conditions that violate all international and humanitarian norms and laws.
It condemned “the heinous crimes committed against the prisoners and detainees in Israeli prisons since October 7” and held the Israeli occupation and the US administration “responsible for the ongoing crimes against Palestinian detainees.”
As the situation of detainees continues to worsen, the Ministry called for a “serious international investigation into the crimes committed by the Israeli occupation against defenseless detainees.”
The Ministry urged for “international pressure on the occupation to open the prisons and secret detention centers to international organizations, institutions, and lawyers” to conduct visits and assess the conditions of the detainees. It also called on the international community and all international human rights organizations and institutions to “assume their responsibilities towards this serious issue, which the world has never witnessed before.”
The statement concluded by calling on all Palestinian people and national factions to stand by the families of the detainees and offer them support.
1,000 Palestinians missing
Earlier this month, Palestinian human rights groups reported a lack of information regarding the whereabouts and status of hundreds of Palestinian workers from Gaza.
After the Israeli genocidal war on Gaza was launched last October, “approximately 6,441 workers were deported to the West Bank, and approximately 1,000 workers remain missing in light of the ongoing crime of forced disappearance against Gaza detainees,” the Commission of Detainees’ Affairs, the Palestinian Prisoners’ Society, and the Ramallah-based Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association (Addameer) said in a joint statement.
The institutions stated that “Israel” has declined to reveal the location or provide any information regarding the well-being of these individuals. The only information provided by “Israel” is that there are two military camps for Gaza detainees: one near Beer al-Sabe and another near al-Quds.
New Guantanamo
Israeli media had repeatedly broadcast scenes showing dozens of Palestinian detainees of all ages in Gaza stripped naked and blindfolded before being led to an unknown location, sparking international outrage.
Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported last December that hundreds of Palestinians who were detained in Gaza and taken to the Sde Teman base near Beer al-Sabe’ were killed as a result of the harsh detention conditions.
It said that “the age group of the Palestinian detainees killed while under investigation ranges from minors to elderly individuals” and also described how “detainees are locked in fenced areas blindfolded and handcuffed for most of the day, with lights kept on throughout the night.”
Commenting on Haaretz’s report, the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Observatory later announced that the testimonies it collected were consistent with the Israeli outlet’s findings regarding the martyrdom of Palestinian detainees from Gaza due to torture in an Israeli center that the Observatory described as a “new Guantanamo”.
Among the crimes committed by the Israeli occupation against civilians are forced displacement, field executions, random and arbitrary arrests, and harassment.
To this end, the Observatory called for “an impartial and urgent international investigation into the Israeli army’s field execution of Palestinian civilians after detaining them from various areas across the Gaza Strip.”
German police crack down on pro-Palestinian encampment in Berlin
Press TV – May 25, 2024
German police have violently cracked down on pro-Palestinian student protesters at a university in the capital Berlin.
Students have gathered a Humboldt University’s Department of Socials to protest against Israel’s savage war against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
The demonstrations began on Wednesday.
Riot police entered the faculty building on Thursday evening and broke up the encampment.
A police spokeswoman said they briefly arrested 169 people and wrote down their identities.
She said that police also took further “measures restricting freedom” at a subsequent protest rally, and issued criminal summons to six more people.
Student organizers condemned violent police actions against protesters, saying the officers used unnecessary force against students.
“The violent eviction” of the student protesters, “marked by police brutality,” as well as “the failure of the university authorities to protect their students,” is a “grave injustice,” the group Student Coalition Berlin wrote in a post on Instagram.
However, the group called on students to continue protests in solidarity with Palestinians.
Encampment protests in Germany have stepped up in recent weeks after anti-Israel protests that have roiled campuses in the United States spread across Europe.
Students have been camping out and calling for their colleges to financially divest and dissociate from companies that profit from or engage in Israel’s brutal military campaign in Gaza.
The protests spread to university campuses in Berlin, Munich, Cologne and other cities across Germany.
Berlin authorities have taken a tough line against anti-Israeli protesters, labeling student demonstrators as “antisemites and terror sympathizers.”
Students say they are “witnessing a great endangerment of academic freedom” since the beginning of Israel’s war on Gaza.
In several cases, officers were seen carrying some students away, while punching their heads and repeatedly kicking them.
Despite repression and police interventions, students continue to mobilize in support of Palestine, leading demonstrations, and organizing lectures and sit-ins on university campuses across Germany and Europe as well.
Israeli troops abduct injured civilians from Gaza hospitals: Report
The Cradle | May 24, 2024
The Israeli army has been abducting injured Palestinian civilians from hospitals in Gaza and transporting them to a detention camp in the Negev, where they are shackled to beds and undergo major surgeries, often without painkillers, the Guardian reported on 24 May.
A whistleblower from the Sde Teiman detention camp told the Guardian some patients had come from hospitals in Gaza after being abducted by Israeli forces. “These were patients who had been captured by the Israeli army while being treated in Gaza hospitals and brought here. They had [missing] limbs and infected wounds. They were moaning in pain,” the source said.
The source described how the field hospital in the detention camp consisted of tents, including an emergency room where patients underwent surgery on a stretcher as there was no operating table.
The patients were handcuffed to the beds, made to wear diapers, and blindfolded.
In one case, a detainee’s hand had been amputated “because the wrists had become gangrenous due to handcuffing wounds.”
A second whistleblower who spoke with the Guardian said, “There were about 15 patients in total, they were all handcuffed and blindfolded. They were naked, wearing diapers and were covered by blankets. Most of them appeared to have obvious war injuries; some had undergone amputations, and others underwent major abdominal or chest surgery. They were practically naked except for a diaper.”
The source said he witnessed a patient undergoing painful medical procedures without any painkillers.
In the other section of the camp, the whistleblowers said up to 200 Palestinian detainees from Gaza are being held in cages under severe physical restrictions.
“The prisoners are detained in a sort of cages, all blindfolded and handcuffed,” the source said. “If someone speaks or moves, they are immediately silenced or they are forced to stand with their hands raised above their head and handcuffed for up to one hour.”
“If they are unable to keep their hands raised, the soldiers attach the handcuffs to the bars of the cage. Many of the detainees had infected wounds that were not being properly treated.”
The source claimed the Israeli military had no proof that detainees were members of Hamas. Some inmates repeatedly asked why they were there. According to the whistleblower, most were considered suspects, and some were released. “But they had not been formally charged. It was a kind of filtering camp, a provisional detention,” he said.
Israeli soldier confesses to killing US elderly man in West Bank
Al Mayadeen | May 22, 2024
A self-proclaimed soldier from “Israel’s” infamous Netzah Yehuda battalion has admitted that his unit killed 78-year-old Palestinian-American, Omar Asad, in January 2022, according to recordings obtained by The Grayzone.
However, after announcing plans to sanction the battalion, the Biden administration withdrew the decision without offering further explanation.
“Four of these units [Israeli units] have effectively remediated these violations, which is what we expect partners to do,” the US State Department claimed.
The fifth unit appears to be Netzah Yehuda, an all-male unit of Orthodox Jewish nationalists that operates exclusively in Ramallah of the occupied West Bank and is accused of crimes, including sexual assault and beating at least three older men to death while they were lying on the ground while in custody.
Netzah Yehuda soldiers detained Asad and left him outdoors in harsh conditions, bound and blindfolded until he died. Instead of punishment, all the soldiers got was a slap on the wrist, and compensation was paid to Asad’s family.
A report by Washington DC-based human rights organization, DAWN, found that at the time of the killing, the commander of the unit, Lt. Col. Mati Shevach, was promoted to Deputy Commander of the Kfir Brigade, which oversees the Netzah Yehuda formation.
Spokesperson Vedant Patel responded during an April 29 State Department press briefing to questions regarding why the administration had hesitated to sanction the battalion.
“This is an ongoing process,” Patel said, further claiming, “I’m not going to speak to it more specifically, but consistent with the memorandum of understanding that we have with the government of Israel, we are engaging with them, consulting with them as it relates to not just this broader process but additional information that they’ve shared.”
The Grayzone obtained the glorified account of the killing of Asad, which according to the self-described soldier’s account, the unit brutalized Asad as punishment for supposedly interfering with a raid.
“This geezer who’s like trying to interfere with our operation, we’re going to like, f*** with him for a night,” the soldier said, as he called Arabs “murders, criminal animals” and boasted about killing and torturing Palestinians, likening himself to Americans who photographed themselves with dead Japanese soldiers during World War II, “doing funny things with their bodies.”
“Yeah, I enjoy it because they’re our enemy,” he expressed.
Read also: IOF units ‘remediated’ after rights violations, no Leahy sanctions
NGO updates complaint to Met Police on UK ministers’ complicity in Israel war crimes
MEMO | May 22, 2024
An NGO has submitted a complaint to the United Kingdom’s Scotland Yard against Israel’s use of “starvation as a weapon of war” and targeting of Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip, in what is the latest such complaint regarding war crimes in Gaza to be reported to British police.
According to the London-based International Centre of Justice for Palestinians (ICJP), it submitted a complaint to Scotland Yard’s War Crimes Team regarding Israel’s suspected use of “starvation as a method of warfare” and for ‘wilfully causing great suffering’ to Palestinians.
Although filed in the UK, both crimes are illegal under British and international law, including under the Rome Statute and the International Criminal Court Act 2001. Using starvation as a weapon of war also violates the Geneva Convention, a major keystone of contemporary international law.
The 60-page complaint – which was added to by a further 800 pages of evidence – includes accounts collected by ICJP’s investigation and legal teams, which include former British police detectives who collected the evidence to the standards of British police forces.
The evidence reportedly includes that collected from first-hand eyewitnesses, expert reports and expert evidence from nineteen medical professionals who have worked within the besieged Gaza Strip since October, when Israel began its ongoing offensive.
According to ICJP’s Director, Tayab Ali, “Complicity comes in many forms, whether that be providing political cover, encouraging criminal acts, supplying weapons or, as in the case of starvation, withholding funds from agencies that provide life sustaining humanitarian aid”.
The extensive complaint notably builds upon and expands an existing complaint issued by the ICJP back in January this year, which named four British government ministers for alleged complicity and criminal responsibility in Israeli war crimes. This latest update, however, further implicates a fifth senior government minister as an alleged perpetrator of those crimes.
Due to the war crimes’ illegality under British law and subsequent ability to be prosecuted in the UK, Scotland Yard’s War Crimes Investigation Team will now reportedly consider the complaints leading up to an ultimate decision on whether to open a formal criminal investigation on the matter. If that proceeds, there is the possibility that police will then question, arrest, and prosecute the alleged perpetrators and those complicit.
READ ALSO: Boris Johnson accused of obstructing investigations into war crimes in Gaza
Report: Israel systematically abuses jailed Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti
MEMO | May 20, 2024
Jailed Palestinian leader, Marwan Barghouti, has been subjected to violations and torture, and spends days in a narrow, dark cell in solitary confinement, without any means to treat wounds he sustained as a result of being dragged with his hands tied behind his back, the Guardian revealed on Saturday.
The newspaper pointed out that books, newspapers and a television that he used to be able to access have been confiscated since October.
“The lights that flicker in his cell each evening are intended to make sleep near impossible,” it said.
His lawyer Igal Dotan, who visited Barghouti in Israel’s Megiddo Prison two months ago, told the paper that “mentally he’s a very strong person, but physically his condition is deteriorating, you can see it. He’s struggling to see out of his right eye, as a result of one of the assaults.”
“He has lost weight – he doesn’t look good. You wouldn’t recognise him if you compare his current appearance with the famous photos of him,” he said.
Barghouti told his lawyers that in March he was dragged to an area of the prison without security cameras and assaulted. He recalled bleeding from the nose as he was dragged across the floor by his handcuffs, before he was beaten unconscious.
Dotan counted bruises in at least three places on Barghouti’s body when he visited weeks later, adding that he probably has a dislocated shoulder from the assault and is in constant pain, but prison officials have refused a full medical examination of his injuries.
Since October, he has been transferred to three different detention facilities, and held in solitary confinement in each.
In Ayalon Prison “he was beaten on several occasions,” said Dotan, including an incident where guards swore at him while Barghouti was “dragged on the floor naked in front of other prisoners.”
Israelis use Palestinian kids as human shields: Rights group
Press TV – May 12, 2024
A Geneva-based rights group has condemned the Israeli regime forces for using children as human shields in their assaults on Palestinians.
The Defense for Children International (DCI) said it heard testimonies of three children who described how they were used as human shields by occupying Israeli forces during a recent search and assault operation in the West Bank’s Tulkarm refugee camp, the Middle East Eye on Sunday reported.
The DCI said the Palestinian children said on May 5 and May 6 Israeli soldiers had forced them to walk ahead of them as they searched through the refugee camp, describing two instances in which the Israeli regime forces had placed their rifles on their shoulders.
One teen named Kareem recounted how Israeli forces stormed his family’s apartment on May 6 and then forced him to lead them through the apartment block as they carried out a search operation in the building. The teen said the soldiers had placed a loaded rifle on his shoulders and fired two shots toward one of the apartment’s entrances.
Another child, Mohammad, said during a raid on his home, he was forcibly separated from his family by the Israeli forces.
“I remained alone with the soldiers after they instructed my mother and siblings to climb to the fourth floor of the building. I started crying and trembling with fear because I didn’t know what they would do to me. They were armed, masked, and their appearance was terrifying, accompanied by a large police dog making frightening noises,” Mohammad said.
He said they told him to knock on each apartment door in the building and tell the residents in the apartments to leave their homes.
Mohammad said if an apartment was empty and no one answered, the armed men would enter by force.
“When we reached the door of one of the apartments and found it empty, the soldiers blew up the door and forced me to enter alone to inspect it,” said the Palestinian child.
Ibrahim, another Palestinian teen, recounted how on the morning of May 6, Israeli forces stormed his family’s home in the Tulkarm refugee camp in a “brutal and terrifying manner,” searching and vandalizing their belongings.
He said, “A group of soldiers took me to one of the rooms and began interrogating me. When I told them I knew nothing, one of them threatened me in Arabic and said (I’ll smash you if you don’t talk). Then he physically assaulted me for several minutes before handcuffing my hands behind my back with a plastic tie. They then took me outside and asked me to walk in front of the soldiers.”
“I was trembling with fear and terror. At first, I thought they wanted to arrest me, but they asked me to walk in front of them in the alleys of the Al-Sawalme neighborhood in the camp. They would hide in the alley and ask me to show the way. After that, they released my hands, and every time we passed by a house or building, they would ask me to enter and ask the residents to leave and head towards the soldiers, after which they would raid those homes. During the raids, they would ask me to open the internal doors of the houses and apartments.”
Ibrahim said after about two hours of searching the camp, the Israelis took him to a house in the camp where he was detained alongside others until the Israeli forces withdrew from the camp.
In the meantime, the use of Palestinians as human shields by Israeli regime forces in numerous cases has been well documented by multiple human rights organizations.
Israeli regime forces put Palestinian civilians in front of them or otherwise put civilians in the line of fire, and force them to open doors that could be booby-trapped or remove suspicious objects that might be bombs. They also force them to walk through suspected booby-trapped buildings.
The Zionist forces also often employ the “neighbor procedure” in which Palestinian civilians are forced to attempt to persuade individuals to leave or surrender themselves.
“International law is explicit and absolutely prohibits the use of children as human shields by armed forces or armed groups,” said Ayed Abu Eqtaish, Accountability Program director at the DCIP, adding, “Israeli forces intentionally putting a child in grave danger in order to shield themselves constitutes a war crime.”
For decades, both Palestinian children as well as adults have been used by the Israeli forces during operations as human shields.
The use of civilians as human shields is one of many war crimes committed by the Israeli regime forces.
Israeli military not a professional army; its ground incursions look like Daesh attacks
By Robert Inlakesh | Al Mayadeen | May 11, 2024
The Israeli military’s ground assaults in the Gaza Strip have been punctuated by the discovery of mass graves, the publicizing of war crimes of occupation soldiers for fun, and a record of mass slaughter, human shield taking, and widespread torture. Although most modern armies have committed war crimes, the Israeli military does not operate like a professional force, but rather a collection of ill-disciplined racist militia groups.
On May 6, following the announcement by Hamas that they had accepted a ceasefire proposal, the Israeli leadership immediately struck down any prospect of a viable agreement being reached and its military began sending tanks toward Rafah, under a massive airstrike campaign. The first objective that the Israeli regime’s military sought to achieve was the capturing of the Rafah Crossing, situated roughly 3 kilometers from the separation barrier between Gaza and the rest of occupied Palestine.
While immediately shutting off Gaza completely, preventing aid trucks and civilian passage through to the Egyptian side of the border, the conduct of the Israeli soldiers was also important to pay attention to. According to the Zionist military, it was the Givati Brigade that was responsible for the storming of the Rafah Crossing. Instead of professionally carrying out their very simple task – driving tanks into an area that was not defended – they decided to film videos of themselves using their military vehicles to crush and demolish areas throughout the border crossing, which were shared online in order to brag about it. The crossing was desecrated, Israeli flags were flown in place of Palestinian ones, and, according to reports, around 20 workers at the crossing were either slaughtered or kidnapped.
The Givati Brigade is supposed to be some of the most well-trained in the Israeli army and is not like the reservists. They are also one of the two brigades that make up the Israeli Southern Command, which collapsed within an hour of the Hamas-led Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on October 7. What these forces were sent to do on May 6 was to violate the terms of the 1978 Camp David agreement, which normalized ties between Cairo and Tel Aviv, as they had entered the Philadelphia Corridor. Although the Egyptian client regime was not willing to declare this act of war a reason to throw away the Camp David agreement, the callous way in which the Zionist forces went about their de facto act of war against Egypt was telling.
The clear provocations by Israeli soldiers who decided to pull out their iPhones and film themselves destroying property for laughs at the Rafah Crossing are nothing new, however. Throughout the ground war in Gaza, Zionist soldiers have filmed themselves humiliating, beating, and posing with Palestinian civilians they have kidnapped. They also filmed themselves stealing property, smashing stores and homes, and defecating and urinating inside Palestinian houses, in addition to randomly blowing up buildings for fun. Israeli soldiers have also filmed themselves playing with women’s lingerie, even wearing it and dancing in it for videos, while hurling insults at Palestinian women. These soldiers then post these videos on social media to brag about their war crimes and sexually motivated actions. Perhaps the most voluminous archive of these videos has been compiled on the Twitter account of Palestinian reporter Younis Tirawi.
Another common theme for the Israeli military’s forces is to go on their phones and film themselves for Tiktok Livestreams, which has even aided the Palestinian Resistance in pinpointing their locations on occasion so that they can carry out operations using short-range rockets and mortar attacks.
If it was just a few instances of Israeli soldiers doing this sort of thing, followed by strong disciplining action from their superiors, then it could be put down to individual actions. This is clearly not the case. Instead, this fits into a trend within the Israeli military that has been ongoing for years. The issue came to a head in 2018 in fact, during the non-violent protest movement in Gaza called ‘The Great Return March’, where Israeli soldiers would publish videos of themselves shooting unarmed civilians and breaking out into laughter, and then posting the video on social media. At that time, by observing the Israeli media’s commentary on it, it became clear that their soldiers do not listen to orders and will even help companies test their weapons on the battlefield, putting aside their standard-issue weapons.
The issue of whether an Israeli soldier has the right to do as he/she pleases emerged in a major way back in 2016. A soldier operating in al-Khalil for the occupation forces, named Elor Azaria, decided to pull out his rifle and shoot a Palestinian man in the head after he was already severely injured and lay on the ground. The incident was filmed, causing an international backlash and forcing the Israeli military to act. In the end, a large group of Israeli society rallied behind Azaria and supported him in his alleged “right” to slaughter Abdel Fattah al-Sharif, even protesting and creating a fundraiser for him. In the end, he was sentenced to 18 months imprisonment. He only served 9 months and exited to a demotion in his rank in the army, yet he was not kicked out of the military.
From Elor Azaria until now, this problem has only grown inside the Israeli military. The issue is that the Israeli military is composed of ill-disciplined soldiers who feel that they can behave in any way they choose. What the war in Gaza has revealed is that this issue is not just a growing problem, but is the culture of the Israeli armed forces. Even the ease with which Israeli soldiers are given high ranks is embarrassing and has created an environment for its soldiers of “participation awards”, enabling soldiers who are ill-prepared to be promoted and get to rule over other soldiers who have no idea what they are doing.
When you have a military force of this nature, formed of entitled ethnic-supremacists who feel like they can behave however they choose, it is a recipe for disaster when you send them into an urban warfare combat zone, densely populated by a civilian population they are indoctrinated to believe are inferior to them. Now add on top of this the religious supremacist element to it, where even the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is calling the people of Gaza “Amalek”, and it becomes clear why these ill-disciplined, entitled, racist, and ill-trained soldiers are carrying out a violent crusade against civilians.
This is why we see the Israeli military looting homes and businesses. This is why we see such mass scale torture, sexual humiliation, and even the rape of Palestinian women. It also explains why the Israeli military committed its series of what has been dubbed ‘Flour Massacres’, murdering over a thousand people who are waiting for food aid in various areas of Gaza, the worst cases being in the North of the besieged coastal enclave.
We have seen the evidence, presented at the International Court of Justice, showing Israeli soldiers chanting on films about their intention to kill “Amelek” arguing that there are no innocent civilians. The whole world has also seen drone footage of Israeli forces using their unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to launch targeted strikes on groups of civilians walking in open areas, in addition to drone footage clearly showing Israeli soldiers using human shields. The Zionist military even shot dead their own prisoners in the al-Shujaiyah neighborhood, while waving their shirts as white flags.
The mass graves that are being uncovered throughout the Gaza Strip produce evidence that civilians were buried alive, stripped naked, and tied up before being executed, with many even showing signs of torture and that they were chucked in black bags among garbage. There are also the two most prominent mass grave cases, revealed after the Israeli army withdrew from the Al-Shifa Hospital and the Nasser Hospital complex.
Women, children, elderly individuals, journalists, UN employees, doctors, civil defense teams, disabled people, and even foreign aid workers were all carelessly slaughtered in the most inhumane ways possible and even with precision weapons.
It is not only the case in Gaza, as in southern Lebanon there is the case of 7 volunteer healthcare workers who were murdered with a precision weapon that completely destroyed the ambulance center they were stationed at.
This is the method of the Israeli military, chaos and insane precision strikes on civilian targets. While many of the killings were clearly ordered up the chain of command when such war crimes are carried out at a pre-approved level, why would soldiers on the ground care about the laws of war? They clearly see that no law applies to them. They don’t even bother changing their tactics often either, an example of this being that the Palestinian Resistance has filmed its operations targeting soldiers who stand in the windows of occupied buildings. Throughout the entire ground war, we see videos of Israeli soldiers making this obvious and stupid mistake. In one case, it appears that an Israeli soldier was smoking marijuana out of a bong when he was killed by a Yassin warhead.
All the abovementioned is meant to say that an invasion of Rafah’s population center, where some 1.4 million displaced civilians are packed into a densely populated area, is understood to be such a major catastrophe because of the nature of what the Israeli military is. This is not a professional army, for the most part, the soldiers are unprepared for what they are sent to face. They are cowardly and trigger-happy, knowing that no consequences will come for opening fire randomly when they freak out. They also have the space to freely carry out their racially and religiously motivated desires by inflicting any pain on civilians that they see fit. The Israeli soldiers know that they will never be held accountable, maybe receiving a slap on the wrist being the worst-case scenario, so they commit unspeakable acts on a daily basis.
Instead of the Israeli military being referred to as an army, it would be more appropriate to call them a collection of ethno-supremacist militias. They do whatever they like and will never be held accountable, serving a population that also believes in their genocidal mentality. There are only three discernable differences between the Israeli militia forces and their Daesh counterparts: Daesh are more willing to die for their sectarian cause, the Israelis inflict much higher civilian death tolls, and they do it with the latest in modern military equipment that is in endless supply from their Western backers.
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From the Archive
Zionism’s Violent Legacy
By Donald Neff | Washington Report On Middle East Affairs | January 1996
On January 4, 1948, Jewish terrorists drove a truck loaded with explosives into the center of the all Arab city of Jaffa and detonated it, killing 26 and wounding around 100 Palestinian men, women and children.[1] The attack was the work of the Irgun Zvai Leumi – the “National Military Organization,” also known by the Hebrew letters Etzel – the largest Jewish terrorist group in Palestine. The Irgun was headed by Revisionist Zionist Menachem Begin and had been killing and maiming Arabs, Britons and even Jews for the previous ten years in its efforts to establish a Jewish state.
This terror campaign meant that at the core of Revisionist Zionism there existed a philosophical embrace of violence. … continue
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