US Secretary of State Tony Blinken asked the Qatari prime minister to tone down Al-Jazeera’s rhetoric about the war in Gaza one week after Israel’s bombing campaign began, Axiosreported on 25 October.
Blinken revealed the request when speaking with a group of American Jewish community leaders on Monday, according to three people who attended the meeting.
Blinken said he asked the Qataris during a visit to Doha on 13 October to “turn down the volume on Al Jazeera’s coverage because it is full of anti-Israel incitement,” according to one source speaking with Axios.
Blinken didn’t give any examples of the heightened rhetoric he asked to be dialed back.
Footage appearing on Al-Jazeera has vividly shown the effects of Israel’s devastating bombing campaign on Gaza, which has destroyed entire neighborhoods, hospitals, schools and markets. Israeli bombing has killed 6,546 Palestinians, including 2,360 children, in the three weeks since Hamas’ surprise attack on Israel on 7 October.
The Al-Jazeera satellite news channel is funded by the Qatari government and has a wide audience in the Sunni Arab world. Critics say its coverage reflects the foreign policy position of Qatar, which is a close ally of the United States, but also funds Hamas.
Meanwhile, Al-Jazeerasaid the wife, son and daughter of one of its correspondents in Gaza were killed on Wednesday night in an Israeli air strike on the Nuseirat refugee camp that killed at least 25 people, according to the Gaza health ministry.
Al-Jazeera said the correspondent, Wael al-Dahdouh, had moved his family to Nuseirat from their home in northern Gaza after Israel warned residents to move south ahead of an expected Israeli ground invasion.
On Sunday, Israel killed Palestinian journalist Roshdi Sarraj when it launched an air strike on the Tel al-Hawa neighborhood in Gaza City,
According to the local WAFA news agency, the bombing of Tel al-Hawa was among many raids the Israeli army carried out in Gaza that day, killing at least 32 Palestinians.
Roshdi’s apartment was damaged in the first week of the war prompting him to take his wife Shorouq and one-year-old daughter Dania to their extended family home in Tel al-Hawa.
“The Israelis were bombing our area with no let-up,” said Yahya al-Sarraj, Roshdi’s father and municipal mayor of Gaza City. “Roshdi tried to shield his wife and daughter when the Israeli air raid struck.”
Israel has killed 22 Palestinian journalists in Gaza since the beginning of the conflict.
Israeli Minister Benny Gantz has reportedly told residents of settlements near Gaza that it is possible they might not be able to return to their homes for a year, Israel’s Channel 12 reported yesterday.
According to the channel, Gantz told residents of Zikim and Netiv Haasara who were evacuated in the aftermath of the surprise infiltration by Palestinian resistance forces on 7 October, that it is possible they will continue to live in hotels for three months before being transferred to alternative housing near the occupied city of Jerusalem.
Last week, Gantz said during an Israeli cabinet meeting with US President Joe Biden that “the process of dismantling Hamas and changing the reality in Gaza will be long and may take years.”
Israel has completely evacuated all residents of the Gaza envelope and the city of Sderot and areas in the city of Ashkelon. Israel has also evacuated residents of settlements near the border with Lebanon for fear of a new front opening with Hezbollah.
The Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip since 2007 has caused a fall in real GDP per capita and a sharp increase in unemployment across the enclave, a fresh report by the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) showed on Wednesday.
“In the period 2006–2022, the population of Gaza grew by 61%, but GDP grew by only 1.1% and real GDP per capita shrank by 27%, from $1,994 in 2006 to $1,257 in 2022, compared with $2,923 and $4,458 in the West Bank, respectively,” the UNCTAD said in the report on its assistance to the Palestinian people.
During the same period, the Gaza Strip saw a 157% increase in the number of unemployed workers, with unemployment rising to 45.3% from 34.8%. Meanwhile, restrictions on the domestic market caused structural changes in the enclave’s economy, the report read.
“This ratio fell to 44% with the onset of the restrictions and closures in 2007 and reached an all-time low in 2021, at 27.7%. The economy of Gaza has undergone a significant structural distortion because of restrictions on movement, limited access to imported inputs, the destruction of the productive base and semi-autarkic isolation from domestic and global markets,” the report read.
In 2007, after Palestinian movement Hamas seized control over the Gaza Strip [after winning elections], Israel imposed a blockade and reduced exports to the region to a humanitarian minimum, while completely banning imports from the enclave. The situation persisted for the next 16 years, although some of the restrictions were altered.
Hamas launched a surprise large-scale rocket attack against Israel from the Gaza Strip on October 7 and breached the border. Israel launched retaliatory strikes and ordered a complete blockade of the Gaza Strip, home to more than 2 million people, cutting off supplies of water, food and fuel.
The blockade was later eased to allow trucks with humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip. The escalation of the conflict has resulted in thousands of people killed and injured on both sides.
The White House and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) knew in April 2021 that the Pfizer COVID-19 mRNA vaccine was linked to heart damage on an unprecedented scale for a vaccine — but they hid that knowledge from the public while pushing vaccine mandates, according to emails obtained by DailyClout through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.
The emails show the White House communications team struggling to craft a cover-up message on email chains that included Dr. Anthony Fauci, then-director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and chief medical advisor to President Biden; CDC Director Rochelle Walensky; Dr. Janet Woodcock, then-acting commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy and Dr. Francis Collins, then-director the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
A number of high-level public health officials worked with upper-echelon leadership to craft a “Myocarditis Email” that minimized the relationship between COVID-19 mRNA vaccines and myocarditis,” said Amy Kelly, program director for the War Room/DailyClout Pfizer Documents Analysis Project.
According to Kelly, the officials included: Ian Sams, COVID-19 response and special assistant to the president and senior advisor and spokesman for the White House; Abbigail Tumpey, then-associate director for communication science for the CDC’s Public Health Infrastructure; and Dr. Dana Meaney-Delman, CDC lead on maternal immunization and CDC chief of Infant Outcomes Monitoring Research and Prevention Branch.
The FOIA emails were obtained by Edward Berkovich, one of 250 volunteer attorneys Kelly oversees on the DailyClout and War Room Project to analyze the court-ordered, FDA-released 450,000 pages of Pfizer’s records on its mRNA COVID-19 vaccine — records the drug maker tried unsuccessfully to keep private for 75 years.
The War Room-DailyClout Project was founded by bestselling author and journalist Naomi Wolf, a former advisor to the Clinton campaign, in collaboration with Steve Bannon, former advisor to President Trump and podcaster on “The War Room.”
In addition to volunteer attorneys, Kelly oversees approximately 3250 volunteer doctors, nurses, scientists and others who are reviewing the documents. They’ve issued 89 investigative reports, including the Oct. 18 report on the myocarditis cover-up evident in FOIA emails.
“Astonishingly, the emails reveal that the most senior of leaders, all the way up to the White House, knew about heart damage linked to mRNA vaccines,” Kelly said. “Yet they “colluded behind the scenes to conceal this side effect from the American people.”
Anyone can study the three FOIA releases of emails at dailyclout.io, Kelly said.
“What I think most important is to see who all is involved,” she said. “I believe 105 different people are on the emails, a whole slew of people at the White House, CDC, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, NIAID, Pfizer, some children’s hospitals and organizations and some other external people,” Kelly said.
“My takeaway from seeing this is that everyone, all over the public health agencies, knew there was an issue” with myocarditis dangers linked to the COVID-19 vaccines, Kelly said. Yet “when you read through the emails, you see they are crafting messages to downplay the significance of myocarditis and the vaccines, all the the way up to the White House.”
“They said, ‘We’re seeing a myocarditis signal and we’re happy to share information with you,’” she said. “The CDC actually didn’t even respond to the first email as far as I can tell. So the Israeli Ministry of Health emailed again March 2, ‘Hey we’re seeing this myocarditis signal, we’re concerned, let’s discuss it if you want.’”
White House created 17-page script to ‘keep everyone on message’
The FOIA email trove was a frequent topic of discussion Saturday at the “Summit for Truth,” which brought together leaders of the health freedom movement at the Bethel Christian Fellowship church and community center in downtown Rochester, New York.
Wolf was the keynote speaker in a lineup that included Dr. Robert Malone, Dr. Ryan Cole, attorney Bobbie Ann Cox, and Brownstone Institute publisher and writer Jeffrey Tucker.
Wolf spoke about her journey from feminist icon to outcast from the liberal media establishment when she questioned the safety of the COVID-19 shots.
She has written two books on her experience investigating and reporting on the pandemic. They include, “The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians, COVID-19 and the War Against the Human,” and the forthcoming “Facing the Beast: Courage, Faith, and Resistance in a New Dark Age.”
During a panel discussion Saturday, Wolf called the White House involvement in a cover-up of vaccine dangers “absolutely shocking.”
Berkovich’s FOIA request was aided by “a whistleblower at the CDC,” Wolf said, who was “throwing the White House under the bus.”
“In addition to the pages he had asked for, he got 46 pages he didn’t request that showed the White House communications team was “freaking out at the highest levels in April of 2021, because news of blood clots and heart damage had reached them,” Wolf said.
“Instead of coming clean with the American people and pulling this injection off the market, they looped in Dr. Fauci, Dr. Collins, Dr. Walensky and created a script,” she said.
It was “a 17-page script, their word, which is wholly redacted, to keep everyone on message and downplay the dangers. And in fact if you recall from 2021, rather than pulling this injection off the market, they mandated it. They doubled down and mandated it.”
Wolf said the emails reveal “a massive crime.”
They show a template was prepared to email to “POTUS, which stands for president of the United States,” to keep the president up to date on the email discussions among the top U.S. public-health officials on myocarditis and vaccines, Wolf said.
“Dr. Wallensky was on the emails, Dr. Fauci, Dr. Collins,” she said. “The entire White House communications team was driving the discussion.”
“They were reacting to the fact that blood clots and heart damage had been presented to them at scale and that the American Association of Pediatrics was warning them about myocarditis in teens, a serious, sometimes fatal disease that needs constant management. Instead of coming clean with the American people… they doubled down and made a strategy to cover it up.”
Public-health officials went ahead with mandates for the Pizer COVID-19 vaccine, “knowing it was killing people,” Wolf said.
Dr. Peter McCullough, one of the most highly published cardiologists in the world, said the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines should have been pulled from the market in January 2021, after “no more than 50 deaths” — the previous government standard to guarantee the safety of a biologic product.
McCullough said FDA records show the agency expected a myocarditis risk from the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines as early as Oct. 22, 2020.
“If they had reported these deaths, there would have been a three- to four-fold excess cardiovascular risk with Pfizer in the core slides at the Dec. 10, 2020 meeting and Pfizer would never have been approved,” he said.
McCullough said the myocarditis cover-up has killed untold thousands of Americans.
He pointed to his research paper with other scientists including Dr. William Makis. They performed a systematic review of “all published autopsy reports involving COVID-19 vaccination-related myocarditis” through July 3, 2023.
The paper concluded “there is a high likelihood of a causal link between COVID-19 vaccines and death from suspected myocarditis in cases where sudden, unexpected death has occurred in a vaccinated person.”
McCullough and colleagues concluded that “urgent investigation is required for the purpose of risk stratification and mitigation in order to reduce the population occurrence of fatal COVID-19 vaccine-induced myocarditis.”
Dr. Bruce Boros, a Key West, Florida cardiologist who was one of the first American physicians to use ivermectin for early COVID-19 treatment based on his resarch of the emerging literature, said recent studies show that the RNA from the COVID-19 vaccines “goes right to the heart.”
A study that applied the Moderna and Pfizer vaccine to heart muscle cells in culture “showed direct evidence that within 48 hours there was heart dysfunction, mechanical and electrical chaos,” Boros said.
Young athletes dropping dead from heart failure at unprecedented rates are “almost assuredly suffering” myocarditis symptoms brought on by the shots, he said.
“Everybody who received the shot had some damage to the heart muscle,” Boros said. “They knew it in the preclinical studies and they covered it up. All the signals were there, the FDA went ahead and approved it anyway.
“It’s all a money game, a eugenics game, and they’re continuing to say you need to get a booster,” Boros said. “Now every child in the world should get this shot for a virus that has been falsely normalized as dangerous when the risk, especially for children, is essentially zero when it comes to death,” he said.
“It saddens me,” Boros concluded. “We need to remember this was created as a bioweapon, and hold our government accountable.”
Mike Capuzzo is the managing editor of The Defender. He is a former prize-winning reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Miami Herald, a science writer, and a regional magazine founding editor and publisher who has won more than 200 journalism awards as a writer, editor and publisher.
Did Pfizer deliberately deceive regulators about contamination of its COVID-19 vaccine? Yes, according to Kevin McKernan, chief scientific officer and founder of Medicinal Genomics.
Appearing on CHD.TV with Children’s Health Defense (CHD) President Mary Holland and Brian Hooker, Ph.D., CHD’s senior director of science and research, McKernan explained how Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine is contaminated with plasmid DNA, which should not be present in an mRNA vaccine.
He said this raises concerns that the plasmid DNA could lead to cancers or autoimmune issues in some vaccine recipients.
McKernan said that annotating Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine sequence with a simple online tool — which any trained person can do — reveals the presence of DNA from simian virus 40 (SV40).
But in the data it gave to regulators, Pfizer deleted the annotation of the SV40 DNA and did not disclose its presence. That deletion, McKernan said, shows “intent to deceive.”
This raises serious questions about the vaccine’s safety that must be investigated, McKernan said. It also suggests major problems with the mRNA vaccine regulatory process.
After McKernan’s lab made its findings public, and other researchers confirmed them, Health Canada also confirmed that the Pfizer vaccine contains this DNA. However, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has neither confirmed nor denied the presence of these billions of plasmid DNA fragments in Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine.
The FDA told reporter Maryanne Demasi, Ph.D., who questioned the agency on the issue, that it remains “confident in the quality, safety, and effectiveness of these vaccines.”
McKernan and his team stumbled accidentally on what Holland called an “incredibly important finding” when they used the RNA from the Pfizer vaccine — which they assumed was a functional pharmaceutical grade RNA — as a control to test the RNA purification system they were using in other work the lab was conducting.
In the process, they tested vaccines and found that instead of only containing mRNA, the Pfizer vaccines also contained DNA plasmids — small, circular, double-stranded DNA molecules distinct from a cell’s chromosomal DNA.
How did the contaminant DNA get into the vaccines?
McKernan explained that to synthesize the RNA for the vaccines, labs use a process called “in vitro transcription” whereby an RNA-making enzyme called an RNA polymerase uses a DNA template to synthesize RNA molecules.
“It’s like the ink for your Xerox machine,” McKernan said.
But the DNA first has to be amplified. For the clinical trials, Pfizer amplified the DNA using PCR (polymerase chain reaction), a method it called “Process 1.” McKernan said this process is ideal because it amplifies the DNA a millionfold. As a result, “There’s no residual background. You get a really clean piece of DNA that you can make your RNA from.”
But to scale up the process to mass produce vaccines for the public, McKernan said, Pfizer did a “bait-and-switch,” producing the vaccines using “Process 2.”
Process 2 includes “changes to the DNA template used to transcribe the RNA and the purification phase, as well as the manufacturing process of the lipid nanoparticles,” Josh Gueztkow and Retsef Levin wrote in a letter, published in the BMJ, which raised concerns with the process.
For Process 2, rather than amplifying DNA with PCR to make the template, vaccine makers amplified the DNA by plugging it into a bacterial plasmid vector, which uses E. coli for rapid amplification, but runs the risk of introducing sequences not present in the initial DNA, McKernan said.
This creates a practically infinite supply of DNA much more cheaply and easily than using PCR, he added.
But this DNA template comes with additional risk because the DNA of the plasmid used to create the template has to be removed from the vaccine before it can be injected into people.
He said it is clear the vaccine makers tried to get rid of that DNA by “chewing it up with an enzyme” called deoxyribonuclease, or DNase, which breaks down DNA, but they failed to eliminate it completely.
Why didn’t the DNA-destroying enzymes eliminate the DNA?
McKernan told Holland and Hooker the DNase failed to fully eliminate the contaminant DNA fragments from the vaccines delivered to the market because of the modifications they made to the RNA in order to make the mRNA vaccines function, and because of “blind spots” in how they measured the amount of residual DNA.
To make the mRNA vaccines work the way they wanted to, the vaccine designers had to make the RNA slightly more durable than usual, he said.
DNA, he said, is like a hard drive — it’s a long-lived form of information storage. RNA is temporary — like the task manager of the programs that are opening and closing on the hard drive.
Those programs and the RNA itself, get turned on and off. For RNA, an enzyme called RNase functions as an on/off switch.
The makers of the mRNA vaccines added a nucleotide, N1-Methylpseudouridine, that stopped the RNA from turning off right away so it would remain present to ensure the spike protein was produced “long enough to matter,” McKernan said.
That made the RNA “extraordinarily sticky,” so when the RNA polymerase copies the RNA off of the DNA template, it accidentally makes some RNA-DNA hybrids, a triple helix.
In that context, the DNase enzyme that was supposed to get rid of the template DNA can’t function properly.
McKernan said it was likely that the vaccine developers didn’t anticipate that would happen and they would therefore need to develop different enzymes.
“I think with the Warp Speed program, they didn’t really have time to investigate this,” he said.
The second reason the DNA is still there, he said, is because of the tools Pfizer used to measure the DNA and the RNA. Pfizer could measure them both with a single tool, called fluorometry, which can identify very tiny pieces of DNA and RNA.
But, he said, instead Pfizer is using fluorometry only for the RNA, which will give the vaccine developers inflated numbers, and the vaccine maker is using a different tool, called qPCR for the DNA, which can’t identify such small pieces of DNA and so will produce deflated numbers.
“They are playing some games” with these measuring tools, McKernan said, because regulators will want them to have high RNA numbers and low DNA numbers — and by measuring RNA and DNA with different tools, that’s exactly what they get.
That, he said, suggests “intent to deceive.”
What’s in the DNA and why should we be concerned?
Hooker asked McKernan to explain what “is hiding” in this remnant DNA and why people should be concerned.
McKernan said “hiding” was an apt term, because Pfizer gave the whole sequence to the regulators, but only annotated certain parts of it, which allowed it to hide some of the contents.
He said anyone can plug the sequence into a standard annotation software tool like SnapGene, and it automatically annotates the entire sequence — and he wrote a Substack post showing people how to do this.
He also showed Holland and Hooker a side-by-side comparison of the software’s annotation and Pfizer’s annotation, and he showed them where a key annotation was missing in Pfizer’s regulatory submission.
McKernan said that annotation marked the location of the fragments of SV40 virus— which Pfizer used as the necessary promoter and enhancer to drive gene transcription during the vaccine manufacturing process.
Someone had to delete those annotations before giving them to the regulators, he said.
SV40 is controversial because it was an artifact of the live polio vaccine and some experts say it is a cancer risk due to potential integration with the human genome.
To really understand the possible risks, McKernan said, more data have to be collected.
“We have a lot of reasons to believe this is a bad idea. They don’t need this DNA in there. They didn’t tell the regulators about it.”
He added:
“So all of that is a train wreck. If you’re putting in 200 billion of these molecules per shot and you’re doing them five times a year … I don’t know how many times people are taking them, but if you think of your schedule, you should be past your fifth by now. So there’s a cumulative dosing problem here. There’s a high number of these fragments in there.”
Even though the amount of DNA overall may be small, McKernan said, it has been fragmented into tiny pieces that make it “like a buckshot,” meaning it scatters like a shotgun bullet, hitting a broad area, which makes them “much more potent as integration tools because you have more active ends of DNA.”
Concerns beyond SV40: gene therapy and ‘open reading frames’
The U.S. regulatory structure is completely outdated, McKernan said. The current regulations allow for fairly high quantities of DNA because they are based on the idea that the DNA takes the form of a dead virus.
Hooker said, “We were told this [mRNA] would not target the nucleus. Is the nuclear targeting sequence the SV40 enhancer?”
McKernan said it is. In fact, he said, SV40 has been successfully researched as a gene therapy tool.
“There’s just no debate anymore. The plasmids that are in there are gene therapy tools, and they’re injected into billions of people,” he said.
Holland asked, “So not only was there no informed consent for anybody, and this was Emergency Use Authorization, so, by law, they weren’t able to give truly informed consent, but it looks like this was a gene therapy, and people were not told that this was a gene therapy. Is that right?”
“That’s right,” McKernan responded.
Holland asked McKernan whether, now that Health Canada acknowledged the presence of SV40, he thought all governments should take the vaccine off the market until this issue is investigated.
“I would think so,” McKernan said. “If they don’t do this, what are they there for?”
McKernan said he also identified other concerns in Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine sequence.
For example, he showed Holland and Hooker that the sequence contains an Open Reading Frame — a DNA sequence with no “stop codon” or stop signal — that is 1,252 amino acids long on the reverse strand of the spike protein in the Pfizer sequence.
Despite extensive research, he said, he can’t identify what it is. “I don’t know what this does, but I know that this is an artifact of their codon optimization that should not be there and is a massive risk and they should get rid of it.”
Hooker asked what the implications of that might be. McKernan said it was unknown, but regulators should never have let it through because it is “risk with no gain and it’s unnecessary.”
Brenda Baletti Ph.D. is a reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.
Washington is preparing contingencies for a “worst-case scenario” of being forced to evacuate hundreds of thousands of US citizens from West Asia, according to several US officials who spoke with the Washington Post on 23 October.
“[US citizens] living in Israel and neighboring Lebanon are of particular concern,” the officials said. According to State Department data, about 600,000 US citizens were in Israel and another 86,000 in Lebanon when Operation Al-Aqsa Flood was launched.
The contingency plan is being prepared in response to widespread anger over Washington’s blind support for Israel’s genocide campaign of Palestinians in Gaza.
As of 24 October, over 5,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli jets in the coastal enclave – nearly half of them children.
Since the start of the genocide in Gaza, US and Israeli embassies have been targeted by furious protesters across the region demanding an end to the bloodshed. In response, the State Department issued a worldwide travel advisory for US citizens last week, citing “increased tensions in various locations around the world, the potential for terrorist attacks, [and] demonstrations or violent actions against US citizens and interests.”
Furthermore, over the past several days, US military bases in Iraq and Syria have been targeted near-daily by resistance factions, forcing the Pentagon to deploy more air defense systems to protect their troops.
These systems will come on top of already-deployed warships carrying thousands of troops and dozens of warplanes to the Eastern Mediterranean, as Washington is warning that a “broader escalation” is possible “in the days ahead.”
The US has rapidly expanded military deployments across the region to back Israel’s assault on Gaza, as historians warn that the occupation state is carrying out a “textbook case of genocide” in the besieged enclave.
Open-source information gathered by Haaretz newspaper reveals that close to 80 US military planes and dozens of leased civilian aircraft are hauling equipment, with massive arms airlifted to Israel and Cyprus and fighter squadrons and Special Forces in Jordan.
At least 62 US and Israeli transport aircraft had landed in Israel by Sunday night, delivering arms and spare parts. Civilian planes leased by the US and Israeli defence establishments are being used for the airlifts.
Even larger numbers of US transports are deploying forces and armaments to bases in Jordan and Cyprus. This includes two fighter squadrons and Special Forces now stationed in Jordan, while 20 planes offloaded cargo from NATO depots at British bases in Cyprus.
Advocacy groups accuse the US of rushing to re-supply weapons used by Israel on Gaza civilians. They argue Washington is seeking to ensure Israel’s long-term military dominance over Palestinians. Activists warn the influx risks further regional conflagration.
Since Israel began its bombardment of the besieged enclave, over 30 US heavy transports have landed in Israel, many delivering advanced weaponry. Others brought officials like Secretary Blinken, while some transported armoured vehicles.
US and Israeli Air Force planes have also flown repeatedly into Europe, likely procuring more arms. Meanwhile, an aircraft carrier group armed with cruise missiles operates near Cyprus alongside missile defence systems deployed by the US.
A second carrier group is soon expected in the Mediterranean, though its destination remains uncertain.
Analysts caution the expansive US military activity enables further repression of Palestinians. Continued unconditional aid, irrespective of Israel’s actions, removes incentives for restraint, they argue.
Some warn active US replenishment of bombs dropped on Gaza may fuel cycles of violence, hindering de-escalation. With two carrier groups nearby, the fear is that planning for the next war has already begun.
The massive arms influx has made the power imbalance enabling Israeli impunity even starker, analysts say. While Gaza lies in ruins, Israel enjoys limitless supply from its superpower patron.
They urge greater scrutiny over whether US actions serve regional security or purely Israeli interests. Platitudes about restraint and “self-defence” ring hollow to Palestinians, they note, when American planes rush in vast stockpiles of bombs.
Israeli historian, Raz Segal, has condemned the latest bombing of Gaza saying that it is a “textbook case of genocide.”
If the UN agency responsible for Palestinian refugees needs fuel, it can ask Hamas for some, the Israel Defense Force (IDF) said on Tuesday, in response to UNRWA’s appeals for humanitarian aid to Gaza.
“These fuel tanks are inside Gaza. They contain more than 500,000 liters of fuel. Ask Hamas if you can have some,” the IDF said on X, formerly Twitter, accompanied by a satellite photo of a dozen objects near Rafah.
It was a direct reply to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), which had posted earlier, “If we do not get fuel urgently, we will be forced to halt our operations in the Gaza Strip as of tomorrow night,” meaning Wednesday.
Israel imposed a total blockade on Gaza after the October 7 incursion by Hamas, which claimed the lives of an estimated 1,400 Israelis, with another 200 or so taken hostage. The IDF has also bombed Gaza with artillery and airplanes, vowing to “dismantle” Hamas.
Asked about the progress of humanitarian aid to Gaza on Tuesday, US President Joe Biden told reporters it was “not fast enough.” A convoy of 20 trucks supposed to deliver aid to the Palestinian territory from Egypt is expected by Wednesday.
Dr. Ghassan Abu Sittah, a north London surgeon who volunteers at the Al Shifa hospital in Gaza City, told BBC that the aid convoy was a “gimmick.”
“When you send 15-20 trucks to a place with two and a quarter million people, you do it so that it appears that there’s aid coming in. Not that you have any intention of altering the outcome for the 15,000 wounded,” Abu Sittah said.
He added that the hospital had received 600 dead Palestinians over the past 24 hours and “three times as many wounded.” Supplies are running out, and another 1,800 or so civilians have sought shelter inside from Israeli airstrikes.
“They’re everywhere. They’re in the corridor and floors, they’re in the wards on the floor. Mattresses everywhere,” Abu Sittah said.
According to the Gaza Health Ministry, as of Tuesday evening, a total of 5,791 Palestinians have been killed and another 16,300 wounded since October 7.
Every day since 7 October has been yet another 24 hours of Israel killing Palestinians in Gaza. Water and electricity cut off, food and medicine denied, all that Gaza receives day and night are more and more bombs and devastation.
Twenty-two hospitals in Northern Gaza were told to evacuate thousands of critically wounded patients, or face bombing by land, air and sea, so the targeting of Al-Ahli Hospital was on the cards of the aggressors; there were even two smaller air strikes a couple of days before last Tuesday’s bombing. They might have lulled the hospital administration into thinking that they had already had their share of Israeli persecution.
The news of the bombing of Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza sent a feeling of paralytic numbness into many of us. As the death toll rose, the mainstream media tried to convince us that the Palestinians had done this to themselves; that this was a missile aimed at Israel which went wrong. Many of my friends chose to believe this.
The lie compounds my pain and anguish, for no matter who dropped the bomb or where it came from the urgent need is to stop other hospitals from suffering the same fate. I am devastated, because Al-Ahli is the only Christian foundation hospital in the Gaza Strip and it is well loved by everyone, Christians and Muslims alike. It was built by the Church Mission Society around 1900.
I worked and lived in the hospital in 1988-89 having answered a request from the Bishop of Jerusalem to look after the wounded of the First Intifada. I told the Bishop I would look after and protect them. I did so until I was barred from entering Gaza by the Israeli occupation authorities.
The bomb came without warning
When the bomb hit, many people were sheltering in Al-Ahli as it is a Christian hospital. There was no other place of safety, and there is also a precious water fountain in the hospital courtyard to drink from, a blessing with the current lack of fresh water in Gaza. The bomb came without warning, targeting the centre of the courtyard where hundreds of people were taking refuge. They were killed. Hundreds of bodies were lying in the hospital courtyard, with many children among those killed. This was not fake news.
Although I am not allowed to enter Occupied Palestine, the people and my colleagues working so hard despite desperate shortages are always in my heart as I am in theirs. Their smiles and their love for their patients keep coming back to me as I write this through my own tears. I wish I could be with them at this terrible time. Professor Ghassan Abu Sitta is now working there to help the wounded but I know he must be completely exhausted.
Please pray for those who have been killed and wounded. Console the mourners and stand in solidarity with the people of Gaza. Do not despair, as this is the moment we must all stand firm and speak up to protect Gaza and its people.
Evidence is now emerging that up to half the Israelis killed were combatants; that Israeli forces were responsible for some of their own civilian deaths; and that Tel Aviv disseminated false ‘Hamas atrocities’ stories to justify its devastating air assault on Palestinian civilians in Gaza.
Two weeks after the Hamas breakout assault on Israel on 7 October, a clearer picture of what happened – who died, and who killed – is now beginning to emerge.
Instead of the wholescale massacre of civilians claimed by Israel, incomplete figures published by the Hebrew newspaper Haaretz show that almost half the Israelis killed that day were in fact combatants – soldiers or police.
In the interim, two weeks of blanket western media reporting that Hamas allegedly killed around 1,400 Israeli civilians during its 7 October military attack has served to inflame emotions and create the climate for Israel’s unconstrained destruction of the Gaza Strip and its civilian population.
Accounts of the Israeli death toll have been filtered and shaped to suggest that a wholesale civilian massacre occurred that day, with babies, children, and women the main targets of a terror attack.
Now, detailed statistics on the casualties released by the Israeli daily Haaretz paint a starkly different picture. As of 23 October, the news outlet has released information on 683 Israelis killed during the Hamas-led offensive, including their names and locations of their deaths on 7 October.
Of these, 331 casualties – or 48.4 percent – have been confirmed to be soldiers and police officers, many of them female. Another 13 are described as rescue service members, and the remaining 339 are ostensibly considered to be civilians.
While this list is not comprehensive and only accounts for roughly half of Israel’s stated death toll, almost half of those killed in the melee are clearly identified as Israeli combatants.
There are also so far no recorded deaths of children under the age of three, which throws into question the Israeli narrative that babies were targeted by Palestinian resistance fighters. Of the 683 total casualties reported thus far, seven were between the ages of 4 and 7, and nine between the ages of 10 and 17. The remaining 667 casualties appear to be adults.
Age distribution of the Israelis killed during Hamas’ October 7 operation (as of 23 October).
The numbers and proportion of Palestinian civilians and children among those killed by Israeli bombardment over the past two weeks – over 5,791 killed, including 2,360 children and 1,292 women, and more than 18,000 injured – are far higher than any of these Israeli figures from the events of 7 October.
Revisiting the scene
The daring Hamas-led military operation, codenamed Al-Aqsa Flood, unfolded with a dramatic dawn raid at approximately 6:30 AM (Palestine time) on 7 October. This was accompanied by a cacophony of sirens breaking the silence of occupied Jerusalem, signaling the start of what became an extraordinary event in the occupation state’s 75-year history.
As per the spokesperson of Hamas’ armed wing, the Al-Qassam Brigades, around 1,500 Palestinian fighters crossed the formidable Gaza-Israel separation barrier.
However, this breakout was not limited to Hamas forces alone; numerous armed fighters belonging to other factions such as Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) later breached the armistice line, along with some Palestinians unaffiliated with any organized militia.
As it became apparent this was no ordinary resistance operation, hundreds of videos quickly flooded social media, most of which have been viewed by The Cradle, depicting dead Israeli troops and settlers, fierce gunfire battles between various parties, and Israelis being taken captive into Gaza.
These videos were either taken on the phones of Israelis, or were released by Palestinian fighters filming their own operation. It wasn’t until hours later that more gruesome and downright dubious allegations began to surface.
She posted this on X at 9:18 PM (Palestine time), on 7 October, although an op-ed Klompa published with Newsweek at 12:28 AM (Palestine time), on 8 October, made no mention of any sexual violence.
Klompas is also the co-founder of Boundless Israel, a “think-action tank” that works “to revitalize Israel education and take bold collective action to combat Jew-hatred.” An “unapologetically Zionist” charitable group that works to promote Israeli narratives on social media.
The one case touted as proof of rape was that of a young German-Israeli woman named Shani Louk, who was filmed face down in the back of a pickup truck and was widely assumed dead.
It was unclear whether the fighters filmed with Louk in the Gaza-bound vehicle were members of Hamas, as they do not sport the uniforms or insignia of the Al-Qassam troops identifiable in other Hamas videos – some even wore casual civilian clothing and sandals.
Later, her mother claimed to have evidence that her daughter was still alive, but had suffered a severe head wound. This rings true with information released by Hamas that indicated Louk was being treated for her injuries at an unspecified Gaza hospital.
Complicating matters further, on the day these rape allegations arose, Israelis would not have had access to this information. Their armed forces had not yet entered many, if not most, of the areas liberated by the resistance and were still engaged in armed clashes with them on multiple fronts.
Nevertheless, these rape claims took on a life of their own, with even US President Joe Biden alleging, during a speech days later, that Israeli women were “raped, assaulted, paraded as trophies” by Hamas fighters. It is important to note that The Forward’s article on 11 October reported that the Israeli military acknowledged they had no evidence of such allegations at that point.
When the army later made its own allegations of decapitations, foot amputations, and rape, Reuters pointed out that “the military personnel overseeing the identification process didn’t present any forensic evidence in the form of pictures or medical records.” To date, there is no credible evidence of these atrocities that has been presented.
Other outrageous allegations, such as the story of Hamas “beheading 40 babies‘ made headlines and the front pages of countless western news outlets. Even Biden claimed to have seen “confirmed photos of terrorists beheading babies.” The claims trace back to Israeli reserve settler and soldier David Ben Zion, who has previously incited violent riots against Palestinians and called for the West Bank town of Huwara to be wiped out. No evidence was ever produced to support these claims and the White House itself confirmed later that Joe Biden had never seen such photos.
The Hamas plan
There is little to no credible evidence that Palestinian fighters had a plan to – or deliberately sought to – kill or harm unarmed Israeli civilians on 7 October. From the available footage, we witness them engaging primarily with armed Israeli forces, accounting for the deaths of hundreds of occupation soldiers. As Qassam Brigades’ Spokesman Abu Obeida made clear on 12 October:
“Al-Aqsa Flood operation aimed to destroy the Gaza Division (an Israeli army unit on Gaza’s borders) which was attacked at 15 points, followed by attacking 10 further military intervention points. We attacked the Zikim site and several other settlements outside the Gaza Division headquarters.”
Abu Obeida and other resistance officials claim that the other key objective of their operation was to take Israeli prisoners that they could exchange for the approximately 5,300 Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli detention centers, many of whom are women and children.
Hamas Deputy Head of the Political Bureau of Saleh Al-Arouri, in an interview after the operation, stressed: “We have a large and qualitative number and senior officers. All we can say now is that the freedom of our prisoners is at the doorstep.”
Both sides play this game: Since the start of its military assault on Gaza, Israel has rounded up and imprisoned more than 1,200 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. To date there have been 38 prisoner exchange deals between the resistance factions and Tel Aviv – deals that Israelis often resist to the very last minute.
While these kinds of testimonies trickle out, reports are emerging that Israeli authorities have dialed up the mistreatment, torture, and even killing of Palestinian prisoners in their custody – a violation of the Geneva Conventions, which ironically, a non-state actor like Hamas appears to have followed to the letter.
In relation to the events of 7 October, there are certainly some videos depicting possibly unarmed Israelis, killed in their vehicles or at entrances to facilities, so that Palestinian troops could gain access.
There are also videos which show the fighters engaging in shootouts with armed Israeli forces, where there were unarmed Israelis taking cover in between, in addition to videos of fighters shooting toward houses and throwing grenades into fortified areas. Eyewitness testimony also suggests grenades were thrown into bomb shelters, though by whom is unclear.
Even at the Israeli “peace rave”, which has been cited as the single deadliest attack committed by Palestinian fighters during their operation, videos emerged that appeared to show Israeli forces opening fire through a crowd of unarmed civilians, toward targets they believed to be Hamas members. ABC News also reported that an Israeli tank had headed to the site of the festival.
An Israeli massacre in Kibbutz Be’eri?
In its report on the events at Be’eri Kibbutz, ABC News photographed artillery pieces resembling Israeli munitions outside a bombed-out home. The reporter, David Muir, mentioned that Hamas fighters, covered in plastic bags, were found in the aftermath.
Additionally, videos of the scene show homes that appear to have been struck by munitions that Hamas fighters did not possess. Muir reported that about 14 people were held hostage in a building by Palestinian fighters.
A Hebrew-language Haaretz article published on 20 October, which only appears in English in a must-read Mondoweiss article, paints a very different story of what went down in Be’eri that day. A Kibbutz resident who had been away from his home – whose partner was killed in the melee – reveals stunning new details:
“His voice trembles when his partner, who was besieged in her home shelter at the time, comes to mind. According to him, only on Monday night (9 October) and only after the commanders in the field made difficult decisions — including shelling houses with all their occupants inside in order to eliminate the terrorists along with the hostages — did the IDF complete the takeover of the kibbutz. The price was terrible: at least 112 Be’eri people were killed. Others were kidnapped. Yesterday, 11 days after the massacre, the bodies of a mother and her son were discovered in one of the destroyed houses. It is believed that more bodies are still lying in the rubble.”
Photo evidence of the destruction in Be’eri corroborates his account. Only the heavy munitions of the Israeli army could have destroyed residential homes in this manner.
Aftermath or Be’eri Kibbutz after the fire power of the two sides ceased
Hamas behaviors: Evidence vs allegations
Yasmin Porat, a survivor from Kibbutz Be’eri, said in an interview for an Israeli radio-show, hosted by state-broadcaster Kan, that Israeli forces “eliminated everyone, including the hostages,” going on to state that “there was very, very heavy crossfire” and even noted tank shelling.
Porat had attended the Nova rave and testified to the humane treatment throughout different interviews she conducted with Israeli media. She explained that when she was held prisoner, the Hamas fighters “guarded us”, telling her in Hebrew to “Look at me well, we’re not going to kill you. We want to take you to Gaza. We are not going to kill you. So be calm, you’re not going to die.” She also added the following:
“They give us something to drink here and there. When they see we are nervous they calm us down. It was very frightening but no one treated us violently. Luckily nothing happened to me like what I heard in the media.”
Increasingly, and to the horror of some Israeli officials and news outlets, Israeli eyewitnesses and survivors of the bloodshed are testifying that they were treated well by Palestinian fighters. On 24 October, Israeli state broadcaster Kan bemoaned the fact that prisoner Yocheved Lifshitz, released by Hamas the day before, was allowed to make statements live on air.
As she was handed over to Red Cross intermediaries, the elderly Israeli female captive was caught on camera turning back to squeeze the hand of her Hamas captor in her last goodbyes. Lifshitz’s live broadcast, in which she spoke about her two-week ordeal, “humanized” her Hamas captors even further as she recounted her daily life with the fighters:
“They were very friendly toward us. They took care of us. We were given medicine and were treated. One of the men with us was badly injured in a motorbike accident. Their (Hamas) paramedics looked after his wounds, he was given medicine and antibiotics. The people were friendly. They kept the place very clean. They were very concerned about us.”
Following her release from Gaza by Hamas, 85 year old Yosheved Lifshitz is interviewed about her experience in captivity. pic.twitter.com/MOTEJ82BmB
It is essential to recognize that in many reports by western journalists on the ground, the majority of information regarding the actions of Hamas fighters comes from the Israeli army – an active participant in the conflict.
Emerging evidence now indicates that there is a high probability, especially due to the scale of the infrastructural damage, that Israeli military forces could have deliberately killed captives, fired on incorrect targets, or mistaken Israelis for Palestinians in their firefights. If the only source of information for a serious claim made is the Israeli army, then it has to be taken into account that they have reason to conceal cases of friendly fire.
Israeli friendly fire was rampant, even in the days that followed, from an army with very little actual combat experience. In the city of Ashkelon (Askalan) on 8 October, Israeli soldiers shot dead and shouted insults at the body of a man they believed to have been a Hamas fighter, yet later realized they had executed a fellow Israeli. This is just one of three such examples of friendly fire in one day, resulting in the killing of Israelis by their own troops.
Amid the fog of war, parties to the conflict have different perspectives on what occurred during the initial raid and its aftermath. It’s not disputed that Palestinian armed groups inflicted significant losses on the Israeli military, but there will be plenty of ongoing debate regarding everything else in the weeks and months to come.
An independent, impartial, international investigation is urgently needed, one that has access to information from all sides involved in the conflict. Neither the Israelis nor the Americans will agree to this, which itself suggests that Tel Aviv has much to conceal.
In the meantime, Palestinian civilians in Gaza endure ongoing, indiscriminate attacks with the most sophisticated heavy weapons in existence, living under the persistent threat of forced and potentially irreversible displacement. This Israeli air blitz was made possible only by the flood of unsubstantiated ‘Hamas atrocities’ stories that media began to circulate on and after 7 October.
Russia’s State Duma chairman has compared the US government to a company executive, who has run a business into the ground and now wants to try again with a new corporation.
Vyacheslav Volodin was reacting on Tuesday to remarks by US President Joe Biden, who said last week that a new international order was needed, and that Washington can “unite the world in ways that it never has been”.
The speaker of the lower house of the Russian parliament said that just as a corporate manager with a bankruptcy on their hands would not be trusted with someone else’s money again, “nobody in the world will accept Biden and the US, who have destroyed the global security system, to build a new world order in their interests.”
The Russian official claimed the US has inflicted harm on the world “in attempting to save its hegemony,” causing a disruption of international commerce through trade wars, a deep crisis in the European Union, tensions over Taiwan, and hostilities in Ukraine and the Middle East.
“Attempts to reshape [the world] to fit the American mold will not lead to anything good and can only result in a global disaster,” Volodin warned, urging the US leader to be isolated “before he unleashes a world war”.
Biden’s “new world order” remark came on Friday, while he was meeting with donors as part of his re-election campaign. He touted the US as an indispensable nation and exemplified whipping up support of Washington-friendly governments for Ukraine as an example of his administration’s unifying endeavors.
He insisted that the US was up to the task of leading humanity, and that there has never been a crisis from which the country did not emerge stronger.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Monday that Biden was correct in saying that the old system of global governance has become obsolete, but that Moscow rejects the notion that another “American-centric world order” should replace it. Peskov stressed that Russia supports a multipolar world, in which the US would be one stakeholder among many equals.
So, you’ve watched 9/11: A Conspiracy Theory and now you’re wondering who Jessica Lynch is? Well, you can always check the hyperlinked transcript. But while we’re at it, why not dig a little further into the Jessica Lynch and learn all about how the media fabricates war stories for the consumption of the fluoride-addled, television-addicted masses?
This site is provided as a research and reference tool. Although we make every reasonable effort to ensure that the information and data provided at this site are useful, accurate, and current, we cannot guarantee that the information and data provided here will be error-free. By using this site, you assume all responsibility for and risk arising from your use of and reliance upon the contents of this site.
This site and the information available through it do not, and are not intended to constitute legal advice. Should you require legal advice, you should consult your own attorney.
Nothing within this site or linked to by this site constitutes investment advice or medical advice.
Materials accessible from or added to this site by third parties, such as comments posted, are strictly the responsibility of the third party who added such materials or made them accessible and we neither endorse nor undertake to control, monitor, edit or assume responsibility for any such third-party material.
The posting of stories, commentaries, reports, documents and links (embedded or otherwise) on this site does not in any way, shape or form, implied or otherwise, necessarily express or suggest endorsement or support of any of such posted material or parts therein.
The word “alleged” is deemed to occur before the word “fraud.” Since the rule of law still applies. To peasants, at least.
Fair Use
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more info go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
DMCA Contact
This is information for anyone that wishes to challenge our “fair use” of copyrighted material.
If you are a legal copyright holder or a designated agent for such and you believe that content residing on or accessible through our website infringes a copyright and falls outside the boundaries of “Fair Use”, please send a notice of infringement by contacting atheonews@gmail.com.
We will respond and take necessary action immediately.
If notice is given of an alleged copyright violation we will act expeditiously to remove or disable access to the material(s) in question.
All 3rd party material posted on this website is copyright the respective owners / authors. Aletho News makes no claim of copyright on such material.
Aletho News
Aletho News 