Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: Al Qassam Brigades

Showing posts with label Al Qassam Brigades. Show all posts

Tuesday, July 25, 2023

No matter what they do, Palestinians are victims

The official spokesman for Mahmoud Abbas, Nabil Abu Rudeineh, said today that the "assassination" of "three young men" by the IDF near the gate of Mount Gerizim in Nablus is a "war crime", and it is a continuation of the policy of "collective punishment" to which our Palestinian people are subjected.

The "victims" were terrorists who opened fire on the Israeli troops and were killed in response.

The "young men" were 32, 33 and 43 years old.

While the Palestinian Authority in English says that they were innocent victims of Israeli aggression, Hamas says it is proud of "this group of the al-Qassam Brigades' mujahideen, who set out with all their faith and certainty to confront this criminal enemy."

There is no universe where soldiers killing those who fire at them first are war criminals - except in Palestinian fantasy land.

Unfortunately, fantasies are often treated as reality when people want them to be true.

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Despite BBC blood libel, combatants under 18 are legitimate targets in international law

Here is a blood libel from the BBC.

In response to Naftali Bennett saying that every single person killed in Jenin was a terrorist, the presenter said, as a fact, "Terrorists but children. The Israeli forces are happy to kill children."

Bennett's answer was good, but here is another case where news interviewers are either ignorant or willfully twisting international law.

Child combatants are still combatants under international law. No matter whether they were forcibly recruited, whether they are under 14, whether they are girls - once someone is shooting at a soldier they are legitimate targets, according to every article I can find on the subject.

In 2000, a group of child soldiers in Sierra Leone known (in the West) as the "West Side Boys" captured a patrol of British soldiers from the Royal Irish Regiment along with their Sierra Leone Army liaison officer. Several of the British soldiers were held for two weeks before the British Army decided to free them in an operation that killed between 25 and 150 of the West Side Boys.

Was the deliberate, planned killing of those children a war crime? Of course not.

Absolutely no international law scholar disputes that the British Army had the right to free their fellow soldiers because they were held by combatants under 18. And no BBC reporter responded to the event by saying on the air, "The British Army is happy to kill children."

No, only Jews are routinely accused of relishing the murder of children. The accusation is centuries old and it is as popular today in England as it was in 1144 when Jews were accused of happily murdering William of Norwich.

Unlike the West Side Boys, who were obviously children, the two "children" killed by the IDF in Jenin were heavily armed, fully grown near-adults. One was a member of Hamas' Al Qassam Brigades.

Of course soldiers in the middle of an operation are not expected to question the ages of those who are shooting at them to determine whether they've celebrated their 18th birthday yet. The idea is absurd to the extreme. International conventions do not distinguish between child combatants and adult combatants - anyone engaging in hostilities is a legitimate military target.

The BBC presenter is knowingly twisting the facts in ways that cannot be interpreted as anything but malicious. She says, " The UN has defined them as children and we know that four people between the ages of 16 and 18 have been killed in this targeted attack let's not forget it's a targeted attack."

Yes, the UN defines anyone under 18 as children. But the UN doesn't say that armed 16 year olds are not combatants.

And suddenly she switches from the UN definition of children to including 18 year old adults as "children," too, contradicting her own definition of children in the very same breath! Her desire to paint Israel as evil causes her to expand the definition of children to make it look like Israel "targeted" four children.

If you think that blood libels went out of fashion in recent decades, here is an example of how they are just as malicious today as they were in the Middle Ages.

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In English, Israel kills "five local young men." In Arabic, there are five "Al Qassam Brigades heroic martyrs."

From the official Palestinian Wafa news agency:

Five Palestinians dawn Monday were shot dead by the Israeli military in Aqabat Jabr refugee camp, adjacent to the occupied West Bank city of Jericho, according to medical sources.

A sizable Israeli force barged its way into the refugee camp, triggering confrontations.

The heavily-armed soldiers opened fire towards local young men, killing five.

The Hamas-linked Felesteen says things a little differently in Arabic:

This morning, Monday, five resistance fighters from the Al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of the Islamic Resistance Movement " Hamas ", were martyred, during the occupation's storming of Aqabat Jaber camp, south of Jericho.

Outside the PA official media, no one is even pretending that the dead were anything but terrorists in Arabic. Here is a cartoon showing that their blood is watering new flowers of terrorists:

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The reactions - and non-reactions - to the murder of an 84 year old Jewish woman

Yesterday, a Palestinian man stalked and murdered an 84 year old Jewish grandmother in Holon. She was identified as Shulamit Rachel Ovadia.

Israeli security services suspect that it was a terror attack, since nothing was taken from her.

The suspect, Mousa Sarsour from Qalqilya, was found this morning after apparently committing suicide, hanging himself in an abandoned Tel Aviv building. He had a valid work permit in Israel.

When attacks like these happen, the reactions (and non-reactions) from the anti-Israel crowd reveal a great deal.

Palestinian terror groups are happy - but they pointedly do not mention the age of the victim. Hamas' Al Qassam Brigades describes the victim as "a Zionist usurper killed in a commando operation." Palestine Today, associated with Islamic Jihad, called her a "female settler."

More mainstream Palestinian newspapers understand that murdering an elderly lady is not something to be proud of. So they are instead quoting the suspect's family, saying that he suffers psychological problems - but he couldn't have murdered her anyway.

Jewish anti-Zionists who claim to care about human rights become deathly silent when the victim is an elderly Jewish woman. The anger that they show when Israeli forced kill a teen throwing Molotov cocktails evaporates when the Jewish victim did nothing to provoke the attack. Their righteous indignation, ready to ignite on a moment's notice at the death of a Palestinian, is simply nonexistent. I can find nothing in the social media accounts of the anti-Israel activists I follow.

To them, Palestinians are pure good and Zionist Jews are pure evil, and they are so invested in pushing that narrative that they will never say a negative word about a terror attack, no matter how heinous. They will go to rallies to support Rasmea Odeh but do not want you to know the name Shulamit Rachel Ovadia.

One Israeli leftist - Dror Etkes, who heads the Kerem Navot NGO - tries to redirect the conversation to make this about Israeli racism:

The man murdered an 84-year-old woman and then committed suicide. Horrifying and shocking by any measure. The man was not investigated and from what has been published so far, it is not known what his motive is. What's more, it is very uncharacteristic for someone with a nationalistic motive to commit suicide after a murder. But the fact that he was Palestinian and she is Israeli, is also enough for the newspaper Haaretz to call him a "terrorist"

And maybe he was "just" a psychopath?

So that's it, a Palestinian cannot be a psychopath, because if he kills an Israeli, that means he is by definition a "terrorist". I don't know what was the motive behind this horrible act. It seems that even the police and the network do not know. But I do know that there are Palestinians who are "just" psychopaths. By the way, there are also such Jews.

To Etkes, the characterization of a murderer of an 84 year old woman as a terrorist is just evidence of Israeli racism. (He also uses the propaganda method of "sure, the attack is horrifying, but look at how terrible the reaction is!")

His theory might make sense if there were random murders of unrelated Palestinians by Palestinian psychopaths. In general, there are very few reports of anything like that.

Mousa Sarsour went out of his way to kill a Jewish woman in Israel, and even if he did have psychological problems, the reason for choosing a Jew has everything to do with Palestinian antisemitism that is called "nationalism." It has everything to do with the social and monetary benefits in Palestinian society of murdering Jews.

Most terrorists, including suicide bombers, are not entirely sane. To claim (without evidence) that this was just a psychopath is simply another way to justify terror.

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Yesterday, I reported that the Palestinian Authority arrested Mosab Shtayyeh, a commander in the Hamss Al-Qassam Brigades, in Nablus.

Coming after Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah party has been taking responsibility for terror attacks itself, including attacks by its own security services, this move was simply an attempt to claim that the PA really opposes terror - so Mahmoud Abbas can make that claim ahead of (or within) his annual anti-Israel speech at the UN.

The arrest was also reportedly after intense pressure from the US and Israel for the PA to adhere to its own signed agreements to fight terrorism, not to contribute to it.

In my post, I predicted that by next week, we'll see that this was simply political theatre.

It seems that we don't have to wait for next week.

After massine riots in Nablus and Jenin, in which Palestinian security forces killed one protester, the PA caved to the terrorist supporters who wanted Shtayyeh released. At dawn today, after all-night negotiations with the rioters, reports say that the PA will release Shtayyeh "within a few days."

Conveniently, this will be after Abbas' speech to the UN and after he leaves the US.

The PA is not serious about fighting terror. On the contrary, it supports terror. And it always has.

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More and more members of Palestinian security forces directly attacking IDF

This morning, an IDF soldier was shot and killed by two Palestinian militants during an arrest operation.

One of the terrorists, Ahmed Abed, worked for the Palestinian Authority security forces.

Both of the terrorists, who appear to be relatives, were claimed by Fatah's Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades.

There has been a significant increase in Palestinian Authority forces directly attacking Israel in recent months. Under signed agreements, the Palestinian police and security forces are supposed to work with Israeli security to arrest and imprison terrorists - but lately they have become the terrorists.

Joe Truzman writes in the Long War Journal:

Since last year, IDF troops have increasingly engaged in armed clashes with members of the Palestinian Authority Security Services (PSS) in the West Bank. In some cases, PSS members belonged to militant organizations.

The trend began in June 2021 when two members of the PA’s military intelligence, Adham Tawfiq and Tayseer Issa, were killed after they fired at Israeli special forces who were attempting to arrest Jamil al-Amouri, a member of Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) in Jenin.

In May 2022, IDF troops arrested an officer of the PA’s Palestinian Preventative Corps during an anti-terrorism raid near Jenin. Three months later, Israeli forces arrested a member of the PA’s customs police after a lengthy armed clash in the town of Rujeib, near the city of Nablus.

In late July, a Palestinian police officer named Mahmoud Hujeer, fired at Israeli troops at the Huwarra checkpoint in the West Bank. Hujeer was arrested after he was critically injured during the attack.

Other examples involve militants and their supporters working for the PSS. In May, Dawood Zubeidi, a member of the PSS, was shot and wounded in Jenin by Israeli forces during an anti-terrorism raid. He later died in an Israeli hospital and was lauded by al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades as a commander belonging to the organization.

The evidence suggests the PA is ostensibly losing control of its security services. While the number of PSS members launching attacks against IDF troops has not reached the level of the second intifada, the upward trend should be noted. Adding to the PA’s problems is the erosion of its authority in pockets of the West Bank.

The question is whether this is the PA losing control - or making an active decision to play both sides of the fence. The public appearances of Fatah's Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades in recent months indicates that this might be an conscious decision to go back to Yasir Arafat's game of controlling both the "good guys" and "bad guys" and telling the West that he needs more help to control his own terrorists.

Just as Hamas policemen are also members of Hamas' terrorist Al Qassam Brigades, Palestinian Authority policemen are members of Fatah's terror group (that was supposed to have been dismantled 15 years ago.)

It is also possible that this is part of the larger fight of who is to succeed Mahmoud Abbas, and that these "rogue" militants are being led by one of the aspiring new Palestinian leaders.

The trend of Palestinian security forces attacking the IDF has also been noted approvingly in Palestinian media, some of whom call for a new violent intifada led by the Palestinians who were armed by the West. From an Amad editorial:

The developments that characterized the act of resistance in recent months are the practical participation of the Palestinian security forces as a vital and active part...Those services and their sons, who fought with a people and under the leadership of the Founder, the longest military confrontation with the army of the national enemy for 4 years from 2000 to 2004, confirmed that the conflict will not be without the Palestinian’s right to his full national entity,...

This is a difficult and complex situation.

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Pro-Hamas Arabic media still insisting that captured Israeli Arab is a "soldier"

On Tuesday, Hamas' Al Qassam Brigades published a video showing Hisham al-Sayed, one of two Israeli men being held by the terror group in the Gaza Strip, hooked up to an oxygen mask.

Al-Sayed is a Bedouin with mental health problems - but Hamas insists that he is an Israeli soldier.

Much of the anti-Israel Arabic media is happily parroting the claim, since it would look really bad for Hamas to have kidnapped a mentally ill Arab civilian whom their allies in the human rights community call "Palestinian."

According to Abu Ali Express, as soon as Hamas released this video Palestinians on social media started making fun of Hamas. They had been led to believe that Hamas had captured a Jewish Israeli soldier, and al-Sayed obviously is neither Jewish nor a soldier. They wondered about the timing of trying to pressure Israel to make a prisoner swap when the government is in limbo, they sarcastically asked whether he was on a hunger strike or whether his family could visit - showing the difference between Arabs in Israeli prisons and this Arab in Hamas custody.

Yet some are doubling down, still insisting that al-Sayed is a soldier. A Nablus academic is upset at the pushback, saying, "The cheap media underestimates the achievement of the Palestinian resistance and depicts it as murderous monsters who hold a mentally ill person for political purposes, even though the prisoner is a combat soldier!!"

One popular tweet reproduces his wallet showing a bus card for the Metropoline Public Transportation, claiming that the bus line really only transports soldiers and no ordinary Israeli citizen holds such a pass. (It isn't true.)

Tellingly, Al Jazeera Arabic calls him a soldier as well. (I cannot find coverage of this in AJ English.)

Hamas' narrative falls apart when people see that they are holding an Arab hostage.

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