Showing posts with label civilian casualties. Show all posts
Showing posts with label civilian casualties. Show all posts

Tuesday, August 15, 2023



Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah threatened Israel on Monday evening in an address marking the 17th anniversary of the 2006 Lebanon war.

During the speech, he said that Hezbollah needed "a few precision missiles" to destroy a list of targets in Israel that included civilian airports, electricity generation and distribution stations, water distribution, main communication centers, infrastructure, oil and gasoline refineries, ammonia depots and the Dimona nuclear reactor.

His mention of the ammonia plants echo a 2016 threat he made where he said that a rocket strike on Haifa's ammonia storage tanks would cause tens of thousands of deaths. “This would be exactly as a nuclear bomb, and we can say that Lebanon today has a nuclear bomb, seeing as any rocket that might hit these tanks is capable of creating a nuclear bomb effect,” Nasrallah said then.

Think about this for a moment. A person who has some 150,000 missiles,  including thousands of precision missiles, and who answers to Iran, is directly threatening to attack Israeli civilians and civilian infrastructure and murdering tens of thousands. His threats check all the boxes of what terrorism is. 

Yet (as of  this writing)  there has not been a word of condemnation from human rights groups over a direct, credible threat to millions of Israeli civilians. And when Nasrallah threatened Haifa with tens of thousands of casualties in 2016, neither Human Rights Watch nor Amnesty International even mentioned it in their press releases. 

Their interest in human rights always ends when the humans are Jewish. 



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Monday, July 17, 2023

From the Palestine Post, July 14, 1948:


By the next day, the death toll reached 18:



This attack is not even mentioned in Wikipedia's list of major attacks on civilians during the war.

Egypt had been bombing civilian areas in Tel Aviv nearly continuously since Israel declared independence on May 14, and the total casualties of innocent Jews was much higher than I had realized. On May 18, Egyptian planes dropped bombs on a crowded Tel Aviv bus station, killing 42 people, including women and children. 

These air raids all targeted civilians. They were the 1948 equivalent of Palestinian rocket attacks, with no military goal and only aimed at terrorizing Jews. 

The National Library of Israel wrote in 2020 that an estimated 150 were killed in Egyptian air raids and shelling from the sea on Tel Aviv during the War of Independence. 





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Friday, July 07, 2023



YNet reports that the IDF, for the first time, used tiny suicide drones in Jenin to neutralize some of the terrorists and destroy command centers.

For the first time ever, the IDF has dispatched the cutting-edge SPIKE FireFly suicide drone in an operational capacity during this week’s large-scale counterterrorism offensive in the West Bank city and refugee camp of Jenin.

The elite Duvdevan and Maglan units deployed six of these loitering munitions, manufactured by Defense giant Rafael Advanced Defense Systems Ltd., which carry a small amount of explosives to target terrorist targets around the Jenin refugee camp, including command centers that housed dozens of explosive charges.

The mini-kamikaze drones managed to destroy the targets from afar, thus minimizing risk to troops. The IDF considers the weapon system’s first baptism of fire a remarkable success and examines its future use for targeted assassinations of terrorists.

According to the arms manufacturer, the weapon, which is known in the IDF as MAOZ, “was designed for the dismounted soldier fighting within the urban arena where situation awareness is limited, the enemy is behind cover, and precision is critical.”

FireFly drones hover silently around alleys or inside buildings. They can be operated autonomously and explode precisely and lethally on the target without endangering soldiers.
The video by Rafael explains it better:



Israel haters love to say that Israel field tests weapons against Palestinians. But when the weapon is designed to minimize collateral damage, and also to minimize the danger to troops, what exactly is wrong with that? If the alternative is a massive bombing from the air, isn't this better?

The objection is simply to invoke an antisemitic trope of greedy Jews stopping at nothing to sell their deadly wares. Any army would do its own extensive testing of any new weapon and not buy them simply because Israel had already used it (and indeed, the US Army tested the Firefly last year, and the British army is also interested.) 

Israeli defense contractors build weapons with the primary purpose of minimizing damage to civilian objects while being just as deadly to the terrorists. Anyone who cares about human rights should be applauding weapons like this. 

But Israel's critics don't care about human rights.



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Sunday, March 19, 2023

The shooting of David Stern as he drove with his family today resulted, as always, with great celebrations by Palestinians. 

Here a crowd goes to his house to celebrate.


And here are the obligatory fireworks celebrating the shooting of a Jew.



But, you may say, these are only the extremists. Certainly normal, sober Palestinians support shooting random Jewish civilians.

Well, Muhammed Shehada - who has bylines in Haaretz, Newsweek, Vice and elsewhere, and is a columnist for the Forward, and who also has a job working for a "human rights" NGO - went out of his way to justify Stern being shot twenty times:

The settler wounded in today's shooting near Huwara is David Stern, a former US Marine soldier who provides combat & weapon training to #Israeli settlers.

He's Israeli-American & lives in the Itamar settlement, built on land confiscated from 5 Palestinian villages.
Under international law, Stern is a civilian. His job and where he lives does not affect that designation. So this celebrated writer who pretends to be a human rights professional is justifying a war crime.

And he is considered moderate enough to write for Jewish-owned media. 

If this is the best example of morality from Palestinian society, then Palestinian society is rotten to the core.

(h/t Adam Albilya)




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Monday, March 13, 2023




Fox News reports:

 In a groundbreaking ruling, an official Islamic legislative body based in the Arab world declared a "fatwa," or a legal opinion, against the Islamist militant group Hamas Thursday, calling its treatment of millions of Palestinians living under its rule in the Gaza Strip "inhumane" and urging the terrorist organization and its followers to immediately give up arms, sit down and make peace.

The unprecedented declaration, published by the Islamic Fatwa Council, a non-government body of Shiite, Sunni and Sufi clerics headquartered in the Iraqi spiritual capital of Najaf, states that Hamas, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood movement, "bears responsibility for its own reign of corruption and terror against Palestinian civilians within Gaza" and deems "it prohibited to pray for, join, support, finance or fight on behalf of Hamas."

"As an Islamic legal body, we take note of the condition of the oppressed all over the world," Muhammad Ali Al-Maqdisi, a cleric for the council, said in a video statement shared with Fox News Digital. 


"We have seen what Gaza has been subjected to under Hamas’ rule. We have also seen the atrocities which, in our view, have been perpetrated against Palestinians — faithful and unarmed civilians — who have neither strength nor recourse. And, so, we believed it was our Islamic obligation to aid the oppressed." 
Here is the video statement from the Islamic Fatwa Council:


 The Whispered in Gaza video series is here.

(h/t Shachar Petrushka)




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Sunday, March 12, 2023



As he did last year, Adin Haykin is documenting every single Palestinian killed by Israeli forces in the West Bank this year, and explaining the circumstances.

I put his current thread on a Twitter Thread Reader post.

Out of 80 killed this year, I count six who were uninvolved civilians. (I'm counting a father who was shot while trying to stop his son's arrest as a civilian.) 

That means that 92.5% of those killed were actively part of hostilities, or members of armed groups. And that includes every single minor who was killed this year. 

It is also entirely possible that some of the civilians listed were killed by Palestinian fire, which as we've seen has been quite wild.




A far as I can tell, never in the history of urban fighting has the percentage of innocent civilians killed been this low. 

In contrast, over 50% of those killed in Operation Banner in Northern Ireland by the British Army were uninvolved civilians. 

Western troops in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria have never achieved anything close to this record. 

The mainstream media emphasizes the uninvolved, as they should. But they do not contextualize their deaths with these facts that the IDF is far exceeding what is considered acceptable by any other army in history, especially when it often operates in an extremely challenging environment when there stone throwers and firebombs coming from attackers on all sides.  

If any other army went under the same microscope that the IDF does, they would look horrible by comparison. 

For example, the New York Times reported in 2021 about an attack by US forces five years earlier that no one knew about:
Shortly before 3 a.m. on July 19, 2016, American Special Operations forces bombed what they believed were three ISIS “staging areas” on the outskirts of Tokhar, a riverside hamlet in northern Syria. They reported 85 fighters killed. In fact, they hit houses far from the front line, where farmers, their families and other local people sought nighttime sanctuary from bombing and gunfire. More than 120 villagers were killed.

Do you remember reading about this incident, or the dozens of others that were uncovered in that story using Pentagon records?  No, the story disappeared from the news media radar in no time. 

Now, imagine the tsunami of coverage from multiple news outlets, the UN resolutions and condemnations from every nation on the planet, that would result if Israel killed 120 civilians in an air strike and claimed it was a successful strike on dozens of fighters. 

That is not just a double standard. That is treating Israel as uniquely evil and ignoring far, far worse things done by "the good guys." 

And that is the entire point. Israel's critics do not want you to know this context when they accuse Israel of war crimes. They do not want you to see how Israel compares to other armies. They never make 3D models of US bombing of wedding parties.

There is only one possible explanation for putting Israel under an electron microscope for doing an amazing job targeting terrorists while virtually ignoring the horrible mistakes that every other professional western army does. It isn't "concern over taxpayer dollars" or "humanitarian concerns" or any of the dozens of other excuses used to justify this obsession with how Israel fights terror. None of the Western armies who wantonly bombed dozens of innocents had to worry about an immediate threat of someone slipping through a porous border and attacking their own citizens who live only a few kilometers away. 

The only explanation is antisemitism. 

Maybe not the explicit, neo-Nazi kind, but this crazed obsession with finding everything wrong with Israel defending itself from real, imminent threats while ignoring everyday Palestinian terror cannot be logically explained any other way except to say that a Jewish state is assumed to be automatically criminal the way Jews have lived under that assumption for thousands of years.

The truly remarkable thing is that the IDF, like the Jews throughout history, don't respond by saying that they might as well act the way they are being accused of acting. Instead, they continue to improve their methods and work towards a 100% record of only killing those who are actively trying to kill them first. (In attacks on Iranian targets in Syria, they are very close to that 100%.) 

The IDF is truly the most moral army in the world. It isn't even close. 




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Monday, February 06, 2023



JNS reports:
Israel’s Cabinet voted on Sunday to establish a new community along the border with the Gaza Strip.

The future town, to be named Hanun, will be located in the Sdot Negev Region and eventually be inhabited by some 500 families.

“The establishment of the community is further evidence of the resilience of the [citizens living in the] ‘Gaza envelope’ and the power of the State of Israel. We’re proud to build up the Land of Israel and we’re proud to strengthen settlement in all parts of our land,” said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Hamas calls Israel building a community within the Green Line a "dangerous escalation"  - and threatened it:
The Hamas movement confirmed that the continuation of the Zionist occupation government with its aggressive settlement policies in our land, the latest of which was its announcement today, Sunday, of building a settlement near the Gaza Strip, constitutes a dangerous escalation that will not bring the settlers security or stability, and will not grant the occupation legitimacy or sovereignty over our land.

In a press statement, today, Sunday, Hamas stressed that the occupation government is solely responsible for its disregard for settling settlers near the Gaza Strip, and for putting them in danger, and it bears full responsibility for its settlement escalation throughout the occupied West Bank.

 The movement called on the international community to shoulder its responsibility in curbing those racist occupation policies that threaten peace and security in the region.

The English announcement stressed "colonialism" while the Arabic one (above) directly threatened the community.

Just more proof that it isn't the "occupation" that Palestinians are upset at - it is Israel's existence. 

And this is a story that Western media still barely reports.




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Sunday, February 05, 2023

With the announcement last week that Israel and Sudan plan to complete a signed agreement this year, Sudanese media has been discussing the pros and cons of normalizing relations with Israel.

Here's one that is very supportive by Salah El-Din Awdah:

And with logic we speak; And logic does not know the language of emotion; Rather, it is the language of the mind. And this language we respond to those who reject normalization.

Whether with Egypt, Morocco, Bahrain, Jordan, or the Emirates, finally with Sudan.

From a religious standpoint, there is nothing that precludes the conclusion of peace treaties with the Jews. Our Holy Prophet himself did it before.

And from a political point of view, every treaty is possible with any side; Politics is the art of the possible.
From a moral point of view, there is no crime in such a step.

Nor can we Sudanese  be more Palestinian than the Palestinians. The Palestine Liberation Organization signed the Oslo Accords with Israel And that during the life of its late leader, Arafat.

My attitude towards the Jews is not new. 

I have praised their democracy as opposed to our government. I have said that they have a million reasons to be proud of it; they describe it as an oasis in the middle of the desert, a democratic and rustic oasis, in the midst of a totalitarian arid desert.

It is strange that among the things that these rejecters blame Israel for is its killing of the Palestinians. They do not blame Islamic regimes for the same thing. 

Israel kills those it considers its enemies and does not kill its people. As for these Muslim regimes, they kill their own people....even killing  because of a veil, as in the Iranian tragedy of Mahsa. Or because of a protest, as in Syria. Or because of a social grievance, as in Al-Bashir’s Sudan. Or because of opposition to the government, as in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Or because of a political dispute, as in Abdel Nasser’s Egypt.

Those who oppose any agreement with Israel belong with all these killers. They are either Baathists, Nasserites, or Bashirites or even Iranians, as the mullahs of Iran arm their people and kill Mahsa without her veil.

Then there is an argument: What do we gain from the relationship with Israel? As if this Israel is a charitable organization and  not a country like the rest of the world. 
We respond to their question with a counter- and logical question: Why do we not ask such a question when establishing a relationship with any other country? Are relations between countries based on this condition?

Welcome to the Jews!




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Monday, January 30, 2023

From Iraqi News:

Media outlets reported that a fleet of container trucks was bombarded on Sunday after crossing the Iraqi border towards Syria.

Iraqi security sources mentioned that 25 container trucks coming from Iran crossed the Iraqi border towards Syria through an unofficial border crossing.

The sources explained that the unidentified warplanes that bombed the trucks fired warning missiles and waited for the drivers to get out before bombing the trucks.
Who else but Israel would go to such lengths - endangering their mission by lingering in the skies for minutes over an enemy country - to protect human lives?

And the drivers would be considered legitimate targets as support personnel, at least in wartime, although it is possible that they did not know what they were carrying.

Not only that, but it appears that Israel has been adding controls to avoid killing people like this as much as possible. In a very similar air raid in 2015, Israel killed seven truck drivers to stop a shipment of weapons. Quietly, behind the scenes, the IAF figured out a way to do raids like this while giving warnings and saving lives.

This requires layers of bureaucracy, changing training methods, dozens of practice runs - a great deal of time and money to save the lives of people who would be properly considered collateral damage by every other army on Earth.

It would be so easy for the IDF to just say, "Who cares? People will malign us anyway. Why risk our own mission for drivers whose deaths would not be considered war crimes by any objective court?" 

The fact that they go to such lengths anyway to save lives when they are nearly universally derided as the worst human rights violators is nothing less than superhuman. 

This incident proves that the IDF really is the most moral army in the world. 

(h/t Yochanan V)



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In late 2021, when Israel declared Al Haq and several other Palestinian NGOs to be illegal, the reaction from "human rights" groups was immediate and fierce. Amnesty and Human Rights Watch called the move "a brazen attack on human rights" and referred to their members as "human rights defenders." The New York Times called them "human rights groups," as did AP.   The UN issued a statement from 17 "experts" calling it "a frontal attack on the Palestinian human rights movement, and on human rights everywhere."

As usual, Israel is right and the "experts" are wrong.

Meet Isam Abdeen, "human rights defender." Although it is unclear whether he stills works there, he was the head of the Local and Regional Advocacy Department at Al Haq when Israel labeled it a terror group and his papers are still on its site. As of last summer he was described as a legal advisor for the Al Haq Foundation.

Abdeen, considered one of the more prominent Palestinian human rights activists, fully defended the murder of seven Jews outside the synagogue in Neve Yaacov on Friday night.

His immediate reaction on his Facebook page was to say, "The shooting by the son of the capital alone in occupied Jerusalem is legitimate in international law, and no justification is needed."

Abdeen expanded on that in a full article where he wrote, "What happened in the occupied Jerusalem, that a holy young man of the capital, alone, committed a resistance act on Palestinian land (occupied Jerusalem) the land of his parents and ancestors, a legitimate act under international humanitarian law, human rights law and dozens of United Nations resolutions that all pour into the pot of the original right of peoples in destiny determination; And he is a legal argument on the world."

Murdering civilians is illegal under international law under all circumstances. The entire Fourth Geneva Convention is meant to protect civilians in a time of war. In 2004, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan directly dismissed the argument of terrorists and their supporters: "There is nothing in the fact of occupation that justifies the targeting and killing of civilians."

This Al Haq "human rights defender" is directly supporting, advocating and praising murdering Jews.

And this supporter of murdering Jews also trains other human rights professionals! 

There cannot be a more grotesque perversion of human rights than having a "human rights lawyer" train others that murdering humans is not only allowed but praiseworthy. 

And this is who  Amnesty and Human Rights Watch and the UN support.

Al Haq is funded by the European Union, Norway, Ireland, Italy, France, Sweden, Denmark, Germany and Spain.. It has never condemned any terror attack against Jews, to my knowledge. it has ties to the PFLP terror group which recruits and brainwashes child soldiers - another human rights violation the group has never condemned. 

And now one of its prominent members directly praises the murder of innocent civilians.

The only way this can be considered a human rights organization is if it considers Jews to be subhuman. 

Exposing this hypocrisy is the single most important thing that can be done to combat terror. In this sense, the media has failed in its most basic responsibility. 

(h/t NGO Monitor)




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Wednesday, January 04, 2023



Yesterday I mentioned the Palestinian organization Maata that keeps track of - and brags about - Palestinian terror attacks.

They just issued their report bragging about "resistance activities" for 2022:

The year 2022 witnessed a remarkable and qualitative escalation in the forms of popular and armed resistance, especially in the West Bank and occupied Jerusalem, as the Palestinians united on the option of all kinds of resistance.

The popular and armed resistance, represented by the Jenin Brigade and the “Black Den” in Nablus, embodied a model of resistance and an icon of challenge in the West Bank for the year 2022, where hundreds of resistance and armed clashes were carried out, and the occupation soldiers and settlers were killed.

The Palestine Information Center - Maata - monitored the killing of (31) Israelis, most of them soldiers, and the injury of more than (525) others, during the year 2022, as a result of carrying out more than (12188) resistance actions, including (848) shooting operations, and (37) attacks. (18) a stabbing or attempted stabbing operation, and (18) a run-over or attempted run-over attack, in addition to one double explosion.
It is interesting that they claim that most of the dead Israelis were "soldiers." They weren't, but there is a slight hesitation to take credit for murdering civilians. 

Anti-Israel groups keep track of, and issue reports, about how many Palestinians were killed during the year (without mentioning that 90% of them were militants.)  But the Palestinians that they pretend to support are proud about the attacks they take responsibility for.

It is also notable that Maata counts Israeli Arab attackers as "Palestinians" but Arab victims (like one border policeman killed in Hadera in March) are "Israeli soldiers."

Also note that while Palestinians pretend to oppose ISIS, when the attacks are done by Arab Israeli  supporters of ISIS (as the two March attacks were) they happily adopt them as their own.



Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon!

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Wednesday, November 30, 2022



Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kanaani said Wednesday, that "the false advocates of human rights have been supporting the racist, terrorist Zionist entity for decades."

Really? 

He apparently tweeted, "The false claimants of human rights support a racist, terrorist and occupying entity for more than 7 decades, which not only commits gross violations of human rights, but also commits genocide against the Palestinian people!”

Sadly, he didn't identify which human rights groups or advocates support Israel. We would all love to know. 

I'd also like to know his definition of "genocide," given that Iran has killed more innocent civilians in the past two months than Israel has in years.






Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon!

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Thursday, November 17, 2022

From Ian:

Alan Baker: Palestinian leadership venturing into international legal field
In addition to their regular, annual shopping list of false and flawed political allegations directed to the court against Israel, the Palestinians are now requesting that the court, by means of a resolution that they initiated in the UN General Assembly’s Special Political and Decolonization Committee to weigh the legal consequences of prolonged annexation of what they claim to be Palestinian territory.

This is despite the fact that there has never been any internationally accepted legal determination that there exists Palestinian territory, as such. Similarly, this question remains an agreed negotiating issue by the Palestinians themselves, pursuant to the internationally endorsed Israeli-Palestinian Oslo Accords (1993-95).

In addition, the Palestinian leadership is also asking the Court to examine Israel’s alleged crime of altering the demographic composition, character and status of the Holy City of Jerusalem, claiming the city to be solely Palestinian.

But more curiously, in this request to the world court, they are attempting to invent what they believe to be a new, curious international status of prolonged occupation. They are asking the court to determine the extent to which such a non-existent status of prolonged occupation has legal consequences for states and the UN.

In fact, no such status is recognized by international law.

Even the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which is universally acknowledged to be the ultimate arbiter of what constitutes international humanitarian law, has never determined a time limit for the occupation of territory.
Netanyahu: Israel-Saudi Normalization Could End Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
Israel and Saudi Arabia reaching a formal peace agreement would “effectively end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu predicted in a new interview with “Call Me Back” podcast host Dan Senor.

“Understand that the Abraham Accords, the peace treaties that Israel had with four Arab states: the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco — that didn’t happen without Saudi approval, because at least some of these countries like to know what their big neighbor, Saudi Arabia, is thinking about [the agreements],” Netanyahu, who is likely to head Israel’s next government following elections earlier this month, said. “And I assure you, [Riyadh] wasn’t negative about it.”

Normalization with Saudi Arabia would “open up all sorts of possibilities,” Netanyahu told Senor, the co-author of Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle. The current opposition leader cited the physical results of such an agreement — ”connecting the Saudi rail system” — as well as the business perks — giving Saudis “direct accessibility to Israeli innovation and technology” — as benefits of a negotiated agreement between Jerusalem and Riyadh.

Netanyahu also addressed his previous government’s coordination with Russia in Syria, where Russian forces are on the ground — and where Israeli military units have often targeted Iranian and Syrian facilities and weapons transfers.
David Singer: MBS & King Abdullah keep Hashemite Kingdom of Palestine alive
The HKoP solution also offered the Arab populations of Gaza, the 'West Bank' and Palestinian Arab refugees in other locations:
· “a legal identity—a globally respected citizenship that allows a person to operate in the modern world. Labor in this day and age is mobile and having citizenship in a country that facilitates such mobility is critical to human development.”
· “Palestinians in Arab countries like Lebanon can then become citizens of this enlarged kingdom while also getting full residency rights in Lebanon, equivalent to what an EU citizen has in the European Union outside his or her home country. This would allow the Palestinians to gain full civil rights as legal foreign residents without impacting the local political or sectarian balance in these countries. The GCC, the EU, the US, Canada, and others can also help support this solution by granting this Jordanian–Palestinian passport easier access to their labor markets.”


The Saudi proposal’s author - Ali Shihabi – is a confidant of MBS and a member of the Advisory Board appointed by MBS to report to him on the building of a new US$500 billion mega city – Neom - in northern Saudi Arabia bordering Israel.

Shihabi had lamented on the absence of a response from any Israeli politician to his plan on 14 August.

This lack of Israeli interest was ongoing when the 21 September meeting agreed:
“to work with regional and international partners to shed light on the tragic situation of the Palestinians in light of the deadlock in the peace process and the absence of any glimmer of hopeand to urge them to take practical steps to support the resumption of dialogue on the basis of the Arab Peace Initiative, United Nations resolutions and relevant peace references, in addition to reviving the diplomatic track to overcome the despair and lack of a vision toward achieving the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people and establishing their state with Jerusalem as its capital.”

MBS was not at this meeting but was subsequently appointed Saudi Arabia’s Prime Minister on 27 September.

MBS, King Abdullah, PLO Leader Mahmoud Abbas and Hamas Leader Ismail Haniyeh have not rejected the HKoP solution.

MBS and King Abdullah’s non-participation at Algiers offers the glimmer of hope that the Hashemite Kingdom of Palestine can soon become a conflict-ending reality.

Tuesday, November 15, 2022


This morning,  terrorist killed 3 Jews and injured others in Ariel.

The Palestinian Amad news site and others identify the terrorist as Muhammad Murad Sami Souf, 19. It says that he is a member of Fatah and his father was a leading Fatah figure who had been released from Israeli prison.

 Fatah has not yet taken responsibility, but it has praised the attack.

This heroic and courageous operation is a natural response to the orgy of the occupation soldiers and settlers and their daily crimes against the Palestinian people, their land, and their Islamic and Christian sanctities.This heroic and qualitative attack confirms the continuation and escalation of the resistance act in the occupied West Bank, and that our Palestinian people are fully aware that resistance is the only way to protect the land and sanctities, and that it is capable of raising the cost of the occupation and defeating it.
Significantly, only yesterday Fatah issued a statement that incited Palestinians to violence, saying "independence and achieving sovereignty over the land of the Palestinian state is a legitimate right of our Palestinian people, and it is a goal that we will continue to struggle with determination and determination to achieve, regardless of the sacrifices."

Fatah has taken credit for numerous other attacks this year, issuing many "martyr posters."

There has been no difference in rhetoric or actions between Fatah and other terror groups like Islamic Jihad, Hamas and the PFLP during the current wave of attacks. 

Yet the West still pretends that Fatah is somehow more "moderate" than the other groups. Only the Fatah-linked Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades are designated as a terror group by the State Department, but not Fatah itself. 

This is because the world wants to maintain the fiction that the PLO - which is dominated by Fatah - is a peace partner, and it would be awkward to say that Abbas is a man of peace but that the political party he heads is a terror group.

The US, EU and PLO play into the fiction that these terror attacks have nothing to do with Fatah, making a distinction between rogue Fatah elements and official Fatah positions. The Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center describes this ambiguity:

To understand the connection between Fatah and the Al Aqsa MArtyrs Brigades [AAMB,] a distinction has to be made between “official” Fatah, which is always conflicted because of the need display “resistance” activities while violating the ground rules agreed on with Israel, and Fatah operatives or security force operatives who ignore the official commitment. That duality is reflected in the inconsistent, diverse statements about the AAMB made by members of the Fatah movement. Some occasionally express reservations, and others publicly support, identify with and praise the armed “resistance,” while local Fatah branches support and openly aid it (al-Jazeera, August 9, 2022). 
The duality of the PA’s approach is also reflected in the way it responds to terrorist attacks for which the AAMB claim responsibility. Publicly, some of the senior PA figures condemn the attacks, primarily those carried out inside Israel territory, but often praise those who carry them out and represent them as role models and heroes who sacrifice their lives for the sake of the Palestinian people. The PA also issues mourning notices for them and senior Palestinian figures attend their funerals and go to the mourning tents to offer condolences. In the case of Ibrahim al-Nabulsi, AAMB leader in Nablus, Fatah even named its summer camps after him.
There's another reason why the West is reluctant to call out Fatah's clear support for these terror attacks. If every single Palestinian faction supports terror so explicitly, then Israel really cannot be blamed for concentrating on defending itself and its citizens - but the West wants to maintain the fiction that Israel is equally responsible for the violence, that it is a "cycle of violence" and not Israel responding to terror.

In the end, it is all politics and optics, and the West doesn't want to admit that the two state solution they want so desperately cannot work as long as one of the states is committed to destroy the other, one Jew at a time. 




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Thursday, October 27, 2022

Last year, during the May 2021 fighting in Gaza, an IAF missile destroyed an apartment in Gaza City, killing a mother and two of her children - Rima Telbani(31), Zeid(4) and Maryam(2).

Israel was blamed for targeting civilians. The New York Times published a  photo of the children

Today, another victim of that attack succumbed to his wounds. His name is Muhammad Ouda Yousef Al-Telbani.



In fact, in the building at the same time were two other senior Hamas terrorists who were killed - who were not mentioned by PCHR.

Which means that the building was almost certainly a command and control center - and the cute Telbani kids were human shields for Hamas, including for their father. 

That changes the story a bit, doesn't it?




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Wednesday, October 26, 2022



At the socialist site  Jewish Currents, writer Alex Kane provides us with an excellent example of anti-Israel agitprop - and even justification of terrorism -  disguised as a critical analysis of the definition of terrorism.

Like all good propaganda, the article starts off with a very reasonable point:

ON OCTOBER 9TH, a Palestinian shot and killed Noa Lazar, an Israeli soldier serving at a checkpoint near the Shuafat refugee camp. Three days later, a Palestinian gunman killed Ido Baruch, a soldier who was guarding Israeli settlers as they marched near the Palestinian town of Sebastia in the occupied West Bank.

Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid called the Shuafat attack a “severe terrorist attack,” and said the assailant behind Baruch’s shooting was a “despicable terrorist.” The Jerusalem Post, Israel HaYom and i24 News referred to the Shuafat shooting as a “terrorist” act. The centrist Anti-Defamation League as well as the liberal Zionist J Street also referred to the shootings as “terror” attacks.

This broad consensus across the Zionist political spectrum reflects a commonly-held view among many Israelis and Israel advocates that the killings of soldiers engaged in a military occupation are acts of “terror,” in the same category as indiscriminate attacks on civilians. But this view represents only one pole of a discursive struggle between Israelis and Palestinians, and, more broadly, Western countries and formerly-colonized nations, who have clashed in international fora like the United Nations (UN) over whether violence against agents of a military occupation ought to count as “terrorism.”

While different countries have codified their own definitions of terrorism in their national laws, “there is no international legal consensus on the meaning of terrorism,” said Ben Saul, Challis Chair of International Law at the University of Sydney and author of the book Defining Terrorism in International Law. According to Saul, there is general agreement among states that the deliberate killing of civilians to achieve political goals constitutes terrorism; the disagreement lies in “whether insurgent or guerrilla attacks on soldiers in armed conflicts should also be called terrorism.”
Kane is partially correct - not only Israel but most Western nations and media usually refer to attacks on their own soldiers as terrorist attacks, but generally not attacks on other nations' soldiers (not just "agents of a military occupation" as Kane claims.)  For example, the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing that killed over 300 US and French soldiers was referred to as a terrorist attack in US statements and news articles even though the targets were military.

However, the official definitions of terrorism adopted by many countries do not give exceptions for attacks against soldiers. Most Western countries make no mention of civilian or non-combatant targets in their definitions. The FBI defines international terrorism based on the identity of the attackers being associated with designated terror groups; attacks against armed forces are not excluded.

Be that as it may, Kane's initial point has validity - one instinctively associates terror attacks with civilian targets - and he leverages that to skillfully pretend that other criticisms of the use of the term have equal validity. 

Since 2000, countries at the UN have tried to come to a consensus on what’s called the Comprehensive Terrorism Convention, which would codify the criminalization of terrorism in international law. But consensus has again stalled due to disagreements on how to classify national liberation struggles. The Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), a body of 57 mostly Muslim-majority countries, argues that violence committed by those in a struggle for self-determination—a term referring to a people’s ability to form their own state and govern themselves—should not be covered by the terrorism convention but rather by international humanitarian law, which governs the permissible use of force based in part on the “principle of distinction” between civilians and soldiers. The OIC’s argument is aimed at exempting Palestinian and Kashmiri fighters from being considered “terrorists” under international law when they launch attacks on Israeli or Indian soldiers who currently occupy their lands. The African Union and League of Arab States share the OIC’s perspective: Both bodies have adopted regional terrorism conventions that exclude struggles for national liberation from their definition of terrorism.    

Here's where we see the depth of Kane's dishonesty. Building on his initial point, he frames the objections of the OIC and others in terms of their targets, saying that their main objections are against considering attacks on "occupying soldiers" to be terrorism.

But that is not what they are saying. The OIC's proposed definition would exempt any attack, even against civilians, even targeting women and children, from being considered terrorism as long as they are "in situations of foreign occupation" or any "armed conflict." It was written, at the height of the second intifada, deliberately to excuse Palestinian suicide and bus bombings.

And this is borne out by parallel activities by anti-Israel activists who have attempted to claim that even directly targeting Jewish civilians are part of a legitimate "right to resist" - by any means. Richard Falk, former  United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories, wrote that "Palestinian resistance to occupation is a legally protected right" specifically in reference to the second intifada attacks on Jewish civilians. 

Kane is presenting these justifications for attacks on civilians as merely objections to use of the term "terrorism" against soldiers. By not mentioning these facts, he is framing the controversy over the definition of the term "terrorism" as two sides making reasonable, equally valid points and that their disagreements are only about attacking the military. 

Kane then subtly justifies attacks on civilians, again by using misdirection to pretend he is only talking about soldiers:

According to George Bisharat, an emeritus professor at the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law, “terrorism” is “a buzzword” intending to cast violence against occupation soldiers as illegitimate. In Israel/Palestine, “it’s being used for its political and rhetorical impact to discredit any violent resistance against Israel’s occupation,” he said, which is why “the non-aligned nations, as they call themselves, are insistent on the principle that violence exercised to advance the right of self-determination is not illegal.”  

 The legal distinction Kane is making has suddenly changed from target of the violence (ostensibly, soldiers) is to the reason for the violence - "self-determination." Kane introduces Bisharat as only talking about targeting soldiers, but  Bisharat's words say otherwise. If "violence exercised to advance the right of self-determination is not illegal" then that includes all attacks, including civilians. (Bisharat himself knows that attacks on civilians is illegal, but he is unhappy about it, ludicrously complaining that the inaccuracy of Palestinian rockets makes it too difficult for Palestinians to adhere to international law by only hitting military targets.)

Which means that Kane is classifying attacks on civilians as just another valid position. He's too smart to say it explicitly, but the Bisharat sentence is in fact the main point that he wants to give the reader - that Palestinian terrorism is legitimate because it is resistance.

In fact, the tone of the article is that Israel is unjustifiably referring to legitimate resistance as terrorism, while those who have cheered and funded the murder of Jewish civilians (the non-aligned nations) have solid legal ground for their support. 

There is another layer to Kane's propaganda techniques.

This entire article is meant to obfuscate a basic fact. By only talking about Palestinian attacks on soldiers, he is implying that soldiers are the main targets of the terror groups. But the terrorists, whether they are Hamas or Fatah or Lion's Den, make no such distinctions. Their own words and publications never say that they only want to attack soldiers - their targets are "settlers" and, to them, every Israeli Jew is a "settler." When they attack soldiers and guards it is because those are the ones on the front lines, not out of any concern for international law or the definition of terrorism. When the armed groups have the opportunity, they attack civilians, and indeed they prefer to attack civilians because they are softer targets. 

This is why the attackers are terrorists by any definition. And that is exactly what Alex Kane and Jewish Currents wants you to forget.




Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon!

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Sunday, August 14, 2022




Amira Hass in Haaretz published a detailed account of the Gazans who died in Operation Breaking Dawn and the circumstances of each death. I disagree with several of her conclusions, and she doesn't identify all of their affiliations with terror groups, but on the whole it is a reasonably fair article that squarely blames Islamic Jihad for the deaths of 19 civilians including 12 children, far more than were killed in Israeli attacks that were targeting terrorists and military targets.
Despite Palestinian media attributing all deaths to Israeli attacks, Gazans know well that a very high number of victims stemmed from failed rocket launches by Islamic Jihad.

The high number of fatalities from so-called internal fire has embittered Palestinians, some Gazans told Haaretz. 
Amira Hass is a reliably anti-Israel reporter for Haaretz, often quoted by anti-Zionist activists and faux "human rights" professionals. 

Which is why this article is being nearly universally ignored by the anti-Israel crowd who have insisted that every dead child was "murdered" by Israel - and fundraised based on that lie.

The only exception I could find was James Zogby, prominent Arab American and pollster, who took advantage of the fact that the Haaretz article is only visible to subscribers - so he misrepresented the article as saying that all the civilians were "murdered " by Israel. 


Mainstream media journalists, who follow Haaretz religiously, have also ignored this story that damns Islamic Jihad for its responsibility for the bulk of the civilians killed. At best they have maintained a "he said, she said" narrative where Israel tells the truth and the Palestinians deny it. 

It is essentially a conspiracy of silence to make sure that the world doesn't learn the truth, outside of the one failed rocket attack Israel documented in Jabalia.

But Arabic-language media has no such qualms. 

Arabic sites, including the influential UK-based Al Quds, have translated and published the Haaretz article. It was also translated in the popular NABD news aggregator. The article is even in one Palestinian media outlet that regularly translates Hebrew articles into Arabic, as well as in "Palestine Forum." 

The Arab world, including Palestinians, is being more honest about Islamic Jihad's culpability in the deaths of children than the Western mainstream media has been. 

The worst of all in attempting to hide these deaths are the very "human rights groups" whose job is to protect these civilians. They know the truth very well but have done everything they can to hide it



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