Zion and the Art of Armageddon

An initial investigation by the Euro-Med Monitor has found no evidence of a military presence at the site of the al-Tabin School massacre in Gaza that killed more than 100 people. “According to all available information and testimonies, there were no military gatherings or command centres at the school, and it was never used for military objectives. Survivors testified that the school was providing shelter to hundreds of children whose families felt safe there,” the group said. “The narrow layout of the school and the lack of launch pads and shelters would make it impossible for the site to be used for military operations. The building’s cramped layout and tight spaces make it unsuitable for military operations that call for planning and logistical assistance.”
 
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Hamas has asked mediators to present a plan based upon previous truce talks instead of attempting to find a new Gaza ceasefire deal, days ahead of talks proposed by the United States, Egypt and Qatar. The May 6 proposal, which Hamas previously agreed to and Israel rejected, also ensures the release of Israeli captives in Gaza as well as an unspecified number of Palestinians held in Israeli jails.

Benjamin Netanyahu has previously said that he would not agree to any deal that stipulated an end to Israel’s war on Gaza without the full defeat of Hamas. But Israel has said it would send negotiators to take part in the ceasefire meeting on August 15.

Oh, Hamas is Hamas, and Zion is Zion, and ne'er the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God's great Judgment Seat;
But there is neither East nor West, Border nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth!
 
Odds said:
Oh, Hamas is Hamas, and Zion is Zion, and ne'er the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God's great Judgment Seat;
But there is neither East nor West, Border nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth!
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Unusual report as this one seems to have gone to the BBC as no mention on AlJ,

A white van parks next to a PA customs building in the west bank. Some get out of the back. Custom officer goes out to see what is going on. One of the ones out of the back shoots him - dead. IDF out of uniform. A number of IDF in uniform appear.

Israel initial comment shot in cross fire. All caught on CCTV. Changes to an operation that went wrong.

Israel's aim was to arrest 2 people.

PA official interviewed. Concern that the numbers shot /killed along with a huge number of arrests will cause a general uprising in the West Bank. He is wondering how they are expected to do their job with this sort of thing going on. The raid rate escalating but not put that clearly.

BBC reporter who is there shows a small shrine, ring of rocks plus flowers were the bloke was shot and comments that there are loads of bullet pock marks around.
 
Extracts from a long read in the Guardian by Omer Bartov.

...Today, across vast swaths of the Israeli public, including those who oppose the government, two sentiments reign supreme.

The first is a combination of rage and fear, a desire to re-establish security at any cost and a complete distrust of political solutions, negotiations and reconciliation. The military theorist Carl von Clausewitz noted that war was the extension of politics by other means, and warned that without a defined political objective it would lead to limitless destruction. The sentiment that now prevails in Israel similarly threatens to make war into its own end. In this view, politics is an obstacle to achieving goals rather than a means to limit destruction. This is a view that can only ultimately lead to self-annihilation.

The second reigning sentiment – or rather lack of sentiment – is the flipside of the first. It is the utter inability of Israeli society today to feel any empathy for the population of Gaza. The majority, it seems, do not even want to know what is happening in Gaza, and this desire is reflected in TV coverage. Israeli television news these days usually begins with reports on the funerals of soldiers, invariably described as heroes, fallen in the fighting in Gaza, followed by estimates of how many Hamas fighters were “liquidated”. References to Palestinian civilian deaths are rare and normally presented as part of enemy propaganda or as a cause for unwelcome international pressure. In the face of so much death, this deafening silence now seems like its own form of vengefulness.
 
He wrote his Oxford PhD thesis, later published as a book, on the Nazi indoctrination of the German army and the crimes it perpetrated on the eastern front in the second world war, and feared the IDF was on the same slippery slope when Yitzhak Rabin ordered IDF troops to "break the arms and legs of Palestinian youths throwing rocks at heavily armed Israeli soldiers...and today the actions of those forces in Gaza border on genocidal murder, perpetrating war crimes on a daily basis to the sound of applause from their unsane supporters.

I have a real problem with the term 'liquidated': a term favoured by Totalitarian regimes to describe the deaths of adversaries fighting for their individual freedom and national survival.
 
At the end of the article he goes on to say...another part of my apprehension had to do with the fact that my view of what was happening in Gaza had shifted. On 10 November 2023, I wrote in the New York Times: “As a historian of genocide, I believe that there is no proof that genocide is now taking place in Gaza, although it is very likely that war crimes, and even crimes against humanity, are happening. […] We know from history that it is crucial to warn of the potential for genocide before it occurs, rather than belatedly condemn it after it has taken place. I think we still have that time.”

I no longer believe that. By the time I travelled to Israel, I had become convinced that at least since the attack by the IDF on Rafah on 6 May 2024, it was no longer possible to deny that Israel was engaged in systematic war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal actions. It was not just that this attack against the last concentration of Gazans – most of them displaced already several times by the IDF, which now once again pushed them to a so-called safe zone – demonstrated a total disregard of any humanitarian standards. It also clearly indicated that the ultimate goal of this entire undertaking from the very beginning had been to make the entire Gaza Strip uninhabitable, and to debilitate its population to such a degree that it would either die out or seek all possible options to flee the territory. In other words, the rhetoric spouted by Israeli leaders since 7 October was now being translated into reality – namely, as the 1948 UN Genocide Convention puts it, that Israel was acting “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part”, the Palestinian population in Gaza, “as such, by killing, causing serious harm, or inflicting conditions of life meant to bring about the group’s destruction”.

Omer Bartov

Left-wing Jews have been largely silenced in the Israeli media but they maintain vigilance with open eyes and hearts full of remorse for what is being done in their name. It is not anti-semitic to criticise the actions of the Zionist state and those who make the attempt to silence good people who refuse to stand idly by and watch while their world burns will ultimately fail.
 
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Omer Barto; born 1954 is an Israeli-American historian. He is the Samuel Pisar Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University, where he has taught since 2000. Bartov is a historian of the Holocaust and is considered one of the world's leading authorities on genocide. The Forward calls him "one of the foremost scholars of Jewish life in Galicia."
Omer Bartov was born in 1954 in Ein HaHoresh, Israel. His father, Hanoch Bartov, was an author and journalist whose parents immigrated to Mandatory Palestine[ from Poland before Hanoch was born.
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en.wikipedia.org

Omer Bartov - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

Filly, motorbiking et al would call him a Jew hater. :rolleyes:
 
Notch7 said:
It’s amazing how Hamas have more command centres than the USA military and NATO combined.
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Depends how you define a command centre.
Could be just some bloke in a tunnel giving out orders using a mobile phone.
 
ellal said:
It's known as a 'double tap strike'...

A favourite amongst terrorists where they attack the people ( often aid workers) who go to help out at the initial attack...

So Israel is using terrorist tactics...

Who would have thought that? ;)
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Tactic used by terrorists worldwide.
The IRA used to devastating effect on more than one occasion.
 
It is an undeniable fact that the state of israel was brought into being by terrorists...

It is also an undeniable fact that many of the leaders of israel have been or are terrorists or war criminals...

And terrorists beget terrorists...

Some countries are funded by the west, and others funded by non western countries...

But the result is always the same...

The countless deaths of innocent people on both sides!
 
Mrs Ten Names said:
So far about 7,000 Hamas have been killed.
That works out as nearly five times more innocent civilians killed for the number of Hamas killed.
40,000 - 7,000 = 33,000
33,000 ÷ 7,000 ~ 4.7

That's not war, that's retribution.
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Technically that's a worse civilian ratio than on October 7th.

800 Civilians and 400 military.
 
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