Israel's War Against Hamas - Updates

[Sixties Fan]

The ancient synagogue of Gaza, dating back to 508 CE during the Byzantine period, was unearthed in 1965. Situated in what was once the bustling port city of Gaza, known as "Maiuma" or El Mineh (the harbor) at the time, this historical site now resides within the Rimal district of Gaza City. The Egyptian archaeologists initially identified it as a church, but a remarkable mosaic featuring King David playing a lyre, labeled in Hebrew, was subsequently found.

This mosaic, measuring 3 meters high and 1.9 meters wide, provided insight into the art and culture of the era. Curiously, it was first mistaken as depicting a female saint playing the harp but was later associated with Orpheus, a figure from Greek mythology, with ties to Jesus or David in Byzantine art.

The ancient synagogue of Gaza, dating back to 508 CE during the Byzantine period, was unearthed in 1965. Situated in what was once the bustling port city of Gaza, known as "Maiuma" or El Mineh (the harbor) at the time, this historical site now resides within the Rimal district of Gaza City. The Egyptian archaeologists initially identified it as a church, but a remarkable mosaic featuring King David playing a lyre, labeled in Hebrew, was subsequently found.

This mosaic, measuring 3 meters high and 1.9 meters wide, provided insight into the art and culture of the era. Curiously, it was first mistaken as depicting a female saint playing the harp but was later associated with Orpheus, a figure from Greek mythology, with ties to Jesus or David in Byzantine art.

Synagogue mosaic of King David (credit: AVISHAI TEICHER/WIKIPEDIA)

Property damage on historical pieces​

Sadly, the main figure's face was damaged shortly after its discovery. Following Israel's capture of the Gaza Strip in the 1967 Six Day War, the mosaic was moved to the Israel Museum for restoration, where it remains a testament to the rich history of the region.

Nowadays, visitors can marvel at the mosaic floor of the synagogue in the Museum of the Good Samaritan, located near the Jerusalem-Jericho Road close to the Israeli settlement of Ma'ale Adumim. One of the most renowned panels in the mosaic floor portrays King David, identified by a Hebrew inscription reading "David," as he plays the lyre with a gathering of docile wild animals before him.

IDF soldiers pray in ancient 6th century Gaza synagogue for first time in decades

A number of posts suggest that soldiers prayed at the ancient synagogue, though IDF rules have reportedly kept soldiers from sharing them for safety.

www.jpost.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

[ Delusional ]


Sinwar's deputy said Hamas had wider goals than running Gaza. “Hamas’s goal is not to run Gaza and to bring it water and electricity and such,” said Mr. al-Hayya, the politburo member. “Hamas, the Qassam and the resistance woke the world up from its deep sleep and showed that this issue must remain on the table.”

“This battle was not because we wanted fuel or laborers,” he added. “It did not seek to improve the situation in Gaza. This battle is to completely overthrow the situation.”

According to the New York Times, which has been conducting interviews with leaders of Hamas in recent weeks as well as with Israeli and Western officials, it appears that the October 7 attack was planned and executed by a small group of Hamas leaders in Gaza who did not share the information with the leadership abroad, or other regional allies such as Hezbollah in Lebanon. Therefore, many outside Gaza were surprised by the scope of the attack and level of atrocities that had taken place and even the Gaza ruling terror group was surprised by the success of its assault and that the number of dead and abducted was higher than expected.

Two officials whose governments are in contact with Hamas said the aim of the October 7 attack was to take as many IDF soldiers, hostage as possible, in order to swap them with Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.

One security source said Hamas expected Palestinians to rise up elsewhere after the assault and that mass demonstrations would force Arab governments and regional allies to join in the war.

“I hope that the state of war with Israel will become permanent on all the borders, and that the Arab world will stand with us,” Taher El-Nounou, a Hamas media adviser, told the Times.


(full article online)

Senior Hamas member says hopes war would become permanent

Khalil al-Hayya, a deputy to Hamas Gaza leader Yahya Sinwar says the group's aim is not to run Gaza but to shake the Middle East and put Palestinian issue back in focus; Tells New York Times expected Arab world to join fight

www.ynetnews.com

 

[rylah]

 

[Ancient lion]

The Resistance: 136 Israeli military vehicles destroyed

"Our fighters continue to confront the Israeli aggression, on all fronts.
We have documented that, since the start of the ground aggression, 136 (Israeli) military vehicles have been completely or partially destroyed and put out of service."

https://www.palestinechronicle.com/...veals-shocking-israeli-losses-on-battlefield/

 

[rylah]

The Resistance: 136 Israeli military vehicles destroyed

"Our fighters continue to confront the Israeli aggression, on all fronts.
We have documented that, since the start of the ground aggression, 136 (Israeli) military vehicles have been completely or partially destroyed and put out of service."

https://www.palestinechronicle.com/...veals-shocking-israeli-losses-on-battlefield/

That is 20 less than in Hamas previous statements,
according to Abu Hmar, more hostages are dead than taken...

But who in "Free Palestine" is going to question the arithmetic?

 

[Sixties Fan]

No one is talking about it, but Hamas' destruction is nearly as important to most Sunni Arab states as it is too Israel.

Hamas is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood - as is Al Qaeda. Most Arab states passionately hate the "Ikhwan," whose slogan is "Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. Qur'an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope."

The Muslim Brotherhood goal, which Hamas shares, is to unify all Muslim countries into a single entity ruled by Sharia law.

This is a direct threat to most Arab governments. Yet Muslim Brotherhood-based political parties have significant support in many so-called moderate Arab states, like Jordan or Bahrain where their parties have about 10% of seats.

The biggest blow to the Muslim Brotherhood's political power in recent years was Egypt's crackdown on the group after President Sis deposed the MB's Morsi. It has been in disarray since throughout the Middle East.

If Hamas ends up with any pretense of victory - meaning if it survives in any form - all that could be reversed. It could cause an "Arab winter" where the Muslim Brotherhood would gain hundreds of thousands of followers.

Iran would take advantage of the changed dynamics, and fund the Brotherhood parties and potential allied armed groups. Regimes may topple.

The entire region could be destabilized if the Gaza Islamists remain in power.

They don't say it out loud, but Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, Tunisia and Morocco, to name a few, are silently counting on Israel to utterly destroy Hamas.

As always, Israel is forced to act alone because many of the countries that will benefit from the destruction of Hamas have populations that are 90% antisemitic.

Let me emphasize what defeating Hamas means. If they survive in Gaza, they will be regarded as victors. If Israel does a prisoner swap, Hamas will be regarded as heroes. If they are sent into exile, they will be regarded as victors. If they survive for two months, pro-Hamas media will paint that as victory as well. A ceasefire or "humanitarian pause" would help Hamas' optics tremendously in the Arab world.

Like it or not, Israel is now fighting on behalf of the moderate Arab world, and in some ways for the entire free world.

When Israel wins, the Arab world will condemn them loudly and applaud them in silence. The world will only see the condemnations.

The Arab world needs Hamas to be destroyed, too

Blogging about Israel and the Arab world since, oh, forever.

elderofziyon.blogspot.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

The BBC’s story reveals the remarkably precise and detailed intelligence that Israel possesses on what’s going on in Gaza. It also illustrates the extraordinary lengths to which the Israeli Defence Forces go to spare the lives of Gaza’s civilians. As any dispassionate person who has followed Israel’s wars knows very well, the IDF try everything they can to get enemy civilians out of harm’s way — by leafleting, “knock on the roof” warning shots, phone calls and other means of communication.

No other army in the world has ever done this. When coalition forces bombed Afghanistan or when US forces flattened Mosul, no-one even bothered to mention the civilians who must have been killed there. Yet Israel’s wars repeatedly engulf it in international outrage with accusations that it kills enemy civilians wantonly or deliberately. This is not just a malevolent lie; it could not be a more grotesque inversion of the truth.

The lie is nevertheless perpetrated day in, day out by western media. While the Israelis say they have killed “thousands of Hamas terrorists” in this current war, western media outlets publish Hamas claims that 10,000 “civilians” have been killed — with no attempt whatever to acknowledge that any of these were Hamas operatives and referring only to women and children among the dead.

Sadly, many civilians will unavoidably be killed in Gaza, as in any war. But the wicked distortion that turns the Israelis from scrupulous adherents to the international law requirement to try to avoid civilian deaths into war criminals turns these media outlets into Hamas accomplices.

While the BBC is a principal and habitual offender, it is to its credit that it has published the story related by Mahmoud Shaheen. It says it contacted him after many al-Zahra residents identified him as the man who had received the warning call.

Elsewhere, further evidence of Israel’s concern for Gaza’s civilians has been venomously distorted.

Yesterday, a remarkable video surfaced showing a long line of people streaming from the north of Gaza to the south. The Israelis have repeatedly warned that residents of the north should move to the south for their own safety since the north was about to become Israel’s principal focus for attack.

Some 800,000 Gazans did so, but Hamas tried to stop more joining them by firing on them, in order to keep them in place as human shields. The reason for yesterday’s large line moving south was that, with the IDF now having moved into Gaza City, its tanks could protect the evacuating civilians from Hamas attack. The video, which you can see here, shows this clearly. Yet this is how the Guardian chose to report it:
Waving white flags and holding their hands above their heads, Palestinian families fled past tanks waiting to storm Gaza City in the next stage of the war that the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has said will give Israel “indefinite” control over the besieged territory.

Israel’s military gave civilians inside the encircled city a four-hour window to leave on Tuesday, as its forces prepared to retake the biggest city in the strip. Men, women and children, some carrying their belongings on donkeys, fled their homes past Israeli troops out of the city.

Posting online, one resident, Adam Fayez Zeyara, said the walk on Tuesday was the most dangerous of his life. “We saw the tanks from point blank. We saw decomposed body parts. We saw death.”

In other words, the Guardian portrayed the Gazans who were being protected by Israeli troops as fleeing from Israeli troops.

By such malevolent misrepresentation, of the kind that the media has habitually promulgated against Israel for decades, the western mind has been poisoned and fatally subverted to endorse evil against its victims.

How Israel tries to protect Gaza's civilians

Despite general media malevolence, the truth sometimes emerges

melaniephillips.substack.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

But while 7 October remains raw in Israel, here in the UK the atrocities are already starting to fade from view. Turn on the television, open up a newspaper or scroll through social media and you will see endless condemnation and vilification – not of Hamas and its barbarism, but of Israel and its attempts to defend itself. Certainly, the tragic plight of innocent Gazan civilians deserves the world’s attention. But a month on from 7 October, so much of the coverage and commentary now skips over the pogrom entirely. You could be forgiven for forgetting why this conflict even started. You might even have the impression that Israel is attacking Gaza because… well, that’s just what evil old Israel does. What we are witnessing right now is the memory-holing of the 7 October massacre.

This memory-holing takes many forms. Some Hamas spokespeople and their useful idiots continue to actively deny the atrocities. Moussa Abu Marzouk, a senior Hamas figure, told the BBC this week that ‘women, children and civilians were exempt’ from the 7 October violence, even though civilians were Hamas’s primary targets. Then there are the legions of online cranks, Islamists and anti-Semites who say the worst of 7 October, from the butchering of babies to the rapes of young women, did not actually happen – despite the vast documentary evidence of these crimes, most of it filmed by Hamas terrorists themselves. It’s a kind of ‘Holocaust denial in real time’, as journalist Bari Weiss has described it.

Then there are those who seek to violently erase the memory of the attacks. In New York and London, posters of Israeli hostages have been defaced and torn down. One man scrawled the word ‘coloniser’ over the faces of kidnapped children. So intense is these people’s loathing of Israel, so unhinged is their anti-Semitism, that they cannot bear to be confronted with Jewish suffering, even that endured by children. What happened on 7 October must be forgotten and suppressed, it seems, so that these activists might once again feel at home on the ‘right side of history’.

Others try to reframe the slaughter as a righteous act of resistance. 7 October was ‘a day of celebration for supporters of democracy and human-rights worldwide’, according to one pseudo-radical journalist. It has been celebrated as a blow for ‘decolonisation’ by academics the world over. Before the bodies were even cold, a joint statement was issued by 31 social-justice campaign groups at Harvard University, insisting that Israel’s ‘apartheid regime’ be held ‘entirely responsible’ for the unfolding violence. In other words, forget Hamas’s decision to wage a genocidal campaign against Israel’s Jews – Israel is the aggressor here. Massacres like that on 7 October apparently cannot be allowed to intrude on this simplistic identitarian worldview, of colonised against coloniser. And so the grotesque anti-Semitic savagery of Hamas is, at best, excused. At worst, it is rebranded and transformed into a progressive struggle for justice.

Finally, there are those who were unmoved by 7 October, but have leapt at the chance to condemn Israel’s response. Artists for Palestine UK, a group including Tilda Swinton, Steve Coogan and Maxine Peake, has produced an open letter denouncing Western governments for supporting Israel. It makes no mention of Hamas, 7 October or the deaths of 1,400 Israelis. The likes of Swinton or Coogan are far from alone. Centrist dads, woke celebs and leftish politicians are all keen to lecture Israel to lay down its weapons. To render itself defenceless against its tormentors. To surrender its civilian hostages to the enemy. To give free rein to Hamas’s genocidal hostility.

We must not let Hamas’s evil be forgotten, obfuscated or downplayed. The forces of irrationalism and racism that drove this pogrom are arguably even more potent today than they were just one month ago. If we memory-hole this massacre, then we are in serious danger of greenlighting the next one. Those who have excused or denied this evil ought to be ashamed.

(full article online)

The memory-holed massacre

One month on, the Hamas atrocities of 7 October are already being denied, obfuscated and forgotten.

www.spiked-online.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

Part 1

On October 7, Hamas terrorists were not the only ones who documented the war crimes they had committed during their deadly rampage across southern Israel. Some of their atrocities were captured by Gaza-based photojournalists working for the Associated Press and Reuters news agencies whose early morning presence at the breached border area raises serious ethical questions.

What were they doing there so early on what would ordinarily have been a quiet Saturday morning? Was it coordinated with Hamas? Did the respectable wire services, which published their photos, approve of their presence inside enemy territory, together with the terrorist infiltrators? Did the photojournalists who freelance for other media, like CNN and The New York Times, notify these outlets? Judging from the pictures of lynching, kidnapping and storming of an Israeli kibbutz, it seems like the border has been breached not only physically, but also journalistically.

AP: Photojournalists or Infiltrators?​

Four names appear on AP’s photo credits from the Israel-Gaza border area on October 7: Hassan Eslaiah, Yousef Masoud, Ali Mahmud, and Hatem Ali.

Eslaiah, a freelancer who also works for CNN, crossed into Israel, took photos of a burning Israeli tank, and then captured infiltrators entering Kibbutz Kfar Azza.

https://honestreporting.com/photographers-without-borders-ap-reuters-pictures-of-hamas-atrocities-raise-ethical-questions/

 

[Sixties Fan]

Part 2

HonestReporting has obtained screenshots of Eslaiah’s now-removed tweets on X in which he documented himself standing in front of the Israeli tank. He did not wear a press vest or a helmet, and the Arabic caption of his tweet read: “Live from inside the Gaza Strip settlements.”

Masoud, who also works for The New York Times, was there as well — just in time to set foot in Israeli territory and take more tank pictures.

Ali Mahmud and Hatem Ali were positioned to get pictures of the horrific abductions of Israelis into Gaza.

Mahmud captured the pickup truck carrying the body of German-Israeli Shani Louk and Ali got several shots of abductees being kidnapped into the Strip.

Interestingly, the names of the photographers, which appear on other sources, have been removed from some of the photos on AP’s database. Perhaps someone at the agency realized it posed serious questions regarding their journalistic ethics.

https://honestreporting.com/photographers-without-borders-ap-reuters-pictures-of-hamas-atrocities-raise-ethical-questions/

 

[Sixties Fan]

Part 3

Reuters: Lynching as “Image of the Day”​

Reuters has published pictures from two photojournalists who also happened to be at the border just in time for Hamas’ infiltration: Mohammed Fayq Abu Mostafa and Yasser Qudih.

They both took pictures of a burning Israeli tank on the Israeli side of the border, but Abu Mustafa went further: He took photos of a lynch mob brutalizing the body of an Israeli soldier who was dragged out of the tank.

Reuters was kind enough to add a graphic warning to the photo caption, but it didn’t prevent editors from shamelessly labeling it as one of the “Images of the Day” on their editorial database.

Let’s be clear: News agencies may claim that these people were just doing their job. Documenting war crimes, unfortunately, may be part of it. But it’s not that simple.

It is now obvious that Hamas had planned its October 7 attack on Israel for a very long time: its scale, its brutal aims and its massive documentation have been prepared for months, if not years. Everything was taken into account — the deployments, the timing, as well as the use of bodycams and mobile phone videos for sharing the atrocities.

Is it conceivable to assume that “journalists” just happened to appear early in the morning at the border without prior coordination with the terrorists? Or were they part of the plan?

Even if they didn’t know the exact details of what was going to happen, once it unfolded did they not realize they were breaching a border? And if so, did they notify the news agencies? Some sort of communication was undoubtedly necessary — before, after or during the attack — in order to get the photos published.

Either way, when international news agencies decide to pay for material that has been captured under such problematic circumstances, their standards may be questioned and their audience deserves to know about it. And if their people on the ground actively or passively collaborated with Hamas to get the shots, they should be called out to redefine the border between journalism and barbarism.

https://honestreporting.com/photographers-without-borders-ap-reuters-pictures-of-hamas-atrocities-raise-ethical-questions/

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

[Sixties Fan]

[ Full comments on twitter]

 

[Ancient lion]

That is 20 less than in Hamas previous statements,
according to Abu Hmar, more hostages are dead than taken...

But who in "Free Palestine" is going to question the arithmetic?

Where are these "previous statements"?

And who is Abu Hmar?

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

[Sixties Fan]