Israel and Hamas agree to Gaza ceasefire and hostage deal

BREAKING NEWS: Israel and Hamas agree to a deal that will pause fighting in Gaza and lead to the phased release of hostages and Palestinian prisoners, sources said

• Implementation is likely to start on Sunday. Hamas is expected to release 33 hostagesduring the first phase of an emerging deal. Hundreds of Palestinian prisoners are set to be released from Israeli jails at the same time.

• The release of the hostages would be the first phase of the deal being finalized. Negotiations to reach the second phase – which is intended to end the war – would begin on the 16th day of the implementation of the deal. Here’s what we know about the potential deal.

A ceasefire during a genocide isn’t justice, it’s just a pause in torture.

There is nothing to celebrate here.

In January of 2023, 9 months before Hamas launched their attack, I wrote that all the ingredients of another Palestinian uprising had been met thanks to Trump’s insane pandering to the evangelical vote to make Jerusalem the capital of Israel.

Trump made Jerusalem the capital of Israel in 2017 because his lunatic evangelical voter block believe one of the pre-conditions of the rapture is Israel going back to its Old Testament Boundaries.

This naked pandering by Trump to the happy happy joy joy evangelical Apocalypse club set off an explosion of Zionist land grabs focused in the West Bank while continuing to brutally occupy Gaza with a never ending blockade.

Those land grabs wound their way through Israel’s judicial system and went against the Zionists who in turn politicised and formed important fringe groups who cut deals with the deeply corrupt Netanyahu which culminated in a show down between the far right Zionists who wanted to over ride judicial orders against their illegal settlements and Israeli civil society who were disgusted by the abuse of power, state over reach and the strangling off of an Independent Judiciary.

The perverse outcome of Trump’s Abraham Accords that sought to normalise relations between Israel and the Sunni Petrostates, is that it cut the Palestinians out altogether meaning their suffering under the oppressive (and illegal) Israeli Occupation would never find hope and their aspirations silenced.

All these ingredients came together on October 7th as Hamas launched a highly organised attack on Israel murdering 695 civilians, 71 foreigners (mostly Thai), 373 security/soldiers and taking 250 hostages. That attack has generated a disproportionate genocidal response from Israel that has killed over 40 000 + the 10 000 under rubble + the 182 000 Palestinians that have died from secondary causes because of the immense violence.

We are knocking on quarter of a million dead, hundreds of thousands wounded, over 60% of Gaza flattened and the startling reality the IDF have in one year dropped more bombs on Gaza than London, Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined…

 

…watching Israeli apologists scream that their disproportionate ethnic cleansing war crime against the Palestinians isn’t a Genocide and that you are anti-semitic for suggesting so in the shadow of the mountain of dead Palestinians they have killed, manages to encapsulate the insanity, malice and blind hate of the last year.

There are of course, ceasefire winners and losers.

 

CEASEFIRE WINNERS:

Netanyahu: The corrupt old fox of Israeli Politics.

Netanyahu’s entire political career has been built upon inflaming Palestinian rage, responding violently with disproportionate force and harvesting the Israeli extremist vote at the ballot box.

He is a ruthless, dangerous and corrupt player of the game. He needs to escalate and feed this conflict because the moment he doesn’t is the moment the Israeli establishment turns on him for the Intelligence failure of October 7th

From the chants of “In blood and fire we will expel Rabin” that radicalised the assassination of Rabin that Netanyahu had championed to the huge donations of cash paid to Hamas to fuel inter-Palestinian blood feuds…

Netanyahu “has always been hard right”, Oliver emphasized, “but it’s worth taking a minute to underscore just how extreme his current government is”. In his most recent election, Netanyahu assembled the most rightwing government in Israel’s history, with a cabinet “stocked with extremists”. One top minister has said “there is no such thing as a Palestinian people” and advocated for a massive expansion of settlements – seizing Palestinian land – against international law.

And Netanyahu has covertly funded Hamas to play them off their more organized and legitimate rival, the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. “Netanyahu took the risk of betting that he could control Hamas, and use them to his own ends, and he was horribly wrong about that,” Oliver explained.

…blame corrupt Netanyahu as much as Hamas for this inhumanity!

 

The American Military Industrial Complex: The Four Corporations of the Apocalypse 

This is an authoritarian regime, propped up by Billions in US Military Aid to oppress and occupy the remaining shreds of Palestinian land and they are perfectly happy to quell any democratic norm to enforce a Jewish State rather than a State of Israel.

The American Military Industrial Complex doesn’t care about the social carnage they cause as long as the invoice gets paid.

 

Putin: The master of Machiavellian Manipulation 

The more unhinged Netanyahu becomes, the more Putin can cause damage in the Ukraine because a divided Western attention benefits him. It was highly likely Russia quietly aided the Hamas tactics via Iran.

The IDF dropped more bombs on Gaza in 1 week than America did in 1 year of war with Afghanistan.

The IDF have killed more civilians in a month than Russia has in almost 2 years of war in the Ukraine.

The IDF manage to make Russia’s war crimes look tame in comparison.

Putin wins thanks to the IDF being far more brutal than his illegal war in the Ukraine.

Zionist Influence/Pressure: Anyone who challenges Israel’s genocide is anti-semitic  

The pro-Israel groups, Zionist apologists and astroturf Free Speech Unions have had a field day naming anyone critical of Israel’s illegal ethnic cleansing war crime as anti-semitic.

 

Lies: The first casualty of war is truth

John Minto has written a devastating critique of many of the lies Israel has spawned to justify their violence…

• Most of the victims were either Israeli soldiers and police or army reservists. One analysis concluded “A total of 1,269 individuals were affected, predominantly military males aged 18-25”
• Many Israeli civilians were killed by Israeli military commanders adopting the “Hannibal directive” whereby it is better to kill or risk killing Israeli war captives than having them taken hostage or prisoner. Orders to attack any vehicle heading to Gaza meant hundreds of cars were attacked, killing hundreds of Palestinians and Israelis alike
• After the resistance fighters broke out from Gaza there was a “second wave” of people who came through the fence and it appears this group were responsible for most of the war crimes committed on that day rather than fighters from the highly-disciplined resistance groups
• There was no widespread sexual assault committed by the Palestinian resistance fighters against Israeli women and children as claimed by Israel
• There were no beheaded Israeli babies, no foetuses ripped from slaughtered mothers, no children raped – all claims made by the Israeli propaganda machine
• Israel has taken more than 9,000 counter hostages (held without charge or trial) from Gaza and the Occupied West Bank since October 7^th
• Human Shields – While the Israeli army has always stated that human shields are “a key pillar of Hamas’s terror operations”, it has not provided credible proof for its allegations which are denied by Hamas. Israel repeatedly pushes this lie as a way of justifying the horrific civilian death toll from its indiscriminate bombing of civilian areas such as schools, hospitals etc
• Attacks on Aid convoys. Here is a UN envoy report on the lack of evidence Israel has provided to back up its claims.

…the IDF have been caught out so many times lying, I just don’t think anyone believes anything they have to say.

Evangelical American Christians: Rapture Provocateurs 

As difficult as this is to accept, Evangelical Republican Christians believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible, and as such, believe that if they whip up Israel/Palestinian conflict, they themselves can trigger the Armageddon.

The PRAYING FOR ARMAGEDDON documentary on Al Jazeera follows Evangelical Republican Christians raising funds for Zionist organisation to go into the West Bank and illegally seize Palestinian land IN THE HOPE of causing violence and the end of days.

Trump making Jerusalem Israel’s capital sparked the violence that helped elect the Zionist fanatics that started the conflict we are seeing erupt in Gaza now.

That’s why the Evangelicals love Trump so much, they think he will start the prophecy for the end of the world.

Irony: If the Grim Reaper and Hypocrisy had a daughter

The most tormented irony in this latest regurgitation of sadism between Hamas and Israel is of course Israel helped enable Hamas into the force it is now!

BLOWBACK: HOW ISRAEL WENT FROM HELPING CREATE HAMAS TO BOMBING IT

Did you also know that Hamas — which is an Arabic acronym for “Islamic Resistance Movement” — would probably not exist today were it not for the Jewish state? That the Israelis helped turn a bunch of fringe Palestinian Islamists in the late 1970s into one of the world’s most notorious militant groups? That Hamas is blowback?

This isn’t a conspiracy theory. Listen to former Israeli officials such as Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, who was the Israeli military governor in Gaza in the early 1980s. Segev later told a New York Times reporter that he had helped finance the Palestinian Islamist movement as a “counterweight” to the secularists and leftists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Fatah party, led by Yasser Arafat (who himself referred to Hamas as “a creature of Israel.”)

“The Israeli government gave me a budget,” the retired brigadier general confessed, “and the military government gives to the mosques.”

“Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation,” Avner Cohen, a former Israeli religious affairs official who worked in Gaza for more than two decades, told the Wall Street Journal in 2009. Back in the mid-1980s, Cohen even wrote an official report to his superiors warning them not to play divide-and-rule in the Occupied Territories, by backing Palestinian Islamists against Palestinian secularists. “I … suggest focusing our efforts on finding ways to break up this monster before this reality jumps in our face,” he wrote.

They didn’t listen to him. And Hamas, as I explain in the fifth installment of my short film series for The Intercept on blowback, was the result. To be clear: First, the Israelis helped build up a militant strain of Palestinian political Islam, in the form of Hamas and its Muslim Brotherhood precursors; then, the Israelis switched tack and tried to bomb, besiege, and blockade it out of existence.

In the past decade alone, Israel has gone to war with Hamas three times — in 2009, 2012, and 2014 — killing around 2,500 Palestinian civilians in Gaza in the process. Meanwhile, Hamas has killed far more Israeli civilians than any secular Palestinian militant group. This is the human cost of blowback.

…Israeli tactics to fund the most radical and extremist groups to topple enemies is a game the Americans played with Al Qaeda and saw resources going to Osama Bin Laden to play the exact same role with the blowback of 9/11.

The exact same thing with Hezbollah, they are the descendants of the Palestinians forced to fell Israel during the Nakba…

Why is Lebanon home to so many Palestinian refugees and leaders?

An estimated 270,000 Palestinians live in the country. Their story is one of war, displacement and a struggle to return.

…the problem with the brutal use of tactics like the IDF use is that it generates unforeseen blowback.

Hamas and Hezbollah are such unforeseen ironic blowbacks.

 

 

 

CEASEFIRE LOSERS:

War on Journalists: Journalism is not a crime

Over 130 journalist have been killed and the IDF have shut down Al Jazeera and censored them every chance they get. Targeting journalists for covering your unhinged disproportional violence and killing journalists to enforce that censorship is a special, almost American level evil.

 

Mainstream Media Coverage: Imagine what they would have gotten away with if it wasn’t for social media 

The way the mainstream media have covered this war should be an embarrassment to journalism and every ‘journalist’ in those mainstream media vehicles should be ashamed of themselves. The numerous times headlines have been written to be sympathetic to Israel is just extraordinary, John Minto is again righteously critical…

A last word on our mainstream media bias. In terms of international news agencies, New Zealand media relies almost exclusively on Western news sources such as the BBC, AP and Reuters none of which has journalists on site in Gaza unlike Al Jazeera and the various Palestinians news services which operate there despite 116 Palestinian journalists killed in Gaza since October 7^th according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Israel has closed the East Jerusalem Office and the Occupied West Bank offices of Al Jazeera and banned foreign journalist from entering Gaza. In the print media our newspapers take stories almost exclusively from The Times, Financial Times, Daily Telegraph, the Washingtion Post and the New York Times.

Using Western, Eurocentric news sources means we get Israeli perspectives, explanations, justifications and reasoning at the centre of news reporting with Palestinian voices, when they are ever included, as passively reported victims.

New Zealand’s mainstream news reporting is unashamedly racist and biased in its reporting of the Middle East. It is no different to the awful reporting from other western media. For example:

A recent computational analysis of the New York Times’ reporting for example revealed it continued to focus heavily on Israeli perspectives despite the mass slaughter of Palestinians.

The paper quoted Israelis and Americans many times more regularly than they did Palestinians, and when Palestinians were referred to it was invariably in the passivevoice.

In Britain, the Muslim Council of Britain’s Centre for Media Monitoring has analysed nearly 177,000 clips from TV broadcasts covering the first month after the 7 October attack. It found Israeli perspectives were three times more common than Palestinian ones.

A similar study by the Glasgow Media Group found that journalists regularly used condemnatory language for the killing of Israelis – “murderous”, “mass murder”, “brutal murder” and “merciless murder” – but never when Palestinians were being killed by Israel. “Massacres”, “atrocities” and “slaughter” were only ever carried out against Israelis, not against Palestinians.

There is no alternative for the news media than to report the truth. Israeli propaganda lies are not the truth and must not be reported when they have been thoroughly debunked.

…imagine what the mainstream gatekeepers would have managed to get away with in framing this conflict if it wasn’t for the social media exposing their falsehoods and lies.

 

America: War Crime Enabler

America has enabled Israel’s ethnic cleansing war crime and barely paused sending Israel massive military aid to kill tens of thousands of civilians.

 

 

Democrats: Gaza helped cost Harris election

I think Democrat acquiescence  to the Israeli lobby helped cost them the election. The righteous fury of many activists at the Democratic enabling of Israel’s war crime saw votes bleed to 3rd party candidates Jill Stein and Cornel West in critical battleground races and helped cost Harris. The irony of that is Trump will be far worse.

 

Ukraine: Russia’s war crimes eclipsed by IDF

Poor Ukraine.

Russia invades them, causes terrible damage and then has Putin’s war crimes eclipsed by the IDF!

The sheer brutality of Israel’s disproportionate response has eclipsed Russia’s war crimes and has shoved the Ukraine War into the background, this has been the reason why Zelensky is taking such enormous risks by attacking Russia before the election in the hope of keeping a Democrat President, because it’s all over rover the second Trump wins.

 

Left/Progressive Israelis: The courage of Allies

We can not and must not allow our righteous anger and disgust at what Zionist Israel has perpetrated here by tarring all Israeli’s with the same brush. Many, many, many Jewish Israelis and Israeli citizens are as appalled, horrified and enraged at what is being done in their name, indeed the courage to be Jewish and stand against this madness is a bravery beyond words.

 

Zionists defending rape: The hatred to Oppress has mutilated them

CCTV footage captured a terrifying incident inside a notorious Israeli prison. Palestinian prisoners were forced to lie face down in an open compound while a phalanx of Israeli Soldiers dragged one screaming teenager to the side of the compound, formed a shield around him and then raped the teenager in front of the others as a military psyop.

They raped a kid to terrify the others.

What can one say after that?

Video appears to show IDF soldiers sexually abusing Palestinian detainee

An Israeli television channel has broadcast CCTV footage allegedly showing Israel Defence Forces (IDF) soldiers sexually abusing a Palestinian detainee.

The video shows dozens of prisoners lying face down on the floor with their hands on the backs of their heads.

One of the prisoners is led away to a discreet corner. Three soldiers then appear to use shields to block the view.

Only a metre or so away, a military dog on a lead can be seen barking fiercely at the prisoner.

The incident, which is said to have taken place at the Sde Teiman prison in July, has been severely criticised by the White House as “deeply concerning” and should be fully investigated.

The facility, in Israel’s Negev region, is holding many Gazans suspected of participating in or aiding the 7 October attacks.

They are held without charge, guarded by IDF reservists and military police, and have no access to lawyers.

In recent weeks, there have been reports that some of the prisoners were raped by guards.

A boy with rips to his rectum and broken ribs was taken to a hospital afterwards.

After previous allegations, Israeli’s actually protested to let the IDF accused rapists go free…

Riots broke out and the prison was stormed by far-right Israelis demanding the release of nine soldiers arrested on suspicion of abuse.

…to be clear, an actual soldier from that unit then appeared on Israeli TV to defend what had happened!!!!!!!!!

How much must the cruelty of Occupation create in the Occupier a level of naked hatred that justifies the sexual rape of children as a psychological tool to terrify those witnessing it?

When you oppress another, it doesn’t just warp them, it warps you.

I pity those who would use this justification for their safety for they have no safety.

 

Palestinians: From the Bleeding River to the Poisoned Sea

Not only do the Palestinians need to deal with the trauma of over 60% of every building destroyed, over 41 000 dead + 10 000 still trapped under rubble + 180 000 dead from secondary collateral damage alongside the nearly 100 000 crippled and maimed – not only do they need to deal with all that, they have to denounce Hamas first before they are allowed our sympathy.

Our double standards in the West are so ugly and wretched they burn the soul.

 

Shared Humanity: We have let ourselves down

Over 60% of all buildings destroyed, the remainder too damaged for inhabiting.

Almost quarter of a million dead.

We are so righteous in denouncing Russian War Crimes but so quiet like timid field mice when it comes to denouncing Israel’s ethnic cleansing war crimes.

We are supposed to be the good guys.

We have enabled a war crime and genocide.

The World Court has sat in judgment and it has accused Israel of genocide and found it plausible that their disproportionate response to October 7th amounted to a genocide.

There are war crime arrest warrants out for the Israeli Prime Minister!

What have we become in the West but an enabler of extreme military violence to continue occupation?

This will stain our collective Mana for a century and beyond.

 

The word Genocide: A win for technical dictionary lovers

There has been a perverse lingual dance attempting to side track and disrupt focus on Israel’s genocide and that is this ludicrous argument that its anti-semitic to claim Israel’s violence amounts to genocide as that a specific term coined to legally define what the Nazi’s had done to the Jewish people during the Holocaust.

I simply don’t understand this as anything other than an attempt to distract criticism because even if we want to calm the easily triggered Zionist apologists, I’m not sure ‘Ethnic Cleansing War Crime’ is much better?

‘Genocide’ or ‘Ethnic Cleansing War Crime’ isn’t the flex Zionists seem to think it is.

The Global Court found that Israel probably has breached technical legal terms of Genocide and because of that finding, they set in place a measurement process that will be utterly meaningless now as Israel ramps the violence up to a whole new level by bombing and invading Lebanon.

 

SPECIAL MENTIONS:

There have been moments of such monstrous cruelty and terrible malice that we just can’t cover a year without noting special mentions of the depravity of the human soul.

IDF raping children on CCTV: What can one say?

I just don’t even know what you can say about a Military who would openly engage in the systematic rape of children as a means of psychological control over children.

Could you imagine that night?

The fear in the air as everyone is forced to lie face down.

The terror as one is dragged to a corner and raped.

The sound, the sobbing, the screams.

I don’t believe in God, but I certainly believe what happened in that IDF compound is Hell.

 

Hannibal Directive: The cold eye of the ideologue 

The truth of just how violent the IDF are prepared to be, not just to Palestinians but their own people as well is shielded behind offical narrative denial and accusations of anti-semitism by any who make them, but this report on ABC strips bare the allegations against the IDF on October 7th that they opened fire intentionally upon their own citizens to prevent them from being kidnapped.

It’s called the ‘Hannibal Directive…

Israeli forces accused of killing their own citizens under the ‘Hannibal Directive’ during October 7 chaos

“Hannibal at Erez, dispatch a Zik [attack drone],” came the command on October 7.

Those words, reported by Israeli newspaper Haaretz in July, confirm what many Israelis have feared since the Hamas attacks on October 7 in southern Israel.

Israeli forces have killed their own citizens.

Israeli authorities say more than 800 civilians and around 300 soldiers were killed on October 7.

A number of Israeli hostages have since died in Gaza.

Israelis are still reeling from the horror and pain of the Hamas-led terror attack, which was the bloodiest single day in Israel’s history.

But the Israeli military is coming under increasing pressure to reveal just how many of their own citizens were killed by Israeli soldiers, pilots and police in the confusion of the Hamas attack on southern Israeli communities.

Survivors and relatives have been asking not just “what went wrong”, but whether the military invoked the controversial — and supposedly rescinded — “Hannibal Directive”.

What is the Hannibal Directive?

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said the directive was named at random by a computer program, but Hannibal was the famous Carthaginian general who took poison rather than be captured by the Romans.

The doctrine, written in 1986 in response to the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers in Lebanon, gave permission for Israeli forces to fire on enemies holding their comrades hostage — even at risk to those hostages.

Its authors said the directive did not allow captives to be killed, but critics say that over time an interpretation spread through the military that it was better to kill comrades than to allow their capture.

“That is legally wrong and morally wrong and ethically wrong, it’s wrong on all accounts.”

‘This was a mass Hannibal’

In July, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz revealed commanders in the IDF gave the order to fire on troops who had been captured by Hamas at three separate locations, explicitly referencing the Hannibal Directive.

One former Israeli officer, Air Force Colonel Nof Erez, told a Haaretz podcast the directive was not specifically ordered but was “apparently applied” by responding aircrews.

Panicked, operating without their normal command structure and unable to coordinate with ground forces, they fired on vehicles returning to Gaza, knowing they were likely carrying hostages.

“This was a mass Hannibal. It was tons and tons of openings in the fence, and thousands of people in every type of vehicle, some with hostages and some without,” Colonel Erez said.

Air force pilots described to Yedioth Ahronot newspaper the firing of “tremendous” amounts of ammunition on October 7 at people attempting to cross the border between Gaza and Israel.

“Twenty-eight fighter helicopters shot over the course of the day all of the ammunition in their bellies, in renewed runs to rearm. We are talking about hundreds of 30-millimetre cannon mortars and Hellfire missiles,” reporter Yoav Zeitoun said.

“The frequency of fire at the thousands of terrorists was enormous at the start, and only at a certain point did the pilots begin to slow their attacks and carefully choose the targets.”

Tank officers have also confirmed they applied their own interpretation of the directive when firing on vehicles returning to Gaza, potentially with Israelis on board.

“My gut feeling told me that they [soldiers from another tank] could be on them,” tank captain Bar Zonshein told Israel’s Channel 13.

Captain Zonshein is asked: “So you might be killing them with that action? They are your soldiers.”

Investigative journalist Ronen Bergman wrote for Yedioth Ahronot newspaper that the military had enacted the Hannibal Directive at midday on October 7.

“The IDF instructed all its fighting units in practice to follow the ‘Hannibal Directive’, although without clearly mentioning this explicit name,” he said.

“The instruction is to stop ‘at all costs’ any attempt by Hamas terrorists to return to Gaza, using language very similar to the original ‘Hannibal Directive’, despite repeated assurances by the security establishment that the procedure has been cancelled.”

Bergman’s investigation found 70 vehicles were destroyed by Israeli aircraft and tanks to prevent them being driven into Gaza, killing everyone inside.

“It is not clear at this point how many of the abductees were killed due to the activation of this [Hannibal] order on October 7,” he wrote.

…if the IDF are prepared to target their own civilians in this manner, what the Christ do they allow against the Palestinians?

 

Precision targeting: A sick joke looking for a Hospital to blow up

This constant claim by the IDF that they don’t target civilians and they are only killing citizens because the ‘terrorist’ is hiding behind them doesn’t justify shooting through the civilian to hit the ‘terrorist’ does it?

It does in Israel. And America.

 

Pager and walkie talkie bombings: Turning civilian tech into illegal war crimes

The indiscriminate Pager bombings are just another war crime…

BREAKING: SNOWDEN SAYS ISRAEL PAGER EXPLOSIONS IS A TERRORIST ACT AGAINST LEBANON

Edward Snowden : “What Israel has just done is, via *any* method, reckless. They blew up countless numbers of people who were driving (meaning cars out of control), shopping (your children are in the stroller standing behind him in the checkout line), et cetera. Indistinguishable from terrorism.”

He’s utterly right.

This appalling indiscriminate attack is a technical war crime…

…the way it was framed as a ‘clever’ attack by Mossad was sadism. Indiscriminate bombings created by fraudulently infiltrating commercial manufacturing infrastructure to weaponise civilian objects might be ‘clever’ but it’s also a premeditated war crime, made cement by the lengths Mossad went to create this unique cruelty.

 

IDF shooting their own hostages waving white flags: A moment that encapsulates IDF violence 

The IDF had been openly shooting Palestinians waving white flags as part of their paramilitary death squad ethnic cleansing war crimes, so when 3 Hostages managed to escape while waving a white flag, the Hostages mistakingly thought they would be saved by IDF soldiers.

Unfortunately for the 3 Hostages, the IDF have mutated into a level of cruelty that sees shooting people with white flags as a legitimate tactic.

The IDF killing 3 escaped hostages waving white flags, who were treated the exact way the IDF were treating white flag waving Palestinians, managed to encapsulate this madness perfectly.

 

Hospital Assassinations:  How many breaches of the Geneva Convention can you commit in one act?

Israeli forces disguised as medical staff and civilians shot dead three Palestinians inside a hospital in the city of Jenin in the occupied West Bank. Shooting patients in hospitals by disguised assassins is, you guessed it, a technical breach of war crimes. The fact they would shoot sleeping patients in a move that breaches almost every part of the Geneva Convention, just shows you, the Israeli’s want it more.

 

Protests on American Universities: When Free Speech isn’t Free

They spent $200k to paramilitarise their response to free speech breaking out on American Campuses..

HOW MUCH MONEY DID THE NYPD WASTE QUASHING STUDENT PROTESTS? WE TALLIED IT UP.

Mayor Eric Adams has calledfor Columbia to foot some of the bill, but New York City residents are, for now, the ones paying for that violent evening. Based on estimates of the size of the police force and the cost per officer, New York spent at least $200,000 on overtime alone for the four-hour raid to clear Hamilton Hall, according to an analysis by The Intercept.

“Every dollar that we spend on policing, especially policing that is suppressing our constitutional rights in a democracy, is an affront against so many New Yorkers who are in desperate need for economic and social support,” said Jawanza Williams, director of organizing at VOCAL-NY, a community activist group. “The administration has a totally flipped, upside-down perspective when it comes to what should be a priority in the city’s spending and the city’s budget.”

…the intense repression meted out to American students challenging Israel’s violence has shown everyone what a farce their ‘free speech’ really is.

It’s ‘free speech’ right up until say something critical of how Israel treats Palestinians.

 

6 year old Hind Rajab: It sits with me

I don’t know why, but Hind’s death sits with me.

The ocean of horror this conflict has unleashed goes quiet in sadness at this one tiny example.

It wasn’t the disgust the IDF had opened fire on a car killing her family and trapping her inside.

It wasn’t the murder of two ambulance staff sent to try and rescue her.

It’s the detail that she was calling emergency services from the trapped car begging and pleading for them to rescue her as she sat trapped amongst her dead family members…

Earlier this month, the PRCS published an audio file in which Hind could be heard pleading on the phone with a member of the rescue team. All members of her family are believed to have been killed before her, leaving her terrified in the car with the dead bodies of her loved ones.

“I’m so scared, please come. Please call someone to come and take me,” she was heard crying desperately in the call that PRCS said lasted three hours in an effort to calm the frightened child.

…I don’t care what your justification is, making a wounded child beg like that for hours until you finally kill her seems a threshold of evil that requires its very own level in hell.

 

CONCLUSIONS:

The biggest test is for us not to have our anger manipulated by actual anti-semites into calling for the destruction of the Israeli state.

I stand with the Palestinian AND Israeli people in demanding peace and healing and de-escalation and rebuilding.

There are many, many, many Israeli Jews, progressives Jews in lots of different countries  AND Israeli citizens who are shoulder to shoulder with collective humanity in demanding a cease fire and an end to the occupation.

Here in NZ we sit on our hands.

Sure we’ve taken a different stance to the other 5 Eyes in actively calling Israel out and demanding a Palestinian focused response, but we should have matched our words with actions by throwing the Israeli Ambassador out as a mater of principle.

America and Israel have no comprehension of how damaged their global brand now is with the next generation who have watched in horror at Palestinian children blown to pieces.

Russia has exploited this.

Iran is being forced into testing a nuclear weapon.

The ramifications of this American endorsed Genocide perpetrated by the Israeli’s will seed a bitter harvest of revenge.

The least we can do in NZ is revoke the Israeli Visa that allows members of the IDF to come to NZ so they can chill out from all the war crimes they’ve committed.

I just don’t think the mana of this land is served in allowing war criminals some Netflix and chill time here.

These were the share prices of the war lords as violence exploded in the Middle East on October 7th last year.

To paraphrase Gil Scott Heron, ‘they got folk out there working for war, we have to go to work for peace’…

Back when Eisenhower was the President
Golf courses was where most of
His time was spent
So I never really listened to
What the President said
Because in general I believed that
The General was politically dead
But he always seemed to know when the
Muscles were about to be flexed
Because I remember him saying something
Mumbling something about a
Military Industrial Complex
Americans no longer fight to
Keep their shores safe
Just to keep the jobs going
In the arms making workplace
Then they pretend to be gripped by
Some sort of political reflex
But all they’re doing is paying dues
To the Military Industrial Complex
The Military and the Monetary
The Military and the Monetary
The Military and the Monetary
The Military and the Monetary
Get together whenever they
Think it’s necessary
They turn our brothers and
Sisters into mercenaries
They are turning the planet into a cemetery
The Military and the Monetary
Use the media as intermediaries
They are determined to keep
The citizens secondary
They make so many decisions
That are arbitrary

We’ve got to work for Peace
Peace ain’t coming this way
If we only work for Peace
If everyone believed in Peace the
Way they say they do we’d have Peace
The only thing wrong with Peace
Is that you can’t make no money from it

We have to work for peace.

PS: I wanted to add one more thing. Each morning as I look over the days publication list, I check our blogger Leslie Bravey who painstakingly logs the deaths and attacks by Israel against Palestinians daily.

I try and read the names, they are difficult on my tongue, the places unfamiliar but the enormity of these lists demands a witness.

I note how every day, Zionist Troll Gaby always posts ‘Yawn’ under each list of the abused and killed.

Gaby attempts to belittle Leslie’s lists but I think it does the opposite. The disgust so many people of conscience feel towards Zionist Israel are summed up in the pettiness of Gaby’s posts.

 

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Increasingly having independent opinion in a mainstream media environment which mostly echo one another has become more important than ever, so if you value having an independent voice – please donate here.