Biden admin justifies Israel’s assault on Gaza hospitals with Israeli ‘intelligence’

[Scott]

I just saw an article with a similar name as the name of this thread, thought it was good considering some people here seem to believe the Biden Administration's line here. Quoting its introduction and conclusion below, constructive comments welcome...

**
Biden admin justifies Israel’s assault on Gaza hospitals with recycled Israeli ‘intelligence’

WYATT REED·NOVEMBER 15, 2023

As Israel assaults Gaza’s Shifa Hospital, the Biden administration claims that “Hamas does use hospitals” as military bases. Once again, Washington appears to be relying on dubious Israeli propaganda rather than independent analysis.

With Israeli troops storming Gaza’s Al-Shifa and Al-Rantisi hospitals, the United States and Israel are doubling down on discredited claims that Hamas has been maintaining “command centers” out of the basements of hospitals in Gaza, even after so-called evidence produced by Tel Aviv was thoroughly debunked.

“I can confirm for you that we have information that Hamas, and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, used some hospitals in the Gaza Strip, including Al-Shifa, and tunnels underneath them, to conceal and to support their military operations and to hold hostages,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters Tuesday.

Kirby’s claim echoed the assertion by National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, who maintained that “open-source reporting” shows “Hamas does use hospitals, along with a lot of other civilian facilities, for command-and-control, for storing weapons, for housing its fighters.”

On November 14, Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh told reporters that US intelligence had no “boots on the ground,” nor any intelligence assets capable of independently gathering intelligence from or about Shifa. When asked if the declassified intel briefing spun out by Kirby and Sullivan arrived through Washington’s “Israeli counterparts,” she refused to answer. But she strongly suggested the intelligence dump was politically motivated.

“This is newly-downgraded information that we felt was important to get out today, because there have been a lot of questions about the hospital and how Hamas operates, and so it was important to get out there,” Singh insisted.

Hamas denies using hospitals for military purposes, and both local healthcare workers and international humanitarian organizations back that up. “I’m sick and tired of these [Israeli] claims that there are Hamas command centers [in hospitals],” Norwegian physician Dr. Mads Gilbert told Al-Jazeera on November 12 [video link in original] . Having performed life-saving procedures for several weeks inside Shifa during Israel’s 2014 assault on Gaza, Gilbert noted, “As I’ve said 100 times… we’ve never seen high-ranking Hamas people in Al-Shifa,” adding “we’ve been able to roam freely.”

But that did little to prevent Israeli troops from waging an all-out assault on the facilities. As Israeli forces surrounded Shifa hospital on Tuesday with the full-throated support of the Biden administration, arresting journalists outside the facility and violently clearing displaced people from its grounds, doctors inside were forced to move babies in intensive care from one wing of the hospital to another to save their lives. A lack of fuel had already forced many of those infants off vital oxygen supply units.

[snip]

Throughout the blood-spattered onslaught on the Gaza Strip, US officials have consistently taken Israeli claims at face value, even parroting Tel Aviv’s excuses when prompted. Following Biden’s now-retracted claim to have seen “confirmed pictures of terrorists beheading children,” US officials continue to exhibit a remarkable willingness to side with the Israeli government and echo its talking points.

During a November 14 press briefing [video link in original] , a reporter asked State Department spokesman Matthew Miller about the Israeli government’s habitual spreading of “misinformation.” Miller responded by brushing off Israel’s parade of fabrications as an inevitable feature of the “fog of war.”

“In the fog of war, from thousands of miles away at the podium,” the spokesman insisted, “I have no way to independently adjudicate the various claims that are being made.”
**

Full article:
Biden admin justifies Israel’s assault on Gaza hospitals with recycled Israeli ‘intelligence’ | The Grayzone

 

[Walt]

To my mind it is pretty much an established fact that Hamas has command center under the hospital. It is their mode of operation, and they have had almost 20 years to build a command center.

The next stage of the argument is what to do about it. Every reasonable step should be taken to minimize civilian deaths... But there are not many reasonable steps left available. It is a bad situation.

 

[Scott]

To my mind it is pretty much an established fact that Hamas has command center under the hospital.

Unfortunately for you, the world doesn't just conform to whatever you believe. In order to ascertain what is true, one must look objectively at the evidence. The article I reference includes plenty of evidence that the Al-Shifa hospital is not a Hamas command center. Again from the article, I think the following take down of Israeli "evidence" that Hamas is doing so to be particularly strong:

**
Israeli and American officials have yet to produced any proof that Hamas operates a “command center” under Al-Shifa. Video published by the Israeli military purporting to prove Hamas kept hostages in the basement of Al-Rantisi Children’s Hospital, Gaza’s last remaining medical center with a pediatric cancer ward, was less than convincing.

In that video performance [link in original], top Israeli army spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari claims that what appears to be a bomb shelter for young children is actually a Hamas torture chamber, citing objects as unlikely as a baby bottle and a woman’s clothes. In one particularly memorable and widely panned moment, Hagari insisted the days of the week written in Arabic on a calendar were actually the names of the “terrorists” meant to guard captive Israelis ostensibly being held there.

The Israeli military has since attempted to downplay the deception as a “mistake in translation.”

It was hardly the first round in Tel Aviv’s fake news campaign. In the weeks since Palestinian resistance groups launched their shock assault on October 7, native Arabic speakers have taken to social media to mock the audio recordings Israel regularly publishes which purport to show Hamas members gleefully discussing carrying out war crimes.

In November alone, official Israeli social media accounts have been forced to walk about at least a half-dozen false assertions.

[snip]

Days later, Israel’s official Arabic-language Twitter account deleted footage of a woman dressed in nursing scrubs who claimed to work as a nurse in Gaza’s Al-Shifa hospital denounced Hamas for supposedly stealing fuel and medicine. Other doctors and nurses at the medical center reportedly told journalist Younis Tirawi: “We don’t know this woman; she has never worked here before & we’ve never seen her at the hospital.”
**

And Israel's lies extend far beyond the Al-Shifa hospital as well. Again from the article:

**
A video showing a crying woman describing how she retrieved her son’s decomposing body from the streets of Gaza was transformed by Israel’s embassy to the US, which used fake captions to falsely claim she was blaming Hamas for the siege. When questioned, the embassy subsequently deleted the post.

The same week, Israel’s main government account on Twitter had to delete its false claim that “AP, CNN, NY Times, and Reuters had journalists embedded with Hamas terrorists on October 7th massacre” – a lie which the New York Times condemned as “reckless” and said put its journalists on the ground in Israel and Gaza “at risk.”
**

 

[Tranquillus in Exile]

So where are the Hamas command centers? Presumably the IDF wants to find and destroy them, or is there some ulterior motive which we are not being told about?
Any ideas?

 

[Yakuda]

I just saw an article with a similar name as the name of this thread, thought it was good considering some people here seem to believe the Biden Administration's line here. Quoting its introduction and conclusion below, constructive comments welcome...

**
Biden admin justifies Israel’s assault on Gaza hospitals with recycled Israeli ‘intelligence’

WYATT REED·NOVEMBER 15, 2023

As Israel assaults Gaza’s Shifa Hospital, the Biden administration claims that “Hamas does use hospitals” as military bases. Once again, Washington appears to be relying on dubious Israeli propaganda rather than independent analysis.

With Israeli troops storming Gaza’s Al-Shifa and Al-Rantisi hospitals, the United States and Israel are doubling down on discredited claims that Hamas has been maintaining “command centers” out of the basements of hospitals in Gaza, even after so-called evidence produced by Tel Aviv was thoroughly debunked.

“I can confirm for you that we have information that Hamas, and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, used some hospitals in the Gaza Strip, including Al-Shifa, and tunnels underneath them, to conceal and to support their military operations and to hold hostages,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters Tuesday.

Kirby’s claim echoed the assertion by National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, who maintained that “open-source reporting” shows “Hamas does use hospitals, along with a lot of other civilian facilities, for command-and-control, for storing weapons, for housing its fighters.”

On November 14, Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh told reporters that US intelligence had no “boots on the ground,” nor any intelligence assets capable of independently gathering intelligence from or about Shifa. When asked if the declassified intel briefing spun out by Kirby and Sullivan arrived through Washington’s “Israeli counterparts,” she refused to answer. But she strongly suggested the intelligence dump was politically motivated.

“This is newly-downgraded information that we felt was important to get out today, because there have been a lot of questions about the hospital and how Hamas operates, and so it was important to get out there,” Singh insisted.

Hamas denies using hospitals for military purposes, and both local healthcare workers and international humanitarian organizations back that up. “I’m sick and tired of these [Israeli] claims that there are Hamas command centers [in hospitals],” Norwegian physician Dr. Mads Gilbert told Al-Jazeera on November 12 [video link in original] . Having performed life-saving procedures for several weeks inside Shifa during Israel’s 2014 assault on Gaza, Gilbert noted, “As I’ve said 100 times… we’ve never seen high-ranking Hamas people in Al-Shifa,” adding “we’ve been able to roam freely.”

But that did little to prevent Israeli troops from waging an all-out assault on the facilities. As Israeli forces surrounded Shifa hospital on Tuesday with the full-throated support of the Biden administration, arresting journalists outside the facility and violently clearing displaced people from its grounds, doctors inside were forced to move babies in intensive care from one wing of the hospital to another to save their lives. A lack of fuel had already forced many of those infants off vital oxygen supply units.

[snip]

Throughout the blood-spattered onslaught on the Gaza Strip, US officials have consistently taken Israeli claims at face value, even parroting Tel Aviv’s excuses when prompted. Following Biden’s now-retracted claim to have seen “confirmed pictures of terrorists beheading children,” US officials continue to exhibit a remarkable willingness to side with the Israeli government and echo its talking points.

During a November 14 press briefing [video link in original] , a reporter asked State Department spokesman Matthew Miller about the Israeli government’s habitual spreading of “misinformation.” Miller responded by brushing off Israel’s parade of fabrications as an inevitable feature of the “fog of war.”

“In the fog of war, from thousands of miles away at the podium,” the spokesman insisted, “I have no way to independently adjudicate the various claims that are being made.”
**

Full article:
Biden admin justifies Israel’s assault on Gaza hospitals with recycled Israeli ‘intelligence’ | The Grayzone

The only justification Israel needs is what happened to them on Oct 7. Nobody least of all Israel gives a shit what the Biden admin justifies.

 

[Scott]

So where are the Hamas command centers?

No idea. Don't even know if they have any left. What I do know is that there is no solid evidence that there's one below the Al-Shifa hospital, and plenty of evidence that there isn't, as well as evidence that Israel's military is actively trying to deceive people into believing that one exists there.

 

[Scott]

I just saw an article with a similar name as the name of this thread, thought it was good considering some people here seem to believe the Biden Administration's line here. Quoting its introduction and conclusion below, constructive comments welcome...

**
Biden admin justifies Israel’s assault on Gaza hospitals with recycled Israeli ‘intelligence’

WYATT REED·NOVEMBER 15, 2023

As Israel assaults Gaza’s Shifa Hospital, the Biden administration claims that “Hamas does use hospitals” as military bases. Once again, Washington appears to be relying on dubious Israeli propaganda rather than independent analysis.

With Israeli troops storming Gaza’s Al-Shifa and Al-Rantisi hospitals, the United States and Israel are doubling down on discredited claims that Hamas has been maintaining “command centers” out of the basements of hospitals in Gaza, even after so-called evidence produced by Tel Aviv was thoroughly debunked.

“I can confirm for you that we have information that Hamas, and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, used some hospitals in the Gaza Strip, including Al-Shifa, and tunnels underneath them, to conceal and to support their military operations and to hold hostages,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters Tuesday.

Kirby’s claim echoed the assertion by National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, who maintained that “open-source reporting” shows “Hamas does use hospitals, along with a lot of other civilian facilities, for command-and-control, for storing weapons, for housing its fighters.”

On November 14, Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh told reporters that US intelligence had no “boots on the ground,” nor any intelligence assets capable of independently gathering intelligence from or about Shifa. When asked if the declassified intel briefing spun out by Kirby and Sullivan arrived through Washington’s “Israeli counterparts,” she refused to answer. But she strongly suggested the intelligence dump was politically motivated.

“This is newly-downgraded information that we felt was important to get out today, because there have been a lot of questions about the hospital and how Hamas operates, and so it was important to get out there,” Singh insisted.

Hamas denies using hospitals for military purposes, and both local healthcare workers and international humanitarian organizations back that up. “I’m sick and tired of these [Israeli] claims that there are Hamas command centers [in hospitals],” Norwegian physician Dr. Mads Gilbert told Al-Jazeera on November 12 [video link in original] . Having performed life-saving procedures for several weeks inside Shifa during Israel’s 2014 assault on Gaza, Gilbert noted, “As I’ve said 100 times… we’ve never seen high-ranking Hamas people in Al-Shifa,” adding “we’ve been able to roam freely.”

But that did little to prevent Israeli troops from waging an all-out assault on the facilities. As Israeli forces surrounded Shifa hospital on Tuesday with the full-throated support of the Biden administration, arresting journalists outside the facility and violently clearing displaced people from its grounds, doctors inside were forced to move babies in intensive care from one wing of the hospital to another to save their lives. A lack of fuel had already forced many of those infants off vital oxygen supply units.

[snip]

Throughout the blood-spattered onslaught on the Gaza Strip, US officials have consistently taken Israeli claims at face value, even parroting Tel Aviv’s excuses when prompted. Following Biden’s now-retracted claim to have seen “confirmed pictures of terrorists beheading children,” US officials continue to exhibit a remarkable willingness to side with the Israeli government and echo its talking points.

During a November 14 press briefing [video link in original] , a reporter asked State Department spokesman Matthew Miller about the Israeli government’s habitual spreading of “misinformation.” Miller responded by brushing off Israel’s parade of fabrications as an inevitable feature of the “fog of war.”

“In the fog of war, from thousands of miles away at the podium,” the spokesman insisted, “I have no way to independently adjudicate the various claims that are being made.”
**

Full article:
Biden admin justifies Israel’s assault on Gaza hospitals with recycled Israeli ‘intelligence’ | The Grayzone

The only justification Israel needs is what happened to them on Oct 7.

What happened to Israelies on October 7, 2023 is certainly quite terrible, but Israel had already killed a lot more Palestinians than that prior to that date. And now they've killed around 10 times as many Palestinians as Hamas killed on October 7th. Now, if they were just killing Hamas fighters, that'd be one thing, but from what I've heard, they're predominantly killing women and children. If civilians are killed in one side of a conflict, I have never heard of a case where killing civilians on the other side of the conflict has helped anything, let alone killing 10 times as many.

 

[IBDaMann]

What happened to Israelies on October 7, 2023 is certainly quite terrible, but Israel had already killed a lot more Palestinians than that prior to that date.

Yakuda's position is that Israel doesn't need to justify "putting a rabid dog down." He thinks Arabs/Muslims are just rabid dogs, i.e. subhuman. You're wasting your time trying to be reasonable. Yakuda craves the Arab Holocaust as well, by any means. Let the IDF take care of the genocide and Yakuda will take care of the excusing.

 

[Nordberg]

To my mind it is pretty much an established fact that Hamas has command center under the hospital. It is their mode of operation, and they have had almost 20 years to build a command center.

The next stage of the argument is what to do about it. Every reasonable step should be taken to minimize civilian deaths... But there are not many reasonable steps left available. It is a bad situation.

There are 36 hospitals in Gaza. There are 300 miles of tunnels.

 

[Scott]

What happened to Israelies on October 7, 2023 is certainly quite terrible, but Israel had already killed a lot more Palestinians than that prior to that date.

Yakuda's position is that Israel doesn't need to justify "putting a rabid dog down." He thinks Arabs/Muslims are just rabid dogs, i.e. subhuman. You're wasting your time trying to be reasonable. Yakuda craves the Arab Holocaust as well, by any means. Let the IDF take care of the genocide and Yakuda will take care of the excusing.

I haven't engaged with Yakuda much on this subject, but if what you say is true about his point of view, then I wouldn't agree with it.

 

[Bai Lan]

Unfortunately for you, the world doesn't just conform to whatever you believe. In order to ascertain what is true, one must look objectively at the evidence. The article I reference includes plenty of evidence that the Al-Shifa hospital is not a Hamas command center. Again from the article, I think the following take down of Israeli "evidence" that Hamas is doing so to be particularly strong:

**
Israeli and American officials have yet to produced any proof that Hamas operates a “command center” under Al-Shifa. Video published by the Israeli military purporting to prove Hamas kept hostages in the basement of Al-Rantisi Children’s Hospital, Gaza’s last remaining medical center with a pediatric cancer ward, was less than convincing.

In that video performance [link in original], top Israeli army spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari claims that what appears to be a bomb shelter for young children is actually a Hamas torture chamber, citing objects as unlikely as a baby bottle and a woman’s clothes. In one particularly memorable and widely panned moment, Hagari insisted the days of the week written in Arabic on a calendar were actually the names of the “terrorists” meant to guard captive Israelis ostensibly being held there.

The Israeli military has since attempted to downplay the deception as a “mistake in translation.”

It was hardly the first round in Tel Aviv’s fake news campaign. In the weeks since Palestinian resistance groups launched their shock assault on October 7, native Arabic speakers have taken to social media to mock the audio recordings Israel regularly publishes which purport to show Hamas members gleefully discussing carrying out war crimes.

In November alone, official Israeli social media accounts have been forced to walk about at least a half-dozen false assertions.

[snip]

Days later, Israel’s official Arabic-language Twitter account deleted footage of a woman dressed in nursing scrubs who claimed to work as a nurse in Gaza’s Al-Shifa hospital denounced Hamas for supposedly stealing fuel and medicine. Other doctors and nurses at the medical center reportedly told journalist Younis Tirawi: “We don’t know this woman; she has never worked here before & we’ve never seen her at the hospital.”
**

And Israel's lies extend far beyond the Al-Shifa hospital as well. Again from the article:

**
A video showing a crying woman describing how she retrieved her son’s decomposing body from the streets of Gaza was transformed by Israel’s embassy to the US, which used fake captions to falsely claim she was blaming Hamas for the siege. When questioned, the embassy subsequently deleted the post.

The same week, Israel’s main government account on Twitter had to delete its false claim that “AP, CNN, NY Times, and Reuters had journalists embedded with Hamas terrorists on October 7th massacre” – a lie which the New York Times condemned as “reckless” and said put its journalists on the ground in Israel and Gaza “at risk.”
**

it must be true if it puts journalists embedded with gaza at risk.

 

[Yakuda]

What happened to Israelies on October 7, 2023 is certainly quite terrible, but Israel had already killed a lot more Palestinians than that prior to that date. And now they've killed around 10 times as many Palestinians as Hamas killed on October 7th. Now, if they were just killing Hamas fighters, that'd be one thing, but from what I've heard, they're predominantly killing women and children. If civilians are killed in one side of a conflict, I have never heard of a case where killing civilians on the other side of the conflict has helped anything, let alone killing 10 times as many.

Hamas kills those women and children by making them shields. Hamas has had complete control of gava for 18 years and it's a shithole. It's amazing how morally bankrupt you people are.

 

[Scott]

Unfortunately for you, the world doesn't just conform to whatever you believe. In order to ascertain what is true, one must look objectively at the evidence. The article I reference includes plenty of evidence that the Al-Shifa hospital is not a Hamas command center. Again from the article, I think the following take down of Israeli "evidence" that Hamas is doing so to be particularly strong:

**
Israeli and American officials have yet to produced any proof that Hamas operates a “command center” under Al-Shifa. Video published by the Israeli military purporting to prove Hamas kept hostages in the basement of Al-Rantisi Children’s Hospital, Gaza’s last remaining medical center with a pediatric cancer ward, was less than convincing.

In that video performance [link in original], top Israeli army spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari claims that what appears to be a bomb shelter for young children is actually a Hamas torture chamber, citing objects as unlikely as a baby bottle and a woman’s clothes. In one particularly memorable and widely panned moment, Hagari insisted the days of the week written in Arabic on a calendar were actually the names of the “terrorists” meant to guard captive Israelis ostensibly being held there.

The Israeli military has since attempted to downplay the deception as a “mistake in translation.”

It was hardly the first round in Tel Aviv’s fake news campaign. In the weeks since Palestinian resistance groups launched their shock assault on October 7, native Arabic speakers have taken to social media to mock the audio recordings Israel regularly publishes which purport to show Hamas members gleefully discussing carrying out war crimes.

In November alone, official Israeli social media accounts have been forced to walk about at least a half-dozen false assertions.

[snip]

Days later, Israel’s official Arabic-language Twitter account deleted footage of a woman dressed in nursing scrubs who claimed to work as a nurse in Gaza’s Al-Shifa hospital denounced Hamas for supposedly stealing fuel and medicine. Other doctors and nurses at the medical center reportedly told journalist Younis Tirawi: “We don’t know this woman; she has never worked here before & we’ve never seen her at the hospital.”
**

And Israel's lies extend far beyond the Al-Shifa hospital as well. Again from the article:

**
A video showing a crying woman describing how she retrieved her son’s decomposing body from the streets of Gaza was transformed by Israel’s embassy to the US, which used fake captions to falsely claim she was blaming Hamas for the siege. When questioned, the embassy subsequently deleted the post.

The same week, Israel’s main government account on Twitter had to delete its false claim that “AP, CNN, NY Times, and Reuters had journalists embedded with Hamas terrorists on October 7th massacre” – a lie which the New York Times condemned as “reckless” and said put its journalists on the ground in Israel and Gaza “at risk.”
**

it must be true if it puts journalists embedded with gaza at risk.

Embedded with Gaza? That's like saying "journalists embedded with Iraq" during the U.S. invasion of Iraq. I'm guessing you meant to journalists embedded either with the Israeli military or Hamas?

 

[Bai Lan]

Embedded with Gaza? That's like saying "journalists embedded with Iraq" during the U.S. invasion of Iraq. I'm guessing you meant to journalists embedded either with the Israeli military or Hamas?

Im just saying. it must be true if the information harms reporters embedded with hamas.

 

[Bai Lan]

yes. ladies and gentlemen. everybody's in on it.

a global theatrics, shot from all angles, complete with real dead bodies, designed to keep you funding those who murder in your name.

 

[Scott]

What happened to Israelies on October 7, 2023 is certainly quite terrible, but Israel had already killed a lot more Palestinians than that prior to that date. And now they've killed around 10 times as many Palestinians as Hamas killed on October 7th. Now, if they were just killing Hamas fighters, that'd be one thing, but from what I've heard, they're predominantly killing women and children. If civilians are killed in one side of a conflict, I have never heard of a case where killing civilians on the other side of the conflict has helped anything, let alone killing 10 times as many.

Hamas kills those women and children by making them shields.

You're just repeating Isreali propaganda here. American Journalist Chris Hedges wrote a recent article that has something to say on that notion and more:

**
There are big Israeli lies. The obliteration of Gaza and wanton killing of thousands of Palestinians, Israel insists, is a targeted effort to get rid of Hamas rather than a campaign to reduce Gaza to a pile of rubble, carry out mass murder and ethnically cleanse Palestinians.

There are small Israeli lies. Forty beheaded [youtube link in original] babies. Al Shifa Hospital is a “Hamas command center.” A calendar in Arabic on the wall of a hospital, according to IDF Spokesperson, Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari [twitter link in original], is “a guardian [guard] list, where every terrorist writes his name and every terrorist has his own shift guarding the people that were here.” An Israeli actor [twitter link in original] dressed up as a nurse and speaking heavily accented Arabic claims to be Palestinian doctor and to have seen Hamas use civilians as human shields. She says members of Hamas “attacked Al Shifa Hospital” and stole “the fuel and medicine.” Palestinian militants, rather than Israeli tanks, Israel says, are responsible for shelling Al Shifa Hospital. Israel struck a car full of “terrorists” in southern Lebanon, “terrorists” who turned out to be three girls, their mother and grandmother. The explosion at the Al Ahli Hospital was the result of an errant rocket fired by the Palestinians, a claim questioned by The New York Times when it discredited the video based on analysis of its time stamp. Israel said it “responded to the request of the director of Shifa Hospital to allow Gazan citizens who were sheltering in the hospital and who wish to evacuate from Shifa Hospital towards the humanitarian crossing in the Gaza Strip via a secure axis,” a statement Mohammed Zaqout, director general of hospitals in Gaza, said was “false,” adding “we were forced to leave by gunpoint.” Israeli Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, in a video pilloried by the BBC [youtube link in original], shows viewers a meager stash of automatic weapons in a promotional video that magically increases once foreign reporters arrive for a guided tour. The IDF later deleted it.

**

Hamas has had complete control of gava for 18 years and it's a shithole.

You can't blame Gaza's problems solely on Hamas. It's had serious problems ever since the Arab-Israeli war of 1948. From Wikipedia's page on the Gaza Strip:

**
During the 1948 Palestine war and more specifically the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, tens of thousands of Palestinian refugees went to the Gaza Strip.[29] By the end of the war, 25% of Mandatory Palestine's Arab population was in Gaza, though it constituted only 1% of the land.[30]
**

According to Wikipedia, its population was estimated at over 2.3 million people in 2022, in an area of only 365 km square. There are a few more densely populated areas in the world, but certainly not in the U.S.:

Maps show the extreme population density in Gaza | CNN

Then you have Israel and Egypt frequently shutting down their borders, making it hard for Gazas to survive, seeing as how they certainly can't be self sufficient and it's hardly surprising that it hasn't been doing well.

It's amazing how morally bankrupt you people are.

Come now Yakuda, we've agreed on other subjects. Do you really think that hurling ad hominem attacks is going to help this discussion?

 

[Scott]

Im just saying. it must be true if the information harms reporters embedded with hamas.

Ahh ok . Do you know if reporters are actually embedded with Hamas? I mean, I think there's clear evidence that a lot of the "evidence" that the Al Shifa hospital was just propaganda work for the Israeli government, so perhaps could be called "Israeli embedded reporters", but haven't seen anything similar in regards to Hamas.

 

[Bai Lan]

Ahh ok . Do you know if reporters are actually embedded with Hamas? I mean, I think there's clear evidence that a lot of the "evidence" that the Al Shifa hospital was just propaganda work for the Israeli government, so perhaps could be called "Israeli embedded reporters", but haven't seen anything similar in regards to Hamas.

well if information indicating that harms them, then yes.

 

[Yakuda]

You're just repeating Isreali propaganda here. American Journalist Chris Hedges wrote a recent article that has something to say on that notion and more:

**
There are big Israeli lies. The obliteration of Gaza and wanton killing of thousands of Palestinians, Israel insists, is a targeted effort to get rid of Hamas rather than a campaign to reduce Gaza to a pile of rubble, carry out mass murder and ethnically cleanse Palestinians.

There are small Israeli lies. Forty beheaded [youtube link in original] babies. Al Shifa Hospital is a “Hamas command center.” A calendar in Arabic on the wall of a hospital, according to IDF Spokesperson, Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari [twitter link in original], is “a guardian [guard] list, where every terrorist writes his name and every terrorist has his own shift guarding the people that were here.” An Israeli actor [twitter link in original] dressed up as a nurse and speaking heavily accented Arabic claims to be Palestinian doctor and to have seen Hamas use civilians as human shields. She says members of Hamas “attacked Al Shifa Hospital” and stole “the fuel and medicine.” Palestinian militants, rather than Israeli tanks, Israel says, are responsible for shelling Al Shifa Hospital. Israel struck a car full of “terrorists” in southern Lebanon, “terrorists” who turned out to be three girls, their mother and grandmother. The explosion at the Al Ahli Hospital was the result of an errant rocket fired by the Palestinians, a claim questioned by The New York Times when it discredited the video based on analysis of its time stamp. Israel said it “responded to the request of the director of Shifa Hospital to allow Gazan citizens who were sheltering in the hospital and who wish to evacuate from Shifa Hospital towards the humanitarian crossing in the Gaza Strip via a secure axis,” a statement Mohammed Zaqout, director general of hospitals in Gaza, said was “false,” adding “we were forced to leave by gunpoint.” Israeli Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, in a video pilloried by the BBC [youtube link in original], shows viewers a meager stash of automatic weapons in a promotional video that magically increases once foreign reporters arrive for a guided tour. The IDF later deleted it.

**



You can't blame Gaza's problems solely on Hamas. It's had serious problems ever since the Arab-Israeli war of 1948. From Wikipedia's page on the Gaza Strip:

**
During the 1948 Palestine war and more specifically the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, tens of thousands of Palestinian refugees went to the Gaza Strip.[29] By the end of the war, 25% of Mandatory Palestine's Arab population was in Gaza, though it constituted only 1% of the land.[30]
**

According to Wikipedia, its population was estimated at over 2.3 million people in 2022, in an area of only 365 km square. There are a few more densely populated areas in the world, but certainly not in the U.S.:

Maps show the extreme population density in Gaza | CNN

Then you have Israel and Egypt frequently shutting down their borders, making it hard for Gazas to survive, seeing as how they certainly can't be self sufficient and it's hardly surprising that it hasn't been doing well.



Come now Yakuda, we've agreed on other subjects. Do you really think that hurling ad hominem attacks is going to help this discussion?

The difference between you and me is I have no problem with Israel reducing Gaza to a pile of rubble. Here is why. The rabid dogs of Hamas have had control of Gaza for 18 fucking years. In 18 years what have they done to make a better life for Palestinians? Has Hamas bombed Israel form Gaza? If Hamas hadnt bombed Israel from Gaza over the last 18 years, is it your claim that Israel would have bombed Hamas?

I get tired of people trying to make a moral equivalence between Israel and Hamas. One of the goals of Hamas is the eradication of Jews from the face of the earth. If that's true, which it is, then Israel has a moral directive to defend themselves.

 

[Tranquillus in Exile]

...there is no solid evidence that there's one below the Al-Shifa hospital, and plenty of evidence that there isn't, as well as evidence that Israel's military is actively trying to deceive people into believing that one exists there.

Why? If there is no Hamas complex beneath the Al Shifa hospital, why is the IDF wasting their time on it? You need to provide a plausible motive for that.

Searching for King Solomon's mines maybe, or the lost Ark of the Covenant? Use your imagination!