Ziofascist Israel’s 2023 to 2024 Genocide of Palestinians, Part 16: April 1 to 15 — Al-Shifa Hospital Destruction and Massacres, AI Targetting, Settler Violence
A documentation of Ziofascist Israel’s 2023 to 2024 genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity against Palestinians from April 1 to 15, 2024.
April 1
The Ziofascist Israeli Destruction of Al-Shifa Hospital
“Over here, this is where the ER [i.e. emergency room] was”:
“In that area is the midwifery building”:
“Over here, this is the laboratory for the blood samples. This is also the management department”:
“…cancer specialty, dialysis…”:
“As you can see, there is no treatment at all”:
Testimonies:
Rafiq: “They tortured us there. There was no food or water. We stayed without food or water for five days. We lived in agony. There were no dressings for our wounds. […] I can’t take it anymore.”
Narrator: “Rafiq has turned into a skeleton. As you see, he left Al Shifa hospital today.
Rafif: “They besieged us for 14 days. There were no medication nor dressings to the wounds.”
Ziofascist Israeli genocidal propaganda commentary:
The Ziofascist Israeli Al-Shifa Hospital Massacres
The Israeli army carried out a massive, shockingly horrific military operation in Al-Shifa Medical Complex in Gaza City over the course of the past two weeks, indiscriminately targeting and attacking Palestinians regardless of their civilian status, professional standing, gender, age, or health condition.
Though the exact number of casualties from the atrocity is still unknown, preliminary reports suggest that over 1,500 Palestinians have been killed, injured, or are reported missing as a result of the massacre at Al-Shifa, with women and children making up half of the casualties. Euro-Med Monitor is able to confirm from its initial investigation and testimonies that hundreds of dead bodies, including some burned, and others with their heads and limbs severed, have been discovered both inside Al-Shifa Medical Complex and in the hospital’s surrounding area.
The massacre claimed the lives of at least 22 patients who were killed in their hospital beds during the Israeli siege of the Medical Complex, amid the willful deprivation of their access to food, medical care, and supplies. Israel’s army also purposefully prevented relief teams and representatives of international organisations from entering Al-Shifa to carry out humanitarian missions or evacuations, plus purposefully cleared the Complex of all working personnel — particularly medical personnel — either by summary execution or forced displacement or arrest. The whereabouts of some of these individuals are still unknown.
Al-Shifa Medical Complex is currently out of service due to the Israeli army bombing and setting fire to every one of its buildings, including the mortuary and all internal and external courtyards and corridors.
The attack on Al-Shifa Medical Complex is the most visible aspect yet of Israel’s systematic and carefully-crafted plan to destroy and besiege the Gaza Strip’s health sector, bring it to the brink of collapse, and deny the Palestinian population any chance at survival or medical care, or shelter.
A reminder that Ziofascist Israel keeps detaining and in many cases torturing medical personal:
Unfortunately not 1st of April jokes:
USA:
April 2
Ziofascist Israel shut down Al Jazeera to prevent the ugly truth about its atrocities against Palestinians from spreading:
USA, from state propagandist Matthew Miller:
Matthew Miller: “So again, do not believe that this attack was on the hospital. The attack was on the Hamas fighting hiding inside the hospital. […] There shouldn’t be terrorists in a hospital at all, and so it is incredibly difficult to operate there and, and, ah, achieve a counterterrorism goal in a way that minimizes harm to patients […].”
More propaganda absurdity from John Kirby:
Reporter: “Is firing a missile at people delivering food and killing them not a violation of international humanitarian law?”
John Kirby (gaslighting and with a liar’s smirk also on his face): “Well, Israelis have already admitted that this was a mistake that they made. They’re doing investigation. They’ll get to the bottom of this. Let’s not get ahead of that. Your question presumes, at this very early hour, that it was a deliberate strike, that they knew exactly what they were hitting, that they were hitting aid workers and did it on purpose. And there’s no evidence of that. […] to date, as you and I are speaking, they have not found any incidents where Israelis have violated international humanitarian law. Unless you think we don’t take it seriously — I can assure you that we do [they don’t] — we look at this in real time.”
Reporter [somewhat incredulously]: “They have never violated international humanitarian law ever in the past 5 or 6 months?”
John Kirby: “I’m telling you, the State Department has looked at incidents in the past and has yet to determine that any of those incidents violate international humanitarian law.”
April 3
In 2021, a book titled “The Human-Machine Team: How to Create Synergy Between Human and Artificial Intelligence That Will Revolutionize Our World” was released in English under the pen name “Brigadier General Y.S.” In it, the author — a man who we confirmed to be the current commander of the elite Israeli intelligence unit 8200 — makes the case for designing a special machine that could rapidly process massive amounts of data to generate thousands of potential “targets” for military strikes in the heat of a war. Such technology, he writes, would resolve what he described as a “human bottleneck for both locating the new targets and decision-making to approve the targets.”
Such a machine, it turns out, actually exists. A new investigation by +972 Magazine and Local Call reveals that the Israeli army has developed an artificial intelligence-based program known as “Lavender,” unveiled here for the first time. According to six Israeli intelligence officers, who have all served in the army during the current war on the Gaza Strip and had first-hand involvement with the use of AI to generate targets for assassination, Lavender has played a central role in the unprecedented bombing of Palestinians, especially during the early stages of the war. In fact, according to the sources, its influence on the military’s operations was such that they essentially treated the outputs of the AI machine “as if it were a human decision.”
Formally, the Lavender system is designed to mark all suspected operatives in the military wings of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), including low-ranking ones, as potential bombing targets. The sources told +972 and Local Call that, during the first weeks of the war, the army almost completely relied on Lavender, which clocked as many as 37,000 Palestinians as suspected militants — and their homes — for possible air strikes.
During the early stages of the war, the army gave sweeping approval for officers to adopt Lavender’s kill lists, with no requirement to thoroughly check why the machine made those choices or to examine the raw intelligence data on which they were based. One source stated that human personnel often served only as a “rubber stamp” for the machine’s decisions, adding that, normally, they would personally devote only about “20 seconds” to each target before authorizing a bombing — just to make sure the Lavender-marked target is male. This was despite knowing that the system makes what are regarded as “errors” in approximately 10 percent of cases, and is known to occasionally mark individuals who have merely a loose connection to militant groups, or no connection at all.
Moreover, the Israeli army systematically attacked the targeted individuals while they were in their homes — usually at night while their whole families were present — rather than during the course of military activity. According to the sources, this was because, from what they regarded as an intelligence standpoint, it was easier to locate the individuals in their private houses. Additional automated systems, including one called “Where’s Daddy?” also revealed here for the first time, were used specifically to track the targeted individuals and carry out bombings when they had entered their family’s residences.
The result, as the sources testified, is that thousands of Palestinians — most of them women and children or people who were not involved in the fighting — were wiped out by Israeli airstrikes, especially during the first weeks of the war, because of the AI program’s decisions.
“We were not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives only when they were in a military building or engaged in a military activity,” A., an intelligence officer, told +972 and Local Call. “On the contrary, the IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.”
The Lavender machine joins another AI system, “The Gospel,” about which information was revealed in a previous investigation by +972 and Local Call in November 2023, as well as in the Israeli military’s own publications. A fundamental difference between the two systems is in the definition of the target: whereas The Gospel marks buildings and structures that the army claims militants operate from, Lavender marks people — and puts them on a kill list.
In addition, according to the sources, when it came to targeting alleged junior militants marked by Lavender, the army preferred to only use unguided missiles, commonly known as “dumb” bombs (in contrast to “smart” precision bombs), which can destroy entire buildings on top of their occupants and cause significant casualties. “You don’t want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people — it’s very expensive for the country and there’s a shortage [of those bombs],” said C., one of the intelligence officers. Another source said that they had personally authorized the bombing of “hundreds” of private homes of alleged junior operatives marked by Lavender, with many of these attacks killing civilians and entire families as “collateral damage.”
In an unprecedented move, according to two of the sources, the army also decided during the first weeks of the war that, for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians; in the past, the military did not authorize any “collateral damage” during assassinations of low-ranking militants. The sources added that, in the event that the target was a senior Hamas official with the rank of battalion or brigade commander, the army on several occasions authorized the killing of more than 100 civilians in the assassination of a single commander.
The following investigation is organized according to the six chronological stages of the Israeli army’s highly automated target production in the early weeks of the Gaza war. First, we explain the Lavender machine itself, which marked tens of thousands of Palestinians using AI. Second, we reveal the “Where’s Daddy?” system, which tracked these targets and signaled to the army when they entered their family homes. Third, we describe how “dumb” bombs were chosen to strike these homes.
Fourth, we explain how the army loosened the permitted number of civilians who could be killed during the bombing of a target. Fifth, we note how automated software inaccurately calculated the amount of non-combatants in each household. And sixth, we show how on several occasions, when a home was struck, usually at night, the individual target was sometimes not inside at all, because military officers did not verify the information in real time.
[…]
“At 5 a.m., [the air force] would come and bomb all the houses that we had marked,” B. said. “We took out thousands of people. We didn’t go through them one by one — we put everything into automated systems, and as soon as one of [the marked individuals] was at home, he immediately became a target. We bombed him and his house.”
“It was very surprising for me that we were asked to bomb a house to kill a ground soldier, whose importance in the fighting was so low,” said one source about the use of AI to mark alleged low-ranking militants. “I nicknamed those targets ‘garbage targets.’ Still, I found them more ethical than the targets that we bombed just for ‘deterrence’ — highrises that are evacuated and toppled just to cause destruction.”
The deadly results of this loosening of restrictions in the early stage of the war were staggering. According to data from the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza, on which the Israeli army has relied almost exclusively since the beginning of the war, Israel killed some 15,000 Palestinians — almost half of the death toll so far — in the first six weeks of the war, up until a week-long ceasefire was agreed on Nov. 24.
‘The more information and variety, the better’
The Lavender software analyzes information collected on most of the 2.3 million residents of the Gaza Strip through a system of mass surveillance, then assesses and ranks the likelihood that each particular person is active in the military wing of Hamas or PIJ. According to sources, the machine gives almost every single person in Gaza a rating from 1 to 100, expressing how likely it is that they are a militant.
[…]
sources explained that the Lavender machine sometimes mistakenly flagged individuals who had communication patterns similar to known Hamas or PIJ operatives — including police and civil defense workers, militants’ relatives, residents who happened to have a name and nickname identical to that of an operative, and Gazans who used a device that once belonged to a Hamas operative.
“How close does a person have to be to Hamas to be [considered by an AI machine to be] affiliated with the organization?” said one source critical of Lavender’s inaccuracy. “It’s a vague boundary. Is a person who doesn’t receive a salary from Hamas, but helps them with all sorts of things, a Hamas operative? Is someone who was in Hamas in the past, but is no longer there today, a Hamas operative? Each of these features — characteristics that a machine would flag as suspicious — is inaccurate.”
[…]
B. said that the reason for this automation was a constant push to generate more targets for assassination. “In a day without targets [whose feature rating was sufficient to authorize a strike], we attacked at a lower threshold. We were constantly being pressured: ‘Bring us more targets.’ They really shouted at us. We finished [killing] our targets very quickly.”
He explained that when lowering the rating threshold of Lavender, it would mark more people as targets for strikes. “At its peak, the system managed to generate 37,000 people as potential human targets,” said B. “But the numbers changed all the time, because it depends on where you set the bar of what a Hamas operative is. There were times when a Hamas operative was defined more broadly, and then the machine started bringing us all kinds of civil defense personnel, police officers, on whom it would be a shame to waste bombs. They help the Hamas government, but they don’t really endanger soldiers.”
One source who worked with the military data science team that trained Lavender said that data collected from employees of the Hamas-run Internal Security Ministry, whom he does not consider to be militants, was also fed into the machine. “I was bothered by the fact that when Lavender was trained, they used the term ‘Hamas operative’ loosely, and included people who were civil defense workers in the training dataset,” he said.
The source added that even if one believes these people deserve to be killed, training the system based on their communication profiles made Lavender more likely to select civilians by mistake when its algorithms were applied to the general population. “Since it’s an automatic system that isn’t operated manually by humans, the meaning of this decision is dramatic: it means you’re including many people with a civilian communication profile as potential targets.”
[…]
According to B., a common error occurred “if the [Hamas] target gave [his phone] to his son, his older brother, or just a random man. That person will be bombed in his house with his family. This happened often. These were most of the mistakes caused by Lavender,” B. said.
[click here for the whole article]
Barak Ravid: “I spoke to ahm, ah, an Israeli reserve officer who was in the same unit as those soldiers who shot those [three Israeli] hostages [who managed to escape]. And I remember him telling me, that the orders are basically — from the commanders on the ground — just shoot every man of fighting age. Those are the orders.”
But those are, but that’s not the rules of engagement that is coming from the IDF leadership. […] At the end of the day, the battalion commander or brigade commander or I don’t know who authorized the strike[!], he interprets differently[!] the orders that are coming from the IDF comm…, ah, headquarters in Tel Aviv.”
Ziofascist Israel’s Al Shifa hospital massacre:
From the Ziofascist Israeli parliament:
USA:
Just five minutes into a meeting with President Joe Biden, a Palestinian American doctor who has treated gravely injured patients in Gaza couldn’t bear to stay, so he left.
Dr. Thaer Ahmad, who specializes in emergency medicine, recalled getting emotional when talking about the many Palestinians he cared for, describing the scale of death in the six months since the war began.
“The decision to leave was a personal one,” he told NBC News in a phone interview, explaining he wanted to show the White House that “it was important to recognize the pain and the mourning that my community was in.”
Ahmad stressed that he wanted “to let the administration feel the way that we felt this past six months and kind of get up and walk away from them.”
He was one of only six Muslim American community leaders who attended a small meeting on Tuesday with Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and senior administration officials at the White House.
Many others who had been invited to attend declined, according to multiple sources familiar with the outreach, underscoring the deepening tensions between the administration and the Muslim and Arab American communities over the president’s support of Israel in its bombardment of Gaza. More than 30,000 people have died, according to health officials, since Hamas’ terrorist attacks in Israel on Oct. 7 and the group is still holding more than 100 hostages captive.
Another doctor who attended was taken aback when she showed Biden prints of photos of malnourished children and women in Gaza — to which Biden responded that he had seen those images before. The problem, the doctor said, was that she had printed the photos from her own iPhone.
“This speaks volumes to the dismissive nature of the administration when it comes to strong-willed action towards a permanent cease-fire or, at a bare minimum, a red line on the invasion of Rafah,” Dr. Nahreen H. Ahmed told NBC News.
Before leaving the meeting early, Ahmad handed a letter to the president from an 8-year-old orphan in Rafah, the southernmost city in Gaza.
“There is an incredible amount of urgency around this,” Ahmad said, expressing deep skepticism that Israel’s military campaign can be done “in a sophisticated or tactical way” that doesn’t put innocent civilians at risk.
British news:
April 4
More impressions from Ziofascist Israel’s Al Shifa hospital massacre:
Ziofascist propagandist Hyman: “Just at the end of… Just at the beginning of this week, we finished an operation in the biggest hospital in Gaza that had been turned into a, a military base for Hamas. They were shooting out of the maternity ward, they were shooting out of the ER, they have no respect…”
LBC’s Nick Ferrari: “Are you able to produce video evidence of that?”
Ziofascist propagandist Hyman [stuttering three times]: “There, there is video of that. I, I hope that it will come out in the, in the…”
LBC’s Nick Ferrari [interrupts, perhaps also to save Hyman]: “But why would it not be published now, Mr. Hyman? I mean I wanna put it to you respectfully, not you personally, but Israel is on the back foot at the moment. You are aware of the level of condemnation of what happened to these seven aid workers. Would it not be wise now for you to be speaking with your colleagues and say ‘What video? What evidence? What can we now put out there to support your claims that the terrorists[!] are hiding in hospitals and mosques and using them effectively as arms dumps.”
The Ziofascist Israeli murder of protected health worker Hussain Mutair:
Ziofascist Israel again attacking people seeking aid:
One can see fired shots spewing up earth or sand:
A Palestinian man with an aid package gets shot at by the Ziofascists:
After being hit and wounded by the Ziofascists, he drops the aid package and rolls on the floor:
This — the location of a parked military vehicle — is where the Palestinian civilian who briefly manages to pick himself and the aid package up appears to be shot from:
He goes down again, rolls on the floor again in pain and the Ziofascists shoot at him again:
The Palestinian civilian eventually succumbs to his wounds and waiting dogs begin to eat his corpse:
Ziofascist Israeli genocidal infanticide:
Ziofascist Israeli abuse of Palestinian detainees:
From an older January thread:
Back to the April thread:
Another compilation from Younis Tirawi on ‘the most moral army in the world’:
“This Winter the Messayat Comes to Hunt”:
Somewhat more aid is being let in by Israel as a result of it killing the World Central Kitchen staff:
USA and Clintons:
Male heckler: “Hilary, Hilary Clinton, hi! Has anybody told you you are the superpredator? Has anybody told you you are the superpredator? You’re responsible for the deaths of millions! […] Bill Clinton, you’re a genocide supporter! Fuck you, you piece of shit!”
Female heckler: “[Hilary] Clinton, you are responsible for genocides, you’re responsible for atrocities You’re literally helping fucking facilitate the genocide of Palestinian people! What the fuck do you have to say for yourself!?”
A reminder that Western academia is largely playing along with the genocide:
April 5
The Al-Shifa massacre:
Lavender:
Palestinian testimonies:
Mousa Salem: “What will the free people of the world say when they stand, when they stand before God? What will they say? What will they say? What can they say? Our Lord will subject them to a painful punishment. God is sufficient for us and the best disposer of affairs.
Where is the world? There is no world. The world has closed its eyes. It is ignoring us. It’s as if, it’s as if we are not human. May God honor you. It’s as if we are statues. A statue. A statue that is being tortured, that is being heavily beaten, and they’re silent [about it]. They don’t even look at us. If only they would stand one centimeter closer by our side. I mean to at least lift the siege off us, to stop the bombardment, to stop the, the, the strikes. People are really suffering.
We are patient, morally principled and resolute. We are people that are heros. We are people that is steadfast, a resolute people, a morally principled people, a heroic people, a steadfast people. Thank God. God is sufficient for us and the best disposer of affairs against a criminal occupation.”
Palestinian patient: “People reached a point where they were asking ‘Should we drink our urine?’
We were in the reception area, and then they [Israeli soldiers] moved us to Bin Nayef department for cancer patients. Then they took us out of the building and burnt down the department. They brought us here to this department, they made us suffer and humiliated us. We were not hopeful, not even one percent. First five or six days we did not have any water. Then after the sixth day, they brought us some water from this. They humiliated us with the food.
Because of the lack of food, water and medicine, some people were martyred. I swear to God, they were martyred. I swear to God. I swear to God. Some were martyred. There was a patient, she had nothing serious, but she was martyred as a result of the siege.
You have the Israeli soldiers coming to this section to dehumanise us. They come to us and say ‘You are the mighty people?’ and things like that. What can you reply to him? Nothing. What can you reply to him with? They have all sorts of weapons on them. If you speak back, they would say ‘Shut up. You are the mighty people?’ Nothing we can do. We are already under their control. God is sufficient for us and he is the best disposer of affairs. God is sufficient for us and he is the best disposer of affairs. God is sufficient for us from the normalisers.”
‘The most moral army in the world’ during Ramadan:
From a female Ziofascist in Tel Aviv, February 2024:
Interviewer: “Do you think killing civilians in Gaza will prevent Palestinian terrorism?”
Corey Gil-Shuster: “Yes.”
Interviewer: “Yes?”
Corey Gil-Shuster: “Yes, because I don’t think there are civilians there that are innocent. Everyone there is somehow connected to the crimes. They can hide hostages in their homes. They can…”
Interviewer: “But that is revenge. What about preventing terrorism from them in the future?”
Corey Gil-Shuster: “If we kill them, they will be afraid.”
Interviewer: “They will be afraid?”
Corey Gil-Shuster: “Yes.”
Palestine at the UN:
USA:
April 6
A doctor at a field hospital for detained Palestinians at Israel’s Sde Teiman army base has described “deplorable conditions” and “routine” amputations due to handcuff injuries, according to an exclusive report from the newspaper Haaretz.
In a letter to Israel’s attorney general and defense and health ministers, obtained by Haaretz, the doctor said the conditions at Sde Teiman field hospital compromise inmates’ health and violate medical ethics.
“Just this week, two prisoners had their legs amputated due to handcuff injuries, which unfortunately is a routine event,” the doctor said in the letter, according to the Haaretz report on Thursday. He wrote that inappropriate care at the detention facility has led to “complications and sometimes even in the patient’s death,” adding that “this makes all of us — the medical teams and you, those in charge of us in the health and defense ministries, complicit in the violation of Israeli law.”
Haaretz reported that the doctor said “inmates are fed through straws, defecate in diapers and are held [in] constant restraints, which violate medical ethics and the law.” It is not clear when the doctor penned the letter.
In a written statement to CNN responding to the claims, an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesperson said: “The IDF operates according to the law and within the framework of the law when it comes to the treatment of detainees. Every procedure is documented and supervised, and is done with extreme care for the human dignity of the detainees, in accordance with the principles of Israeli and international law.”
The IDF statement continued, “The handcuffing of the detainees is carried out in accordance with the procedures, their health condition and the level of danger posed by them, in order to ensure the safety of the forces and the medical staff.”
[…]
CNN spoke to a source who has a medical background and previously visited the Sde Teiman field hospital. They confirmed seeing detainees held in constant restraints.
The medical source, who spoke to CNN on Thursday on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals, said all the Gazan detainees they saw at the field hospital had all four limbs shackled, which the source said increases the risk of blood clotting and other health concerns.
The source said the detainees were blindfolded and that at least three patients they saw were wearing diapers.
The medical source highlighted the systematic “dehumanizing” of detainees at the field hospital, which they described as a large “tent” that is “not insulated” from the elements.
Umm Daqqa: “Let them see what happened to us and what they have done to the people. Some people don’t even have a penny. […] They don’t even let us bake bread. […]”
USA:
Marwan Bishara: “The basic challenge is: Who guarantees that these steps will happen either consequentially or in parallel or at a certain time, and so on and so forth. It’s the United States. That’s why Bill Burns is in the negotiations, to be able to give guarantees for bridging the two sides.”
April 7
Attacks on hospitals and health professionals — Dar Alsalam hospital:
Al Amal hospital:
Al Shifa hospital:
WHO Representative D. Ayadil Saparbekov: “Here I am in what remains of the emergency room of the biggest hospital of Gaza, Al-Shifa. Unfortunately, as you can see around me, it’s only the rubbles. What used to be the beds, what used to be the, ah, oxygen, ah, pipes, what used to be the rooms for doctors and for the patients. Patients used to be here to receive their first aid, but unfortunately now everything is burned, and as you can see behind me, there is nothing left of the emergency room.”
WHO Representative D. Ayadil Saparbekov: “In the yard of the hospital, the graves of people […]. Some of them have been buried, some of them are not yet even buried, so you can see here, here, in many other places, you can see the bodies that rotting under the Gazan sand.
Al Ahli Baptist hospital (where Israel committed the then biggest massacre on October 17, 2023):
AI targetting of Palestinians:
Also Ziofascist Israel:
Three replies:
Ziofascist Israel again creating the false image that it is opposed to genocide while committing genocide against Palestinians:
More replies and an older comment:
If things are still unclear about Israel being a racist, genocidal, terrorist and Nazi Germany-like entity:
From that May 2023 Haaretz article:
About two months ago, Walid Daqqa completed a 37-year prison sentence for belonging to the terrorist cell that murdered Moshe Tamam, an Israeli soldier, in 1984. Two and a half years remain on an additional sentence, for his part in after he was convicted of helping former lawmaker Basel Ghattas smuggle cellphones into prison. Daqqa is the longest-serving security prisoner in Israel, one of the few who was incarcerated before the Oslo Accords and remains […]
USA:
April 8
Ireland:
Britain — a reminder that it is not just the Tories but also Starmer-led Labour which support the Ziofascist Israeli genocide of Palestinians:
Above: ? Below: Lisa Nandy
Emily Thornberry
Keir Starmer
David Lammy
…and many other Israeli Ziofascist-supported “Labour Friends of Genocide” such as Luciana Berger and the despicable Margaret Hodge whose main concern it is to make Labour safe for Ziofascists like themselves:
Interviewer: “And there are still many here who support the Palestinian cause, some quite strongly and stridently.”
Margaret Hodge [chirping away insanely]: “I think it’s quite interesting. I mean I’ve been in and out: There are very few who are daring to exp… very, very few who are daring to express their support. […] this is a different, different Labour party. And I think Keir Starmer — beyond my expectations — moved in the most ruthless, determined, and single-minded way…”
Interviewer: “Did he surprise you?”
Margaret Hodge: “Yeah, beyond… I thought this would all take a decade. And he done it in three years.”
Relatedly:
April 9
Except one could of course argue that the ‘vision’ of Israel had always rested on the the displacement and genocide of the native Palestinians:
An insane Ziofascist propagandist replies:
USA:
Speaking of insane Ziofascists:
Another example:
Another example:
Replies to the Ziofascist propagandist Ben Shapiro:
Another example:
Student: “Nancy Pelosi, you’re complicit in genocide! The blood of over 15,000 Palestinian babies is on your hands! How can you be a Democrat and say you hold Democratic values while over 100.000 innocent Palestinian civilians have been massacred with bombs that you paid for. We will not be shamed into voting for you or Genocide Joe and your massacrous policies! My family back home in Palestine is being killed! Their blood is on your hands. And David Axelrod: Shame on you, and every one of the Democratic elites that want to shame us into voting for Genocide Joe! 80% of Democrats support a ceasefire, shame on you! Shame on you!”
Another example:
Another example:
Britain:
April 10
Israel-Russia:
USA:
Tucker Carlson: “[F]or example, during the more than a decade the US government spent occupying Iraq, the ancient Christian community of Iraq was completely devastated. Nine out of ten of them are no longer there, they are gone. That was an effect of our foreign policy. […] Virtually no one in any American church said anything when Christians were killed in Syria, very often by Islamic extremists paid for by the United States. […]”
April 11
Human heads eaten by crows, unidentified and decomposing body parts, and hundreds of corpses piled up and buried in mass graves are all that remained of the victims of the massacre at al-Shifa Hospital. The grim scene was something out of a dystopian movie, the product of the two-week siege of Gaza’s largest hospital that ended in its total destruction.
Following the completion of al-Shifa’s decimation, the Israeli army announced that it had been one of the most successful operations since the start of the war, claiming that it had arrested hundreds of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad members in the medical compound. But the question that no one seemed to ask is how such a massive number of so-called “operatives” from Hamas and PIJ had gathered at al-Shifa with the full knowledge that the place had already been combed by the army once before and that Gaza City had been occupied by the army ever since.
Mondoweiss contacted many survivors of the events at al-Shifa. Most of them refused to speak and feared exposing their identities. A few accepted under the condition of anonymity, fearing that their testimonies would make them targets by the Israeli army and that they would be subsequently killed. In light of the testimonies gathered by Mondoweiss, a different picture emerges of what happened.
The intelligence leak
One young man who managed to escape the hospital mere moments before the army invasion began said that there had indeed been hundreds of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad-affiliated employees in the hospital, but none of them were military operatives. They were workers in the Gaza government’s civil branch, including Civil Defense crews, the police force, the internal security services, interior ministry employees, and employees of other branches of the local government. All of them had gathered to receive their governmental salaries at al-Shifa, given that it was one of the few remaining places that was supposed to be relatively safe from the fighting.
“There was a room in the specialized surgeries building that served as an office for the government branches that operated aboveground,” said the young man, (hereafter named “Z”), referencing the Hamas government’s civilian branches.
Z also confirmed that a number of PIJ members who worked non-military jobs were there as well to receive salaries. “There was another building that was an office for the [PIJ] movement, and the men employed by the movement would go there to collect their salaries.”
“It had been a long time since any of these employees had seen one another,” Z explained. “That’s why they were all chatting in the medical compound and catching up with one another.”
The way the Israeli army described the gathering was that it had obtained confirmed intelligence reports of a large number of “terror operatives” from both groups inside al-Shifa, and after the raid, it announced that it had arrested 900 “suspects” and confirmed that 500 of them were “terror operatives,” while announcing that it had killed 200 more “gunmen,” among them “top commanders in Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.”
The siege begins
Z told Mondoweiss that he heard the sound of army vehicles and tanks approaching the hospital minutes before the attack. He and his colleague had also arrived at al-Shifa to receive their salaries.
“When we heard the vehicles, I told my colleague we had to leave immediately, thinking they might be headed toward the hospital itself,” Z said, explaining that anyone employed by the Hamas government is regarded as wanted by Israel. His colleague didn’t listen, believing that the army might be invading a nearby area instead. “He told me they were probably headed to the industrial zone.”
At first, Z’s colleague refused to leave, but as the sound of the tanks drew nearer, both decided to leave immediately. While they were both civilians with no military background, they were both members of the Hamas movement.
A few moments later, the invasion started. They witnessed the tanks surrounding the compound and the arrival of quadcopter drones hovering overhead. In an instant, all of al-Shifa was besieged from land and from air.
Another survivor who had managed to escape the compound said that the majority of intelligence regarding who had gathered at the compound was relayed to Israel by informants, collaborators, and undercover Israeli spies.
“On the night of the invasion, there were two street vendors who always sat at the entrance of al-Shifa,” the survivor told Mondoweiss. “One of them sold water, and the other sold canned foods. When the invasion happened, the two merchants revealed themselves to be soldiers. They took out handguns and entered the hospital with other soldiers, and they directed them where to go. They had been there for a long time and knew where everything was.”
The medical compound housed several buildings, including maternity wards, specialized surgery buildings, and cardiac wings. When the soldiers entered the compound, everyone was ordered to evacuate the buildings. Drones carrying speakers broadcast the army’s orders, telling people that they must exit and gather in the courtyard.
“The drones kept saying, ‘come out, you animals,’” Z told Mondoweiss.
Executions of doctors and suspected government employees
When everyone left the buildings, the army began to separate the crowds of people into groups, making each group wear differently-colored plastic bracelets. The soldiers told them that these bracelets were connected to a system that alerts snipers to their movements. They were divided into two colors: yellow, which was attached to hospital staff and whoever the army considered civilians, and red, which was given to people who could not move on their own, such as patients, the injured, amputees, or people with broken limbs.
The army also gathered people who were suspected of belonging to Hamas or the PIJ. They were not given bracelets but were separated from the injured and hospital staff, who were sent to a different building.
A third much larger group was ordered to leave the hospital entirely — thousands of displaced persons who had been sheltering in the compound, in addition to some members of the hospital staff. Some of the staff members, including doctors, refused to leave. When they refused the army’s orders, they were executed immediately and without argument.
The army then brought out a huge number of men from the group of suspected Hamas and PIJ members and employees, gathering them in the center of the courtyard. It then proceeded to execute them, one after the other. When the slaughter was done, army bulldozers piled up their corpses in the dozens, dragging them through the sand and burying them.
As this was ongoing, other soldiers stormed various buildings in the compound in search of people who had refused to evacuate when the initial order was given. They killed anyone they found, regarding them as suspects.
There were some in the hospital who resisted and attempted to open fire, including police officers carrying handguns. That number of people was minor, and their resistance did not save them — they were killed along with those who did not put up any resistance.
A video published on social media filmed by a journalist at the hospital shows a female doctor, who identified herself as Amira al-Safadi, describing what happened.
“After the first day of the attack, which we were surprised by at 2 a.m., the army ordered us not to leave when it entered,” Dr. Safadi says. “Then, on the second day, it gave us the bracelets and emphasized that we had to wear them and that anyone who left the building without wearing one would be immediately killed.”
“We were sent to four different buildings,” she continues, describing that she joined a number of other doctors and nurses with their patients. “Around 16 injured patients died because we were unable to treat them.”
By the time the army withdrew from al-Shifa, the entire compound had been all but decimated, reduced to rubble and burnt buildings.
One of ‘largest massacres in Palestinian history’
The Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor said that the massacre at al-Shifa was one of the largest in Palestinian history, estimating that at least 1,500 people had been killed, injured, or reported missing, “with women and children making up half of the casualties.”* The organization also confirms that at least 22 patients were shot while in their hospital beds, while the number of displaced persons sheltering at the hospital who were forced to evacuate southward was estimated to include 25,000 people. Moreover, 1,200 housing units in the vicinity of al-Shifa were destroyed.
Despite the army’s claims about the al-Shifa operation’s strategic and military importance and the number of alleged Hamas and PIJ members it had arrested and killed, it obfuscated the real intended purpose of the operation, which was to destroy the health system in northern Gaza and worsen the already disastrous humanitarian conditions. The entire compound is now unfit for use. Even the morgue, containing countless bodies of the slain, was burned down.
Israel’s “operation” at al-Shifa was, indeed, a success, and that success was to put Gaza’s largest hospital out of service and hasten social collapse in the north.
Dr. Mark Perlmutter: “[W]hat impressed me the most was the overt genocide that I was suspecting was going on. That’s what brought me there. I was involved into a telehealth network providing advice to young orthopedic surgeons providing surgery in Gaza. And when I realized, based on direct feedback, that these very misplaced pins and screws were being performed by trainees without guidance because their attending orthopedic surgeons were killed or captured and imprisoned inside of Israel, and that they were flying without instruction, that I’d make a commitment to go. When I got there, echoing what Feroze had said, genocide was the overwhelming impression that I got.
There are distinct signs of genocide. First of all, the bombs are cluster bombs. We’ve taken small pieces of shrapnel, dozens of pieces of shrapnel, out of toddlers, infants and teenagers. The country is 50% children, if not more. Overwhelmingly, our victims were children. I would say 70–75% of the people that we operated on were elementary school age or younger. The injuries were devastating. As Dr. Sidhwa said, the world’s best marksmen are not going to shoot a kid in the forehead twice and in the abdomen. These are midline shots directly aimed, and that doesn’t happen by accident.
Secondly, the bombing was concentrated at the time of evening prayers. It happened all day long, but it was distinctly, purposefully concentrated when the Muslims were gathered together in tight units, shoulder to shoulder, knee to knee, praying to God, while they’re being bombed. And the cluster bombs are infinitely more effective when the intended target is concentrated into a smaller location. That defines genocide. The cluster bombs are illegal. The snipers, aimed distinctly at children, are unethical and illegal.
And then, of course, the way that you dehumanize a population is to kill the humans. You deprive them of their medical schools, their clinics, their ambulances. Sure, there was a big American and worldwide — justified — outcry when the World Central Kitchen vans were distinctly and purposely bombed right through the center of their hoods, but prior to that, 200 ambulances were targeted by the red cross — in this case, it’s a red crescent — very prominently displayed on top of an ambulance. They have very modern ambulances. There was no mistaking that they were ambulances that were bombed. Two hundred were destroyed, along with the paramedics. Doctors were distinctly shot. An orthopedic surgeon was shot in his knee while he’s operating on a patient, because the soldier commanded him to leave the operating room and he refused to abandon his patient, quite ethically. He had his knee blown out across the room. He was immediately fixed by his trainees. And two days later, he was imprisoned by Israel for 45 days, according to him, a juice box every other day, blindfolded the entire time, dropped off at a nonroad prison — border to crawl for three kilometers until somebody rescued him, blind in one eye because a rifle butt exploded his right eye. This is dehumanization. This is the — the purpose of this is to kill a population.
From the two doctors’ own April 11 article in Common Dreams:
On March 25 the two of us, an orthopedic surgeon and a trauma surgeon, traveled to the Gaza Strip to work at Gaza European Hospital in Khan Younis. We were immediately overwhelmed by the overflown sewage and the distinct smell of gunpowder in the air. We made the short journey from the Rafah crossing to Khan Younis, where Gaza European Hospital stands as one of the last remaining semi-functional hospitals for the 2.5 million human beings — half of them children — in the Gaza Strip. As humanitarian surgeons we thought we had seen all manner of cruelty in the world, but neither one of us has ever experienced anything like what we found when we arrived in Gaza.
We exited the van into a sea of children, all shorter and thinner than they ought to have been. Even over their screams of joy at meeting new foreigners, the snowmobile-like hum of Israeli drones could be heard overhead. It quickly became background noise, an omnipresent reminder that violence and death can rain down on anyone at any time in this besieged and ransacked territory.
Our limited sleep was constantly interrupted by explosions that shook the hospital’s walls and popped our ears, even well after the United Nations Security Council declared a cease-fire must be implemented. When warplanes screamed overhead, everyone braced for a particularly loud and powerful explosion. The timing of these attacks always coincided with “iftar,” when families in this overwhelmingly Muslim county broke the daily fast of Ramadan and were most vulnerable.
We walked through the wards and immediately found evidence of horrifying violence deliberately directed at civilians and even children. A three-year-old boy shot in the head, a 12-year-old girl shot through the chest, an ICU nurse shot through the abdomen, all by some of the best-trained marksmen in the world. Every square inch of the hospital’s floor is taken up with makeshift tents where displaced families live, desperate to find some semblance of safety. They are the lucky several hundred who get to live indoors, unlike the tens of thousands sheltering outside on the hospital’s grounds.
As we got to work we were shocked by the violence inflicted on people. Incredibly powerful explosives ripped apart rock, floors, and walls and threw them through human bodies, penetrating skin with waves of dirt and debris. With the environment literally embedded in our patients’ bodies we have found infection control to be impossible. No amount of medical care could ever compensate for the damage being inflicted here.
As humanitarian trauma surgeons we have both seen incredible suffering. Collectively, we were present at Ground Zero on 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, the Boston Marathon bombing, and the 2010 earthquake in Haiti on the first day of these disasters. We have worked in the deprivation of southern Zimbabwe and the horrors of the war in Ukraine. Together we have worked on more than 40 surgical missions in developing countries on three continents in our combined 57 years of volunteering. This long experience taught us that there was no greater pain as a humanitarian surgeon than being unable to provide needed care to a patient.
But that was before coming to Gaza. Now we know the pain of being unable to treat a child who will slowly die, but also alone, because she is the only surviving member of an entire extended family. We have not had the heart to tell these children how their families died: burned until they resembled blistered hotdogs more than human beings, shredded to pieces such that they can only be buried in mass graves, or simply entombed in their former apartment buildings to die slowly of asphyxia and sepsis. […]
“Sophicide”:
As members of the Palestinian Feminist Collective and scholars at North American universities, we are steadfast in our commitment to the intellectual pursuit of knowledge, truth, and justice in environments free from systemic oppression. The Zionist regime’s escalated genocide in Gaza has meant the annihilation of intellectual and cultural sources of wisdom, or sophicide.
Sophicide refers to the Zionist regime’s deliberate annihilation of Indigenous knowledge traditions inspired by the land itself, as well as the carriers of that knowledge, including elders and women. It involves the crushing of Palestinian life and learning through the systematic murder of Palestinian students, mentors, teachers, researchers, scholars, academics, writers, librarians, archivists, spiritual leaders, historiographers, creatives, poets, interns, lecturers, professors, staff, and lab technicians. Such attacks on these Indigenous knowledge carriers impacts entire generations of learners, crushing their aspirations and dreams.
Sophicide also includes scholasticide, a Palestinian concept that refers to the physical destruction of centers of knowledge, educational resources, infrastructures, and archives as well as the silencing, censorship, and repression of Palestinian history, epistemology, scholarship, and subjectivity. The Zionist regime’s academic repression has extended beyond Palestine and into U.S. and Canadian education centers across Turtle Island, reflecting a systemic failure by university administrators and other authorities to protect students, educators, and staff in their communities and the pursuit of knowledge free from harm.
Ziofascist sociopathy:
Ziofascist sociopath/psychopath: “I’ll tell you what: If you show me your titties, I wont kill any more Palestinian kids.”
Female voice: “You killed 25 Palestinian kids, like you’re proud of us?”
Ziofascist sociopath/psychopath: “If you love Palestinians, you’ll show me your titties, and I’ll…”
Female voice: “I’m not showing you shit! You don’t deserve it, you fucking racist.”
Ziofascist sociopath/psychopath: “I’ll keep killing them. How does that sound?”
Female voice: “You’re gonna do it anyways, you’re gonna do it anyways. So why the fuck does it…”
Ziofascist sociopath/psychopath: “Show me tits. Every second that you don’t show me a titty, another Palestinian kid [inaudible]…”
Female voice: “Let me see, let me see what you’re doing, terrorist. Let me see.”
Ziofascist sociopath/psychopath: “I’m killing terrorists, what the fuck are you talking about!?”
Female voice: “You just said you’re killing children.”
Ziofascist sociopath/psychopath: “Yeah, it’s funny, isn’t it.
Female voice: “Am I laughing? You’re maniacal.”
Ziofascist sociopath/psychopath [screams shrilly and mockingly]: “Ahhhh, get the rubble off me.”
Female voice: “Yeah, I’m gonna post this, watch.”
Ziofascist sociopath/psychopath: “Yeah, ok, do it, nobody gives a shit [inaudible].”
USA:
Unfortunately, Benjamin Netanyahu is right — “unfortunately,” I say, because he is the most incompetent, corrupt and divisive Israeli prime minister ever, as many in Israel believe. But he is right that it’s crucial for Israel to conquer Rafah and destroy the Hamas battalions ensconced in that city at the southern end of the Gaza Strip, protected by a human shield of some 1.4 million residents and refugees from the north.
If this does not happen, Hamas will survive to fight and murder and rape another day — and its leader, Yahya Sinwar, will emerge from his hiding place declaring victory. And he will be right. For Palestinian-Israeli peace to have any chance, for regional stability and for the future welfare of Israel and Israelis, especially those living in the south of the country, Hamas must be obliterated.
April 12
Ziofascist settler attacks in the West Bank:
Jerusalem:
“When the dust cleared from the latest raid on the Armenians, the Armenian community planted the flag of Artsakh in a pile of rubble that was originally church structures, destroyed by Israelis on […] bulldozers.”
“These increasingly frequent and violent enroachments are aimed at displacing the entire Armenian community from the old quarter [of Jerusalem]”
Over the past six months in Gaza, Israel has killed civilians on an industrial scale, turned hospitals into strategic military targets and food into a weapon of war.
Blatantly violating basic principles of the laws of war, Israel has deployed the language of international humanitarian law as a form of “humanitarian camouflage,” in the words of independent UN expert Francesca Albanese, in the furtherance of its genocidal campaign.
In her new report titled “Anatomy of a Genocide,” Albanese says that one of her “key findings is that Israel’s executive and military leadership and soldiers have intentionally distorted jus in bello principles, subverting their protective functions, in an attempt to legitimize genocidal violence against the Palestinian people.”
Jus in bello refers to the conditions under which states may legitimately resort to war. It regulates the conduct of parties engaged in an armed conflict.
International humanitarian law, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross, “is synonymous with jus in bello; it seeks to minimize suffering in armed conflicts, notably by protecting and assisting all victims of armed conflict to the greatest extent possible.”
With its genocidal conduct in Gaza, as per analyst Trita Parsi, “Israel is engaged in a deliberate and systematic effort to destroy existing laws and norms around warfare.”
He added, “Israel is seeking to either destroy these norms or create a new normal in which it — much like the US — will be untouchable above these laws and norms.”
This effort was exemplified by Israel’s actions on just one day, 1 April, in Gaza and beyond.
Israel’s forces withdrew from the vicinity of Gaza’s largest and most important hospital after perpetrating what may be one of the worst massacres in Palestinian history; an Israeli attack destroyed the Iranian consulate in Damascus, killing 12, including two Iranian generals; and Israeli personnel killed seven aid workers, including nationals of some of Israel’s closest allies, in central Gaza while they were undertaking an aid mission coordinated with the military.
“Israel is crossing every possible red line, still with full impunity,” Albanese said the following day.
“Sanctions now. Indictments now,” she added.
In the absence of such accountability measures for past and ongoing rights violations, and enabled by decades of impunity, Israel’s total war on Palestinians in Gaza is also a war on the principles of international law, the impact of which will surely be profound.
April 13
Ziofascist settler attacks:
The settlers and at least two soldiers are in the background, Palestinians in the foreground. After shots get fired in their direction, they run:
Protests of Palestinians in the West Bank:
In the meantime and in contrast to actual settler terrorism, a Ziofascist nutjob propagandist wants others to believe that people holding peaceful spaces on Twitter/X support “terrorism”:
April 14
April 15
Ziofascist Israeli propagandist Orly Goldschmidt [starting with an outright lie, followed by stuttering and more outright lies]: “So we didn’t flatten anything. The Iranians are saying that Israel has, ah, bombed, ahm, ah, ah, a building, an official building, but that, that’s not true. And by the way, that building was not a consulate or anything like that. It was a building near a consulate. […] they were IRGC members whose only goal was to murder Jews and Israelis.”
SkyNews’ Kay Burley: “But you did do it.”
Ziofascist Israeli propagandist Orly Goldschmidt: “I’m not saying we do… did it. I’m saying…
SkyNews’ Kay Burley [interrupts]: “You are saying you did it.”
Ziofascist Israeli propagandist Orly Goldschmidt: “No, I haven’t said that, and I’m not gonna comment on that. Whoever said… did that, did that in order to, ah, ah, defend, ah, innocent people around the world[!], because […]”
Replies:
Ziofascist propagandist Eylon Levy: “Let’s make Gen-Z… Gen-Zionist!”
