2023-2024 Israel-Hamas War

 2023-2024 Israel-Hamas War (Israeli–Palestinian conflict,  bombing,  cover-up,  murder,  genocide?)

Date	7 October 2023 - Present
Location	Israel,  Gaza Strip,  West Bank,  Golan Heights,  Lebanon,  Egypt,  Indian Ocean,  Iraq,  Syria
Participants	Israel, Hezbollah, Iran, Houthi, Yemen
Perpetrators	Hamas, IDF
Deaths	20,000
Injured (non-fatal)	60,000
Subpage	•2023-2024 Israel-Hamas War/Israeli invasion of Gaza •2023-2024 Israel-Hamas War/October 7
Description	Hamas attack on dozens of illegal Israeli settlements in Southern Israel provoking mass retaliatory killings by Israel. Corporate media call it the Israeli "9-11", while critics of Israel refer to "10-7" as a staged, military operation in order to manufacture consent for a disproportionate response.

On 7 October 2023 – precisely one day after the 50th anniversary of the start of the Yom Kippur War – the 2023-2024 Israel-Hamas War began. Around 3,000 armed Palestinian militants led by Hamas infiltrated Israel from the Gaza Strip – seemingly unopposed – and broke through the Gaza–Israel barrier into nearby settlements and military installations in Israel, in Operation Al Aqsa Flood.

Israel responded by bombarding and invading Gaza in the far more devastating Operation Iron Sword. By December 2023 reports from the NYT and Haaretz emerged, that the Israeli IDF and Unit 8200 knew of the exact details of the planned incursion, but deemed the plan "not realistic", raising questions over the official narrative of 10-7 being a Palestinian "surprise attack".

On 20 March 2024, Al Jazeera Investigations released an hour-long video entitled "October 7" which found that many of the worst stories that came out in the days following the attack were false. This was especially true of atrocities that were used repeatedly by politicians in Israel and the West to justify the ferocity of the bombardment of the Gaza Strip, such as the mass killing of babies and allegations of widespread and systematic rape. The video revealed that claims by the Israel Defence Force that it found 8 burned babies at a house in Kibbutz Be’eri were entirely untrue. There were no babies in the house and the 12 civilians inside were killed by Israeli forces when they stormed the house.

Background

Full article: Israel

Full article: Palestine

Full article: Yom Kippur War

The land that is now known as Israel and Palestine has been contested for millennia. World War 2 and the Balfour Declaration caused the formation of a Zionist deep state of Israel at the will of Zionists, many of whom settled there in the 1800s. Israel was founded in 1948 and remained and expanded ever since, despite numerous attacks.

Official narrative

Full article: Israeli–Palestinian conflict

50 Years On, Palestine War On Same Occasion; Why Hamas Attacked Israel On Oct 7

After a surprise hang-glider and land assault on Israeli settlements, military bases and a music festival, over 1000 people died on the 7th of October by the hand of Hamas fighters. Israeli forces claim that Hamas gunmen killed more than 100 people in the kibbutz of Be'eri and a similar number in the Kfar Aza kibbutz. By 11 November 2023, the death toll in Gaza had reportedly exceeded 11,000 Palestinians whilst the Israelis revised downward their death toll from the October 7 Hamas attack in southern Israel to around 1,200 from a previous government estimate of 1,400.

Israeli military prisoners-of-war and civilians, including children, had been taken hostage by Palestinian militants; several of these hostages have reportedly since been taken to the Gaza Strip. Numerous cases of violence against Israeli civilians have occurred since the beginning of the Hamas offensive, including a massacre at a music festival in Re'im that killed at least 260. Hamas called it "Operation Al Aqsa Flood". In response, the IDF launched Operation Iron Sword, where it called up 300,000 reservists and started a massive assault on Gaza. On the northern border with Lebanon, minor exchanges of fire continued.

IDF officials reported that the bodies of 1,500 Hamas soldiers had been recovered from Israeli territory.. Apparently not many prisoners were taken, with pictures showing desecration of their corpses.

4 weeks into the conflict, Houthi militants in Yemen announced a number of missile and drone attacks on Israel. In January 2024, the US and UK launched airstrikes on more than a dozen sites used by Houthis in Yemen

Genocide?

On December 29, South Africa’s government filed a case with the International Court of Justice alleging that, by atrocities against the Palestinian people after October 7, Israel is violating the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The government of Israel has said it would be represented at the ICJ to oppose the allegations.

Hamas

Several international law scholars - including former Attorney General of Canada Irwin Cotler and former ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo - called Hamas' assault genocide. In the first week, many self-recorded acts of mutilation and sexual assault were broadcast by Hamas and praised and re-broadcast by Muslims on social media. Israeli police said dozens of women and some men were raped, highlighting the Hamas founding charter, which calls for the destruction of Israel, denounced Zionism and Judaism, and, according to certain researchers according to Rutgers, implies a call for the genocide of Jews (before a 2017 revision that advocated for a Palestinian state in the 1967 borders, what would include the West Bank region and East Jerusalem).

Several Hamas soldiers confiscated victims' phones to livestream their deaths on social media while they posted messages or media on victims' social media accounts and even went as far as calling relatives to taunt them. Ghazi Hamad, senior Hamas official, promised in a late October 2023 interview to launch "a second, a third, a fourth" attack until the country is "annihilated," asserting, "We are victims - everything we do is justified".

Al Jazeera's hour-long video "October 7" reveals widespread human rights abuses by Hamas fighters and others who followed them through the fence from Gaza into Israel. But the investigation also found that many of the worst stories that came out in the days following the attack were false. There were a number of incidents where the police and IDF appear to have killed Israeli citizens.

Forensic examinations on victims on the attacks of 7th October showed signs of sexual abuse, mutilations, broken limbs, and broken pelvises, with reports of released hostages and 1,500 testimonies supporting the rape reports. The NYT also shared testimonies of sexual violence during hostages their time in Gaza City. Following the capture of Hamas soldiers, one came on the record to confess he got permission to "rape corpses", and given explicit instructions to kill everyone they encountered, including beheading victims and cutting off their legs. The plan, as described in the videos, involved moving from home to home, from room to room, throwing grenades, and killing everyone, including women and children. In one video a person whose face is blurred says that gunmen were ordered to "crush victims' heads, sever limbs, and cut off their legs".

Problems with official narrative

Given the reputation of Israel, and the enormous reach and capabilities of Israel's military-intelligence apparatus, the attack is unlikely to have been unexpected, as has been acknowledged by IDF and Egyptian officials, who repeatedly warned Tel Aviv that an escalation was imminent Stories in corporate media also say that US intelligence officials also had warned that Hamas was preparing a large-scale operation.

In March 2023, Israel passed a law that according to Minister of Settlements Orit Strock was "a step on the way to re-occupying and resettling the Gaza Strip", a move she acknowledged would cause "many casualties."

Disinformation

Ben Shapiro shared an image of "burned Jewish babies" during the October 20233 "surprise" Hamas attack on Israel. The picture was soon exposed as an AI generated fake

On 11 October 2023, Jonathan Cook posted on X:

"So Western journalists simply accepted without any evidence that Hamas beheaded 40 Israeli babies. It's not like they don't know there's a precedent for this kind of disinformation.

"Remember how a US ally spread lies in 1990 about Iraqi soldiers pulling babies from incubators.

"The fake testimony was supplied by a schoolgirl, 'Nayirah', who it much later turned out was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the US. Her lies helped pave the way to the US launching the 1991 Gulf War."

Intelligence Failure?

Israeli soldier says warning signs weren't taken seriously ahead of Hamas attack

In 2021, Israel completed a sensor-equipped underground wall on its side of Gaza, a countermeasure developed after Hamas used tunnels to repel its troops during a 2014 invasion of the besieged Palestinian territory. The project also includes an above-ground fence, a naval barrier, radar systems and command and control rooms. The barrier includes hundreds of cameras, radar and other sensors, and spans 65km (40 miles). 140,000 tonnes of iron and steel were used in its construction, which took three-and-a-half years to complete. Israeli officials just argued that intelligence failed because of Sabbath and a Jewish holiday on top of that.

Israeli journalist Efrat Fenigson, who served in Israel's intelligence forces, said "No military involvement, no police, no arms on the ground for hours and hours. This is something that is non-typical and unusual for Israel defence forces...[The fact that the border was breached in 15 places] is completely ridiculous because normally with one breach of the fence, the whole army is triggered and things start moving immediately. Things start moving immediately and here there was nothing for hours."

Hannibal Directive

The Israeli forces used the Hannibal Directive, which states that kidnappings "must be stopped by all means, even at the price of striking and harming our own forces," and also allows for no consideration to be taken to save friendly civilians.

Yasmin Porat, a survivor from the Kibbutz Be’eri, told Israeli radio that Israeli security forces "undoubtedly" killed a large number of their own civilians following the Hamas assault on 7 October. Porat stated that the Palestinian fighters – who she says treated her and the other Israeli civilians "humanely" – intended "kidnap us to Gaza. Not to murder us"..."After we were there for two hours with the abductors, the police arrive. A gun battle takes place that our police started....They eliminated everyone, including the hostages. Because there was very, very heavy crossfire."

Israel’s Haaretz newspaper published an interview with a man called Tuval who lived in Kibbutz Be’eri, but who was away on 7 October. Tuval’s partner was however killed in the events. Haaretz reported: "According to him [Tuval], only on Monday night and only after the commanders in the field made difficult decisions – including shelling houses with all their occupants inside in order to eliminate the terrorists along with the hostages – did the IDF [Israeli army] complete the takeover of the kibbutz. The price was terrible: at least 112 Be’eri people were killed. Others were kidnapped. Yesterday, 11 days after the massacre, the bodies of a mother and her son were discovered in one of the destroyed houses. It is believed that more bodies are still lying in the rubble."

Israeli helicopter pilots told how they focused on vehicles streaming back into Gaza from the Nova electronic music festival and nearby kibbutzes, attacking cars with knowledge that Israeli captives could be inside. One Apache pilot reflected on the difficult dilemma of whether to shoot at people and cars returning to Gaza. He knew that many of those vehicles may have contained Israeli captives. But he chose to open fire anyway. In 4 hours, 300 cars were targeted.

Re'im music festival

The official narrative holds that Hamas massacred 260 civilians, injured a greater number, and took an unknown number of hostages at the "Supernova Sukkot Gathering", an open-air psychedelic trance music festival. The event was held near a Gaza Regiment military base. The concert was not meant to be held so close to the base and the location of the event was moved just two nights before. These circumstances should normally have led to a long list of security precautions in a super-militarized state such as Israel. Witness reports from survivors indicate most died in crossfire, after an IDF roadblock hindered the participants from escaping.

Foreknowledge

Foreknowledge by Israeli intelligence

“Last year, after Israel obtained the Jericho Wall document, the military’s Gaza division drafted its own intelligence assessment of this latest invasion plan.

Hamas had "decided to plan a new raid, unprecedented in its scope," analysts wrote in the assessment reviewed by The Times. It said that Hamas intended to carry out a deception operation followed by a “large-scale maneuver” with the aim of overwhelming the division. But the Gaza division referred to the plan as a “compass.” In other words, the division determined that Hamas knew where it wanted to go but had not arrived there yet. On July 6, 2023, the veteran Unit 8200 analyst wrote to a group of other intelligence experts that dozens of Hamas commandos had recently conducted training exercises, with senior Hamas commanders observing.

The training included a dry run of shooting down Israeli aircraft and taking over a kibbutz and a military training base, killing all the cadets. During the exercise, Hamas fighters used the same phrase from the Quran that appeared at the top of the Jericho Wall attack plan, she wrote in the email exchanges viewed by The Times. The analyst warned that the drill closely followed the Jericho Wall plan, and that Hamas was building the capacity to carry it out. The colonel in the Gaza division applauded the analysis but said the exercise was part of a “totally imaginative” scenario, not an indication of Hamas’s ability to pull it off.

“In short, let’s wait patiently,” the colonel wrote.”
Ronen Bergman,  Adam Goldman (2023) 

Foreknowledge by Netanyahu

A month after the attack, prime minister Netanyahu removed the following tweet very quickly after being pressued by intelligence agencies and the IDF, hinting at internal deep political interference. The BBC mentioned "the post on X unleashed a wave of furious reactions by high-ranking Israeli security officials, exposing deep internal divisions".

“Under no circumstances and at no stage was Prime Minister Netanyahu warned of war intentions on the part of Hamas. On the contrary, the assessment of the entire security echelon, including the head of military intelligence and the head of Shin Bet, was that Hamas was deterred and was seeking an arrangement".”
Benjamin Netanyahu (October 2023) 

Foreknowledge on the stock market

In December 2023, Haaretz revealed that unnamed people who "made giant gambles against Israel on the markets in Tel Aviv and Wall Street days before Hamas’ attack made billions."

Difference in Aid by EU Telecom-providers

A Dutch investigation by journalist Tim Hofman revealed the European internet providers actually decided within one day to make telephones calls - to Ukraine from the EU - free of charge. The same European Telecom providers refused the same procedures for at least 8 months into the 2023 Israel-Hamas conflict. Upon investigation by the same journalist, at least one Dutch telecom provider lied on camera that a "middle-man actually requested the 26 EU countries via the European Parliament" to immediately order telecom companies within one day after the Russian invasion. After verifying this procedure with multiple Dutch Ministerial Departments, this handler was denied to have ever existed, playing questions as to who or whom is deep lobbying to deny Palestinians cheaper telecommunication systems, but grant them to Ukrainians at instant.

Israeli Air Force

Dozens of Israeli air force reservists said 2 months earlier they’ll refuse to show up for duty if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government moves ahead with a contentious plan to overhaul the country’s judiciary. Israeli Army suspended its navy commander 2 months before the attack. A protest signed by thousands of reservists over the last seven months up to the attack, had mostly remained threats. Up to the attack, 161 critical air force personnel announced they will stop their service, raising concerns about the military’s readiness in the face of similar refusals at a time of heightened violence and tensions on several fronts. Hundreds of reservists from various units joined a rally in Tel Aviv in august 2023, declaring they would not report for duty anymore.

US Claims

Iran was reported in the Washington Post to give "Hamas (...) $70 million in military assistance from Iran. According to a US State Department report from 2020, Iran provides about $100 million annually to Palestinian terrorist groups, including Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command Current and former intelligence officials confirmed that Iran had provided technical help to Hamas in manufacturing the more than 4,000 rockets and armed drones launched into Israel. At least some Hamas militants also have undergone training in advanced military tactics, including at Lebanese camps staffed by technical advisers from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Hezbollah.

Iranian officials helped plan Hamas’s surprise attack on Israel and gave the green light for the assault at a meeting in Beirut a week before the attack, according to senior members of Hamas and Hezbollah. Details of the operation were refined during several meetings in Beirut attended by IRGC officers and representatives of four Iran-backed militant groups, including Hamas, which holds power in Gaza, and Hezbollah, a Shiite militant group and political faction in Lebanon, they said. Although the US denied this, Syrian advisors and EU officials repeated the claim, in a rare agreement with Iran. In case, these claims are true, the picture painted by the US and Israel of a pure intelligence failure is even more suspicious.

Iran denied any involvement.

US Weapons

US Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene argued the weapons used in the attack appeared to be American and were moved from Ukraine to Gaza.

"Israel might use nuclear bomb"

On 5 November 2023, Sky News reported that an Israeli junior minister who said dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza was "one of the possibilities" in the Hamas war has been suspended, with Benjamin Netanyahu saying the statement was "not based in reality".

Junior minister Amihai Eliyahu, of the right-wing Otzma Yehudit party, made the claim in an interview with Kol Beramah radio.

Reactions

Interestingly enough, a spokesperson for Hamas admitted Israel to be practically undefeated with US support, but wants to maintain the strategy of tension between Gaza and Tel Aviv, seemingly not trying to advance the cause of the Palestine with other means, apart from bloodshed.

President Joe Biden and his top advisers were reported by CNN after 2 months to be warning Israel "with growing force" that it will become increasingly difficult for it to pursue its military goals in Gaza as global outcry intensifies about the scale of humanitarian suffering there.

Hamas representative in Lebanon Ahmad Abd Al-Hadi said in an October 12, 2023 show on NBN TV (Lebanon) that the goal of its “strategic deception” was to make Israel “fall asleep for a while, making it believe that Gaza was not going to do anything.” He said that this is the reason that Hamas did not join the August 2022 and May 2023 rounds of fighting between Gaza and Israel. Abd Al-Hadi added that Hamas and other factions had managed attacks against Israel in the West Bank from Gaza in order to move Israel’s focus from Gaza to there. Later in the interview, he said that in this operation Hamas has made several steps forward in its enterprise to liberate Palestine and destroy Israel. Abd Al-Hadi stated that another goal of the operation was to land a blow to the normalisation of relations between Israel and several Arab countries - Memri TV

A good example of how this event has played into PM Netanyahu's hand; Al Jazeera wrote; The Israeli military is bombarding Gaza, Hamas is launching more rockets and the death toll on both sides of the divide is rising. Splashed across Israeli media headlines is ‘Israel at War’ with many outlets reporting events as they happen, while some op-eds – and even high profile figures – have been using rhetoric criticised as dangerous and inflammatory.

Jonathan Conricus, a former international spokesman for the Israel Defence Forces, compared it to a "Pearl Harbour-type of moment for Israel, where there was reality up until today, and then there will be reality after today."(which was accused in OP-EDs and books by historians to not be that much of a surprise), while the Intercept compared the attack to 9-11, which is ironic of itself as 9-11 is suspected to have been made possible with help of the Israeli Deep state.

Covert operation

US Navy Seals were reported to enter the conflict.

Chemical Attacks

Israel was using banned white phosphorus artillery projectiles on harbors in Gaza according The Guardian, in days before their invasion of the Gaza Strip, while denying using them.

Deep state leadership

Full article: Israeli Deep state

PM Netanyahu rallied the country and even his enemies in Israeli parliament, as he even was able to form a new coalition in Israeli parliament, which is very important as Israel has no constitution and Israeli parliament has a final say since 2023 is nearly all affairs as they control the judges.

Colonists

“There had already been a significant increase in violence by Israeli settlers this year, even before the Hamas attack, according to UN data, with more than 100 incidents reported each month and about 400 people driven from their land between January and August.

Israeli human rights organisation B'Tselem told the BBC that since the attack, it had documented "a concerted and organised effort by settlers to use the fact that the entire international and local attention is focused on Gaza and the north of Israel to try to seize land in the West Bank". Partial data compiled by B'Tselem, covering the first six days after the Hamas attack, recorded at least 46 separate incidents in which it said settlers threatened, physically attacked or damaged the property of Palestinians in the West Bank.

"A lot of shepherding families and communities have fled because they were threatened in the past week by settlers," said Roy Yellin, a spokesman for B'Tselem. "Settlers have been giving residents a deadline to leave and telling them if they don't they will be harmed. And some villages have been totally emptied out."”
Joel Gunter,  BBC (2023) 

The attack also gave the IDF a window to raze several villages in the West Bank and remove Palestinian villages. A crime according to NGOs.

 

Known Participants

All 5 of the participants already have pages here:

Participant	Description
Ansarallah	Islamist political and military organisation from Yemen.
Hezbollah	Political Islamic party, and army fighting many wars in the Middle East, linked to possible CIA drug trafficking.
Iran	Iran possesses the 4th largest oil reserves of any nation state.
Israel	Only country in the world to be founded, led and designated by and for Jewish people after the Holocaust. Zionists achieved this with forms of land grabbing, apartheid and murder of Palestinians, but saying that is apparently.... antisemitic...
Yemen	A war torn country in the Middle East

 

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