New details emerged about fighters from Hamas who sparked a new war
Israel-hamas islamic jihad militants and the 7th October attack: Israeli-Israel dialogue with Israel, according to a Palestinian affairs expert
Hamas is trying to break down Israeli society, which it sees as a colonizer, according to a Palestinian affairs expert at Tel Aviv University.
They always believe that all of us should go back to Germany and Poland if we happen to be from another part of the world. It’s to break our spirit, really.
There is Israel’s strict policy toward Gaza, leading to a travel and economic blockade on the territory for the last 16 years. Israel says this is to contain attacks by Hamas after it took over Gaza in 2007 from the internationally recognized Palestinian Authority, now based solely in the occupied West Bank. Netanyahu’s longtime policy was to preserve this political division between the territories to prevent them from uniting into one Palestinian state.
“I am not a radical Muslim, but I think it is part of the learning process for those who belong to Hamas and they dislike the Jews or Israel, so they become radicals,” said Mkhaimar Abusada. “That probably explains the brutality that took place on the 7th of October.”
According to Gaza experts, there are around 20,000 to 25,000 Qassam militants in the group. They think about 5,000 to 6,000 of them belong to Islamic Jihad.
Hamas militants spark a new war with Israel: The older man’s walk and the smell of a blood-soaked mattress
The kitchen was turned upside down and the older man’s walker was strewn over the floors in the Kibbutz Be’eri massacre. In one house the smell of a blood-soaked mattress lingers.
Israel’s army says it collected terabytes of footage of the attacks from GoPro cameras retrieved from Gaza militants, as well as victims’ cellphones and neighborhood security cameras.
Since the current war began, Gaza health officials have said that more than 7,000 Palestinians have been killed, and new details are emerging about those who carried out the violence.
A member of Hamas’ political bureau said “we want to get the attention of the world.” “Please, look at the Palestinians. We are under oppression and torture and collective punishment all the time. This is our message to the world.”
In the videos, the men claim their orders were to kill, and to take many hostages back to Gaza. One claimed those who took hostages were promised $10,000 and an apartment.
Both his neighbor and his father spoke on condition of anonymity, and referred to Mohammed only by his first name, out of concern Israel could target them.
Source: New details emerge about Hamas-led fighters who sparked a new war with Israel
A Palestinian Mock Theoretical Soldier: Mohammed, a Militant in a New War with Israel, and the Hamas-Led Movement
“May God be merciful with him,” his father told NPR. “To be a martyr is a huge thing and this is what he pursued.” I hope God accepts him as a martyr.”
He said Mohammed had made it a mile or two inside Israel when an Israeli aircraft shot him — five bullets to the chest, one near the neck — and recited the shahada, Islam’s affirmation of faith, before he died from his wounds.
Mohammed disappeared on the day of the attacks, his neighbor said. His family only discovered what happened the next day, when a fellow militant returned from Israel back to Gaza with Mohammed’s cellphone and personal effects, and told Mohammed’s family what had happened.
Everyone in the family and neighborhood knew he belonged to the militant wing of Islamic Jihad, a smaller Palestinian militia in Gaza that is closely aligned with Iran.
In an interview with NPR, his neighbor in Gaza said Mohammed had led an ordinary life. He failed his high school exam. He worked as a taxi driver, had a big wedding party with family and friends, and started a business selling food products.
They were young. They were well-trained. They had specific orders that they were given. They had a mix of motivations, tied to the unique conditions and ideologies that permeate life in Gaza.
Source: New details emerge about Hamas-led fighters who sparked a new war with Israel
The Israeli War against Hamas: Israel’s Cold War in Gaza Needs to Be Learned, Not Nurtured by a Black Hole
The men were filmed with their heavy breathing, nervous pacing and shouted instructions. In one of the most gruesome scenes screened to foreign media, a man calls out for a knife and calls to cut off a wounded man’s head, before attempting to behead him with a garden hoe.
According to the Gaza expert in Cairo, elite fighters traveled to countries like Lebanon or Iran to learn the combat skills of Hezbollah. He believes they returned to Gaza to train the squads who carried out the attacks.
The Israeli army wouldn’t elaborate on the question of foreign training, but asserts there was Iranian involvement. Iran denies there was prior coordination.
The military of Israel has released images of pamphlets it said were found with Hamas and has also released interrogation videos of some of the attackers it has captured.
Israel’s political leaders need to clearly and publicly emphasize they will leave Gaza and lift the siege after Hamas has been militarily defeated and largely disarmed. They need to tell people they understand a political resolution is needed with the Palestinians. That is not a message Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is now conveying, given the shock in Israel and the makeup of his government. But it is one Israel’s partners in the region need to hear — and soon.
An Israeli ground campaign would cost a lot. If it proceeds, invading Israeli soldiers will lose their lives and there will be even more Palestinian casualties because Hamas has ensured by using hospitals, mosques and schools to store its weapons. But defeating Hamas cannot be done only with strategic strikes from the air, any more than we were able to root out ISIS in Mosul, Iraq, or Raqqa, Syria, from the air. In that fight, the United States had local partners who did the terrible and costly ground fighting in cities while our forces largely devastated them from above.
In order to ensure the safety of the new civil administration and those responsible for reconstruction, police could be provided by many countries. Funding for reconstruction could come from Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E and Qataris who said they wanted to relieve the suffering of the Palestinians in Gaza and help them recover. Canada and others could provide monitoring mechanisms to ensure that assistance would go to its intended purposes.
That formula must guide the day-after reality in Gaza. Israel would have to stay in Gaza until a new administration could be created to make up for the loss of the current one. The administration should be run by Palestinian technocrats from Gaza, the West Bank and the diaspora, and should be covered by an international umbrella. The United States would need to mobilize and organize the effort, possibly using an umbrella like the United Nations or the Ad Hoc Liaison Committee donor group to the Palestinians or even acting on the proposal by President Emmanuel Macron of France to use the international anti-ISIS coalition to counter Hamas. A coalition like this one could help create the division of labor.
What would a defeat of Hamas mean? It would mean its military infrastructure was mostly destroyed and its leadership was largely gone, leaving it powerless to block a reconstruction for Gaza as it did in the past. In essence, this would mean there would be no war-making capacity in Gaza and that capacity could not be rebuilt.
Nowhere was the instinct to cater to the mood of the street more vividly revealed than in the quick denunciations of Israel after Hamas claimed that Israel bombed Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza. Israel has denied hitting the hospital but in several Arab countries, Hamas’s claims were accepted. At this point, multiple national intelligence agencies have said it was most likely a Palestinian rocket that hit the hospital.
But they said this in private. Their public postures have been quite different. The Hamas massacre of more than 1,400 people in Israel was condemned by only a few Arab states. Why? Because Arab leaders understood that as Israel retaliated and Palestinian casualties and suffering grew, their own citizens would be outraged and they needed to be seen as standing up for the Palestinians, at least rhetorically.
Iran has supported Hamas for many years, according to the U.S. State Department. Ali Barakeh, a senior Hamas official based in Beirut has said that Iran provided “help and support” for its Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel where Israeli authorities say the group killed more than 1,400 people and took some 220 hostages.
I have worked for 35 years for peacemaking policy and conflict resolution in the U.S., including during the wars in Germany and Iraq. Finding a peaceful solution between Israel and the Palestinians is something that has kept me busy.
The list of names and corresponding identification numbers from Gaza’s Ministry of Health came late Thursday in response to comments from President Biden casting doubt on the Palestinian death toll. Over seven thousand have been killed in Gaza so far, but hundreds have not yet been identified.
Israel has pummeled Gaza ever since Hamas, the militant group that governs the territory, unleashed a day of violence on Israeli communities near its border on Oct. 7, attacking soldiers and civilians in a rampage that Israel says left 1,400 people dead. Nearly 230 hostages continue to be held by Hamas.
“We absolutely know that the death toll continues to rise in Gaza,” Kirby said in a briefing. “But what we’re saying is, you shouldn’t rely on numbers put forth by Hamas.”
The list of dead could not be independently verified. With Gaza’s borders closed, it is impossible for foreign journalists to verify information. The health ministry is run in coordination with the internationally-backed Palestinian Authority, and its numbers are produced in connection with hospitals in Gaza. Humanitarian organizations see the ministry’s numbers as credible and cited them frequently by the U.S. State Department.
On Thursday, Israel announced it had killed Shadi Barud, a top Hamas intelligence official who Israel described as one of the two architects behind the Oct. 7 assault, alongside Yahya Sinwar, the Palestinian leader of Hamas in Gaza.
“Last night was just horrible. Every second and every minute there was continuous bombing,” said Shaimaa Ahed on Thursday. The 20-year-old engineering student has been documenting her experience during the conflict for the Institute for Middle East Understanding, a U.S.-based non-profit that seeks to give voice to Palestinians.
Everyone in the home where Ahed is staying takes turns wearing a mask to avoid breathing in polluted air as she said, that the home was full of dirt and gunpowder.
“I know what they are telling us about Gaza,” Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and “The Gaza Envelope'” Palestinian commander Amir-Abdollahian told NPR
I’m not okay, to be honest. She said that she was physically and mentally exhausted, and the people of the Gaza strip were the same. “If it wasn’t for our faith and religion, we would have completely broken down.”
This is a long way to go. This is not just a round with Gaza. “This is something larger than that,” Richard Hecht told NPR Thursday.
Almost a quarter million Israelis have been forced to leave their homes in Israel’s north and south according to officials.
The Gaza Envelope is an area near the border of the Gaza Strip, where the violence between Hezbollah and Israel has increased over the last few weeks.
In an interview with Morning Edition’s Steve Inskeep that took place in New York City, Amir-Abdollahian said he had met with “leaders of the resistance in Lebanon and also Palestinian groups” in recent weeks and heard of plans that are “more powerful and deeper than what you’ve witnessed.”
Anything will be possible if women and children and civilians continue to be killed in the West Bank and Gaza.
Iran sponsors numerous militant groups in the region. Over the years it has trained and armed proxy militia groups in Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, Iraq and Gaza, where Hamas has ruled since 2007.
They have missiles, rockets, and drones and can easily be obtained from anywhere. “They have whatever it takes to produce their own weapons and they have their own training and that is why they decided themselves to go ahead with this operation.”
The Foreign Minister’s Discussion on the Israeli War, Security and Security. I. The NPR Interview with Mr. Ismail Haniyeh
There are some other highlights from the NPR interview with Iran’s Minister of Foreign Affairs. The interview was conducted through an interpreter.
We don’t want this conflict to get out of hand. Actually, we’re advising everybody and encouraging them to move toward the stopping of war crimes as soon as possible. The situation is still complicated. It’s difficult for our region to tolerate the fact that 7,000 civilians have been killed as the result of the bombardments of the Israeli regime. This is the image that we’re now seeing in the region and because of the continuation of crimes of the Israeli regime, the whole region has been turned into a powder keg.
They decide on their own. Anything can happen at any time. But we do encourage the U.S. to abandon its absolute total support of the Israeli regime. The security and political systems of Israel have totally collapsed according to information inside the region. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and his security and political system has no trust in the citizens. Right now, the only thing functional in Israel is their war machine that is also being run and controlled and managed by the U.S. Of course, if I were to be fair, I’d say Netanyahu also has his own role to play. Because if the attacks and the war stop, then he will fall in less than two days.
The foreign minister made comments about launching “pre-emptive action” via members of the “resistance front” in the past, in addition to the rocket fire from Lebanon.
I met with the head of the political wing of Hamas some days ago. He said that they stand ready to combat the army of Israel for a long period of time, militarily. He said that they can come to an accord with Israel to keep people away from conflict. It will be like this: We hit their military, they hit our military. It will be just between the military people, leave the civilians out of it We were ready to do it for a long time. We held talks with the officials of the State ofQatar about how we can help release the non-military or civilian prisoners. I raised the issue with Mr. Ismail Haniyeh. He said there wasn’t a reason to keep the non-military prisoners. As soon as there’s a truce, we’re going to identify them so we can separate the military from the non-military.
