The official version of the Hamas attack on Israel is preposterous. According to CNN, Hamas was able to train for a year and a half in six military camps inside the Gaza Strip. Rumors about this preparation had been circulating in Lebanon since May. It gave rise to a deadly battle between Palestinian factions in September in Saida.

On 30 September, Egyptian Intelligence Minister Kamel Abbas personally called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to warn him. An Israeli private security company took over the Shabak in the ensuing days. The Mossad was also tipped off by the CIA on 5 October. It is therefore impossible for Israel to have been surprised. In addition, as Manlio Dinucci points out, routine security procedures were suspended. And it took the army 5 hours to intervene.

So the question is, why did Benjamin Netanyahu allow 1,300 of his fellow citizens to die?

According to the official version, the Hamas attack "caught Israel by surprise". However, a series of inexplicable facts do not make the official version credible.

Last week's multi-site terror attack in southern Israel, and Israel's aerial bombardment of Gaza in response, have divided public opinion like never before. In this NewsReal Joe and Niall again explain why it's extremely unlikely that Israeli security services were caught by surprise, and speculate as to the motives of a 'fifth column' for provoking this almighty maelstrom of hatred and vengeance.

* Starts at 03:12 *


Running Time: 01:31:38

Download: MP3 — 62.9 MB

The annihilating violence of organized state force that is now unfolding in Gaza can never be morally equated with even the most atrocious acts of the colonized, committed in the hope of liberation.

"An act of sheer evil" is how President Biden condemned the recent incursion of Hamas militants into what is now southern Israel, but which the Palestinian refugees incarcerated in Israel's open-air prison, the Gaza Strip, still call home. To be sure, anyone actually committed to peace and to nonviolence, to genuine security and justice, will condemn the killing of noncombatants, no matter who the perpetrator may be. It is hard to do so, however, when such condemnation is hypocritically exploited to sanction a far greater and uglier violence.

"Sheer evil" is an epithet that seems pretty rich when it falls from the lips the former Democratic Senator who never opposed the Clinton administration's vicious sanctions on Iraq that caused the death of half a million Iraqi children and who voted for the endless wars on Afghanistan and Iraq that have left both nations' defenseless noncombatant populations decimated by loss of life and material destruction. It's pretty rich from the former Vice-President who embraced the Obama-era drone program responsible for the deaths of uncounted Afghan civilians, including children and wedding parties; it's nauseating from the President who talked in bland euphemisms about continuing to conduct the so-called war on terror "from over the horizon," that is, by remotely controlled killing machines. It would be no less rich falling from the lips of any U.S. politician who has urged the continuing supply to Israel of the munitions it needs to conduct its ruthless and ongoing campaigns against Gaza and the West Bank — campaigns that long preceded the current relentless and merciless collective punishment of the utterly vulnerable population of Gaza.

The Ukrainian president reportedly told journalists not to mention the issue until the end of the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

President Vladimir Zelensky has allegedly ordered Ukrainian journalists to avoid reporting on corruption, the editor-in-chief of the Zerkalo Nedeli ('Mirror of the Week') news outlet has claimed.

The Ukrainian president told journalists not to mention the issue until the end of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, according to a leading Kievb outlet.

Israel accused Hamas of "actively preventing" civilians from leaving Gaza.

The Israel Defense Forces have denied deliberately killing civilians trying to flee north Gaza in airstrikes, saying any information coming from the Hamas-controlled Palestinian enclave should be treated with "extreme caution and suspicion" as it serves their "propaganda purposes."

While not completely ruling out the possibility of a "freak accident," IDF spokesperson Lt. Colonel Jonathan Conricus insisted on Sunday that "there was no targeting of vehicles, there was no targeting of civilians" referring to Friday's incident, in which dozens of people were killed or injured.

Israel has decided to put off the start of its ground operation against Hamas in Gaza due to adverse weather conditions, the New York Times has claimed. The newspaper is also reporting that the incursion will likely come at quite a price for the Israeli military, given its scope as well as the fortifications built by the militants.

In an article on Saturday the media outlet alleged, citing anonymous Israeli officers, that the "invasion was initially planned for the weekend but was delayed by a few days, at least in part because of weather conditions." These are so far precluding Israeli pilots and drone operators from providing ground forces with air cover, the NYT explained.

It quoted three unnamed Israeli officers as confirming that the imminent operation would involve tens of thousands of service members, including commando units, and tanks supported by warplanes, helicopter gunships, drones and artillery fired from land and sea. The alleged goal is the complete destruction of Hamas' leadership, which has controlled the enclave since 2007.

Benjamin -Bibi- Netanyahu has always been a warmonger. He thinks he, and his people, are superior to the Palestinians, and come to think of it, to Muslims in general. And when he first appeared on the scene some 30 years ago, he might have had a point, at least from a military point of view.

But he does not today, and that is very dangerous for his people. Bibi lives in the past, because he liked that past - he could feel superior. He does not recognize to what extent the world, including his, has changed. But change it did, while he was dreaming of winning warfare.

He is not unique in this. The entire US political system suffers from the same "affliction". There has never been a better reason to introduce term limits in Congress and the Senate. Politicians like Pelosi and Feinstein are just about crying out for help: please get me out of here! Enter Joe Biden stage left. At least Joe has the excuse that he can't find the exit.

Bibi is not 85 or 90 yet. He's "only" 73. But he's been around long enough to get stuck (rusted) in his own preferred ideas and view of the world. Bibi thinks he can do with the Palestinians whatever he sees fit. But, again, the world has changed. And Israel's alleged military superiority has changed with it.

It didn't have to be this way. Bibi is more or less the successor to Yithzak Rabin, who was elected PM in 1992 (he had earlier been PM from 1974-77) , and murdered in 1995. Rabin had entirely different ideas about his country. He rejected the use of force in favor of peace negotiations with the Palestinians (1993 Oslo Accords, 1994 Nobel Peace Prize).

That's why he was murdered. Bibi first became PM in 1996. He had several stints in the job and kept floating to the top. And now Bibi threatens to raze the Gaza strip, and potentially kill 100s of 1000s of civilians. But there is no place in the world for people like him.

On February 12, 2002 at a Pentagon news conference, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was asked by Jim Miklaszewski, the NBC Pentagon correspondent, if he had any evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and was supplying them to terrorists.

Rumsfeld delivered a famous non-answer answer and said:

Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don't know we don't know.

When he was pressed by Jamie McIntyre, CNN's Pentagon correspondent, to answer the question about evidence, he continued to talk gobbledygook, saying, "I could have said that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, or vice versa."

He never said he had evidence, because he didn't.

Rumsfeld, who enjoyed his verbal games, was the quintessential bullshitter and liar for the warfare state. This encounter took place when Rumsfeld and his coconspirators were promoting lie after lie about the attacks of September 11, 2001 and conflating false stories about an alliance between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden in order to build a case to wage another war against Iraq, in order to supplement the one in Afghanistan and the war on "terror" that they launched post September 11 and the subsequently linked anthrax attacks.

A year later on February 5, 2003, US Secretary of State Colin Powell went before the UN Security Council and in a command performance assured the world that the U.S. had solid evidence that Iraq had "weapons of mass destruction," repeating that phrase seventeen times as he held up a stage prop vial of anthrax to make his point.

He said, "My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources — solid sources. These are not assertions. What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."

He was lying, but to this very day his defenders falsely claim he was the victim of an "intelligence failure," a typical deceitful excuse along with "it was a mistake." Of course, Iraq did not have "weapons of mass destruction" and the savage war waged on Iraq was not a mistake.

Scott Ritter, the former Marine U.N. weapons inspector, made it very clear back then that there was no evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, but his expertise was dismissed, just as his current analysis of the war in Ukraine is. See his recent tweet about Senator Diane Feinstein in this regard:

The West is using a tried and tested catchphrase for the Israel-Palestine conflict...

Since Hamas' surprise attack on the Israeli people on Saturday, the world has been painfully divided. While there is no question that terrorism and deaths of innocent civilians are never an acceptable means of attaining political goals, when it comes to the context, there are two wildly divergent takes:

The majority of the Global South (minus India) see that the latest escalation in the Israel-Palestine conflict proliferated over decades. This is reminiscent of a relevant quote by Noam Chomsky in which he noted that it was Israel's policies, beginning in the 1970s, of prioritizing expansion over security that would lead to a degradation of Israeli national security and isolate the country.

On the other hand, every major political figure in the West has joined in a chorus of condemning Hamas terrorists, even going as far as to revive an overused slogan: "unprovoked," as in, the supposedly "unprovoked" attack on Israel. Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky even brought the analogy full circle on Monday when he compared Hamas to Russia during a NATO parliamentary session in Copenhagen.

The Kingdom reportedly put the US-brokered normalization plan on ice over Israel's bombardment of Gaza...

Saudi Arabia has suspended plans to normalize relations with Israel amid the latter's ongoing war with Palestinian Hamas militants, Reuters reported on Friday. Backed by the US, the deal would have been a diplomatic coup for Washington and a strategic blow to Iran.

Prior to Hamas' surprise attack on Israel on Saturday, Saudi Arabia and Israel were drawing close to a deal that would have seen the Sunni kingdom recognize the Jewish state, with Saudi Arabia gaining a defense pact with the US and more advanced American weapons in exchange, although the White House stressed that the precise terms had yet to be worked out.

With Israeli warplanes continually bombing Gaza since Saturday and an invasion of the Palestinian enclave reportedly imminent, Saudi officials paused the deal to avoid setting off a wave of anger across the Muslim world, Reuters reported, citing two sources close to Riyadh.

The sources stressed that the deal is not permanently scrapped, but that Riyadh will likely require any future agreement to include significant concessions to the Palestinians from the Israeli side.