Tag: war

US Casualties in Middle East

It appears US special forces are already actively engaged in the Middle East and possibly even in Gaza.

Five American service members were killed in a crash late Friday after their helicopter had a “mishap” during a training exercise and went into the eastern Mediterranean Sea, the military said Sunday. Two officials confirmed that the five were Army special operations soldiers, as first reported by The New York Times and Washington Post. Search and rescue efforts went into Saturday before being called off, according to the officials.

“Training Exercise,” in the military context, is always a pseudonym. The US special forces don’t “train” overseas, unless they are training foreign militaries. The “mishap” was most likely the fact that the helicopter was shot down, although the list of possible culprits is far too long to even hazard a guess.

Meanwhile, Gazans are reporting encounters with English-speaking troops with US flags on their uniforms. Given the number of dual citizens in the IDF, this doesn’t necessarily mean US special forces are already on the ground in Gaza, but it would be very foolish to assume they are not already engaged there.

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Ukraine Endgame

As US supports pivots to the Middle Eastern front, Russian strategists are already contemplating what comes after the surrender of Ukraine, the fall of the Kiev regime, and the end of the Special Military Operation in Novorossiya.

Immediately after the end of the Special Military Operation, the West will not be able to fight with us. It does not have a trained army, it will not accumulate the required amount of resources, it has no plans for war with Russia. It only has scraps of speculation and guesswork. These three factors make war with NATO unlikely. It is clear that the United States can push the Europeans to take crazy steps. But on the economic and diplomatic front we have specialists who will try to keep them from doing this. And the NWO will lead to processes that will lead to a split in the European Union and NATO. If we break through a land corridor to Hungary, then Serbia will be magnetized to this axis. And it can be followed by Slovakia and Romania, where very interesting processes are taking place. Eastern Europe will begin to break away from old Europe, which will be severely depressed due to the economic situation. After all, Europe is  defeated not only on the eastern front, but also in the global south. 

Consider this: Romania, Hungary, Slovakia and Serbia have a combined population of roughly 42 million. This is substantial, it is also a promising market–make your own conclusion. As I already stated many times, Russia doesn’t need love or obedience, Russia is interested in trade with people who still recognize that there are only two genders. Simple as that. Once the land bridge is built, European structure changes dramatically.

It’s unlikely that either Zelensky or the Kiev regime will long survive the fall of Avdeevka, whether it is followed by a Russian winter offensive or not. Post-Zelensky succession struggles have already begun, and as the assassination of the top personal aide to the Ukrainian Armed Forces shows, they are likely going to be very violent and nasty. And the first priority of whoever wins will be to surrender to Russia on the most favorable terms possible.

My assumption is that Russia will not accept any settlement that does not include the transfer of Odessa. And while it is clear that Ukraine does not have the ability to prevent Russian forces from taking it, there is no reason for Putin to spend the Russian blood required to do so when a little patience and a new regime will likely allow him to accomplish his goals without it. This patient approach might, in fact, be a micro-analogy for the way Xi is approaching China’s desired reunification with its wayward island.

The longer Israel is enmeshed in Gaza, and the more US resources that pour into the region, the more it looks to me as if the October 7 attacks were intended to draw the US deep enough into the conflict to prevent its full engagement on any other front. While both the Netanyahu government and the anti-China faction of the neocons welcomed the redirection of the US military focus from Ukraine to Israel, it chiefly appears to serve the strategic interests of the Russians, which might explain why the Russians have been surprisingly inactive in Syria while Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran have all been unexpectedly passive in response to the slow-paced Israeli invasion.

The scale of the global violence may be limited and regional to date, but the strategic scope is observably worldwide. It appears the complexities of WWIII will pose an even greater challenge to historians than its predecessor. But now that the second front appears to have been opened, it can only be a matter of time before the third one – presumably Taiwan, though possibly the Philippines – follows suit.

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Do They Want Right-Wing Death Squads?

Because left-wing murders are, historically, how a society gets right-wing death squads:

The former head of Spain’s People’s Party in the Catalonia region was shot in the face in Madrid on Thursday, police said. Alejo Vidal-Quadras, 78, was shot on Núñez de Balboa street in the wealthy Salamanca area of central Madrid at about 1.30pm, as he was returning home from a church service, according to witnesses.

A Civil Protection spokesperson said Vidal-Quadras retained consciousness and was rushed to the nearby Gregorio Marañón hospital, while police are now hunting for two people who fled the scene on a motorbike, with the shooter wearing a black helmet. Witnesses described the attacker as a ‘young, small man’ who was wearing jeans and a dark coat and was seemingly waiting for the politician to pass by.

The pair exchanged no words, with the shooter reportedly stepping up and blasting Vidal-Quadras from near point blank range before hopping onto the motorcycle piloted by an accomplice.

Vidal-Quadras was the head of the centre-right PP in Catalonia and was also the Vice-President of the European Parliament from 2009-2014, when he left the group to join newly created party Vox.

People have mostly forgotten that the original Brownshirts were formed in Germany from groups of WWI veterans in response to murderous rampages by Communist militants. For all that it is feared by the Left and Center alike, the violence of the Right has historically been predominantly defensive and reactive.

Even Franco’s Nationalist government only came to power in Spain in response to eight years of murderous Leftist violence, particularly the Red Terror of 1936-1939 that left over 50,000 Spaniards dead, including 6,832 members of the clergy.

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Ben Shapiro and the Inevitability of Defeat

If you want to know why I expect that Israel will lose its war with Hamas and the Arab nations, and why the USA will lose WWIII, just read this transcript of a strategic analysis of Russian military doctrine by Ben Shapiro, and then recognize that he is a public microphone who simply repeats what the neocons who are running both the micro and macro war efforts genuinely believe:

Russia is not a first-world power. Russia is a second-world power. As they suggested, it’s a gas station with a nuclear arsenal. That doesn’t mean it’s not geostrategically important. It doesn’t mean it can’t cause all sorts of headaches and problems for the West. It doesn’t mean that it can’t turn off the gas that they get and cause serious problems for Western and Eastern Europe.

What it does mean is that when Russia goes to war, Russia does not go to war the same way the United States does. It does not go to war the same way Israel, or the UK, or NATO does. When Russia goes to war, it basically just uses overwhelming force and kills enormous numbers of civilians.

And what we’re seeing is that the Russians don’t even have the number of supplies that they need to fight this battle. What that means is that the war gets ugly, it gets ground down, and very vicious, street fighting, lots of civilian deaths, and this has been part of Russia’s playbook for quite a while. They’ve been using this since Chechnya in the late 1990s. If you cannot pacify a region, you just start killing as many civilians as you can.

At the very least, you try to shock and awe people into surrendering, by killing civilians and demonstrating that you are harder than they are, that you do not care how many civilians you have to kill.

Ben Shapiro, 3 November 2023

Now, read it again, this time keeping in mind the famous aphorism of Sun Tzu regarding knowledge and the likelihood of either victory or defeat.

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

The neocons neither know the enemy nor do they know themselves. That is why, now that the conflicts have transformed from one of influence and subversion to one of power and war, they are destined to lose.

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Hultgreen-Curie, Naval Edition

Joe Biden proposed, and the US Senate confirmed, the first woman to lead the US Navy.

The US Senate has confirmed three high-ranking military nominations, including Admiral Lisa Franchetti, who becomes the first woman to lead the Navy. Senator Tommy Tuberville allowed the votes to go through after months of blocking all confirmations in an anti-abortion protest.

Franchetti, 59, was sworn in as the 33rd Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) on Thursday, following a 95-1 vote on Capitol Hill. The four-star admiral also became the first woman granted a seat at the Joint Chiefs-of-Staff. President Joe Biden nominated her in July – reportedly against the advice of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. Since her nomination she has been serving as acting CNO, due to Tuberville’s obstruction.

First woman approved to lead US Navy, 3 November 2023

To say this bodes ill, particularly in the current circumstances, is probably the understatement of the year. But if the limits of imperial overstretch have indeed been reached, it would be absolutely appropriate to have that critical historical moment overseen by the first female Joint Chief of the Navy.

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Mailvox: Why International Opinion Matters

An SGer asks a reasonable question:

Why does Israel care what the international community thinks?

Because the nation is too small and too weak to survive without being provided resources and protection by other nations. Only large nations with abundant natural resources such as China, the USA, and Russia can afford to ignore international opinion without rapidly regressing into a pre-industrial state of starvation. Unfortunately, the current Israeli elite has transformed what was once excellent diplomacy into an abusive parasitism over time, which is short-term advantageous but long-term self-destructive.

The current crisis is almost certainly related to the fact that Benjamin Netanyahu is the Prime Minister of Israel. In the eyes of the world, Israel had a just cause to use force to take its hostages back. But it does not see Israel having just cause to ethnically cleanse Gaza or bomb the civilian population there. Hence the rapid loss of global sympathy, and the concomitant increase of global antipathy.

Here’s a hint: if you’re appealing to the historical examples of Dresden and Nagasaki, you are absolutely going to lose the rhetorical war every single time. Even many Americans regard those wartime acts as inexcusable war crimes, as does most of the planet.

Scott Ritter’s article on his complicated personal history with Israel is, as is often the case with Ritter, somewhat hit or miss – at this point, the current state of South Africa is better seen as an ex post facto justification of apartheid than as a positive example for Israel or anyone else – but he does manage to demonstrate why no world leaders, and even many Israelis, have absolutely no trust in Netanyahu or his leadership in this war.

I didn’t blame Israel as a whole, but rather the individual Israelis involved, first and foremost the man who had taken over from Yitzhak Rabin as the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu.

Netanyahu’s incompetence as a political leader had resulted in him being voted out of office in 1999, replaced by Ehud Barack (who had apparently learned to lie to a degree sufficient to the task of being an Israeli politician). In September 2002, Netanyahu testified before the US Congress about Iraq’s nuclear weapons program. Even though he did so as a private citizen, his status as a former Prime Minister gave his words credibility they did not deserve.

“There is no question whatsoever that Saddam is seeking, is working, is advancing towards the development of nuclear weapons,” Netanyahu said. “Once Saddam has nuclear weapons, the terror network will have nuclear weapons.”

Netanyahu’s statements directly contradicted the findings that my Israeli colleagues and I had reached—findings that were shared by the International Atomic Energy Agency, responsible for overseeing the dismantling of Iraq’s nuclear program—that the Iraqi nuclear program had been eliminated, and that there was no evidence of its reconstitution.

But Netanyahu’s job wasn’t to tell the truth about Iraq’s nuclear program, but rather use the fear generated by the specter of an Iraqi nuclear weapon to justify a war with Iraq that would remove Saddam Husein from power. “If you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region,” Netanyahu told his receptive congressional audience. “And I think that people sitting right next door in Iran, young people, and many others, will say the time of such regimes, of such despots is gone.”

Looking back today, at the horrific consequences of America’s illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, at an Iranian regime firmly entrenched behind a nuclear program that is not going away, one can clearly see that Benjamin Netanyahu was wrong about everything. But that has been his modus operendi from the start—to exaggerate and lie about threats faced by Israel to justify military action which invariably resulted in disaster.

Now, regardless of what one thinks of Ritter, the fact that Netanhayu’s known modus operandi for more than two decades has been “to exaggerate and lie about threats faced by Israel to justify military action which invariably resulted in disaster” does not leave one with a great deal of confidence in a positive outcome of this recent war between Israel and the organization it helped create, Hamas.

This is Netanyahu’s war, one that he has long sought, and quite possibly one of which it will eventually be learned that he arranged and staged. We may even need to coin a new term for this sort of war, because if it is true that Netanyahu not only permitted, but was involved in encouraging the attacks, “green flag” wouldn’t suffice to describe it. “Puppet flag” would be more accurate.

And as for any objections that it would require a sociopath to contemplate and actually do such a contemptible thing, well, there appears to be considerable evidence that Netanyahu is not only a sociopath, but one whose psyche was deeply affected by the death of his heroic older brother at Entebbe. As the Germans learned to their great detriment, as the Ukrainians are presently learning to theirs, it is very costly to a nation to permit a psychologically-damaged individual to hold the reins of government.

UPDATE: Oh, Sweet Moses. Israeli PR doubles down on the rhetorical retardery.

Nations that have failed to support Israel’s response to the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7 are on the side of the militant group in the conflict, the Israeli Foreign Ministry has declared. There can be no neutrality regarding the conflict, a ministry spokesman has insisted.

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Green Flag Confirmed

Jonathan Pollard, the US traitor and spy whose loyalty to Israel cannot possibly be questioned, has testified that IDF helicopter pilots received a stand-down order on October 7th that prevented them from responding to the Hamas attacks for six hours that day:

In a recent interview, Jonathan Pollard explicitly confirmed the only plausible explanation for what happened on Simchas Torah: there was a stand down order while thousands of Jews in dozens of communities were brutally murdered, tortured, raped, mutilated, and dragged off to Gaza.

The vital clip is available here, and a link to the complete interview with Kofy Time TV is in the description.

As copious video evidence has shown, the savages conducted their rampage methodically and at great leisure, without concern that an overwhelming military response was likely to arrive any moment. They somehow knew they had time to sit down and eat, take smoking breaks, pose for videos, loot the dead, and torture many of their victims.

If you managed, in spite of all odds, to break into Fort Knox, you wouldn’t take your sweet time.

Unless, of course, you knew with absolute certainty that the cavalry wouldn’t be coming for a while, because certain people in the highest positions of power made sure of it. As Pollard states:

“…It took six hours for any reaction to occur, when the army and air force bases were within earshot of what was going on. I have friends who were helicopter pilots, attack pilots, who were sitting in their cockpits ready to take off, fully loaded, ready to stop them at the fence. They didn’t get their orders for six hours. They could hear it. They could hear the fighting! They were called by friends in the border kibbutzim and moshavim that were being overrun and slaughtered, saying ‘Help us! Please! They’re killing our children!’ They weren’t given permission to take off. That will haunt my friend for the rest of his life. He feels personally responsible for many deaths because of that – wrongly.”

I respectfully disagree with Mr. Pollard. The helicopter pilots and others who obeyed orders to stand down while their friends and neighbors were crying out for help are personally responsible. The people who gave them this order, and all those who relayed it down the chain of command, are most responsible, of course, and these people must be identified, apprehended, interrogated, and brought to justice immediately, BEFORE we deal with our enemies in Gaza and elsewhere. We cannot continue to have these people in positions of power, giving orders to our family and friends in the army and playing with the lives of our people.

The history of US wars, from the Spanish-American War to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, are riddled with false flags and green flags. Nor did the USA invent the concept; the Romans were notorious for producing one excuse or another to justify their legions marching on various kingdoms and empires. The Nazis famously used a false flag to justify their invasion of Poland in 1939.

On August 31, 1939, German troops dressed in Polish uniforms pretended to attack a German radio station near the German-Polish border at Gleiwitz.. Concentration camp inmates had been previously shot and dressed in German uniforms and left at the radio station to make it seem the Poles had attacked Germany, giving Germany the excuse for starting World War II in Europe.

But as bad as false flags are, it is arguably even more noxious for a government to abdicate its primary responsibility of protecting its own citizens and knowingly permit foreign hostiles to kill, capture, and otherwise abuse them. And therefore it strikes me as highly unlikely that Israel is going to be any more successful in its war against Hamas if it is being led by a Netanhayu government than the USA was in its failed wars against Afghanistan and Iraq under the leadership of the Younger Bush.

It’s not possible to dismiss Mr. Pollard’s accusations as antisemitism, anti-Zionism, or secret sympathies for Hamas. This six-hour stand-down order proves that a) the Hamas attacks were, as we suspected, a green flag, and b) that Netanyahu and at least some IDF generals knew about the attacks before they took place. This also suggests, given the speed and scope of the subsequent US military response, there were also US parties aware of the planned attacks. The global opposition to the Netanyahu government’s actions may actually be the lesser of the two serious problems presently faced by Israelis, given that they are presently being governed by a leadership that appears to be almost as willing to kill them as its enemies are.

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The Rage is Boundless

I don’t mean to elevate the blood pressure of anyone who is reading alternative media, but I fear it has been reliably reported on social media that new Hamas outrages have been discovered.

  • Hamas hands Israeli babies bottles but they are actually dynamite sticks painted to look like bottles, and they explode after the babies realize the fuse is lit.
  • Hamas paints walls to look like tunnels and then makes Israeli babies drive into the walls thinking it was a road the whole time.
  • Hamas puts Israeli babies on see-saws and then drops anvils on the opposite side, launching the Israeli babies into the stratosphere.

There is only one solution to these unconceivable horrors committed by subhuman animals, and that is to send in every single soldier in the US Army and the US Marine Corps to genocide the entire Gaza Strip, West Bank, and the East Bank. Also, Syria, Iran, and southern… what the hell, all of Lebanon too. After which, gold-plated condominiums will be constructed, at US expense, to console the shattered survivors of these unprecedented outrages.

Anything less would be an anti-semitic hate crime. Write your congressman!

UPDATE: The media elites really don’t get it. The lack of self-awareness is astonishing.

Israel has made two major mistakes.

  • First, the goals of the war have been poorly articulated.
  • It has failed sufficiently to emphasize that an entire army of accomplices stands behind Hamas.
Why Israel is fast losing the public relations war, THE TIMES OF ISRAEL, 1 November 2023

The first point is relevant, the second one is not, but neither explain the global loss of sympathy for the Israelis in the aftermath of the October 7th attacks. The reason Israel is now losing the public relations war is because a) the response is observably and statistically disproportionate, b) the misguided attempt to capitalize on the initial world reaction through argumentum iniuriae has failed due to both a lack of credibility and a complete failure to read the crowd, c) the media narrative contradicts the Ukraine media narrative of the last 20 months, and d) neocon + ADL overreach.

UPDATE: It appears the Israeli propagandists failed to learn the lesson of Sandy Hook, which is this: Americans don’t give a fuck anymore. GenX and the younger generations are not gullible Silents and Boomers. We all know that governments have historically done terrible things in order to get the people to buy into whatever their cause du jour is. So, the elites can fly false flags and slaughter every kindergartener in New Jersey, they can rape every puppy and kitten in Tel Aviv, and it still won’t move us to support them one little bit.

Also, you might not want to run with “dead babies” when you support abortion. Your rhetoric is DOA. I mean, what’s the real problem there, the lack of maternal consent to the murder?

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Absolutely Certainly Again

The founding editor of The Times of Israel cries out in shock while his people besiege and bomb a city without air defenses:

More than three weeks after that blackest Shabbat in our Israeli history, we remain, unsurprisingly, a nation deep in shock.

Shocked at the unrestrained murderous savagery that thousands of our neighbors unleashed upon us — the hysterical exultation with which they ripped away 1,400 lives in ways many of us still will not bring ourselves to watch….

But the shock is also expanding, now, to horror, disappointment and fury at the shift outside Israel — from brief, initial empathy for all those whose lives were shot and burned and butchered away, for their bereft and broken families and for the innocent snatched away into Hamas’s underground hellholes, to a rising global effort to deprive us of the right to ensure it will not happen again. A rising global effort propelled by Israel-haters and antisemites, assisted by falsehoods and misrepresentations everywhere from TikTok to supposedly responsible media, and inflated by fools, to try to halt our military response, or limit and undermine it. Basically, to tell us that what happened on October 7, if it happened, was terrible, but we need to get over it. Subverting “Never Again,” and telling us instead, well, yes, Almost Certainly Again.

But David Horovitz shouldn’t be shocked. He shouldn’t even be surprised. His people don’t need to “get over it,” they need to learn that their actions speak much louder in the ears of the world than their endless flow of words.

Let’s get this straight. Jews have been invading the British Mandate of Palestine since the end of the 19th century, just as they’ve been invading various countries for centuries, often illegally. After decades of anti-British terrorism led to the British withdrawal, the Jewish military forces won the wars of 1948 and 1967 fair and square, and they now hold the land currently controlled by the State of Israel and recognized by the international community by the same right of conquest that most modern states hold their land.

They hold no historical claim to the land prior to that 20th century claim, because their initial claim to the land of Canaan is also one of conquest, conquest that was repeatedly superseded by various other conquests by a number of other parties. Remember, the Jews didn’t even found the city of Jerusalem. Furthermore, the greater part of the land of Israel never belonged to either the tribe or the kingdom of Judah, so the Biblical claim to which the Christian Zionists hold so fervently doesn’t even apply to any of the Canaanite lands north of Jericho or east of the Jordan River.

The allotment for the tribe of Judah, according to its clans, extended down to the territory of Edom, to the Desert of Zin in the extreme south. Their southern boundary started from the bay at the southern end of the Dead Sea, crossed south of Scorpion Pass, continued on to Zin and went over to the south of Kadesh Barnea. Then it ran past Hezron up to Addar and curved around to Karka. It then passed along to Azmon and joined the Wadi of Egypt, ending at the Mediterranean Sea. This is their southern boundary.

The eastern boundary is the Dead Sea as far as the mouth of the Jordan.

The northern boundary started from the bay of the sea at the mouth of the Jordan, went up to Beth Hoglah and continued north of Beth Arabah to the Stone of Bohan son of Reuben. The boundary then went up to Debir from the Valley of Achor and turned north to Gilgal, which faces the Pass of Adummim south of the gorge. It continued along to the waters of En Shemesh and came out at En Rogel. Then it ran up the Valley of Ben Hinnom along the southern slope of the Jebusite city (that is, Jerusalem). From there it climbed to the top of the hill west of the Hinnom Valley at the northern end of the Valley of Rephaim. From the hilltop the boundary headed toward the spring of the waters of Nephtoah, came out at the towns of Mount Ephron and went down toward Baalah (that is, Kiriath Jearim). Then it curved westward from Baalah to Mount Seir, ran along the northern slope of Mount Jearim (that is, Kesalon), continued down to Beth Shemesh and crossed to Timnah. It went to the northern slope of Ekron, turned toward Shikkeron, passed along to Mount Baalah and reached Jabneel. The boundary ended at the sea.

The western boundary is the coastline of the Mediterranean Sea.

Joshua 15: 1-12

Now, Israel’s right to exist is no more questionable than the USA’s right to exist. No reasonable, historically-literate individual can deny it. Everyone has to live somewhere. Every nation has the right to live somewhere.

And Israel has the right to defend itself. No question. But therein lies the problem. Israel has more than 11 percent of its Jewish population living on what are not recognized as Israel’s lands, and the Jewish nation has more than 50 percent of its people living in a diaspora scattered throughout lands that belong to other nations.

And all of those nations have the right to defend their lands too. Including the Palestinians. So, it’s always important to look very carefully at the question: who is defending what?

Very few outside the Muslim world supported the October 7 attacks by Hamas. Most of the world was rightly horrified by them. But everyone also understands that they didn’t happen in a vacuum or for no reason. Similarly, everyone understands that Israel has the right and the responsibility to respond to those attacks with military action against Hamas, as well as to utilize its military forces to rescue the hostages that are being held by Hamas.

However, that understanding does not go so far as to provide pre-approval for an unlimited military response. If it is true that the IDF has already killed 6,747 Palestinians in Gaza in reprisal, and for which the Gaza Health Ministry has provided evidence to the U.S. President, then it appears Israel is already approaching the limits of what most fair-minded people around the world are going to accept, especially in light of the frothing-mouthed genocidal rhetoric being thrown about by too many loud-mouthed US supporters of Israel. The correct Israeli response to the massive pro-Gaza support being demonstrated around the world should not be shock, rhetoric, and even more doubling down, but rather, sober contemplation of the likely consequences if what appears to be a path toward opening the second front of World War III is continued.

The reason people are telling writers like David Horovitz “Almost Certainly Again” is because for every violent action or forced compulsion, the potential for an opposite reaction that corresponds to, or exceeds, the magnitude of the original action is created. This is not to justify these hypothetical reactions, merely to explain their inevitability. And as long as there are Jews who refuse to stay in their lanes and live in their own lands, there will be reactions to their various provocations, large and small, no matter how eloquently those provocations are justified or rationalized or legalized or defined away.

Those who advocate genocide should not expect much in the way of sympathy from the rest of humanity when they find themselves under attack by anyone, for any reason. Which is why I’ll go Horovitz’s imagined interlocutors one step better and say: Absolutely Certainly Again. Because the only thing that a nation can reliably control over time is its own collective behavior, and the recent rhetoric of the Israeli government as well as that of the global diaspora tends to indicate that neither has learned the vital lesson of the Third Law of Motion as it applies to violence.

We must pray for more reasonable minds to prevail. But we should not expect them to do so.

UPDATE: This sort of rhetoric from the Defense Minister is why people around the world do not trust Israel’s assertions of self-defense and refuse to support its military actions in Gaza. Because this isn’t some hot-headed relative of a Hamas victim, this is one of the government leaders to whom the IDF generals answer.

Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant underlined his government’s determination to ignore pleas for a ceasefire. He told families of the 239 hostages trapped in Gaza: ‘We are fighting animals, not people.‘

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