I have to admit, I am pretty surprised by the reactions to the evidence coming out of Al Shifa. The level of gaslighting by the media is absolutely unreal.
The IDF fought Hamas forces at the hospital, and captured a bunch of equipment. But somehow the narrative has become “there was no Hamas there; this is a totally valid amount of RPGs and AKs for a hospital to have. Why do those Israelis murder so many civilians?”.
It’s utterly incomprehensible to me.
I am not aware that any analysis or commentary has claimed that it is normal for there to be any guns or other weapons at a hospital, simply that journalists do not have free access to the hospital, and that any evidence coming from IDF sources is of dubious veracity at best:
At any rate, reliable evidence is corroborated from multiple independent sources.
The video of a walk through which the IDF soldier said was unedited did indeed seem to be a single take. Perhaps a later video included parts of that video I saw and others.
Where are you seeing that? I’ve seen “There’s no evidence that this was a Hamas HQ,” but that’s a far cry from what you’re saying the narrative has become.
Kindly direct us to objective reporting which shows the amount of weapons and infrastructure Israel claimed both before and after.
After hearing Bibi on NPR yesterday, I expected the finds to be considerably more impressive. Instead, my mind immediately went to Bush’s WMD - as others’ apparently did. So if we think Israel’s claims and justification somewhat overblown, well, at least they are not uniquely so. Your country isn’t perfect. I’m not aware of any country that is.
There is a lot of “Found a bag with an AK47 and a grenade, according to the IDF” sort of thing.
Babale, do you have a good source for what they actually found (or at least for what they actually found that was shown to the public)? I’ve read several news sites, but am still rather confused about it.
[url=Benjamin Netanyahu says Israel wants a different future for Gaza : NPR]
NETANYAHU: We found more than [ a major command center]. … But we found there are a lot of weapons, a lot. We found a lot of ammunition. We found bombs. We found on level minus-two, a command and control center of Hamas with military encoded encryption. We found a terror tunnel in the compound. … Believe me. It’s a command center. And it’s not an intensive care unit. I mean, that’s what it is. It’s a military compound. …
INSKEEP: Well, we’ll continue watching for the evidence coming out of that area.
When passionate it is easy to give in to exaggeration, but that choice may not be equally persuasive to everyone.
that Netanyahu piece invokes some DTrump-tweet vibes …
*we found terror tunnels, and weapons - lots of weapons.
Beautiful weapons*
Several news outlets reported over the past couple hours a US-brokered 5-day ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas. A National Security Council spokesperson says there is no deal, but they are trying to work hard to get a deal.
So the question is: if what the White House is saying is true, who leaked news of the deal, and why? Who would want to scupper such talks, assuming that’s the motivation?
It’s hard for me to picture a UN employee leaking news of a coming cease fire but maybe a spouse/partner/lover of an employee. It would be hard for me to get a specific idea but I can imagine in a history bool in the year 2100 they would know who the leaker was.
So I was reading the NBC news article by Julie Tsirkin and Kristen Welker about trying to pass a funding bill to cover military aid to Israel and Ukraine. They said a sticking point is that House Democrats want to get humanitarian assistance for the Gaza/Israel conflict zones. Do you think the House Democrats are trying to get assistance for both sides’ populations?
I’m skeptical Hamas leaders will release the hostages without a big payoff. I doubt that Hamas leaders are getting bombed and shot in Gaza. They aren’t concerned about their underlings that are dying.
Let’s see what develops. I certainly hope no government makes a substantial money transfer into Hamas or Iranian bank accounts.
The best case would be if the boots on the ground commanders have hostages. These terrorists would have motivation to pause or stop the Israeli attack.
I was thinking that the IDF should announce that every hamas guy who surrendered with a hostage would be allowed to live, but the martyr thing would probably prevent that.
Here is video from a robot lowered into the tunnel in the hospital grounds.
“Be allowed to live”?? Can’t go around murdering prisoners. In the U.S. military that type of thing could (in principle) get you the death penalty.
I was thinking more in the line or identifying murderers and rapists from the captured video.
Realistically, the Gazans have greater need. Israel is much more capable of providing help to their own than Gaza is, leaving aside that Hamas doesn’t seem to give a flip about their own civilians.
The IDF released footage that they claim shows one of the tubnels under Al Shifa leading to the Hamas HQ they’ve been talking about. For reasons that should be obvious assaulting the tunnels themselves with ground troops is something that will be very dangerous and take a long time, but as those sorts of operations pick up the IDF’s claims of underground Hamas bases will be evaluated based on what ends up turning up.
They also released surveillance footage from the hospital that shows two hostages (both foreign workers) being brought into the hospital by Hamas at the start of all this.
I was going off the videos released by the IDF and the media coverage of those, which at the time is all there was.
No doubt people are going to claim that they were bringing them in for treatment, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Mind you, they had to pass at least 5 other hospitals en-route to Al-Shifa from Israel, if they were that concerned about the health of their hostages. Would make perfect sense though if you were operating out of the hospital.
The CCTV video also shows a hostage being frog-marched through the hospital by armed Hamas militants. The hospital staff must have forgotten about that incident when asked by the media later of they’ve ever seen Hamas operating from the hospital.
None of these guys saw cameras in the hallways.