Tag: Gaza

Hamas used horrific sexual violence, raping and mutilating Israeli women and girls on October 7: NYT

Posted on by Lone Candle

“A harrowing new report by The New York Times detailed horrific accounts of sexual violence carried out by Hamas during its October 7 terrorist attacks on Israel.
Allegations of rape were made almost immediately after the attacks, which Israel said left some 1,200 people dead.

But many of the accounts were not from direct witnesses, sparking debates about whether they could be relied upon.

The Times said it carried out exhaustive work on its investigation, citing more than 150 interviews, video footage, photos, and GPS data.

It concluded that in at least seven locations women and girls appeared to have been the victims of sexual assaults or mutilations.

One witness interviewed by the outlet was Sapir, a 24-year-old accountant who only gave her first name.

She said she saw gunmen rape and kill at least five women while she was hiding near Route 232, around four miles southwest of the Nova music festival, which was targeted by Hamas on October 7.

She told the outlet that she saw “about 100 men” as they dished out weapons and passed wounded women between them.

In a particularly disturbing and graphic account, Sapir said that she saw the attackers cut the breast off of one woman as she was being raped and pass it between them before throwing it on the ground. “They play with it, throw it, and it falls on the road.”

“That day, I became an animal,” Sapir said. “I was emotionally detached, sharp, just the adrenaline of survival. I looked at all this as if I was photographing them with my eyes, not forgetting any detail. I told myself: I should remember everything.”

Another witness, Raz Cohen, said he survived the attacks by hiding in the dried-up bed of a stream along Route 232. He told the Times that he saw five men dragging a young, naked woman across the ground.

“I saw the men standing in a half circle around her. One penetrates her. She screams. I still remember her voice, screams without words,” Cohen said.

“Then one of them raises a knife,” he added, “and they just slaughtered her.””

https://www.yahoo.com/news/hamas-used-horrific-sexual-violence-131412764.html

Israel moves into southern Gaza after a week-long truce — and its goals are murkier than ever

Posted on by Lone Candle

“The continued, widespread bombing of civilian buildings to get at the tunnels underneath, where Hamas protects fighters and its supplies, has already caused thousands of deaths, but Raphael Cohen, director of the strategy and doctrine program with RAND Project AIR FORCE, told Vox there’s no real alternative.
“Israel’s been seized with the tunnel issue since Operation Protective Edge, so at least since 2014, at least the past decade, and has invested a lot of time and energy into … how you detect these things, but hasn’t figured out a foolproof way of finding them, particularly without being there on the ground,” he said. “There’s no silver bullet to detect them, and once you find them, then you have to destroy the tunnel, and there’s no clean way to do it.”

But an investigation by the Israeli outlets +972 and Local Call this week indicates that in northern Gaza, the IDF was far less precise in its operations than necessary to keep from harming civilians — backing up what Israeli officials have already said about their approach being destructive rather than surgical. According to the investigation, based on interviews with current and former Israeli intelligence operatives, the military “has files on the vast majority of potential targets in Gaza — including homes — which stipulate the number of civilians who are likely to be killed in an attack on a particular target.”

Some of those targets, which the military calls “power targets” are “not distinctly military in nature,” according to the investigation, and “include private residences as well as public buildings, infrastructure, and high-rise blocks.” The investigation found that the military has stepped up its attacks on power targets in the latest conflict, dubbed “Operation Swords of Iron.” That, in turn, has exponentially increased the number of civilian casualties, as has the use of artificial intelligence to generate Hamas targets, according to the report.

“When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed — that it was a price worth paying in order to hit [another] target,” one source told the outlet. “We are not Hamas. These are not random rockets. Everything is intentional. We know exactly how much collateral damage there is in every home.”

The IDF has destroyed much of northern Gaza’s infrastructure — around 98,000 buildings have been demolished or damaged in the north, according to a BBC review of satellite imagery. Throughout the region, about 60 percent of the housing stock has been damaged or destroyed, Al Jazeera reported.”

https://www.vox.com/world-politics/2023/12/2/23985622/israel-goals-southern-gaza-truce-hamas

Gazans turn on Hamas as food shortage fuels disorder

Posted on by Lone Candle

“Desperate Palestinians have begun attacking Hamas security forces as tensions grow in Gaza over chronic shortages of food, water and medicine.
In rare acts of defiance, Gazans hurled rocks at Hamas police who tried to jump a queue for water”

https://www.yahoo.com/news/gazans-turn-hamas-food-shortage-120846775.html