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Sweden closing Nordsteam investigation a shocking coverup, investigator tells Grayzone

Watch the Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal interview Swedish engineer Erik Andersson, who led the first independent investigation to the site of the Nordstream pipelines blast sites, on the Swedish government’s sudden closing of the investigation into the terror attack on the eve of joining NATO.

Andersson also addresses US meddling in Swedish politics, and the potential consequences of Stockholm surrendering its traditional neutrality to the anti-Russian alliance.

Full interview here.

The Pulitzer Winner Hersh Unveils Mystery on Death of Navy SEALS in Gulf of Aden | VT Foreign Policy
February 16, 2024
VT Condemns the ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINIANS by USA/Israel

$ 280 BILLION US TAXPAYER DOLLARS INVESTED since 1948 in US/Israeli Ethnic Cleansing and Occupation Operation; $ 150B direct "aid" and $ 130B in "Offense" contracts
Source: Embassy of Israel, Washington, D.C. and US Department of State.

In the cover image the USS Lewis B. Puller departs Naval Station Norfolk in July 2017. / US Navy photo by Bill Mesta.

The Seals and the Dhow

Originally published by Seymour Hersh on his Substack

All links to Gospa News articles (and headlines) have been added aftermath, in relation to the topics highlighted

Subscribe to the Gospa News Newsletter to read the news as soon as it is published

This is a painful story for the families of three Navy SEALs. Two of the SEALs were lost at sea and a third was critically injured on a mission on January 11 in the Gulf of Aden between Yemen and Somalia. It was a mission that never should have been ordered, and when everything went wrong, it was covered up with a series of lies.

Why report a story about two deaths and an injury when there is a president who has put America indirectly into wars in Ukraine, Israel, Yemen, and elsewhere in the Middle East? I have learned in six decades of chasing down hidden stories that it is delving into the little lies that reveals much about the bigger lies. So it has been in the past month with the story of the dead and injured SEALs.

Middle East Dashing to WWIII! Kremlin Condemns Illegal US, UK Strikes on Houthis in Yemen. Germany to Join Mission

Their target was a wooden smuggling vessel, operated by Somalis, that was suspected of delivering modern ballistic missiles or missile parts to America’s new enemy: the Houthis of Yemen. Somalis have been smuggling goods through the Red Sea and Indian Ocean in their wooden sailing vessels, known as dhows, since biblical times. Few have motors or any means of electronic communication, and the larger dhows, like the one targeted by the SEALs, often serve as living quarters for the smugglers’ families. (dhow is a a sailing boat with a long, thin hull – ed).

The SEALs were assigned to a ship named the Lewis B. Puller, after a fabled combat general, the most decorated marine of all time, who fought in World War II against the Japanese, as well as in Haiti, in Central America, and in the Korean War. The ship, modeled on an oil tanker, is what the Navy calls an Expeditionary Mobile Base, which means that it is capable, with its landing decks, of supporting a vast number of air and sea military activities from all the services, including those of the Navy SEALs. The Puller was commissioned in 2017 in a port in Bahrain and was not much in the news until it became known that the failed SEAL mission took place.

IRGC Missiles hit anti-Iran terrorists’ and Mossad Espionage Base (video). Houthis Struck US Ship

On January 13, the New York Times, citing two current and two former Pentagon officials, published the first account of the two deaths, which were said to have taken place while the SEALs were attempting to board a dhow at night.

The Quoting of a Former SEAL Senior Chief

The sea was rough, and one SEAL slipped off the boarding ladder. The initial report claimed that a second SEAL jumped into the water in an effort to save his colleague and both drowned. It was not clear whether he was also on the ladder or jumped from the inflatable speedboat known as a RHIB, for rigid hulled inflatable boat, that the SEALs used to approach the ship. A January 22 Times article about the incident, by Dave Philipps, known for his excellent sources in the special operations community, revealed that a third SEAL attempted to climb the ladder to board the dhow. He fell during the attempted boarding and struck the speedboat. He was rescued and today remains in critical condition.

Philipps quoted a former SEAL senior chief explaining that he and his retired colleagues were convinced the story, as told by administration officials, “doesn’t make sense. Something else must have gone wrong.”

Navy Seal Who Went AWOL Killed While Fighting Russians In Bakhmut

There were questions at the time about President’s Biden decision in early January to expand the American war portfolio. He has taken on the Houthis, who had survived a seven-year war with the Saudi air force, supported by American bombs and targeting intelligence. That war ended with what amounted to a Saudi surrender. The American attacks, still being supported by British air power, are in their second month, and the world’s major shipping companies are still choosing not to chance a ten-day shortcut by sailing from Europe via the Suez Canal into the Red Sea. The Houthi threat is still there, pending an Israeli decision to cease its onslaught in the Gaza Strip. Ironically, or tragically, Biden is now said to be telling the Israelis that a ceasefire is needed. The world is coming to its own judgment about Biden, who is now seeking a second term.

Refer a friend

The Somali dhow offered the White House a chance to justify its new offensive. It had been tracked by American intelligence since leaving Somalia because it was believed to be carrying ballistic missile parts needed by the Houthis in their ongoing campaign against Western shipping; The basis for that intelligence, which proved to be wrong, has not been made known.

Worse than Ukraine! In Yemen “Catastrophic” Hunger due to Saudi War: 400,000 Toddlers at “Risk of Death”

Back to the Lewis B. Puller. The more than a dozen senior officers from all services assigned to the ship’s command center were gung-ho to send the hot-shot SEAL team to intercept the dhow, compel the boat to stand to, and board it to find ballistic missiles or parts of weapons that were coming to the Houthis from Iran, known to American intelligence as a longtime supporter and supplier of weaponry to Yemen. But there was a serious problem. The issue is what is known in the Navy as the Sea State Code, which is based on terminology used in oceanography to describe the general conditions of the ocean’s surface, as determined by three key factors: wind, waves, and swell.

The Serious Problem of Sea State

There are ten categories of sea state, and SEALs can operate with ease and safety up to sea state 3. One experienced retired senior American Navy officer told me that even four- and five-foot waves can sometimes create difficulties for a Navy tanker attempting to refuel an aircraft carrier, but it can be done with skilled maneuvering. No ship loaded with high-octane fighter fuel wants to crash into the side of a carrier.

When the seas get higher, to level 4 or 5, the waves and stronger current make boarding a targeted vessel, even a wooden dhow, an extremely dangerous prospect, in part because of the difficulty in handling steel ladders, known as caving ladders, that are standard SEAL boarding gear. The steps are lightweight aluminum tubes linked by equally lightweight steel cables.

US judge rules in favor of Navy SEALs Refusing Vaccination on Religious Grounds

What is hard to do at sea state 3 is deadly dangerous at sea state 4 or 5, a retired Navy officer, with years of experience in special operations, told me. “The waves are going up and down eight feet and more and you do not board a ship in heavy sea,” he said. He added that Navy captains of combat ships finishing a long deployment understand that crews due for shore leave are not permitted to leave the ship in such churning waters.

The retired officer said that when the officer on the Puller who was in charge of all special operation missions, an Army colonel, told “the SEAL team leader to ‘saddle up,’ the team leader told him to look outside the window.” His message was that “it was dark, and the sea was too rough. And it was beyond the capabilities of his team.” The retired officer added: “It was an argument between the on the scene commander and a guy in charge of the SEALs.”

The SEAL team leader said no. But he was ordered to carry out the mission, despite the obvious weather issues, and he did so.

The Mystery on a Ballistic Missile

The questions that were not asked, the retired officer said, were these: “Do we know if the dhow is carrying a ballistic missile or a box full of missile parts?” No. “Can you get a key to a launch site?” No. “Or a map of all the Houthi launch sites?” No. “Do Somali smugglers know the difference between a case of Johnny Walker Red and one of Johnny Walter Black?” Yes.

CIA-GATE – 1. Bulgarian Network to Weaponize Ukraine Intelligence and Middle-East’s Terrorists

The decision to ignore the concerns of the SEAL commander has been seen by the angered SEAL community in America as “beyond rational planning” and “a disaster waiting to happen.” I learned that one high-ranking member of the community, now retired, wrote a private letter to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, asking that the officer who overruled the SEAL commander be court-martialed for dereliction of duty as the buck-stops-here boss of the operation. “It will never happen,” the former officer told me. “Dead SEALs will go down in Navy annals as heroes, not victims.” His point was that the Navy would never acknowledge that the SEAL team had no business being sent on a search-and-destroy mission in such weather.

US launches ‘Retaliatory AirStrikes’ in the Middle East. Targeted 85 sites in Iraq and Syria. At least 18 People Died

As many as nine SEALs may have been aboard the SEALs’ inflatable speedboat—there was a second boat with no SEALs aboard as backup—as it dashed to the dhow that, as ordered, came to a stop and acknowledged that it was to be boarded. Three SEALs began the treacherous climb aboard the vessel. It is not known just what happened—did one fall off the special ladder, made up of steel tubes and chain links? Or did the ladder, swaying to and from in the heavy sea with two SEALs making the climb and a third waiting to do so, suddenly get rocked by a huge wave that flung the men against the side of the dhow, leaving both unconscious or worse, with only to drop into the sea? The badly injured third SEAL survived only because he fell into one of the speedboats.

Only Obsolete Rocket Motors and Pieces of Old Missiles on the Dhow

The SEALs who made the climb into the dhow “did find the treasure,” the retired officer sardonically told me. “There were some obsolete rocket motors, all Iran-made, and some pieces of Styx missiles from the 1950s and ’60s, but no significant missile components among the cargo, other than ancient engines and some random tubes that had been used in missile attacks. There was the usual cargo of liquor, cigarettes, random knock-off clothing, porn cassettes.”

The Somali smugglers were taken prisoner and placed on Navy vessels that came to the scene, and the dhow sent to the bottom.

The two deaths were reported, but over the next few days, the retired officer said, all involved “were playing the game,” keeping as many details as possible under wraps. The Lewis B. Puller was locked down in extreme secrecy. The names of the dead were made public, but not that of the survivor, if he does survive. His is a story that no one in the Navy wants told. I learned that the commanding officer of the Lewis B. Puller, who graduated from the Naval Academy in 2000 and spent his career in Navy aviation—not as a pilot but as a backseat radar intercept officer—may be quietly retired, if the system works as it usually does.

Gaza, Donbass, Syria: GENOCIDES of the Zionist, Nazi, Jihadist Regimes is US-NATO’s “New” Geopolitical WEAPON

There is a Navy history for such arrogance and deception that dates to the end of the Second World War. The chief of Naval Operations was crusty Admiral Ernest King, a brilliant officer who played a key role in advising President Franklin Delano Roosevelt on military matters. When asked at one point by an aide what to tell the press about the progress of the war against the Japanese fleet, King famously said: “Don’t tell them anything. When it’s over, tell them who won.”

Originally published by Seymour Hersh on his Substack

All links to Gospa News articles (and headlines) have been added aftermath, in relation to the topics highlighted

Subscribe to the Gospa News Newsletter to read the news as soon as it is published

Seymour Myron “Sy” Hersh (born April 8, 1937) is an American investigative journalist and political writer. He gained recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which he received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. During the 1970s, Hersh covered the Watergate scandalfor The New York Times, also reporting on the secret U.S. bombing of Cambodia and the CIA’s program of domestic spying. In 2004, he detailed the U.S. military’s torture and abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq for The New Yorker. Hersh has won a record five George Polk Awards, and two National Magazine Awards. He is the author of 11 books, including The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House (1983), an account of the career of Henry Kissinger which won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

“Soros” French Judges want to Arrest Assad for Douma Chemical Attack despite it was White Helmets False-Flag

In 2013, Hersh’s reporting alleged that Syrian rebel forces, rather than the government, had attacked civilians with sarin gas at Ghouta during the Syrian Civil War, and in 2015, he presented an alternative account of the U.S. special forces raid in Pakistan which killed Osama bin Laden. In 2023, Hersh highlighted that the U.S. and Norway had sabotaged the Nord Stream pipelines.

Nord Stream Sabotage: UN Security Council Rejected Investigation on Terroristic Act. Russia: “Dangerous Precedent”

GOSPA NEWS – WARZONE

GOSPA NEWS – WEAPONS LOBBY DOSSIER

Thanks to Ukrainian Weapons Hamas resists vs Israel’s Massacre in Gaza which goes on due to US Veto at UN

Western Weapons sent to Kiev found in Possession of Mexican Drug Cartels

Pentagon’s Weaponry Shady Traffic. Missiles for Ukraine Disappeared. New US Supplies to Kosovo Separatists

Fabio G. C. Carisio
Fabio is investigative journalist since 1991. Now geopolitics, intelligence, military, SARS-Cov-2 manmade, NWO expert and Director-founder of Gospa News: a Christian Information Journal.

His articles were published on many international media and website as SouthFront, Reseau International, Sputnik Italia, United Nation Association Westminster, Global Research, Kolozeg and more…

Most popolar investigation on VT is:

Rumsfeld Shady Heritage in Pandemic: GILEAD’s Intrigues with WHO & Wuhan Lab. Bio-Weapons’ Tests with CIA & Pentagon

Fabio Giuseppe Carlo Carisio, born on 24/2/1967 in Borgosesia, started working as a reporter when he was only 19 years old in the alpine area of Valsesia, Piedmont, his birth region in Italy. After studying literature and history at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan, he became director of the local newspaper Notizia Oggi Vercelli and specialized in judicial reporting.

For about 15 years he is a correspondent from Northern Italy for the Italian newspapers Libero and Il Giornale, also writing important revelations on the Ustica massacre, a report on Freemasonry and organized crime.

With independent investigations, he collaborates with Carabinieri and Guardia di Finanza in important investigations that conclude with the arrest of Camorra entrepreneurs or corrupt politicians.

In July 2018 he found the counter-information web media Gospa News focused on geopolitics, terrorism, Middle East, and military intelligence.

In 2020 published the book, in Italian only, WUHAN-GATES – The New World Order Plot on SARS-Cov-2 manmade focused on the cycle of investigations Wuhan-Gates

His investigations was quoted also by The Gateway Pundit, Tasnim and others

He worked for many years for the magazine Art & Wine as an art critic and curator.

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www.gospanews.net/

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https://www.vtforeignpolicy.com/2024/02/the-pulitzer-winner-hersh-unveils-mystery-on-death-of-navy-seals-in-gulf-of-aden/

https://donshafi911.blogspot.com/2024/02/the-pulitzer-winner-hersh-unveils.html

Moderna is Planning Another COVID Campaign Starting April 2025

The COVID-19 vaccine industry is in trouble, with Big Pharma players such as Pfizer and Moderna undergoing significant turbulence. The departure of key sales executives further exacerbates the challenges faced by these companies.

Endpoints News reports: "[Moderna] reaffirmed its focus on driving Covid-19 and soon RSV vaccine sales, though the former’s sales have been challenged by waning demand. Moderna said last month that it expects Covid sales to “hit a low point” in 2024, while Pfizer recently slashed expectations for its Comirnaty shot by $2 billion."

"Pfizer also announced an executive shake-up on Tuesday. Chief commercial officer and global biopharma president Angela Hwang will depart after 27 years at the pharma giant as the company creates two non-oncology commercial units.

…the company prepares to launch its RSV vaccine in 2024 and promises to deliver “multiple products per year from 2025 forward.” The company stuck to its full-year 2023 sales guidance of $6 billion to $8 billion on its latest quarterly call, but said the low end is more realistic, also noting a $1.3 billion write-down for “excess and obsolete” Covid product. Executives expect 2024 revenue to be around $4 billion."

"However, according to my secret sources, it appears that after an anticipated “low point” in 2024, Moderna expects that covid vaccine volume will steeply ramp up again starting in April 2025. According to an insider (don’t ask me how I got this): Moderna is preparing to launch 15 mRNA products in the next 5 years. Up to four of those could come by 2025," revealed Sasha Latypova, a former pharmaceutical industry executive with 25 years experience in various roles. Her clients included Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Novartis, AstraZeneca, GSK, and more.

Full story:
https://sashalatypova.substack.com/p/future-outlook-moderna-is-planning

Join @ShankaraChetty


Moderna is planning another covid campaign starting April 2025.
Employees are asked to donate blood for experiments in exchange for $75 gift cards.

Sasha Latypova
According to Endpoints News, covid vax business is in trouble - both Pfizer and Moderna are tanking, and heads of sales have departed:

[Moderna] reaffirmed its focus on driving Covid-19 and soon RSV vaccine sales, though the former’s sales have been challenged by waning demand. Moderna said last month that it expects Covid sales to “hit a low point” in 2024, while Pfizer recently slashed expectations for its Comirnaty shot by $2 billion.

Pfizer also announced an executive shake-up on Tuesday. Chief commercial officer and global biopharma president Angela Hwang will depart after 27 years at the pharma giant as the company creates two non-oncology commercial units.

…the company prepares to launch its RSV vaccine in 2024 and promises to deliver “multiple products per year from 2025 forward.” The company stuck to its full-year 2023 sales guidance of $6 billion to $8 billion on its latest quarterly call, but said the low end is more realistic, also noting a $1.3 billion write-down for “excess and obsolete” Covid product. Executives expect 2024 revenue to be around $4 billion.

However, according to my secret sources, it appears that after an anticipated “low point” in 2024, Moderna expects that covid vaccine volume will steeply ramp up again starting in April 2025.

According to an insider (don’t ask me how I got this):

Moderna is preparing to launch 15 mRNA products in the next 5 years. Up to four of those could come by 2025.

Review of Moderna’s publicly available full of shit R&D pipeline indicates that indeed, there are 4-5 different mRNA vaxxes for flu in late stages of development, another one for RSV, then different combos of flu-Covid+RSV, etc.

Also, looks like gene therapies have been renamed into “intracellular therapeutics”. Gosh, all that attention to gene hacking is not great for PR! They still sport old failures like the CMV and zika vaxxes, on their pipeline, including the gene therapy (ahem, intracellular therapeutic) for Crigler-Najar syndrome which conclusively failed around 2012, that’s eons ago! They are claiming they gave it away for free to something called The Institute for Life Changing Medicines. It’s life changing, for sure… the founder of this Institute, Tachi Yamada “passed away unexpectedly” in August 2021. I wonder what was the cause of death? He looked not old and quite healthy… Maybe he partook in the intracellular miracles?

More from my secret Moderna source:

There is an email today asking for employees to donate blood to develop assays that will be used to generate key data in their clinical trials. They are offering $75 gift cards.

Starting April of 2025 the covid campaign [is expected to] kick off, [therefore] by April of 2024 they will be in full covid vax production.

I find it odd this year [2023] there was no covid vax production, boosters etc were basically left over from the original product runs.

I am going to speculate here about this interesting timing:

2024 is an election year! Biden (or a suitable puppet substitute) needs to be installed/reinstalled, and therefore the government’s covid boot should be off our necks since it is associated too much with the current regime. The authorized “freedom” narrative goes like this: Mistakes were made, dolts botched shit, replace those dolts with some other dolts, do some listening sessions to pretend public pushback had some impact. Do some bombshell interviews on Tucker Carlson’s show, where literal truth bombs like “Pfizer lied!!” “FDA didn’t do its job!” and “WHO bad!” are allowed to be dropped. Blame Pfizer for everything! (don’t mention Moderna too often, best - not at all). Even allow somebody to sue Pfizer! Blame the corporate greed, the greedy capitalists, corporations and stuff. Note: the federal government is not at fault, they are saintly incompetent people prone to making many mistakes. They are sincerely stupid, and just can’t see the data! Ask them to look at the VAERS data one more time…

There is non-zero probability that Pfizer production may be shut down at some point: maybe FDA will “find” manufacturing violations, or maybe AG Paxton will miraculously prevail in his lawsuit in TX for false advertising, maybe investigation by Ron DeSantis will miraculously turn out not to be a fake political stunt - there are several potential scenarios how this will unfold. Note, this post was written and scheduled several weeks ago. Late breaking news: Ron DeSantis’s grand jury is a political stunt and a total joke. In any case, Moderna might become the “exclusive” manufacturer of Poison-19, just like Emergent Biosolutions is exclusive for the anthrax poisoning-of-the-troops elixir. Hence, planning ramped up volumes in 2025.

Since Moderna is a DOD/DARPA/CDC/CIA company, this should tell us that the government are planning another bunch of false flags, fear mongering and generation of “sentinel cases” (cruise ships, Navy ships, subways, large events, other crowded places) for some “new mutated covid variant” in 2025. Or they are simply expecting the VAIDS to ramp up by 2025. Or all/combinations of the above.

It should be noted that Moderna doesn’t really make their product, it is made for them by the DOD/CIA’s baby Resilience - a biomanufacturing behemoth, funded and controlled by the federal government. Resilience goes by several names (aka Nanotherapeutics, Ology and a few others), and has many strong links to the CIA and Inqtel (CIA’s “venture fund”). Here is a well made 7 min analysis, click on the link:

https://twitter.com/Cancelcloco/status/1735421884395860246


Here is my prediction for the dominant narratives in regard to this for the elections year - R vs D affiliations do not matter. Only the candidates that are beholden to the Pandemic Preparedness Cult (here, here, here) will be allowed to proceed to the actual ticket. So that the DOD/CIA control them no matter what the outcome of the elections. It is crucial for the DOD/CIA to continue making poison, pumping poison and profit from it. Thus, be prepared for your favorite candidate to endorse the idea of pandemics and outbreaks of dangerous pathogens, the idea that the government must “protect” us from these dangers, the stories of dolts botching shit, pointing of fingers at their opponent who was “pro-lockdown and masking”, promises to replace dolts with some other better dolts, even promises to get Pfizer and their corporate greed “brought to justice”, sort of. But do not expect any of your favorite candidates to point at the root cause of the millions of dead and injured - the federal government and its goon agents who built the illegal-legal cage where genocide is completely legal, or at a minimum, impossible to prosecute. That’s because the goal of your favorite political candidate is to align with the interests of that awesome federal government power pyramid in order to be hired as its next sock puppet, not to upset or reform it.

Art for today: Hydrangea and Sake Bottle, oil on panel, 14x18 in.

https://donshafi911.blogspot.com/2024/02/moderna-is-planning-another-covid.html

Are You an Anti-Paxxer?

As doctors drop Paxlovid because of drug interactions and research shows it causes Covid rebounds and virus shedding, Pfizer and MSM crank the PR machine to hide the facts and shame "anti-paxxers."

Don't fall for it!


Are You an Anti-Paxxer?
As doctors drop Paxlovid because of drug interactions and research shows it causes Covid rebounds and virus shedding, Pfizer and MSM crank the PR machine to hide the facts and shame "anti-paxxers."

Linda Bonvie

Pfizer has a big public relations push on for its controversial drug Paxlovid. There’s even a name being bandied about for those who question the drug: “Anti-Paxxers.”
When an article by Los Angeles Times metro reporter Rong-Gong Lin II recommended last month that practically everyone who tests positive for Covid takes Pfizer’s Paxlovid, some media veterans may have wondered what had become of the traditional wall between news reporting and advertising.

The story, which appeared on January 28, swept away almost all of the reservations that have been raised about the safety and effectiveness of this patent medicine, assuring us that “Paxlovid rebound” is a non-issue and fear of serious side effects is “erroneous.” It even went so far as to suggest that if your doctor won’t prescribe this “highly effective” medication, it’s time to go doctor shopping.

So why is this LA Times writer so desperately trying to sell us this fast-tracked antiviral that comes with a black box warning?

The article appeared at a particularly critical time for Pfizer just as it transitions from Emergency Use Authorization, or EUA Paxlovid, to FDA-approved Paxlovid. Originally free to patients, the medication was stockpiled by the U.S. government to the tune of 24 million treatment courses at a cost to taxpayers of $530 a box. Now, the FDA-approved version (same drug, different box) sells for a list price of up to $1,500. (According to an analysis by researchers at Harvard University, the actual cost to Pfizer for a five-day Paxlovid course is $13).

But to Pfizer’s chagrin, it now doesn’t seem to be able to even give the stuff away, let alone sell it at a premium price. Last fall Pfizer accepted a return of nearly 8 million boxes sent back by the U.S. government.

What’s a drugmaker to do when both patients and doctors shun a product that was anticipated to be the better half of Pfizer’s post-Covid “multibillion-dollar franchise?

Flush with all that Covid cash and new Paxlovid FDA approval last May, Pfizer went shopping for partners to help promote its products.

No stranger to top-tier PR firms such as Edelman and Ogilvy, the drugmaker tagged two of the biggest names in contemporary communications companies, Publicis Groupe, a Paris-based giant PR and ad agency, and the humongous Interpublic Group. These high-level agencies come at a big price tag, but what they can offer is priceless—a way to get your story told by respected media outlets.

That’s right, if you have enough money to hire the folks with all the right contacts, you too can create your own “news!” And these special contacts are something that PR firms, such as Edelman, are very proud of. Many agency hires, in fact, are recruited directly from major media outlets, such as Edelman NYC Brand Director Nancy Jeffrey, who spent a decade at the Wall Street Journal.

As quoted in an Edelman website blog, Jeffrey recalls how Richard Edelman (son of founder Dan) would call her during her time working at the paper “to meet a client with a story to tell.” As Jeffrey says, “No one at Edelman ever rises too high to pitch a reporter.”

So was our LA Times reporter “pitched,” or does he just have an evangelical connection with Paxlovid?

Let’s take a close look at his story and see what we find.

Side effects be gone!

First, there’s the article’s headline, which began: “If it’s COVID, Paxlovid”? Getting your oft-advertised product’s rhyming tagline in a headline—now that’s branding! And we don’t have to tell any of the side effects in this venue. The LA Times piece was off to a great start.

Why aren’t more people being given Paxlovid, the reporter wanted to know. It’s “cheap or even free for many,” he said. And then he delivered his first rave review, calling it “highly effective.”

By paragraph four, however, our intrepid reporter had uncovered the bad news that “a number of doctors are still declining to prescribe it.” But why? It must be those pesky “outdated arguments” about “Paxlovid rebound.” Anyone who gets Covid “has a similar rare chance of rebound,” he told us. For extra punch, he called on Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, professor of medicine at UCSF, to back up that statement. Rebound is “like, bogus” and “just dumb,” Chin-Hong said.

What Lin didn’t report is that a study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine in November 2023, by researchers from Mass General Brigham, found that in Covid patients taking Paxlovid, rebound was “much more common” and often without symptoms. Nearly 21 percent had virologic rebound versus under 2 percent not on the drug. Of perhaps even more significance, prolonged viral shedding for an average of fourteen days was noted in those who rebounded, indicating that they “were potentially still contagious for much longer.” The virologic rebound “phenomenon,” in Paxlovid patients, the authors noted, “has implications for post-N-R (Paxlovid) monitoring and isolation recommendations.” This study closely monitored patients with follow-ups three times a week “sometimes for months.”

After quoting from several Paxlovid-positive FDA and CDC statements and referencing a California Public Health commercial where people dance to an upbeat tune singing “Test it, treat it, beat it, California you know you need it,” Lin got around to some serious stuff—side effects.

Not mentioned by Lin, but good to know anyway, Paxlovid bears an FDA-required black-box warning about drug interactions, cautioning of “potentially severe, life-threatening, or fatal events.” But the article carefully danced around this inconvenient issue, simply mentioning that some Paxlovid takers may need to have their medications adjusted. The fear of “serious side effects . . . is largely erroneous,” it claimed.

Really?

“There are 125 drug interactions (for Paxlovid) across twenty-five different classes of medicines,” author and FLCCC President Dr. Pierre Kory said in a phone interview. “I’ve never used any medicine that had that number and degree of drug interactions, and I find it absurd,” added Kory, who is an expert in early Covid treatment.

And this is no secret. The Paxlovid package insert lists thirty-nine specific drugs that interact with this anti-viral (which is not a complete list, we’re warned) including medications that treat conditions such as an enlarged prostate, gout, migraines, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, arrhythmias, and angina.

With side effects out of the way, our reporter moved on to an interesting idea—doctor shopping.

If your doctor turns you down for Paxlovid, “what other options are there?” How about “reaching out to another healthcare provider” we’re advised, one “who might be more knowledgeable about Paxlovid . . .”

Don’t be an ‘Anti-Paxxer!’

The LA Times isn’t alone in this timely pushing of Paxlovid. The New York Times also ran a glowing Paxlovid piece at the beginning of January. The black-box warning was glossed over by simply saying that some “doctors balk” over the “long list of medications not to be mixed with Paxlovid,” referring to the drug as being “stunningly effective.” The NYT reporter also added five mentions of a study—actually a preprint (not yet peer reviewed or published)—which through the use of statistical magic concluded that during the course of the research had only half of the eligible Covid patients in the U.S. taken Paxlovid, 48,000 lives would have been saved.

The server where the research was posted warns journalists and others when discussing preprints to “emphasize it has yet to be evaluated by the medical community and information presented may be erroneous.”

Paxlovid is not the only drug that gets special treatment by the media. Last January, a 60 Minutes segment was called out by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine as “an unlawful weight loss drug ad” for the med Wegovy. The piece, it noted, “looked like a news story, but it was effectively a drug ad,” the group said in a press release. PCRM also stated that Novo Nordisk, which makes Wegovy, paid over $100,000 to the doctors CBS interviewed for the segment.

With this new frenzy to sell Paxlovid, one can’t help but compare it to the campaign against ivermectin. Kicked off by the FDA in August 2021, it successfully branded this Nobel Prize-winning, FDA-approved drug as nothing more than a horse dewormer endorsed by fanatical outlier doctors and accepted by gullible patients. Despite being found to be an extremely safe treatment as well as an effective one for Covid, the FDA, CDC, and its media “partners” made ivermectin the subject of false accusations and warnings about the supposed risks of using it.

But early on in the game it was decided, as Dr. Kory pointed out, “to keep the market open for their novel pricey Paxlovid pill.” And to that effect, nothing was going to stand in the way. In an interview last summer with the head of the UCSF Department of Medicine, FDA Commissioner Dr. Robert Califf admitted that he helped promote Paxlovid—something he acknowledged is explicitly against the rules.

“In normal times, the FDA should not be a cheerleader . . .” Califf said. But since back then EUA drugs could not be advertised (a policy that changed in the fall of 2022) he went ahead and pitched it himself.

The Paxlovid campaign is far from over. In fact, it may now be revving up to full throttle. There’s even a name being bandied about for those who question the drug: “Anti-Paxxers.”

And if we can take any insight from the new Pfizer tagline (just filed for protection with the US Patent and Trademark Office), “Outdo Yesterday,” there are even more spurious strategies in its pharmaceutical pipeline.

Full story:
https://rescue.substack.com/p/are-you-an-anti-paxxer

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https://donshafi911.blogspot.com/2024/02/are-you-anti-paxxer-as-doctors-drop.html

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Ten New Year’s Resolutions to Restore Medical Freedom
Clayton J. Baker, MD
As 2023 staggers to its conclusion, leaving behind a world of brutal wars, tenuous economies, corrupt governments, and tyrannical elites, perhaps the most unsettling aspect of the year’s end is a strange silence.

Some things always generate plenty of noise. The 2024 US Presidential election promises to be even more hysterical than the last two. It will probably be a rematch, pitting a widely hated octogenarian incumbent President with obvious, rapidly progressing dementia against a widely hated late-septuagenarian former President facing dozens of felony indictments. Still almost a year away, the commotion surrounding this impending showdown of the senescent is already continuous, cacophonous, and confounding.

However, regarding the most important historical event since World War II, there is almost total silence.

The Covid-19 debacle is the defining event of the 21st century. It is at once the worst act of biological warfare in human history and the greatest mass violation of civil liberties since the Iron Curtain. Even more importantly, it is the self-evident template for the establishment of the technocratic soft-core totalitarianism advocated by globalist entities such as the World Health Organization and the World Economic Forum.

And yet virtually no one in the mainstream will discuss it. The legacy media shows near zero curiosity regarding Covid’s origins, the disastrous response, or the toxic vaccines.

Both the Biden and Trump camps pretend it never happened. Out of the 4 Republican debates held to date, only one question has been asked about Covid vaccines. And that single exchange, between journalist Megyn Kelly and candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, was mysteriously blacked out, even from supposedly “free speech” platform Rumble’s livestream of the event, with Rumble’s CEO later blaming the blackout on “the source feed from a 3rd party” which he did not name. Nothing to see here.

Among the other presidential candidates, former Democrat Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Republican Ron DeSantis have spoken up repeatedly and honestly about Covid. As a result, they have both been aggressively reviled and ostracized by both the mainstream media and the establishments of both political parties.

Advocates for civil rights in general, and for medical freedom in particular, should be deeply disturbed by this attempt to cast the whole Covid-19 catastrophe down the memory hole. Medical freedom is rapidly developing as a philosophical, intellectual, and ethical concept. However, theoretical efforts to promote medical freedom – and by extension, to re-enforce all fundamental civil liberties – will come to naught if the greatest assault on freedom in modern history is allowed to be forgotten, and the perpetrators are allowed to continue as if nothing happened.

As a prominent man once asked: “What is to be done?” In my attempt to answer that question, here are 10 New Year’s Resolutions for Medical Freedom advocates.

1. Speak the Truth About Covid at Every Opportunity.

Honest and informed citizens, politicians, and public figures must plainly tell truthful narratives about Covid every chance they get. A brief, factual account might sound something like this:

a. SARS CoV-2 is a man-made bioweapon developed through US Government funding, which got out of the lab and into the human population.

b. The mRNA Covid vaccines are essentially pre-planned antidotes to that bioweapon, which were hastily produced and aggressively pushed on the population for profit, with an appalling and criminal disregard for safety.

c. The lockdowns, masking, school closures, mandates, censorship, scapegoating, etc., were deliberate and illegal assaults on citizens’ civil rights – blatant power grabs that governments made under the pretense of a declared emergency.

Medical freedom advocates must explain to people that they have been repeatedly lied to for the past 4 years, by virtually every authority. Then, tell them the truth – coolly, rationally, and politely. If they don’t want to hear it, tell them anyway.

For decades, every citizen in modern Western society has been browbeaten with leftist and globalist propaganda, ranging from countless Global Warming false prophecies, to risible DEI nonsense, to Baskin-Robbinsesque gender insanity, to fascistic vaccine absolutism. Then came Covid. At this late date, it is reasonable and salutary to present one’s neighbor with a brief smattering of truth.

2. Encourage and Petition Politicians to Commit to Medical Freedom Policies.

The Pharma industry spent a reported $379 million on political lobbying in 2022 alone. It’s going to take a lot of grassroots work with politicians to combat the pernicious influence of that much purchased influence.

There is evidence that this can be done. People such as Dr. Mary Talley Bowden in Texas are leading the way in this regard. As of December 23, 2023, Bowden and colleagues have convinced 40 candidates and 25 elected officials from 17 states to publicly state that “the Covid shots must be pulled off the market.” Per Dr. Bowden, “many of these are also pledging not to take donations from Big Pharma.”

Those committed to medical freedom should set all their elected officials and relevant appointed government bureaucrats on speed dial. These individuals in positions of power – at all levels, local to national – must hear regularly from their constituents. Constituents must tell these people exactly what they know, as well as what they want. It is now up to constituents to teach their officials the facts about the world.

As Andrew Lowenthal has demonstrated in detail, the Censorship Industrial Complex is real, and because of it, many elected officials and bureaucrats suffer from the same lack of accurate information on policy matters as the majority of their constituents.

3. Work to Outlaw all Gain-of-Function Research.

All research regarding the genetic manipulation of viruses needs to end. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and others have pointed out that such research is really bioweapons research, in which our tax dollars are misused to fund the development of a bioweapon and its antidote vaccine in concert. In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis and the state legislature have passed laws banning gain-of-function research in that state.

The Covid era displayed in high relief the disastrous wages of such “research.” It needs to be completely outlawed everywhere, and all labs involved in such work, from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, to the Ralph Baric lab at the University of North Carolina, to illegal labs in the rural USA or allegedly in places like the Ukraine, need to be permanently shut down.

Key to achieving this is not falling prey to the intentionally confusing semantic arguments about what technically constitutes “Gain-of-function” and what doesn’t. The word games Anthony Fauci played with Congress need to be called out as the dishonest prevarications they are, and rejected as a defense for those involved in such wicked “research.” (Of note, the Florida laws included language to prevent this deception, outlawing all “enhanced potential pandemic pathogen research.”)

4. Work to Get the USA out of the World Health Organization.

The WHO’s newly proposed pandemic agreement and amendments to the existing International Health Regulations (IHR) unfortunately are bald-faced, bad-faith attempts to usurp power from sovereign nations by an unelected globalist elite, all in the nebulous name of “global health.”

As David Bell and Thi Thuy Van Dinh have written, despite claims by WHO Director General Tedros Ghebreyesus that “no country will cede any sovereignty to [the] WHO,” in fact

The documents propose a transfer of decision-making power to the WHO regarding basic aspects of societal function, which countries undertake to enact.
The WHO Director-General will have sole authority to decide when and where they are applied.
The proposals are intended to be binding under international law.
Furthermore, the proposed amendments to the IHR will change WHO directives during declared health emergencies from non-binding recommendations to dictates with the force of international law. As Bell and Dinh state, “It seems outrageous from a human rights perspective that the amendments will enable the WHO to dictate countries to require individual medical examinations and vaccinations whenever it declares a pandemic.”

And the potential incursions to medical freedom hardly end there, potentially including all the items in Article 18 of the existing IHR, which already directly contradict the UN’s own Universal Declaration of Human Rights in multiple places.

Most current debate on the matter surrounds the question of whether individual countries should accept or reject these proposals. However, in the wake of the Covid disaster, the WHO’s current proposals reveal that its intention is not to step back, learn from the catastrophe, and account for the mistakes it and other authorities made. Rather, it seeks to consolidate its own power by permanently encoding the top-down, public-health-by-totalitarian-diktat approach that caused so much destruction. Not only these policies, but the organization proposing them should be categorically rejected.

The WHO is a classic wolf in sheep’s clothing. It is an unelected globalist cabal of profiteering elites, heavily funded by Bill Gates and closely associated with the World Economic Forum. It is engaged in blatant political power-grabbing while masquerading as a benevolent public health institution.

It is insufficient for nations to merely reject the WHO’s proposed pandemic agreement and amendments to its IHR. The USA and every sovereign nation should leave the WHO entirely, and medical freedom advocates should lead the way in the struggle to make this happen.

5. Join the Fight to Remove the Covid mRNA Vaccines From the Market.

The Covid-19 mRNA vaccines have demonstrated toxicities far more common, more varied, and more severe than numerous conventional medicines that have been appropriately pulled from the market in the past. Dr. Peter McCollough and numerous other leaders in the fight for medical freedom have rightly called for the Covid mRNA vaccines to be removed from the market.

Despite the intense efforts of Big Pharma, the growing Censorship Industrial Complex, and captured government agencies, public awareness of the numerous and often deadly toxicities of the Covid mRNA injections is growing.

This is reflected in both reduced public “uptake” for recurrent “boosters” per CDC data and the falling stock price of Pfizer, Inc. A small but growing number of politicians, as described above, are committing to the fight to remove the vaccines from the market, demonstrating that this is becoming a tenable and perhaps winning political position to hold.

Encouraging as these trends may be, they are insufficient on their own. Medical freedom advocates should speak out supporting the removal of the Covid mRNA vaccines from the market. They should recruit, support, and vote for elected officials and candidates taking this position, and support legal actions toward this goal.

6. Push for a Moratorium on the mRNA-Based Pharmaceutical Platform as a Whole.

Even if the Covid mRNA vaccines are removed from the market, a widely overlooked corollary question remains: how much of the toxicity from these products is Covid-specific, i.e. due to the spike protein, and how much is due to the deeply problematic and incompletely understood mRNA platform itself?

There is certainly plenty of toxicity to go around, as numerous mechanisms of injury have been identified from these injections. These include toxicities to the heart, immune system, skin, reproductive organs, blood clotting cascade, and cancer promotion, among others. It is willful denial at best and criminal negligence at worst to assume that the mRNA platform does not contribute to these problems.

mRNA vaccines are currently in use in food animals, notably swine. Furthermore on its own website, Moderna describes a pipeline of mRNA vaccines currently in development for Influenza, Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV), Cytomegalovirus (CMV), Epstein-Barr Virus (EBV), Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), Norovirus, Lyme disease, Zika virus, Nipah virus, Monkeypox, and others. Meanwhile, the trial for its EBV vaccine has reportedly been halted in adolescents due to a case of – you guessed it – myocarditis.

The human population will soon be inundated with mRNA-based drugs on a scale and with an imposed intensity that will make the Covid era seem positively quaint. The safety record for the sole mRNA product currently in human use – the Covid vaccines – is abysmal.

A moratorium of at least several years, combined with an open, thorough, and publicly debated inquiry into the likely and possible toxicities inherent to the mRNA platform is essential to human safety, and if done, will save countless lives in coming years.

7. Work to Have the 1986 Vaccine Act Repealed.

The toxicity of vaccines was so well-established even decades ago, that a Federal law – the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA) of 1986 (42 U.S.C. §§ 300aa-1 to 300aa-34) was passed to specifically exempt vaccine manufacturers from product liability, based on the legal principle that vaccines are “unavoidably unsafe” products.

Since the 1986 NCVIA act protecting vaccine manufacturers from liability, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of vaccines on the market, as well as the number of vaccines added to the CDC vaccine schedules, with the number of vaccines on the CDC Child and Adolescent schedule rising from 7 in 1986 to 21 in 2023.

The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA) of 1986 should be repealed, returning vaccines to the same liability status as other drugs.

8. Work to End Vaccine Mandates at Every Level of Society.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, in the 2019-20 academic year there were 3,982 degree-granting colleges and universities in the United States. In the fall of 2021, all but approximately 600 of these institutions mandated Covid-19 vaccination for their students.

Since then, nearly all such institutions have dropped their student Covid vaccine mandates. However, at this writing, 71 colleges and universities, or approximately 1.7%, continue to mandate the Covid vaccines for students to attend.

The number of mandating schools reduced gradually, largely through the intense, extremely labor intensive work of a very few small, newly-formed, grassroots organizations like No College Mandates. While the effectiveness of such efforts is undeniable, the 71 holdouts (which include “elite” institutions such as Harvard and Johns Hopkins) demonstrate just how deeply entrenched the mandating of vaccines remains in certain segments of society.

As a result of the hubris and abuse it displayed during Covid, the entire vaccine mega-industry has suffered tremendous (and richly deserved) damage to its formerly unquestioned, “safe and effective” image. However, from education to healthcare to the military, gains made against vaccine mandates have been partial and temporary at most. A concerted effort to further educate the public about the immense problems with vaccines and to restore individual choice must be joined by a great many more people if this fundamental imposition on basic bodily autonomy is to be overcome.

9. Work to End Direct-to-Consumer Advertising of Pharmaceuticals.

The United States is one of only 2 countries in the world that allows direct-to-consumer advertising of pharmaceuticals. The dangers of this utterly ill-advised policy are multiple.

First, as we all can see by simply turning on the television, Big Pharma abuses this privilege to aggressively yet seductively hawk every product it feels it can make a buck off of. The “pill for every ill” mindset shifts into hyperdrive, with an expensive, proprietary, pharmacological cure for everything from your morbid obesity to your “bent carrot.” The situation on social media is, if anything, even worse.

It is no coincidence that black markets for overhyped, purported wonder drugs such as semaglutide develop, nor that dangerous misuse, such as thousands of reported overdoses have been reported. Perhaps more importantly, direct-to-consumer advertising provides Big Pharma with a convenient and legal way to capture media. Big Pharma was the second-largest television advertising industry in 2021, spending $5.6 billion. No legacy media outlet dares to go against the wishes of those providing that level of funding. This effectively muzzles any and all dissenting voices from appearing on those platforms.

A free society requires freedom of the press and media. The Covid era has demonstrated that direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising stifles freedom of the press and media to a dangerous and unacceptable degree.

10. Play Offense.

If all you do is play defense, the best result you can hope for is a draw. During the lockdowns, with courts closed, businesses shuttered, and citizens isolated from one another, it was extremely difficult to mount even a solid defense against the gross incursions on our civil rights. A few courageous individuals, often acting alone and at tremendous personal cost, managed to counterpunch effectively. Their contributions to saving our “free” societies (if indeed they are eventually saved) will perhaps never be adequately recognized.

Today, despite the mainstream silence, the tide is turning in favor of medical freedom and civil liberties in multiple areas. It is time for the masses to join in and help those who managed to make these early advances, and who continue to fight on behalf of all citizens.

For example, New York attorney Bobbie Anne Cox continues her David v. Goliath legal struggle to defeat Governor Kathy Hochul’s extralegal and grossly unconstitutional quarantine camp order. This case may eventually reach the Supreme Court. I don’t want to declare that Ms. Cox can’t do it alone, because that’s pretty much what she has done so far, and having followed that case, I wouldn’t bet against her. But hell, even Hercules had a sidekick. Medical freedom advocates would do well by actively and generously supporting her.

After surviving his own trial by fire, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has announced a lawsuit against Pfizer for “unlawfully misrepresenting the Covid-19 vaccine’s effectiveness, and attempting to censor public discussion of the product.” Citizens of other states would do well to aggressively petition their attorneys general to take similar action, including removing the mRNA vaccines from the market in their states on the grounds of their demonstrated adulteration with potentially harmful DNA.

If medical freedom advocates want the concept to prevail, they must go on offense. Get involved. There is no need to reinvent the wheel at this point. Adopt one or more of the organizations or causes above as your personal project, join, and contribute. Add your light to the sum of light, and the darkness will not overcome it.

In summary, those of us seeking to secure and ensure medical freedom for ourselves and future generations must become vocal, persistent advocates, as well as courageous people of action. Furthermore, we must not allow the abuses and evils of the Covid era to vanish down the memory hole, which of course is exactly what every politician, bureaucrat, Deep State apparatchik, and globalist elite who perpetrated those deeds wants to happen. Some cliches are true, and this is one of them: if we allow ourselves to forget history, we will be doomed to repeat it.

Covid-19 was the defining event of the century. It was a destructive, deadly catastrophe, but it does have one remarkable silver lining. It peeled the veneer off our governments, institutions, corporations, and society as a whole. It revealed how the powerful plan to strip us of our freedoms – medical and otherwise. We now know what we face. May we, the ordinary citizens, have the courage and intelligence to act effectively to regain and retain our freedoms, dignity, and fundamental human rights.

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Author

C.J. Baker, M.D. is an internal medicine physician with a quarter century in clinical practice. He has held numerous academic medical appointments, and his work has appeared in many journals, including the Journal of the American Medical Association and the New England Journal of Medicine. From 2012 to 2018 he was Clinical Associate Professor of Medical Humanities and Bioethics at the University of Rochester.

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https://brownstone.org/articles/ten-new-years-resolutions-to-restore-medical-freedom/

Ten New Year’s Resolutions to Restore Medical Freedom
Clayton J. Baker, MD
As 2023 staggers to its conclusion, leaving behind a world of brutal wars, tenuous economies, corrupt governments, and tyrannical elites, perhaps the most unsettling aspect of the year’s end is a strange silence.

Some things always generate plenty of noise. The 2024 US Presidential election promises to be even more hysterical than the last two. It will probably be a rematch, pitting a widely hated octogenarian incumbent President with obvious, rapidly progressing dementia against a widely hated late-septuagenarian former President facing dozens of felony indictments. Still almost a year away, the commotion surrounding this impending showdown of the senescent is already continuous, cacophonous, and confounding.

However, regarding the most important historical event since World War II, there is almost total silence.

The Covid-19 debacle is the defining event of the 21st century. It is at once the worst act of biological warfare in human history and the greatest mass violation of civil liberties since the Iron Curtain. Even more importantly, it is the self-evident template for the establishment of the technocratic soft-core totalitarianism advocated by globalist entities such as the World Health Organization and the World Economic Forum.

And yet virtually no one in the mainstream will discuss it. The legacy media shows near zero curiosity regarding Covid’s origins, the disastrous response, or the toxic vaccines.

Both the Biden and Trump camps pretend it never happened. Out of the 4 Republican debates held to date, only one question has been asked about Covid vaccines. And that single exchange, between journalist Megyn Kelly and candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, was mysteriously blacked out, even from supposedly “free speech” platform Rumble’s livestream of the event, with Rumble’s CEO later blaming the blackout on “the source feed from a 3rd party” which he did not name. Nothing to see here.

Among the other presidential candidates, former Democrat Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Republican Ron DeSantis have spoken up repeatedly and honestly about Covid. As a result, they have both been aggressively reviled and ostracized by both the mainstream media and the establishments of both political parties.

Advocates for civil rights in general, and for medical freedom in particular, should be deeply disturbed by this attempt to cast the whole Covid-19 catastrophe down the memory hole. Medical freedom is rapidly developing as a philosophical, intellectual, and ethical concept. However, theoretical efforts to promote medical freedom – and by extension, to re-enforce all fundamental civil liberties – will come to naught if the greatest assault on freedom in modern history is allowed to be forgotten, and the perpetrators are allowed to continue as if nothing happened.

As a prominent man once asked: “What is to be done?” In my attempt to answer that question, here are 10 New Year’s Resolutions for Medical Freedom advocates.

1. Speak the Truth About Covid at Every Opportunity.

Honest and informed citizens, politicians, and public figures must plainly tell truthful narratives about Covid every chance they get. A brief, factual account might sound something like this:

a. SARS CoV-2 is a man-made bioweapon developed through US Government funding, which got out of the lab and into the human population.

b. The mRNA Covid vaccines are essentially pre-planned antidotes to that bioweapon, which were hastily produced and aggressively pushed on the population for profit, with an appalling and criminal disregard for safety.

c. The lockdowns, masking, school closures, mandates, censorship, scapegoating, etc., were deliberate and illegal assaults on citizens’ civil rights – blatant power grabs that governments made under the pretense of a declared emergency.

Medical freedom advocates must explain to people that they have been repeatedly lied to for the past 4 years, by virtually every authority. Then, tell them the truth – coolly, rationally, and politely. If they don’t want to hear it, tell them anyway.

For decades, every citizen in modern Western society has been browbeaten with leftist and globalist propaganda, ranging from countless Global Warming false prophecies, to risible DEI nonsense, to Baskin-Robbinsesque gender insanity, to fascistic vaccine absolutism. Then came Covid. At this late date, it is reasonable and salutary to present one’s neighbor with a brief smattering of truth.

2. Encourage and Petition Politicians to Commit to Medical Freedom Policies.

The Pharma industry spent a reported $379 million on political lobbying in 2022 alone. It’s going to take a lot of grassroots work with politicians to combat the pernicious influence of that much purchased influence.

There is evidence that this can be done. People such as Dr. Mary Talley Bowden in Texas are leading the way in this regard. As of December 23, 2023, Bowden and colleagues have convinced 40 candidates and 25 elected officials from 17 states to publicly state that “the Covid shots must be pulled off the market.” Per Dr. Bowden, “many of these are also pledging not to take donations from Big Pharma.”

Those committed to medical freedom should set all their elected officials and relevant appointed government bureaucrats on speed dial. These individuals in positions of power – at all levels, local to national – must hear regularly from their constituents. Constituents must tell these people exactly what they know, as well as what they want. It is now up to constituents to teach their officials the facts about the world.

As Andrew Lowenthal has demonstrated in detail, the Censorship Industrial Complex is real, and because of it, many elected officials and bureaucrats suffer from the same lack of accurate information on policy matters as the majority of their constituents.

3. Work to Outlaw all Gain-of-Function Research.

All research regarding the genetic manipulation of viruses needs to end. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and others have pointed out that such research is really bioweapons research, in which our tax dollars are misused to fund the development of a bioweapon and its antidote vaccine in concert. In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis and the state legislature have passed laws banning gain-of-function research in that state.

The Covid era displayed in high relief the disastrous wages of such “research.” It needs to be completely outlawed everywhere, and all labs involved in such work, from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, to the Ralph Baric lab at the University of North Carolina, to illegal labs in the rural USA or allegedly in places like the Ukraine, need to be permanently shut down.

Key to achieving this is not falling prey to the intentionally confusing semantic arguments about what technically constitutes “Gain-of-function” and what doesn’t. The word games Anthony Fauci played with Congress need to be called out as the dishonest prevarications they are, and rejected as a defense for those involved in such wicked “research.” (Of note, the Florida laws included language to prevent this deception, outlawing all “enhanced potential pandemic pathogen research.”)

4. Work to Get the USA out of the World Health Organization.

The WHO’s newly proposed pandemic agreement and amendments to the existing International Health Regulations (IHR) unfortunately are bald-faced, bad-faith attempts to usurp power from sovereign nations by an unelected globalist elite, all in the nebulous name of “global health.”

As David Bell and Thi Thuy Van Dinh have written, despite claims by WHO Director General Tedros Ghebreyesus that “no country will cede any sovereignty to [the] WHO,” in fact

The documents propose a transfer of decision-making power to the WHO regarding basic aspects of societal function, which countries undertake to enact.
The WHO Director-General will have sole authority to decide when and where they are applied.
The proposals are intended to be binding under international law.
Furthermore, the proposed amendments to the IHR will change WHO directives during declared health emergencies from non-binding recommendations to dictates with the force of international law. As Bell and Dinh state, “It seems outrageous from a human rights perspective that the amendments will enable the WHO to dictate countries to require individual medical examinations and vaccinations whenever it declares a pandemic.”

And the potential incursions to medical freedom hardly end there, potentially including all the items in Article 18 of the existing IHR, which already directly contradict the UN’s own Universal Declaration of Human Rights in multiple places.

Most current debate on the matter surrounds the question of whether individual countries should accept or reject these proposals. However, in the wake of the Covid disaster, the WHO’s current proposals reveal that its intention is not to step back, learn from the catastrophe, and account for the mistakes it and other authorities made. Rather, it seeks to consolidate its own power by permanently encoding the top-down, public-health-by-totalitarian-diktat approach that caused so much destruction. Not only these policies, but the organization proposing them should be categorically rejected.

The WHO is a classic wolf in sheep’s clothing. It is an unelected globalist cabal of profiteering elites, heavily funded by Bill Gates and closely associated with the World Economic Forum. It is engaged in blatant political power-grabbing while masquerading as a benevolent public health institution.

It is insufficient for nations to merely reject the WHO’s proposed pandemic agreement and amendments to its IHR. The USA and every sovereign nation should leave the WHO entirely, and medical freedom advocates should lead the way in the struggle to make this happen.

5. Join the Fight to Remove the Covid mRNA Vaccines From the Market.

The Covid-19 mRNA vaccines have demonstrated toxicities far more common, more varied, and more severe than numerous conventional medicines that have been appropriately pulled from the market in the past. Dr. Peter McCollough and numerous other leaders in the fight for medical freedom have rightly called for the Covid mRNA vaccines to be removed from the market.

Despite the intense efforts of Big Pharma, the growing Censorship Industrial Complex, and captured government agencies, public awareness of the numerous and often deadly toxicities of the Covid mRNA injections is growing.

This is reflected in both reduced public “uptake” for recurrent “boosters” per CDC data and the falling stock price of Pfizer, Inc. A small but growing number of politicians, as described above, are committing to the fight to remove the vaccines from the market, demonstrating that this is becoming a tenable and perhaps winning political position to hold.

Encouraging as these trends may be, they are insufficient on their own. Medical freedom advocates should speak out supporting the removal of the Covid mRNA vaccines from the market. They should recruit, support, and vote for elected officials and candidates taking this position, and support legal actions toward this goal.

6. Push for a Moratorium on the mRNA-Based Pharmaceutical Platform as a Whole.

Even if the Covid mRNA vaccines are removed from the market, a widely overlooked corollary question remains: how much of the toxicity from these products is Covid-specific, i.e. due to the spike protein, and how much is due to the deeply problematic and incompletely understood mRNA platform itself?

There is certainly plenty of toxicity to go around, as numerous mechanisms of injury have been identified from these injections. These include toxicities to the heart, immune system, skin, reproductive organs, blood clotting cascade, and cancer promotion, among others. It is willful denial at best and criminal negligence at worst to assume that the mRNA platform does not contribute to these problems.

mRNA vaccines are currently in use in food animals, notably swine. Furthermore on its own website, Moderna describes a pipeline of mRNA vaccines currently in development for Influenza, Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV), Cytomegalovirus (CMV), Epstein-Barr Virus (EBV), Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), Norovirus, Lyme disease, Zika virus, Nipah virus, Monkeypox, and others. Meanwhile, the trial for its EBV vaccine has reportedly been halted in adolescents due to a case of – you guessed it – myocarditis.

The human population will soon be inundated with mRNA-based drugs on a scale and with an imposed intensity that will make the Covid era seem positively quaint. The safety record for the sole mRNA product currently in human use – the Covid vaccines – is abysmal.

A moratorium of at least several years, combined with an open, thorough, and publicly debated inquiry into the likely and possible toxicities inherent to the mRNA platform is essential to human safety, and if done, will save countless lives in coming years.

7. Work to Have the 1986 Vaccine Act Repealed.

The toxicity of vaccines was so well-established even decades ago, that a Federal law – the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA) of 1986 (42 U.S.C. §§ 300aa-1 to 300aa-34) was passed to specifically exempt vaccine manufacturers from product liability, based on the legal principle that vaccines are “unavoidably unsafe” products.

Since the 1986 NCVIA act protecting vaccine manufacturers from liability, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of vaccines on the market, as well as the number of vaccines added to the CDC vaccine schedules, with the number of vaccines on the CDC Child and Adolescent schedule rising from 7 in 1986 to 21 in 2023.

The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA) of 1986 should be repealed, returning vaccines to the same liability status as other drugs.

8. Work to End Vaccine Mandates at Every Level of Society.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, in the 2019-20 academic year there were 3,982 degree-granting colleges and universities in the United States. In the fall of 2021, all but approximately 600 of these institutions mandated Covid-19 vaccination for their students.

Since then, nearly all such institutions have dropped their student Covid vaccine mandates. However, at this writing, 71 colleges and universities, or approximately 1.7%, continue to mandate the Covid vaccines for students to attend.

The number of mandating schools reduced gradually, largely through the intense, extremely labor intensive work of a very few small, newly-formed, grassroots organizations like No College Mandates. While the effectiveness of such efforts is undeniable, the 71 holdouts (which include “elite” institutions such as Harvard and Johns Hopkins) demonstrate just how deeply entrenched the mandating of vaccines remains in certain segments of society.

As a result of the hubris and abuse it displayed during Covid, the entire vaccine mega-industry has suffered tremendous (and richly deserved) damage to its formerly unquestioned, “safe and effective” image. However, from education to healthcare to the military, gains made against vaccine mandates have been partial and temporary at most. A concerted effort to further educate the public about the immense problems with vaccines and to restore individual choice must be joined by a great many more people if this fundamental imposition on basic bodily autonomy is to be overcome.

9. Work to End Direct-to-Consumer Advertising of Pharmaceuticals.

The United States is one of only 2 countries in the world that allows direct-to-consumer advertising of pharmaceuticals. The dangers of this utterly ill-advised policy are multiple.

First, as we all can see by simply turning on the television, Big Pharma abuses this privilege to aggressively yet seductively hawk every product it feels it can make a buck off of. The “pill for every ill” mindset shifts into hyperdrive, with an expensive, proprietary, pharmacological cure for everything from your morbid obesity to your “bent carrot.” The situation on social media is, if anything, even worse.

It is no coincidence that black markets for overhyped, purported wonder drugs such as semaglutide develop, nor that dangerous misuse, such as thousands of reported overdoses have been reported. Perhaps more importantly, direct-to-consumer advertising provides Big Pharma with a convenient and legal way to capture media. Big Pharma was the second-largest television advertising industry in 2021, spending $5.6 billion. No legacy media outlet dares to go against the wishes of those providing that level of funding. This effectively muzzles any and all dissenting voices from appearing on those platforms.

A free society requires freedom of the press and media. The Covid era has demonstrated that direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising stifles freedom of the press and media to a dangerous and unacceptable degree.

10. Play Offense.

If all you do is play defense, the best result you can hope for is a draw. During the lockdowns, with courts closed, businesses shuttered, and citizens isolated from one another, it was extremely difficult to mount even a solid defense against the gross incursions on our civil rights. A few courageous individuals, often acting alone and at tremendous personal cost, managed to counterpunch effectively. Their contributions to saving our “free” societies (if indeed they are eventually saved) will perhaps never be adequately recognized.

Today, despite the mainstream silence, the tide is turning in favor of medical freedom and civil liberties in multiple areas. It is time for the masses to join in and help those who managed to make these early advances, and who continue to fight on behalf of all citizens.

For example, New York attorney Bobbie Anne Cox continues her David v. Goliath legal struggle to defeat Governor Kathy Hochul’s extralegal and grossly unconstitutional quarantine camp order. This case may eventually reach the Supreme Court. I don’t want to declare that Ms. Cox can’t do it alone, because that’s pretty much what she has done so far, and having followed that case, I wouldn’t bet against her. But hell, even Hercules had a sidekick. Medical freedom advocates would do well by actively and generously supporting her.

After surviving his own trial by fire, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has announced a lawsuit against Pfizer for “unlawfully misrepresenting the Covid-19 vaccine’s effectiveness, and attempting to censor public discussion of the product.” Citizens of other states would do well to aggressively petition their attorneys general to take similar action, including removing the mRNA vaccines from the market in their states on the grounds of their demonstrated adulteration with potentially harmful DNA.

If medical freedom advocates want the concept to prevail, they must go on offense. Get involved. There is no need to reinvent the wheel at this point. Adopt one or more of the organizations or causes above as your personal project, join, and contribute. Add your light to the sum of light, and the darkness will not overcome it.

In summary, those of us seeking to secure and ensure medical freedom for ourselves and future generations must become vocal, persistent advocates, as well as courageous people of action. Furthermore, we must not allow the abuses and evils of the Covid era to vanish down the memory hole, which of course is exactly what every politician, bureaucrat, Deep State apparatchik, and globalist elite who perpetrated those deeds wants to happen. Some cliches are true, and this is one of them: if we allow ourselves to forget history, we will be doomed to repeat it.

Covid-19 was the defining event of the century. It was a destructive, deadly catastrophe, but it does have one remarkable silver lining. It peeled the veneer off our governments, institutions, corporations, and society as a whole. It revealed how the powerful plan to strip us of our freedoms – medical and otherwise. We now know what we face. May we, the ordinary citizens, have the courage and intelligence to act effectively to regain and retain our freedoms, dignity, and fundamental human rights.

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Author

C.J. Baker, M.D. is an internal medicine physician with a quarter century in clinical practice. He has held numerous academic medical appointments, and his work has appeared in many journals, including the Journal of the American Medical Association and the New England Journal of Medicine. From 2012 to 2018 he was Clinical Associate Professor of Medical Humanities and Bioethics at the University of Rochester.

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Syria is playing the long game - developing strategy for the potential of all-out war.
An in-depth analysis of Syrian military developments since October 7th

vanessa beeley

Map showing the recent events on military front in Syria since October 7th Al Aqsa Flood operation.

"While red lines in politics are mostly colorless to provide more room for maneuver, red lines in the field are drawn with iron and fire and colored with blood, making these lines unbreakable."

Ibrahim Wahdi - SAA soldier and journalist

October 7th has sent shock waves throughout the world. The invincible Israel with, allegedly, the most powerful military and intelligence capability was proven to be a paper tiger by a weaker and less well equipped Palestinian Resistance coalition.

The effect has been dramatic on regional Resistance factions - triggering a regional wide engagement with Israel or with the illegal US military bases in Syria and Iraq. As a result, there has been an unprecedented military escalation in the region that has largely gone unreported with all eyes on Gaza and the ongoing Zionist ethnic cleansing in both Gaza and West Bank.

Israel is in disarray with internal divisions threatening the Netanyahu extremist coalition government. Netanyahu is unable to acknowledge the military and intelligence failings despite pressure to do so, even from within his own military.

Instead Israel has resorted to the familiar sadistic war against women, children and innocent civilians for almost two months. The ongoing brutal massacre on an hourly basis, the targeting of hospitals, UNRWA refugee centers and schools, humanitarian convoys, ambulances, paramedics, civil defence headquarters are a litany of war crimes.

Of course any admission by Netanyahu would signal the end of his political career and bring him to trial for corruption. Despite the knowledge that his military would suffer horrendous losses in a ground operation in the sprawling urban landscape of the Gaza enclave, Netanyahu gave the green light to invade. He relied on the daily horrific civilian death toll to break the Resistance resolve.

The message was “to resist is futile” but just as the entire globalist axis led by the US and UK failed to factor in the determination of the Syrian people to prevent regime change in Syria - the world has underestimated the strength of the Palestinian Resistance against decades of apartheid, oppression and trickle expansionist ethnic cleansing by the Zionist entity.

Hezbollah in northern Palestine has skillfully and tactically occupied the Zionist forces in the north preventing their involvement in the Gaza operations and ongoing stealth ethnic cleansing of the West Bank.

Yemen has directly engaged by targeting sites in southern occupied Palestine. Iraqi Resistance factions have increased their attacks against US illegal military bases in Iraq and Syria resulting in the death of at least forty US military personnel. Most recently Yemeni forces have seized an Israeli owned vessel in the Red Sea holding the crew hostage.

Palestinian factions inside Syria have launched several missile attacks on Israeli occupation sites in the illegally annexed Golan territories and even attacked Eilat from Syrian territory.

In response, the US and Israel have mobilised their ISIS agents in Syria to attack Syrian Arab Army positions in the central desert areas.

Hayat Tahrir Al Sham (HTS), an Al Qaeda offshoot, have escalated attacks on the northern Lattakia countryside axis and intensified drone attacks in Western Aleppo, northern Lattakia and northern Hama.

Israel aggression particularly south of Damascus has increased with the latest attack on the Sayeda Zainab district of south-east Damascus yesterday afternoon (22/11). Aleppo and Damascus civilian airports are still closed, not because of the previous damage from Israeli aggression, due to the high risk of Israeli bombardment.

The US has directly engaged with the Syrian Arab Army in Deir Ezzor in north-east Syria. Syria has responded by directly engaging with the US occupation forces, targeting US military bases and shooting down US drones. Syria has expanded the operational area in Syria for all Resistance factions to enable the targeting of Israel from multiple and mobile fronts.

In this article the focus will be on the military situation in Syria. Syria has endured a 12 year Western-orchestrated regime change war that has decimated Syrian infrastructure, depleted the military capability, imposed unprecedented sanctions unilaterally on the Syrian people. The US occupies oil and agricultural resources in the north-east, their assets occupy the agricultural resources in the north-west. Their Kurdish proxies and Al Qaeda assets benefit from the trade of Syrian resources under the protection of US political and military endorsement and collaboration.

Syria’s refusal to abandon Palestine and willingness to expand the ability of Resistance factions to target Israeli facilities and installations has triggered serious recriminations from the US/Israeli axis.

ISIS aggression on behalf of Israel and US

On the 8th of November ISIS groups attacked Syrian Arab Army positions in the vicinity of the Homs, Hama and Raqqa triangle. The attack led to the deaths of 21 SAA soldiers and several injured. Military reinforcements were dispatched to comb the area and to eliminate the ISIS fighters.

Since the double earthquake tragedy that struck Syria and Turkey on the 6th February there have been a number of ISIS attacks on Syrian military and civilians. This attack of the 8th November and the one that preceded it are the most intense.

On 18th October, ISIS launched a wide-scale assault on the SAA and allies in the Al Sukhnah area of the eastern Homs desert. ISIS took control of SAA positions along the main road and the Dubayyat gas field. This from a Carnegie Middle East Center report in 2015 when ISIS was gaining ground in Syria (before Russian intervention in September 2015):

Faced with dense regime defenses around Shaer, the Islamic State shifted its focus to Palmyra, which has been the site of the most development in Syria’s gas sector since the mid-1990s. Fields in the area were expected to eventually produce 9 million cubic meters of crude gas per day. These included the Arak, Dubayat, Hail, Hayan, Jihar, al-Mahr, Najib, Sukhneh, and Abi Rabah fields, which according to a former industry insider have collectively been producing half of Syria’s output of natural raw and liquid petroleum gas. Palmyra is also the transit point for pipelines carrying gas from important fields in Hasakah and Deir Ezzor provinces in northeastern and eastern Syria respectively.

The US appears to be recycling their strategy of pre-Russian intervention to control the ‘hub between the extraction or transfer of virtually all of Syrian gas production and the processing and power plants further west that supply electricity and gas for domestic and industrial use’ to the most populated areas of Syria that are under the control of the Syrian government and military.

The SAA was forced to withdraw and to await reinforcements from the 18th Division and allied forces.

The ISIS terrorists were counter-attacked and the Syrian positions were recaptured in the southern outskirts of Al Sukhna. ISIS forces were routed with a high casualty rate.

Units of the SAA pursued the remnants of ISIS terrorists targeting them heavily with artillery to force their retreat to the 55 km exclusion zone established by the US occupation forces around the US allied Al Tanf military base on the borders of Iraq and Jordan.

ISIS terrorists were also besieged in small pockets around Al Dubayyat gas field. Russian and Syrian warplanes concurrently bombed ISIS groups emanating from the area of Al Tanf that were trying to reach Al Dubbayat to break the SAA siege on their militants.

On November 16th, Deputy Head of the Russian Reconciliation Center, Vadim Collet, gave a statement that:

“Armed groups trained at Al-Tanf base are planning to carry out sabotage acts in southern Syria against Syrian forces on main roads and fuel and energy facilities” adding that “the leadership of both Russian and Syrian forces will take preemptive measures to prevent armed provocations”

On the 13th November, at night, the SAA again repelled an ISIS attack on Point 10 in the Ja'ideen area in the eastern desert of Raqqa, on the administrative border with Homs province.

The joint Russian-Syrian warplanes targeted ISIS terrorists, forcing them to withdraw again to the open desert within the US controlled Al Tanf 55 km exclusion zone.

The Syrian Arab Army secured the area between the Al-Rasafa Castle and Al-Zamla village less than an hour after the failed infiltration operation, which demonstrates a significant improvement in the Syrian Arab Army's ability to respond and deal with these attacks.

Later on November 14, an ISIS cell attacked a Russian patrol with an RPG on Al-Shaer gas field road in the desert. Three Russian soldiers were injured in the attack.

The level of attacks being carried out by the ISIS terrorists is indicative of both their presence in the areas occupied by US allied forces and of the control that the US alliance has over this terrorist faction operating in Syria and Iraq.

The ISIS attacks must be seen in conjunction with the US and Israeli direct attacks on SAA and allied military positions.

Israeli aggression against Syria since October 7th

After five Israeli attacks in October, four of which targeted civilian airports in Damascus and Aleppo, putting them out of service, Israel has attacked more than three times in November.

On November 8th at 22.50 Israel launched an attack on the positions of allied forces in the farmland extending from Sayeda Zainab and Aqraba, south-west of Damascus. They also targeted radar systems and air defence positions in Tal Qalib and Tal Al Massih in the Sweida district, southern Syria - scene of the most recent separatist protests backed and instigated by the US and Israel. Three civilians were injured in the Sweida attack.

In the early dawn hours of November 10th, Israel bombed two positions of the Syrian allies in the vicinity of Shanshar, south-west of Homs. This led to the deaths of seven Hezbollah soldiers and significant material damage.


Hezbollah fighters killed by Israeli aggression on November 10th

Israel justified this aggression as a response to an attack on Eilat in southern occupied Palestine two days prior. The attack utilised a Shahed 101 suicide drone with a 600 km range. The drone was launched from central Syria, crossed Jordanian airspace undetected to Eilat where it hit and caused damage.

However Israel is not able to identify who launched the drone. Sayed Hassan Nasrallah referred to the loss of Hezbollah fighters in Syria based on Israeli false claims. If indeed Hezbollah had launched the drone they would have claimed responsibility. Therefore this attack indicates the entry of new players in the Resistance axis.

The following day, a faction calling themselves SWAT Jazeera Al Arabiya (Arabian Island) claimed responsibility for the Eilat attack. The faction is still mysterious but appears to be an ideological ‘jihadist’ group following the Islamic Resistance Iraq operational blueprint. While the SWAT zone of operation remains secret their arrival on the scene will send the message to the US and Israel that they will face more enemies the longer the genocidal campaign against Palestinians continues.

Again on November 18, at 2:25 am, Israeli warplanes bombed two Hezbollah positions in the Bahdalia area close to Sayyida Zeinab city, southeast of Damascus, causing material losses.

Perhaps more importantly than standard Israeli aggression against Syria - on the 18th October unidentified gunmen assassinated Lieutenant Colonel Qais Ismail and First Assistant Muhammad Hussein of the 112th Brigade, 5th Armoured Division. The attack was carried out to west of Daraa, south of Damascus.

On October 24th Israel had dropped leaflets by drone on the ceasefire line threatening the 112th Brigade and their commander - effectively threatening officers of the SAA in the Daraa district. Was the 18th October assassination a precursor to further attacks by Israeli proxies on the ground south of Damascus?



The two 112th Brigade officers gunned down and the leaflet dropped by Israeli drones.

Yesterday, the 22nd November at 15.10, Israel again targeted the southern districts of Damascus including Sayeda Zainab (an important Iranian/Shia muslim pilgrimage site). I was actually in the area when this attack took place close to Sayeda Zainab. At this time of the afternoon the area is heaving with civilians and children who are leaving school. Video:

Attacks on illegal US occupation bases in Syria and Iraq

The following is an indication only of the number of attacks, the bases and US personnel casualties (it will need updating as attacks are almost daily):


US illegal bases in Syria and Iraq have been targeted daily by the Resistance factions since the start of the Al Aqsa Flood operation. The US air defences have been unable to successfully counter drone and missile attacks. There are have been an estimated 50-60 attacks on US occupation forces between October 17th and November 22nd. This has resulted in 59 casualties, according to a press briefing by Dep. Pentagon Press Sec. Sabrina Singh:

“The Pentagon is seeing an increase in attacks on US forces in Iraq and Syria, with a total of 55 attacks injuring dozens of service members since October 17, an official said Tuesday. The attacks, 27 in Iraq and 28 in Syria, have resulted in 59 service members being injured”, then corrected it, "Sorry, I can give you that rundown. So as of today, there have been approximately 58 attacks. So that's 27 in Iraq and 31 attacks in Syria."

The US has routinely responded with airstrikes targeting SAA and allied sites in eastern Deir Ezzor countryside. The recent US aggression has adopted a different strategy.

In the early hours of 9th November, US warplanes fired four rockets targeting a bakery and aid distribution warehouse belonging to the SAA allied forces on the outskirts of Deir Ezzor city.

The attack developed into intense and direct clashes for over two hours between the US occupation forces with its Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) on the eastern bank of the Euphrates River, and the Syrian Arab Army with its allies on the western bank near the towns of Abu Hardoub, Al-Quriyah, and Al-Miyadin.

Various types of medium and heavy weapons, as well as rockets, were used during the clashes. Additionally, eight Fajr-1 rockets were fired, targeting the Green Village inside the US occupation base in the Al-Omar oil field.

Three US armored Humvees were destroyed, and a number of US soldiers and SDF fighters were injured. However, shooting down a US counter-drone Coyote Block 2 UAV by Syrian air defenses in Al-Mayadeen vicinity two days later was an extraordinary development.



On November 13th, again early morning, US warplanes carried out six airstrikes on the Sayyal area in Al Bukamal (on border with Iraq) and sites near a bridge in Al Mayadin City, east of Deir Ezzor. One death and one injury from these attacks.

This time the US targeted empty buildings and a PMU (Iraqi Popular resistance faction) missile launch site. The Resistance immediately responded and targeted US bases occupying the Al Omar oil field and the Conoco gas field, Shaddadi, Khrab Al Jir and other US occupation locations.

The Conoco attack was notable. Remnants of the missiles found near the Conoco base indicate the use of 220 mm Caliber missiles launched from an Uragan launcher. A Syrian Arab Army artillery and rocket system. Field sources reported that 15 rockets targeted the US base killing 6 US soldiers in the command headquarters.

The US Central Command statement indicates a weakness in the US military occupation of Syria. For the second time, following an unprecedented series of attacks on their bases the US retaliation has been muted and largely ineffectual.

“in response to continued provocations by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and their affiliated groups in Iraq and Syria, U.S. Central Command (USCENTOM) conducted air strikes against facilities near the cities of Abu Kamal and Mayadin”

This would suggest that Washington is reticent to escalate in the region where all US forces are sitting ducks. The default position is to trigger proxy forces including ISIS.

The increasing number of attacks on US bases in Syria alone are an indication that the West Asia region has had enough of US illegal warfare and occupation.

Despite having air superiority in the region the US knows that open war would be a military quagmire and would end in defeat. The success of the Resistance in targeting US bases and bypassing US air defence has sent a strong message to the US - that the Resistance capability is a force to be reckoned with.

These groups excel in maneuvering, concealment, rapid and accurate targeting, and have the ability to significantly alter the course of events. They pose huge risk to US forces illegally on the ground in Syria.

The balance of power between US forces, direct and proxy, has shifted and the SAA is taking the fight to the US with a vengeance. A two hour direct engagement between SAA and US forces, the shooting down of a US drone, the targeting of the Conoco base all suggest that the SAA is contemplating military escalation in coordination with Iraqi Resistance and other allies. The US military hegemony in Syria is at a tipping point.

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In north-west Syria - Al Qaeda supports Israel against Palestine

Al-Qaeda's Hayaat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) failed to achieve any military victory on any front in northwest Syria following several failed attacks on Syrian Arab Army positions.

Since the beginning of October, HTS has been increasing drone attacks to compensate for military failures on the ground. The most devastating drone attack was on the 5th October (2 days before Al Aqsa Flood) when they targeted the Homs Military Academy, during a graduation ceremony packed with celebrating families. More than 89 people, mostly civilians were killed and 227 injured, many critically.

Deputy Head of the Russian Center for Reconciliation in Syria, Vadim Collet, said that:

“the raids resulted in the destruction of shelters and training camps belonging to the Al-Nusra Front group.” adding that “34 militants were killed and more than 60 others were injured.”

The SAA and Russian air forces responded decisively. Russian and Syrian warplanes combined with artillery and missile launchers have carried out multiple attacks against terrorist positions since October 5th. Dozens of terrorist headquarters, ammunition stores, drone manufacturing facilities have been destroyed in Idlib province (north-west Syria).

Multiple terrorists from HTS, Omar Ibn Al Khattab Brigade, Ansar Al Tawhid, Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP) and other Al Qaeda derivatives have been killed or injured in the attacks.

The strikes targeted terrorist controlled villages and towns such as Kefraya, Bara, Bilon, Ayn Larouz, Bazabour, Jisr Al Shughour, Afes and others on the axis of the northern Lattakia countryside, Western Aleppo countryside and the axes of Al Ghab plain in northern Hama, and Idlib itself.

Video:



Syrian Arab Army initiated a new phase of military operations over a month ago. These operations have been escalating intensively and progressively, achieving significant results. The terrorists have been deprived of their ability to launch wide-scale attacks, and their military capabilities, infrastructure, ammunition depots, and drones have been gradually destroyed. This strategy has developed in lock-step with events since October 7th.

Video:



The Syrian Ministry of Defense has reported the downing of dozens of drones on the fronts of Aleppo, Idlib, Hama, and Homs. Some of these drones are large-sized, GPS-guided, long range and can carry 100 kg of explosives.

This increase in drone warfare, aided and abetted in development by NATO member states including Turkey, is an indication that the Al Qaeda asset are collaborating with the US and Israel to keep the SAA and allies occupied on the northern front.

Syrian Ministry of Defense:

“Units of our armed forces operating in the axes of Idlib, Hama and Aleppo countryside confronted attempts by terrorist organizations to attack safe villages and some military points with suicide drones, and destroyed four of them.

A drone equipped with a liquid fuel rocket engine, four meters long, six meters wingspan, and loaded with one hundred kilograms of explosives was also shot down in the Jorin area in Hama northern countryside”

The SAA is tactically depleting the terrorist offensive capability in the north-west to enable the SAA to engage in the south should a direct confrontation with Israel or the US arise in the Golan territories. As former SAA soldier and researcher Ibrahim Wahdi has pointed out:

The intense airstrikes, artillery shelling, and missile attacks carried out by the army in the past month will greatly pave the way for any future military operation if a decision is made to advance towards the M4 highway.

For example, a few days ago the Syrian Arab Army's anti-tank units had successfully cut off the supply routes of armed groups near Tafasnaz, isolating them from the Turkish base at Tafasnaz Airport, destroying their vehicles, killing and injuring many of them within less than an hour, without the need for any ground advancement. This demonstrates the army's capability to carry out similar, broader operations in the future if a decision is made for a large-scale ground operation.

We are witnessing a micro-glimpse of what might happen were the SAA to engage in a comprehensive war against the US/Israel-led axis of terror.

The Syrian leadership is taking a cautious approach for obvious reasons while opening up new fronts for Resistance factions operating on Syrian territory.

Even if the Israeli war on Gaza were to escalate, leading to regional and international engagement, Syria would not need to enter the war directly. Opening the Golan front for anyone who wishes to fight against Israel would potentially be sufficient.

As President Assad strongly stated in his speech at the Emergency Arab League Summit on Gaza:

By our will only, by the overwhelming popular public opinion in our countries, with the new reality imposed by the Palestinian resistance in our region, we possessed those tools. Let us use them, and let us take advantage of the global transformation that has opened for us political doors that have been closed for decades, so that we can enter through them and change the equations, and let the precious souls who rose in Palestine be a rewarding price for achieving what we were unable to do in the past and what we must accomplish in the present and in the future.

All countries in the region, specifically Syria, should take advantage of the new reality and build upon the victories of the resistance in Gaza. With every military confrontation, the popular resistance proves its ability to adapt, utilize the terrain of the battlefield, choose the timing, and employ sophisticated techniques in simple ways, relying on the most important factor in winning wars, which is determination.

The military tactics employed by the Palestinian resistance were simple yet highly effective, and the most significant outcome was the clear military weakness of colonial forces in the region when facing the unified alliance of resistance forces.

The war against Israel no longer requires the intervention of the Egyptian army, just as expelling the United States from Iraq and Syria would not require a comprehensive war.

It is clear that Israel has failed to achieve any military victory in Gaza. Even with resorting to genocide and destruction, it has not succeeded in even swaying the popular Palestinian support for the Resistance Coalition in Gaza and the West Bank.

Not even a few thousand out of more than two million residents in Gaza have emerged demanding surrender or cessation from the resistance. On the contrary, with every new massacre, we see Palestinians more determined to remain steadfast and to resist ethnic cleansing for the third time.

Time is Israel’s greatest enemy. The longer the Israeli military incurs losses on the ground in Gaza, the longer Western public outrage increases at the massacres of thousands of children, the longer Netanyahu loses public confidence in Israel and abroad - the greater the defeat for Israel long term.

Confronted with the psychopathy of the Israeli leadership and military the Resistance Axis is conducting itself with dignity and professionalism. It is hard to determine the balance of power in the region due to the hysterical and irrational rhetoric emanating from Washington, London and Tel Aviv. However it is shifting fast and there will be no going back.

Ibrahim Wahdi:

Regionally, there are important players with differing tactics, strategies, capabilities, and, most importantly, their understanding of the terrain, which makes it nearly impossible to predict the outcome of the current confrontation.

However, the Middle East will certainly witness radical transformations after the Al-Aqsa Flood operation. With the rise of China and Russia, the East as a whole is asserting itself, which means that countries like Iran and Syria will also enter new historical stages on the geopolitical level. The so-called Global South is rising from the ashes of decades or centuries of colonialist terrorism.

****

This article was co-written with Ibrahim Wahdi - please subscribe to his blog here. His Telegram channel and Twitter/X account.

Please do consider subscribing to my Substack account and I hope you find this article useful. Thank you.



https://beeley.substack.com/p/syria-is-playing-the-long-game-developing?r=29hg4d&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post

Will Russia-China Strategic Patience Extinguish the Fire in West Asia?, by Pepe Escobar - The Unz Review
Once upon a time, by the Don river, in the southern steppes of what today is still known as “Ukraine”, the Great King of Persia, the mighty Darius, leading the most powerful army ever assembled on earth, received a puzzling message from a foe he was pursuing: the nomad ruler Idanthyrsus, King of the Scythians.

A Scythian envoy arrived at the Persian camp carrying a bird; a mouse; a frog; and five arrows.

And then he left, in a rush.

Wily Darius interpreted the message as the Scythians ready to submit to the Persians.

Not so fast. It was up to Darius’s senior foreign policy advisor, Gobryas, who also happened to be his brother-in-law, to break the code:

“Unless you Persians turn into birds and fly up in the air or into mice and burrow in the ground or into frogs and leap into lakes, you will never get home again but stay here in this country, only to be shot by Scythian arrows.”

Well, apparently this tale from the depths of the pre-Silk Roads proves the strategic nightmare of waging war against elusive nomadic horse archers on the Eurasian steppes.

But that could also be a tale about waging war against invisible urban guerrillas in sandals and RPGs hidden in the rubble in Gaza; flash mini-squads emerging from tunnels to hit and burn Merkava tanks before disappearing underground.

History also tells us that Darius failed to bring the Scythian nomads to a head-to-head battle. So, in the autumn of 512 B.C., he pulled a pre-American gambit in Afghanistan 2,500 years before the fact: he declared victory and left.

That Landed Aircraft Carrier

Everyone familiar with West Asia – from US generals to grocers in the Arab Street – knows that Israel is a landed aircraft carrier whose mission is to keep West Asia in check on behalf of the Hegemon.

Of course in a dog eats dog geopolitical environment it’s easy to misunderstand all wag the dog shenanigans. What’s certain is that for hegemonic circles of the US Deep State, and certainly for the White House and the Pentagon, what matters in the current incandescent juncture is the uber-extreme/genocidal Likud-led Netanyahu government in Israel, not “Israel” per se.

That projects Netanyahu as the exact mirror image of the beleaguered sweaty sweatshirt actor in Kiev. Quite the geopolitical gift – in terms of deflecting blame away from the Hegemon for a genocide deployed live on every smartphone on the planet.

And all that conducted under a veneer of legality – as in the White House and the State Department “advising” Tel Aviv to act with moderation; yes, you can bomb hospitals, schools, medical workers, journalists, thousands of women, thousands of children, but please be gentle.

Meanwhile, the Hegemon has deployed an Armada to the Eastern Mediterranean, complete with two very expensive iron bathtubs, sorry aircraft carrier groups plus a nuclear submarine close to the Persian Gulf. That’s not exactly to survey guerrillas in underground tunnels and to “protect” Israel.

The ultimate – neocon and Zio-con – targets are of course Hezbollah, Syria, Hashd al-Shaabi in Iraq and Iran: the whole Axis of Resistance.

Iran-Russia-China, the new neocon-defined “axis of evil”, which happen to be the Top Three Actors of Eurasia integration, for all practical purposes have interpreted the genocide in Gaza as an Israeli-American operation. And they have clearly identified the key vector: energy.

The inestimable Michael Hudson has noted how “we’re really seeing something very much like the Crusades here. It’s a real fight for who is going to control energy, because, again, the key, if you can control the world’s flow of energy, you can do to the whole world what the United States did to Germany last year by blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines.”

BRICS 10 on the Move

And that brings us to the fascinating case of the OIC/Arab World delegation of Foreign Ministers now on tour of selected capitals promoting their plan for a complete ceasefire in Gaza plus negotiations for an independent Palestinian state. The delegation, called the Gaza Contact Group, includes Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, Indonesia, Nigeria and Palestine.

Their first stop was Beijing, meeting Wang Yi, and the second stop Moscow, meeting Sergei Lavrov. That tells us all we need to know about BRICS 11 in action – even before the fact.

Well, that’s actually BRICS 10, because after the election of pro-Hegemon Zionist Javier “Chainsaw Massacre” Milei for President, Argentina is now out of the picture, and possibly discarded by January 1st, 2024, when BRICS previously 11 starts under the Russian presidency.

The OIC/Arab League special conference on Palestine in Saudi Arabia had yielded a meek final declaration that disappointed virtually the whole Global South/Global Majority. But then something started to move.

Foreign Ministers started to coordinate closely. At first Egypt with China, after previous coordination with Iran and Turkey. That may sound counter-intuitive – but it’s all due to the gravity of the situation. That explains why the Iranian Foreign Minister is not part of the current traveling delegation – which is led, in practice, by Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

The meeting with Lavrov coincided with an extraordinary online BRICS meeting on Palestine, called by the current South African presidency. Crucial point: the flags of new members Iran, Egypt and Ethiopia could be identified behind the speakers.

Iran’s President Raisi went no holds barred, calling for BRICS member states to use every political and economic tool available to pressure Israel. Xi Jinping called once again for a two-state solution and positioned China as the mediator of choice.

For the first time Xi in his own words laid it all out: “There can be no security in the Middle East without a just solution to the question of Palestine. I have emphasized on many occasions that the only viable way to break the cycle of Palestinian-Israeli conflict lies in a two-state solution, in the restoration of the legitimate national rights of Palestine, and in the establishment of an independent state of Palestine.”

And it should all start via an international conference.

All of the above implies a concerted BRICS 10 unified position, in the next few days, applying maximum pressure on Tel Aviv/Washington for a ceasefire, fully supported by virtually the whole Global Majority. Of course there are no guarantees the Hegemon will allow it to succeed.

Secret negotiations involving Turkey, for instance, have floundered. The idea was to have Ankara cutting off the supply of oil to Israel coming from the BTC pipeline from Baku to Ceyhan: the oil is then loaded on tankers to Ashkelon in Israel. That’s at least 40% of the oil fueling Israel’s military machine.

Ankara, still a NATO member, balked – spooked by the inevitably hardcore American response.

Riyadh, in the long run, could be even more daring: no more oil exports until there’s a definitive solution to Palestine according to the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative. Yet MbS won’t do it – because Saudi wealth is all invested in New York and London. It’s still a long, winding, bumpy road to the petroyuan.

Meanwhile, realpolitik practitioners such as John Mearsheimer correctly point out that a negotiated solution for Israel-Palestine is impossible. A quick glance at the current map shows how the two-state solution – advocated by everyone from China and Russia to the Arab world – is dead; a Palestinian state, as Mearsheimer noted, “is going to be like an Indian reservation” in the US, “cut apart and isolated, not really a state.”

No Hedging When it Comes to Genocide

So what is Russia to do? Here is a very good informed hint.

“Putin in the Labyrinth” means Moscow actively involved, in a BRICS 10 manner, to bring about a peaceful West Asia while maintaining internal stability in Russia under the ever-evolving Hegemon Hybrid War: it’s all interconnected.

The Russia-China strategic partnership’s approach to West Asia set on fire by the usual suspects is all about strategic timing and patience – which the Kremlin and the Zhongnanhai exhibit in droves.

No one really knows what goes on in the background – the deep shadow play behind the fog of intertwined wars. Especially when it comes to West Asia, always enveloped in serial mirages arising from the desert sands.

At least we may try to discern mirages around the Persian Gulf monarchies, the GCC – and especially what MbS and his mentor MbZ are really playing at. This is the absolutely crucial fact: both the Arab League and the OIC are controlled by the GCC.

And yet, as both Riyadh and Abu Dhabi become members of BRICS 10, they certainly see that the Hegemon’s new gambit is to set back the advances of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in West Asia by setting the region on fire.

Yes, this is the War against China morphing from Hybrid to Hot, side by side with the Final Solution for the “Palestinian problem”.

And as a bonus, from the Hegemon’s perspective, that should bring this bunch of desert bedouins firmly on board the new D.O.A. gambit, the IMEC (India-Middle East Corridor), which is in fact the Europe-Israel-Emirates-Saudi Arabia-India trade corridor, in theory a competitor to BRI.

A major running theme across all nooks and crannies of the Arab street is how killing off the Palestinian resistance is an even more passionate issue for the sold out GCC elites than confronting Zionism.

That explains, at least in part, the non-reaction reaction of the GCC to the ongoing genocide (they are now trying to make amends). And that is parallel to their non-reaction reaction to the Hegemon’s methodical, slow motion genocide, rape and pillaging over time of Iraqis, Syrians, Afghans, Libyans, Yemenis, Sudanese and Somalis.

It’s absolutely impossible – and inhuman – to hedge when it comes to genocide. The verdict is still pending on whether the GCC has chosen a side, thus turning completely apart, spiritually and geopolitically, from the wider Arab street.

This genocide may be the defining moment of the young 21st century – realigning the entire Global South/Global Majority and clarifying who’s on the right side of History. Whatever it does next, the Hegemon seems destined to totally lose the entire West Asia, the Heartland, wider Eurasia and the Global South/Global Majority.

Blowback works in mysterious ways: as the “aircraft carrier” in West Asia went utterly insane, it only turbo-charged the Russia-China strategic partnership to mold History further on down the road to the Eurasia Century.


https://www.unz.com/pescobar/will-russia-china-strategic-patience-extinguish-the-fire-in-west-asia/

November 17: Today’s news on Palestine & Israel – Day 42
[email protected] November 17, 2023 Gaza, genocide, hamas, humanitarian aid, Israel, West Bank
Palestinian children run as they flee from Israeli bombardment in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on Nov. 6, 2023. (photo)
Humanitarian & fuel updates, hospital crises, West Bank news, Israel news, “genocide in the making,” and more

Find previous daily casualty figures and daily news updates here. For more news, go here and here. Live broadcast news from the region is here.

Some people are led to be skeptical of the Al Jazeera news network. However, the network has won several Emmys, a Peabody and the Overseas Press Association’s Edward R. Murrow award, among many other honors. The New York Times reports that “its reporting hews to international journalistic standards and provides a unique view on events in the Middle East.” it’s important to remember that all news sources may potentially have bias. For example, CNN uses anchors who used to work for the Israel Lobby, who have lifelong attachment to Israel, and who often exhibit pro-Israel spin and omission in their broadcasts. Similarly, Fox News is strongly influenced by Rupert Murdoch, who has a similarly strong attachment to Israel, and who may have fired Tucker Carlson, the network’s most popular host, in part due to the host’s opposition to war and his pattern of failing to exhibit sufficient devotion to Israel).

Latest statistics:

Palestinian death toll: 11,232* (~11,029 in Gaza** (including at least 4,707 children and 3,155 women), and at least 203 in the West Bank). *IAK does not yet include 471 Gazans killed in the Al Ahli hospital blast since the source of the projectile is being disputed; although much evidence points to Israel as the culprit, experts are still looking into the incident. Israel is blocking an international investigation.

Palestinian injuries: 31,750** (including at least 29,000 in Gaza** and 2,750 in the West Bank). **NOTE: it is impossible to offer an accurate number of injuries in Gaza due to the ongoing bombardment and communication disruption. The Associated Press has reported ~32,000 in Gaza, while the UN number is somewhat lower. Our total for Gaza and the West Bank is based on the conservative figure.

It remains unknown how many Americans are among the casualties. About 1.6 million people have been displaced; 3,640 are missing (1,770 children) and presumed to be under rubble.

Israel has now killed more Palestinians in a little over a month than in all the previous 22 years combined.

Reported Israeli death toll has been reduced to ~1,200*** (The Israeli spokesman said the original figure of deaths on March 7 was an “initial estimate” – 3 killed in West Bank, 56 in Gaza), including 32 Americans, and ~5,400 injured). The names of the 1,175 identified (about 33 of them children) are here.

***NOTE: It is unknown at this time how many of the deaths and injuries in Israel may have been caused by Israeli soldiers; additionally, since Israel has a policy of universal conscription, it is unknown how many of those attending the outdoor rave a few miles from Gaza on stolen Palestinian land were Israeli soldiers.

Hover over each bar for exact numbers.
Source: IsraelPalestineTimeline.org

“Genocide in the making” – UN: Grave violations committed by Israel against Palestinians in the aftermath of 7 October, particularly in Gaza, point to a genocide in the making, UN experts said today. They illustrated evidence of increasing genocidal incitement, overt intent to “destroy the Palestinian people under occupation”, loud calls for a ‘second Nakba’ in Gaza and the rest of the occupied Palestinian territory, and the use of powerful weaponry with inherently indiscriminate impacts, resulting in a colossal death toll and destruction of life-sustaining infrastructure.

We are deeply disturbed by the failure of governments to heed our call and to achieve an immediate ceasefire. We are also profoundly concerned about the support of certain governments for Israel’s strategy of warfare against the besieged population of Gaza, and the failure of the international system to mobilize to prevent genocide. [Israel’’s] egregious violations cannot be justified in the name of self-defense [and it] cannot wage a war against the population under its belligerent occupation.

The reality in Gaza, with its unbearable pain and trauma on the survivors, is a catastrophe of enormous proportions.

Humanitarian aid: 16 November was the second consecutive day in which no aid trucks entered Gaza. This is due to UNRWA’s lack of fuel. UNRWA also announced that, due to the communication shutdown, it will be unable to manage or coordinate humanitarian aid convoys starting 17 November.

Due to the absence of fuel, on 16 November, UNRWA stated that 70 per cent of the people in the south have no access to clean water. Furthermore, raw sewage started flowing in the streets in some areas.

In the north, the water desalination plant and the Israeli pipeline are not functioning. There has been no distribution of bottled water among IDPs accommodated in shelters for over a week, raising grave concerns about dehydration and waterborne diseases due to water consumption from unsafe sources.

Israeli claims that it is providing incubators has been refuted by the director of al-Shifa Hospital: “The Israeli occupation forces claim to have provided incubators to the hospital, but this is not true; this is false. In addition, we are not in need of incubators; we have already incubators in the hospital, yet we are out of fuel to generate electricity [for the incubators].” (12:40 GMT)

RECOMMENDED READING: Israel-Palestine war: Israel wants to seize Gaza’s multibillion dollar gas field

“Immediate possibility of starvation”: “Food production has come to an almost complete halt, markets have collapsed, fishermen cannot access the sea, farmers cannot reach their farms,” Abeer Etefa, a Middle East regional spokesperson for the World Food Program said. “People are facing the immediate possibility of starvation.” (12:05 GMT)

Fuel for Gaza – to protect Israelis: The war cabinet will allow the entry of two fuel trucks per day into southern Gaza in response to a US request. The decision was intended to “minimally support water, sewage and sanitation systems, in order to prevent the outbreak of epidemics that could spread in the entire area, harm both the residents of the Strip and our forces, and spread even into Israel.” (12:05 GMT)

RECOMMENDED READING: ABC News: Father in Gaza travels over 8 miles in wheelchair to get baby’s first vaccinations

Sites of bombardment and casualties Friday so far include:

House in Khan Younis – at least 4 killed
Bani Suhaila, east of Khan Younis – several killed
House in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza – at least 18 killed
Residential blokcs in Jabalia – dozens killed
Al-Falah School in the Zeitoun neighbourhood south of Gaza City – dozens killed
A field hospital set up in Gaza by Jordan – several staff injured
Poultry farm in Rafah – 7 killed
Home in al-Qarara, east of Khan Younis – 10 killed, including a baby
Ihya’ As Sunna Mosque in Gaza City was hit by an airstrike during a prayer – about 50 killed
RECOMMENDED READING: BBC: How the dead are counted in Gaza

Gaza Gov’t building destroyed: The Israeli occupation army has blown up the Palestinian Legislative Council building in Gaza after it was occupied by the Golani Brigade. The army announced on Tuesday that it had taken control of several government buildings in Gaza City, including the Legislative Council headquarters and the police headquarters.

As usual when destroying civilian infrastructure, the Israeli occupation forces claimed that the buildings were being used by Hamas for “military purposes”.

RECOMMENDED READING: Does Israel have the right to self-defense in Gaza?

West Bank update: Three Palestinians were killed and several others sustained injuries in the early hours of this morning as Israeli occupation forces targeted a group of people in Jenin refugee camp, north of the occupied West Bank, with a drone strike.

Yesterday, about 80 Israeli military vehicles entered Jenin, damaging roads and cars, and surrounding 4 hospitals. At one hospital, the medical staff were forced to evacuate and undergo interrogation. The military claimed that Hamas fighters were hiding inside.

Two more young Palestinians were shot dead by Israeli occupation forces this morning in Hebron. Emergency medical teams were denied access to the scene; the two were pronounced dead a short time later. The bodies of the two victims were taken away by the Israeli occupation forces.

Israeli occupation forces once again suppressed worshipers attempting to reach the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound for the weekly Friday prayers, marking the sixth consecutive Friday of such restrictions. Normally, tens of thousands worship there on Fridays; Israeli occupation forces limited the number to only a few hundred.

“Fire and brimstone”: Far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich says talks brokered by Qatar to release hostages going in the “wrong direction”, suggests that Israel should go “fire and brimstone” in Gaza and cut off contact.

Will ground war expand to southern Gaza? Two members of Israel’s war cabinet and one of its observers support the expansion of the army’s ground invasion to southern Gaza, a senior security official told Israeli media outlet Walla!. According to the source, there is unanimity between defence minister Yoav Galant, minister Benny Gantz and the Israeli army’s former chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot to push ahead with military operations regardless of ongoing talks on a deal to release captives.

Israeli deaths: In the past 24 hours, three Israeli soldiers were reportedly killed in Gaza, bringing the total number of soldiers killed since the start of ground operations to 56, according to official Israeli sources.

The firing of rockets by Palestinian armed groups towards Israeli population centers has continued over the past 24 hours, with no reported fatalities. (Information on rocket attacks is here.) It appears that the last time a rocket killed an Israeli was October 7, as reported by Ha’aretz. Ten Israelis were killed – 4 of them Palestinian Israelis.










https://israelpalestinenews.org/november-17-todays-news-palestine-israel-day-42/

Who is fighting to stop carbon pipelines from being installed near their communities? Environmentalists, lawmakers, regulators, as well as residents. Here's the latest example...
https://www.activistpost.com/2023/11/residents-convince-county-board-to-pass-resolution-against-proposed-carbon-pipeline.html

A Planned US-Israeli Attack on Iran is Contemplated
The U.S. led War on the People of Palestine and the Middle East is a Criminal Undertaking


Introduction

We stand in Solidarity with Palestine. But we must recognize that the United States Military and Intelligence apparatus is firmly behind Israel’s genocide directed against the People of Palestine.

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And this must be part of the solidarity campaign, namely to Reveal the Truth regarding Washington’s insidious role, which is part of a carefully planned military agenda directed against Palestine and the broader Middle East. Netanyahu is a proxy, with a criminal record. He has the unbending support of Western Europe’s “Classe politique”.

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The U.S. led War on the People of Palestine and the Middle East is a Criminal Undertaking

Israel and the Zionist lobby in the U.S. are NOT exerting undue influence AGAINST U.S. Foreign Policy as outlined by numerous analysts.

Quite the opposite. The Zionist lobby is firmly aligned with U.S. foreign policy, and Vice Versa. It targets those who are opposed to war, who call for a cease fire. It exerts influence in favour of the conduct of the U.S. military agenda in support of Israel.



The US military-intelligence establishment in coordination with powerful financial interests is calling the shots in regards to Israel’s genocidal intent to “Wipe Palestine off the Map”.

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America’s Military Doctrine: Deliberately Targeting and Killing Civilians

The targeting of civilians and the killing of children in Gaza is modelled on numerous US sponsored massacres of civilians (1945-2023) including the 2004 attack on Fallujah. (More than 30 Million mainly civilian deaths in US-led wars in what is euphemistically called the “post War Era”).
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Veteran War correspondent Felicity Arbuthnot reflected on the indescribable barbarity of the 2004 Fallujah massacre, which resulted in countless deaths and destruction. It was a genocide conducted by the U.S military:
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“The Americans invaded, chillingly: “house to house, room to room”, raining death and destruction on the proud, ancient “City of Mosques.”

Marines killed so many civilians that the municipal soccer stadium had to be turned into a graveyard …

One correspondent wrote: “There has been nothing like the attack on Fallujah since the Nazi invasion and occupation of much of the European continent – the shelling and bombing of Warsaw in September 1939, the terror bombing of Rotterdam in May 1940.”



Fallujah, 2004

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The U.S. is supportive of the Israeli genocide directed against the people of Palestine. Prime Minister Netanyahu is a criminal. He is Washington’s proxy, unreservedly endorsed and supported by the Biden Administration as well as the U.S. Congress.

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Zionism constitutes the ideological underpinnings of contemporary U.S. imperialism and its unending war against the people of the Middle East.

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The Zionist “Greater Israel” dogma –as in all wars of religion since the dawn of mankind– is there to mislead people Worldwide as to “who is really pulling the strings”.

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Zionism has become a useful instrument which is embodied in U.S. military doctrine. The “Promised Land” broadly coincides with America’s hegemonic agenda in the Middle East, namely what the U.S. military has designated as the “New Middle East”.

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Cui Bono: “To Whom Does it Benefit”

There are strategic, geopolitical and economic objectives behind Israel’s genocide directed against the people of Palestine. “Crimes are often committed to benefit their perpetrators”: Israel’s War against the People of Palestine serves the interests of Big Money, the Military Industrial Complex, Corrupt Politicians…

The Genocide is implemented by Netanyahu on behalf of the United States.

The US military and intelligence apparatus are behind Israel’s criminal bombing and invasion of Gaza. The unfolding Middle East War is largely directed against Iran.

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Iran and the Nuclear Issue

Historical Antecedents. Using Israel As a Means to Attacking Iran

In 2003, the war on Iran project (Operation Theatre Iran Near Term, TIRANNT)) was already Déjà Vu. It had been on the drawing board of the Pentagon for more than 15 years.

Let us recall that at the outset of Bush’s Second Term, Vice President Dick Cheney dropped a bombshell, hinting, in no uncertain terms, that Iran was “right at the top of the list” of the rogue enemies of America. And that Israel would, so to speak,

“be doing the bombing for us” [paraphrase] , without US military involvement and without us putting pressure on them “to do it”. For further details see my article below was first published by Global Research in May 2005, as well as PBS Interview with Z. Brzezinski

This Dick Cheney-style option is currently (November 2023) once more on the drawing board of the Pentagon, namely the possibility that Israel which is already bombing Lebanon and Syria, would be incited to wage an attack on Iran (acting on behalf of the United States).

US Congress Resolution (H. RES. 559) Accuses Iran of Possessing Nuclear Weapons

Careful timing: In June 2023, the US House of Representatives adopted Resolution (H. RES. 559) which provides a “Green Light” to wage war on Iran.

The US House passed a resolution that allows the use of force against Iran, intimating without a shred of evidence that Iran has Nuclear Weapons:

Resolved, That the House of Representatives declares it is the policy of the United States—

(1) that a nuclear Islamic Republic of Iran is not acceptable;

(2) that Iran must not be able to obtain a nuclear weapon under any circumstances or conditions;

(3) to use all means necessary to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon; and

(4) to recognize and support the freedom of action of partners and allies, including Israel, to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.

Click below to access the complete text of H. RES 559



Israel’s Undeclared Nuclear Weapons Arsenal

Whereas Iran is tagged (without evidence) as a Nuclear Power by the U.S. House of Representatives, Washington fails to acknowledge that Israel is an undeclared nuclear power.

In recent developments, Israeli Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu, “admitted to the world that Israel has nuclear weapons ready to be used against Palestinians”

The Times of Israel reported that: “Amichai Eliyahu said Sunday [November 5, 2023] that one of Israel’s options in the war against Hamas was to drop a nuclear bomb on the Gaza Strip”

Video on Israel’s Nuclear Weapons Facility

English subtitles



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The War on Energy

Unspoken Objective of a US-NATO-Israel War against Iran: Natural Gas

Reserves of Natural Gas: Iran ranks Second after Russia. Russia, Iran and Qatar possess 54.1 percent of the World’s reserves of natural gas.

-Russia 24.3%,

-Iran 17.3%,

-Qatar, 12.5 % (in partnership with Iran)

versus

-5.3 % for the US

President Joe Biden ordered to “blow up” (September 2022) the Nordstream Pipeline, which constitutes a U.S. Act of War against the European Union.

In the words of Joe Biden:

“There will be no longer a Nord Stream 2”. Statement at White House Press Conference (February 7, 2022)

America’s strategic objective was, despite its meagre reserves of natural gas:

To Force the European Union to buy LNG “Made in America”.

What this implies is that America’s military agenda against Russia and Iran constitutes a means to hike up EU energy prices, which is an act economic warfare against the People of Europe.






The Iran-Qatar Natural Gas Partnership

The maritime gas reserves of the Persian Gulf are under a (joint ownership) partnership between Qatar and Iran (See diagram below).





The Biden Administration is Intent upon Destabilizing the Iran-Qatar Partnership

This partnership is supportive of the People of Palestine.

In March 2022, “President Joe Biden following a meeting with Qatar’s Emir Sheik Tamim “designated Qatar as a major non-NATO ally of the United States, fulfilling the promise that he had made to Qatar earlier this year [2022], the White House said” Reuters



“The designation is granted by the United States to close, non-NATO allies that have strategic working relationships with the U.S. military.

Biden promised Qatar’s emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, in January [2022] during a meeting at the White House that he would grant Qatar the special status.” Reuters See also followup Reuters article.

What is at stake are cross-cutting coalitions. Qatar is a “Partner” of Iran in relation to the strategic reserves of maritime gas in the Persian Gulf. There is no formaI military cooperation between the two countries.

Washington’s unspoken agenda is to break and/or destabilize Qatar’s Partnership with Iran, by integrating Qatar into the US-NATO military orbit.

It is worth noting that a few days prior to the October 7, 2023 Hamas operation, the Emir of Qatar Sheik Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani “laid the foundation stone for the Northern Dome expansion project” in Iran’s Pars South Field (See map above).

“the Emir of Qatar said the groundbreaking for the Northern Dome expansion project was laid today, which is in line with Qatar’s strategy to strengthen its position as a global LNG producer …

This joint gas field, known as “South Pars” in Iran, is the largest natural gas field in the world and contains 50.97 trillion cubic meters of gas and about 7.9 billion cubic meters of natural gas condensate.

At the time of writing, the implications of Qatar’s “Special Status” Military Alliance with the U.S. remain unclear.

America’s Al-Udeid military base in Qatar (left) is the largest US base in the Middle East.

Have the status and functions of Al Udeid changed since the signing of the March 2022 agreement designating Qatar as a “Major Non NATO Ally of the US”

Qatar is both A Partner of Iran as well as a Major Non NATO Ally of the U.S. Reports confirm the development of a close relationship between the commanders of the US Air Force and the Qatari Emiri Air Force.

Qatar is a “Powder Keg”?

The U.S. foreign policy objective is to ultimately destroy and undermine that “friendship” with Iran which is highly valued and supported by Qatari citizens.

The export of gas from South Pars North Dome transits through Iran, Turkey and Russia.

Qatar, Russia and Iran (the 3 largest holders Worldwide of natural gas reserves) reached an agreement in 2009 to create a ‘Gas Troika’, a trilateral gas cooperation entity including the development of joint projects.

A large number of countries including South Korea, India, Japan, China are importing LNG from Qatar.

Last year (November 2022), “QatarEnergy signed a 27-year deal to supply China’s Sinopec with liquefied natural gas”. Qatar has also a strategic alliance with China.

Washington’s objective under the disguise of America’s “Major Non-NATO Alliance” with Qatar is to:

Break the Qatar-Iran Partnership
Exclude Iran from the Joint Maritime Gas Field
Exert US Control over the Maritime Gas Field in the Persian Gulf
Weaken and Disable the “Gas Troika” (Russia, Iran, Qatar)
Create Chaos in the Global Energy Market,
Undermine the Trade in Liquid Natural Gas (LNG) to Numerous Countries
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Iran. Third Largest Reserves of Oil Worldwide

Iran is not only second in terms of its gas reserves after Russia, it ranks third Worldwide in relation to its oil reserves (12% of Worldwide oil reserves) versus a meagre 4% for the U.S.








The Ben Gurion Canal Project

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U.S. Seeks Dominance over Strategic International Waterways

The Ben Gurion Canal Project was initially a “secret” (classified) U.S. project formulated in 1963 by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory LLNG, a strategic think tank (focussing on nuclear radiation) on contract with the U.S Department of Energy. The LLNG project was formulated in response to the nationalization of the Suez Canal in July 1956 by President Gamal Abdel Nasser (1956-1970). Its intent was to bypass the Suez Canal.

The Ben Gurion Canal project is currently contemplated as means control the channels of international maritime trade to the detriment of the people of the Middle East. It also seeks to destabilize China’s maritime commodity trade.



In the context of the broader US-led Middle East War, the Ben Gurion Canal Project is part of America’s hegemonic military agenda. It is consistent with Netanyahu’s “Plan to Wipe Palestine Off the Map”.

According to Yvonne Ridley:

“The only thing stopping the newly-revised [Ben Gurion Canal] project from being revived and rubber-stamped is the presence of the Palestinians in Gaza. As far as Netanyahu is concerned they are standing in the way of the project” (Yvonne Ridley, November 10, 2023, emphasis added)

The U.S led war is intent upon confiscating all Palestinian territories, which would be appropriated by the State of Israel, acting as a strategic “Anglo-American Hub” in the Middle East:

The Ben Gurion Canal will give Israel in particular and other friendly nations the freedom from blackmail arising out of access to the Suez Canal.

Arab states have been leveraging the Red Sea to pressure Israel and in response, Israel has decided to gain more control of the Red Sea. These African countries have cultural and economic affinities with the Arab states. One of the main military benefits for Israel is that it gives Israel the strategic options as the Ben Gurion Canal will totally take away the importance of Suez for the US military if needed in the aid for Israel.

Israel aims to push Egypt further into a corner by eliminating Suez in the global trade and energy corridor and becoming a global trade and energy logistics center.

Experts are of the opinion that this situation will shake the strategic-energy balance of China’s Belt and Road Project initiative in the Mediterranean, along with the Strait of Hormuz, which is the transfer point of 30 percent of the world’s energy. The Ben Gurion Canal would have the solid backing of the West. (Eurasia Review, November 7, 2023, emphasis added)

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“Greater Israel”.

Strategic “Anglo-American Hub”

The Promised Land of Greater Israel coincides with America’s Colonial Design in the Middle East

The Greater Israel design is not strictly a Zionist Project for the Middle East, it is an integral part of US foreign policy, its strategic objective is to extend US hegemony as well as fracture and balkanize the Middle East.

In this regard, Washington’s strategy consists in destabilizing and weakening regional economic powers in the Middle East including Turkey and Iran. This policy –which is consistent with the Greater Israel– is accompanied by a process of political fragmentation.



Since the Gulf war (1991), the Pentagon has contemplated the creation of a “Free Kurdistan” which would include the annexation of parts of Iraq, Syria and Iran as well as Turkey



“The New Middle East”: Unofficial US Military Academy Map by Lt. Col. Ralph Peters

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“America’s Promised Land”. Global Warfare

When viewed in the current context, including the siege on Gaza, the Zionist Plan for the Middle East coincides with America’s long war against the Middle East. As we mentioned earlier the Zionist agenda provides an ideological and religious justification of America’s long war against the Middle East.

The 1979-80. the so-called Soviet Afghan War, engineered by the CIA
The 1980-88 Iraq-Iran War engineered by the U.S.
The 1991 Gulf War against Iraq,
The 2001 The US-NATO Invasion of Afghanistan,
The 2003 Invasion of Iraq
The 2006 War on Lebanon,
The Arab Spring,
The 2011 war on Libya,
The 2015 war on Yemen
Obama’s 2014-2017 “Counter-Terrorism” Operation against Iraq and Syria
The ongoing wars against Syria, Iraq and Yemen
The “Greater Israel” project consists in weakening and eventually fracturing neighboring Arab states as part of a US-Israeli expansionist project, with the support of NATO.

Needless to day, the ideological and religious underpinnings of the “Greater Israel” project are consistent with America’s imperial design.

While the Zionist agenda is not the driving force, it serves the useful purpose of misleading public opinion concerning America’s long war against the people of the Middle East.

The Historical Context: A Sequence of Military Plans and Scenarios to Wage War on Iran

Since the launching of the Theater Iran Near Term (TIRANNT) war games scenario in May 2003 (leaked classified doc), an escalation scenario involving military action directed against Iran and Syria had been envisaged, of which Syria was the first stage.

TIRANNT was followed by a series of military plans pertaining to Iran. Numerous post 9/11 official statements and US military documents had pointed to an expanded Middle East war, involving the active participation of Israel.

Israel is America’s ally. Military operations are closely coordinated. Israel does not act without Washington’s approval.

U.S.-Israeli Air Defense

Barely acknowledged by the media, the US and Israel have an integrated air defense system, which was set up in early 2009, shortly after the Israel invasion of Gaza under “Operation Cast Led”.

The X-band radar air defense system set up by the US in Israel in 2009 would

“integrate Israel’s missile defenses with the U.S. global missile detection network, which includes satellites, Aegis ships on the Mediterranean, Persian Gulf and Red Sea, and land-based Patriot radars and interceptors.” (Sen. Joseph Azzolina, Protecting Israel from Iran’s missiles, Bayshore News, December 26, 2008). )

What this means is that Washington calls the shots. Confirmed by the Pentagon, the US military controls Israel’s Air Defense:

”This is and will remain a U.S. radar system,’ Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said.

‘So this is not something we are giving or selling to the Israelis and it is something that will likely require U.S. personnel on-site to operate.’” (Quoted in Israel National News, January 9, 2009, emphasis added).

At the outset of Obama’s Second Term, the US and Israel initiated discussions pertaining to a “US personnel on site” presence in Israel, namely the establishment of a “permanent” and “official” military base inside Israel.

And on September 17, 2017, a US Air Defense base located in the Negev desert was inaugurated.

According to the Israeli IDF spokesperson, the objective is to send a “message to the region, ” including Iran, Lebanon, Syria and Palestine.

Of utmost relevance:

Israel would not be able to act unilaterally against Iran, without a green light from the Pentagon which controls key components of Israel’s air defense system.

In practice, a war on Iran, would be a joint US-NATO-Israeli endeavor, coordinated by US Strategic Command (STRATCOM) with America’s allies playing a key (subordinate) role.

Michel Chossudovsky, October 31, 2017, November 11, 2023

Planned US-Israeli Attack on Iran

by

Michel Chossudovsky

May 2005

At the outset of Bush’s second term, Vice President Dick Cheney dropped a bombshell. He hinted, in no uncertain terms, that Iran was “right at the top of the list” of the rogue enemies of America, and that Israel would, so to speak, “be doing the bombing for us”, without US military involvement and without us putting pressure on them “to do it”:

“One of the concerns people have is that Israel might do it without being asked… Given the fact that Iran has a stated policy that their objective is the destruction of Israel, the Israelis might well decide to act first, and let the rest of the world worry about cleaning up the diplomatic mess afterwards,” (quoted from an MSNBC Interview Jan 2005)

Israel is a Rottweiler on a leash: The US wants to “set Israel loose” to attack Iran. Commenting the Vice President’s assertion, former National Security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski in an interview on PBS, confirmed with some apprehension, yes: Cheney wants Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to act on America’s behalf and “do it” for us:

“Iran I think is more ambiguous. And there the issue is certainly not tyranny; it’s nuclear weapons. And the vice president today in a kind of a strange parallel statement to this declaration of freedom hinted that the Israelis may do it and in fact used language which sounds like a justification or even an encouragement for the Israelis to do it.”

The foregoing statements are misleading. The US is not “encouraging Israel”. What we are dealing with is a joint US-Israeli military operation to bomb Iran, which has been in the active planning stage for more than a year. The Neocons in the Defense Department, under Douglas Feith, have been working assiduously with their Israeli military and intelligence counterparts, carefully identifying targets inside Iran (see Seymour Hersh)

Under this working arrangement, Israel will not act unilaterally, without a green light from Washington. In other words, Israel will not implement an attack without the participation of the US.

Covert Intelligence Operations: Stirring Ethnic Tensions in Iran

Meanwhile, for the last two years, Washington has been involved in covert intelligence operations inside Iran. American and British intelligence and special forces (working with their Israeli counterparts) are involved in this operation.

“A British intelligence official said that any campaign against Iran would not be a ground war like the one in Iraq. The Americans will use different tactics, said the intelligence officer. ‘It is getting quite scary.'” (Evening Standard, 17 June 2003)

The expectation is that a US-Israeli bombing raid of Iran’s nuclear facilities will stir up ethnic tensions and trigger “regime change” in favor of the US. (See Arab Monitor).

Bush advisers believe that the “Iranian opposition movement” will unseat the Mullahs. This assessment constitutes a gross misjudgment of social forces inside Iran. What is more likely to occur is that Iranians will consistently rally behind a wartime government against foreign aggression. In fact, the entire Middle East and beyond would rise up against US interventionism.

Retaliation in the Case of a US-Israeli Aerial Attack

Tehran has confirmed that it will retaliate if attacked, in the form of ballistic missile strikes directed against Israel (CNN, 8 Feb 2005). These attacks, could also target US military facilities in the Persian Gulf, which would immediately lead us into a scenario of military escalation and all out war.

In other words, the air strikes against Iran could contribute to unleashing a war in the broader Middle East Central Asian region.

Moreover, the planned attack on Iran should also be understood in relation to the timely withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon, which has opened up a new space, for the deployment of Israeli forces. The participation of Turkey in the US-Israeli military operation is also a factor, following an agreement reached between Ankara and Tel Aviv.

In other words, US and Israeli military planners must carefully weigh the far-reaching implications of their actions.

Israel Builds up its Stockpile of Deadly Military Hardware

A massive buildup in military hardware has occurred in preparation for a possible attack on Iran.

Israel has recently taken delivery from the US of some 5,000 “smart air launched weapons” including some 500 BLU 109 ‘bunker-buster bombs. The (uranium coated) munitions are said to be more than “adequate to address the full range of Iranian targets, with the possible exception of the buried facility at Natanz, which may require the [more powerful] BLU-113 bunker buster“:

“Given Israel’s already substantial holdings of such weapons, this increase in its inventory would allow a sustained assault with or without further US involvement.” (See Richard Bennett)

Gbu 28 Guided Bomb Unit-28 (GBU-28)

The Israeli Air Force would attack Iran’s nuclear facility at Bushehr using US as well Israeli produced bunker buster bombs. The attack would be carried out in three separate waves “with the radar and communications jamming protection being provided by U.S. Air Force AWACS and other U.S. aircraft in the area”. (See W Madsen)

Bear in mind that the bunker buster bombs can also be used to deliver tactical nuclear bombs. The B61-11 is the “nuclear version” of the “conventional” BLU 113. It can be delivered in much same way as the conventional bunker buster bomb. (See Michel Chossudovsky, see also this)

According to the Pentagon, tactical nuclear weapons are “safe for civilians”. Their use has been authorized by the US Senate. (See Michel Chossudovsky)

Moreover, reported in late 2003, Israeli Dolphin-class submarines equipped with US Harpoon missiles armed with nuclear warheads are now aimed at Iran. (See Gordon Thomas)

Even if tactical nuclear weapons are not used by Israel, an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities not only raises the specter of a broader war, but also of nuclear radiation over a wide area:

“To attack Iran’s nuclear facilities will not only provoke war, but it could also unleash clouds of radiation far beyond the targets and the borders of Iran.” (Statement of Prof Elias Tuma, Arab Internet Network, Federal News Service, 1 March 2005)

Moreover, while most reports have centered on the issue of punitive air strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, the strikes would most probably extend to other targets.

While a ground war is contemplated as a possible “scenario” at the level of military planning, the US military would not be able to wage a an effective ground war, given the situation in Iraq. In the words of former National Security Adviser Lawrence Eagelberger:

“We are not going to get in a ground war in Iran, I hope. If we get into that, we are in serious trouble. I don’t think anyone in Washington is seriously considering that.” ( quoted in the National Journal, 4 December 2004).

Iran’s Military Capabilities

Despite its overall weaknesses in relation to Israel and the US, Iran has an advanced air defense system, deployed to protect its nuclear sites; “they are dispersed and underground making potential air strikes difficult and without any guarantees of success.” (Jerusalem Post, 20 April 2005).

It has upgraded its Shahab-3 missile, which can reach targets in Israel. Iran’s armed forces have recently conducted high-profile military exercises in anticipation of a US led attack. Iran also possesses some 12 X-55 strategic cruise missiles, produced by Ukraine. Iran’s air defense systems is said to feature Russian SA-2, SA-5, SA-6 as well as shoulder-launched SA-7 missiles (Jaffa Center for Strategic Studies).

The US “Military Road Map”

The Bush administration has officially identified Iran and Syria as the next stage of “the road map to war”.

Targeting Iran is a bipartisan project, which broadly serves the interests of the Anglo-American oil conglomerates, the Wall Street financial establishment and the military-industrial complex.

The broader Middle East-Central Asian region encompasses more than 70% of the World’s reserves of oil and natural gas. Iran possesses 10% of the world’s oil and ranks third after Saudi Arabia (25 %) and Iraq (11 %) in the size of its reserves. In comparison, the US possesses less than 2.8 % of global oil reserves. (See Eric Waddell, The Battle for Oil)

The announcement to target Iran should come as no surprise. It is part of the battle for oil. Already during the Clinton administration, US Central Command (USCENTCOM) had formulated “in war theater plans” to invade both Iraq and Iran:

“The broad national security interests and objectives expressed in the President’s National Security Strategy (NSS) and the Chairman’s National Military Strategy (NMS) form the foundation of the United States Central Command’s theater strategy. The NSS directs implementation of a strategy of dual containment of the rogue states of Iraq and Iran as long as those states pose a threat to U.S. interests, to other states in the region, and to their own citizens. Dual containment is designed to maintain the balance of power in the region without depending on either Iraq or Iran. USCENTCOM’s theater strategy is interest-based and threat-focused. The purpose of U.S. engagement, as espoused in the NSS, is to protect the United States’ vital interest in the region – uninterrupted, secure U.S./Allied access to Gulf oil. (USCENTCOM, USPolicy , emphasis added)

Main Military Actors

While the US, Israel, as well as Turkey (with borders with both Iran and Syria) are the main actors in this process, a number of other countries, in the region, allies of the US, including several Central Asian former Soviet republics have been enlisted. Britain is closely involved despite its official denials at the diplomatic level. Turkey occupies a central role in the Iran operation. It has an extensive military cooperation agreement with Israel. There are indications that NATO is also formally involved in the context of an Israel-NATO agreement reached in November 2004.

Planning The Aerial Attack on Iran

According to former weapons inspector Scott Ritter, George W. Bush has already signed off on orders for an aerial attack on Iran, scheduled for June.(See this)

The June cut-off date should be understood. It does not signify that the attack will occur in June. What it suggests is that the US and Israel are “in a state of readiness” and are prepared to launch an attack by June or at a later date. In other words, the decision to launch the attack has not been made.

Ritter’s observation concerning an impending military operation should nonetheless be taken seriously. In recent months, there is ample evidence that a major military operation is in preparation:

1) several high profile military exercises have been conducted in recent months, involving military deployment and the testing of weapons systems.

2) military planning meetings have been held between the various parties involved. There has been a shuttle of military and government officials between Washington, Tel Aviv and Ankara.

3) A significant change in the military command structure in Israel has occurred, with the appointment of a new Chief of Staff.

4) Intense diplomatic exchanges have been carried out at the international level with a view to securing areas of military cooperation and/or support for a US-Israeli led military operation directed against Iran.

5) Ongoing intelligence operations inside Iran have been stepped up.

6) Consensus Building: Media propaganda on the need to intervene in Iran has been stepped up, with daily reports on how Iran constitutes a threat to peace and global security.

Timeline of Key Initiatives

In the last few months, various key initiatives have been taken, which are broadly indicative that an aerial bombing of Iran is in the military pipeline:

November 2004 in Brussels: NATO-Israel protocol: Israel’s IDF delegation to the NATO conference to met with military brass of six members of the Mediterranean basin nations, including Egypt, Jordan, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria and Mauritania. NATO seeks to revive the framework, known as the Mediterranean Dialogue program, which would include Israel. The Israeli delegation accepted to participate in military exercises and “anti-terror maneuvers” together with several Arab countries.

January 2005: the US, Israel and Turkey held military exercises in the Eastern Mediterranean, off the coast of Syria. These exercises, which have been held in previous years were described as routine.

February 2005. Following the decision reached in Brussels in November 2004, Israel was involved for the first time in military exercises with NATO, which also included several Arab countries.

February 2005: Assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. The assassination, which was blamed on Syria, serves Israeli and US interests and was used as a pretext to demand the withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon.

February 2005: Sharon fires his Chief-of-Staff, Moshe Ya’alon and appoints Air Force General Dan Halutz. This is the first time in Israeli history that an Air Force General is appointed Chief of Staff (See Uri Avnery)

The appointment of Major General Dan Halutz as IDF Chief of Staff is considered in Israeli political circles as “the appointment of the right man at the right time.” The central issue is that a major aerial operation against Iran is in the planning stage, and Maj General Halutz is slated to coordinate the aerial bombing raids on Iran. Halutz’s appointment was specifically linked to Israel’s Iran agenda: “As chief of staff, he will in the best position to prepare the military for such a scenario.”

March 2005: NATO’s Secretary General was in Jerusalem for follow-up talks with Ariel Sharon and Israel’s military brass, following the joint NATO-Israel military exercise in February. These military cooperation ties are viewed by the Israeli military as a means to “enhance Israel’s deterrence capability regarding potential enemies threatening it, mainly Iran and Syria.” The premise underlying NATO-Israel military cooperation is that Israel is under attack:

“The more Israel’s image is strengthened as a country facing enemies who attempt to attack it for no justified reason, the greater will be the possibility that aid will be extended to Israel by NATO. Furthermore, Iran and Syria will have to take into account the possibility that the increasing cooperation between Israel and NATO will strengthen Israel’s links with Turkey, also a member of NATO. Given Turkey’s impressive military potential and its geographic proximity to both Iran and Syria, Israel’s operational options against them, if and when it sees the need, could gain considerable strength. ” (Jaffa Center for Strategic Studies, http://www.tau.ac.il/jcss/sa/v7n4p4Shalom.html )

The Israel-NATO protocol is all the more important because it obligates NATO to align itself with the US-Israeli plan to bomb Iran, as an act of self defense on the part of Israel. It also means that NATO is also involved in the process of military consultations relating to the planned aerial bombing of Iran. It is of course related to the bilateral military cooperation agreement between Israel and Turkey and the likelihood that part of the military operation will be launched from Turkey, which is a member of NATO.

Late March 2005: News leaks in Israel indicated an “initial authorization” by Prime Minster Ariel Sharon of an Israeli attack on Iran’s Natanz uranium enrichment plant “if diplomacy failed to stop Iran’s nuclear program”. (The Hindu, 28 March 2005)

March-April 2005: The Holding in Israel of Joint US-Israeli military exercises specifically pertaining to the launching of Patriot missiles.

US Patriot missile crews stationed in Germany were sent to Israel to participate in the joint Juniper Cobra exercise with the Israeli military. The exercise was described as routine and “unconnected to events in the Middle East”: “As always, we are interested in implementing lessons learned from training exercises.” (UPI, 9 March 2005).

April 2005: Donald Rumsfeld (right) was on an official visits to Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan and Azerbaijan. His diplomatic endeavors were described by the Russian media as “literally circling Iran in an attempt to find the best bridgehead for a possible military operation against that country.”

In Baku, Azerbaijan Rumsfeld was busy discussing the date for deployment of US troops in Azerbaijan on Iran’s North-Western border. US military bases described as “mobile groups” in Azerbaijan are slated to play a role in a military operation directed against Iran.

Azerbaijan is a member of GUUAM, a military cooperation agreement with the US and NATO, which allows for the stationing of US troops in several of the member countries, including Georgia, Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan. The stated short term objective is to “neutralize Iran”. The longer term objective under the Pentagon’s “Caspian Plan” is to exert military and economic control over the entire Caspian sea basin, with a view to ensuring US authority over oil reserves and pipeline corridors.

During his visit in April, Rumsfeld was pushing the US initiative of establishing “American special task forces and military bases to secure US influence in the Caspian region:

“Called Caspian Watch, the project stipulates a network of special task forces and police units in the countries of the regions to be used in emergencies including threats to objects of the oil complex and pipelines. Project Caspian Watch will be financed by the United States ($100 million). It will become an advance guard of the US European Command whose zone of responsibility includes the Caspian region. Command center of the project with a powerful radar is to be located in Baku.” ( Defense and Security Russia, April 27, 2005)

Rumsfeld’s visit followed shortly after that of Iranian President Mohammad Khatami’s to Baku.

April 2005: Iran signs a military cooperation with Tajikistan, which occupies a strategic position bordering Afghanistan’s Northern frontier. Tajikistan is a member of “The Shanghai Five” military cooperation group, which also includes Kazakhstan, China, Kyrgyzstan, and Russia. Iran also has economic cooperation agreements with Turkmenistan.

Mid April 2005: Israel Prime Minister Ariel Sharon meets George W Bush at his Texas Ranch. Iran is on the agenda of bilateral talks. More significantly, the visit of Ariel Sharon was used to carry out high level talks between US and Israeli military planners pertaining to Iran.

Late April 2005. President Vladmir Putin is in Israel on an official visit. He announces Russia’s decision to sell short-range anti-aircraft missiles to Syria and to continue supporting Iran’s nuclear industry. Beneath the gilded surface of international diplomacy, Putin’s timely visit to Israel must be interpreted as “a signal to Israel” regarding its planned aerial attack on Iran.

Late April 2005: US pressure in the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has been exerted with a view to blocking the re-appointment of Mohammed Al Baradei, who according to US officials “is not being tough enough on Iran…” Following US pressures, the vote on the appointment of a new IAEA chief was put off until June. These developments suggest that Washington wants to put forth their own hand-picked nominee prior to launching US-Israeli aerial attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities. (See VOA). (In February 2003, Al Baradei along with UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix challenged the (phony) intelligence on WMD presented by the US to the UN Security Council, with a view to justifying the war on Iraq.)

Late April 2005. Sale of deadly military hardware to Israel. GBU-28 Buster Bunker Bombs: Coinciding with Putin’s visit to Israel, the US Defence Security Cooperation Agency (Department of Defense) announced the sale of an additional 100 bunker-buster bombs produced by Lockheed Martin to Israel. This decision was viewed by the US media as “a warning to Iran about its nuclear ambitions.”

The sale pertains to the larger and more sophisticated “Guided Bomb Unit-28 (GBU-28) BLU-113 Penetrator” (including the WGU-36A/B guidance control unit and support equipment). The GBU-28 is described as “a special weapon for penetrating hardened command centers located deep underground. The fact of the matter is that the GBU-28 is among the World’s most deadly “conventional” weapons used in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, capable of causing thousands of civilian deaths through massive explosions.

The Israeli Air Force are slated to use the GBU-28s on their F-15 aircraft. (See text of DSCA news release)

Late April 2005- early May: Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan (right) in Israel for follow-up talks with Ariel Sharon. He was accompanied by his Defense Minister Vecdi Gonul, who met with senior Israeli military officials. On the official agenda of these talks: joint defense projects, including the joint production of Arrow II Theater Missile Defense and Popeye II missiles. The latter also known as the Have Lite, are advanced small missiles, designed for deployment on fighter planes. Tel Aviv and Ankara decide to establish a hotline to share intelligence.

May 2005: Syrian troops scheduled to withdraw from Lebanon, leading to a major shift in the Middle East security situation, in favor of Israel and the US.

Iran Surrounded

The US has troops and military bases in Turkey, Pakistan, Azerbaijan, Afghanistan, and of course Iraq.

In other words, Iran is virtually surrounded by US military bases. (see Map below). These countries as well as Turkmenistan, are members of NATO`s partnership for Peace Program and have military cooperation agreements with NATO.



Copyright Eric Waddell, Global Research, 2003

In other words, we are dealing with a potentially explosive scenario in which a number of countries, including several former Soviet republics, could be brought into a US led war with Iran. IranAtom.ru, a Russian based news and military analysis group has suggested, in this regard:

“since Iranian nuclear objects are scattered all over the country, Israel will need a mass strike with different fly-in and fly-out approaches – Jordan, Iraq, Turkey, Azerbaijan, and other countries… Azerbaijan seriously fears Tehran’s reaction should Baku issue a permit to Israeli aircraft to overfly its territory.” (Defense and Security Russia, 12 April 2005).

Concluding remarks

The World is at an important crossroads.

The Bush Administration has embarked upon a military adventure which threatens the future of humanity.

Iran is the next military target. The planned military operation, which is by no means limited to punitive strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities, is part of a project of World domination, a military roadmap, launched at the end of the Cold War.

Military action against Iran would directly involve Israel’s participation, which in turn is likely to trigger a broader war throughout the Middle East, not to mention an implosion in the Palestinian occupied territories. Turkey is closely associated with the proposed aerial attacks.

Israel is a nuclear power with a sophisticated nuclear arsenal. (See text box below). The use of nuclear weapons by Israel or the US cannot be excluded, particularly in view of the fact that tactical nuclear weapons have now been reclassified as a variant of the conventional bunker buster bombs and are authorized by the US Senate for use in conventional war theaters. (“they are harmless to civilians because the explosion is underground”)

In this regard, Israel and the US rather than Iran constitute a nuclear threat.

The planned attack on Iran must be understood in relation to the existing active war theaters in the Middle East, namely Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine.

The conflict could easily spread from the Middle East to the Caspian sea basin. It could also involve the participation of Azerbaijan and Georgia, where US troops are stationed.

An attack on Iran would have a direct impact on the resistance movement inside Iraq. It would also put pressure on America’s overstretched military capabilities and resources in both the Iraqi and Afghan war theaters. (The 150,000 US troops in Iraq are already fully engaged and could not be redeployed in the case of a war with Iran.)

In other words, the shaky geopolitics of the Central Asia- Middle East region, the three existing war theaters in which America is currently, involved, the direct participation of Israel and Turkey, the structure of US sponsored military alliances, etc. raises the specter of a broader conflict.

Moreover, US military action on Iran not only threatens Russian and Chinese interests, which have geopolitical interests in the Caspian sea basin and which have bilateral agreements with Iran. It also backlashes on European oil interests in Iran and is likely to produce major divisions between Western allies, between the US and its European partners as well as within the European Union.

Through its participation in NATO, Europe, despite its reluctance, would be brought into the Iran operation. The participation of NATO largely hinges on a military cooperation agreement reached between NATO and Israel. This agreement would bind NATO to defend Israel against Syria and Iran. NATO would therefore support a preemptive attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, and could take on a more active role if Iran were to retaliate following US-Israeli air strikes.

Needless to say, the war against Iran is part of a longer term US military agenda which seeks to militarize the entire Caspian sea basin, eventually leading to the destabilization and conquest of the Russian Federation.

The Antiwar Movement

The antiwar movement must act, consistently, to prevent the next phase of this war from happening.

This is no easy matter. The holding of large antiwar rallies will not in itself reverse the tide of war.

High ranking officials of the Bush administration, members of the military and the US Congress have been granted the authority to uphold an illegal war agenda.

What is required is a grass roots network, a mass movement at national and international levels, which challenges the legitimacy of the military and political actors, and which is ultimately instrumental in unseating those who rule in our name.

War criminals occupy positions of authority. The citizenry is galvanized into supporting the rulers, who are “committed to their safety and well-being”. Through media disinformation, war is given a humanitarian mandate.

To reverse the tide of war, military bases must be closed down, the war machine (namely the production of advanced weapons systems) must be stopped and the burgeoning police state must be dismantled.

The corporate backers and sponsors of war and war crimes must also be targeted including the oil companies, the defense contractors, the financial institutions and the corporate media, which has become an integral part of the war propaganda machine.

Antiwar sentiment does not dismantle a war agenda. The war criminals in the US, Israel and Britain must be removed from high office.

What is needed is to reveal the true face of the American Empire and the underlying criminalization of US foreign policy, which uses the “war on terrorism” and the threat of Al Qaeda to galvanize public opinion in support of a global war agenda.

Israel’s Nuclear Capabilities

With between 200 and 500 thermonuclear weapons and a sophisticated delivery system, Israel has quietly supplanted Britain as the World’s 5th Largest nuclear power, and may currently rival France and China in the size and sophistication of its nuclear arsenal. Although dwarfed by the nuclear arsenals of the U.S. and Russia, each possessing over 10,000 nuclear weapons, Israel nonetheless is a major nuclear power, and should be publicly recognized as such.

Today, estimates of the Israeli nuclear arsenal range from a minimum of 200 to a maximum of about 500. Whatever the number, there is little doubt that Israeli nukes are among the world’s most sophisticated, largely designed for “war fighting” in the Middle East. A staple of the Israeli nuclear arsenal are “neutron bombs,” miniaturized thermonuclear bombs designed to maximize deadly gamma radiation while minimizing blast effects and long term radiation- in essence designed to kill people while leaving property intact.(16) Weapons include ballistic missiles and bombers capable of reaching Moscow…

The bombs themselves range in size from “city busters” larger than the Hiroshima Bomb to tactical mini nukes. The Israeli arsenal of weapons of mass destruction clearly dwarfs the actual or potential arsenals of all other Middle Eastern states combined, and is vastly greater than any conceivable need for “deterrence.”

Many Middle East Peace activists have been reluctant to discuss, let alone challenge, the Israeli monopoly on nuclear weapons in the region, often leading to incomplete and uninformed analyses and flawed action strategies. Placing the issue of Israeli weapons of mass destruction directly and honestly on the table and action agenda would have several salutary effects. First, it would expose a primary destabilizing dynamic driving the Middle East arms race and compelling the region’s states to each seek their own “deterrent.”

Second, it would expose the grotesque double standard which sees the U.S. and Europe on the one hand condemning Iraq, Iran and Syria for developing weapons of mass destruction, while simultaneously protecting and enabling the principal culprit. Third, exposing Israel’s nuclear strategy would focus international public attention, resulting in increased pressure to dismantle its weapons of mass destruction and negotiate a just peace in good faith. Finally, a nuclear free Israel would make a Nuclear Free Middle East and a comprehensive regional peace agreement much more likely. Unless and until the world community confronts Israel over its covert nuclear program it is unlikely that there will be any meaningful resolution of the Israeli/Arab conflict, a fact that Israel may be counting on as the Sharon era dawns.

From John Steinbach, Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal, Global Research



https://www.globalresearch.ca/planned-us-israeli-attack-on-iran-2/5615443

Al Shefa is the main hospital in besieged Gaza! The Zionist terrorists have no mercy!

#IsraelWarCrimes

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/8/why-is-gazas-al-shifa-hospital-at-the-heart-of-israels-war

Why is Gaza’s al-Shifa hospital at the heart of Israel’s war?
It’s Gaza’s largest hospital, sheltering and treating thousands of Palestinians even as Israel attacks it.

Lorraine Mallinder
An injured Palestinian boy is carried from the ground following an Israeli airstrike outside the entrance of the al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City
For Palestinians in Gaza, it’s the “house of healing”. For Israel, it’s Hamas’s main command centre.

Al-Shifa, the biggest hospital in the enclave, is now at breaking point, battling to treat thousands of patients as it comes under direct attack from the Israeli military.

Last week, the Israeli army bombed an ambulance outside the hospital, part of a convoy that was meant to carry patients from Gaza City to the Rafah border crossing, so they could be treated in Egypt. Fifteen people were killed in the attack, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, which had coordinated the journey with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Gaza.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) said the attack, which killed people inside and around the ambulance, should be investigated as a possible war crime.



On Monday, it was reported that Israeli forces had again targeted the hospital, this time hitting a solar panel system that provided electricity to its main departments. With barely any fuel left in its tanks to keep its one generator running, it’s now only a matter of time before the hospital is forced to switch off vital equipment like ventilators and dialysis machines, leaving patients to die.

Here’s what you need to know about al-Shifa and why is it being targeted:

What is al-Shifa?

Dar al-Shifa, literally translated as “house of healing”, is the largest and most extensive medical complex in the strip, comprising three specialised facilities: surgical, internal medicine, and obstetrics and gynaecology.

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Week in the Middle East


Located in the northern Remal neighbourhood, close to the port, the site originally housed British Army barracks. It became a hospital in 1946, undergoing successive expansions under Egyptian rule and during the Israeli occupation in the 1980s.

The hospital has become a lifeline for people seeking urgent medical intervention. Like all hospitals in the besieged strip – bar the Jordanian field hospital, which received an airdrop of medical aid at midnight on Sunday – it has been denied urgently needed supplies of medicine and fuel.

It has the capacity to treat 700 patients, but right now doctors are treating approximately 5,000, according to a recent report by Doctors Without Borders, known by its French initials MSF. Thousands of people who have lost their homes are living in the hospital corridors and in the courtyard.

INTERACTIVE_GAZA_al-Shifa_NOV8_2023-1699442409

Already overwhelmed, the hospital has been flooded with bodies and wounded patients since last week’s bombing of the Abu Assi school, run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). Casualties mounted on Sunday, following one of the heaviest nights of bombardment seen so far, which saw the Israeli military hit 450 targets in the north – including the nearby Shati refugee camp.

Dr Marwan Abusada, the hospital’s head of surgery, said that al-Shifa can offer 210 beds on normal days. Currently, 800 patients are waiting to be admitted, he said in a statement relayed to Al Jazeera by NGO Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP).

The hospital is also low on personnel. Israeli air attacks have killed 150 medical staff in the strip.

What are conditions like right now?

“At all levels, we are dealing with a health disaster,” said Dr Abusada.

MSF, which supplied al-Shifa with the medicines and equipment that it still has in its stock, has reported that surgeons at the hospital are operating on patients without painkillers. Short on beds, surgeons have amputated limbs as patients lie on the floor.

With nowhere to keep patients in the unhygienic conditions, patients who have undergone surgical procedures run a high risk of infection. “We have a type of worm, called white flies, covering the wounds after the surgery. They appear after one day,” said Dr Abusada.

Running on empty, the hospital is barely able to deliver needs, conserving its electricity supply for its emergency unit, intensive care and operating rooms. “We are trying hard to continue delivering services to the patients who need kidney dialysis, urgent catheterisation and … incubators, but we are delivering the bare minimum,” said the doctor.

On Monday, an Al Jazeera report depicted scenes of chaos outside and inside the hospital, with bloodied patients lining the corridors. Having just pronounced a man dead, surgeon Sara Al Saqqa spoke of living, sleeping and waking at the hospital, working as many as 72 consecutive hours.

“Every day, we say today was the worst ever, then the next day is worse,” she said, adding later that there aren’t enough freezers to keep the corpses.

At the weekend, the hospital was forced to transfer its maternity ward to the private Al Helou International Hospital in Gaza City. An estimated 50,000 pregnant women are caught up in the conflict, according to the United Nations Population Fund in Palestine. Premature births and miscarriages are on the rise, owing to the fear and panic caused by bombardment.

In northern Gaza, where the hospital is located, the main sources of water – a desalination plant and the pipeline from Israel – have been shut down since the start of the war. At present, the hospital only receives salty groundwater, unsuitable for drinking and hygiene. According to the UN, only 5 percent of Gaza’s water needs are being met.

A Palestinian man mourns
A Palestinian man mourns as civil defense teams and residents conduct a search and rescue operation for Palestinians stuck under the debris of a demolished building following Israeli airstrikes hit al-Shati refugee camp in Gaza City on October 24, 2023. [Ali Jadallah/Anadolu via Getty Images]
Why is it under attack?

Al-Shifa is a prime target for Israeli forces, which claim the hospital is located above the headquarters of Hamas, the armed group that has governed Gaza since 2007.

Last month, the Israeli military released a video that used a combination of satellite imagery and animated graphics to claim that it had intelligence-based proof of Hamas’s purported use of the hospital below ground, with tunnels, facilities and meeting rooms. Hamas has rejected those claims, which it said is sheltering more than 40,000 displaced people.

It’s not the first time that links have been drawn between Hamas and al-Shifa. Following Israel’s 2014 ground offensive in Gaza, Amnesty International accused Hamas of committing “spine-chilling” atrocities against political rivals in abandoned areas of the hospital to extract confessions of collaboration. In an earlier report, the rights group had also accused Israel of war crimes during its incursion, which killed more than 2100 people.

Back then, too, the hospital had come under attack. Israel and Hamas traded blame for an explosion at the hospital that reportedly killed at least 10 children. Hamas blamed the blast on an Israeli drone attack, while Israel claimed it had been caused by a failed Palestinian rocket. The episode had shades of a similarly disputed, but much deadlier explosion at al-Ahli Arab Hospital last month.

In the current conflict, Israel has accused Hamas of storing fuel for its own operations, preventing more supplies from entering in the limited number of humanitarian convoys crossing into the strip. With no power, 16 out of the 35 hospitals in the Gaza Strip have stopped working.

Smoke rises following Israeli strikes, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, in Gaza City, November 7
Smoke rises following Israeli attacks, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestinian group Hamas, in Gaza City, November 7, 2023 [Mohammed Al-Masri/Reuters]
What next for al-Shifa?

As Israeli forces close in, the outlook is bleak for al-Shifa. At the time of writing, Israeli troops had severed northern Gaza from the rest of the enclave and were engaging Hamas fighters in the heart of Gaza City.

Israel has insisted that it wants to rout Hamas, destroy the alleged headquarters below the hospital and hunt down the group’s fighters. It has also said it wants to assume control of the strip’s security for the foreseeable future.