Politics, philosophy, and music. Lecturer in Politics & Religion, University of Stirling. Author of “Hizbullah and the Politics of Remembrance” (Cambridge UP)
If you believe the Israeli army has become immoral only after the 7th of October 2023, you are dead wrong. Read this:
During the 1948 war, the Zionist Haganah and the newly formed IDF did not rely on conventional warfare alone.
Israeli historians Benny Morris and Benjamin Z. Kedar have documented a covert biological warfare campaign known as “Cast Thy Bread” or “Shallah Lahmekha”, in which Arab water sources were deliberately contaminated with bacteria, including typhoid and dysentery agents. The operation targeted wells and water systems in places such as Acre, where a typhoid outbreak preceded the city’s fall, and included attempted operations elsewhere, including Eilabun and the Gaza area.
What had long been dismissed as rumour has since been substantiated through declassified Israeli military archives, references in David Ben-Gurion’s diary, British, Red Cross and Arab reports, and the detailed research published by Morris and Kedar in Middle Eastern Studies.
The significance is not only historical but legal and moral. The poisoning of civilian water sources violated the 1925 Geneva Protocol’s prohibition on bacteriological warfare and formed part of a wider strategy designed to weaken Arab communities, spread fear, impede military movement and discourage the return of displaced Palestinians. Its overall battlefield impact may have been limited, but the precedent is stark: biological contamination was used as an instrument of war and population control during Israel’s foundational conflict.
‘They massacred Arab babies’
Headline in the Sydney Daily Telegraph, 1948.
This passage stands out:
Jews saw their opportunity. Men of the army of Zion attacked Deir Yassin at 10 a.m. that day.
They easily overcame the opposition. They killed 20 Arab defenders, and entered the village, tossing grenades into houses.
They killed old men, women, and children with bayonets. For three hours the slaughter went on.
Babies were killed in front of their mothers. Mothers’ throats were slit. Some were beheaded.
A group of men and women—some of the women obviously pregnant—were lined up and shot. The bloodlusting Jewish soldiery desecrated the bodies of pregnant mothers with knives.
When they had murdered 264 villagers, the Jews called a halt. They rounded up four truckloads of survivors of all ages and both sexes, tossed the bodies of the dead into the village well, and drove off with the survivors.
The victorious Jews drove the survivors through Jewish areas as exhibits of victory while Jews spat upon them. The parade continued, with breaks, for two days.
——————-
Every Zionist accusation is a confession.
Zionism is Jewish supremacism. The bloodlust is baked in.
#EndJewishSupremacy
#DismantleZionism
🚨 A journalist colleague, @loffredojeremy reached out to the number that had sent death threats to Lebanese journalist @AmalKhalil, asking for comment.
This was the response:
“These are not innocent people… journalists affiliated with Hezbollah… should know that they are destined for death.”
Read that again.
A direct threat is not only repeated, it is justified.
Journalists are being labeled, dehumanised, & openly treated as legitimate targets.
This is not intimidation.
This is the normalisation of targeting journalists.
Amal al-Khalil was reporting from village to village, documenting funerals, destruction, & the human cost of Israel’s war on Lebanon.
She is not a combatant. She is a journalist.
And yet, the message is clear: those who report are being threatened with death.
This is being said openly.
Read the message below 👇
This excellent exposé of Mossad's methodology in conducting assassinations in Lebanon is essential viewing.
Make sure you subscribe and donate to @AlMahtta0 and follow @RadwanMortada.
I hope they will be able to put English subtitles on all their videos. No doubt donations would help this along.
Mapped the IDF's newly declared "Forward Defense Zone" in south Lebanon. Its maritime boundary fully absorbs Lebanon's Qana gas field, whose exploration rights were explicitly guaranteed under the 2022 US-brokered maritime border agreement.
More maps in this thread 🧵
‼️ Israel just formalized its land grab in southern Lebanon with a brand-new “Yellow Line” - a unilateral buffer zone, straight out of the Gaza playbook.
The IDF now claims a high-security perimeter inside Lebanese territory, reportedly covering 55 villages.
Residents are barred from returning & Israeli forces say they will continue demolishing any homes, infrastructure, or “threats” they deem necessary within that area. Same rules of engagement as Gaza. Same permanent-occupation model.
Surely, this was never agreed to by the Lebanese government?
The 10-day ceasefire, barely two days old, was presented as a pause to negotiate withdrawal and de-escalation. There has been no indication Beirut agreed to Israel carving out a security strip, preventing civilians from returning, or continuing destruction under its own rules.
Netanyahu and the IDF are openly saying they’re staying put and expanding control. That’s not a ceasefire, that’s the slow-motion imposition of a buffer zone dressed up as security policy.
Lebanon did not agree to give up these villages. Israel is acting as if it has.
At this pace, it is only a matter of time before the Resistance resumes activity against, what is in effect, an official occupying force.
A ceasefire this fragile will not hold
Israel has destroyed the final bridge to Southern Lebanon. There is now no way for millions of displaced people to reach their homes. There is no means for essential aid and supplies to reach those who were unable to flee.
Another mammoth war crime, another act of barbarity.
@HalaJaber It’s so shameful that he was called a “Christian Zionist” a minority movement of American nut jobs, and he just stood there passively nodding. A complete disgrace, but typical of Lebanese when receiving white people��s attention.
The bells of Our Lady of the Head Church tolled solemnly at the moment the town’s son, Hezbollah martyr Jaafar Ibrahim Salim, returned home; an echo of grief, honor, and farewell carried through every corner of the village of Bahboush in Koura, north Lebanon.
A Muslim-Shia northerner rose to Allah sw, while defending our south from Zionist aggression and occupation, being honored by his Christian brothers and sisters who all come from the same village, on the eve of Good Friday. Nothing tops this.
Nothing.
There’s something surreal in the number of times in the past month Israeli PM #Netanyahu announced the “expansion” northward of ground operations in the south of Lebanon while #Hezbollah has been gradually hitting more southward, closer to the border.
(Then) President Amine el-Gemayel writing in 1985:
“If Israel does not withdraw fully and soon, the Lebanese resistance movement could develop from a movement to free Lebanon from Israeli occupation to a movement that threatens the Israeli state per se. Passions that are unleashed now could evolve into a massive and unpredictable movement with long-range consequences for the prospects of peace in the Middle East.”
Analysis?
(1) Israel did not withdraw (until 2000).
(2) The resistance movement expanded in capacity and evolved into a transnational actor (with Iranian backing).
(3) Israel is now engaged in a regional, existentially framed war. The region is in deep trouble.
(4) Segments of Lebanese society have yet to comprehend these dynamics, and continue to miss the point: occupying the South will not resolve the problem.
https://t.co/IlVbZZXm0Q
A v.timely &insightful piece by @ziadaburish: "The result was an army structurally oriented twd shoring up state power domestically, managing Lebanon’s internal fractures, &maintaining intnl alliances rather than confronting Israel’s repeated violations of Leb. territory."
Incredible photo of the Lebanese journalist, Ali Shoeib, reporting in front of illegal invaders.
Shoeib was murdered by Israel today in a targeted assassination.
Today in Lebanon, Israel killed two journalists, one of them had lost 7 members family just a month ago, and it also killed the paramedics that rushed to save them, along with a few civilians and a Lebanese army soldier. Just an average day in the life of zionism.
In 1949 Lebanon's PM Riad al Solh declared that the borders had not been touched only to be contradicted by a mbr of Parliament from Southern villages that zionist forces had in fact transgressed the border. State marginalisation & colonialism way before PLO, Hezbollah, etc.
"في أول جلسة عقدها مجلس النواب، بعد توقيع الهدنة مع اسرائيل عام ١٩٤٩، وقف رئيس مجلس الوزراء رياض الصلح قائلاً: "ان حدود لبنان لم تمس".
فوقف النائب نصار غليمة (ابن جديدة مرجعيون الجنوبية) وأعلن ان الحدود قد مست.
فرد عليه وزير الدفاع المير مجيد أرسلان مكذب��ً.
عند ذلك صاح نصار غليمة قائلاً:
"تلفن، يا معالي الوزير، لمخفر تل النحاس (القريب من بلدة كفركلا الحدودية) فتسمع الجواب: شالوم يا مير."
نص من مذكرات حبيب صادق "حوار الأيام"