Three weeks before Oct 7, Sinwar himself sent a warning to Israel: "Convey a message to them that I am preparing the mother of all surprises. A terrifying operation. Something extraordinary." Again, he rolled the word "zilzal," earthquake, on his tongue. "Please convey to the Israelis what I am saying word for word"
Sinwar's warning came after he had engaged in negotiations with Israel for 5 years for a mutual ceasefire, ending Israel's suffocation of Gaza's economy & gradually easing the blockade. Whenever the two sides came close to deal, Netanyahu procrastinated
The UAE and Egypt warned Netanyahu that Sinwar wasn't joking & that he was going to launch a major surprise attack. The UAE asked Netanyahu to alleviate the suffering in Gaza & defuse tensions in the West Bank to dissuade Sinwar from attacking, Netanyahu ignored every one of those warnings
In October 2023, Hamas offered to release all civilian hostages if Israel promised not to invade Gaza. Netanyahu rejected it. Some of us noted this at the time; establishment media did not, being too busy spreading pro-genocide atrocity propaganda about Hamas raping women and beheading babies.
The only open question is whether Hamas asked for anything at all. Qatari PM Mohammed al-Thani says Hamas agreed to free the hostages without conditions. Mossad chief David Barnea insists Hamas "set unacceptable conditions, such as halting the IDF's incursion into Gaza and new rights for worshippers on the Temple Mount."
Correct: because the natives had dared to resist their occupiers, it was unacceptable to stop Israel from destroying Gaza, or from denying Palestinians access to one of Islam's holiest sites.
A senior Israeli military official now tells Haaretz that when the Hamas offer reached the military, it was ignored: "To be honest, the issue of the hostages was not seriously on the agenda at this stage, and no one at the military or political level was open to discussing the proposal."
Antony Blinken was told of the Hamas offer directly, and rejected it too. "Israel is still under attack, and there's no one to talk to," he told the Qatari PM. This is the same Blinken who would soon claim that if Hamas freed the hostages, "this could end tomorrow." That was ghoulish on its own terms, endorsing mass murder as the means to an "end." It also wasn't honest, which for Blinken was the default.
Former CIA chief William Burns now says: "The basic problem was that Hamas was looking for a 'permanent end to the conflict,' as they called it." Yes. And the Biden team pretended Hamas was the obstacle, to help Israel put a permanent end to Gaza as a society and to Palestinians as a people seeking self-determination.
⭕️ NEW: Israeli prison guards celebrated in real time as Palestinian prisoner Thaer Abu Asab was beaten severely and killed, according to WhatsApp messages and an indictment detailed by Haaretz.
“You’re going to be proud of me, of my shift. After what happened, the count took two hours and 23 minutes. Draw your own conclusions,” one female guard wrote to her partner, who was also a guard.
“They’re doing CPR in the clinic right now, baby! God willing, that son of a thousand whores will die.”
Another guard sent an excited update: “Holy shit, what a count. We fucked them up so bad.”
A third texted a friend: “What an insane count. There’s never been anything like it. We poured cheese on them, cracked some eggs [the Hebrew word for eggs is also slang for testicles]. So much blood in the wings.”
She then added: “OMG, they’re doing CPR on a prisoner because we beat him. He’s dead. Listen, it’s funny how it all happened in an instant: Boom, count. Boom, dead prisoner.”
Abu Asab was a Fatah member serving a 25-year sentence for attacks against Israel. He was pronounced dead at Soroka Medical Center in Be’er Sheva after being taken there that evening. The indictment says the severe beating injured his heart and caused his death.
Last week, nearly three years after Abu Asab was killed, prosecutors filed a rare indictment against 12 Israel Prison Service guards. They are accused of beating him and eight other Palestinian prisoners in Cell 6 of Wing 24 at Ketziot Prison as retaliation for reports that Druze soldiers had been killed in the war. Those reports turned out to be nothing more than a rumor, Haaretz reported.
The assault began after Abu Asab asked a guard whether there was a ceasefire. A prisoner told investigators that approximately 15 guards and 15 members of the prison’s Keter tactical unit entered while the prisoners were kneeling with their hands over their heads and faces down. They beat everyone with batons for approximately five minutes, later unleashed dogs and shouted, “No ceasefire.”
Abu Asab was beaten the worst. Witnesses said he was left unconscious and bleeding, his face blue and his hands covered in blood.
The investigation also uncovered evidence that such violence was routine, known to senior commanders and concealed through a code of silence. Because prosecutors said they could not establish which guards delivered the fatal blows, the 12 who entered the cell were charged with the relatively lenient offense of reckless homicide. Female guards who stood at the cell entrance were questioned as suspects but not indicted.
🔗 Full: https://t.co/2WRQbwwobx
Ha'aretz reports that Hamas, through Qatar, conveyed immediately on Oct. 7 that they were willing to return all the civilian hostages for nothing -- their only ask was for a mediator to arrange the exchange and establish a connection to then negotiate the further release of the soldiers. Israel refused to talk or hear about it.
So Qatar reached out to Antony Blinken to let him know that Hamas was willing to release all the civilian hostages.
Blinken told Qatar he didn't want to hear it because "Israel is still under attack, and there's no one to talk to."
Blinken had the opportunity to free every single civilian hostage and de-escalate the situation. Instead he wanted war.
Sunday was the first day of school for eight-year-old Wafaa Akila. Wafaa never made it home. She was killed alongside her father by an Israeli strike on their car in western Gaza. Israel says it was targeting a ‘Hamas militant.’
Israel just demolished a 120-year-old home in Ni’lin because it didn’t have a building permit.
The house was built around 1906.
The State of Israel was founded in 1948.
The occupation of the West Bank began in 1967.
So the paperwork they demanded was issued by an authority that didn’t exist when the walls went up. Bold bureaucratic innovation: retroactive zoning for a country that arrived later than the stone.
Imagine the clerk:
“Sir, we’re going to need the Ottoman-era permit, the British Mandate stamp, and the Israeli one you never applied for because we hadn’t invented ourselves yet. Also the land is now strategically important. Have a nice day.”
Nothing says “rules-based order” like fining a building for missing a form that predates the form-maker. Next they’ll ticket the olive trees for growing without a 2024 agricultural license.
Free Palestine.
And maybe start requiring permits for founding states on other people’s already-built villages.
Palestinians: The Israeli government’s goal is to ethnically cleanse Palestinians.
Some pro-Israel voices: That’s a lie. You’re spreading propaganda.
Israel’s defense minister: We will ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Gaza by any means.
This is the literal definition of Ethnic Cleansing.
They don't even hide it. Israeli media openly covers it.
But you are called anti-semitic if you call it ethnic cleansing.
Israel has now killed more people during the Gaza “ceasefire” it agreed to in October 2025 than the total number of military and civilian casualties on October 7, 2023.
Over 300 of those killed during the “ceasefire” were children, eight times the number killed on Oct 7.
At the Oxford Union debate, I argued that Israel seeks a peace that erases Palestine, while Palestinians seek a peace of true religious coexistence.
"Do you know why [Israelis] can point to Jewish heritage in Palestine? It is because Muslims preserved it. They were not like the Israelis today who are trying to erase Palestinian heritage"
One of the cruelest things about being Palestinian is that sometimes you do not even know whom to trust to tell you what is happening to your own people.
This morning, an Israeli-backed operation was carried out in Gaza City to capture a senior Hamas security official. Israeli strikes accompanying the operation killed civilians, including children and a woman.
In the hours that followed, Palestinians were presented with two completely different versions of what had happened.
The Hamas-run Government Media Office portrayed the operation as a failure: the force had been discovered, clashes had broken out, and the mission had been thwarted.
Shortly afterward, Israel announced that the operation had succeeded and published a photograph of the captured Hamas official.
Think about that.
After nearly three years of war, Palestinians are still struggling to find sources they can trust to tell them what is happening to their own people.
And the problem does not stop in Gaza. It travels abroad through people who believe they are defending Palestine.
Yesterday, I watched an influencer claim that Israel has prevented eggs, chicken, medicine, and other basic goods from entering Gaza for 19 years.
The video has more than a million views.
Claims like this can be disproved with a one-minute search. But every easily disproved lie does something far more dangerous:
It gives people a reason to doubt the truth.
Surround a real catastrophe with enough falsehoods, and eventually people begin to wonder whether the catastrophe itself is false.
And we do not need lies.
The Palestinian cause does not need invented atrocities to be just. We do not need AI-generated images, fabricated stories, exaggerated numbers, or claims that collapse under the first Google search to prove our suffering.
What happened to Gaza is horrifying enough.
What happened to my own family alone, the people we lost, the homes destroyed, the families scattered, is enough. None of it needs embellishment to become a crime.
The truth is already unbearable. Why would we weaken it by lying?
If you support Palestine, defend the truth with the same passion with which you defend Palestinians. Correct misinformation even when it comes from “your side.”
Our story does not need to be made more horrifying. It needs to be told exactly as it happened.
Because when reality is already this terrible, adding lies does not strengthen the Palestinian story.
It gives those who want to deny it the weapon they have been waiting for.
#SurvivalTestimony
GAZA, 1989
"Behind me stands Ansar 2. A prison camp surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards. One of nearly a dozen camps holding 5,000 Palestinians."
"Doctors. Lawyers. Children. Students. Journalists."
"Most held without charge or trial. Labeled simply as 'security offenders.' All that is necessary under current administrative Israeli laws."
A camera, a reporter, and a system that needed no evidence—just a label and a cage.
That was 1989.
Seen this tape before October 7—or only after? 🧭
It's long past time for the U.S. government to stand up for human rights, investigate this violence against Americans and Palestinians, and hold the perpetrators accountable.
I'm grateful for Senator Van Hollen's leadership and proud to stand with him in pressing for answers.
Israeli soldiers from the Duchifat Battalion detained Palestinians herding sheep and beat them with stones for around 30 minutes on February 26, 1988 during the First Intifada, breaking their bones. CBS documented the horrifying event.
Still can’t believe people lost their minds over the “40 beheaded babies” and “babies in the ovens” fake stories, then went silent while Palestinian and Lebanese children were being blown apart in real time.
Israeli official speaks to Australia's ABC about the strike he ordered on World Central Kitchen that killed Jacob Flickinger and 6 other aid workers.
Says he's not sorry, that WCK has Hamas links and is "not really an organisation you can say is innocent."
https://t.co/aqzxmMAd7B
NEW: Israel funded a fake US think tank called the "Hanover Institute" that published 124 reports totaling over 560,000 words in nine days, designed to be cited by AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity.
The site was built on a platform that promises to optimize content so AI systems will treat it as credible research.
Every headline mirrors a question a user might type into a chatbot:
Is Israel Carrying Out a Genocide in Gaza?
The answers consistently frame information to blunt criticism of Israel.
The operation was funded through Israel's government advertising agency via the European ad group Havas, with tens of millions of dollars routed to American contractors including a firm run by former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale.
An Israeli official admitted to Ynet:
We paid a lot of money, but the situation only got worse.
Source: The Guardian