Tuesday, January 02, 2024

The Other Denial

At some point, it is a futile task to continually point out the monstrous atrocities against innocent Israeli citizens on October 7th of last year.

It is not that it shouldn't be done. It's that Hamas supporters (you know who you are and what you support), rather like pro-abortionists, are moved by hatred and an ignorant stranglehold on ideology, and not by a dearth of credible evidence.

Whether they do embrace the truth or not, they shall be judged:

Based largely on the video evidence — which was verified by The New York Times — Israeli police officials said they believed that Abdush was raped, and she has become a symbol of the horrors visited upon Israeli women and girls during the Oct. 7 attacks.

Israeli officials say that everywhere Hamas terrorists struck — the rave, the military bases along the Gaza Strip border and the kibbutzim — they brutalized women.

A two-month investigation by the Times uncovered painful new details, establishing that the attacks against women were not isolated events but part of a broader pattern of gender-based violence on Oct. 7.

Relying on video footage, photographs, GPS data from mobile phones and interviews with more than 150 people, including witnesses, medical personnel, soldiers and rape counselors, the Times identified at least seven locations where Israeli women and girls appear to have been sexually assaulted or mutilated.

Four witnesses described in graphic detail seeing women raped and killed at two different places along Route 232, the same highway where Abdush’s half-naked body was found sprawled on the road at a third location.

And the Times interviewed several soldiers and volunteer medics who together described finding more than 30 bodies of women and girls in and around the rave site and in two kibbutzim in a similar state as Abdush’s — legs spread, clothes torn off, signs of abuse in their genital areas.

Many of the accounts are difficult to bear, and the visual evidence is disturbing to see.

The Times viewed photographs of one woman’s corpse that emergency responders discovered in the rubble of a besieged kibbutz with dozens of nails driven into her thighs and groin.

**

Testimonial details of gang rape, execution and women’s bodies having no underwear are almost identical to The Times report.
The UN issued a statement on Dec. 1 condemning the targeting of women — almost two months after the Oct. 7 terrorist attack.
“We are alarmed by the numerous accounts of gender-based atrocities and sexual violence during those attacks. This is why we have called for all accounts of gender-based violence to be duly investigated and prosecuted, with the rights of the victim at the core,” the statement says.
Hamas has denied the accusations of sexual violence.
 
Now, about that:

Israeli security agencies published video footage Monday from the apparent interrogations of seven Hamas terrorists who were captured following the Palestinian terror group’s October 7 onslaught, in which they admitted they had been ordered to carry out atrocities against Israeli civilians.

In one video released by the Israel Defense Forces, a person whose face is blurred said that gunmen were given instructions to kill everyone they saw, including beheading victims and cutting off their legs.

“The plan was to go from home to home, from room to room, to throw grenades and kill everyone, including women and children,” he said. “Hamas ordered us to crush their heads and cut them off, [and] to cut their legs.”

He also said they were given permission to rape the corpse of a girl.

 
Oh, more than that! 
**

One witness saw militants gang rape a woman and then cut offher breast, according to police testimony viewed by the Journal. First responders said they saw signs of sexual violence, including women found naked or with their underwear pulled down or tops removed.

The Journal saw images taken by a first responder of a naked woman with a knife and three nails in the crotch area, women whose clothing was partially or entirely removed and women with blood from the crotch area. In another image provided by the first responder, a woman’s breast was almost entirely sliced off. Her shirt was ripped away and she had a knife wound in the neck. In two other photos a naked man was found gagged and shot and one photo showed a man’s eyeball had been removed.


Those who would deny the above but embrace the pro-Hamas cause need only remember this response to Israel's heavy yet proportionate retaliation:

Union Maj.-Gen. William T. Sherman, commanding officer of Union troops in the vicinity of Atlanta, Ga., in early September 1864 had just routed Confederate forces from this key southern railway and manufacturing hub in a bloody campaign to capture the centre and now warned the citizens of Atlanta to evacuate the city. His plan was to burn it.

Sherman had no intention of perpetrating a mass slaughter, but he did aim to level the city. Some leading citizens wrote him and beseeched him to spare Atlanta.

On Sept. 12, 1864, he answered the citizens in a two-page letter in which he declared: “You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out. I know I had no hand in making this war, and I know I will make more sacrifices today than any of you to secure peace. But you cannot have peace and a division of our country.”

Sherman did not aim to kill southerners, not in Atlanta nor in his subsequent “march to the sea,” but the core of his argument applies almost perfectly to the phenomenon that came to dominate warfare in the 20th and 21st centuries — aerial bombing. ...

There is really only one way to avoid civilian casualties by aerial bombardment — don’t start a war in the first place. Either Hamas could not figure that out, or they didn’t care.

 

Sometimes the goal isn't winning but losing at a great cost just to garner sympathy from larger and more gullible powers.

It's not like the leadership of Hamas has to bear the cost.

 


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