By Sheerpost-Nora Barrows-Friedman - January 18, 2025 

In the lead-up to the ceasefire announcement on Wednesday, and in the hours following, Israel carried out massacres and campaigns of further destruction across the Gaza Strip.

“The more we hear about a potential ceasefire agreement, the higher the pace of the attacks, the more families are being targeted and killed,” Hani Mahmoud reported for Al Jazeera.

The following is from the news roundup during the 16 January livestream. Watch the entire episode here.

Approximately 60 Palestinians were killed in a series of attacks just hours before the deal was reached.

Gaza’s civil defense stated that the Israeli military intensified its bombardment of Gaza City after the ceasefire announcement.

In the early hours of Thursday, journalist Anas Al-Sharif reported that 30 Palestinians, including children, were killed in Gaza City a few hours after the ceasefire deal was announced.

“The Israeli occupation army extinguished this joy. … Israel doesn’t want the children, women and families who have endured this war during this past period to live in peace, safety and happiness,” he stated.

The attacks continued. The Palestinian ministry of health in Gaza said on Thursday that since the ceasefire deal was announced, 72 people were killed.

Early Wednesday morning, Israel bombed a home in Deir al-Balah, in the central Gaza Strip, killing at least 12 people, including a 7-year-old boy and three teenagers, according to the Palestinian civil defense.

Israel also bombed a school shelter in Gaza City and a home in al-Bureij refugee camp.

On Monday 13 January, a series of Israeli strikes killed at least 33 Palestinians across Gaza, including seven separate attacks on Palestinians in Gaza City.

On 14 January, Israel bombed a shop along the coastal road in Deir al-Balah which sparked a large fire that, driven by strong sea winds, quickly spread to engulf makeshift encampments for displaced people, according to the United Nations.

While no casualties were reported, 67 families lost all their belongings, as their tents were destroyed in the fire.

The Israeli army ordered the further forced displacement of people in Jabaliya, in northern Gaza, on Wednesday.

The Gaza government media office stated on 12 January that 100 days have passed since Israel began its targeted campaign of destruction and slaughter in the north, leaving approximately 5,000 Palestinians dead or missing, 9,500 wounded and 2,600 abducted.

“During these hundred days, our Palestinian people in the northern Gaza Strip have experienced the most heinous forms of killing, ethnic cleansing, destruction and displacement,” the media office declared.

“The destruction of homes, hospitals, public facilities and infrastructure clearly exposes the intention of the Israeli occupation to deliberately and systematically eliminate the foundations of life in the Gaza Strip, causing a deep humanitarian crisis that exacerbates the suffering of our honorable Palestinian people.”

The media office added: “We affirm that our Palestinian people will remain steadfast in the face of this brutal aggression and that the occupation will not succeed in displacing our people and depriving them of their rights. These crimes will only increase our Palestinian people’s determination to obtain their legitimate rights and regain their seized land.”

Hospitals under attack

The aid group Relief International reported on 10 January that Al-Awda Hospital in Jabaliya, the last barely functioning hospital in the north, came under direct attack by Israeli occupation forces.

The hospital received immediate evacuation orders at the beginning of January, and Relief International said that since then, the hospital has been awaiting clearance for the safe evacuation of patients to Gaza City. The clearance, however, had not been granted.

An Al Jazeera correspondent said on 15 January that Israeli vehicles were beginning to bulldoze the western side of the Indonesian Hospital, which was completely rendered out of service last month.

The United Nations reports that its health partners are “warning of severe fuel shortages that are putting essential services at risk. According to the partners, all hospitals [that are] still partially functioning have exhausted their fuel reserves. They are now relying on piecemeal deliveries of fuel each day to try and sustain the most critical services.”

We continue our reporting on Israel’s abduction and subsequent disappearance of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, the director of the Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahiya, in the north of Gaza. The hospital was surrounded and destroyed by Israeli forces on 27 December, after more than 80 days of relentless attacks because doctors refused to abandon their patients and staff.

Al Mezan, a human rights group, announced on Wednesday that it had confirmed that Israel had transferred Abu Safiya to Ofer military prison on 9 January. Israeli authorities continue to bar Abu Safiya from meeting Al Mezan’s lawyer until 22 January.

The American Academy of Pediatrics, representing tens of thousands of pediatricians and pediatric specialists, demanded that US Secretary of State Antony Blinken work to immediately release Abu Safiya, who is a pediatrician.

The American Academy of Pediatrics had been under pressure by groups such as Doctors Against Genocide who had demanded the institution take a stand to end the genocide in Gaza and free a fellow pediatrician, and so many other Palestinian doctors, from illegal Israeli detention.

Six journalists killed

Israel killed six journalists in Gaza this past week, bringing the number of reporters and media workers killed since October 2023 to 208.

On 10 January, Saed Sabry Nabhan, who worked as a photojournalist with the Al-Ghad satellite channel, was killed by an Israeli sniper in Nuseirat refugee camp, according to the Gaza government media office.

On 13 January, Muhammad Bashir al-Talmas, an editor at Safa, a Palestinian press agency, died after sustaining serious injuries during an Israeli airstrike on the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood in Gaza City.

Also on 13 January, Israel killed Ahlam al-Nafed, a journalist and photographer while she was walking to al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, according to DropSite News.

Al-Nafed had documented the relentless attacks on the Indonesian Hospital.

Two reporters, Aqel Salah and Ahmed Abu Alrous, were killed on Wednesday in separate airstrikes.

Salah was killed in an air attack that targeted a group of people in the Beach refugee camp west of Gaza City, Al Jazeera reported.

And Abu Alrous was killed in Nuseirat along with three others in an Israeli airstrike that targeted the vehicle they were in.

Abu Alrous had uploaded a video of himself just hours before he was killed, expressing joy and cautious optimism at the prospect of a ceasefire.

“All good people, we are now in the final moments. We, the people of Gaza, need your prayers,” he said in his video.

Also on Wednesday, journalist Ahmed al-Shayah was killed in an Israeli airstrike targeting a food distribution point in al-Mawasi, west of Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip.

Highlighting resilience

Finally, as we always do, we wanted to share images of people expressing defiance and resilience in the face of Israel’s campaign of destruction. In the past 24 hours, as the news of the possible ceasefire spread, Palestinians poured into the streets in celebration across Gaza.

Two of the journalists we rely on for news in the north, Anas al-Sharif and Hossam Shabat, were in the streets reporting live for as the ceasefire deal was announced on Wednesday evening.

While being carried on the shoulders of his community, Shabat said that it was a joyful atmosphere and that his eyes welled up with tears.

In central Gaza, a woman spoke to journalist Fadi Thabet, explaining that the people will rebuild Gaza.

And finally, a group of children erupted with joy at hearing the news of a looming ceasefire.

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Nora Barrows-Friedman

Nora Barrows-Friedman is a staff writer and associate editor at The Electronic Intifada, and is the author of In Our Power: US Students Organize for Justice in Palestine (Just World Books, 2014).

‘I Felt Like a Nazi’: Zionists Admit Genocide

By Sheerpost- Kit Klarenberg / Substack- January 18, 2025 

On December 23rd 2024, Israel’s Haaretz published an extraordinary investigation into the “impact” of Zionist Occupation Force “brutality” on the “mental health” of its own militants. Specifically, “moral injury” incurred by Tel Aviv’s soldiers while perpetrating unabashed genocide in Gaza. While at significant pains throughout to paint Israelis as the ultimate victims of the 21st century Holocaust they are committing, the outlet’s little-noticed reporting offered extensive, unprecedented insight into routine horrors casually meted out to Palestinians by the entity, before and after October 7th 2023.

The article’s author, along with a ZOF “social welfare officer”, decades prior conducted academic research into why Tel Aviv’s soldiers regularly commit the most sadistic atrocities imaginable against innocent Palestinians. This followed the First Intifada, 1987 – 1993, during which the entity brutally cracked down upon righteous Palestinian resistance to Israel’s illegal, immoral occupation of their historic lands. The pair’s joint research effort provided a rich yield of first–hand evidence of Zionist cruelty, as ZOF soldiers candidly “opened up” to them.

The pair identified separate “groups” of ZOF soldiers, “based on personality traits”. First and foremost was a “ruthless and callous” faction, who “committed the most severe atrocities” and “viewed brutality as an expression of strength and masculinity.” The “power” they felt serving in Israel’s genocidal military was “intoxicating”. One boastfully described how he had “no problem” brutalising and murdering women, citing how he’d kicked a Palestinian female so hard bones in her groin “broke”, and “she can’t have children today”:

“It’s like a drug…you feel like you are the law, you make the rules. As if from the moment you leave the place called Israel and enter the Gaza Strip, you are God.”

Meanwhile, another ZOF militant “shot an Arab four times in the back” from a distance of just 10 metres, “and got away with a self-defense claim.” This was, the killer admitted, “cold-blooded murder” – and “we did things like that every day.” Another recalled how a young Palestinian was walking down a street calmly, minding their own business, when Zionist forces opened fire. “Bang, a bullet in the stomach,” and he was “dying on the sidewalk”. Israeli operatives then “drove away indifferently” to their victim.

‘Flattening Gaza’

Per Haaretz, “these soldiers were remorseless and did not report moral injury.” Nonetheless, a few of the genocidal war criminals involved were “convicted by military courts” for their horrendous actions, which left them feeling “bitter and betrayed.” Those murderers who got away with it unpunished were tacitly assisted by “a small, ideologically violent group [that] supported the brutality.” Despite not “taking part” in the killings directly, “they believed in Jewish supremacy and were derogatory toward Arabs,” so determinedly turned a blind eye.

Meanwhile, a “large group” of ZOF soldiers “with no prior inclination to violence” became callous and inhumane due to the influence of their superiors, and the “norms” of their unit. “I felt like…a Nazi…it looked exactly like we were actually the Nazis and they were the Jews,” one member of this contingent testified. Another bore witness to how a “new commander”, during their “first patrol” together in the early hours of the morning, hideously mutilated a defenceless Palestinian child:

“There’s not a soul in the streets, just a little four-year-old boy playing in the sand in his yard. The commander suddenly starts running, grabs the boy, and breaks his arm at the elbow and his leg…Stepped on his stomach three times and left. We all stood there with our mouths open…He told me, ‘these kids need to be killed from the day they are born.’ When a commander does that, it becomes legit.”

Still, there were some ZOF conscripts who “opposed the influence of callous and ideological groups” on the “culture” of the Zionist entity’s military, who bravely “took a moral stand and went on to report the atrocities” they’d witnessed, if not participated in directly. Despite being “initially intimidated by brutal commanders,” they blew the whistle. Their reward was to be “severely harassed and ostracized” by Zionist entity authorities. One truth-teller was permanently discharged for their disclosures. “Traumatized” and “depressed”, they subsequently fled Israel.

Another whistleblower, who dared make clear his personal opposition to official orders that amounted to “flattening Gaza”, and necessitated “crimes against humanity”, suffered “severe social ostracism” for his refusal to comply, and willingness to publicise the frightful objectives with which he was tasked. He was resultantly bullied and pressured out of his unit, and returned back to civilian life “mentally crushed”. Such ill-treatment is only to be expected, given the ZOF’s wider institutional culture, and the innately genocidal nature of the putrid ideology of Zionism.

As Haaretz notes, multiple ZOF war criminals gave jubilant eulogies at the October 2024 funeral of Shuvael Ben-Natan, an entity militant neutralised during Tel Aviv’s invasion of Lebanon that month. One bragged their fallen comrade “entered Gaza to take revenge”, while another exultantly recounted how Ben-Natan murdered a 40-year-old Palestinian “harvesting olives with his children in the West Bank.” Others nostalgically recalled how their deceased friend “boosted morale in Gaza by setting a home on fire without approval.”

‘Sadistic People’

Ben-Natan’s fellow war criminals also psychotically used the occasion of his funeral to “[profess] their commitment to continue with arson and revenge in Gaza, Lebanon and the West Bank.” We see such sickening scenes playing out in real-time today. Meanwhile, other comparable, if not worse, Zionist atrocities are well-hidden from public view, perpetrated in mass “detention facilities” such as Sde Teiman. Haaretz refers to the “severe sexual abuse” to which Palestinian inmates are subjected at the site as “a microcosm of brutalization in the current war.”

The rape and sexual torture at Sde Teiman is so widespread and merciless, a “veteran physician” alerted authorities. As a result, nine IDF reserve soldiers “were subsequently detained on suspicion of aggravated sodomy and other forms of abuse.” Haaretz suggests there are also 36 ongoing investigations into deaths of Palestinian Sde Teiman detainees since October 7th 2023. “Anonymous soldiers” consulted by the outlet amply testified to how “a discourse of hatred and revenge normalized the abuse of detainees” at the facility.

This included “harsh, arbitrary violence on a frequent basis, humiliation and degradation, deliberate starvation and other abusive practices.” A “young student” called up for ZOF duty who witnessed the savagery at Sde Teiman first-hard referred to a profusion of “sadistic people” there, “who enjoy causing suffering to others.” They stated it “was most disturbing…to see how easily and quickly ordinary people can detach themselves and not see the reality right in front of their eyes when they are in a difficult and shocking human situation.”

A “reservist doctor” posted to Sde Teiman echoed their comments, referring to “total dehumanization” throughout the site. Strikingly though, their statements indicated intimate personal complicity in the horrendous acts perpetrated against innocent Palestinian detainees there, about which their coworker was so distressed. The doctor’s evident lack of remorse over their personal maltreatment of captives was writ unambiguously large. They laconically justified their actions due to “normalization” of horrific abuse at the detention facility:

“You don’t really treat them as if they are human beings…the hardest thing for me is…what I didn’t feel…It bothers me that it didn’t bother me”.

Another ZOF reservist posted there – described as “restrained” by Haaretz – was said to have maintained her “standards” morally “by escaping the facility.” She claimed to have been “scared” by widespread “dehumanization” and “dangerous attitudes” she encountered there. Her experiences were so “traumatic”, she managed to be “discharged” from duty “with a psychiatrist’s help.” More widely, such perspectives, she lamented, have “become more normal in our society.” Haaretz concurs, noting government officials routinely engage in “rhetoric of hatred and revenge.”

This open, state-level encouragement of wanton slaughter – which constitutes incontrovertible proof of the Zionist entity’s genocidal intent – is coupled with a “weakening” of Israel’s “civilian and military justice systems.” Documentation testifying to monstrous acts by ZOF militants is voluminous. Frequently, they gleefully film themselves abusing and killing captives, shooting Palestinians waving white flags, massacring women and children, looting abandoned homes, wantonly destroying abandoned property, and more. Despite this wealth of evidence though, official investigations into ZOF abuses, let alone prosecutions, have been “miniscule”.

Mainstream news outlets are committed to a conspiracy of silence on the Gaza genocide. Distancing, evasive language, omission, and other duplicitous chicanery is systematically employed to downplay or outright justify the entity’s ferocious erasure of the Palestinian people. The disclosures and condemnation of the Haaretz probe would never appear in the Western media. Yet, it is clear that its author believes ZOF abuses to be fundamentally aberrant and heretical, the result of “corrupting influence of…callous and ideologically violent soldiers”.

In reality, atrocities are and always have been hardwired into the ZOF. After all, Zionism is dependent on ethnic cleansing, population displacement, and land theft. Its military will therefore invariably act accordingly. Partition of Palestine was first proposed by Britain’s October 1937 Peel Commission. Many Zionists were angry that the portion of Palestinian territory granted to them was too small. However, David Ben-Gurion, widely considered the father of Israel, and its first Prime Minister, robustly dismissed their concerns:

“It does not hurt our feelings that by this acquisition we are not in possession of the whole land…This increase in possession is of consequence not only in itself, but because through it we increase our strength, and every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole. The establishment of a state, even if only on a portion of the land, is…a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country.”

Kit Klarenberg

Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist and MintPress News contributor exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions. His work has previously appeared in The Cradle, Declassified UK, and Grayzone. Follow him on Twitter @KitKlarenberg.