Hamas gunmen snatched many “hostages off the streets of Israel after crossing into the territory on Saturday as the war takes a darker turn and the death toll approaches 300 after less than one day,” reports The Daily Mail. Hamas killed entire families and kidnapped women and whole families, taking them across the border:
Horrifying new footage emerging this afternoon showed women being marched into vehicles full of male fighters, bloodied and bruised, often with their hands bound behind their backs.
Earlier pictures showed Israeli pensioners captured in Israel and taken into the Gaza Strip on golf carts. Other clips showed entire families forced into trucks and being driven off by militants.
At least 1,100 people have been wounded in the conflict in Israel alone, and it’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has announced his country is ‘at war’ with the Palestinians militants.
Thomas Helm, Jerusalem Correspondent at The National spoke to MailOnline from Jerusalem today. He said the hostage situation set a dangerous tone for how the conflict could develop.
‘There are reports that [the Palestinians] have taken an Israeli General hostage, entire families have been taken, point blank killings… wars have been started where one Israeli hostage was taken and now it seems like there could be about 60.
‘So it couldn’t be worse….The militants have claimed to have taken dozens of soldiers captive, but this does not include the number of civilians who have reportedly been detained.
An Israeli army spokesman says fighting is continuing in 22 locations in southern Israel some 12 hours after Hamas militants launched a surprise attack from the Gaza Strip.
Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari also said that Israel was striking targets in Gaza from the air and that ground operations were imminent.
Hagari confirmed ongoing hostage situations in the towns of Ofakim and Beeri. Earlier, both the Israeli military and Hamas confirmed that some Israelis had been captured and taken hostage.
Hamas, the de facto governing authority of the Gaza Strip, claims to have fired 5,000 rockets into Israel today, setting off air raid sirens in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, before invading by ground and air, reportedly using paragliders.
The coordinated attack has seen border fences broken down, tanks immobilised, dozens of hostages reportedly taken and residential buildings targeted by airstrikes.
Emerging footage shows horrific scenes, including Palestinian groups celebrating as they paraded the naked body of a female …. on a truck through Gaza.
Hamas, which rules the Gaza strip southwest of Israel, has been emboldened by the Obama administration’s policy of appeasing Iran, whose oppressive regime bankrolls Hamas.
Earlier, the Biden administration paid Iran a $6 billion ransom in exchange for 5 U.S. hostages being released from prison. That works out to $1.2 billion each. As former State Department official Gabriel Noronha points out, “Three years ago,” an Iranian official “said they could balance their budget by getting a billion each for American hostages. Well, Biden just gave Iran $1.2 billion each for five.”
As one observed noted, large numbers of civilians died because of the Biden administration’s policy of appeasing Iran:
Elderly civilians were slaughtered at a bus stop; a household of at least six were left dead with floors and walls covered in blood; a dozen were shot dead in their cars at an intersection; desecrated bodies are being victory paraded through Gaza, including Hamas necrophiliacs molesting an undressed woman. Dozens reported kidnapped, saw a video of infants being held at gunpoint. This is what Biden’s $6 billion ransom payment to the terrorist government of Iran has bought: ISIS on the Mediterranean.
Recently, a “high-level Iranian spy ring” including an Obama administration official was “busted in Washington,” reports Tablet Magazine. “A top Biden/Obama admin official was essentially operating an Iranian spy ring,” notes Jason Bedrick of the Heritage Foundation. As law professor David Bernstein points out, “There is an ongoing, breaking espionage scandal involving Iranian agents of influence penetrating the highest levels of US government, and the MSM is expressing only passing interest… This should be huge news.”
Tablet Magazine reports:
The Biden administration’s now-suspended Iran envoy Robert Malley helped to fund, support, and direct an Iranian intelligence operation designed to influence the United States and allied governments, according to a trove of purloined Iranian government emails. The emails, which were reported on by veteran Wall Street Journal correspondent Jay Solomon, writing in Semafor, and by Iran International, the London-based émigré opposition outlet which is the most widely read independent news source inside Iran, were published last week after being extensively verified over a period of several months by the two outlets. They showed that Malley had helped to infiltrate an Iranian agent of influence named Ariane Tabatabai into some of the most sensitive positions in the U.S. government—first at the State Department and now the Pentagon, where she has been serving as chief of staff for the assistant secretary of defense for special operations, Christopher Maier.
On Thursday, Maier told a congressional committee that the Defense Department is “actively looking into whether all law and policy was properly followed in granting my chief of staff top secret special compartmented information.”
The emails, which were exchanged over a period of several years between Iranian regime diplomats and analysts, show that Tabatabai was part of a regime propaganda unit set up in 2014 by the Iranian Foreign Ministry. The Iran Experts Initiative (IEI) tasked operatives drawn from Iranian diaspora communities to promote Iranian interests during the clerical regime’s negotiations with the United States over its nuclear weapons program. Though several of the IEI operatives and others named in the emails have sought to portray themselves on social media as having engaged with the regime in their capacity as academic experts, or in order to promote better understanding between the United States and Iran, none has questioned the veracity of the emails.
The contents of the emails are damning, showing a group of Iranian American academics being recruited by the Iranian regime, meeting together in foreign countries to receive instructions from top regime officials, and pledging their personal loyalty to the regime. They also show how these operatives used their Iranian heritage and Western academic positions to influence U.S. policy toward Iran, first as outside “experts” and then from high-level U.S. government posts. Both inside and outside of government, the efforts of members of this circle were repeatedly supported and advanced by Malley, who served as the U.S. government’s chief interlocutor with Iran under both the Obama and the Biden administrations. Malley is also the former head of the International Crisis Group (ICG), which directly paid and credentialed several key members of the regime’s influence operation.
As Professor David Bernstein observes, “The fact that Robert Malley could get anywhere near the levers of power … given his background and expressed views is a sign of severe rot in the American establishment.” As a lawyer notes, “Rob Malley, the rabid pro-Iran installment of the Biden administration, was an Iranian spy. That this isn’t the biggest story in foreign policy world is insane.”
