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Probe Demanded Over 'Absurd' Israeli Narrative About Gaza's Al-Shifa Hospital
"Israel needs to offer the outside world more than a few rifles and other armaments to justify its attacks on Gaza's hospitals and ill and injured civilians," said Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor.
Nov 17, 2023
A human rights monitor in Geneva on Friday called on the United Nations to help get to the bottom of Israel's claim that its bombing and raid of Gaza's largest medical complex this week was necessary to stop Hamas from running a vast military compound beneath it—an allegation that more than two days after the attack began, has been backed up only by images Israel released of a small cache of weapons.
Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor said the time has come for an independent international investigation into "Israel's absurd narrative" about al-Shifa Medical Complex in Gaza City, and noted that administrators at the facility are also demanding a probe "that includes a United Nations inspection."
Israel did extensive damage to al-Shifa's cardiac care department, surgical ward, and a pharmaceutical warehouse when it began bombing the hospital at dawn on Wednesday in just one of more than 245 attacks on medical facilities in Gaza since October 7. Israeli officials said they expected to find "the beating heart" of Hamas' military operations in the hospital.
But after searching basement areas and several health departments as well as conducting a "violent interrogation campaign" targeting displaced people and medical personnel, Euro-Med said, Israel has so far produced only a video showing a small number of weapons.
"The absence of any neutral international party's involvement in the Israeli military raids and searches of al-Shifa Medical Complex and other hospitals in the strip raises widespread doubts about the Israeli narrative," said Euro-Med. "Israel needs to offer the outside world more than a few rifles and other armaments to justify its attacks on Gaza's hospitals and ill and injured civilians."
"We are left with nothing—no power, no food, no water. With every passing minute, we are losing a life. Overnight, we lost 22 persons."
Separately, the BBC aired a segment on Friday in which the network noted the Israel Defense Forces first released a seven-minute video displaying the weapons it found—a video that appeared to be edited despite IDF claims that it was filmed in a single shot with no edits, and that raised several other questions.
"This IDF video was posted, then deleted, then reposted, this time without a section referring to an Israeli soldier who'd been held hostage," reported the BBC.
Reporters from the network arrived at al-Shifa a few hours after the IDF released the original video, and were shown a different selection of weapons than those that appeared in the military's video.
"What we see in this IDF video doesn't equate Israel's description of an 'operational command center for Hamas,'" the BBC reported.
The footage, released late at night "after long hours of searches and fruitless inspections," said Euro-Med, "raises a lot of questions, especially since no gunman has been arrested and no evidence has been found to back the previous claims about the presence of tunnels beneath the hospital."
The IDF has also claimed that Hamas "knew we were coming" and had likely "made off with or hidden traces of their presence" at al-Shifa, The New York Times reported.
Israel's narrative about al-Shifa has also drawn scrutiny from Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, who said that even if the hospital were being used as a command center for Hamas, "protecting [patients] is paramount."
"Even if health facilities are used for military purposes, the principles of distinction, precaution, and proportionality always apply," Tedros said.
The director of al-Shifa, Muhammed Abu Salmiya, told Al Jazeera Friday that staff are still trying to save as many of the 7,000 patients and refugees in the hospital as they can amid Israel's ongoing siege, but they "lost all those who were in the intensive care unit" following the attack on Wednesday.
"We are left with nothing—no power, no food, no water," said Abu Salmiya. "With every passing minute, we are losing a life. Overnight, we lost 22 persons."
The Biden administration, which has continued supporting Israel's bombardment of Gaza as the death toll has grown to at least 11,470 in less than six weeks, said this week it believed the IDF's claims about al-Shifa, with President Joe Biden saying it was a "fact" that Hamas has "their headquarters, their military hidden under a hospital."
A day after the bombing, as observers awaited evidence of an extensive command center beneath the hospital, U.S. State Department spokesperson Matt Miller appeared less confident in Israel's narrative, telling reporters that the White House "never said there were command posts in every hospital in Gaza."
"We don't want to see hospitals struck from the air," said Miller. "We understand that Hamas continues to use hospitals in places where they embed their fighters."
After the BBC reported on the IDF's changing video documentation of its findings, Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft called Israel's "propaganda" supporting its onslaught in Gaza "increasingly clownish."
"Only Joe Biden seems to believe it," said Parsi.
Journalist Jeremy Scahill pointed out that Israel itself is known to have built "an underground operating room and tunnels under the hospital" in 1983.
"This is not a secret," Scahill wrote on social media, noting that Israel has claimed Hamas expanded the tunnels in recent years.
Allegations of a Hamas command center, supported by the U.S., said Scahill, "should be backed up by clear evidence, not a Geraldo Rivera/Al Capone's vault-style video presentation featuring an English-speaking IDF soldier."
"No matter what is or is not found, there is no justification for the repeated attacks against civilian hospitals—in fact al-Shifa is the largest hospital treating the most vulnerable people in Gaza, including NICU babies," he added. "The mere existence of tunnels, originally built by Israel, does not prove the specific allegations made by the U.S. or Israel. The standard for such evidence should be very, very high."
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We Don't Need to Wait for Chilcot, Blair Lied to Us About Iraq. Here's the Evidence.
With the help of the BBC and Dr David Morrison, I carried out my own inquiry. The facts are devastating for Blair, for Parliament and for all of us.
Oct 29, 2015
Two weeks ago, I found myself in conversation with Dr Hans Blix, head of the United Nations weapons inspection team, ahead of the Iraq invasion in 2003.
Dr Blix told me that Tony Blair's claims about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction were simply not an accurate reflection of the intelligence provided to the British government.
"The big difference in the British dossier," Dr Blix told me, "was that they simply asserted that these items are there. But when Mr Blair asserts that there were weapons, well, that's an assertion, which was not supported by evidence. Both the UK and the US replaced question marks with exclamation marks. I certainly think it was a misrepresentation."
"Both the UK and the US replaced question marks by exclamation marks. I certainly think it was a misrepresentation."
--Hans Blix
He talked about how cautious assessments were turned into bold statements by Blair and the UK government. For example, intelligence chiefs gave this assessment on March 15, 2002: "Intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles programs is sporadic and patchy."
Three weeks later, the prime minister stridently claimed: "We know that he [Saddam Hussein] has stockpiles of major amounts of chemical and biological weapons."
Shaken by the force of his testimony, I eventually said to Dr Blix: "That's devastating. And so basically you are telling me that Mr Blair misrepresented the truth, lied indeed to the British parliament to make the case for an illegal war?"
He paused. Then he said: "Well, I'm a diplomat, so I'm not using such... such words. But in substance, yes. They misrepresented what we did, and they did so in order to get the authorization that they shouldn't have had".
Lies, delays, and a national embarrassment
Dr Blix's comments were made before Tony Blair claimed to CNN earlier this week that the information he had received was "wrong". As far as Hans Blix is concerned, Tony Blair misled the British public and parliament about the intelligence he was given.
My conversation with Dr Blix was the culminating moment of my search for the truth about how Britain came to invade Iraq. It is now a matter of days before John Chilcot writes to David Cameron, setting out the timetable for publication of his long-delayed inquiry into the Iraq war.
One report has suggested that Chilcot may push back his report as far as 2017 - no less than seven years late, and a full decade after the last British troops pulled out of Iraq in 2007. The delay in his inquiry, commissioned by Prime Minister Gordon Brown in 2009, has become a national scandal. This is why I approached the BBC a few months ago and asked the Corporation for permission to carry out my Chilcot inquiry.
I pointed out that most of the testimony to Chilcot was publicly available. I also suggested that we should call our own witnesses.
The BBC agreed. For the last few weeks a producer, a researcher and I have been seeking answers to the key questions about the lead up to the Iraq war. The results can be heard tonight on BBC Radio 4.
What we need to know
As background to our work, I asked my friend Dr David Morrison to prepare a series of background narratives on the four crucial questions. These are published today by openDemocracy and they address four key questions:
Question 3:Was the war legal?
Question 4:Did our military action in Iraq increase the terrorist threat to Britain?
I have known Dr Morrison for more than 12 years. Back in 2003, I read the devastating evidence that he dispatched to the Foreign Affairs Committee as it made its report into the Iraq war. The Foreign Affairs Committee ignored the thrust of Dr Morrison's arguments. However, they published his brilliant paper as a memorandum for their own report.
His paper and a later one on the Committee's findings, which are still worth reading today, provided devastating evidence that Tony Blair misled the British public about the threat from Saddam Hussein in order to make the case for war.
I have not accepted all of Morrison's arguments. However, his narratives provided an invaluable basis for our work, because he has a remarkable gift for highlighting like nothing else the key issues.
These documents set out with great clarity the key facts that everyone will need in order to assess whether John Chilcot has produced a fair report. I have summarised Morrison's most devastating points here.
Tony Blair misrepresented the evidence on WMD
On February 14 2003, Hans Blix told the UN Security Council: "Many proscribed weapons and items are not accounted for. To take an example, a document, which Iraq provided, suggested to us that some 1,000 tonnes of chemical agent were 'unaccounted for'. One must not jump to the conclusion that they exist."
Yet less than a month later, on March 18, Tony Blair told MPs: "When the inspectors left in 1998, they left unaccounted for 10,000 liters of anthrax; a far-reaching VX nerve agent program; up to 6,500 chemical munitions; at least 80 tonnes of mustard gas, and possibly more than 10 times that amount; unquantifiable amounts of sarin, botulinum toxin and a host of other biological poisons; and an entire Scud missile program. We are asked now seriously to accept that in the last few years--contrary to all history, contrary to all intelligence--Saddam decided unilaterally to destroy those weapons. I say that such a claim is palpably absurd."
There, Tony Blair stated as a fact that proscribed material deemed "unaccounted for" by inspectors actually existed. In doing so, he seriously misled the House of Commons.
Furthermore. Blair neglected to mention that his own intelligence services had advised that even if Saddam still had weapons stockpiled, they would have degraded to the point where they were unusable.
Tony Blair stated as a fact that proscribed material deemed "unaccounted for" by inspectors actually existed. In doing so, he seriously misled the House of Commons.
According to a 2002 report the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), much of Iraq's pre-Gulf war stocks of chemical and biological agents listed by Blair, if they existed at all, would have degraded to such an extent that they would no longer be effective as warfare agents. The government's own dossier, which was published a few weeks later, referred to the IISS approvingly as "an independent and well-researched overview."
Among other things, the IISS report notes: "As a practical matter, any nerve agent from this period [pre-1991] would have deteriorated by now ..." It also says: "Any VX produced by Iraq before 1991 is likely to have decomposed over the past decade ...Any G-agent or V-agent stocks that Iraq concealed from UNSCOM inspections are likely to have deteriorated by now. Any botulinum toxin produced in 1989-90 would no longer be useful".
The prime minister didn't tell MPs any of this on 18 March 2003 when they voted to go to war.
What Blair didn't tell us about Hussein Kamal
Blair also used vital testimony selectively in order to build the case for war. On 18 March 2003, he told MPs:
In August [1995], it [Iraq] provided yet another full and final declaration. Then, a week later, Saddam's son-in-law, Hussein Kamal, defected to Jordan. He disclosed a far more extensive biological weapons program and, for the first time, said that Iraq had weaponized the program--something that Saddam had always strenuously denied. All this had been happening while the inspectors were in Iraq."
The prime minister chose not to divulge to MPs that Kamal also told UN inspectors that, on his orders, all Iraq's proscribed weapons had been destroyed.
A transcript of the IAEA/UNSCOM interview with Kamal came into the public domain in early 2003. In that interview, he said: "I ordered destruction [sic] of all chemical weapons. All weapons - biological, chemical, missile, nuclear were destroyed". He described anthrax as the "main focus" of Iraq's biological program, and when asked, "Were weapons and agents destroyed?" he replied: "Nothing remained". Of missiles, he said: "not a single missile left but they had blueprints and molds [sic] for production. All missiles were destroyed."
A transcript of a CNN interview with Hussein Kamal on 21 September 1995 can be read here. In it, he said "Iraq does not possess any weapons of mass destruction".
The Iraq war made Britain more vulnerable to terrorist attacks
In the build up to the Iraq war, Blair's government was repeatedly warned by intelligence chiefs that invading Iraq would dramatically increase the threat of terrorist attacks on UK soil, and act as a recruiting tool for al Qaida and other extremists across the world.
Sir David Omand, Security and Intelligence Co-ordinator in the Cabinet Office from June 2003 until April 2005, has testified to Chilcot that the Joint Intelligence Committee [JIC] "judged that the build-up of forces in the Gulf, in the region, before an attack on Iraq, would increase public hostility to the west and western interests.
He also said the JIC "warned that AQ [al-Qaeda] and other Islamist extremists may initiate attacks in response to coalition military action. We [the intelligence services] pointed out that AQ would use an attack on Iraq as justification ... for terrorist attacks on Western or Israeli targets. We pointed out that AQ was already in their propaganda portraying US-led operations as being a war on Islam and that, indeed, this view was attracting widespread support across the Muslim community".
"Coalition attacks would, we said, radicalize increasing numbers... [and] that the threat from AQ would increase at the onset of any attack on Iraq and that we should all be prepared for a higher threat level to be announced and for more terrorist activity in the event of war."
In addition, Eliza Manningham Butler, head of MI5 at the time, has testified to Chilcot that the Iraq war "substantially" exacerbated the overall terrorist threat MI5 and fellow services had to deal with. She said there was hard evidence for this, for instance "numerical evidence of the number of plots, the number of leads, the number of people identified, and the correlation of that to Iraq and statements of people as to why they were involved, the discussions between them as to what they were doing".
"Coalition attacks would, we said, radicalize increasing numbers... [and] that the threat from Al Qaeda would increase at the onset of any attack on Iraq."
--Sir David Omand
She added: "By 2003, I needed to ask the prime minister to double our budget. This is unheard of, it's certainly unheard of today, but he and the Treasury and the Chancellor accepted that because I was able to demonstrate the scale of the problem that we were confronted by."
In the build up to war, Blair's government was very keen to bring intelligence assessments of the threat from Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction" to public attention, but it kept silent about the pre-war intelligence assessments that the al-Qaeda threat to Britain would be heightened by British participation in military action against Iraq. Had MPs been aware of these assessments on 18 March 2003, they might not have given the green light to military action.
On that day, Tony Blair did not tell them that al-Qaida activity in Britain would likely increase with murderous effect if they voted for war. On the contrary, he told them that a vote for war was a vote to combat al-Qaida; that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein would prevent a future alliance between him and al-Qaida, as a consequence of which al-Qaida would be armed with "weapons of mass destruction".
'Go blame the French'
On March 18 2003 Tony Blair claimed that France had undermined support for a second UN resolution, which would have authorized the use of force to disarm Saddam. He told the House of Commons: "Last Monday [10 March], we were getting very close with it [the second resolution]. We very nearly had the majority agreement... Then, on Monday night, France said that it would veto a second resolution, whatever the circumstances."
In fact, France said no such thing. On the contrary, in an interview that Monday night, President Chirac made it very clear that there were circumstances in which France would not veto a resolution for war. Early in the interview, he identified two different scenarios, one when the UN inspectors report progress and the other when the inspectors say their task is impossible - in which case, in his words, "regrettably, the war would become inevitable." That portion reads:
"The inspectors have to tell us: 'we can continue and, at the end of a period which we think should be of a few months' - I'm saying a few months because that's what they have said - 'we shall have completed our work and Iraq will be disarmed'. Or they will come and tell the Security Council: 'we are sorry but Iraq isn't cooperating, the progress isn't sufficient, we aren't in a position to achieve our goal, we won't be able to guarantee Iraq's disarmament'. In that case it will be for the Security Council and it alone to decide the right thing to do. But in that case, of course, regrettably, the war would become inevitable. It isn't today."
From that, it is plain as a pikestaff that there were circumstances in which France would not have vetoed military action, namely, if the UN inspectors reported that they couldn't do their job. They had never reported this. By contrast, as Hans Blix told the Chilcot Inquiry in 2010, inspectors were given access to every site they asked to visit and inspect: "on no particular occasion were we denied access".
Tony Blair gave Alastair Campbell "his marching orders to play the anti-French card with the Sun and others."
This is not the story the British public was told. The day after Chirac's interview, on 11 March 2003, Blair blamed France for the US/UK failure to persuade more than two other members of the UN Security Council (Spain and Bulgaria) to vote for war. We know this from evidence given to the Chilcot inquiry on 19 January 2011 by Stephen Wall, who was Tony Blair's EU adviser from 2000 to 2004. He confirmed that he had witnessed Tony Blair in a Downing Street corridor give Alastair Campbell "his marching orders to play the anti-French card with the Sun and others".
Over to Chilcot
On the basis of the evidence before Chilcot, there is little reason to doubt that the Blair government misrepresented the intelligence to parliament and to the British public to make the case for an illegal war in which 179 British soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians died.
The invasion of Iraq was intended to deal with international terrorism. It is plain that the terrorist threat to Britain has increased beyond measure as a result of the decision to go into Iraq.
Let's see if John Chilcot agrees.
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The People Take on Fracking Corporation in UK-Wide Actions
Balcombe fracking protests spread nationwide as demonstrators shut down corporate headquarters, PR firm and drilling site
Aug 19, 2013
In a rapid-fire succession of civil disobedience actions across the United Kingdom, anti-fracking protesters came out in force Monday against drilling company Cuadrilla, shutting down their headquarters, their PR company and their drill site in Balcombe.
In an effort to suspend the "sustained campaign of corporate misinformation" being peddled by Bell Pottinger, beginning at 8 AM local time, six activists using superglue and reinforced arm tubes blocked the entrance company headquarters in London. Bell Pottinger is the PR company behind Cuadrilla's operation in Sussex where fracking already occurs.
Reporting on the action, the group No Dash for Gas writes:
Another activist climbed the building and unfurled a banner reading: 'BELL POTTINGER - FRACKING LIARS'. The campaigners used a sound system to play an undercover recording in which a Bell Pottinger spin doctor admits the company's pro-fracking PR offensive 'sounds like utter fucking bullshit.'
By 9 AM, 20 activists in Lichfield--two hours north of London--shut down Cuadrilla's headquarters by blockading it with their bodies. According to No Dash for Gas, three people entered the building and successfully occupied eight work stations using D-locks forcing the company to clear the entire floor of staff.
"We need to reclaim our energy system from the hands of corporations that will frack our countryside, crash our climate targets and send fuel bills through the roof," declared protester Debby Petersen.
And in Balcombe, where Cuadrilla's test drilling site set off the nationwide protests, hundreds of protesters faced off with police as they locked arms around five activists who blocked the main gates by securing themselves with D-locks and superglue to a wheelchair. A larger group of activists reportedly blocked the surrounding road.
Meanwhile, No Dash for Gas reports, a double-decker bus with children from the camp toured the area with the slogan "Don't frack with our future" emblazoned on the side of the vehicle.
Elsewhere, activists placed a wind turbine blade on the roof of the constituency office of Balcombe MP and Cabinet member Francis Maude, who was targeted for his pro-fracking views.
Reports of aggressive police tactics being used at the Balcombe protest have already drawn criticism and a formally filed complaint after a video surfaced of officers arresting a peaceful protester by "kneeling on his head and pushing his face into the ground as other officers restrain him." Other police had reportedly charged, pushed and shoved protesters and forced "one protester's head down with a bicycle wheel."
BBC had this video of the police violence in Balcombe:
Police violence at peaceful fracking protest in Balcombe captured on BBC NewsPolice violence caught on camera as protesters peacefully blockade the site of the controversial drilling site in Balcombe, West ...
Among the six demonstrators arrested by the Balcombe gates was Green Party MP, Dr. Caroline Lucas, who--along with her son--was forcibly removed from outside the test drilling site where she sat with her arms linked with other protesters.
"I'm proud of the people around me who have put their bodies where the police are," Lucas said. "They have tried to use the democratic processes, tried to raise the issue through those democratic panels. The government isn't listening. Climate change is the greatest threat that we face and I think that people are right to try and take action against fracking."
The actions follow three weeks of protests by the people of Balcombe against test drilling in the area which, protesters say, could lead to fracking to extract shale gas.
As others have taken up the local fight, a growing 'climate camp' in Balcombe housed and fed roughly 800 people over the weekend as they prepared for their multi-front battle against Cuadrilla and the gas drilling industry.
Reclaim the Power posted a number of images on their Flickr page from Monday's demonstrations.
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