“ISRAEL’S MODUS OPERANDI IS CAUSING COLLATERAL DAMAGE. ITS A TACTIC THEY’VE USED FOR DECADES IN PALESTINE, LEBANON AND BEYOND.”

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The US Government cleared Israel of bombing al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City last Wednesday evening, but unanswered questions remain leaving it the #1 suspect. 

“Israel's modus operandi is causing collateral damage. It's a tactic that they've used for decades in Palestine, Lebanon and beyond," reporter Antony Loewenstein, who has investigated and detailed how Israel controls the Palestinians, said when asked about Israel's ongoing war against the Palestinians just days before the deadly blast.

The October 17 Gaza hospital blast killed at least 100 civilians, the US Government says. The Gaza Health Ministry says 471 Palestinian civilians died. While the exact number of the dead is not known, it is known they were sheltering from an Israeli bombing campaign in the Christian hospital's interior courtyard when they were killed.

The reporting on the explosion has been, before this, hopelessly naive. 

It ignores that modern, 21st Century warfare is four-dimensional and that one of those dimensions is information warfare. It also discounts the possibility of a new, and previously secret, Israeli weapon designed not just to kill but to confuse—such new weapons are to be expected in 21st Century warfare, 21st Century war-fighters say, The Free Lance previously reported. The ever-present possibility of sabotage appears not to have been considered at all—not even by military bloggers.

Israel has been battling the Palestinians over land both groups claim as their homeland for 75 years. Viewed historically, the conflict between them has been one, long, generally low-intensity conflict periodically interrupted by relatively brief, but intense, shooting wars.

To counter Israel's American-equipped conventional military superiority, Palestinian militia resort to unconventional, guerilla warfare. Palestinian weapons and tactics have increased in lethality over the course of the last three major shooting wars, graduating from rocks to bombs to missiles. The latest war between them is one of the fiercest and bloodiest in the long history of the conflict. 

Palestinian militia launched a sophisticated, multi-domain attack on Israel from the Gaza Strip on Oct. 7. It caught Israel by complete strategic, operational and tactical surprise. Palestinian forces used digital spy craft to identify selected , weak spots in Israel's mined, fortified border. Then they used advanced drone tactics to breach it. Thousands of Palestinian militiamen shot their way into the Jewish homeland.

Simultaneously, a barrage of more than 2,500 rockets overwhelmed Israel's vaunted "Iron Dome" anti-missile defense system and struck targets throughout Israel. Chaos unleashed inside Israel by the missile strikes disrupted it's ability to mobilize armed forces to neutralize the invaders.  They killed more than 1,405 Israelis, including 307 soldiers and 57 police officers.

More than 1,500 Palestinian militiamen were killed in action, and their bodies recovered by Israeli forces. The rest retreated back across the border into Gaza. Before they left, they took 224 hostages with them. Some of the hostages hold dual Israeli-American citizenship. 54 are Thai nationals. “Almost 50” have so far been killed by Israel ‘s retaliatory bombing campaign, Hamas, the primary Palestinian militia in Gaza, says.

Immediately after the stunning attack, Israel's right-wing Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, vowed revenge.

"We will take mighty vengeance for this wicked day," Netanyahu said.

"I say to the residents of Gaza," Netanyahu added, "leave now because we will operate forcefully everywhere."

Israel immediately unleashed a relentless airborne and artillery bombardment on Gaza that continues to this day. It is more violent and destructive than any military force Israel used on the Palestinians, ever, the Associated Press reports. Israel even bombed the global news organization's Gaza Office.

"Cataclysmic" is what Amnesty International calls it. Entire neighborhoods in Gaza have been bombed to rubble. Whole families have been murdered in their homes. More than 6,747 Palestinians have been killed by Israel, the Gaza Healthy Ministry reported on Thursday when it released a list of the names of the dead. 2,665 of them are children. Another 281 could not be identified.

Even if the numbers are inflated, as Pres. Joe Biden suggested on Wednesday, thousands of innocent people have still been killed.

Israel itself reported 320 air, artillery or missile strikes on Monday and 400 on Tuesday alone. 

Ten days into this war, an explosion ripped through the courtyard inside the al-Ahli Arab Hospital complex. It was the middle of the workday on the East Coast. The New York Times used extra-large font on its Internet homepage to report the massacre. It laid the blame on Israel, and attributed it to the militia-controlled Gaza authorities: “Israeli Strike Kills Hundreds in Hospital, Palestinian Officials Say."

Protests exploded against Israel in Arab countries around the world.

Prime Minister Netanyahu's Government quickly denied it bombed the hospital. Israel said a missile fired at Israel by Palestinian militia mis-fired, fell on the hospital and exploded. The Netanyahu-led Israeli government released video which it said exonerated it of guilt. US officials supported Israel. They said with "high confidence" the explosion was caused by a defective Palestinian rocket that broke up mid-flight, and not by an Israeli bomb, Reuters reported.

US officials endorsed Israel's explanation, but the region's leaders rejected it, including Morocco, Egypt, Saudi Arabia. 

"The truth about who was responsible for the Gaza hospital strike is now irrelevant. Public opinion has decided: Israel is the culprit," former French ambassador to the US, Gérard Araud, said. "All the explanations won’t do anything. This is a major defeat for Israel. It will have political consequences." 

Not in the US. In fact, the Times and other mainstream news organizations quickly backed away from their initial report that Israel was responsible. The Times issued an "Editor's Note" saying it "should have taken more care with the initial presentation, and been more explicit about what information could be verified."

But then the Times actually reviewed the video Israel claimed exonerated it and found it failed to support Israel and the US Government's claim a Palestinian missile caused the explosion.

"The missile in the video was never near the hospital," the Times reported on Wednesday. "It was launched from Israel, not Gaza, and appears to have exploded above the Israeli-Gaza border, at least two miles away from the hospital."

The Israelis lied. They used real video to fabricate a false narrative that exonerated them and simultaneously laid the blame on the Palestinians. Lying to deny a crime one is suspected of committing has long been considered circumstantial evidence of guilt admissible in criminal prosecutions in American courts.

The world may never know with certainty whether Israel or Palestinian militia is responsible for the Gaza hospital blast. 125 years after a mysterious explosion sent an American battleship to the bottom of Havana harbor, triggering the Spanish-American war, we still don't know what, or who, caused the catastrophic blast that killed 260 American sailors.

But we do know something for certain about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We know that for the last decade-and-a-half the Israeli government's strategy to control the Palestinians has been to periodically "mow the grass" in Palestinian territory with bombs and bullets. They say they only attack militia targets. They kill so many innocent Palestinians they virtually guarantee future violence, Raphael S. Cohen, Senior Political Scientist at RAND, recently observed.

While its "mowing the grass" strategy buys Israel "at best a few years of relative peace," Cohen says, it fuels "further long-term radicalization. And so the cycle continues ad infinitum."

Meanwhile, Israeli forces are massed on the Gaza border, poised to invade—the next, more violent, more bloody stage of the war.

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