Silverseren

Nearly half of the air-to-ground munitions that Israel has used in Gaza in its war with Hamas since October 7 have been unguided, otherwise known as “dumb bombs,” according to a new US intelligence assessment.

Israeli officials are facing backlash after years of Prime Minister Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu quietly allowing Hamas to remain in power.

But reporting in the New York Times has revealed that Netanyahu's government was more hands-on about helping Hamas: they helped a Qatari diplomat bring suitcases of cash into Gaza, indirectly boosting the militant organization, according to the report.

The calculus — the Times reported on Sunday, citing Israeli officials, Netanyahu's critics, and the man's own reported statements — was to keep Hamas strong enough to counteract the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, allowing Netanyahu to avoid a two-state peace solution and keep both sides weak.

Israeli security officials got it wrong; they didn't think Hamas was capable, or even interested, in launching a large attack against the Jewish state.

According to the findings that were sent to Haaretz, Mara'i's chest was bruised and his ribs and breastbone were broken. There were also signs of external bruises to his head, neck, back, buttocks, left arm and thigh. According to the autopsy report, he was healthy and had no preexisting conditions before his imprisonment.

Meanwhile, a prisoner released from Megiddo Prison in the north on November 16 said he was in the cell with Mara'i. In a phone interview with Physicians for Human Rights after his release, he said that since the war started, forces from various prison service units at Megiddo Prison would come every Sunday and Tuesday to shackle the prisoners' hands behind their backs and beat them. He said that a few days before his release he saw Mara'i being beaten.

"They handcuffed us behind our backs and started a punching party. They taunted one of the prisoners, Abed al-Rahman Mara'i, and cursed his late father, who had recently died. He started screaming and then about 15 people from the force attacked him, all of them surrounding him and hitting him hard," according to the prisoner's testimony that was shared with Haaretz.

"The blows went on for about five minutes, and they focused on beating him on the head. Then they took him away." About a week later, the prisoner said, the other inmates learned that Mara'i had died.

The US State Department transmitted an emergency declaration to lawmakers late Friday night for the sale of thousands of munitions to Israel, bypassing the standard 20-day period that congressional committees are typically afforded to review such a sale

Scholar and policy analyst Jehad Abusalim remembers his friend Refaat Alareer, the acclaimed Palestinian academic and activist who was killed by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City earlier this week.

“Refaat Alareer was a towering figure in Palestinian society, especially in Gaza,” who used education and “language as a weapon against oppression,” says Abusalim, who speaks about the widespread destruction of schools and educators in Gaza by Israel’s renewed bombardment, siege and invasion. “The tragedy that has befallen the academic, scholarly and intellectual community in Gaza and in Palestine is unprecedented. Israel is destroying the foundations of society in the Gaza Strip.”

As Israel expands its ground assault into Khan Younis, a surgeon at the European Hospital in the city describes desperately trying to treat a relentless stream of wounded children as critical supplies run out

A female abductee freed with her children – but without her husband, who remains in captivity – is heard on one recording saying: “The feeling we had there was that no one was doing anything for us. The fact is that I was in a hiding place that was shelled and we had to be smuggled out and we were wounded. That’s besides the helicopter that shot at us on the way to Gaza.”

She adds: “You have no information. You have no information. The fact that we were shelled, the fact that no one knew anything about where we were… You claim that there is intelligence. But the fact is that we are being shelled. My husband was separated from us three days before we returned to Israel and taken to the [Hamas] tunnels” under Gaza.

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The former abductee continues: “Do you think the men are strong? My husband would beat himself every day, punch his face until it bled because it was too much for him, and now he is alone, and God knows under what conditions.”

“And you want to topple the Hamas government, to show that you have bigger balls? There is no life here that is more important than others,” she adds. “None of us there deserve any less treatment than any resident of Israel. Return them all and not in a month, two months or a year.”

Referring to reports that the Israeli military is considering flooding Hamas tunnels in Gaza, she continues: “And you are talking about washing the tunnels with sea water? You are shelling the route of tunnels in the exact area where they are. The girls ask me where is their father? And I have to tell them that the bad guys don’t want to yet release him.”

The woman adds: “You put politics above the return of the kidnapped.”

A main courthouse in Gaza has been destroyed by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), according to several Israel media outlets.

Footage, showing the demolition of the Palace of Justice, was published on 4 December by Israel media.

Among the dead is Sofyan Taya, president of the Islamic University of Gaza and a renowned researcher in physics and applied mathematics. Taya was killed along with his family in an Israeli airstrike Saturday in Jabaliya, just north of Gaza City.

On Friday, Montaser Al-Sawaf, a freelance journalist working for the Turkish Anadolu Agency, was killed along with his brother and other relatives in an Israeli airstrike on his home. Al-Sawaf reportedly bled to death after no ambulances were available to save him. The Committee to Protect Journalists says at least 56 Palestinian media workers have been killed by Israeli forces since October 7.

The outlet attributed to mistake to “faulty sourcing.”

Castelman was hit by soldier who apparently mistook him for a terrorist during Jerusalem attack, but footage shows him unarmed, with his hands in the air prior to being shot

Over the first four days of Israel-Hamas prisoner exchange, Israel arrests 133 Palestinians while releasing 150.

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But the worry for Palestinian prisoners does not end after their release. The majority of those freed are usually rearrested by Israeli forces in the days, weeks, months and years after their release.

Dozens of those who were arrested in a 2011 Israel-Hamas prisoner exchange were rearrested and had their sentences reinstated.

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Many of the women and children released during the truce have testified to the abuse they experienced in Israeli prisons.

Several videos have also emerged in recent weeks of Israeli soldiers beating, stepping on, abusing and humiliating detained Palestinians who have been blindfolded, cuffed and stripped either partially or entirely. Many social media users said the scenes brought back memories of the torture tactics used by United States forces in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison in 2003.