Instagram removes clip discussing Hamas, restores later
A clip posted on Instagram by Democracy Now of an interview with journalist Jeremy Scahill discussing his interviews with Hamas members was removed, Semafor news agency reports.
The US-based independent media outlet also received a takedown notice saying that it had shared “symbols, praise, or support of people and organisations we define as dangerous”, the report added.
Later in the day, Democracy Now posted a shorter version of the clip. A spokesperson of Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, told Semafor that the video’s removal was an error and it had been restored.
The social media giant has been accused of silencing pro-Palestine voices. In a report in December, Human Rights Watched accused Meta of “systemic and global censorship” when it came to pro-Palestinian content, describing it as “the biggest wave of suppression of content about Palestine” ever recorded.
Meta be damned, information will find a way out regardless
In a nutshell:
- Hamas wanted to take Israeli soldiers hostage to trade for their fighters in Israeli prisons
- Hamas didn't expect the 'success' they had on Oct 7, causing many other people and other factions to cross the fence
- Many civilian hostages (unplanned) were taken into Gaza (which Hamas first tried to return but Israel refused)
- Hamas expected harsh retaliation to draw attention back onto the Palestinian cause which had become completely ignored by the international community
- Hamas didn't expect the genocidal scale of Israel's revenge
Drop Site News: Jeremy Scahill on Launching Investigative News Outlet with Ryan Grim
DROP SITE EXCLUSIVE: Hamas Leaders Reveal REAL Oct 7 Plan
Long read, but very informative, all very accurate in tune with all the tidbits investigations have uncovered since Oct 7.
Top class journalism.
On the Record with Hamas
In a Drop Site News exclusive, Hamas officials discuss their motivations, political objectives, and the human costs of their armed uprising against Israel
https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/on-the-record-with-hamas
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Hamas leaders cast their operations on October 7 as a righteous rebellion against an occupation force that has waged a military, political, and economic war of collective punishment against the people of Gaza. “They have left us no choice other than to take the decision in our hands and to fight back,” said Dr. Basem Naim, a senior member of Hamas’s political bureau and a former government minister in Gaza. “October 7, for me, is an act of defense, maybe the last chance for Palestinians to defend themselves.”
Naim, a medical doctor, is a member of the inner circle surrounding former Gaza Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, the chief political leader of Hamas, who is based in Doha, Qatar. In the aftermath of October 7, Naim has served as one of the few Hamas officials authorized to speak publicly on behalf of the movement. In an interview, Naim offered an unapologetic defense of the October 7 attacks against Israel and said that Hamas was acting out of existential necessity in the face of sustained diplomatic and military assaults not only on Palestinians in Gaza, but also the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem.
“The people in Gaza, they had one of two choices: Either to die because of siege and malnutrition and hunger and lacking of medicine and lacking of treatment abroad, or to die by a rocket. We have no other choice,” he said. “If we have to choose, why choose to be the good victims, the peaceful victims? If we have to die, we have to die in dignity. Standing, fighting, fighting back, and standing as dignified martyrs.”
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Hamas has emphasized that its aim on October 7 was to shatter the status quo and compel the U.S. and other nations to address the plight of the Palestinians. On this front, informed analysts say, they succeeded. “On October 6, Palestine had disappeared from the regional agenda, from the international agenda. Israel was dealing unilaterally with the Palestinians without generating any attention or any criticism,” said Mouin Rabbani, a former UN official who worked as a special advisor on Israel-Palestine for the International Crisis Group. “The attacks of Hamas on October 7 and their aftermath played a crucial role, but I think just as much credit, if you will, goes to Israel, if not more so,” he added. “If Israel had responded in the way that it did in [previous assaults on Gaza] in 2008, 2014, 2021, it would have been a story for a number of weeks, there would have been a lot of hand wringing, and that would have been the end of it.”
“It's not only the actions of the colonized, but also the reaction of the colonizer that has created the current political reality, the current political moment,” Rabbani said.
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In both Israeli and U.S. media, Sinwar is generally portrayed as a cartoonish villain hiding in his tunnel lair, dreaming up ways to murder and terrorize innocent Israelis as part of a warped, ISIS-style interpretation of Islam. He has been a U.S. State Department-designated terrorist since 2015. “The United States has to have a bogeyman, a Saddam Hussein figure, a Hitler figure,” said Khalidi. “I think Sinwar has been chosen.”
Despite the sinister portrayals, Sinwar’s writings and media interviews indicate he is a complex thinker with clearly defined political objectives who believes in armed struggle as a means to an end. He gives the impression of a well-educated political militant, not a cult leader on a mass suicide crusade. “It's not this black image of Sinwar as a man with two horns living in the tunnels,” said Hamad, the Hamas official who worked directly with Sinwar for three years. “But in the time of war, he's very strong. This man is very strong. If he wants to fight, he fights seriously.”
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In his past media interviews, Sinwar has spoken of Hamas as a social movement with a military wing and framed its political goals as part of the historic struggle to reestablish a unified state of Palestine. “I am the Gaza leader of Hamas, of something much more complex than a militia—a national liberation movement. And my main duty is to act in the interest of my people: to defend it and its right to freedom and independence,” he said. “All of those who still view us as an armed group, and nothing more, you don't have any idea of what Hamas really looks like.... You focus on resistance, on the means rather than the goal—which is a state based on democracy, pluralism, cooperation. A state that protects rights and freedom, where differences are faced through words, not through guns. Hamas is much more than its military operations.”
Sinwar, unlike leaders of Al Qaeda or ISIS, has regularly invoked international law and UN resolutions, exhibiting a nuanced understanding of the history of negotiations with Israel mediated by the U.S. and other nations. “Let's be clear: having an armed resistance is our right, under international law. But we don't only have rockets. We have been using a variety of means of resistance,” he said in the 2018 interview. “We make the headlines only with blood. And not only here. No blood, no news. But the problem is not our resistance, it is their occupation. With no occupation, we wouldn't have rockets. We wouldn't have stones, Molotov cocktails, nothing. We would all have a normal life."
“All of those who still view us as an armed group, and nothing more, you don't have any idea of what Hamas really looks like.”
Throughout 2018 and 2019, Sinwar endorsed the large-scale nonviolent protests along the walls and fences of Gaza known as the Great March of Return. “We believe that if we have a way to potentially resolve the conflict without destruction, we’re O.K. with that,” Sinwar said at a rare news conference in 2018. “We would prefer to earn our rights by soft and peaceful means. But we understand that if we are not given those rights, we are entitled to earn them by resistance.”
Israel responded to the protests with the regular use of lethal force, killing 223 people and wounding more than 8,000 others. Israeli snipers later boasted about shooting dozens of protesters in the knee during the weekly Friday demonstrations. For many Palestinians these events reinforced the view that Israel’s policies cannot be changed by words.
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“The battle between us and the occupation who desecrated our land, displaced our people and are still murdering and displacing Palestinians—confiscating lands and attacking sacred places—is an open ended battle,” Sinwar said. When asked about the killing of Israeli civilians by Hamas rockets, Sinwar became animated. “You can’t compare that to those who resist and defend themselves with weapons that look primitive in comparison. If we had the capabilities to launch precision missiles that targeted military targets, we wouldn’t have used the rockets that we did,” he shot back. “Does the world expect us to be well-behaved victims while we’re getting killed? For us to be slaughtered without making a noise? That’s impossible.”
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Two and a half years later, Sinwar authorized the start of Operation Al Aqsa Flood, the single deadliest attack inside Israel in history.
Hamas officials told me that for strategic reasons they timed the attacks to coincide with Shemini Atzeret, the final day of the Sukkot thanksgiving holiday, but more broadly to exploit mounting divisions within Israeli society and the deepening unpopularity of Netanyahu within Israel. On a tactical level, they engaged in extensive monitoring of the Israeli military facilities along what is referred to as the “Gaza envelope” and identified vulnerabilities in surveillance systems and perimeter defenses.
Throughout the two years leading up to the October 7 attacks, Hamas officials told me, they sent Israel repeated warnings to halt the activity of illegal settlements and annexations in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Hamas also protested Israel’s mounting attacks and provocations on the grounds of Al Aqsa mosque, the holiest Islamic site in Palestine, and demanded that the U.S. and other nations restrain Israel. “We talked to the mediators, especially the United Nations and the Egyptians and the Qataris: ‘Tell Israel to stop this. We will not be able to tolerate more and more,’” said Hamad, a Hebrew speaker with a long history of negotiating with Israeli officials. “They did not listen to us. They thought that Hamas is weak, Hamas is now just looking for some humanitarian aid, some facilities in the Gaza Strip. But at the same time, we were preparing.”
“We talked to the mediators, especially the United Nations and the Egyptians and the Qataris: ‘Tell Israel to stop this. We will not be able to tolerate more and more.’”
“We were preparing because we are under occupation,” said Hamad. “We think that the West Bank and Gaza is one unit. This is our people under oppression, under killing and massacres. We have to save them. And Israel feels that they are above the law. They can do anything. No one can stop them.”
“We have said it before October 7 that the earthquake is coming. And the repercussions of this earthquake will be beyond the borders of Palestine,” Naim said.
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Naim said Hamas had concluded that Israeli policy could only be altered through violent resistance. “I have to say we are also reading history very well. We [learned] from the history in Vietnam, in Somalia, in South Africa, in Algiers,” he said. “At the end, they are not peaceful NGOs who will come and say, ‘Sorry we have bothered you for some years and now we are leaving and please forgive us.’ They are so brutal and bloody that they will not leave except with the same tools they are using.”
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Before October 7, the prospects for a Palestinian state were becoming slimmer and slimmer. The conditions in Gaza were dire and there were no signs of improvement because of the intense Israeli blockade and lack of interest from the world. Residents of the Strip, according to polls, were increasingly apportioning blame for their misery on Hamas—one of the central aims of Israel’s collective punishment strategy. The U.S. was spearheading a series of diplomatic initiatives to normalize relations between Israel and Arab states. The Abraham Accords, launched under President Donald Trump, effectively excised the issue of Palestinian self-determination as a condition for normalization, a major victory for Israel.
Israeli provocations and attacks against worshippers at Al Aqsa were becoming a regular occurrence. Israel was aggressively moving forward with its annexation of Palestinian land and armed settlers were conducting deadly paramilitary actions, often with the support or facilitation of the government, against Palestinian farms and homes in the occupied territories.
The Palestinian Authority in the West Bank was widely despised for its corruption and collaboration with Israel, including through the brutal actions of its U.S.-backed security forces. The PA, often referred to as a subcontractor of the Israeli occupation, routinely arrests dissidents, union organizers, and journalists, in addition to people Israel has identified as security risks.
Hamas wanted to shatter the status quo on Gaza, position itself as the defender of the Palestinian people, and open possibilities for a new alignment of political power to replace what they saw as PA leader Mahmoud Abbas’s Vichy rule. At its highest level, Operation Al Aqsa Flood was to be the opening salvo in what Hamas hoped would be a decisive and historic moment in the war for the liberation of Palestine.
On a tactical level, the October 7 operations exceeded Hamas’s projections. “It was very surprising for us how speedy one of the strongest brigades in the Israel Army—the Gaza brigade is one of the strongest, most sophisticated groups of their army—to collapse within hours without any serious resistance, and that even the state as a whole, for hours and maybe days, continued to be paralyzed, were not able to respond in the proper professional way,” said Naim, the Hamas political bureau member.
“They were able to create this image of undefeated, undefeatable army, undefeatable soldiers, the long hand of Israel, which can hit everywhere or strike everywhere and come back, relax, to drink at some cafe in Tel Aviv, like what they have done in Iraq, in Syria, Lebanon, everywhere. I think it has shown that [Israel’s self-promoted reputation] was not reflecting the reality.” The attacks, he said, showed Palestinians and their allies that “Israel is defeatable and liberation of Palestine is a good possibility.”
“There was absolutely no control of the battle space. There was no control of this area.”
Nine months after the attacks, Israel remains in a state of shock and disbelief over the total failure of its vaunted military and intelligence agencies to protect the most vulnerable areas of Israel.
“Hamas won the war on October 7. The fact that they were able to conquer parts of Israel and kill so many Israelis,” said Gershon Baskin, an experienced Israeli negotiator in regular touch with elements of Hamas. “They took out Israel's electronic surveillance system with drones that you can buy on Amazon and hand grenades. They took down Israel's internal communication systems in the kibbutzim all around the Gaza Strip. They were so much more sophisticated than Israel.”
Hamas “never imagined that there would be no Israeli army when they crossed the border into Israel,” said Baskin. “One of the Hamas leaders told me, ‘If we knew there was going to be no army there, we would have sent 10,000 people and conquered Tel Aviv.’ And they're not mistaken. They had no army there, and when they encountered the [Nova] music festival that they didn't know about, they went on a killing spree.”
Khalidi also believes that Hamas was not prepared for its own operational success on October 7. “I don't think they expected the Gaza division to fall apart. I don't think they expected to overrun a dozen or more border settlements. I don't think they expected thousands and thousands of Gazans to come out of this prison that Israel has created and kidnap individual Israelis. I don't think they expected the kind of killing that took place in these border settlements. I don't think all of this was planned, frankly,” he told me. “There was absolutely no control of the battle space. There was no control of this area. The Israeli army took four days to reoccupy every single military position, every single border village. So there were two days, three days, in some cases more, during which there was complete chaos. I'm sure horrific things happened.”
Hamas has consistently denied allegations that its fighters intentionally killed civilians on October 7. In a manifesto published on January 21, titled “Our Narrative,” Hamas sought to explain Operation Al Aqsa Flood, though the document consisted mostly of general grievances. Among the tangible aims of the attacks in Israel, Hamas said, its fighters had “targeted the Israeli military sites, and sought to arrest the enemy’s soldiers to [put] pressure on the Israeli authorities to release the thousands of Palestinians held in Israeli jails through a prisoners exchange deal.”
“Maybe some faults happened during Operation Al Aqsa Flood’s implementation due to the rapid collapse of the Israeli security and military system, and the chaos caused along the border areas with Gaza,” it continued. Sinwar reportedly acknowledged to his comrades after October 7 that “things went out of control” and “People got caught up in this, and that should not have happened.”
Rabbani said that it is undeniable that Hamas killed civilians during the October 7 attacks and expressed serious doubts about the group’s official position that Al Aqsa Flood was focused solely on targeting the Israeli military. “Hamas has a history of this—its suicide bombings against civilian buses and restaurants and so on during the Second Intifada,” he said. Rabbani recalls reading accounts of the October 7 attacks and watching videos from that day of Israeli civilians being killed or captured. “My initial view was that these were probably people who had been suffering in Gaza their whole lives, didn't expect to go back alive, and wanted to go out with a bang. I'm sure that's the explanation for some of these cases,” he said.
“But I also wonder to what extent it was premeditated. I'd be very interested to learn to what extent Hamas intended to inflict a terribly traumatic blow on Israeli society, and not only the Israeli military,” he added. “There is evidence to support it. There is also evidence to contradict it. But I think it's a question worth examining in more detail.”
The discourse surrounding the killing of Israeli civilians on October 7 has been a central element in shaping public opinion on the war. “So much of the rage in Israel is a function of this very high toll of civilian death,” said Khalidi. “War leads to civilian deaths, but this was far beyond what could or should have been acceptable under any circumstances, and that is also on the planners of this operation. I think that's a hard thing to say, but I think it's something that should be said.”
Israel’s social security agency has determined the official death toll from October 7 to be 1,139 people. Among those killed, 695 were categorized as Israeli civilians, along with 71 foreign civilians and 373 members of Israeli security forces. As horrifying as the civilian death toll was on October 7, the message was and remains firm from U.S. and Israeli officials: Israeli lives are worth exponentially more than those of Palestinians.
Hamas has said that its forces targeted military bases and illegal settlements, characterizing the killing of civilians in the kibbutzim as collateral damage in battles against armed settlers “registered as civilians while the fact is they were armed men fighting alongside the Israeli army.” Hamas officials suggested that many of the confirmed dead Israeli civilians were killed in crossfire, “friendly fire” incidents, or intentionally killed by the Israeli Army to prevent them from being taken alive back to Gaza. “If there was any case of targeting civilians," Hamas alleged in its manifesto, "it happened accidentally and in the course of the confrontation with the occupation forces.”
Abulhawa charged that the Israeli and U.S. governments launched a coordinated propaganda campaign in the immediate aftermath of October 7 aimed at dehumanizing Palestinians and successfully crafted a false narrative of Hamas fighters as bestial monsters who killed for the sake of killing. She cited the volume of horror stories of sadistic crimes allegedly committed by Hamas fighters, including the beheading of babies, that have been promoted by Israeli and US officials, including Biden, only to later be disproven under scrutiny from journalists and independent researchers. “They said that they beheaded babies, that they eviscerated a pregnant woman, that they burned a baby in an oven, like really horrific violence that seemed just evil and gratuitous to kill Jews. That was the narrative,” she said. “It had not even a seed of truth.”
Hamas’s Naim credited the October 7 attacks and the nine months of armed insurgency against the invading Israeli forces for elevating the plight of Palestinian liberation to the center of global attention. “This popular support everywhere, especially in America and Europe, do you believe this would happen by a workshop in Washington, D.C., discussing between Palestinians and Americans how to run Rafah crossings?” he asked. “Unfortunately, this is the way. There is no other way.”
Hamad told me that no one involved with the planning of the October 7 attacks that he spoke with predicted the full scope of Israel’s response and that many Hamas leaders expected a more intense and prolonged version of previous Israeli attacks on Gaza. “This is a point that is very sensitive,” he said. “No one expected this reaction from the Israel side, because what happened now in Gaza, it is a full destruction of Gaza, killing about 40,000 people, destroying all the institutions, hospitals and everything. I know the situation is horrible in Gaza. It's very, very hard. And we need at least ten years to reconstruct Gaza.”
“This war is totally different,” Hamad said. “Totally different.”
Article continues here about the prisoner exchange
https://www.dropsitenews.com/i/146407346/prisoner-dilemma
Conclusion:
Rabbani agreed that how people in Gaza will ultimately judge Hamas’s responsibility for the apocalyptic devastation they’ve endured remains unpredictable. “I think there will also be many Palestinians who will look and say, ‘Okay, the Gaza Strip has been reduced to rubble. You've left the people of the Gaza Strip defenseless and subject to genocide. And yes, Israel did it. Israel is responsible. But that's on you as well.’” At the same time, Rabbani says the attacks of October 7 represent a historic chapter in the cause of Palestinian liberation and compared it to other pivotal moments in anti-colonial struggles in South Africa and Vietnam that came with significant death tolls among civilians. “There's no denying the catastrophic consequences,” he said. “But my sense is that the changes in the longer term—of course without in any way trying to minimize the enormously unbearable damage that has been inflicted on an entire people—will, in the end, be seen as a critical turning point akin to Sharpeville, Soweto, Dien Bien Phu.”
