Dec 28, 2023
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Army reveals 3,000 terrorists were in position to storm Galilee; strikes drove them away; commandos then carried out 70 forays into Lebanon
By Emanuel Fabian and Michael Bachner
The Israel Defense Forces revealed Tuesday that even before it officially launched ground operations in southern Lebanon earlier in the day, its troops had conducted dozens of secret cross-border raids throughout the current war, destroying numerous Hezbollah positions, tunnels and sites. The army also disclosed that days after Hamas’s October 7 mass onslaught in southern Israel, thousands of terrorists had been positioned near the Lebanon border in a plan to storm the Galilee and unleash similar carnage there.
The IDF briefed reporters on the new information before IDF Spokesperson Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari held a briefing in Hebrew and in English, presenting images and maps from the foiled mass invasion plan and elaborating on the subsequent covert commando missions in southern Lebanon, which aided the military campaign to dismantle the immediate threat and drive Hezbollah away from the border.
The army said special forces have since then carried out more than 70 small raids, destroying numerous Hezbollah positions, tunnels and thousands of weapons that would have potentially been used in the terror group’s invasion plan.
According to the IDF, troops in the raids over past months silently reached around 1,000 Hezbollah sites in southern Lebanon, some of them several kilometers from the border fence, including tunnels and bunkers where the terror group had stored weapons. The IDF said the sites were located both inside Lebanese villages and in forested areas.
The raids have been carried out since early in the Israel-Hamas war, after the IDF said it managed to push back Hezbollah’s elite Radwan force from the border area, enabling Israeli commandos to enter Lebanon with almost no detection. There were no direct clashes with Hezbollah operatives amid any of the raids.
According to IDF assessments, some 2,400 Radwan terrorists and another 500 Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists — trained by Radwan — had been waiting in southern Lebanon villages to attack Israel in the days after Palestinian terror group Hamas carried out its October 7, 2023, mass invasion from Gaza, in which some 1,200 people were murdered in Israel and 251 were kidnapped to the Strip amid widely documented atrocities and systematic targeting of civilians.
Despite being false, this report has been shared vigorously on posts throughout social media sources, including Reddit, Threads, X (formerly
By TAMAR URIEL-BEERI, JACOB LAZNIK
The false report went viral on different media sources and social media
Despite being false, this report has been shared vigorously on posts throughout social media sources, including Reddit, Threads, X (formerly Twitter), and Facebook.
The report has also been posted on London-based Arab media source Middle East Eye, which has over 1.6 million followers on Instagram, as well as Turkish news website TRT World, which has 2.1 million followers.
On these various posts on different media sites, authors of the posts sharing this false report have also altered the original text to say that the officials were resigning over issues with the ongoing war in Gaza, with some posts "citing" personal objection to being 'implicit in genocide."
Some have also falsely reported, such as Al Jazeera, that IDF spokesperson Daniel Hagari himself has resigned from his position.
Al Jazeera has since retracted the statement. The original post that contained the false information has reached over 31 thousand views.
I couldn’t stand to watch Shaun’s latest video, so I started reading the transcript instead. I got about 15 minutes in before I just had enough.
The good: I don’t think he’s legitimately antisemitic. I think he’s just a contrarian dipshit who took his anti-Israeli stance mostly because he had an excuse to go against what his government was saying (along with other Western governments) and didn’t bother to look deeper. So he is a lot of things but antisemitic does not seem to be one of them.
Also, I should commend him for pointing out actual cases of Israeli disinformation, such as an outright lie by the IDF spokesman, and brings up the violence towards mourners and even pallbearers at Shireen Abu Akleh’s funeral, which he rightfully condems (no, chanting slogans does not justify it).
The bad: The sheer one-sided laziness, up to and including outright lies (which, I hope, for his sake, were based in ignorance and not malice), starting right at the beginning. He says what got him doubting the narrative of ‘Israel good, Palestinians bad’ was a photo of Israelis sitting on chairs they’d brought watching the Gaza Strip being bombed from a safe distance in 2014—he neglects to mention that those are people from nearby Sderot, a town that had been subject to repeated rocket strikes from Hamas. He offhandedly mentions that the other side does it, too, but barely gives this thought much weight. Worse, he certainly does not consider that Israelis can at least claim that they’re cheering for the death of mlitants out for their blood hiding in the destroyed buildings, while Palestinians cheer for the deliberate killing of civilians: stabbing and shooting random civilians, launching rockets indiscriminately at civilians (no, Israel doesn’t do that, that’s what intel and GPS systems are for).
(Pro-tip: check out what your favourite pro-Palestinian influencer’s page for what they said while the October 7th Massacre was still ongoing. I bet you’ll be horrified. Shaun himself, for example, retweeted an infographic about the asymmetry of casualties in both sides over the years and blocked me when I called him out on his callous ‘well, numerically…’ attitude. That was last October, not 2014.)
Then there’s Abu Akleh’s death, which he also discusses. I’m using this term charitably, because he says it was definitively proven as murder and says any claim to the contrary has been proven to be a mendacious cover-up. No, he does not provide any sources countering, say, the official US position. (For the record: fuck then-Prime Minister Yair Lapid’s reaction. He is a prime example of the problems Israel actually has.)
Then he had the sheer audacity to claim that the claims of tunnels under As-Shifā’ Hospital were unfounded. What fucking nerve.
I was hoping to reach the point where he talks about how Hamas treats the Gazans, and point out that the disparity of casualties has to do in large part with the fact that Israel actually cares for its civilians (something he didn’t even hint at up to where I got), but that bold-faced lie about the hospital made it too much for me.
Fuck you, Shaun.
…Oh, and one last thing: he talked about the Western position being one of resistence to the implied barbarism of Islam. So, Shaun, I’m here to say it’s not fucking ‘implied’, you dolt, it’s emphatic. Read the fucking Qur’ān and tell me that shit doesn’t sound like any other cult leader’s insane ramblings. Listen to opinions Muslims express in polls. Talk to them about history, especially the history of the region. It’s cultish shit on par with MAGA/QAnon and Russian propaganda, but you start hemming and hawing when brown people say it, like a stereotypical Westerner who dismisses their country’s superstitions but gladly adopts those that come from China or India. How utterly disguting.
EDIT: I should’ve stopped listening to this prick back when he made his inaccuracies-ridden video about Harry Potter. I guess maybe in his view, there are indeed good and bad sides rather than actions…
from the Human Rights Watch.
by Seth J. Frantzman
This statement by Israel Defense Forces spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari must be read, it shows how Hamas took over Shifa hospital in Gaza, returning even after the IDF cleared the area in November. It's important to understand the criminal aspect of Hamas here, how it likely had advise from its hosts/handlers/patrons abroad to go back to the hospital...that they thought they would be able to stop any action again in the same place. This isn't just hubris. It is how Hamas felt secure at the hospital. It knew that the intl NGOs, UN and others would never oppose it or speak out about hundreds, or almost 1,000 terrorists being there. Hamas leadership relaxes in a country that is a western ally. Hamas feels safe because of the West. This is a fact. This is how Hamas became so powerful, with the backing of int'l organizations and a sense of impunity granted by the West and also by Iran-Russia-China-Turkey-Doha. It's important to understand this. Hamas today is an empire of terror created with backing from abroad. The criminal group illegally took over Gaza and was systematically rewarded by the int'l community since 2007. This is a fact.
STATEMENT BY HAGARI:
The operation at the Shifa Hospital continues. This is the operation with the largest aggregation of terrorists we have apprehended since the beginning of the war. So far, we have apprehended over 500 suspects, 358 of which are Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists.
They are surrendering, we are interrogating them, and they are providing us with very valuable and important intelligence.
We apprehended the chain of command of the Islamic Jihad, including:
1. Muhammad Jundia – Commander of the Shejaiya Battalion of the Islamic Jihad and the Deputy Commander of the terrorist organization’s Northern Brigade
2. Samir Ziad Abd Abu Odeh – Commander of the Al-Shati sector in the rocket unit of the Islamic Jihad.
3. Ahmad Samara – responsible for tunnels and underground terror infrastructure of the Islamic Jihad in the Northern Gaza Strip.
We apprehended senior Hamas figures, including:
1. Hamdallah Ali and Omar Azida– Azida, a senior official in the West Bank Headquarters, responsible for directing Hamas terrorist activity in the area of Nablus. Ali, who advanced Hamas activity in the Qalqilya area. The two are senior officials in the West Bank Headquarters of Hamas, they acted within their roles to advance terrorist attacks from Judea and Samaria, directed the transfer of weapons and funds to terrorists. This group operated under Saleh al-Arouri.
2. Mahmoud Kwasma - an operative in the Hamas West Bank Headquarters, planned and financed the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers in 2014, Naftali Fraenkel, Gilad Shaer and Eyal Yifrach, may their memory be a blessing.
In addition, we apprehended additional senior officials in Hamas' Internal Security forces.
Many terrorists in Shifa, especially from the Islamic Jihad, surrendered to our forces. This is a very hard blow to the Islamic Jihad - many of its operatives in the north, who are the majority of its significant operatives, either surrendered or were eliminated in the operation so far. With a number of them, we exchanged fire until they surrender or are eliminated.
During the last 24 hours, we entered the Qatari Building [in the Shifa compound]. This is a building that we also operated in during the previous operation in Shifa. This time, terrorists were hiding there. Shayetet 13 searched the building. During the scans on the basement floor, they encountered a terrorist cell. Our soldiers eliminated the terrorists without our forces being harmed. In another battle, another terrorist surrendered; after these battles, several terrorists surrendered. Among them are very senior officials - I still cannot publish their identities because they hold significant intelligence – after we finish interrogating them and find the intelligence with them, we will publish the identities of these terrorists. Senior Hamas officials understand well the significance of the operation and as the picture of the apprehended and of the eliminated terrorists becomes clearer - the pressure on them will increase.
At the beginning of the war, we destroyed the underground infrastructure dug under the hospital, and we confiscated military equipment and weapons hidden in it. The terrorists' command center at the Shifa Hospital was dealt with then. The terrorists fled in the previous operation when we called to evacuate the compound.
This time we operated differently. This time we operated by surprise. We raided the compound by surprise. The operation, led by the 162nd Division and carried out by special forces units led by Shayetet 13, in full cooperation on the ground, shoulder to shoulder with the ISA and Unit 504 for intelligence extraction in the field. We used deception tactics in this operation, and it was this that led to the success and apprehension of all 358 terrorists and there are more still inside this compound who haven’t managed to escape. This led to Hamas and the Islamic Jihad being severely damaged as a result of the operation. Those who did not surrender to our forces fought against our forces and were eliminated. Among them also the head of the Special Operations Directorate of Hamas' General Security - who chose to fight against our forces openly and our forces eliminated him.
The fighting continues inside the hospital buildings - inside the buildings at the hospital. There are Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists who decided to barricade themselves - they are currently barricading themselves in the area of the emergency room. At this stage, we are evacuating the patients - there are about 220 patients there - to another building. We are creating infrastructure for them, with appropriate medical equipment so that all the patients and doctors can be safe. For the past 24 hours, we continue to call upon the terrorists in the building to surrender, those who surrender will stay alive, those who do not we will fight against until we eliminate them.
Even at these hours, our soldiers are scanning the buildings, evacuating the wounded, and continuing to operate in the compound. There will be more ongoing combat here - there will be several more days to this operation.
Last night, when we visited the soldiers in the field during the operation, from all the special units - as I said, the Commander of Shayetet 13 briefed us, but there was also the ISA, also Unit 504 and also the senior command that came with us to the field. They told us something very very important - they emphasized to us, the soldiers and the commanders, that they will do everything necessary in this operation or another in order to bring about the release of the hostages. They emphasized - this is the most important thing to us.
We do not forget that in Gaza there are 134 hostages. It is our duty to continue and make every operational and intelligence effort, and also in negotiations, in order to bring them back home. This is what we are doing, and this is what we will continue to do. This is our responsibility.
I want to also send encouragement this evening to the families of the hostages. You and your loved ones are with us all the time.
* * *
by Emanuel Fabian
IDF Spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari confirms many Hamas members have surrendered to troops in the Gaza Strip today, saying they have revealed intelligence information on the terror group’s functioning amid the ground offensive.
“In Shejaiya and Jabaliya, terrorists who surrendered handed over weapons and equipment,” he says, confirming footage that leaked today.
“From the interrogations of the terrorists who surrendered, the following intelligence has emerged: The situation of the operatives on the ground is difficult, and the Hamas leadership, led by [Yahya] Sinwar, denies the reality even though it is updated on the details,” Hagari says.
“The operatives complain that the Hamas leadership is out of touch with the tough situation they are in on the ground,” says.
Hagari says there is a “widespread feeling that the Hamas leadership underground does not care about the public in Gaza who are above ground,” adding that this also worries the Hamas operatives.
“The intelligence that emerges from the interrogations creates more targets and aids us in the operational activity,” Hagari adds.