The Big Story
Yesterday, The Scroll mentioned reports of a deadly explosion late Tuesday evening at Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City. Early claims by the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry—initially broadcast by Qatar’s network Al Jazeera and then repeated in headlines in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere—were that the explosion was the result of an Israeli airstrike that had left more than 500 civilians dead. Despite the lack of evidence for the extraordinary claim—how would the hospital have arrived at an accurate death toll in the first hour after a mass casualty event?—it was amplified by Western journalists, including “disinformation” reporters from the BBC and NBC news. Elected Democrats also rushed to repeat the claim, despite a lack of sourcing or time to evaluate evidence. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) described the alleged Israeli attack as a “war crime” and called on Biden to “push for an immediate ceasefire to end this slaughter,” while Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) asserted that “Israel just bombed the Baptist Hospital killing 500 Palestinians” and blamed Biden for “your war and destruction.”
But the story of the hospital bombing appears to be untrue in almost every detail. Caveats apply, including that Gaza is an active war zone where information is difficult to verify, but virtually every piece of publicly available evidence supports the version of events initially offered by the IDF—that the explosion was the result not of an Israeli airstrike but of a misfired rocket from Gaza-based militant group Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The hospital itself was not blown up, as many initially claimed, and is in fact still standing. Photographs of the hospital parking lot show a small crater and minimal structural damage to the hospital (both inconsistent with Israeli Air Force ordnance), and aerial photography and drone footage show rocket shrapnel on the roofs of neighboring buildings. On Wednesday, the IDF released audio from what officials said was an intercepted call between Hamas fighters referring to the explosion as a rocket misfire.
By the time the truth began seeping out online, the “news” of this “massacre” had already spread throughout the Arab and Muslim world, sparking large protests outside the U.S. embassies in Baghdad and Beirut, drone attacks on U.S. bases in Iraq, and attempts to storm the Israeli consulate in Istanbul and the Israeli embassy in Amman, Jordan. The Jordanian government canceled a planned Wednesday summit in Amman that President Biden and the leaders of Jordan, Egypt, and the Palestinian Authority were to attend, citing Israel’s “massacres against the Palestinians.” The U.S. embassy in Lebanon on Wednesday morning warned American citizens not to travel to the country.
Analysts on social media have noted that visual evidence of the blast site is difficult to square with the initial claims of 500 deaths, and indeed, Gazan authorities have since revised their estimate of the number killed from “at least 500” down to “hundreds,” although no reliable estimates had emerged by the time of The Scroll’s publication Wednesday. Biden, after initially prevaricating, announced this morning during a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he believed Israel’s version of events, citing information presented to him by the U.S. Department of Defense. American officials backed that verdict, telling NBC News that the United States had “independently assessed” that the explosion came from a rocket launched by Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
Whether anyone will have learned anything from this whole sordid episode remains an open question. The Scroll has its doubts. At press time, Tlaib was repeating her incendiary accusation at a Wednesday afternoon protest outside the Capitol in Washington, D.C., telling Biden that “not all of America is with you on this one” and demanding the administration push for an immediate ceasefire.
IN THE BACK PAGES: Tony Badran on how the U.S. blinded Israeli intelligence gathering efforts on Hamas and other Palestinian groups inside Lebanon
→President Biden visited Israel today, meeting with Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu and members of the Israeli cabinet in Jerusalem before delivering a speech in Tel Aviv. Biden again emphasized his support for Israel in its campaign against Hamas, but warned Israel not to make the same mistakes as the United States after 9/11—a gesture, presumably, toward the repeated statements from U.S. officials that their goal is to prevent the conflict from “escalating” beyond Gaza. Biden cautioned the Israelis to “live by the laws of war” in their military response, announced a plan to deliver humanitarian aid to civilians in Gaza, and pledged $100 million in new U.S. funds for Gaza and the West Bank, while promising to ask Congress “for an unprecedented support package for Israel’s defense.” (Translation: Look at all the money we gave you; now don’t act without our permission.)
→A former employee of the Palestine Liberation Organization now working for U.S. immigration authorities posted a series of pro-Hamas and antisemitic messages on social media following the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks on Israel, including “Fuck Israel and any Jew who supports Israel,” according to an investigation from The Daily Wire. Nejwa Ali, a native of Dearborn, Michigan, worked as a public affairs officer for the Palestinian delegation to the United States from 2016 to 2017, until the delegation was expelled by the Trump administration. Ali was then hired as an asylum officer for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, before transferring to a different position under DHS. On her personal social media, Ali was a rabid partisan of the Palestinian cause, denouncing Israel as well as her employer, the U.S. government. “Fuck Israel, the government, and its military. Are you ready for your downfall?” Ali wrote on Instagram after the Oct. 7 attacks. She went on to share cartoon images of Hamas terrorists paragliding into Israel and an antisemitic caricature of a Jewish nose. On the topic of Israeli civilian deaths, Ali was unmoved, writing, “I hold every Israeli accountable for their governments [sic] actions, IF they do not speak against Israel.” Ali was still employed by DHS at the time of The Scroll’s publication.
Read the rest here: https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-u-s-govt-hired-a-pro-hamas-plo-spokeswoman-to-handle-asylum-claims
→A former intern for the Anti-Defamation League was among the New York University students caught on camera ripping down posters of Israeli hostages on NYU’s campus. Yazmeen Deyhimi, a junior who was featured last year in a New York Times style section piece about clubbing in a barbershop basement, admitted to tearing down the posters in an apology posted on Instagram, after being outed by fellow students. The ADL, which was once run as an organization dedicated to fighting antisemitism in the United States, is morphing under its current leadership into an arm of the Democratic Party’s political machine; it has become a champion of progressive causes and consequently struggled with junior staffers who reject the organization’s pro-Israel stance. This March, leaked audio from an ADL Zoom chat showed President Jonathan Greenblatt under attack from young ADL staffers over his criticism of the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction (BDS) movement.
Read the rest here: https://nypost.com/2023/10/17/nyu-student-that-ripped-down-israeli-hostage-posters-is-former-adl-intern/
→The U.S. Treasury Department announced new sanctions on Wednesday targeting 10 Hamas “members, operatives, and financial facilitators” in Gaza and throughout the Middle East. “We will continue to take all steps necessary to deny Hamas terrorists the ability to raise and use funds to carry out atrocities and terrorize the people of Israel,” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in a Wednesday statement.
It’s certainly pretty to think so. In truth, as Tablet and The Scroll have repeatedly noted, the United States is continuing to directly and indirectly funnel money toward Hamas, Iran, and other Iranian assets throughout the Middle East. For instance: U.S. aid to the Palestinian Authority, as The Scroll reported yesterday, is paid directly to the families of Hamas “martyrs” through the PA’s “pay to slay” program. The United States also spends hundreds of millions of dollars annually, including via monthly cash stipends, on security assistance to the Lebanese Armed Forces and Internal Security Forces, cutouts for Hezbollah (for more on this, read today’s Back Pages). That’s to say nothing of the tens of billions of dollars that have flowed into Iran’s coffers as result of the Biden administration’s refusal to enforce oil sanctions on Iran. As The Guardian reported in September, “Analysts say that this trade [in sanctioned oil] is going on with the full knowledge of the Biden administration, who have prioritised diplomatic overtures with Iran over enforcing their own sanctions.”
One more thing to file under “just for show”: the Treasury also announced Wednesday that it was sanctioning 11 individuals and 8 entities connected to Iran’s ballistic-missile and unmanned-aerial-vehicles programs—the same day that U.N. sanctions on Iran’s missile and missile-related technology programs expired.
Read more here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/team-biden-mainstreams-terror-financing-lebanon
→Speaking of Iranian assets, Ariane Tabatabai, the Pentagon employee outed in September as a participant in an Iranian government influence operation, will keep her top-secret security clearance after an internal DOD review, the Washington Free Beacon’s Adam Kredo reports. Tabatabai previously worked under Robert Malley, the lead Iran negotiator in both the Obama and Biden White Houses who was mysteriously placed on leave in April and had his security clearance suspended. Tabatabai was one of the Iran experts identified by Semafor in a September story as participating in the Iran Experts Initiative, an influence operation by the Iranian foreign ministry to coordinate Western experts’ public messaging about the Iran deal with Tehran’s diplomatic goals. Emails published by Semafor revealed that Tabatabai corresponded with Iran’s then foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, about whether to attend a conference in Israel, writing, “I thought maybe it would be better that I go and talk, rather than an Israeli like Emily Landau who goes and disseminates disinformation.” The Pentagon did not disclose any further details about its review of Tabatabai’s security clearance.
Read the rest here: https://freebeacon.com/biden-administration/member-of-iranian-influence-network-to-keep-security-clearance-after-pentagon-review/
→A synagogue in the German capital of Berlin was firebombed by masked assailants throwing Molotov cocktails early Wednesday morning, according to German police. The attempted arson on the Kahal Adass Jisroel community center, which includes a synagogue, a kindergarten, and a yeshiva, followed overnight rioting in the trendy Neukölln and Kreuzberg neighborhoods and at the Brandenburg Gate, during which large crowds of Muslim immigrants clashed with German police, injuring several officers. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz denounced the attack on the synagogue, saying it “outraged him personally” and that his government stands “united for the protection of Jews.”
Read the rest here: https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/berlin-synagogue-attacked-firebombs-antisemitic-incidents-rise-germany-104064043
TODAY IN TABLET:
We Know Terror, by Michael Fisher
Black Americans know the pains and the agony of being terrorized. Celebrating it is an outrage, and an insult—to us.
SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.
Eyeless in Gaza
How the U.S. blinded Israeli intelligence gathering efforts on Hamas and other Palestinian groups inside Lebanon
“... Promise was that I
Should Israel from Philistian yoke deliver;
Ask for this great deliverer now, and find him
Eyeless in Gaza ...”—John Milton, Samson Agonistes
It will be a while before we’re able to piece together a more complete picture of how Israel, despite its vaunted intelligence-gathering capabilities, was blindsided by the massive Hamas terrorist onslaught on Oct. 7, which led to the biggest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust. After the current Israeli operation in Gaza concludes, there will be inquiries, official and unofficial, in Israel and beyond, about what contributed to this intelligence failure. Where was Israel blinded, and how?
A key focal point for these inquiries will be Lebanon. Immediately following the Oct. 7 massacre, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing Hamas and Hezbollah sources, that the terrorist attack was planned by the Iranians and Hezbollah in Lebanon, where the Iranians had set up a joint operations room, the existence of which Hezbollah media had previously disclosed in 2021. The New York Times corroborated the Journal's story a few days later, adding that training for the attack, including on paragliders which were used to slaughter Israelis and tourists at a music festival, also took place in Lebanon.
So how did Israel find itself blind and deaf in Lebanon? Why was it that, with all this activity taking place in Lebanon over several months, Israel was not able to pick up meaningful intelligence on a lethal adversary? To answer these questions, we must turn to the current security environment in Lebanon, which in turn shaped and constrained Israel’s intelligence gathering capabilities.
Since Israel’s last major war in Lebanon in 2006, the tiny country has come under American sponsorship, even as it remained under Iranian suzerainty via its local regent, Hezbollah. This U.S.-Iranian condominium, solidified during Barack Obama’s two terms in office, is being topped off by the construction of a brand-new, $1 billion U.S. Embassy in Beirut—a symbol of the U.S.'s commitment to underwriting the country’s existing Hezbollah-led order.
America’s most significant commitments to Iranian-dominated Lebanon involve underwriting the Lebanese security sector, especially its two largest organs: the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) and the Internal Security Forces (ISF). The U.S. provides arms, training and equipment to these forces. Over the past year, American taxpayer dollars have also underwritten their salaries.
Right from the outset, the Lebanese security forces used American training and equipment to uncover Israeli spy cells gathering intelligence on Hezbollah. In 2009, the ISF detected an Israeli breach of Hezbollah’s ranks. The then-head of the ISF called the group’s intelligence chief and told him: “You’ve been infiltrated.” After Hezbollah and the ISF exchanged information, Hezbollah reportedly then took over the surveillance, apprehension, and interrogation of the spies. Following the assassination of Hezbollah senior commander Imad Mughniyeh in Damascus the previous year, the LAF gave Hezbollah a counterintelligence assist by snatching Israeli spies in eastern Lebanon.
It’s hard to argue with the notion that funding the security arm of an Iranian-backed pseudo-state run by a terror army that has murdered hundreds of Americans and targets America’s only useful military ally in the region is the furthest thing from a wise or sane investment. But the U.S. didn’t set out to fund Hezbollah’s auxiliary security services—not initially.
During the presidency of George W. Bush, Washington imagined that building and strengthening so-called state institutions in Lebanon would bolster a weak political coalition the U.S. was then backing, and help fend off a violent campaign sponsored by Syria and meant to eliminate the possibility of any kind of functioning Lebanese state. The ISF’s Intelligence Branch in particular was run by figures close to Saad Hariri, the son of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, whom Hezbollah had assassinated four years earlier. A U.N. commission, and then a special tribunal, were set up to investigate Hariri Sr.’s murder, and this loyalist ISF unit worked with the U.N. investigators. A small number of ISF officers spent their days analyzing the data of cellphone communications between members of the Hezbollah assassination unit that killed Hariri Sr. They were all targeted for assassination between 2006 and 2008.
Whatever the intentions of the Bush-era policy, to anyone familiar with Lebanese dynamics, it was as predictable as it was inevitable that the ISF would reach out to Hezbollah with an offer to provide it with counterintelligence services. With that offer, the ISF essentially was telling Hezbollah, “the assistance we are getting from the U.S. is not targeted against you. To the contrary, it can be of benefit to you. It is our duty, as a security organ of the state, to defend Lebanon and every Lebanese against all external threats, the Israeli enemy chief among them. So American assistance can be a boon to you as well.”
Guided by a combination of fear as well as a desire to curry favor, Lebanese security organs redirected the signal-detection equipment provided by the U.S. to fight Islamic militants, and used it against Israel instead. Under the terms of the arrangement with Hezbollah, the LAF and ISF are allowed, even encouraged, to use American support to Hezbollah’s advantage by focusing on Sunni Islamic groups (that is, those not already working or aligned with Hezbollah) and on Israel.
This cooperation did not eliminate Hezbollah’s red lines, however. It merely affirmed the terror group’s dominance. As such, when the head of the ISF Intelligence Branch was deemed a potential source of trouble in the early days of the uprising against the Assad regime, he was swiftly eliminated in an October 2012 car bombing.
The counterintelligence collaboration between Hezbollah and the security services has continued uninterrupted ever since. In recent years, LAF and ISF counterintelligence units have proved their worth to Hezbollah by uncovering Israeli agents, networks, and spying equipment.
The largest recent ISF counterintelligence operation occurred in the beginning of 2022, a few months after Hezbollah media disclosed the existence of the IRGC joint operations room in Beirut that oversaw the 2021 war in Gaza. The ISF uncovered multiple Israeli spy cells inside Lebanon, some of which had penetrated Hezbollah and others that were providing intelligence from Syria. Others, meanwhile, were collecting on Hamas. According to a report in the pro-Hezbollah Al-Akhbar, the informants were asked to observe movements of Palestinian outsiders into the camps and to monitor locations that might have a military purpose.
Up until that point, Israel had been watching Hamas’ rising profile in the country quite closely. An unsourced December 2021 report in Yedioth Ahronoth claimed Hamas fighters in Lebanon were receiving training from the Iranians. The dismantling of the spy networks came before the public activity of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) leaders in Lebanon was set to increase. Senior leaders in both factions, including PIJ’s Ziad Nakhaleh, had either already relocated to Lebanon or were about to. With this process underway, it was necessary to blind the Israelis, using U.S.-trained-and-equipped Lebanese counterintelligence forces—who enjoyed the additional advantage of being immune to Israeli retaliation, as U.S.-trained-and-protected state actors.
In August 2022, a meeting between Nakhaleh, the Islamic Jihad leader, and Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah was publicized by Hezbollah media. The meeting discussed the so-called “unity of fronts” against Israel, and “the roles all the parties in the Resistance Axis are expected to play in the next stage.” According to Iranian sources cited in the above-mentioned New York Times report, planning for the Hamas terrorist attack started around this time in 2022.
The Iranian-Hezbollah-Palestinian coordination effort went into high gear in 2023, specifically in Lebanon. In early April 2023, the head of Iran’s Quds Force, Esmail Ghaani, arrived in Beirut to meet with the leaders of Hezbollah, Hamas, and PIJ at the Iranian Embassy. Prior to his Beirut stop, Ghaani’s itinerary reportedly included meetings with leaders of IRGC-commanded militias operating in Syria and Iran. In conjunction with Ghaani’s Beirut visit, Hezbollah orchestrated the firing of 34 rockets—the largest number to be fired from Lebanon since 2006. From April through September, Hamas and PIJ leaders held meetings with the Iranian leadership in Iran, Syria, and Lebanon, and continued to consult regularly with Nasrallah in Beirut.
Ghaani reportedly returned to Beirut in early August. Right before the Quds Force commander’s second visit, clashes erupted in Ain el-Helweh, the largest Palestinian camp near Sidon, between Fatah and Islamist factions. The fighting began following a visit to Lebanon by Palestinian Authority intelligence chief Majed Faraj, and the subsequent assassination of one of his security officials in the camp, Abu Ashraf al-Armoushi.
Pro-Hezbollah media interpreted Faraj’s visit as intersecting with Israeli interests in an attempt to agitate against Hamas and PIJ, who had been leading the unrest in the West Bank. According to Al-Akhbar, Faraj wanted “to curb the Palestinian resistance factions which have grown capable of targeting Israeli settlements with rockets.” In addition, the paper claimed, Faraj offered cooperation with the Lebanese government on checking any uncontrolled armed presence in the camps, as well as handing in all wanted men to the authorities, “in return for Beirut to tighten the vise on Hamas’ and Islamic Jihad’s political and military activity” in Lebanon.
If that was indeed Faraj’s plan, it didn’t go anywhere. The initial fighting stopped a few days later in early August before breaking out again briefly the following month and ending in a ceasefire in mid-September 2023.
As these events unfolded in the period immediately preceding the Oct. 7 attack, the ISF uncovered and arrested another Hamas operative spying for Israel in Sidon. The ISF reportedly also confiscated his computers and was able to trace his various connections inside Hamas’ Qassam Brigades. According to Al-Akhbar, his tasks included monitoring Hamas members who had moved to Lebanon from the West Bank and Gaza.
The ISF’s bust led to their greater cooperation with Hamas to obtain further information. In turn, Al-Akhbar claimed, Hamas began its own investigation in Gaza to track everyone the operative had worked with or remained in contact with since coming to Lebanon from Turkey. That is, the ISF once again contributed to blinding Israel on behalf of Iranian assets. In doing so, it may well have directly aided and reinformed Hamas operational security in Gaza on the eve of the Oct. 7 attack.
U.S. policy in Lebanon, and its sponsorship of the Lebanese security sector, badly undermined Israel’s collection capabilities in the country. But what about America’s own intelligence gathering capabilities in Lebanon? Over the past decade, one of the justifications you’d hear from U.S. officials and bureaucrats for supporting the Lebanese military and security organs was that this deepening relationship gave America better visibility and human intelligence into what was going inside a terror hotbed. America’s Lebanese assets would also supplement our extensive capabilities monitoring terror groups throughout the region, including the IRGC, Hezbollah, and Hamas. And that’s in addition to what we collect in neighboring Syria, where the Iranian network has been active for years. By way of example, in 2017, following a chemical attack in northwestern Syria by the Assad regime, the U.S. government disclosed that signals intelligence had intercepted communications of the Syrian command leaving no doubt as to Assad’s responsibility for the attack.
And yet, despite countless meetings and high-level visits between Iranian officials, Hezbollah, and Hamas, coupled with intensified kinetic activity in the region, U.S. officials are saying that they “weren’t tracking” this operation. That answer is, to put it mildly, difficult to believe. But let’s ask another question: how come none of the U.S.-subsidized clients in the Lebanese military and security services—the ones who were busy busting Israeli cells all the way up to September—provided the U.S. any meaningful intelligence, even despite the fact that Hamas paragliders had been training in Lebanon? Hundreds of military-aged Palestinian hang gliders repeatedly soaring over any country seems like a difficult target for a major intelligence service to miss.
What seems clear is that, in exchange for the U.S. providing training and equipment, and paying everyone’s salaries, U.S. clients inside Lebanon managed exclusively to provide U.S.-subsidized counterintelligence support to Hezbollah and Hamas that contributed to blinding Israel, while failing entirely to provide the U.S. itself with any relevant information whatsoever. The U.S. government’s awesome signals intelligence capabilities in the eastern Mediterranean and the Levant, Iraq, and the Gulf were also unable to pick up anything of interest, while the planning and the training was happening in the country where the Biden administration is completing a 43-acre embassy compound.
It would be bad enough that U.S. policy in Lebanon appears to have contributed to keeping Israel in the dark in the months before the Oct. 7 massacre. It did. But it also did more than that. As Hezbollah increased the tempo of cross border attacks and provocations from Lebanon, leading to the establishment of a military outpost in the Israeli Golan, the administration backed Hezbollah’s play and moved to distract Israel by tying it down in a land border demarcation process with the Lebanese, helping to keep Israel’s political echelon from noticing the actual threat brewing inside Lebanon.
Did the U.S. intend for any of this to happen? Not exactly. On the other hand, everything that did happen was the direct product of U.S. policy, which means that America must shoulder some part of the blame. And if the U.S. chooses to continue its deadly policies in Lebanon, it will hardly be able to plead ignorance the next time that the Iranian "axis of resistance" murderers Israelis—and Americans.
So both Obama and Biden provided material support to terrorist organizations, Hamas and Hizbollah. Obama also helped to strengthen ISIS.
While we can only guess why Obama and Biden supported terrorism, one thing we know for sure is that it was not done by accident.