Free Palestine

She closed her eyes, leaned her head against the wall, and patted his chest in an attempt to calm down.

Israeli air strikes have routinely targeted crowded family homes since the beginning of the war in Gaza, even in Rafah, which Israel declared a Menna area in October, but which has now become the next target of its devastating ground offensive.

Israel says it is trying to avoid harming civilians and blames the deaths on Hamas, which it claims has deployed fighters, tunnels and rocket launchers in densely populated residential areas. But the army rarely comments on individual raids that often kill women and children.

The army did not immediately comment on this raid.

14 dead in the house
Of the 14 dead in Abu Anza’s house, there were 6 children and 4 women, according to Dr. Marwan Al-Hams, director of the hospital to which the bodies were taken.

Besides her husband and two children, Rania also lost her sister, her cousin, her pregnant cousin, and other relatives.

Farouk Abu Anza, one of her relatives, said that approximately 35 people were residing in the house, some of whom were displaced from other areas.

He added that they are all civilians, most of them children, and that there are no armed men among them.

The dream years
Rania and her husband Wissam, both 29 years old, spent 10 years until she became pregnant with her two children.

Two rounds of IVF failed, but after the third round, she reported that she was pregnant, early last year, and gave birth to the two children on October 13. She said that her husband, a day laborer, was so proud that he insisted on naming the girl after him.
She added: "I couldn't get enough of them. I swear I couldn't get enough of th

Palestinian territories
“Menstruation has become a nightmare.” Double suffering for women and girls in Gaza in light of the war
Free / Subtitles - Dubai
06 March 2024
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A woman with her children in Gaza (expressive image)
A woman with her children in Gaza (expressive image)
In addition to the tragedies of hunger, cold, and scarcity of drinking water, women and girls in the Gaza Strip have been suffering from difficult humanitarian conditions of their own, since the start of the war between the Israeli army and Hamas, about 5 months ago.

According to a report published by the British newspaper " The Guardian ", women and teenage girls face many unbearable difficulties due to the menstrual cycle, with one of them confirming that the arrival of those days has become a "frightening nightmare."

Teenager Mona, 17 years old, says that on normal days, she used to overcome severe menstrual pain by preparing hot drinks, wrapping herself in blankets, and taking painkillers.

But this teenager currently lives in the city of Rafah, south of the Gaza Strip, where more than 45 people live with her in a very small house.

Mona explains that she cannot obtain sanitary pads or use the toilet comfortably, as there is no privacy to a large extent, pointing out that she suffers greatly due to vomiting and abdominal pain, in addition to the problem of bleeding.

She added: "In the small house we took refuge in, there is only one bathroom... I feel embarrassed to wait in line during my menstruation, and this causes me psychological and physical distress."

“The Israeli bombing and displacement have created an enormous amount of stress, but the experience of menstruation in these circumstances feels like a completely different kind of pain of war,” Mona explains.

The privacy dilemma
United Nations estimates indicate that nearly 700,000 women and girls in the Gaza Strip suffer from menstrual problems, and they try to manage them with little privacy due to the lack of bathrooms and toilets.

In shelters run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine (UNRWA), there is an average of only one toilet for every 486 people.

Sarah (27 years old) lives in Egypt, but was visiting her aunts in the northern Gaza Strip when the war began, as she became trapped with them.

The young woman lived during the first period of the war in the center of the city of Deir al-Balah, where she stayed with her school friends after she was separated from her relatives during a frantic and rapid evacuation operation.

“I struggled to get sanitary pads, and I felt very humiliated because I couldn’t have them,” she says.

As the Israeli campaign moved south, Sarah fled again to Rafah, where she took refuge in a tent that did not have even basic sanitation services.

“My period is approaching,” she said. “I have to share a bathroom with more than 100 women and children.”

She added: "There are no sanitary pads or painkillers in pharmacies, and all shops and stores were closed because they had run out of goods."

Polluted water makes matters worse
The extreme cold in the tents, and stomach pain caused by drinking contaminated water, add to the horror of menstrual cramps.

Sarah says: “The Israeli bombing is terrifying, but it becomes even more terrifying during menstruation... I feel that my mental health is deteriorating further due to the bombing and menstrual pain.”

It is very difficult to find sanitary pads, to the point that one of the girls who lives in an UNRWA school in Al-Maghazi camp said that she had to wash used sanitary pads so that she could use them again.

That girl said that the recycled sanitary pads or the soap she used to clean them caused her skin irritation, stressing that she had no other options.

For her part, Mona obtained some sanitary pads from a charitable organization, but they were of such poor quality that she contracted an infection while using them, according to the British newspaper.

Then she resorted to using torn pieces of cloth, before deciding to now use paper tissues, even though blood was leaking from them and they were not performing the desired purpose well.

Mona says: “I searched in many pharmacies for sanitary pads, but unfortunately I did not find any of them... and even when they are available, they are of very poor quality and their prices are high.”

In another grim twist to the horrors of managing her time in the war, Mona is now bleeding more than she was before, which she attributes to stress.

She concluded by saying: "My menstrual cycle used to be regular, but now it comes twice a month... and I attribute this change to fear and stress."

He knew the impact it would have.” A Jewish activist cries for American soldier Aaron Bushnel
[ندعوك للتسجيل في المنتدى أو التعريف بنفسك لمعاينة هذا الرابط]

A leader in the Al-Qassam Brigades , the military wing of the Islamic Resistance Movement ( Hamas ), told Al Jazeera that the Ansar Allah Houthi group informed them that its recent escalation in the Red Sea was due to the Israeli occupation’s intentions to attack Rafah, south of the Gaza Strip, and the continuation of the starvation policy.

The leader stated, on Thursday, that Ansar Allah sent a letter to Al-Qassam to ask for its opinion regarding mediations to release the crew of a ship they are holding, and that the group confirmed that any decision regarding the ship and its crew is “exclusively with Al-Qassam.”

He added that Ansar Allah informed Al-Qassam that its strategic decision was to continue the Red Sea battle until the aggression stopped and the siege on the Gaza Strip was lifted .

The leader, who preferred not to reveal his name, also said that communication and coordination between Al-Qassam and the fighting fronts in Lebanon, Yemen and Iraq has been continuing since the first hours of the start of the Battle of Al-Aqsa Flood on the seventh of last October.

The same source stated that the United States tried directly and through mediators to stop the fighting on each front separately. But her attempts were rejected. He stressed that the decision of all fronts is not to stop the fighting until the aggression against Gaza stops.

05:28
Britain entered Palestine after its colonial interests converged with the Zionist movement, and with its entry ended 400 years of Ottoman rule following fierce battles that took place between the two parties inside the Palestinian territories during World War I in 1917, after which a history of persecution, displacement, and oppression began against the Palestinians, while changing the demography of the land by attracting immigration. Judaism throughout the mandate until its termination in 1948.

British support for settlement did not stop with the end of the mandate. On November 25, 2021, the British House of Commons (the first chamber of Parliament) approved the memorandum submitted by Interior Minister Priti Patel to classify the Islamic Resistance Movement ( Hamas ), with its political and military wings, as a “terrorist movement

,
the Ottoman Empire began to suffer from an economic crisis in the middle of the nineteenth century, which opened the way for Britain to enter the Arab region under the name of foreign missions, or what was known as the “Peaceful Crusade.”

The interests of British colonialism needed someone to strengthen them, and it found nothing but the Zionist movement to achieve its goals and create a national homeland for the Jews.

In 1830, British Foreign Secretary Henry John Temple undertook to follow up on the establishment of a national homeland for the Jews, until Britain opened its first consulate in Jerusalem in 1838, taking advantage of the Ottoman peace law.

The British helped a number of Jews buy lands in Palestine and build Jewish colonies on them, in order to cut the line of communication between Asia and Africa, prevent any future military movements, and to ensure that Britain’s economic interests would move smoothly to India.

The Ottoman restrictions against Jewish ownership in particular were severe. One of the tricks practiced by European Jews was to buy land through foreign intermediaries, or to build a number of hospitals and orphanages, which would later be transformed into Jewish settlements.

The Jaffa-Jerusalem railway line...the first foothold of the Mandate.
The Ottoman Empire did not allow foreign companies to build in Palestine, except for those holding the “Ottoman system of privileges”, so the British tried, with the help of the Zionists, to obtain this privilege, to own lands for the benefit of the Jews.

In 1856, the English Sir Moses Montferry (Jewish origin) contacted Henry John Temple, who was the British Prime Minister at the time, and they discussed the idea of ​​building the Jaffa-Jerusalem railway, to serve the colonial interests of the British and facilitate Jewish immigration to the region.

The stated goal at the time of establishing the railway was to facilitate the movement of European Christian pilgrims from Jaffa to Jerusalem, in addition to developing European trade with the Ottoman Empire, and to facilitate the movement of the population in the region in general.

This coincided with the visit of the Ottoman Minister Mehmed Amin Pasha to London, so Montferry contacted him to sign an agreement on the railway project, and they agreed to sign it on May 20, 1856, but the Ottoman Empire retracted this.

After years in which it seemed that the project would not be implemented, the Jewish businessman, Yosef Navon, took over the task in 1885. He moved to Istanbul and continued to promote the project for nearly three years in order to obtain the approval of the Ottoman Empire.

Then the attack began to intensify between the Palestinians and the Jews, and the number of dead and wounded increased, so Britain declared a state of emergency and imposed a curfew in the country, and the Palestinians responded to it with a general strike campaign starting from Jaffa to the rest of the Palestinian regions, and they began an armed campaign against the British Mandate.

The Mandate forces responded to the strike with a series of violent arrests, the destruction of large areas of buildings, and displaced at least 6,000 people. Because they felt that the revolution would not be stopped by military means, they announced the establishment of the Royal Peel Commission.

After that, a series of conferences and committees were held to study the Palestinian situation and propose maps for dividing the Palestinian region, including the Round Table Conference in early 1939, Britain’s recommendation for partition in 1943, and MacDonald’s White Paper, which limited the percentage of Jewish immigration to only 75,000 for the five years following the year. 1939.

Then in 1944, the British Labor Party issued a resolution recommending the displacement of Palestinians in exchange for receiving larger numbers of Jews.


The end of the Mandate and the declaration of the establishment of Israel.
On June 17, 1946, a series of Zionist attacks against the British began in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, followed by a series of arrests of Jews by the British government, to which the Jews responded with other attacks by bombing several areas of the British Civil Administration.

The British issued a white paper again, blaming the Jewish Agency for committing “terrorist acts,” and America announced its support for the settlement project and its support for the declaration of the division of Palestine into four areas on April 20, 1946, based on the “Morrison-Grady Plan,” which specified the area of ​​​​the Jewish areas at 17%. .

The Jewish Agency then demanded the establishment of a state in Palestine, based on the area recommended by the Peel Commission in 1937, which is a larger area that includes all of the Galilee region and the western coastal plain with the exception of the Jaffa region. America directed the Agency’s demands for partition to the British leaders, ending any British solution. Joint American, at a time when Jewish operations against the British continued.

Announcement:

Islamic Resistance Movement ( Hamas ) rejected the results of an Israeli army investigation into the “flour massacre” that occurred a week ago west of Gaza City , which resulted in the death of about 120 Palestinians who were part of a crowd awaiting the arrival of food aid, and described the investigation as sham and misleading.

The movement said in a press statement that the investigation presented by the Israeli occupation army into the Nabulsi roundabout massacre that occurred on February 29 is “false and deceptive and goes beyond the compelling facts, which documented the exposure of Palestinians to direct fire on the upper parts of the body with the intention of immediate killing.”

The statement added that the evidence, including inspection of the bodies of the martyrs, confirms that they were deliberately exposed to fire from soldiers and tanks.

The Hamas movement said, "The horrific massacre will remain a witness to the criminality and Nazism of the Israeli entity, which lacks human and moral values."

Al Jazeera broadcast harsh scenes documenting the killing of an unarmed elderly Palestinian by Israeli occupation soldiers during their storming of a house west of Gaza City, in the north of the Strip .

The scenes - which were filmed by an Israeli soldier's camera - showed the moments when the soldiers stormed the house and killed the elderly man who was alone in the house.

One of the soldiers - during a conversation with his colleagues outside the building - admitted to killing the defenseless elderly man who did not carry a weapon and gestured with his empty hands to confirm this, while the other soldiers showed celebration of what the soldier did.

The soldiers returned to the building again and shot the elderly man's body even though there was no danger to them or there were any clashes in the area.

According to camera data, the clip dates back to November 6th at 4:50 p.m.

Al Jazeera broadcast harsh scenes documenting the killing of an unarmed elderly Palestinian by Israeli occupation soldiers during their storming of a house west of Gaza City, in the north of the Strip .

The scenes - which were filmed by an Israeli soldier's camera - showed the moments when the soldiers stormed the house and killed the elderly man who was alone in the house.

One of the soldiers - during a conversation with his colleagues outside the building - admitted to killing the defenseless elderly man who did not carry a weapon and gestured with his empty hands to confirm this, while the other soldiers showed celebration of what the soldier did.

The soldiers returned to the building again and shot the elderly man's body even though there was no danger to them or there were any clashes in the area.

According to camera data, the clip dates back to 
November 6th at 4:50 p.m.
[ندعوك للتسجيل في المنتدى أو التعريف بنفسك لمعاينة هذا الرابط]

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Hamas calls for the formation of an international investigation committee into allegations of “sexual violations” on October 7

Hamas hands over Israeli female prisoners as part of an exchange deal last November (Reuters)
9/3/2024
On Friday, Hamas called for the formation of an impartial international committee to investigate international allegations that its members committed sexual violations during the October 7, 2023 attack, reiterating its rejection of those allegations.

A press statement issued by the office of the UN Special Envoy for Sexual Violence in Conflict Areas, Pramila Patten, said last Monday that a UN team that visited Israel and the West Bank found reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence occurred in several locations during the attacks of last October 7, which was denied. agitation.

The movement said in a statement on Friday to a member of its political office in Gaza, Bassem Naeem, “We once again confirm our strong condemnation of the report issued by Ms. Pramila Patten, regarding allegations and claims of incidents of sexual violence during the events of October 7 by Palestinians.”

The movement explained that the report came “after failed Zionist attempts to prove these false charges, which were confirmed to be baseless and based on fabricated stories by elements known to be linked to the Zionist security establishment.”

The statement stated that Patten herself confirms that she did not conduct a professional investigation, but was on a mission to collect information and investigate.

The movement expressed its extreme surprise that Patten issued its report after listening to only one party and neglecting to listen to hundreds of women who were subjected to harassment and sexual violence inside and outside the occupation prisons, especially those who were arrested from Gaza after October 7.

For the eyes of Israel.” The United States is destroying

the world order it bui
[ندعوك للتسجيل في المنتدى أو التعريف بنفسك لمعاينة هذا الرابط]

A volunteer with the ZAKA organization near Kibbutz Kfar Gaza, November 14, 2023. AFP.
“We found a child with his head cut off. We looked for his head but did not find it.” “I saw a pregnant woman in a pool of blood. Her stomach was cut open, and her fetus was stabbed.” “The walls and stones were screaming: ‘I have been raped.’” Since October 7, these allegations and others like them have been repeated countless times on the lips of Israeli and Western officials, and on the screens and pages of Western media, and they continued to be repeated even after their credibility began to be questioned. But what has not received much attention is that these statements have a main source: an Israeli emergency response organization called ZAKA.

ZAKA members showed up early at the sites of attacks, asserting their authority as “eyewitnesses” affiliated with a non-governmental entity. They quickly became widespread in major Western press institutions: from Reuters, CNN, The New York Times, and the BBC, to The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, and many others. Despite this, most of these institutions did not bother to research the background of ZAKA and its members. Such research would have destroyed the legitimacy of relying on it as the main source for such serious accusations. What will quickly unfold paints a picture of an extremist organization that has long been dogged by reports of fraud, forgery, corruption and even sexual assault.

Fraud, embezzlement and sex scandals
In 1989, the Islamic Jihad movement carried out a martyrdom operation in Jerusalem in which 16 Israelis were killed. One of the witnesses to the operation was Yehuda Meshi-Zahav, a 30-year-old Haredi Jew who grew up in a home that was hostile to Zionism on religious grounds, and who in his youth had led demonstrations opposing the breaking of the Jewish Sabbath, during which he threw stones at the police. His presence in that place was a “turning point,” as it prompted him to realize “the common destiny of the Jews,” and to establish the “ZAKA” organization in the same year, which was officially registered six years later.

The Zaka Search and Rescue Organization (whose name is an abbreviation in Hebrew for “Disaster Victim Identification”) works to collect the remains of those killed, whether in resistance operations, traffic accidents, or natural disasters, in order to bury them according to Jewish law, which requires collecting the entire body, washing the blood, and preparing them. To be buried as soon as possible. The organization relies entirely on government donations and aid, and the majority of its members are ultra-Orthodox Haredi volunteers. Because the Haredim do not serve in the occupation army for religious reasons, this volunteering was portrayed as their alternative contribution to Israeli society.

The name of the organization quickly emerged during the first and second intifadas, expanding to include multiple units, and even establishing an international unit that sent its members to many natural disaster sites around the world. At the same time, its relationship with the government has strengthened, as ZAKA says on its website that it “works in close cooperation with the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the army and other government agencies.” It seemed as if the organization was achieving a double goal for Israel. On the one hand, it reduces - at least superficially - the internal tension between religious and secularists, and on the other hand, it works to promote the image of “Israel” as a global benefactor.

ZAKA has already succeeded in garnering international recognition. In 2005, the United Nations classified it as an international humanitarian organization, and in 2016, it granted it consultative status. Among the tributes enumerated by the ZACA website, former United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon says that his organization is “happy to have ZAKA as a partner in our humanitarian operations,” while Samantha Power, the former US ambassador to the United Nations and current head of the United States Agency for International Development, praises ( USAID), Meshi-Zahav personally, saying that he and his organization represent “all who believe in the principles of equality, human rights and dignity.”

Inside “Israel,” the image of Meshi-Zahav and his organization was not as bright. At the level of credibility, Zaka was known early on for spreading exaggerations, interpretations, and lies. An Israeli Army Radio correspondent put it in 2002 by saying, “ZAKA sends everything: what happened, what they think happened, and what didn’t happen... In the past, they sent several pieces of news that turned out to be lies.”

By fabricating dozens of stories about killing children and raping women, ZAKA was able to promote itself as an ideal destination for donations to “support victims of terrorism,” and provided “Israel” with a feast of propaganda material that was quickly devoured by the Western media, turning it into fuel for a war of extermination.

Also, the history of ZAKA is not very consistent with the image of its contribution to internal harmony. Based on its mission to implement Jewish law, standing against autopsies, cremation, and even archaeological excavations in burial sites was one of its most important priorities. The organization works to do this by putting pressure on the police, resorting to the judiciary, and even pursuing the bodies of Jews around the world. Where a Jew dies under mysterious circumstances, Zakka travels to transport his body and prevent an autopsy. In 2007, the organization was suspected of involvement in the burning of a cremation facility near Netanya, after a complaint was filed against it, and Meshi-Zahav blessed the perpetrator of the operation. In his youth, Meshi-Zahav went even further when he was a member of the secret organization Keshet, which would send bullets and fake explosives to the homes of doctors and archaeologists with the words “This time it will be by mail only,” and pour paint and softeners into their water sources, as he himself admitted. In his book.

But that was not the biggest Zaka scandal. In March 2021, Haaretz published an investigation that included accusations against Mishi Zahav of rape and sexual assault against a woman and at least five children, the youngest of whom was five years old, with the participation and assistance of his brothers and those close to him. In her testimony, the woman says that Meshi-Zahav assaulted her in 2011 when she contacted him to help her family in financial distress, and then threatened her by saying, “If you tell anyone anything, one of the Zakat cars will run you over.” Police questioned the woman two years later, but closed the investigation “due to lack of evidence.”

After the investigation was published, others filed similar complaints, and a recording was leaked in which Meshi-Zahav is heard asking one of his employees to organize a group sex ring. Subsequently, the police opened a new investigation, revealing that Meshi Zahav had assaulted dozens since the 1980s, while witnesses from the neighborhood in which Meshi Zahav and his family live in Jerusalem said that the news did not surprise them. His brother Rami was previously convicted in 2014 of raping a woman from his family, while his other brother, Moshe, fled Israel at the time. In the midst of the whirlwind, Meshi-Zahav resigned from his position and apologized for receiving the prestigious “Israel Prize,” which Yoav Gallant, the current Minister of Defense and Minister of Education at the time, had announced less than a month before in honor of his “contribution to Israeli society.” Although he denied all the accusations, and even threatened to sue his complainant for defamation, Meshi-Zahav attempted suicide shortly after the scandal, falling into a coma and dying a year later.

Read also:
Soldiers in Sitra Press: Western media as an Israeli battalion
In addition to all of this, the financial situation of “Zaka” has always raised doubts, as it sought to collect money in every possible way (including suing a man who killed his child and hid her body because “Zaka” had to) To break the Sabbath in search of her.) The second intifada represented a golden opportunity to attract donations from inside and outside Israel, given that ZAKA was often the first to arrive at the sites of martyrdom operations and was thus able to promote its role in “honoring” the dead by collecting their remains. But soon “the good times ended,” as a spokesman for the organization said, commenting on the decline in donations it received as the uprising subsided. Zaka's income shrank from $3.7 million in 2003 to $2.1 million in 2004. By 2005, it owed banks and others $1.8 million.

Then Zaka began looking for money elsewhere. Given that the amount of support it receives from the Israeli government depends on the number of its volunteers, this number began to swell, according to the records submitted to the Ministry of the Interior, to reach three thousand in 2022. However, an investigation conducted by Haaretz revealed that the actual number of volunteers does not exceed a thousand, and that this fraud brought millions into the organization. dollars, and that the government turned a blind eye to him for years and to other violations such as not meeting the necessary training conditions.

On the other hand, the decline in funding meant that ZAKA had to compete with similar volunteer organizations, led by ZAKA - Tel Aviv (which separated early from the parent organization based in Jerusalem) and Ehud Hatzala (United Relief). As well as the larger organization, Magen David Adom. These organizations are now competing to reach the sites of accidents and operations first, and to highlight their name at every available opportunity, in the hope of attracting donations.

All of this happened while ZAKA's senior employees received a large share of its budget as annual wages, and used the organization's name to transfer donations to their private companies, purchase villas, luxury hotel reservations, and airline tickets.

But Zaka's financial crisis worsened after the Meshi-Zahav scandal, as its budget registered a deficit in four of the last five years, reaching the brink of bankruptcy last year. Therefore, the October 7 attacks were a huge gift awarded to ZAKA, from which it received more than $13.7 million in donations until the end of January, in addition to receiving a contract from the Ministry of Defense to clean up the sites of the attacks. From the first moments, ZAKA turned these sites into propaganda stages to garner funding for an organization that had witnessed “atrocities.” The more horrific the picture, the higher the stock.

According to Eitan Schwartz, an advisor to the Israeli Prime Minister’s Information Directorate, “The testimonies of ZAKA volunteers, as first responders on the ground, had a decisive influence in exposing the atrocities in the south to foreign journalists covering the war. The entire State of Israel was involved in crafting the narrative that Hamas was equal to ISIS and in deepening the state’s legitimacy to respond with great force.”

Once again, Zaka seemed to have achieved a double goal. By fabricating dozens of stories about the killing of children and the rape of women, it was able to promote itself as an ideal destination for donations with the intention of “supporting the victims of terrorism,” and at the same time provided “Israel” with a feast of propaganda materials that were quickly devoured by the Western media, turning them into fuel for a war of extermination.

Imagination Testimonials
“When we enter a house, we use our imagination. The bodies tell us the stories that happened to them, they tell us: This is what happened.”
- Yossi Landau

When he was twenty years old, the American Jew Yossi Landau decided to immigrate to Israel. As a boy, Landau and his family volunteered for a relief organization in New York. Shortly after his move, he met Mishi Zahav, and he was one of the first volunteers in Zaka. When the September 11 attacks occurred, Landau was visiting his family in New York, so he volunteered to treat the wounded, and almost became one of them when the Twin Towers collapsed. Landau's name emerged as a symbol of volunteerism, and he rose within the organization's structure and participated in its international missions. When October 7 came, he was in charge of operations for the southern region.

Landau was one of the first to raise allegations of the beheading of children in settlements surrounding the Gaza Strip, claiming on CNN ten days after the attack that he had seen “a 14- or 15-year-old without a head.” His story soon became more vague, as he began confirming to Israeli and international media that “headless children” had been found, before they became “headless infants.” In his interview on CNN, he also said that he found in the Be'eri settlement a family consisting of two parents and two children aged seven or six, handcuffed, with signs of torture on their bodies, and who had been killed by shots to the head from behind. In a press conference a few days later, he said that he saw in Be'eri the body of a pregnant woman who was killed by a shot from behind, and her stomach was cut open and her fetus removed.

All of these “testimonies” have been proven false. The story of the beheading of children, which was seized upon by Netanyahu and Biden, as well as by the Western press, was stated by the occupation army itself that it “could not confirm it,” and the White House followed suit, before the entire story collapsed. While Haaretz reported that there is no evidence of the story of the pregnant woman, and that the residents of Be'eri themselves had not heard of her existence. As for the story of the murdered family, it did not apply to any of the settlement’s dead, except that twelve-year-old twins were actually killed in Be’eri when an Israeli tank opened fire on the house in which there were Qassam Brigades resistance fighters, according to a report published by The Intercept website.

This did not discourage Western media from continuing to rely on Landau and other ZAKA members as sources in their coverage. Even after reports were issued questioning Landau's account, the New York Times devoted ample space to him and his colleagues to talk about the "shock" they experienced as a result of what they saw. In the same report, the newspaper acknowledges that “some critics have challenged” the allegations, and that “a number of ZAKA members have provided misleading testimony to the media.” But it conveys Landau's justification for these "exaggerations" by saying that some people impersonated volunteers in the organization, and that ZAKA volunteers were working under pressure. The newspaper also quoted him as denying that he claimed to have found the bodies of beheaded children, even though this claim was documented in his voice and image in several sources. The New York Times also did not report that before he made the excuses, he had stated that those who doubted his story “should be killed with the Hamas terrorists.”

No need for evidence
Landau was one of dozens of ZAKA volunteers who opened the doors to provide their accounts of what happened on October 7th. Among them was Simcha Greenman, the organization's deputy Modi'in district commander, who played a major role in promoting the rape accounts.

The Guardian quoted Greenman as saying that he found in one of the kibbutzim “a woman naked from the waist down, bent over a bed, with a bullet in the back of her head, and a grenade in her hand.” Also in a later report in The Guardian, he said that in another house he found “a dead woman with sharp objects and nails in her vagina.” On Politico's website, a report was published based entirely on Greenman's testimony, focusing on his psychological crisis in comprehending what he saw, including images of "murdered women...many of whom had blood running down their legs. You then understood that what had happened was not just a quick shooting." . Greenman says that when he came to the site of the Nova party near the Re'em base, he found dismembered body parts and young women who had been shot below the waist, reiterating his conclusion that "something more than shooting had happened to them."

The same allegations were made repeatedly by Greenman in the pages of Time magazine, on NPR radio, and at a hearing at the United Nations, where he spoke alongside Hillary Clinton and former Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. Greenman said at the hearing that the woman whom Zakka allegedly found murdered with sharp objects and nails in her vagina, “her body was mutilated to the point that we could not recognize her... Her body was violated in a way that we could not understand or deal with.”

Repeatedly, Greenman himself has made contradictory statements that call into question the veracity of his account and his ability to judge what he claims to have seen. “I'm not a doctor, but from what you see, you understand that something terrible has happened,” he says in the Politico report. In an interview with the Israeli channel i24, he added: “I cannot say that women were raped because I am not a doctor and I cannot conduct medical examinations. I can only collect the bodies. But when I find a woman with her hands tied in front, bent over on her bed in her home, naked from the waist down, and bleeding from several places, I do not have to answer whether she was raped or not. There is no doubt about that.”

For Western media institutions, truth is nothing but something manufactured according to desires, and reproduced over and over again under the cover of the institution’s shiny name, no matter how much the facts contradict it.

The Guardian quotes a number of Zaka volunteers as saying that at first they “did not think about rape at all,” attributing this to their being religious conservatives. Greenman told POLITICO that when the volunteers had “suspicions” about this, they informed the authorities, who asked them to document the cases on video, and obtained special permission to do so from the Chief Rabbi of Israel, adding, “We tried, but we are not trained to do it correctly.” But in the i24 interview, conducted one week after the Politico report was published, he says of demands to release photos as evidence of rape allegations: “We would never publish photos like that. “As a member of ZAKA, one of the first things you learn is never to take any pictures, because we respect the dead.”

Certainly, many Western media outlets were not among those demanding evidence. In a report based exclusively on testimonies from ZAKA, Reuters quotes volunteer Itzik Itah that, “When you find a naked woman lying on her face, and it is clear that she did not take off her clothes herself, this is a woman who has been raped.” Another volunteer who was cited by the BBC in a report on the rape allegations was Ukrainian-Israeli Nachman Dykshtina, who said that at the site of Re'im's party he saw "piles and piles of [corpses] of women, their upper clothes were torn off, while they were completely naked underneath." This was stated in a written certificate delivered by ZAKA, translated and edited.

The lack of evidence was the common denominator in the testimonies of ZAKA volunteers, but their response to repeated calls for evidence was a lack of professional training. “We're not criminal investigators,” Greenman says, not realizing that that also means he's not authorized to make the rulings he made. After refuting Landau's story about a pregnant woman's belly being ripped open in Be'eri, ZAKA issued a statement saying that its volunteers “are not pathology experts and do not have the professional tools necessary to determine the identity, age, and how of the murdered person.” They only have eye testimonies.” However, professional training was not the only thing ZAKA volunteers lacked. According to a source in the occupation army, their work was often chaotic and sloppy, even in what was supposed to be the core of their mission. “ZAKA did not write anything on the body bags, and you can forget about documentation,” the source says.

Amid this chaos of contradictions, interpretations, and lies, one might wonder: How was ZAKA, with its scandalous history, zero credibility, and lack of professionalism, chosen to be the first responder at the sites of the October 7 attacks?

Not by chance, says Haaretz. In an investigation into the organization’s benefit from its presence at the sites of the attacks, the newspaper attributes this choice to the connections that Haim Otmazgin, head of special operations at ZAKA, has with the occupation army. As a reserve officer in the army's Home Front Unit, Otmazgin used his close relationships with his commanders in the unit to give Zakat the advantage, which it used to launch a successful propaganda campaign. Otmazgin himself led the work in several locations, including Hafa Re'im and the settlements of Kfar Azza and Be'eri, barring rival organizations from entering them as “closed military zones,” and even using the space available to him to film a lyric video calling on viewers to donate to the organization. Thus, Otmazgin was a link between ZAKA and the army, ensuring mutually beneficial results.

Making the Truth
In 1997, director, writer, and independent investigative journalist Andre Vlček was wandering alone in the streets of the poor neighborhood of Côte-Soleil in Haiti, when he stumbled upon an American military base, at whose door the poor of the neighborhood were lined up in line. They were waiting to enter what turned out to be a “clinic,” where American nurses and doctors trained on patients and performed surgical operations with a minimum of local anesthesia, without sterilization, diagnostic equipment, or any of the obvious conditions in a health facility. Near the clinic, there was another spotless, air-conditioned facility equipped with all the required tools and equipment, but it was designated for American soldiers and cadres only. Vlcek wrote an investigation, accompanied by photographs documenting everything he saw, and sent it to the New York Times, the Independent, and others, without receiving a response.

Vlcek told this story in a 2012 article about “the death of investigative journalism” in the West. “Only atrocities that serve the geopolitical and economic interests of the West can be considered real atrocities and can be written about and analyzed in our major media,” Vlcek says.

Western coverage of the October 7 attacks and the war of annihilation that followed was one of the most prominent, and bloodiest, examples of this fact. Despite the heavy reliance on ZAKA as a body that provided the Western media with what it wanted to hear, and gave it a facade to hide behind to say what it had previously assumed, resorting to the organization was only one example of the way these institutions work. Far from the professional lectures that they like to give, especially to those working in journalism outside the Western world, the story of “Zaka” confirms that for these institutions, the truth is nothing but something that is manufactured according to desires, and is reproduced over and over again under the cover of the institution’s shiny name, no matter how much the facts contradict it.

Will America's Arabs be punished by Biden?

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