Hamas Used Gaza Hospital as a Command Center, U.S. Intelligence Says

Hmm, I seem to recall US Intelligence swearing that Saddam Hussein definitely had WMDs and was definitely about to use them on his own people and we definitely needed to invade Iraq to stop him. US Intelligence is not a fact or truth seeking operation; its purpose is to further American imperial interests all else be damned.

Hasn't the IDF been in control of the hospital for like a month, and are yet to produce any evidence (those 3 rifles and the calendar don't count)?
- They kidnapped the hospital director and tortured him until he confessed that he was Hamas. That's way better than video and photo evidence of the huge base they claimed was underneath the hospital.
  
  Look at this cool video of this 3d animation the IDF made before they started attacking the hospital. That looks more realistic than real life. In fact it looks so realistic that actual video footage wouldn't do these tunnels justice. Which is why the IDF isn't providing it.
  You can trust Bidens word. Surely he would never lie about completely unverified ridiculous Zionist claims
They also insisted for years that a baby formula factory was a chemical weapons plant.
They also reaffirmed and spread the hoax of the beheaded babies, even when the IDF had already denied it.
To be fair, they also said Russia was about to invade Ukraine and no one believed them.
- It's hard to believe someone's telling the truth if they lied about almost everything else.
Hopefully they're giving real intel to the decision makers, but anything released to the public is intended for influence purposes. Nothing in their mission requires or even encourages telling the general public true things.
- They gave the wmd 'intel' to lawmakers who were then pressured into supporting the illegal US invasion of Iraq.
  Not much has changed since then. Hell, the Afghanistan Papers detailed how everyone in the intelligence community knew the war was a lost cause, but it still came as a shock to most law makers.
That's not quite on point. The IC wants the facts. What the political leadership do with those facts is a whole different thing.
One does not really need US intelligence's confirmation to undestand that the use of human shields is standard operating procedure for islamistic terrorists. It's not that they don't care about their own citizens but they simply don't see getting martyred as a bad thing. Quite the opposite.
- To me it comes down to a strategic approach. In how many ways is it possible for Hamas to actually hurt Israel in a significant way? Not very many, even thousands of civilians dead doesn't genuinely weaken the country much. But they can make Israel hurt themselves, by basically making them go evil and lose their allies.
  Similar to how Bin Laden very much succeeded in his goals for the Sept 11th attack, by getting us to pass the Patriot Act, invade some countries and start ripping ourselves apart imo.
  Regardless, arguing this position on here is going to be like trying to swim up a waterfall. Israel has gone too far, and the hate against them is too strong because of that. The middle of a war is not the time for nuance.
  edit for a qualifier
- SOP? Sure. Actual case here where a protected target was bombed? Prove it.

Even if it did, and I wouldn't take Israels best ally as complitelly objective fact, you don't just bomb a whole hospital full of civilians

From the Israeli point of view yes you do.
Hospitals being a forbidden target is important, civilians dying is not, because they don't care about civilians.
It's sad to see how something intended to become a Jewish nation after 2k years and so on became a dumbed down pidgin version of 1950s' late European colonialism.
- To defend that israel does not commit war crimes, I have seen zionists claim that if civilians are used for military purposes (involuntary human shield), they become valid military targets ..
Isn't this the same hospital Israel allegedly leveled a few months back?
Edit: Nope, it was Al-Ahli Arab hospital.
- The article says it's the attack from November
Yup. I think there's a difference between the factual claim of whether Hamas has operations on the hospital grounds vs the justification for the type of military action taken against the hospital. I think it is possible to accept there is truth to the Hamas operations center being located there and still condemn the military tactics used against the hospital due to civilian casualties and harm it caused. Unfortunately those 2 things seem to be conflates that acknowledgement of Hamas being there is implicitly condoning Israel's actions.

Saddam’s WMDs were also hidden in the still to appear gigantic, impossible to avoid command centre tunnel network under the hospital.

Would you like a slice of yellow cake?

AP have the most comprehensive coverage of the document, which is not publicly available. Two sections in jump out to me:

“The U.S. Intelligence Community is confident in its judgment on this topic and has independently corroborated information on HAMAS and PIJ’s use of the hospital complex for a variety of purposes related to its campaign against Israel,” the assessment states. It continues that it believes the groups “used the al-Shifa hospital complex and sites beneath it to house command infrastructure, exercise certain command and control activities, store some weapons, and hold at least a few hostages.”

And

The U.S. believes that Hamas members evacuated days before Israel raided the complex on Nov. 15 and that they destroyed sensitive documents and electronics before Israeli troops entered the facility.

And the source of the intelligence is probably Israel itself?
- Of course
- From the AP article:
  U.S. officials had previously pointed to classified intelligence, obtained independently from the Israelis, to offer support for Israel’s raid.
  The US and UK (possibly more, I lost track at some point) have been running surveillance flights over Gaza for pretty much the entire duration of the war. There are plenty of eyes on Israel's military operations and ways to gather intelligence inside Gaza.
  NYT themselves came to the conclusion that al-Shifa was used for military purposes based on Hamas' own propaganda. It's always been a question of how central it was to Hamas' operations.
Lol, it's declassified, but not public. Do words mean nothing anymore?

Did they use the part of the hospital Israel built to be a bunker as their command center?

Are we considering armed guards at hospitals to be war crimes now, because Israel built that bunker and definitely stations armed guards at all of its hospitals.

But Hamas... exists.
That's good enough to genocide Palestine, right guys?

U.S. Intelligence Says

The actual news here is the declassified document. Which according to the article is just a note saying we believe the IDF.
Yup totally confidence inspiring.
- While the spy agencies provided no visual evidence, a U.S. official said they were confident in their assessment because it was based on information collected by Israel and America’s own intelligence, gathered independently.
Bombed UN facilities in Gaza was used by Hamas as counterfeit olive oil factories, U.S. Intelligence Says

This "news" only really serves as justification for the blowing up of hospitals and civilians

The evidence was a chair and a rope on the floor in a bombed portion of the hospital.

Please, they've been parrotting Israeli propaganda since day one. Their words mean nothing.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

U.S. spy agencies believe that Hamas and another Palestinian group fighting Israel used Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza to command forces and hold some hostages, according to new American intelligence declassified on Tuesday.

The hospital was the focus of a large Israel Defense Forces effort in November to take control of the facility, an operation that came under intense international scrutiny and criticism.

But critics said the military operation effectively cut off and shut down a crucial part of Gaza’s medical network with little evidence that Hamas was using the hospital as a command post.

A senior U.S. intelligence official said on Tuesday that the American government continued to believe that Hamas used the hospital complex and sites beneath it to exercise command and control activities, store weapons and hold “at least a few hostages.”

A humanitarian team lead by the World Health Organization, which visited Al-Shifa immediately after Israeli forces stormed the hospital, called it a “death zone.”

While the spy agencies provided no visual evidence, a U.S. official said they were confident in their assessment because it was based on information collected by Israel and America’s own intelligence, gathered independently.

The original article contains 469 words, the summary contains 191 words. Saved 59%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

US ~~Intelligence~~ Propagandists

It's sad the New York Times has fully turned into a Zionist propaganda outlet the last few days.

Well they go back and forth. They have demanded better evidence before and here they do point out that this isn't that evidence. It's just a declassified document saying we officially believe the IDF. Which isn't really new.

Lol what does this matter?

Israel committed so much more heinous atrocities I honestly give no fuck that an oppressed people have a terrorist group lashing out using a hospital as a base.

Israel lied about the sexual assault and baby mutilations, they are ar performing genocide and they've oppressed these people for generations.

Fuck Israel

honestly give no fuck that an oppressed people have a terrorist group lashing out using a hospital as a base.
You're rooting for terrorists operating from hospitals.
I am in shock that you think this is defensible.
- You're rooting for terrorists performing genocide
  If my two options are terrorists doing a genocide and terrorists doing a war crime (because of you know the genocide they're facing and decades of oppression)
  It easily makes sense why.
- They're not rooting for the terrorists. When is rooting the same as not giving a fuck?
  I think they're saying that Israel has gone so far overboard that they can't find a good enough excuse to justify their actions.
It matters because one of the charges leveled against Israel is that they bombed a hospital just to genocide Palestinian babies. Clearly, Hamas was using said babies as human shields, which is a war crime. Now the shoe is on the other foot and Hamas apologists don't like it, so now you just say it doesn't matter, lol.
- Nope the shoe literally cannot be on the other foot.
  Israel funded Hamas.
  Israel has developed this culture in Gaza because of the treatment of Palestinians.
  Israel has far more money and resources.
  So the instigator with more money/power in the situation causing a genocide after decades of racial abuse gets no pass that shoe cannot go anywhere else
  All of Hamas' actions are only happening because of Israel. Sorry

Why they need to justify something we all know is a lie?

I find it more remarkable to think that this is a valid justification.

So funny seeing people here react to any news regarding Israel and Gaza. Bomb falls in parking lot of a hospital, Hamas says 20 minutes later 500 dead, everyone believes the and it takes weeks to disprove their claim and bunch of sources to analyze and report on their findings. Any non-Hamas source says terrorists are using terrorist tactics... entire lemmy goes: fake, discredited, Israel ally is lying for them, etc.

And down-votes that are coming on this comment just go to prove how big of a supported to terrorism people here are.

"Terrorists" is the 21st century equivalent to "savages" to justify imperialism and genocide. US propagandists can stfu.
- Call it what you like. The fact is they hid behind civilians, kidnapped other civilians and tortured them. Or is cutting off womb of a pregnant woman with baby still moving in her now not savage because we don't want to identify with US?
entire lemmy
Different people are saying different things. Stop clumping everyone together. Lemmy isn't a monolith.
You have one downvote. From me. And yeah if you're going to bomb a protected target we're going to want to see the evidence. You don't just get to shrug and mumble something about terrorists.
- Protected by whom? International rules of war which were never respected in the first place?
My issue is that on the (?second) day of the war, a group of Western reporters were presented with "evidence" of the planning that had gone into the attack, and I found the "evidence" to be laughably bad - the evidence itself, the supposed circumstances it was found under, the condition of the evidence - all were bad. And if you present such incredibly poor "evidence" at one point, I'm going to automatically be much more suspicious of any other "evidence" you present later.
My issue is more with people supporting a genocide because Hamas exists.
Few people have a problem condemning Hamas, but when Israel is clearly killing far more civilians and bombing more hospitals than Israel, obsessing about the lesser problem (who were Israel-funded in any case) is deeply suspicious.
- On no account should any genocide be tolerated or supported. Am merely pointing out how differently people react on different kind of news. Not to mention how frequently people confuse Palestinian cause with Hamas cause.

Again this shit?