Israel demanded the United Nations condemn Hamas for Mass Rape, while hiding the truth from MANY NATIONS they were giving THE RAPISTS millions in cash – under the table! Outrageous! Hamas leaders knew about this. Were they BLACKMAILING Netanyahu, telling him if he does not weaken his border defenses – the whole world would learn the truth? Isn’t there an agreement not to negotiate with TERRORISTS? Did Hamas rape before? Did Israel know they were dealing with Rapists when they handed them all those suitcases – full of cash? Did Netanyahu understand he was double-crossed on Oct.7th.? How about….The U.S.A.?
Let me paint this picture. The Nazis take over a town in Poland, and start raping women. The townspeople approach the Mayor, and give him their money, so he can give it to the Nazis, saying
“If you only rape Jewish women, there will be more bags of money!”
John Presco
https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/11/middleeast/qatar-hamas-funds-israel-backing-intl/index.html
https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/11/middleeast/qatar-hamas-funds-israel-backing-intl/index.html
Shlomo Brom, a former deputy to Israel’s national security adviser, told the New York Times that an empowered Hamas helped Netanyahu avoid negotiating over a Palestinian state, saying the division of the Palestinians helped him make the case that he had no partner for peace in the Palestinians, thus avoiding pressure for peace talks that could lead to the establishment of an independent Palestinian state.
Naftali Bennett, a former Israeli prime minister, told CNN Sunday that after years of flagging his concerns to the Netanyahu government when he was minister of education, he stopped the suitcase cash transfers when he became prime minister in 2021.
“I stopped the cash suitcases because I believe that horrendous mistake – to allow Hamas to have all these suitcases full of cash, that goes directly to reordering themselves against Israelis. Why would we feed them cash to kill us?” Bennett asked.
U.S. demands condemnation of Hamas at UN meeting, but Security Council takes no immediate action
Deputy Ambassador Robert Wood made clear the U.S. is focused on condemning Hamas for an “unprovoked invasion and the terrorist attacks.”
Israeli police officers evacuate a family from a site hit by a rocket in Ashkelon on Oct. 7, 2023. | AP Photo/Tsafrir Abayov
Israel presses U.N. to investigate charges of sexual violence by Hamas fighters
DECEMBER 6, 20235:41 PM ET
HEARD ON ALL THINGS CONSIDERED
By
,
Michele KelemenLISTEN· 3:44
3-Minute ListenPLAYLIST
- Embed
- Transcript
Editor’s note: This story contains descriptions of graphic violence and sexual assault.
Demonstrators at a rally in London wave Israeli flags and hold posters of Israeli hostages on Sunday during a protest over the United Nations’ response to allegations of rape and other sexual crimes committed by Hamas militants during the Oct. 7 attacks.
Henry Nicholls/AFP via Getty Images
The evidence of sexual violence on Oct. 7, Israel says, is overwhelming: Witness accounts of militants raping women; bodies of women discovered with their clothes removed; others shot through the head and the breast.
For two months, Israeli officials have shared what they say proves Hamas fighters committed rape and other sexual assaults during the militant group’s attack on Israel on Oct. 7 that left 1,200 Israelis dead, including more than 300 women.
In recent weeks, Israel has accused major international groups, including the United Nations, of being slow to acknowledge and condemn the sexual violence, which Hamas has denied.
“I say to the women’s rights organizations, to the human rights organizations, you’ve heard of the rape of Israeli women, horrible atrocities, sexual mutilation: Where the hell are you?” said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at a press conference on Tuesday.
Sponsor Message
MIDDLE EAST CRISIS — EXPLAINED
Israel is expanding its offensive in Gaza, forcing more Palestinians to flee south
This week, the pressure on United Nations officials rose after a remarkable session on Monday that included firsthand accounts from Israeli responders of injuries they saw on the bodies of victims.
In response, U.N. officials have defended themselves and called for investigations into the allegations.
What Israel says happened to women on Oct. 7
In total, Israel says it has collected more than 1,500 eyewitness accounts of rape or evidence of sexual violence on Oct. 7.
At the U.N. on Monday, testimony from three Israelis — a police officer, a first responder and a member of a morgue team that processed bodies — described and listed details of Israel’s case.
Simcha Greiniman, a volunteer rescue worker who helped collect bodies on Oct. 7, recounted discovering the body of a woman laying on the floor of her home.
MIDDLE EAST CRISIS — EXPLAINED
After Houthi attacks in the Red Sea, fears of a wider Middle East conflict grow
“She was naked. She had nails and different objects in her female organs,” he said, visibly emotional and hesitating between words. “She was abused in a way we could not understand and could not deal with.”
In another home, Greiniman encountered the body of a woman leaning on a bed, naked from the waist down, shot through the back of her head, he said.
“I’m standing in front of you to make sure that you hear the voices of those women that cannot stand next to us now and be here to scream out what happened to them,” Greiniman said.
Sponsor Message
Yael Reichert, a superintendent of an Israeli national police unit, recounted testimony from survivors of the attacks and first responders who witnessed the immediate aftermath.
A survivor from the Nova rave, a music festival where hundreds of young people were killed, told responders that “everything was an apocalypse of corpses,” with dead women who were missing clothes, Reichert said.
MIDDLE EAST CRISIS — EXPLAINED
At Israeli rave site attacked by Hamas, DJs play music to honor the dead and missing
A first responder at a kibbutz told Israeli officials that they encountered the body of a woman in the shower of a home with her hands tied, Reichert said. In a video played before the U.N. audience, another first responder described seeing gunshot wounds to women’s breasts and the genitals of men and women alike. In another video, a woman described as a survivor of the rave attack said she witnessed multiple men rape the same woman, then mutilate her.
At the base where the bodies of victims were taken for identification, staff were shocked by “the extent of the cruelty, the atrocities we witnessed,” said Shari Mendes, a member of an Israeli reserve unit charged with preparing bodies of female soldiers for burial.
For weeks after Oct. 7, staff members worked through hundreds of bodies, many of them charred, injured or mutilated beyond recognition, she said. Some arrived at the base with limbs removed.
“Many young women arrived in bloody, shredded rags, or just in underwear, and their underwear was often very bloody,” Mendes recalled. A leader of her unit “saw several female soldiers who were shot in the crotch, intimate parts, vagina, or shot in the breast” in what “seemed to be a systematic genital mutilation of a group of victims,” Mendes added.
MIDDLE EAST CRISIS — EXPLAINED
New details emerge about the Hamas-led attackers who massacred Israelis
Israeli officials have also circulated videos of what they say are interrogations of Hamas fighters captured on Oct. 7. In brief video clips played at the U.N. on Monday, two men said they witnessed sexual violence during the attacks.
“These were not merely sick, spur-of-the-moment decisions to defile and mutilate Israeli women and girls,” said Gilad Erdan, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations. “This was premeditated. This was planned. This was instructed.”
NPR cannot independently verify allegations of sexual violence. Hamas denies that its fighters committed sexual assault and rape.
Washington — Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont said Sunday that Israel is “losing the war” of worldwide public opinion as it seeks to eradicate Hamas in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attack.
Sanders, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, told “Face the Nation” that Israel has the “right to defend itself” against Hamas, but it “cannot go to war against the Palestinian people and cause the horrific damage to human life that we are seeing right now.” 
It’s Time to Ditch the Handheld Magnifier!
“Israel is losing the war in terms of how the world is looking at this situation,” he said.
Citing the increasing death toll and displacement of civilians, Sanders said the U.S. “has got to put all of the pressure that it can to tell [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu to stop this disastrous military approach.”
“It is a humanitarian disaster,” Sanders said.
Sen. Bernie Sanders on© Provided by CBS News
Secretary of State Blinken said Thursday there’s a “gap” between Israel’s intent to protect civilians in Gaza and the “actual results.” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin warned earlier this month that Israel risked “strategic defeat” in Gaza if it does not do more to protect Palestinian civilians.
It’s Time to Ditch the Handheld Magnifier!
But the Biden administration has repeatedly called on Congress to approve more aid to Israel since the Oct. 7 attack. The Senate voted Wednesday not to advance a bill that would provide billions in dollars in emergency spending that includes aid for Israel and Ukraine. Sanders joined Republicans, who want more border security and immigration measures included in the bill, in voting against it.
“I think that it would be irresponsible for the United States to give Netanyahu another $10 billion to continue to wage this awful war,” he said, adding that he strongly supports Ukraine aid. “What the Congress has got to do is make it clear to Netanyahu that we’re not going to simply give them a blank check to kill women and children in Palestine.”
Sanders has not called for a permanent cease-fire, though he said he supports a humanitarian pause in the fighting that would allow for the release of more hostages held by Hamas and for the U.N. to deliver aid.
“I don’t know how you can have a permanent cease-fire with Hamas, who has said before Oct. 7 and after Oct. 7, that they want to destroy Israel, they want a permanent war. I don’t know how you have a permanent cease-fire with an attitude like that,” he said.
about:blank
now controls the main square in Gaza City.
Israel advances further into southern Gaza
Israel’s military says it has captured Hamas’ former headquarters in Gaza City, but the war between the two sides was still raging Monday further south in Gaza, and the situation for civilians is only getting worse. United Nations relief agencies say about 90% of the Palestinian territory’s population has been displaced — nearly 2 million men, women and children.
Travel Oregon with Travel Oregon
The U.N. World Food Program (WFP) says nearly all of those in the enclave are going without food for days at a time, and half of the displaced Palestinians are starving.
“I have seen a family gathering over a loaf of bread, just getting it into small pieces like croutons that we put on the side,” WFP spokesperson Abeer Etefa told CBS News. “The suffering of the children in Gaza is, I think, it’s unmatched.”
“The humanitarian operation is actually on the brink of collapse,” added Etefa. “It’s impossible to deliver aid in these conditions… We need the cease-fire now.”
That call, and a plea for a major increase in the flow of humanitarian aid, was repeated by the head of the U.N.’s relief agency for Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and West Bank (UNRWA), Philippe Lazzarini. He told CBS News as he prepared to cross into Gaza from Egypt on Monday that the failure of global powers to negotiate a new cease-fire had left him with “deep frustration, disappointment, some outrage also.”
It’s Time to Ditch the Handheld Magnifier!
The U.S., Israel’s most valuable ally, stood alone on the U.N. Security Council Friday to veto a resolution that would have called for a new cease-fire in the war.
Lazzarini said he was visiting the area to show solidarity with the Palestinian people trapped there, and with the more than 10,000 staff members from his agency still trying to help those people. UNRWA said over the weekend that at least 134 members of its staff had been killed in Gaza since Oct. 7, when the war was sparked by Hamas’ brutal terror attack on southern Israel.
With the flow of aid into Gaza constrained by the war raging again after a brief truce last month, Lazzarini said there was a “total discrepancy between the few trucks” being permitted to enter the enclave with aid materials and “the immensity of the needs.”
Trucks loaded with humanitarian aid materials sit waiting to cross into Gaza on the Egyptian side of the Rafah border crossing, Dec. 11, 2023. / Credit: Ahmed Shawkat/CBS News© Provided by CBS News
“The only way to reverse that is to bring in, at scale, meaningfully, the human assistance and the commercial goods,” he said, renewing a specific call for Israel to open its Kerem Shalom crossing south of Rafah.
“It’s a crossing which is very well equipped for inspections,” Lazzarini said on the Egyptian side of the Gaza border. “It’s a crossing which used to be used before October 7th, processing hundreds of trucks on a daily basis, processing hundreds of commercial trucks and, indeed, this is a crossing that we are asking to be opened.”
In a message shared Monday on social media, UNRWA said it was “on the verge of collapse,” and added that if the agency did cease operations, “humanitarian aid that almost an entire population of Gaza depends on, will also collapse.”
Separately, almost two dozen U.N. ambassadors were on an informal trip sponsored by the United Arab Emirates and Egypt to visit the Egyptian side of the Rafah crossing Monday.
A Egyptian Red Crescent official (foreground) gives visiting U.N. ambassadors a tour of aid provision facilities on the Egyptian side of the Rafah border crossing with the Gaza Strip, Dec. 11, 2023. / Credit: Ahmed Shawkat/CBS News© Provided by CBS News
“What we saw and heard today confirms that one single border crossing is critically insufficient. We need sustained access through multiple routes, including the sea route, and we need to minimize delays in the entry of aid through a robust and streamlined monitoring mechanism,” UAE Ambassador Lana Nusseibeh told CBS News on Monday.
The U.N. ambassadors visited just a day before the General Assembly was scheduled to vote on a non-binding resolution calling for a cease-fire, similar to the one vetoed by the U.S. in the Security Council, which would have been binding under international law.
In the meantime, undaunted by the increasingly urgent calls for a new cease-fire, Israel continued with the military operation it has vowed will destroy Hamas.
An Israeli airstrike obliterated a family home in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis. And Nasser hospital, the biggest in southern Gaza, was left overflowing with the dead, the injured, and scores of parents and children — many who had fled their homes in the north, as they were instructed to do by Israel’s military — grappling with loss and grief.
A picture taken in southern Israel near the border with the Gaza Strip, Dec. 11, 2023, shows Israeli soldiers taking position on a hill overlooking northern Gaza, amid continuing battles between Israel and the militant group Hamas. / Credit: MENAHEM KAHANA/AFP/Getty© Provided by CBS News
The Ministry of Health in Hamas-ruled Gaza said 208 people were killed in Israeli strikes Monday alone, and many more were believed to be trapped under the rubble of destroyed buildings. According to the ministry, which does not discern between civilian and militant deaths in Gaza, more than 18,000 people have been killed in the Palestinian territory since the war started on Oct. 7.
There’s been more anguish in Israel, too, including in Jerusalem as people gathered for the funeral of a soldier killed in Gaza. There’s been more anxiety, as well, as another rocket fired from Gaza landed in the Tel Aviv suburbs Monday morning, damaging apartments and several cars.
Despite Israel’s grinding offensive, Hamas still has the ability to hit the country, and it tries every day.
CBS News’ Ahmed Shawkat and Pamela Falk contributed to this report.
The UN is in disarray over the Israel-Hamas war
It’s an emotional time for an institution whose staffers are being killed in Gaza while Russia and the United States feud at the Security Council.
Israel’s U.N. Ambassador Gilad Erdan wears a yellow Star of David that reads “Never Again,” as he addresses members of the U.N. Security Council at United Nations headquarters on Oct. 30, 2023. | Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/AP
By NAHAL TOOSI
11/04/2023 07:00 AM EDT
The state of Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians is nearly as old as the United Nations. But it’s hardly ever caused as much havoc at the typically staid institution as it has in the last month.
Israeli officials have called for the secretary-general to resign, a top human rights official stepped down with an angry letter invoking “genocide,” and diplomats on a paralyzed U.N. Security Council are upbraiding each other for being too soft on Hamas, the militant group that attacked Israel on Oct. 7.
The frustration is palpable in Turtle Bay, the New York neighborhood home to the U.N. headquarters, diplomats and officials say. It courses through WhatsApp messages and the corridors. Informal meetings on totally unrelated topics inevitably turn toward the Middle East.
And it’s getting worse as the body count rises — a number that already includes more than 70 U.N. employees.
“You can feel that tension — it’s definitely a big crisis. The numbers are absolutely staggering,” said one diplomat from a Security Council member country, who like others, was granted anonymity to candidly discuss a sensitive issue. “This adds to the frustration that you will sort of sense in the hallways at the U.N.”
The drama revives the question of whether the United Nations is a useful forum for solving problems or just one to air grievances. Moscow and Beijing are using the moment to erode U.S. influence with countries that identify with the Palestinian cause and resent how their own needs are ignored by Washington.
Biden under pressure from within his own party to use leverage on Israel
BY JENNIFER HABERKORN AND NICHOLAS WU | NOVEMBER 03, 2023 05:04 PM
Richard Gowan, a U.N. analyst with the International Crisis Group, a think tank, said that during many moments of upheaval, U.N. diplomats spar in public but are affable with one another otherwise. “I am hearing that the mood in private is much edgier this time around,” Gowan said.
The new war began when Hamas stormed southern Israel and killed some 1,400 people while taking more than 200 hostage. Israel has since laid siege to the Gaza Strip, launching airstrikes and sending in ground troops. At least 9,000 Palestinians are believed to have been killed, most of them civilians, according to reports citing health officials in the Hamas-controlled territory.
The initial Hamas attack drew denunciations from many corners of the U.N., including Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. But the Security Council — the U.N.’s most powerful body — was immediately riven. While the U.S. demanded countries condemn Hamas by name, some countries reportedly refused — opting for generic condemnations of attacks on civilians.
In the days since, Russia and the United States have quarreled over the texts of potential Security Council resolutions, each accusing the other of bad faith and offering varying descriptions of where they really stand. Members diverge on whether to call for a cease-fire, whether to say Israel has the right to self-defense and whether to even mention the initial attack in statements.
The United States in particular has resisted calls for a cease-fire, saying such a move would undercut Israel’s ability to defend itself, instead backing “humanitarian pauses” — lulls in fighting that could last as little as a few hours.
National security adviser defends Israel’s efforts to defeat Hamas
BY KELLY GARRITY | OCTOBER 29, 2023 09:40 AM
Russia and to a lesser extent China — who, like the U.S., wield veto power on the council — have led the opposition to the United States. Other countries, including Brazil and the United Arab Emirates, have also played key roles.
So far, no resolution related to the Israel-Hamas war has passed the 15-member body. Russian-backed ones have received too few votes. A Brazilian-led one that earned enough votes was vetoed by the U.S., while a U.S.-led one with enough votes was vetoed by Russia and China.
MOST READ
- Former US ambassador to Israel says Netanyahu is a ‘clear and present danger’ to Israel
- Her Online Sex Life Was Exposed. She Lost Her Election. Now She’s Speaking Out.
- ‘America doesn’t want’ retribution from Trump, McCarthy says
- House GOP chips away at centrist resistance on Biden impeachment inquiry
- Prosecutors fight to preserve March 4 trial for Trump
But the 193-member U.N. General Assembly, where the great powers lack vetoes, overwhelmingly passed a non-binding resolution led by Jordan and other Arab states that called for a humanitarian truce. The measure ultimately passed with 121 votes in favor, 14 against and 44 abstentions.
The United States voted against it, partly because it failed to specifically mention Hamas or the hostages. But even some traditional U.S. allies, such as Australia and the United Kingdom, abstained instead of siding with the United States. France supported the resolution. A Canadian amendment that would have addressed some U.S. and Israeli concerns failed to pass. The U.S. allies in particular have struggled to maintain a variety of interests, including a desire to keep good ties with Arab countries without necessarily upsetting Israel or America.
The results were a striking contrast to U.S.-led resolutions against Russia’s war on Ukraine, which received more than 140 votes. Now, Russia — which has killed numerous Ukrainian civilians and abducted thousands of Ukrainian children — is casting itself as a champion of human rights.
Dmitry Polyanskiy, a senior Russian diplomat at the United Nations, said Russia had no problem calling out Hamas for its brutal attacks, but that Israel and the United States should acknowledge the assault was preceded by decades of Israeli oppression of Palestinians.
He also insisted Russia targets Ukrainian military infrastructure, not civilians. If the U.S. wants to condemn atrocities, he said, “why don’t they condemn what Israel is doing in Gaza?”
U.S. diplomats at the United Nations dismissed Russia’s tactics as ludicrous, noting that U.S. leaders have repeatedly called for Israel to protect civilian lives. As far as America’s standing? They argued that this current crisis won’t affect the U.S. ability to rally countries around other issues, including Ukraine.
“One-sided resolutions, whether they are put forward in the Security Council or the General Assembly, will not help to advance peace,” said Nathan Evans, spokesperson for the U.S. Mission to the United Nations. “The only thing that Russia has contributed to this effort are failed resolutions that the vast majority of the Security Council has opposed.”
Israel shouldn’t be compared to Russia, Biden admin says, as civilian deaths soar
BY MATT BERG | OCTOBER 30, 2023 04:48 PM
The modern state of Israel was established in the late 1940s, just a few years after the United Nations, and it has long been a lightning rod at the international body. Its very creation sparked a war. It is often the target of ire from other countries, especially Muslim-majority ones, at the U.N. (In fact, U.S. diplomats argue that recent U.N. votes are in line with past ones related to Israel.)
In a sense, the debates at the United Nations mirror the infighting at other institutions — from the U.S. State Department to the European Union’s executive bodies — over how to approach this new Middle East war. But the reflections are not exactly the same: There has long been more overt sympathy for the Palestinians within the U.N. than, say, the United States government.
This time, the actions of the Israeli ambassador, Gilad Erdan, have startled many in the U.N. system, where decorum is prized.
During at least one U.N. gathering, Erdan wore a yellow star patch on his suit — a reference to an identifying measure used against Jews during the Holocaust. Erdan also has called for the resignation of Guterres, the secretary-general, who has supported a cease-fire and pointed to the long history of Palestinian suffering in discussing the current war.
Israeli officials accused Guterres of effectively justifying the Hamas attack, even though he has condemned them. But Erdan’s call for Guterres to step down galled some U.N.-based diplomats who said Guterres often takes positions that run against the interests of an individual state if he believes it’s in line with U.N. principles.
Erdan said he has no choice in a system he described as tilted against Israel and sympathetic to terrorism by Palestinians who seek to eradicate his country.
“Sometimes I need to shock the U.N. bodies to show them what we truly think about how they treat Israel with double standards that they do not apply to any other country in the world,” he said.
The United Nations, he argued, “can be relevant only to allow countries to explain their decisions and acts. But surely it cannot be the arena now to solve any kind of conflicts.”
Rosamond Press 
Leave a comment