₦airaland Forum

Türkiye said on Friday that it has detained a private detective accused of working for Israel’s national intelligence agency Mossad. The suspect was detained in a joint operation with prosecutors and the police in Istanbul, according to security officials.

The National Intelligence Organization of Türkiye, or MIT, said that the suspect, identified as Serkan Cicek, was taken into custody during the operation code-named Metron Activity.

Security officials said he had been working for Mossad and was in contact with Faysal Rasheed, a member of Israel’s Online Operations Center.

Cicek allegedly admitted to carrying out surveillance in Istanbul, at Rasheed’s request, on a Palestinian activist who opposes Israel’s Middle East policies.

According to Turkish intelligence, Cicek — whose real name is Muhammet Fatih Keles — changed his name after falling heavily into debt and left his business career to establish a private firm, Pandora Detective Agency, in 2020.

He is said to have worked with Musa Kus, who was sentenced to 19 years in prison for spying for Israel, and with lawyer Tugrulhan Dip, both of whom were found guilty of selling personal data from public records to detectives for profit.


Suspect received payment in crypto

Officials said Cicek drew the attention of Mossad after launching his detective work. On July 31, Rasheed allegedly contacted him via WhatsApp, introducing himself as an employee of a foreign law firm.

Rasheed then tasked Cicek with conducting a four-day surveillance mission on a Palestinian activist living in Basaksehir, on the outskirts of Istanbul. Cicek was reportedly paid $4,000 in cryptocurrency on August 1 to carry out the assignment.

Cicek learned that the target was a Palestinian activist after researching the name online. Despite knowing his associate Kus had been jailed for spying for Israel, he accepted the job.

Authorities said Cicek visited the address given by Rasheed but was unable to find the target. He entered the housing complex on August 1-2 under the pretext of looking for an apartment to rent and carried out reconnaissance, but failed to gather the information Mossad had requested.

On August 3, Israeli agent Rasheed cut off contact, according to officials.

Executive Summary

Since 2006, Gaza has endured repeated rounds of intensive Israeli military action, including major operations in 2008–09, 2012, 2014, the 2018–19 Great March of Return protests and their repression, the May 2021 escalation, and the largescale 2023–2025 war. Each escalation resulted in high Palestinian civilian casualties, destruction of homes and infrastructure, mass displacement, and long-term damage to health, water, sanitation, and livelihoods. Independent monitors, UN agencies, and medical and human rights researchers have consistently documented high civilian death tolls, attacks on civilian infrastructure, and patterns that raise serious concerns regarding proportionality, distinction, and accountability. Despite repeated Palestinian efforts at negotiation and nonviolent resistance, these initiatives have not prevented the recurrence of devastating military escalations.

Peer-reviewed research, including capture–recapture analysis of mortality from October 7, 2023 to mid2024, has confirmed extraordinarily high numbers of traumatic deaths and indicates systematic undercounting of civilian fatalities. These findings underscore the catastrophic humanitarian toll of the most recent conflict phase.



1. Chronology of Major Israeli Escalations (2006–2025)

2006 Gaza Conflict (June 2006 and aftermath): Triggered by the capture of an Israeli soldier, Gaza experienced bombardments and localized operations causing several hundred deaths. (UN OCHA)

Operation Cast Lead (Dec 2008 – Jan 2009): A three-week assault resulted in thousands of Palestinian casualties and widespread destruction. (Amnesty, OCHA)

Operation Pillar of Defense (Nov 2012): A weeklong campaign left roughly 167 Palestinians dead according to B’Tselem. Civilian infrastructure was heavily impacted. (B’Tselem)

Operation Protective Edge (July–August 2014): One of the deadliest campaigns prior to 2023, causing thousands of deaths, mass displacement, and widespread home demolitions. (B’Tselem)

Great March of Return (2018–2019): Civilian-led border protests against the blockade resulted in hundreds of Palestinian deaths and thousands wounded, largely from live fire. UN and human rights groups condemned excessive force. (UNRWA)

May 2021 Escalation: Eleven days of intense hostilities caused 256 Palestinian deaths, including many women and children, with significant destruction of housing and infrastructure. (UN OCHA)

Oct 7, 2023 – 2025 Ongoing War: The deadliest period to date, with tens of thousands of Palestinians killed and catastrophic infrastructure collapse. Academic studies confirm severe undercounting and immense humanitarian impacts. (The Lancet)



2. Humanitarian Impact

Deaths and Injuries: Civilian casualties, including large numbers of children and women, were consistently reported. The 2023–2025 war produced unprecedented fatalities. (The Lancet)

Displacement and Shelter: Repeated bombardments destroyed entire neighborhoods, leaving hundreds of thousands displaced and reliant on humanitarian aid.

Health System Collapse: Hospitals and clinics were damaged or destroyed in multiple campaigns, leading to critical shortages of medicines and supplies. Fuel shortages compounded the crisis, with hospitals forced to suspend operations. (Reuters)

Infrastructure and Utilities: Bombardments repeatedly damaged electricity, water, and sanitation systems, creating catastrophic public health risks and deepening economic collapse.

Psychological Trauma: Generations of Palestinians endured bereavement, sieges, and repeated displacement, leaving long-lasting social and psychological scars.



3. Palestinian Efforts for Peace and Nonviolent Action

Recognition and Negotiation (Oslo Process): The PLO formally recognized Israel in the early 1990s, establishing the Palestinian Authority and beginning negotiations for a peace settlement. (Office of the Historian)

Diplomatic and Legal Paths: Palestinians pursued UN recognition, international complaints, and diplomatic initiatives over decades.

Nonviolent Mass Action: The Great March of Return exemplified largescale peaceful protest, demanding an end to the blockade and recognition of rights. (UNRWA)

Local Ceasefires and Coordination: Palestinian factions have accepted or pursued ceasefires and prisoner exchanges, reflecting recurring attempts to deescalate conflict.



4. Conduct of Hostilities and Accountability Concerns

Civilian Casualties: Reports documented high civilian death rates and failures of distinction and proportionality. (B’Tselem, Amnesty, UN OCHA)

Attacks on Medical Facilities: Hospitals and ambulances were repeatedly damaged or forced to close during escalations. (Reuters)

Destructive Tactics: Aerial bombardment of dense neighborhoods and use of heavy artillery have been criticized for disproportionate civilian harm. (B’Tselem)

Undercounting of Deaths: Academic methodologies, such as capture–recapture analysis, indicate that official counts underestimate the true scale of fatalities. (The Lancet)



5. Illustrative Cases

Great March of Return (2018–2019): Civilian protesters were killed and injured by live fire, highlighting excessive force. (UNRWA)

Protective Edge (2014) and Cast Lead (2008–2009): Entire neighborhoods were destroyed, with high child casualties. (B’Tselem)

Oct 7, 2023 – 2025 War: Civilian deaths and infrastructure destruction reached unprecedented levels. (The Lancet)



6. Central Findings

1. Severe Civilian Suffering: Repeated operations produced consistent patterns of mass casualties and destruction. (UN OCHA, The Lancet, B’Tselem)
2. Palestinian Peace Efforts: Diplomatic and nonviolent initiatives are well-documented but have not ended cycles of violence. (Office of the Historian, UNRWA)
3. Accountability Concerns: Independent monitors have repeatedly raised questions about Israel’s adherence to international humanitarian law. (B’Tselem)



7. Recommendations from Monitors

Immediate protection of civilians and humanitarian access.
Independent investigations into potential violations of international law.
Accountability measures for unlawful attacks.
Transparent reconstruction that prioritizes civilian needs. (B’Tselem)



8. Limitations and Data Caveats

Casualty figures vary across sources due to differing methodologies.
Ongoing hostilities and lack of access complicate verification.
Academic methods suggest underreporting, especially in the 2023–2025 war. (The Lancet)



9. Practical Recommendations

Advocate for humanitarian corridors and civilian protection.
Support independent investigations into alleged violations.
Amplify Palestinian diplomatic and nonviolent initiatives to balance public discourse. (Office of the Historian)



10. Key References

The Lancet: Traumatic injury mortality in Gaza (2023–2024)
UN OCHA: Casualty data since 2008
B’Tselem: Reports on 2012, 2014, and subsequent operations
UN Human Rights Council reports
UNRWA documentation of Great March of Return

The Israeli military says explosions seen and heard in the Qatari capital, Doha, are the result of an assassination attempt against Hamas leaders.

Tuesday’s attack is the first by Israel in Qatar, a key mediator in ceasefire talks between Israel and Hamas and home to the region’s largest United States military base, Al Udeid Air Base.

Israel has been bombarding Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen and Syria as well as carrying out daily attacks in the occupied West Bank in Palestine.

A Hamas source told Al Jazeera that the attack in Doha targeted the Hamas negotiating team. The attack came as the negotiators were meeting to consider the latest ceasefire proposal put forth by the US.

The Israeli military released a statement saying it and the Shin Bet intelligence service “recently carried out a targeted attack on the top leadership of the Hamas terrorist organization”.

“The members of the leadership who were attacked led the terrorist organization’s activities for years, and are directly responsible for carrying out the October 7 massacre and waging the war against the State of Israel”, it added, referring to the Hamas-led attacks in southern Israel on October 7, 2023, which started the war in Gaza.

The statement said that before the attack, “steps were taken to minimize harm to uninvolved people, including the use of precision weapons and additional intelligence information.”

In a statement, Majed al-Ansari, spokesperson for Qatar’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said the country “condemns in the strongest terms” the attack, which he said was carried out on residential buildings housing several members of the Hamas political bureau.

“This criminal attack constitutes a flagrant violation of all international laws and norms and a serious threat to the security and safety of Qataris and residents of Qatar,” the statement said.

NewsNation’s Natasha Zouves investigates a secret U.S. Army experiment in St. Louis, where a mysterious fog once drifted through a neighborhood of more than 10,000 people. The chemical contained cadmium, a known carcinogen and decades later, residents are getting sick, some with rare cancers. Now they’re asking: What else was in that spray? NewsNation’s Natasha Zouves continues the investigation


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upYvUe6hWEk

Local media sources reported on Friday that Ahmed al-Rahawi, the prime minister of the Iran-backed Houthi rebel group, was killed by an Israeli airstrike on Yemen's capital Sanaa. No further confirmation is so far available, and some reports have been conflicting.

Is the Houthi prime minister dead? And what about other government officials, who were seemingly also targeted by an Israeli airstrike?

While Yemeni media reported on Friday that Ahmed al-Rahawi, prime minister of the Houthis, was killed in an Israeli attack, this information has not been confirmed by other sources. It also remains unclear whether this strike was different from a strike that also happened on Thursday and that reportedly targeted senior Houthi government members, among which the defense minister and the chief of staff.

The Israeli military released a statement saying that an airstrike on Thursday "struck a Houthi terrorist regime military target".

Israeli media reported that the attack targeted senior Houthi government members, including the defence minister. A Houthi official cited by one Israeli media outlet however denied this.

The airstrike on Thursday came just four days after another Israeli attack on Sanaa that killed 10 people and wounded 90 others.

Righteousness2:
Netanyahu addresses Iranian citizens in wake of worsening WATER CRISIS: As soon as you are free, Israel will provide you with water recycling technology. Take to the streets for your future.

(Amit Segal)

is your love man telling us he is sabotaging public facilities in IRIran ?

Animals have been living in captivity since 2013 and an NGO claims they have never attacked humans; the government alleges a risk to the local population.
The Israeli government shot down more than 200 crocodiles on a farm in the West Bank, alleging a risk to public safety after years of neglect of the property. The measure was harshly criticized by animal rights organizations, who called it an "unjustifiable execution," especially because, according to them, the reptiles never posed any real danger to the population.

The animals had been confined since the closure of the farm in 2013, located in the Petzael settlement in the Jordan Valley. The property previously operated as a tourist attraction and was later converted into a commercial breeding facility for leather production. After abandonment, the crocodiles were kept in poor conditions, which, according to authorities, led to the practice of cannibalism among animals.

What motivated the slaughter of the crocodiles?

According to an official statement from the cogat, an agency of the Israeli Ministry of Defense responsible for civil affairs in the Palestinian territories, the farm's fence was deteriorated, which would have allowed the escape of several crocodiles for residential areas and nearby nature reserves. After 12 years without a definitive solution and with the owner's refusal to repair the enclosure, the government decided to carry out the slaughter “in a humane manner”.

The action was reportedly accelerated by videos circulating on social media showing young people throwing stones at crocodiles, reinforcing the argument of imminent risk. Even so, the measure generated significant repercussions, especially after the total number of animals killed was released: 262 crocodiles, according to the NGO Let the Animals Live.

What do the farm owner and NGOs say?
Gadi Bitan, who operated the farm for over 30 years, claimed that was not informed in advance about the action and classified the event as an “unjustified execution.” He told the portal Ynet that the animals were “well fed and healthy”, and that no serious incidents had been recorded since the farm closed.


The NGO Let the Animals Live reinforced the criticism, stating that crocodiles “never attacked humans” and that there were viable alternatives to slaughter, such as transfer to sanctuaries or readaptation of the structure. For the organization, the slaughter represents a prolonged failure of public administration to deal with the issue ethically.

Conflict between safety and animal rights
The episode occurs amid a delicate context of permanent tension in the West Bank region, where the Israeli occupation is constantly contested by the international community. The use of occupied land for commercial ventures, especially in sensitive areas such as the Jordan Valley, raises debates on legality, ethics and environmental impact.

Furthermore, the decision reignites the debate on the State responsibility for managing abandoned properties that pose environmental and animal risk. International animal protection organizations already requested an investigation about the case and defend more transparent and scientific criteria for this type of action.

Do you believe the slaughter was necessary? Or do you think the government failed seriously? Share your thoughts in the comments—we'd love to hear your perspective on the balance between safety and respect for animal life.

Israel will not give in to pressure to end the war in Gaza, nor will foreign countries force it to accept a Palestinian state, Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar says in a briefing with international journalists.

He blasts “a distorted campaign of international pressure” on Israel to end the war, which would leave Hamas in power in Gaza. “It ain’t gonna happen,” he says. “No matter how much pressure is put on Israel.”

Sa’ar says that the pressure campaign’s second goal is to force a two-state solution on Israel. “Establishing a Palestinian state today is establishing a Hamas state. A jihadist state,” says Sa’ar. “It ain’t gonna happen.

Sa’ar accuses European governments of allowing their policies to be affected by their “huge Muslim populations,” with Israel being sacrificed to appease this constituency.

“Israel will not be the Czechoslovakia of the 21st century,” he says, referring to European powers agreeing to Nazi Germany’s 1938 annexation of the Sudetenland in an effort to appease Adolf Hitler.

“We won’t sacrifice our own existence for the sake of the appeasement countries,” Sa’ar continues. “We won’t give up our basic interests for the sake of internal politics in certain countries that lost control over their own streets.”

He says that pressure on Israel “is directly sabotaging the chances for a ceasefire and hostage deal” with Hamas and is making military escalation more likely. “The international pressure must not be on Israel. It must be on Hamas.”

Source: https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/saar-palestinian-state-aint-gonna-happen/

caleboxylic:
Tell your hamas to free the hostages. It's simple. Hamas started the war. They must end the war or the war ends them.

what will happen if hamas free the hostages and israel insist on bombing them

The Netherlands has included Israel for the first time on its list of foreign states that pose a threat to the country, according to a recent report released by the country's chief counterterrorism agency, the Dutch National Coordinator for Security and Counterterrorism (NCTV).

The document, titled Assessment of Threats from State Actors, points to efforts by Israel to manipulate Dutch public opinion and influence political decision-making through disinformation campaigns.

One incident cited in the report involves a document circulated last year by an Israeli ministry to Dutch journalists and politicians through unofficial channels. The report claimed the document contained unusual and unwanted personal details about Dutch citizens, following tensions during a rally in Amsterdam of supporters of football team Maccabi Tel Aviv.

The NCTV also flagged concerns over mounting threats from both Israel and the US toward the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague. These threats, it noted, could potentially disrupt the court’s work.

As a host country to several international legal institutions, the Netherlands was described as having a "special responsibility" to safeguard their operations in the face of such external pressures.

Although the NCTV had previously expressed concern about Israeli spyware and surveillance tools, this particular report does not name Israel in its espionage section.

A pair of leading Israeli human rights groups has accused Israel of “committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza,” becoming the first such organizations to make the claim.

B’Tselem said in a major report released on Monday that it came to that “unequivocal conclusion” after an “examination of Israel’s policy in the Gaza Strip and its horrific outcomes, together with statements by senior Israeli politicians and military commanders about the goals of the attack.”

A second Israeli group, Physicians for Human Rights Israel (PHRI), announced it was joining B’Tselem in calling Israel’s actions in Gaza genocide. It published a separate legal and medical analysis documenting what it called “deliberate and systematic extermination of the health system in Gaza.”

Israeli government spokesman David Mencer dismissed the report. “We have free speech in this country but we strongly reject this claim,” he told reporters, adding that Israel has allowed aid into Gaza.

Israel has consistently argued that it is acting in accordance with international law and that its war in Gaza following the deadly Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023 is one of self-defense.


When other, non-Israeli, groups have previously accused the country of committing genocide or genocidal acts, the Israeli government has reacted with anger, strongly rejecting the statements and often responding with claims that the accusations are grounded in antisemitism.


B’Tselem said in the 79-page report that the reality on the ground in Gaza “cannot be justified or explained as an attempt to dismantle the Hamas regime or its military capabilities.”

Announcing the report’s findings, B’Tselem Executive Director Yuli Novak said that “nothing prepares you for the realization that you are part of a society committing genocide. This is a deeply painful moment for us.

“But as Israelis and Palestinians who live here and witness the reality every day, we have a duty to speak the truth as clearly as possible: Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians. Our genocide has context,” Novak said.

The group said that Israel’s onslaught on Gaza includes mass killing – both in direct attacks and through creating catastrophic living conditions – large-scale destruction of infrastructure, destruction of the social fabric, mass arrests and abuse of detainees, and mass forced displacement, including attempts at ethnic cleansing.


It added that statements made by senior Israeli decision-makers “have expressed genocidal intent throughout” the conflict.

B’Tselem said the report was based on data collected over the past 20 months, including information on “thousands of cases” allegedly committed by Israel’s forces against Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Israeli territory.

The group said it used its own information as well as external data gathered by thoroughly vetted organizations.

PHRI added that the evidence it had gathered indicated a “deliberate and systematic dismantling of the health system in the Gaza Strip and other vital systems for the survival of the population.”


“This is not about collateral damage from war, but a deliberate policy aimed at harming the Palestinian population as a group,” PHRI said in a statement.

But while B’Tselem says the Israeli government is responsible for the situation in Gaza, it also accused the international community of enabling genocide.

“Many state leaders, particularly in Europe and the US have not only refrained from effective action to stop the genocide but enabled it – through statements affirming Israel’s ‘right to self-defense’ or active support, including the shipment of weapons and ammunition – which continued even after the International Court of Justice ruled that there was ‘plausible risk that Israel’s actions amount to genocidal acts,’” it stated.


The group said that the sense of fear, rage and desire for revenge which many Israelis felt after the October 7 terror attacks served as “fertile ground for incitement against Palestinians in general, and Gazans in particular.”

Hamas and its allies killed 1,200 people, including children, and kidnapped 251 others to Gaza during the attack – the worst terror attack on Israel since the country’s establishment.

The report from B’Tselem comes as pressure mounts on Israel over the catastrophic situation in Gaza. Images of children dying of acute malnutrition have provoked global outrage, with the United Kingdom, France and Germany saying last week that the crisis was “man-made and avoidable.”


At the same time, the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is under pressure from all sides domestically – with protests demanding the end of the war and the release of all hostages growing in strength and frequency, and far-right members of his coalition threatening to collapse the government if he ends the conflict.

On Monday, the presidents of five of Israel’s leading universities published an open letter to Netanyahu, raising concerns over the crisis in Gaza.

“Alongside a growing segment of the Israeli public, we observe with shock the harrowing scenes emerging daily from Gaza, where hunger and disease continue to claim the lives of the most vulnerable,” the university leaders said. They added that they were “appalled” by statements made by some politicians who were “advocating for the intentional destruction of Gaza and the forced displacement
of its civilian population.”

First Israeli group
While B’Tselem is the first Israeli organization to accuse the government of genocide, a number of international groups, organizations and governments have reached the same or similar conclusions in the past.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks to the press after meeting with US Speaker of the House Mike Johnson at the US Capitol in Washington, DC, on July 8.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks to the press after meeting with US Speaker of the House Mike Johnson at the US Capitol in Washington, DC, on July 8. Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images
The accusations have always sparked reaction, given their seriousness and the sensitivities around the use of the word genocide, which is defined by the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”

The United Nations Special Committee said last November that Israel’s war conduct in Gaza was “consistent with the characteristics of genocide,” including mass civilian casualties and using starvation as a weapon.


Human Rights Watch accused Israel of committing “acts of genocide” against Palestinians in Gaza by depriving them of adequate water supplies last December, while Amnesty International said around the same time that there was “sufficient evidence” to conclude genocide was happening in the territory.

The government of South Africa filed a lawsuit against Israel with the International Court of Justice in December 2023, accusing the country of committing genocide in Gaza. Ireland joined South Africa’s case earlier this year.

The UN’s top court ordered Israel to take “all measures” to prevent a genocide in Gaza in a ruling on South Africa’s request for emergency measures, which act like a restraining order while the court considers the full merits of the genocide case, a move that could take years.

Several prominent Israeli individuals have also made the same accusation, including leading genocide expert Omer Bartov who penned an op-ed in the New York Times saying that his “inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people.”

The Christian community in Gaza has lost at least 21 members so far. This may sound like a small number, but given they were only 1,000 before the war, these massacres threaten to eliminate the Christian presence in the strip for the first time in almost 2,000 years. Proportionally speaking, the death rate of Palestinian Christians is double that of the entire Palestinian population in Gaza.

And yet, the leaders of Christian-majority countries in the West have remained shockingly silent on the plight of Palestinian Christians. United States President Joe Biden, a devout Catholic, has said and done nothing to protect fellow Catholics in Gaza, who have also been targeted by the Israeli army.

This falls in line with decades of unwavering Western Christian support for the racist Israeli state, which has threatened the Christian presence in the holy lands for decades.

A history of Christians targeted
The Israeli onslaught against Palestinian Christians was taking place long before Hamas was even created. During the Nakba of 1948 when Jewish militias attacked Palestinian villages and towns, Palestinian Christians were targeted just like Palestinian Muslims.

Christian Palestinians were forced out from Lydda (what Israelis call today Lod). Many ended up taking refuge in Ramallah, walking dozens of kilometres on foot while trying to avoid the brutal Jewish militants.

In Jerusalem and other areas, Palestinians regardless of their faith were also expelled. Members of my own family – my dad, uncle and grandmother – had to flee for their lives. My aunt and her family who lived in the Musrara neighbourhood sought refuge near the Notre Dame Catholic Chapel, thinking they would be safe there, but a Jewish sniper shot and killed her husband, leaving her a widow with seven young children.

The terror and dispossession did not stop even after the state of Israel was established. For example, residents of the two predominantly Palestinian Christian villages of Iqrit and Biram, which at the end of the Arab-Israeli War fell within northern Israel, were forced out in November 1948. They were told they could return “within two weeks”, but the Israeli state never allowed them to.

In the following decades, the Palestinian Christians who remained within the territory Israel claimed faced the same apartheid regime that Palestinian Muslims did. They have been subjected to about 65 racist laws that deprive them of the same rights as Jewish citizens of Israel, according to research done by the Haifa-based Adalah NGO.

One of the earliest of these laws was the 1950 Law of Return, which enshrined the right of Jews to come to Israel, settle and automatically receive citizenship. It denied the same right to the expelled indigenous Palestinian population despite the fact that the United Nations had decreed in Resolution 194 that Palestinian should be allowed to return to their homeland and be compensated for the loss of their homes.

More recently, the Knesset approved the Nation State Bill in 2018, which formally declares Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people, thus further solidifying the legal iteration of Jewish supremacy. This emboldened even more the extremist elements within Israeli society and encouraged even more anti-Palestinian violence.

Incidents of Jewish extremists harassing and intimidating Palestinian Christians, spitting on them and attacking their processions have spiked. Christian properties, including churches and cemeteries, have been targeted.

Just days before Hamas’s October 7 attacks in southern Israel, a group of Jewish men and boys harassed a Christian procession carrying a cross, viciously spitting on them. A video of the incident went viral and caused international outrage, but clearly not among Western leaders. Repeated appeals from Christian church leaders for action on Jewish Israeli violence have fallen on deaf ears for years.

Western silence on Palestinian Christians’ plight
On October 17, just days after launching its brutal war on Gaza, Israel bombed the courtyard of the Christian-run Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza, killing hundreds of people who had sought shelter there from its bombardment. The Israeli propaganda machine tried to blame the attack on the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, but subsequent investigations confirmed that the “evidence” it had produced was fabricated.

Two days later, the Israeli army bombed the nearby Church of St Porphyrius, the world’s third oldest church, killing at least 18 people.

The Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem, which runs the church, said many of those inside at the time were women and children. “Targeting churches and their institutions, in addition to the shelters they provide to protect innocent citizens … constitutes a war crime that cannot be ignored,” it said in a statement .

But the targeting of Palestinian Christians continued. On December 16, two Palestinian women who had taken refuge in the Holy Family Catholic church in Gaza City were shot dead by an Israeli sniper. The Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem said the two women were “shot in cold blood” while Pope Francis condemned the murder during his weekly Sunday homily.

British MP Layla Moran, who has relatives trapped in the same church, has said they have witnessed the Israeli army use white phosphorus against its compound in addition to targeting its solar panels, water tanks and generators, making life incredibly difficult for those taking shelter there.

Over the past 80 days of war, Christian Palestinians have not stopped appealing to the world to take note of their plight and the plight of all Palestinians and take action to stop the genocide.

A Palestinian Catholic mother published an appeal to Biden, calling on him to base his policies on his moral beliefs. “We are not children of a lesser God, Mr. President, we are the Palestinian Christians of the holy land where the message of love peace, and justice started, and we call upon you to stop this Genocide.”

Leaders of the Palestinian Christian community also sent an open letter to Western church leaders and theologians in which they challenged “western theologians and church leaders who have voiced uncritical support for Israel and [called on] them to repent and change”.

Unfortunately, these appeals have been completely ignored.

Biden and other leaders of Western Christian-majority nations have demonstrated remarkable disregard for Palestinian lives – both Muslim and Christian. The US has repeatedly voted against ceasefire resolutions at the UN Security Council and blocked any attempts to pressure Israel to stop slaughtering Palestinians or even to marginally criticize it.

Biden and his administration have indeed treated us, Palestinian Christians, as the children of a lesser God. He and other Western leaders who have backed Israel are fully responsible for the genocide of the Palestinian people. What they have done will not be forgotten.

turkey was 10th and Iran was 12th

1982: Israel faced a moral crisis

In Israel, the Sabra and Shatila massacre aggravated the moral crisis the Israeli society was facing since June 1982 and the invasion of Lebanon. Throughout the summer, a growing protest movement emerged in the country calling into question the legitimacy of the war. For the first time in its national history, a military operation appeared to have been unnecessary for Israel’s survival. For the first time too, some anti-war actions were conducted. The dissenters came from the opposition in Parliament (Labour party), the intellectual elite, the mass media and even some IDF soldiers. They criticized the army’s strategy as not appropriate (for fighting the PLO), the military methods as disproportionate (to the threat) and considered the Israeli government as morally responsible for the killing of civilians (Journal of Palestine Studies, 1982:214-225).

In the days following the Sabra and Shatila massacre, protest and emotion grew in intensity. The population was shocked by the TV images coming from Beirut and the first testimonies of survivors. How could the “only true democracy” of the Near East could have gone this far astray?

F. General and Legal Interpretations
The question of whether the Israeli forces had been involved, directly or indirectly, in the massacre that was reported to have been carried out by the Phalangists, divided (and still divides) the legal experts’ and researchers’ communities. Several bodies tried to describe in legal terms what occurred in the Sabra and Shatila camps.

At the international level, the Security Council of the United Nations immediately « condemn[ed] the criminal massacre of Palestinian civilians in Beirut » (resolution 521, September 19th, 1982). On December 16th, 1982, the General Assembly declared the massacre as « an act of genocide » (resolution 37/123). Some members asked for an official United Nations investigation authority to be created, but in vain. A few international experts, mainly lawyers, therefore established an “International Commission to enquire into reported violations of International Law by Israel during its invasion of the Lebanon”. Sean McBride, President of the International Peace Bureau in Geneva, was its Head. The experts’ conclusions were mainly based upon the fourth Geneva Convention. They asserted that “the Israeli authorities bear a heavy legal responsibility, as the occupying power, for the massacres at Sabra and Chatila. From the evidence disclosed, Israel was involved in the planning and the preparation of the massacres and played a facilitative role in the actual killings” (McBride, 1983). They also labelled the Israeli invasion as a “cultural genocide” or “sociocide”. Most of them considered that one could substantiate “the allegation of the deliberate destruction of the national and cultural rights and the identity of the Palestinian people and (...) this constitutes a form of genocide”.

In Lebanon, a commission of inquiry was established after the massacre and placed under the chairmanship of As‘ad Germanos. But it never published its findings since the Lebanese authorities wanted to support “national reconciliation” and downplay, in that context, the Phalangists’ implication in the Sabra and Shatila killing. However, one should note that E. Hobeika, the Phalangist chief of intelligence, was killed in Beirut in a car-bomb attack on January 25th, 2005. Two days before his death, he had declared that he was ready to testify about the Sabra and Shatila massacre in front of the Belgian Court that charged A. Sharon for “genocide”, “war crimes”, and “crimes against humanity” (see below).

On the Israeli side, a national commission of inquiry was also set up on September 28th, 1982 and was headed by Itzhak Kahan, Head of the High Court. I. Kahan was asked, with the help of Aharon Baron, Judge in the High Court and General Yona Efrat, “to investigate all the facts and factors connected with the atrocity which was carried out by a unit of the Lebanese Forces against the civilian population of the Shatilla and Sabra camps” (The Kahan Commission, 1983). On February 7 th, 1983, the Kahan Commission published clear conclusions: the Phalangists perpetrated the atrocities; none of the Israeli leaders had been directly involved in it. Nevertheless, the Commission considered that the Israeli political and military top command bears indirect responsibility. Indeed, the leaders should have foreseen that the danger of a massacre existed: “it is evident that the forces who entered the area were steeped in hatred for the Palestinians, in the wake of the atrocities and severe injuries done to the Christians during the civil war in Lebanon by the Palestinians and those who fought alongside them; and these feelings of hatred were compounded by a longing for revenge in the wake of the assassination of the Phalangists’ admired leader Bashir and the killing of several dozen Phalangists two days before their entry into the camp” (The Kahan Commission, 1983). Moreover, “no energetic and immediate actions were taken to restrain the Phalangists and stop their actions” (The Kahan Commission, 1983), although IDF soldiers had reported about illegal activities in the camps. Nonetheless, no legal proceedings were taken against the Israeli leaders. Only A. Sharon was blamed personally and asked to “draw the appropriate personal conclusions arising out of the defects revealed (...) and if necessary, (...) consider whether he should exercise his authority” (The Kahan Commission, 1983), or not. He resigned from his office on February 11th, 1983. But he remained part of the government as a Minister without portfolio.

The conclusions of the Israeli Commission of inquiry are partly called into question by the scientific community. A. Kapeliouk (1982), G. de La Pradelle (2003) and the McBride Commission (in which G. de La Pradelle was also one of the lawyers, 1983), but also journalists (Péan, 2002; Fisk, 2001), rejected, for instance, the argument that the IDF’s officers posted near the camps were not able to see what happened. According to them, the Israeli headquarters were located on a several-floor building, which was overlooking the camps.

Their main objection to the conclusions of the Kahan Commission, however, concerns the assessment of the level of Israel’s responsibility. A. Kapeliouk (1982) and G. de La Pradelle (2003) argued that the massacre of Sabra and Shatila was not an isolated incident, contrary to what the Commission inferred. The Sabra and Shatila slaughter was part of a long Palestinian drama, which had started in 1948 with the creation of the Israeli State and the expulsion of Palestinians from their land. For both authors, the 1982 massacre should be considered as the prolongation of an old Israeli policy, which has consisted in threatening the PLO, or even try to eliminate it. As the McBride Commission noticed: “there has been a conscious attempt to disrupt the social organisation of the Palestinian people to ensure that through their dispersal, their sense of identity and group loyalty would be weakened, if not destroyed” (Race & Class, 1983:469).

Finally, researchers pointed out signs of the existence of a “plot” planned by the Israeli top command and the Phalangist chiefs. They asserted: “The massacre was not a spontaneous act of vengeance for the murder of Bashir Gemayel, but an operation planned in advance aimed at effecting a mass exodus by the Palestinians from Beirut and other parts of Lebanon” (al-Tal, without date). The Kahan Commission vigorously rejected the idea of a conspiracy “between anyone from the Israeli political echelon or from the military echelon in the IDF and the Phalangists, with the aim of perpetrating atrocities in the camps” (The Kahan Commission, 1983). It explained that the entry of the Phalangists into the camps had been carried out without prior knowledge that a massacre would be perpetrated.

To conclude, one can say that the Israeli hierarchy had probably not ordered the Phalangists to perpetrate a slaughter. But at the same time, one should emphasize that the weakening of the PLO’s infrastructures and the national feelings of Palestinians by military means have been consistent aims of Israeli politics.

G. Judicial actions
In June 2001, 23 victims of the Sabra and Shatila massacre brought a complaint against A. Sharon in front of a Belgian Court. They charged him with “genocide”, “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity”. The same complaint was brought against General A. Yaron. Indeed, according to the Belgian “Law of Universal Competence”, an alleged victim could charge somebody whatever his nationality and place of residence.

Mr. Chebli Mallat, a Christian Maronite from Lebanon, was one of the plaintiffs. Being a well-known lawyer, he explained his commitment to A. Sharon’s trial by his will to “put an end to impunity” (Naïm, 2001).

But in June 2002, the Belgian justice declared the complaint inadmissible. The Court based its argument on two grounds:

-* Firstly, the defendant must be found and arrested in Belgium. At the moment of the trial, however, A. Sharon and General A. Yaron were living in Israel.

-* Secondly, according to Israeli law, the defendant cannot be prosecuted if he holds a political office. Indeed, A. Sharon was Prime Minister when the charges were brought against him.

The group of plaintiffs decided, therefore, to appeal the case to the Belgium’s Supreme Court of Appeal. In February 2003, the highest court of Belgium called into question the first argument that was given by the magistrates’ court. The Supreme Court asserted that pursuits could be instituted even if the defendant does not live in Belgium. But the Supreme Court of Appeal confirmed the second argument which deals with A. Sharon’s political immunity. In fact, it is likely that some political pressure was exercised in order to downplay the case.

D. Witnesses
Many people saw and spoke to victims in the immediate aftermath of the massacre. A few hours after the slaughter, testimonies were recorded or written down by foreign journalists, diplomats and Red Cross teams.

Leila Shahid (1983; 2002) was among the first to directly interview victims. She was the leader of the General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS) in France at that time and was visiting Beirut with Jean Genet, a French novelist (J. Hankins, 1992) who wrote a famous essay based on his direct experience as an eye witness (1997). There is also a play issued from J. Genet’s novel, entitled “Quatre heures à Chatila”. The testimonies L. Shahid compiled are personal reminiscences by the camps’ inhabitants who considered themselves “survivors”. Like other testimonies (al-Shaikh, 1984), they emphasized the following facts:

-* Rumours of massacre rapidly emerged inside the camps, but were not taken seriously by the inhabitants; “Thursday night, we were sitting at home when the sky over the camp was lit by flares. A man came in and said the Phalangists are massacring people. We didn’t believe him and went to bed”. Testimony from Sobhia F. (Shahid, 2002:45).

-* People did not know exactly what was going on, nor precisely who was behind the persecutors;

-* The assailants proceeded neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood, house-by-house, threatening and killing in cold blood in front of relatives or neighbours. “They killed the men right in front of us. There was my husband, Hamid Mustafa, who was only forty-seven. My son Hussein was fifteen, and my son Hassan was fourteen. There was also the son and brother of our neighbour, and others too. In all, seven men they killed and piled one on top of the other in front of the house. They emptied their pockets, taking their watches and whatever they were carrying. Then they dug a pit and buried them”. Testimony from Umm Hussein (Shahid, 2002:57).

Similar narratives have been heard during the commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the massacre, as well as during the trial that was held in Belgium against A. Sharon in 2001-2003 (Revue d’Etudes Palestiniennes, 2003 ; Péan, 2002) [See below].

A few foreigners were direct witnesses of the massacre. They were mostly Western doctors and nurses. The majority of them had arrived in Lebanon during the Israeli invasion and were working at the Akka and Gaza Hospitals, both located in Sabra and Shatila camps. Their testimonies were widely broadcasted on Western media, as they spoke other languages than Arabic. They were also asked to testify in front of the Israeli inquiry commission (Siegel, 2001). Their version was very similar to the Palestinian refugees’ testimonies.

Some IDF soldiers also directly witnessed the massacre, as was revealed by the Israeli Commission of inquiry (The Kahan Commission, 1983). Their testimonies confirmed the killing of civilians. For example, Lieutenant Grabowsky declared to the magistrates, that on Friday the 17th, « in the early morning hours, he saw Phalangists soldiers taking men, women and children out of the area of the camps and leading them to the area of the stadium. Between 8:00 and 9:00, he saw two Phalangist soldiers hitting two young men. The soldiers led the men back into the camp, after a short time he heard a fex shots and saw the two Phalangist soldiers coming out. At a later hour he went up the embankment with the tank and then saw the Phalangist soldiers had killed a group of five women and children” (The Kahan Commission, 1983).

Foreign journalists and diplomats entered the camps in the aftermath of the massacre after the IDF had withdrawn from the entrances. Their reports and photographs all expressed despair and brutality. Loren Jenkins, from the Washington Post, wrote on September the 23th: “The scene at the Chatila camp when foreign observers entered Saturday morning was like a nightmare. Women wailed over the deaths of loved ones, bodies began to swell under the hot sun, and the streets were littered with thousand of spent cartridges. Houses had been dynamited and bulldozed into rubble, many with the inhabitants still inside. Groups of bodies lay before bullet-pocked walls where they appeared to have been executed. Others were strewn in alleys and streets, apparently shot as they tried to escape”.

In 2004, a German film-documentary, entitled Massaker (produced by Monika Borgmann, Lokman Slim et Hermann Theissen, this documentary was awarded several times at film festivals), gave the floor to executioners. Six Phalangists who remain anonymous tell about how they killed civilians in Sabra and Shatila, but also how they had been trained by the IDF during all of the civil war and how they were under their orders when they perpetrated the slaughter (Mandelbaum, 2006).

E. Memories
There are several narratives on the Sabra and Shatila massacre, which vary widely from one another, and even sometimes contradict each other.

After the massacre had occurred, the Israeli leaders denied any responsibility in it. They argued that no Israeli forces were patrolling the camps when the slaughter was perpetrated. They also pretended that they could not have been aware of what was going on, as they could neither see, nor hear anything in the camps, from their positions. “I can say clearly and immediately that no soldier and no commander in the Israel Defence Forces participated in this terrible act. The hands of the IDF are clean”, the Minister of Defence A. Sharon stated in his address to Parliament on September 22nd, 1982 (Journal of Palestine Studies, 1982:213). The Prime Minister, M. Begin, declared on his side, that he learned of the massacre only on Saturday the 18th from a radio report.

The Israeli leaders also claimed that they had not had any direct contact with the Phalangists on the field. “We don’t give the Phalangists orders, and we are not responsible for them”, General Eitan said (Journal of Palestine Studies, Winter 1983:103). Moreover, the Israeli leaders insisted on the fact that their orders were clear: the militiamen should target the “terrorists”, but should not harm the civilians.

Finally, the Minister of Defence explained that the IDF’s non-interference in the camps had prevented casualties inside Israeli ranks. He added: “We did not imagine in our worst dreams that the Phalangists would act thus (...). The inhuman tragedy, which took place, was beyond our control, notwithstanding all the pain and the sorrow. We cannot bear the responsibility on our shoulders” (Journal of Palestine Studies, 1982:216-217). But, according to the Israeli officials, the Phalangists, and especially their chief of intelligence E. Hobeika, should be charged.

A part of the Israeli population reacted to the Israeli public statements with scepticism. On the 25th of September, about 400 000 people (almost 10% of the population) demonstrated against the government’s actions. It was the largest demonstration in the Israeli national history. “Begin is a murderer” or “Fascism will not take over” were slogans chanted by the protesters. Zeev Shiff, the military correspondent of the newspaper Haaretz, accused Begin’s government of lying: “ It is not true that these atrocities came to our attention only on Saturday afternoon after foreign correspondents had filed reports on them from Beirut (...). I myself heard of the massacre in the camps on Friday morning, and I immediately informed a senior official. This means that the slaughter started on Thursday night, and that whatever I learned on Friday morning was certainly already known to other people by the time it reached my ears” (Journal of Palestine Studies, Winter 1983:175). He goes on blaming: “It is not true that the Phalangists sneaked into the camps without our knowledge. When the IDF surrounds the camps with such huge forces, it is impossible for scores of armed men to pass through without arousing our attention” (Journal of Palestine Studies, Winter 1983:176).

Popular pressure, in addition to international condemnations, led Begin’s government to accept the idea of setting up a national Commission of inquiry (see below). But the latter’s report largely called into question the Israeli official narrative. Indeed, it considered the political and military hierarchy indirectly responsible for the tragedy. Yet some of the leaders have continued denying any kind of responsibility. This denial is particularly evident since the Second Intifada has begun in September 2000 in the Palestinian Territories. In fact, as A. Kapeliouk rightly asserts (REP, 2003), there have been attempts from the Israeli to reformulate national history as soon as the relationship with the Palestinian neighbours became increasingly tense.

In Lebanon, after the massacre, the political authorities accused S. Haddad’s troops (Israel’s traditional ally) of being responsible for it. They also accused the Israeli government of complicity, as the camps’ entrances were under the IDF’s control. But the authorities never blamed the Phalangists for their actions in the camps, although they were the perpetrators. Moreover, the Christian militia was cleared of any kind of responsibility by all political parties, even the leftists. One could explain the sudden Lebanese consensus by the priority given to « national reconciliation » in the aftermath of the Israeli invasion and the siege of Beirut. The « Christian conservatives » and the « Islamic-progressists » gathered behind their new President, Amin Gemayel (Beshir’s brother) to put an end to the Israeli occupation of South Lebanon. Thus, the accusations towards a common foreign enemy - the State of Israel - momentarily helped the Lebanese overcome their internal divisions.

As for the Palestinian refugees, they also considered the Israeli government as the main instigator of the Sabra and Shatila massacre. They particularly charged A. Sharon who was suspected of having planned their expulsion. The Israeli Minister of Defence has been named, from that time onwards, “the butcher of Sabra and Shatila”.

In 2002, the 20th anniversary of the slaughter was commemorated in all Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. Candles were lit in order to keep alive the memory of the slaughter. Mass graves in front of the Sabra and Shatila entrances have been used as memorials. Many witnesses were asked to testify on what happened, in order for the new generations to remember (Péan, 2002 ; Revue d’Etudes Palestiniennes, 2003 ; Sayigh, 2001). Lebanese and Palestinian political parties also organized a march in solidarity with the Palestinian people, which gathered 2000 people. European activists and even European deputies, took part in the demonstration, and called for A. Sharon’s sentence. Indeed, at the same period in Brussels, A. Sharon was personally accused of “war crimes” for his actions in Sabra and Shatila [see below]. A. Sharon’s trial in front of a Belgian Court, as well as the ceremonies of the anniversary, have strengthened the Palestinian narrative of the Sabra and Shatila massacre. Furthermore, A. Sharon’s arrival to power as the Prime Minister of Israel in 2002 has crystallized enmity against his person. His policy of repression towards the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and especially the “massacre of Jenin” in 2002 (in which the IDF launched a military operation against the refugee camp of Jenin in the Northern West Bank. The battle lasted for more than a week. Its aim, according to the Israeli authorities, was the weakening of armed groups supposed to be responsible of suicide-bombings. The number of victims has been subject to controversy. During the attack, civilians were killed and many houses from the same camp’s neighbourhood bulldozed. Access to the camps was prohibited to humanitarian organizations and media, even some days after the end of the attack), has reinforced the Palestinian narrative, according to which A. Sharon wants to destroy the social organisation of the Palestinian people and to weaken its national identity (Nab’aa, 2006).

The Sabra and Shatila massacre took place between the 16th and the 18th of September 1982 in Lebanon. It was perpetrated by a Lebanese Christian militia, the Phalangists, which was under the political and military control of the State of Israel. The victims were mostly civilians from Sabra and Shatila. Sabra and Shatila are two Palestinian adjoining refugee camps located in the southwest of Beirut (see maps).

On the 18th of September, after about forty hours of killing, the first images of the massacre showing civilian victims appeared on TV. They provoked worldwide indignation and compassion.

A. Context
At the time of the massacre, the question of Palestine and the Palestinian presence in Lebanon were major stakes on the regional and internal political arena.

Palestinians have settled in Lebanon in the aftermath of the creation of the State of Israel. “During the summer of 1948, some 110,000 Palestinians were driven out of Galilee and crossed the border into Lebanon” (Picard 2002:79). Most of them became refugees. During the seventies, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) set up its headquarters in Lebanon after its leaders and activists had been expelled from Jordan. The PLO was responsible for some 340,000 Palestinians. It provided social services and basic infrastructures and built institutions in various domains (economic, cultural, social and political). In the same time, Yasser Arafat, the PLO’s historic leader, developed a military apparatus to lead the armed struggle against Israel. Thousands of Palestinian fighters (the fedayin) were sheltered and trained in the refugee camps. The camps were under the sole control of the Palestinian military police, according to an agreement signed by Y. Arafat and the chief of the Lebanese army in 1969. In that context, refugee camps became symbols of Palestinian resistance.

In 1975, civil war broke out in Lebanon, opposing two camps: the “Christian-conservatives” and the “Islamic-progressives” (Picard, 2002). The first group mainly included Christians (Maronites, in particular) and formed “a bloc around the presidency for the preservation of the traditional order” (Picard, 2002:108). The Phalangists (or Kataeb), founded in 1936 by Pierre Gemayel, increasingly ruled the coalition. The second group, which constituted “a heterogeneous coalition with three focuses - leftist, Muslim, and Palestinian” (Picard, 2002:108), shed a doubt on the prevailing leadership. Its leaders “wanted Lebanon to make a decisive commitment to the cause of Palestinian resistance”, whereas the “Christian conservatives” supported the status quo from which they benefited.

In 1976, the Syrian armed forces took part in the Lebanese civil war, invading Lebanon and strengthening one camp first and then, the other. Israel’s support to the Christians was instituted almost at the same time. It was agreed that Israel would help if the existence of Lebanese Christians were to become endangered. According to the Phalangists, the number of Palestinian refugees, for the most part Muslims, threatened the demographic balance between Christians and Muslims in the country. They also feared that it may weaken their (profitable) position in the political game.

From the mid-onwards, the South of Lebanon became the favourite battlefield of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Palestinian fighters carried out commando raids against Israeli interests and citizens throughout the world and planned more and more attacks at the Northern border of Israel. The Israeli government reacted by interfering on Lebanese soil and directing “policing” or “preventive” operations towards Palestinians – in total contradiction with International Law. The everyday lack of security caused by these policing interventions and by bombings affected not only the Palestinians, but also the Lebanese, especially in the South. The Israeli Prime Minister Menahem Begin also put pressure on the Lebanese Army, as he wanted the latter’s command to play a role in protecting Israeli interests by attacking the PLO’s apparatus.

In March 1978, the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) invaded the South of Lebanon up to the Litani River. The Israeli leaders reproached the Lebanese army with not being able to secure the border. Forced to withdraw in July due to international protests, the IDF decided thereafter to create a Lebanese border militia. The Army of Free Lebanon (AFL) was formed with deserters from the Lebanese army and placed under the command of Saad Haddad. Its purpose consisted in protecting the northern border of Israel from Palestinian incursions. S. Haddad coordinated the AFL’s actions directly with the Israeli military command.

On the 6th of June, 1982, the IDF invaded Lebanon for a second time. The Israeli troops rapidly encircled West Beirut where the PLO had established its headquarters, and met with the Phalangist forces, posted in the eastern part of the city. This military operation, named “Peace for Galilee”, officially aimed at ensuring the security of the inhabitants of Northern Israel. But the weakening of the PLO’s infrastructure and apparatus was also on the agenda.

Although the military balance of forces was largely in favor of the IDF, the “Islamic-progressives” stood up to air strikes, naval gunfire and tank artillery launched on the Lebanese capital. The siege of Beirut, which lasted all summer, found an issue in negotiations that aimed at preparing the PLO’s withdrawal from Lebanon. The negotiations were conducted by US envoy Philip Habib with spokespersons of the Palestinian side, as the United States did not recognize the PLO.

An agreement was reached in the middle of August on the principle of an evacuation of the Palestinian fighters and PLO officials and the dismantlement of PLO offices and infrastructures. The “Habib Roadmap” put the evacuation under the supervision of a multinational force formed by some Italian, French and American troops and scheduled to remain on the battlefield during thirty days from the date of their arrival. It also guaranteed security to the Palestinian civilians that were to remain in the camps after the PLO’s departure. Indeed, Y. Arafat feared retaliations against his people.

The evacuation was carried out from the 21 th of August to the 1st of September 1982 and was followed by the withdrawal of the multinational force, which came sooner than scheduled.

A new Lebanese President was elected by the Parliament in the aftermath of the PLO’s evacuation. Bechir Gemayel, chief of the Phalangists, won the ballot on the 23rd of August. But the “Islamic-progressives” had boycotted the elections, for they considered the leader of the “Christian-conservatives”’ as the candidate of Israel. Indeed, it is a fact that the Israeli authorities - and especially the Minister of Defence Ariel Sharon - wanted to install a friendly Lebanese government, which could be brought to sign a formal peace agreement with Israel.

However, B. Gemayel was killed on the 14th of September before assuming office. This political assassination gave the Israeli government an opportunity to condemn the Palestinians, and an argument to enter West Beirut. The massacre of Sabra and Shatila started two days later.

B. Instigators and perpetrators
At the time of the massacre, the Sabra and Shatila camps were under the military control of the IDF. Soon after the announcement of Gemayel’s death and in contradiction with “Habib’s roadmap”, M. Begin and A. Sharon decided to enter West Beirut. The invasion began on Wednesday the 15th in the early morning, with tank shelling and gunboats. A. Sharon arrived on the field at 9:00 to oversee the operation. By 12:00 noon on Thursday the 16th of September, he announced the military takeover of the city. The IDF’s headquarters were located at the traffic circle of the Kuwaiti embassy near the Sabra and Shatila camps. Israeli tanks surrounded the camps, sealing the main entrances with checkpoints.

The Israel’s invasion of West Beirut led to worldwide protest. As indignation rose, even among some members of the Israeli government who were not kept informed as well as in the United States, the Israeli Prime Minister, the Minister of Defence, and the top military leaders, claimed that they entered Beirut in order to prevent violence and pogroms. In their opinion, Gemayel’s death could produce disorder. As for Y. Arafat, he reiterated his fear for the fate of Palestinian civilians who had remained in Lebanon after the PLO’s departure.

The Phalangists entered the Sabra and Shatila camps in the afternoon on Thursday the 16th. As proven by a multitude of sources, their entrance was coordinated with, and authorized by, the IDF. According to the inquiry of an Israeli Commission (The Kahan Commission, 1983) (see below), which was based upon testimonies of the political and military hierarchy, the Israeli leaders decided to send the Phalangists in the camps during a meeting on Wednesday the 15th. Those present were A. Sharon, IDF chief of staff General Rafael Eitan, Major General Amir Drori, head of Israel’s northern command, Fadi Ephram, the Phalangists’ commander in chief, and Elias Hobeika, chief of intelligence. The Israelis ordered the Christian militiamen to enter the camps in search of “terrorists” and weapons. According to them, 2000-armed terrorists had remained in the camps despite the PLO’s evacuation; they should be forced out.

In the afternoon of September the 16th, meetings were held between the Phalangists and the Israeli military command, including General Amos Yaron, IDF chief in Beirut. Around 17:00 - 18:00, the first Phalangists’ unit (about 150 men) entered the camps with E. Hobeika at its head. Saad Haddad’s troops were not part of the operation, contrary to what was asserted by some direct witnesses and the Lebanese authorities. The Israeli Commission of inquiry (The Kahan Commission, 1983) and A. Kapeliouk’s field research (Kapeliouk, 1982) showed that the Israeli leadership neither ordered, nor coordinated the entry in Sabra and Shatila with the Army of Free Lebanon. But it could be possible that a few of its members were deserters and had joined the Phalangists before the massacre occurred.

The killing started almost immediately after the Phalangists’ entrance, according to the inhabitants’ testimonies. Electricity had been cut off since the end of the afternoon but the camps were well-lit thanks to flares fired by the IDF over the camps. The militiamen entered houses, shooting people, slitting them with knives, axes or hatchets, raping women and girls. Injured refugees started to arrive at the Gaza hospital north of Sabra, carried by their relatives. Furthermore, scared inhabitants seeking protection asked the medical teams to take them in.

On the morning of Friday the 17th, new Phalangists’ units entered the camps. At the height of the assault, the militiamen were about 400. The killing went on all day long with its share of summary executions, house demolitions, and looting of private goods such as money or jewellery. Corpses were lying on the streets, abandoned under ruins or bulldozed in mass graves. Witnesses saw many inhabitants piled up onto trucks and driven outside the camps to unknown destinations. Nobody knows what became of them. They are the “missing” of the Sabra and Shatila massacre.

The first rumours of massacre reached journalists from refugees who had escaped. They also reached the Israeli command as some of the IDF soldiers, posted at the entrances of the camps, witnessed killings of civilians and reported it to their hierarchy. The Israeli Commission of inquiry (The Kahan Commission, 1983) revealed that at 12:00 noon, General A. Drori warned his superior General R. Eytan in Tel Aviv who, then, decided to fly to Beirut to check. The IDF chief of staff met F. Ephram and E. Hobeika in the following hours: they agreed on a withdrawal of the militiamen for the next morning.

Early in the morning on Saturday the 18th, the Phalangists ordered the camps’ inhabitants by loudspeaker to surrender. They gathered them outside, separated the Lebanese from the Palestinians, men from women, executed some of them, let others go, threw some inside trucks and forced the majority of the men to enter the Sports City stadium, where IDF officers and Phalangists questioned them. Meanwhile, a group of militiamen went to the Gaza hospital, asked the foreign medical team to leave the building, and killed the Arab personnel.

At 10:00, the Phalangists left the Sabra and Shatila camps. But testimonies certify that the interrogations continued at the Sports city (Fisk, 2001). The Lebanese army took control of camps on the following day, Sunday the 19th.

C. Victims
The exact number of victims from the Sabra and Shatila massacre is not and will never be precisely known. Estimations have always varied widely between 700 to 3500. The lowest number (between 700 and 800 victims) has been produced by the IDF and was used by the Israeli Commission of inquiry, as « this may well be the number most closely corresponding to reality » (The Kahan Commisssion, 1983). The Lebanese authorities published higher figures in the middle of October 1982. According to official sources, casualties reached the number of 2 000, and are divided as follows: 762 identified corpses have been buried by the Lebanese army or the Red Cross, whereas 1200 others have been buried by families on their own initiative and registered with the Red Cross.

The Lebanese historian Bayan al-Hout (2004) conducted fieldwork between 1982 and 1984 on casualties in Sabra and Shatila. She identified 1390 cases: 906 dead and 484 “missing”.

Amnon Kapeliouk, an Israeli journalist, worked on a reconstitution of the events soon after the slaughter. He based his personal inquiry upon primary sources, such as testimonies, IDF archives and declarations, press reports, evidences gathered by the Israeli Commission of inquiry, etc. and published the results of his research in 1982: Sabra and Shatila. Inquiry Into a Massacre [Sabra et Chatila: enquête sur un massacre], which became a reference book.

In A. Kapeliouk’s opinion, the number of victims reached 3 000 - 3 500. He added to the 2000 death formally listed and recognized by the Lebanese authorities three other kinds of victims:

-* Those who were buried in mass graves dug up by the assailants and whose bodies have not been brought up;

-* Those who died under the ruins of their houses;

-* The “missing” who were taken alive to unknown destinations and never returned. According to the Red Cross, the number of the “missing” reached 359 between the 18th and the 20th of September.

No estimation of the number of injuried was given, but cases of mutilation are numerous.

The victims of the Sabra and Shatila massacre presented several features. First, a large number of them were civilians. The massacre was perpetrated on the fringers of Beirut, inside refugee camps which are densely populated and mostly residential areas. Moreover, the slaughter occurred a week after the departure of the majority of the PLO’s fighters. Even if the Israelis claimed that some combatants remained in the camps, no clear evidence has been provided. On the contrary: whereas a three-month-siege was not able to force the Palestinian resistance to lay down its arms, only one day was needed for the IDF to take over Beirut after the PLO’s departure.

Secondly, males were the majority of victims of the massacre, although one witnessed women, eldery people or babies among the victims. Indeed, men were most systematically searched, lined up and/or executed by the Phalangists.

Thirdly, most of the victims were 1948-Palestinian refugees and their descendents living in the Sabra and Shatila camps. Some of the dead were Lebanese. The Lebanese casualties either shared their lives with a Palestinian man or woman and had settled in camps, were visiting relatives, or had escaped from the shelled South Lebanon and found refuge in Beirut’s suburbs. A few foreign workers were also to be counted among the victims, according to the Palestine Red Crescent and the Lebanese authorities. Indeed, the Syrians, Pakistanis, Iraqis or Egyptians who work in Lebanon as unskilled and under-employed workers, often live in Palestinian refugees camps where the cost of living is cheaper.

This leads to a fourth remark: the dead of the Sabra and Shatila massacre were poor. They came from the lower class settled in Beirut. The Lebanese who had come from the South had left their land behind and were forced to work as unskilled workers in Beirut. By law, Palestinians in Lebanon are not allowed to practice a large number of professions, such as doctor, advocate, ingeneer, civil servant, etc. They therefore cannot earn a decent salary and are financially dependant on international organizations and reminittescences from the diaspora.

Fifth, the victims of the massacre were mostly Muslims, even if some Lebanese Christians (civilians or militiamen) have been killed during the slaughter. The Muslim dead were Sunni, in keeping with the general characteristics of the Palestinian population as most Palestinians follow Sunni Islam. But the Lebanese from the South were Shi’i.

Finally, violence inflicted on human bodies as witnessed by some journalists and broadcasted worldwide after the massacre contributed to distinguish the Sabra and Shatila slaughter from other carnages that have been perpetrated during the civil war. This kind of “savagery” and the fact that the victims were mostly civilians also contributed to it being considered a “striking” event in the genealogy of political violence in Lebanon and in collective and individual memories.

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At various times, the F.B.I. cast its net across entire communities of Muslims, using a specific type of assessment known as a Type 5. During one such initiative, focused on rooting out ISIS supporters, Albury knocked on the door of a woman, a young Syrian refugee, who looked so terrified that she was visibly shaking. You should be scared, Albury thought, guiltily. Open that door, I will ruin your life.

He hated this part of the job. She looked at him as if he were the secret police. That was in fact his goal, the response he’d been trained to elicit. “What the F.B.I. was directing us to do was to go into these communities and instill fear and then generate this paranoia within these people so that they know that they’re under suspicion perpetually,” he says. There was no real justification for this suspicion, he thought, other than suspicion as a state of being. “Say you’d get an alert from the C.I.A. or some other intelligence source that an ISIS recruiter had been trying to recruit teenagers and young men from a specific Syrian refugee camp during a specific time period,” Albury says. “This happened all the time. That would give the F.B.I. license to look at every male Syrian refugee between certain ages who had been at that camp and then come into the United States after the time the recruiter was supposed to have been there. And so the F.B.I. would look at all of those kids, and they could keep looking at those kids, and their friends, and maybe all the kids in a 30-block radius because they could say they had ‘credible intelligence’ to suggest that some of these people had terrorist sympathies.”

‘It became too hard to ignore the human cost of what we were doing.’
It was in this manner, among others, that large numbers of people in Minneapolis’s Somali, Syrian and other immigrant communities, and those in other cities, were put under long-term monitoring without their knowledge, their names inscribed in F.B.I. files for use in later investigations or disseminated to other intelligence agencies. “It becomes a vicious circle,” Albury says, “because the longer that you look at a kid, the bigger the file gets, even if they’ve done nothing. And then six months later, somebody calls the F.B.I. and says, ‘I’ve seen some suspicious activity in this neighborhood,’ and an agent can see that we have thick files on all of these kids. But the question is, OK, so you have thick files on these kids, but the files have shown that these kids are guilty of nothing. So what does that actually achieve? It achieves ‘intelligence,”’ he says. “And that is a nebulous, wonderful-sounding word that everyone likes to throw around, but based on my experience, the entire purpose of these assessments was to create a database of American Muslims.”

Albury had reached an emotional low point common to many people who joined the F.B.I., or the U.S. military, early in the war on terror, convinced they would be engaged in the righteous defense of the nation. It took him years to reconcile himself to the idea that the F.B.I. was not particularly adept at its new intelligence-gathering mission, and he had never felt comfortable with the bureau’s relationship with the C.I.A. But “Minneapolis broke me,” he says. “It became too hard to ignore the human cost of what we were actually doing.”

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Compounding this disillusionment was the increasingly visible disproportionate phenomenon of police brutality against African Americans. The August 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., devastated Albury. So did all the other high-profile police killings of Black men and boys that year: Dontre Hamilton, Eric Garner, Laquan McDonald, Tamir Rice. Many of his colleagues made clear that they saw the victims as guilty, or at least suspicious, leaving the cops no choice but to use force. After Garner died in a police chokehold, some members of the J.T.T.F. argued that Garner had caused his own death. “You agree, right?” Albury recalls being asked. “He should’ve just complied, right?”

Albury was 36, earning $120,000 a year and seven years away from his 20-year mark, when he could retire from the F.B.I. with full benefits and a pension. He had just had a second child, a boy. It was easy to compartmentalize a career in law enforcement; some would say it was in his best interest. Albury never could. He saw himself in the communities he served as an F.B.I. agent. Increasingly, he understood the fear they exhibited, too, as the same fear that was felt by his own community at the hands of the police and the F.B.I. When Black Lives Matter protests erupted in Minneapolis, some cops on the J.T.T.F. openly fantasized about running the protesters over with their cars. “This was before Charlottesville,” Albury notes, referring to the white-nationalist rally in 2017.

Every day was a slog through his own guilty conscience. He had joined the F.B.I. truly believing in its mission, and even after he realized that the bureau was imperfect, like every other institution, a part of him still clung to a belief that he was serving the greater good. But he felt increasingly betrayed by the F.B.I. and the rest of the “terrorism industrial complex,” as he’d come to see the national-security establishment and the amorphous war on terror, a war based largely, if not entirely, on fear. Fear had led different groups of Americans to distrust and even hate one another. And it had also given the bureau tremendous power. The government had used the shock of Sept. 11 to invert the rule of law, and now the law kept becoming more and more inverted.

In reality, there was no evidence of rogue Al Qaeda sleeper cells hiding in suburbia, as was acknowledged in a 2005 internal F.B.I. report. The United States had not faced imminent attack, as Mueller warned repeatedly during the early years after Sept. 11. Paradoxically, genuine terrorist incidents like the Fort Hood massacre or the Boston Marathon bombing were committed by individuals who had been on the F.B.I.’s radar and had fallen off. There was no existential threat from Islam, as Albury was taught as a surveillance trainee, just an endless list of people who were being targeted because they were Muslim. It had taken him a decade to reach this conclusion, and now that he had, he was firmly on the path toward what he called “my awakening.”

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In 2007, a new squad supervisor directed a major intelligence initiative against a purported Hezbollah sleeper cell in Silicon Valley. The information came from a Lebanese Christian informant who Albury learned had an open disdain for Muslims. Based on these claims, Albury said, at least eight investigations were opened on various targets, including an unassuming engineer Albury kept tabs on for more than a year. Surveillance teams monitored his phone calls, read through his emails and followed him to and from work. “So here I am, at 3 a.m., gathering this guy’s garbage to put in the back of my car, and I know I’m not going to find, like, a receipt from Hezbollah or some other smoking gun,” Albury says. “I used to take at face value that these people must be guilty of something if we were looking at them,” he continued. “But as an agent, you realize that’s not it. Most of these people hadn’t done anything.”

But the bureau believed sources could tell them where the terrorists were, even though, with the exception of Abdhir, Albury found no actual terrorists. “You just burn out,” says one former agent who says he tried to get off the J.T.T.F. and transfer to another squad, only to be told his skills were best suited for counterterrorism. “It’s shocking when you want to be rescuing people and kicking in doors and executing search warrants and saving the day, and then you get on a national-security squad, and you don’t do any of that. It’s all cloak and dagger, and bullshit cases, and that is a disaffecting experience. So you get agents who kind of check out and sit at their desk and don’t do a goddamn thing. And then you get agents like me and Terry, who try really, really hard and hit that point where they just can’t anymore.”

By 2009, many of Albury’s original squadmates had transferred off the joint task force or left the F.B.I. entirely. At the end of that year, Albury decided to take a four-month assignment as a counterterrorism investigator in Iraq. “Ideologically I was still very much committed to the mission and the F.B.I.’s role in protecting the country,” he says. “In some distorted sense of duty, I believed by going to Iraq, I could finally realize my goal of actually countering terrorism.”

The bureau had sent agents to Iraq as counterterrorism investigators and interrogators since the initial invasion in 2003, to gather intelligence on possible threats to the United States or its bases overseas. Another, no less important role was providing constitutional cover to the U.S. occupation, making sure that prisoners were read their Miranda rights and otherwise treated in accordance with the Geneva Conventions. Now, with the war winding down and many of those prisoners still languishing in military or C.I.A.-run detention facilities, the F.B.I.’s main assignment was to obtain whatever additional information it could from the detainees before handing the reins over to the Iraqis. “It hit me very quickly that no one really had a clear idea of what our mission was, or what we were trying to accomplish, other than to leave Iraq as soon as possible,” Albury says.

Most of the prisoners Albury interviewed had been in U.S. detention for years without formal charges, and given the circumstances under which they were captured, they would most likely never see the inside of a courtroom, though they would also not be released. Many had been turned in by informants who were paid by the military to direct them to supposed “bad actors.” The experience was demoralizing and left him feeling complicit. When he returned to San Jose in April 2010, he told his supervisor he wanted off counterterrorism: “I can’t do it anymore.”

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He was transferred to a violent-crime squad, where he spent the next 18 months serving warrants, going on stakeouts and investigating a Vietnamese gang. This, he later said, was the most gratifying work of his career. But Albury was now married with a baby daughter, and the Bay Area was expensive. His wife had spent part of her childhood in Minnesota and still had family there. It seemed like a place where they could put down roots. He had never been there, except for a layover at the Minneapolis airport, but that was what appealed to him about the place. A fresh start.

At the end of 2011, Albury put in for a transfer. “Don’t do it,” one colleague said; Minnesota was cold, and the people were colder. Albury pushed back: “That’s your left-coast elitism talking.” Another colleague told him about a Vietnamese American agent who had found the racial hostility in the Minneapolis field office so intolerable that he left. One afternoon, an agent took Albury aside and implored him to reconsider: “It’s not the right place for you.”

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A citation signed by James Comey, awarded to Albury in 2016 for his investigation into a possible Al-Nusrah sleeper cell.Credit...From Terry Albury
“You know what I think we should do with the Somalis?” a secretary with the Minneapolis Joint Terrorism Task Force said to a group of agents in the office in fall 2012. Albury had been on the job for a few weeks. “I think we should blow up the Somali towers.”

She was referring to the Riverside Plaza housing project, the heart of Minneapolis’s East African immigrant community. Albury managed a smile, assuming she was joking to shock the new guy. But she was serious. “You don’t get the problem,” she told Albury. “These people are dirty, smelly, disgusting, worthless pieces of [expletive].”

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Despite his stellar record as a criminal investigator, Albury wound up back on the J.T.T.F. Minneapolis didn’t need any more criminal investigators. It needed agents to develop sources within Minneapolis’s Muslim community, a large number of whom were Somali immigrants, or “skinnies,” as some of his colleagues called them. In all his years as an F.B.I. agent, Albury had never heard the sort of unabashed hatred for any group of people as he did for the Somalis, whom agents denigrated for their poverty, or their food, or the habit some Somali immigrant women had of tucking their cellphones inside their hijabs while shopping at Walmart or driving a car.

Albury had spent his entire career absorbing racism and shrugging it off, which was how you dealt with being a token, he thought. In Minneapolis, he was often the only African American in the office; one translator frequently told him about her discomfort doing interviews with certain agents who threw around prejudicial remarks as if they had forgotten she was there. With him, agents were more careful — usually.

“There was this one special agent in the Salt Lake City field office who sent out this bureau-wide email trying to get people to sign onto a class-action suit against Obama and the Justice Department for discriminating against white guys,” Albury says. “He was upset that the D.O.J. had endorsed all of these diversity events, and he wanted a White History day or month, or something.” Special agents in the Minneapolis office “openly discussed the email and how ​​it was about time that someone had the courage to say what he said.” A few agents, acknowledging it was probably a losing cause, suggested they might sign onto the suit anyway, to send a message. “There were days I literally counted down the hours until my shift was over,” Albury says. “But meanwhile I kept up this [expletive] facade.”

His first assignment in Minneapolis was mosque outreach: Take a list of all the Islamic centers in a 10-mile radius, sit down with the leaders and play the role of your friendly neighborhood F.B.I. agent while building profiles on anyone who might make a good confidential source. He had also done this in San Jose, and he had a standard pitch. “We’ve been hearing some things about your mosque. …” That always put them on the defensive. Sometimes he’d throw a few Arabic phrases into his conversation, mentioning the good work the F.B.I. was doing to help “counter violent extremism” and expressing concern about the continued harassment of Muslims in the Twin Cities. His job was to protect them, the “honest, decent Muslims,” which was why he needed their help. “We’re here to work with you, not against you, so if you hear anything that worries you. …”

The targets saw right through it. “I’m not here for your bullshit,” one imam told him, ordering Albury out of the mosque.

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The war on terror was evolving to focus more and more on so-called homegrowns, including those Americans who left the United States to wage jihad overseas. Minneapolis-St. Paul was a key front. Between 2007 and 2009, more than 22 young men from the Minneapolis area left to join the Somali militant group Al Shabaab. By the time Albury arrived in Minneapolis in 2012, a number of those men had been killed in Somalia, and the bureau was nearing the end of several lengthy investigations of men who had either joined the fight or recruited others. But a number of investigations dragged on indefinitely.

‘You lose perspective. You invest years in it and begin to believe it’s your duty to find evidence, no matter how small, confirming your suspicions.’
One day, Albury was handed a thick file pertaining to the leader of a prominent mosque in Minneapolis-St. Paul. The imam had been on the F.B.I.’s radar for years, suspected of radicalizing youth in his community. Albury found nothing in his file to suggest the man was sympathetic to terrorism. Still, he recruited an informant to insinuate himself into the cleric’s world. The informant spent a year praying at the mosque, slowly making his way into the imam’s inner circle. He recorded every conversation.

“Had he been very outspoken against U.S. foreign policy?” Albury says about the imam. “Yes, but that was his constitutional right. He was also very upset when members of his congregation told him that F.B.I. agents had knocked on their door and harassed them, and he sermonized about that, and this was also perfectly legal to do.” But never once had the imam said anything to tie him to Al Shabaab — in fact, as the years went on, he became an outspoken opponent of Islamic terrorism, even urging his congregation to call the F.B.I. if they suspected their children were being recruited. Yet the investigation remained open.

Another endless case, this one a material-support investigation into the brother of one of the early travelers from Minnesota to join Al Shabaab, was proving equally tough to close. The case was based on the claims of an informant, code-named Cottonball, who claimed that a local young man was moving money and other resources to his big brother, a well-known Al Shabaab fighter known as Adaki, in Somalia. The informant had been providing the F.B.I. with intelligence for more than a year, making wildly contradictory claims that his handlers either didn’t care much about or hadn’t even noticed.

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“Why are we still wasting our time on this case?” Albury asked his boss. “Every week he says something different. It’s all BS.”

The supervisor, Albury recalls, told him to trust the source.

Most of his Minneapolis colleagues assumed the people they were investigating were guilty, whether the source was trustworthy or not. Too many members of the J.T.T.F. seemed to be driven by personal animus, describing Islam as a religion of violence, a message that was still being promulgated in F.B.I. and other law-enforcement training materials as late as 2011. His first partner, who worked primarily on cases involving Palestinians, used to argue to keep open cases that even his bosses wanted to close. That was what happened when you worked in counterterrorism too long, Albury thought. “You lose perspective. You invest years in it and begin to believe it’s your duty to find evidence, no matter how small, confirming your suspicions.”

He’d had no luck persuading his bosses in San Jose to close cases he felt were dubious. Now, in Minneapolis, he tried harder. He scoured the F.B.I. guidelines to find the rules against investigating someone based on false predication, presenting his supervisors with copious examples of claims that didn’t add up. “I wrote my case-closing referrals like they were Ph.D. dissertations,” he says. “I’d cite every possible fact and policy to ensure that no one could offer resistance.” By the end of 2014, Albury managed to close both the investigation into the imam and the Cottonball case, the second of these with a scathing rebuke of the informant, whose claims were never substantiated. His supervisor, Albury recalls, seemed pleased. “That’s the best closing referral I’ve ever read,” he said.

Closing cases became Albury’s mission. He was a cleaner, an agent who could take a case with inherent flaws and find a way to fix them or shut it down. This generally resulted in even more cases landing on his desk — “I think a lot of my bosses knew these cases were bullshit,” he says — but he didn’t care. If he could give one person in the Muslim community some peace, he decided, that was something.

But it also wasn’t enough. Adaki’s little brother, for example, was screwed for life. There was nothing connecting the kid to terrorism. Albury knew this after spending months completing a process known as “baseline collection”: scouring his social media, checking his phone records, running his name through the D.M.V. database as well as myriad other secret and top-secret government databases. But now his name was in the system. That meant any number of government agencies — the F.B.I., the C.I.A., the D.E.A., ICE — could have access to his file.

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Albury had recruited too many informants found in precisely this manner not to understand that what he’d done by simply looking at Adaki’s brother was to open him up to future harassment or, at best, put an asterisk next to his name that would be with him forever. Now, any time he applied for a passport, or a job that required a background check, or a driver’s license, or simply had his name run through any sort of government database, for the rest of his life, it would show up that he’d been looked at by the F.B.I., which would inevitably be viewed as suspicious. That was what was so insidious about the process, Albury thought. And it wasn’t just this kid — there were thousands of Minneapolis Muslims in the system just like him and untold millions elsewhere in the country.

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Albury and other members of the Minneapolis terrorism task force with James Comey in 2016. Credit...From Terry Albury
In December 2008, Attorney General Michael Mukasey, in one of his final acts in the Bush Justice Department, pushed through a series of changes to the F.B.I.’s investigative guidelines that permitted agents to open low-level investigations known as “assessments,” without any formal claim of wrongdoing or even a credible tip. All that was needed was an agent’s assertion that there was a “clearly defined objective” in looking at a subject to initiate the baseline collection process. Over the next two years, according to a 2011 report by The New York Times, the F.B.I. opened nearly 43,000 counterterrorism-related assessments, though fewer than 2,000 led to further investigation.

Albury had been doing assessments for years before they were officially enshrined in the F.B.I.’s rule book. It was standard procedure, which officials often described as “leaving no stone unturned,” though determining a party’s guilt, or even guilt by association, was never the sole objective. Assessments were the opening salvo to the informant-recruitment process. It was a delicate art of manipulation, persuading a person to work for the federal government against his or her own community, but with access to the person’s criminal history, or immigration status, it was much easier. There were different techniques agents were allowed to use. They could assist a person who lacked legal status to be given it, a tactic known as the “immigration-relief dangle.” Conversely, agents could also work with immigration officials to deport those people if and when they’d exhausted their usefulness as confidential sources. Fear was a prominent driver. “You love America and want to protect this country, right?” Albury would ask his targets, many of whom were recent immigrants, or permanent residents, or maybe they were in the United States on a visa or had no documentation at all, and so what were they going to do, say no? He was standing before them with a gun on his hip.

Most of the time, people would say yes. Those who refused might get put under even more pressure. In 2013, a Muslim man filed a lawsuit, Tanzin v. Holder, challenging the F.B.I.’s abuse of the no-fly list to coerce Muslims into spying on their communities, an intimidation tactic Albury says was not uncommon during his time in both San Jose and Minneapolis. Another approach was to threaten uncooperative sources with spreading disinformation unless they agreed to cooperate. “The script was, ‘Everyone in your community already thinks you’re a source, so you might as well work with us,’” Albury says. “Another was, ‘Everyone tells us you’re a good guy,’” which was used to both butter up someone who wanted to be perceived as a good American and plant a seed of doubt as to what it might be like to be viewed as not a “good guy” by the F.B.I. By his own estimate, Albury recruited at least 15 informants over his career, one of whom later became a C.I.A. asset. “I don’t think anyone fully appreciates how demoralizing it is to be sitting across the table from a peace-loving man or woman from a foreign country, insinuating all kinds of baseless BS, attempting to coerce them to spy on their equally peaceful community,” he says, “but it was also my job.”

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The San Jose office was in the midst of a major material support for terrorism investigation focused on a Bay Area engineer, Rahmat Abdhir, whose brother, Zulkifli, was a bomb maker on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists list. Albury joined the case, and in 2007, after traveling to Japan and the Philippines, he helped the F.B.I. win indictments against both men. This, as he saw it, was how a terrorism investigation was supposed to go: He had worked a case all the way to the grand jury, and he was even commended by Mueller for his efforts. The J.T.T.F. had helped stop a bomb maker from making more bombs intended to kill innocent people. It was exactly what he joined the F.B.I. to do.

“That case was an exception,” says Cook, who served as a supervisory special agent on the San Jose joint task force from 2002 to 2007. Very few terrorism investigations, he says, actually concluded. More often they went on indefinitely, with agents unable to gather the evidence needed to prosecute, despite working leads for years. “I’d say most of our investigations were based on very thin leads from questionable sources,” says one former agent on the San Jose joint task force. “But what was the alternative? The government was convinced that there were sleeper cells all over the country, and we had to find them.”

Years after the Sept. 11 attacks, agents in every one of the F.B.I.’s 56 field offices and its many satellite agencies like San Jose continued to follow Mueller’s 2001 edict to “leave no stone unturned” in chasing down possible leads. In 2006 alone, the F.B.I. received 219,000 tips from the public that resulted in more than 2,800 counterterrorism threat reports and suspicious-incident reports. The F.B.I.’s post-Sept. 11 mission (which was inscribed on a banner that hung for a while in the lobby of F.B.I. headquarters) was to “Prevent, Disrupt, Defeat” terrorist operations before they occur. It was a slogan that required a certain ideological buy-in, Albury would later realize; preventing terrorism was a fundamental shift from investigating terrorism. “A cornerstone of F.B.I. training is: Everyone is a potential source,” Albury says. “Every encounter was exploitable either domestically, via the F.B.I., or internationally, through the C.I.A. or another intelligence partner.”

‘I used to take at face value that these people must be guilty of something if we were looking at them. But as an agent, you realize that’s not it. Most of these people hadn’t done anything.’
Albury didn’t let himself think too much about the more uncomfortable aspects of the Patriot Act and what it allowed the F.B.I. to do. He had a wealth of resources at his disposal: top-secret databases, informants, electronic surveillance tools. It was easy, as a member of the J.T.T.F., to send a national-security letter to an internet or phone company or another commercial entity and obtain information about a customer. It had also become routine to obtain a FISA warrant for more elaborate operations like wiretaps. Tremendous pressure was put on agents to bolster their squad’s numbers on open or active investigations and informants, which boosted the office’s statistics, resulting in more funding for agents, analysts, surveillance teams and other aspects of the J.T.T.F., which in turn would open more investigations.

‘We’ve built this entire apparatus and convinced the world that there is a terrorist in every mosque, and that every newly arrived Muslim immigrant is secretly anti-American, and because we have promoted that false notion, we have to validate it.’
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He spent hours driving around in his black Dodge Durango, jotting down the comings and goings of various Muslims who for one reason or another had fallen into the post-Sept. 11 dragnet. One target was Omar Ahmad, a Palestinian-born engineer and a founder of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the largest Muslim civil liberties and advocacy organization in America. Ahmad had been on the F.B.I.’s radar since the 1990s, suspected of ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, which Albury was taught was akin to a Mafia organization with shadowy links to terrorism. Now Ahmad was put under round-the-clock surveillance by the San Francisco division, which searched through his garbage, placed GPS devices in his car, listened to his phone calls, searched his electronic communications and sent undercover informants into his personal, professional and religious circles.

Albury’s job was to spy on Ahmad outside his mosque in Santa Clara, taking notes on whomever Ahmad stopped to speak with before and after prayers. Because Ahmad was assumed to be connected to terrorism, everyone with whom he came in contact was seen as a potential co-conspirator, and the people those individuals came in contact with were as well. The CAIR founder might have a brief chat with an imam, who also had a conversation with a professor of Islamic history. The professor would talk to the owner of an Islamic grocery store. The store owner might later go and smoke shisha with three other men, and all these people would now be under a sort of unofficial surveillance by investigative specialists like Albury, who would write up daily reports to the investigating case agents. In 2010, the Justice Department closed its investigation of Ahmad. No charges were ever filed.

Albury remained an investigative specialist for four years. He learned to speak rudimentary Arabic and also developed an interest in Middle Eastern culture and history that would prove useful later in his career. He even got used to the casual Islamophobia that was rife in his office and that he later recognized as endemic to the post-Sept. 11 F.B.I. Objecting out loud to it could label him as a terrorist sympathizer — or a liberal, which for many in law enforcement, he knew, amounted to the same. Albury had pinned his hopes on becoming a special agent, a member of the trusted brotherhood, and if that meant keeping his opinions to himself, he would do it.

So Albury nodded along when colleagues joked about wiping the Middle East off the map or referred to Muslims as “ragheads,” and in the spring of 2005, having passed a grueling series of interviews and background checks, he was admitted to the F.B.I. Academy in Quantico, Va. Five months later, he was issued a badge and a gun and returned to the Bay Area, this time as a special agent on the San Jose Joint Terrorism Task Force.

At 26, Albury was one of the youngest agents on the joint task force. He was 6 foot 3, and “he looked like he was 12,” says Russ MacTough, a former F.B.I. agent who was one of Albury’s closest friends on the task force. Albury took a cerebral interest in terrorism, amassing stacks of books on Western colonialism and America’s long history of supporting Middle East coups, trying to understand the political and sociological roots of jihadism, why someone might want to fly a plane into a building. “Terry was very smart and maybe a little cocky, which is fine,” says his former supervisor Randy Cook. “Self-confidence is a very good quality to have as an agent.”

In the wake of the Church Committee, new guidelines limited the F.B.I.’s ability to investigate anyone without an indication of criminal activity. But Sept. 11 changed this calculus. Terrorism was the new communism. “The indoctrination was immediate,” Albury recalls. “It was, ‘We’re at war, we need to respond, we need to use every tool at our disposal.’” President Bush, in his speeches following Sept. 11, went out of his way to describe Islam as a religion of peace, portraying the perpetrators of the attacks as outliers. But as Albury went through training, “it was made very clear from Day 1 that the enemy was not just a tiny group of disaffected Muslims,” he says. “Islam itself was the enemy.”

“Don’t tell anyone you’re with the F.B.I.,” the agents said. “Just be a regular Joe Citizen.” Albury had been working as an investigative specialist for about a year in the San Francisco division when he was approached by two senior agents and encouraged to take an Arabic language class at U.C. Berkeley and to start hanging around at the Zaytuna Institute, a nearby Islamic community education center. It was an off-book assignment, as Albury was neither a special agent nor a trained undercover operative, but he was smart and a quick study. He was also Black, which he came to understand would be an asset in this new threat environment. “Everyone was under terrific pressure to understand what was going on,” says Kathleen M. Puckett, who spent 23 years in the F.B.I. as a special agent in counterintelligence and counterterrorism. “There was this hysteria,” she recalls. “Were we going to get hit again?”

Albury spent a year at Berkeley and Zaytuna, chatting up students and instructors. “One guy was an aspiring State Department employee — a white kid from Berkeley who wanted to learn Arabic,” he recalled. Others were student activists or do-gooder types looking for a more nuanced perspective on Muslims or the Middle East than the “us versus them” rhetoric emanating from some corners of the Bush administration. No one he met talked about jihad or tried to convert him to Islam. Still, he took careful notes, passing them to the agents, who never told him what they did with the names and numbers he provided.

‘I Helped Destroy People’
Terry Albury, an idealistic F.B.I. agent, grew so disillusioned by the war on terror that he was willing to leak classified documents — and go to prison for doing it.

By Janet Reitman
Published Sept. 1, 2021
Updated Sept. 9, 2021

Early on the morning of Aug. 29, 2017, Terry Albury awoke with a nagging sense of foreboding. It was not yet dawn in Shakopee, Minn., the Minneapolis suburb where Albury, an F.B.I. special agent, lived with his wife and two young children, and he lay in bed for a few minutes, running through the mental checklist of cases and meetings and phone calls, the things that generally made him feel as if his life was in order. He was a 16-year veteran of the F.B.I.: 38, tall and powerfully built, with buzzed black hair and a black goatee. Most of his career he had spent in counterterrorism, investigating sleeper cells and racking up commendations signed by the F.B.I. directors Robert Mueller and James Comey, which praised his “outstanding” work recruiting confidential sources and exposing terrorist financing networks. He was a careful investigator and a keen observer. “Something is going on behind the scenes that I’m not aware of,” he told his wife the night before. She told him to stop worrying. “You always think there’s something going on.” She was right. But this time he had reason to be apprehensive, even though he’d been careful. The memory card was buried in his closet, tucked into a shirt pocket under a pile of clothes. “Stop being so paranoid,” he told himself. Then he left for work.

At least 90 Palestinians, including 36 people near food aid sites in Rafah, killed in Israeli attacks across Gaza today.
World Food Programme (WFP) said thousands of Palestinians in Gaza are on the “verge of catastrophic hunger”, with one in three people in the enclave not eating for days at a time.
Syria president announces “immediate ceasefire” in Suwayda province.
Hamas said Israel rejected a ceasefire proposal that would have seen the release of all remaining captives held in Gaza, and pledged it was prepared for a lengthy war if there is no deal.
Israel’s war on Gaza has killed at least 58,765 people and wounded 140,485. An estimated 1,139 people were killed in Israel during the October 7 attacks, and more than 200 were taken captive.

NGO head calls for ‘real access’ in Gaza, end to militarised schemes
Jan Egeland, head of the Norwegian Refugee Council, has rejected recent comments by the EU’s foreign policy chief, who said the bloc has noted “some good signs” regarding aid distribution in Gaza.

Kaja Kallas told reporters this week that those “good signs” included “more trucks going in” to the bombarded enclave.

“But for NRC and many others, no relief has entered for 142 days. Not one truck. Not one delivery,” Egeland wrote on X, noting that 85 percent of aid trucks never reach their destination amid looting or other issues fuelled by the Gaza starvation crisis.

He added that Palestinian families are surviving on a single “poor-quality meal” per day, if that, while the US- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation aid scheme has turned assistance into a dangerous and deadly scenario.

“Calling this ‘good signs’ is not just misleading, it undermines the reality aid workers and civilians face every day. Donors and diplomats must demand real access: security guarantees, full-scale entry, and an end to militarised distributions,” Egeland said.

“This isn’t progress. It’s failure, rebranded.”

Israel said Thursday that it “deeply regrets” a deadly strike on Gaza’s only Catholic church, which killed three people.

The Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem, which has jurisdiction for Roman Catholics in Gaza, said the Holy Family Church was struck by Israel on Thursday morning. The church has become a shelter for the enclave’s tiny Christian community amid the 20-month war.

The office of Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that “Israel deeply regrets that a stray ammunition hit Gaza’s Holy Family Church. Every innocent life lost is a tragedy.”

“Israel is investigating the incident and remains committed to protecting civilians and holy sites,” the office added in a statement.

Pope Leo received a phone call from Netanyahu on Friday, following the strike, the Vatican said, in which the patriarch expressed the importance of protecting places of worship.

During the phone call, which Netanyahu’s office is yet to comment on, Leo renewed his calls for a ceasefire to be reached by the warring sides in Gaza, a statement said.

Pope Leo “again expressed his concern for the dramatic humanitarian situation of the population in Gaza, whose heartbreaking price is paid especially by children, the elderly and the sick,” according to the statement.

Leaders from the Catholic and Greek Orthodox Church visited the church on Thursday, in a highly unusual trip given Israel’s tight control over access in and out of the territory.

Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, together with Theophilos III, the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem, visited the enclave to show their support for Gaza’s Catholics, according to a statement from the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem.

The two expressed “the shared pastoral solicitude of the Churches of the Holy Land and their concern for the community of Gaza,” according to a statement from the Jerusalem Patriarchate.

Netanyahu told US President Donald Trump in a phone call that the church incident was a “mistake,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told a briefing Thursday. Asked about Trump’s view on the strike, Leavitt described it as “not a positive reaction.”

The Israel Defense Forces acknowledged it hit the church “mistakenly.”

“An initial inquiry into reports regarding injured individuals in the Holy Family Church in Gaza City, suggests that fragments from a shell fired during operational activity in the area hit the church mistakenly,” the IDF said in a statement on Thursday.

“The cause of the incident is under review.”

Church ‘directly’ hit
Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, told Vatican News that the church was hit “directly” by a tank Thursday morning.

The parish priest, Father Gabriel Romanelli, was injured in the attack, the patriarchate said, alongside a number of others. Romanelli is an Argentine who has ministered in Gaza for close to 30 years.

It named the three killed as Saad Issa Kostandi Salameh, Foumia Issa Latif Ayyad and Najwa Abu Dawood. Several others were also injured.

Images verified by CNN showed the church was damaged in the attack, but the crucifix on top of the church’s roof appeared intact.

The church has come under attack once before amid Israel’s war in Gaza. In December 2023, an Israeli military sniper shot and killed two women who were sheltering inside, according to the patriarchate.

The church is known internationally for its close connection with the late Pope Francis, who would call the parish almost daily as the war raged on.

Only around 1,000 Christians are thought to have lived in Gaza before the October 7 attacks, which is overwhelmingly a Muslim territory.

Meanwhile ceasefire talks to end the war in Gaza, which Palestinian officials say has killed over 58,000 people, are continuing.

Israel may show flexibility on a key sticking point in the talks, sources have told CNN, as negotiators attempt to close the gaps preventing the first pause in months of fighting.

Specifically, there could be some flexibility from Israel on the potential withdrawal of its troops from the Morag Corridor – a key Israeli security zone in the southern Gaza strip – a source familiar with the matter told CNN on Thursday.

The corridor was established by Israeli forces in April with the stated intention of dividing up Gaza and exerting greater pressure on Hamas. Its name refers to the Jewish settlement of Morag that once lay between the cities of Khan Younis and Rafah in the south of the territory.

The US had talked up the prospects of a quick agreement in the talks, which had gained momentum after a deal ended the brief Israel-Iran conflict last month. But days of talks yielded no breakthrough.

This story has been updated with additional developments.

CNN’s Mohammed Tawfeeq contributed to this report.

doesnt matter, the world was promised to israel BY GOD

QUNEITRA, Syria (North Press) – The Israeli army bulldozed on Tuesday 15 homes in the northern countryside of Quneitra, southern Syria, for being too close to a military outpost recently established in the area.

Local sources told North Press that the demolition took place in the town of al-Hamidiyah, with the army justifying the action as necessary to expand the security perimeter of its military position.

The sources emphasized that the homes were inhabited and that the demolitions occurred without prior warning to residents.

In a related incident, Israeli forces carried out a surprise raid in the nearby village of Trunjeh, conducting intensive searches of several homes before arresting a young man. The reason for his arrest remains unknown.

Tensions have been steadily rising in areas near the ceasefire line in Quneitra since the fall of the former regime. The Israeli army has increased its presence and activity in the region, carrying out near-daily incursions involving home searches and resident detentions.

ElSudani:
Where's pastor Righteousness to come and defend his people?

They are deeply hypocrites and they know it, i wonder how their conscience stand and what type of evil god they worship to defend horrible killings and treatment of HUMAN BEINGS, just to support israel

THEY REALLY DONT CONSIDER YOU A HUMAN, IF YOU ARE NOT OF THEIR FAITH

Hope the christian world will condemn Israel for this, perhaps, their christian brothers are also HAMAS

Righteousness2:
The HEADING of the OP is FAKE NEWS.
Fhe OP is A regular FAKE News Merchant on ISRAEL.

ISRAEL did not ask syria go leave southern. Nothing of such happened.

seems you have a better information

gmo10:
Israel is their father
Controlling the middle east militarily
Respect

EVIL ZIONISM AND ITS RELIGIOUS FANATIST SUPPORTERS DOES