Hospital Director Admits to being Hamas Brigadier-General

Hamas uses hospitals for terror purposes, Gaza hospital director admits

Ahmed Kahlot (pictured), the director of the Kamal Adwan Hospital in Jabalya in the north of the Gaza Strip, made the confession under interrogation

Kamaal Aduan Hospital head Ahmad Kahlot of Jabliya in Gaza has confessed to the Shin Bet that Hamas took over his hospital as a military operations center, it was revealed on Tuesday.

Kahlot told his interrogators that he joined Hamas in 2010 at the equivalent rank of a brigadier-general.

Next, he said that many of the hospital staff doubled as members of Hamas’s az-al-adin al-Qasam brigades. These include doctors, nurses, paramedics, and other staff.

More specifically, he said that the hospital had 16 staff members who doubled as terror operatives for Hamas.

Kahlot was arrested on December 12 and since then has explained in detail how Hamas concealed its weapons and wove its operations into the workings of the hospital.

Hostage IDF soldier held in hospital

In addition, he confessed that Hamas brought one of the IDF soldier hostages to the hospital and used ambulances to move around Israeli hostages’ bodies.

The IDF has put out general evidence of Hamas abusing nearly all of its 20-plus hospitals and specific evidence of more extensive abuse of a few hospitals, such as Shifa and Rantisi.

Shifa Hospital’s Director Muhammad Abu Salmiya was arrested by the Shin Bet on November 23 and his detention was extended for 45 days by a videoconference court hearing on November 27.

Hamas fighters used a 'safe' hospital as a terror base knowing they 'won't be targeted', the director of a Gaza medical facility has admitted to Israeli security forces.

Ahmed Kahlot, the director of the Kamal Adwan Hospital in Jabalya in the north of the Gaza Strip, made the confession under interrogation, Israeli media reports.

He told Shin Bet officials that Hamas used the hospital to hide its operatives, carry out military activities, move its personnel around and even bring in captured soldiers, according to Israel National News.

'They hide in hospitals because for them a hospital is a safe place. They won't be targeted when they are inside a hospital,' Kahalot said, the outlet reported. 

Kahlot said he was recruited by Hamas in 2010. 'I know 16 employees in the hospital - doctor, nurse, paramedic, or clerks… who also have different positions in al-Qassam.'

The al-Qassam brigades is the military wing of the terror group that attacked Israel on October 7, killing around 1,200 Israelis and taking 240 hostage into Gaza.

'There are offices where the Hamas leader and two of the senior officials were. There's a place where the soldier was in (the kidnapped soldier),' he continued.

'There's a place for the interrogators, internal security, and special security. All of them have private telephone lines inside the hospital.'

He added: 'They [Hamas] have a private ambulance, even its colour and the way it's painted are different, and it doesn't have a license plate. 

'They used it to transport the soldier [kidnapped] and transport bodies… It didn't assist us with transporting the injured,' Israel National News quoted him as saying.

'I begged him to take someone to the Indonesian Hospital, take to Shifa [hospital], but he would refuse. His mission is more important. 

Despite suggesting he was a member of the group, Kahalot criticised Hamas' use of his and other hospitals. 'The leaders of Hamas are cowards. They left us in the field while they hid in secret places… They have destroyed us.'

Antique West African Mask Sells for 3.6 Million Pounds

Antiques dealer who bought West African mask for £130 then sold it for £3.6million WINS legal battle with previous owners after judge rules the elderly French couple failed to appreciate its true worth

• Elderly couple accused dealer of misleading them about the artefacts true value

An antiques dealer who bought an African mask for £130 and then sold it for £3.6million has won a legal battle with its previous owners - after a judge ruled the elderly French couple failed to appreciate its true worth. 

The couple, in their eighties, sold the wooden mask in September 2021 as part of a number of antiquities including African artifacts they had kept in their secondary home in southern France and wanted to be rid of.

The objects had belonged to an ancestor who was a governor in West Africa, and were believed to be of little value.

Apart from the mask, they also included lances, a circumcision knife, a bellows and musical instruments.

They let the mask go for 150 euros (£130), but in March 2022 it was sold to an unidentified buyer at an auction in the southern city of Montpellier, fetching 4.2 million euros (£3.6million).

Fang masks, highly stylised and carved from wood, are made by the Fang people who occupy regions in Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea and Gabon

The couple, aged 81 and 88, from Nimes in France, were clearing out their home in 2021 and decided to sell the 'Ngil' mask

The auctioneers described it as 'an extremely rare 19th-century mask, property of a secret society of the Fang people in Gabon', an ethnic Bantu group, with only around 10 such objects still in existence.

The couple promptly filed for an injunction to cancel the original sale, arguing there had been an 'authentication error'. They also said the mask's buyer 'was aware of the mask's real value' at the time of the purchase.

But the court rejected the request, saying the couple had failed to make any attempt to get the mask valued before selling.

Their claim was characterised by 'inexcusable negligence and frivolity', the court said, ruling that they were not owed any money.

It also ruled that the antiquities dealer, who himself was no expert on African art, did not cheat them.

The dealer actually offered to pay them 300,000 euros (around $330,000), the auction starting price, but the couple's children refused, preferring to take the matter to court.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12881613/Antiques-dealer-bought-African-mask-130-sold-3-6million-WINS-legal-battle-previous-owners-judge-rules-elderly-French-couple-failed-appreciate-true-worth.html

Auctioneer Jean-Christophe Giuseppi poses next to a 'Ngil' mask of the Fang people of Gabon

Two West African Statuettes

5,000 years old African rock art – the ‘earliest directly dated’ paintings in the region

Ancient works of art from the Maclear District, South Africa

 

Hamas: Origins, Nature, and Goals

12/18/2023 by Raymond Ibrahim

Although most in the West consider Hamas, which brutally massacred some 1,400 Israelis on October 7, 2023, to be anything from a terrorist to a nationalist organization, the group sees itself first and foremost as a religious—namely, Islamic—movement, dedicated to enforcing Muslim law (sharia), including through jihad.

“Hamas” means “zeal” in Arabic and is an Arabic acronym from harakat al-muqawamah al-islamiyyah (the Islamic Resistance Movement). The group is primarily concentrated in the Gaza Strip.

Created primarily by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in 1987 as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas has the stated goal of replacing the entire state of Israel with a Muslim state governed by sharia. Jihad and Islamist indoctrination are its two principal means of instituting this new state.

Although its official membership is around 20,000, more than 200,000 Palestinians—5.26 percent of the then total population of the Palestinian Territories—attended the funeral procession for Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in 2004, suggesting that its local sympathizers are ten times its official number.

In addition to its immediate goals, Hamas’s founding charter also illustrates the organization’s commitment to Islamic principles in general. The slogan—“Allah is its goal [theocratic rule], the Prophet its model [example of the Muhammad], the Koran its Constitution [sharia], Jihad [terrorism] its path, and death [suicide-bombings] in the cause of Allah its most sublime belief” —fully demonstrates its Islamic, as opposed to territorial or nationalistic, motivations.

Though most Hamas members are Palestinian Sunni Arabs, the charter “welcomes all Muslims who share its beliefs and thinking, commit themselves to its course of action, keep its secrets and aspire to join its ranks in order to carry out their duty.”

The Hamas Charter echoes the sentiment of observant Muslims in regard to the land of Palestine, all of which is believed to be “waqf land” that has belonged to Islam “since it was conquered by the Companion [Caliph Omar I] of the Prophet [c. 640].” In accordance with Islamic law, observant Muslims stress that the entire land of Palestine belongs to Islam by right and must therefore be re-conquered by Islam, not necessarily by Palestinians, but by Muslims. Hamas clearly defines “Nationalism as part and parcel of the religious faith,” thereby universalizing the notion of “nationalism” to include the entire Muslim umma, irrespective of actual nationality. And like global jihadists, Hamas clerics have publicly expressed their support for re-establishing the Caliphate.

Based on all the above, it is unsurprising that Hamas includes statements such as the following (from Article 7 of its charter):

The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (evidently a certain kind of tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews [related by al-Bukhari and Moslem].

To achieve its immediate goal of an Islamic Palestinian state, Hamas has steadfastly denounced the Oslo Accords, the Annapolis conference, and other diplomatic efforts to establish a long lasting peace in the region, referring to them as “initiatives, the so-called peaceful solutions, and the international conferences … [which] are all contrary to the beliefs of the Islamic Resistance Movement.”

“The so-called peace process is futile,” Hamas leader Khaled Mashal declared in 2015. “There is no peace. Only the path of jihad, sacrifice and blood.”

However, when addressing Western audiences, Hamas leaders (such as Ismail Haniyeh and Khaled Meshal) have stated that they are willing to recognize Israel with pre-1967 borders, even as the organization continues to reiterate, on a regular basis, its total rejection of Israel’s existence.  Such doublespeak is a common tactic that finds its roots in Islam’s doctrine of deception, known as taqiyya, which the various PA factions even implement against one another.

As was the case with its parent organization, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas has gained the support of the Palestinian people by providing social and welfare services and by presenting itself as Israel’s implacable foe, as well as an opponent of the more corrupt, effete Fatah.

Hamas is also steadily Islamicizing Palestinian society through indoctrination and propaganda. This method is a fundamental part of the organization’s charter: “We must imprint on the minds of generations of Muslims that the Palestinian problem is a religious one,” an “Islamic education based on the implementation of religious precepts [Sharia].”  Hamas has gone to extreme lengths to indoctrinate young Palestinians into its beliefs, including the use of “jihadist” Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny lookalikes in its television programs.

Hamas’s principal sources of funding traditionally include Iran, which, according to the U.S. State Department, spends approximately $100 million annually supporting Palestinian groups including Hamas;  private charities, including those operating in the West (the most notorious being the Holy Land Foundation, now defunct, which channeled $12 million to Hamas ); and individual donors from the Gulf States.

Between 1993 and 2009, the military wing of Hamas, the Izz ad-Din Qassam Brigades, is believed to have killed over five hundred people in more than 350 separate terrorist attacks, many of them suicide bombings.  Since then, Hamas’s brigades have continued to launch rocket attacks against towns in southern Israel.

By far, its most successful jihad occurred last October 7, 2023, when the Hamas jihadists slaughtered 1,400 Israelis.

Muslims take over: The BMJ ("British Medical Journal") is no longer Objective

British Medical Journal is a rag, not objective, has anti-Israel bias - comment

Open Letter to the British Medical Journal:

On the morning of July 7, 2005, a bomb exploded on a Number-30 double-decker bus in London’s Tavistock Square opposite BMA House – the venerable and palatial headquarters of the British Medical Association (BMA) and the British Medical Journal. The suicide bomber, 18-year-old Hasib Hussain, was believed to have been thwarted in his original intention to detonate his 4.5 kg. bomb on a London underground train.

BMA House is very near the University College London, the BBC (which is today blatantly anti-Israel and has had to “apologize” for several false reports since October 7), the British Museum, and the National Gallery.

A total of 52 people died and more than 800 were injured in the blast, which The BMJ and many other British publications described as a “terrorist attack” committed by the al-Qaeda terrorist organization. This group, founded in 1988, views itself as the spearhead of a global revolution to unite the Muslim world under an Islamic state that transcends national boundaries. It doesn’t like Christians any more than it likes Jews.

The explosions were caused by improvised explosive devices made from a white crystalline powder combining acetone that had been hidden in backpacks. Flesh and blood splattered on the walls of BMA House whose construction began on the Tavistock Square site in 1911. The medical journal reported that physicians in the building helped the wounded before ambulances arrived. Then-editor-in-chief Fiona Godlee praised the staff for their efforts to produce the journal without interruption from a contingency site as the “best answer to those who would tear our world apart.” 

Personal belongings near cars abandoned following the party in Kibbutz Re'im (credit: Chaim Goldberg/Flash90)

The BMJ's anti-Israel bias

ON DECEMBER 4 of this year, I wrote a news article as The Jerusalem Post’s health and science reporter about a shockingly unfair and anti-Israel editorial published in BMJ Global Health – owned by the BMJ Group but with its own editor, Nigerian/Australian associate Prof. Seye Abimbola. It was entitled “Violence in Palestine demands an immediate resolution of its settler colonial root causes.”

My article quoted four prominent Israeli medical academics and a senior legal expert who wrote a strong letter of protest to BMJ Global Health. The Israelis charged that the editorial “completely ignored the events of October 7, when Hamas terrorists raped, burnt, mutilated, tortured and killed entire families and took women, children, and the elderly hostage. In addition, it is full of distortions and obfuscations… In a perfect example of fake news, the authors refer to the bombing  as representing one of the most horrific attacks on a healthcare facility in our collective facility. In fact, the hospital bombing was well documented by nearly all reputable sources to have been the result of terrorists’ failed firing from within Gaza and not an Israeli airstrike.”

Clearly, the Israelis wrote, those who wrote the editorial that “lacks any scientific value… consider all of Israel, Gaza and the West Bank as belonging to the Palestinians. It refers to alleged ‘implementation of eliminatory settler colonial strategies by the Israeli occupation that aims to increase morbidity and mortality…’ Besides the fact that Gaza has not been occupied by Israel since 2007, and putting aside for a moment the thousands of patients from Gaza (including Hamas terrorists!) that have been treated in Israeli hospitals, and Gazan physicians trained in Israeli hospitals. If Israel is trying to increase morbidity and mortality, [it] is doing a very poor job of it,” they continued.

“Since Hamas’s takeover of the Gaza Strip, they have done everything possible, including diverting humanitarian aid for terrorist purposes, to ensure these conditions persist,” the Israelis declared. The terrorists have even stolen many tens of thousands of liters of fuel meant for humanitarian purposes. Israel provides the Gaza Strip water, food, and electricity from its own supplies during times of peace and allows the transport of basic humanitarian aid even during times of war.

When bombers act in London, The BMJ recognizes them as “terrorists,” but when they are much more vicious and ruthless and are perpetrated against Israelis, they are “militants.” The BMJ can’t boast that it is objective, as it has become anti-Israel.

I MYSELF am well familiar with The BMJ, which is one of the world’s oldest general medical journals that launched its first weekly edition in 1840. Its current editor-in-chief is Dr. Kamran Abbasi, a physician, journalist, and broadcaster.

                             (Pictured: Dr. Kamran Abbasi, from Pakistan)

Decades ago, BMJ editors asked me to serve as its freelance Israel Medical News Correspondent. I agreed, and for years, I wrote scores of widely read articles on discoveries coming from this country’s researchers and physicians that benefited mankind. I was so proud to write for the journal, telling the world from Jerusalem about the accomplishments of Israeli medicine.

The BMJ even invited me along with about a dozen of its other medical news correspondents from various countries to visit the journal. My only condition was that I could get kosher food, and at the banquet held in our honor, before everyone began to eat, a rabbi marched in and ceremoniously placed before me a kosher meal triple-wrapped in aluminum foil that had been heated up. Everyone gaped at me, but I learned later that quite a few of the reporters were in fact Jewish, albeit not consumers of kosher food. 

During one of Israel’s wars against Lebanon whose Hezbollah terrorists incessantly bombarded our northern border, a BMJ news editor told me they were “sick of Israel” and that from now on, they would accept only “negative stories” about my country and “nothing positive.” I immediately resigned and stopped reading the journal because I felt the editors were not practicing fair journalism in which I always believed. When numerous Israeli physicians called me to ask why I stopped, I told them. They all said they would cancel their BMJ subscriptions, and I venture that it has very few Israeli subscribers today.

The editors apparently forgot the Blitz that began on September 7, 1940 – ‘Black Saturday’ – when Nazi bombers attacked London, leaving 430 dead and 1,600 injured. Well, we Israelis now have our own ‘Black Saturday” – October 7, 2023. Since then, many tens of thousands of guided missiles and rockets have been hurled at Israel by Iranian-backed Hamas, and more by Iranian-backed Hezbollah. Many Israelis have died and homes, businesses, agricultural fields and infrastructure destroyed, but fortunately, our Iron Dome air-defense system has intercepted nearly all of them.

But Israel’s southern communities have endured decades of missile attacks by ISIS-like Hamas that has now murdered so many Israelis; raped and slaughtered more than 360 people at a music festival; tortured and burned Israeli families alive; beheaded live babies, children, women, and men they pulled out of their beds, forced children to watch and then murdered them. They kidnapped toddlers and children on motorcycles, pressing their legs against the burning-hot exhaust to mark their skin so they couldn’t escape. And Hamas still holds 124 hostages of all ages in Gaza. 

All these Nazi-inspired atrocities are clear violations of International Human Rights Law that prohibits arbitrary deprivation of life; torture, cruel or degrading treatment or punishment; slavery and forced labor; arbitrary arrest or detention; arbitrary interference with privacy; war propaganda; discrimination; and advocacy of racial or religious hatred. 

Ideologically, The BMJ today is a rag. Shame on you.

The writer is The Jerusalem Post’s health and science reporter.

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-778350

Antarctic ice shelf: BMJ has warned that Global Warming is a Public Health Emergency