I've primarily studied physics of the 19th-21st century, so I can't provide a detailed accounting of the history of this subject for the period before.  The records before circa 1800 are less complete, less common, and more difficult to decipher due to the unique terminology employed by every single discoverer of this physical phenomena.  Suffice it to say that this phenomena has been harnessed for a long time and observed for a very long time.  Any time you see ball lightning in ancient artwork: you are seeing the record of an observation of a huge macroscopic plasmoid/exotic vacuum object/etc (hereafter referred to mostly as plasmoids for simplicity).  Plasmoids are as natural as sunshine and lightning.  They mostly exist at the microscopic scale beyond our ability to directly perceive.  Occasionally the environment is ripe for mother nature to generate ball lightning as in the Hessdalen lights of Norway.  In extreme situations ball lightning can be a yard/meter in diameter.  During earthquakes and volcanic eruptions in particular, the forces at play are so intense as to be difficult to comprehend.  When the right elements are moving relative to one another with the right dynamics, you get ball lightning.  Unfortunately ball lightning isn't so common as to be readily studied in nature.  Until recent decades it was often considered an urban legend or myth.  Thankfully the advancement of mobile camera technology has dramatically increased the documentation of natural ball lightning.  Once you accept that nature produces such a phenomenon rarely it's only a small step from there to accept that it's possible for humans to engineer the conditions that produces such a phenomenon on command.  Just as we see nature produces light and lightning and we humans also make our own (smaller!) light and lightning.  Ball lightning is what plasmoids are called when you find them in nature.  Plasmoids are what you call ball lightning that's made in a lab.

Let's start with John Ernst Worrell Keely.  By today's standards he's regarded as a quack inventor at best and a fraudster at worst.  By 1872 he had created a sort of steam engine that you need only crank to start, then it would be self-powered by water.  Modern debunkers assert he secretly employed air compressors to drive the apparatus and thus was a complete fraud.  Though a closer look at what he built reveals that he created engines which generated a lot of water cavitation using multiple methods (clever geometry, resonant effects, etc), which means he was definitely making plasmoids.

Any time you're generating a large quantity of water cavitation some fraction of those cavitation bubbles will collapse forming Rayleigh jets with a very fine tip which experiences immense pressures and temperatures and voltage over a infinitesimal area.  Any type of hard sharp punch (including a powerful laser pulse) will produce in electromagnetism what is called a toroidal moment where the electric and magnetic fields bend back into each other, forming a closed tube shape that connects to itself: a hollow doughnut.  This is a semi-stable field configuration that can last from mere moments to at least months depending on the environment.  Macroscopic plasmoids intentionally created in a lab typically last on the order the 2 seconds to 2 minutes.  Plasmoids are readily trapped and kept stable at lower powers in metal lattices for long periods, at least months.

John Keely used a steam engine type design to drive pistons to do work.  In recent years there have been numerous much simpler systems working on the same principle.  Some call them "nuclear siphons" because the cavitation is driving a tiny nuclear reaction by the use of short-lived plasmoids.  This nuclear reaction manifests as anomalous pressure and temperature at the site of the water cavitation.  Using clever geometry it's possible to connect together some mundane PVC water pipes together such that they'll cavitate in a way that pushes water uphill.  Water cavitation is perhaps the simplest low-tech way of generating (tiny) plasmoids and its effects have probably been rediscovered many times by many people.

Nikola Tesla independently discovered plasmoids by circa 1890 when experimenting with high power disruptive electric discharges (not resonating, not oscillating, but just unidirectional periodic sharp pulses of high voltage).  When he placed a single-turn copper helix by the spark gap that coil “[…] become ensheathed in an envelope of white sparks. Undulating from the crown of this coil were very long fluidic silvery white streamers, soft discharges which appeared to have been considerably raised in voltage.”

The sparks surrounding the coil (and the plasma streamers) is a very strong sign that in that configuration he was making plasmoids. This same effect is documented by Takaaki Matsumoto and Ken Shoulders.  Some describe the sparks as forming a kind of Pearl necklace, beads on a string, etc. Closer examination of these “sparks” shows they’re super-tightly-wound plasma structures in the fractal toroidal shape.  It was precisely this "Tesla Impulse" technology that he was designing as the enabling basis for his "Radiant Energy" that he wished to broadcast to all homes without wires.  Pulsed Tesla Impulses are capable of generating very high power radio waves, orders of magnitude stronger than any similarly-powered radio transmitter.

In the 1940s the German's were experimenting with various high-power radar technology (high power continuous radio waves).  There are reports that crossing of two such radar beams (such as when two radar stations track the same enemy plane) would occasionally create macroscopic ball lightning that the allied pilots  called "foo fighters."

In the 1950s the US federal government was spending many billions of dollars on nuclear weapons technology and nuclear technology more generally.  They had achieved nuclear fission.  They had also achieved limited nuclear fusion in the form of hydrogen bombs.  There was considerable effort advanced by Truman in 1953 to use "atoms for peace."  This meant in part that money previously spent exclusively on nuclear bombs and their enabling technology would be expanded to include energy-generation technology of both the fission and fusion types.  At the early part of the atomic age many scientists were optimistic they would quickly find a way to do controlled fusion which can provide unlimited clean energy almost for free.

One scientist working on "atoms for peace" projects was Winston Bostick.  Among other things by 1956 Bostick had created a z-pinch plasma gun that would produce plasmoids on command.  More than any other scientists mentioned in this list, Bostick was an insider to the US nuclear regime.  He was an Chicago-trained nuclear physicist that worked at MIT, Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, etc.

Bostick published several papers and some of his work was discussed in mainstream press.  His line of research into fusion via plasma confinement then goes dark.  It appears likely that his fundamental research successfully led to nuclear energy and nuclear bomb applications.  All knowledge related to high-end weapons and energy systems are tightly controlled by the US federal government.  Remember that scientists made nuclear bombs with pencils and slide rules in the 1940s, so clearly it has to be the case that the key relevant engineering dynamics aren't that complex.  This is why you can't let the information be shared too broadly: you want to maintain a monopoly on advanced weapons and energy technology that gives you an edge over rival nations.  The most advanced technology will be held back as secret for as long as possible, only shown publicly and admitted when forced by events.

In the 1960s engineer inventor Josef Papp created his "Noble Gas Engine."  Papp did not disclose theories for it's mechanism of action and kept key aspects of his design secret.  He was an engineer, not physicist.  The main technical mechanism was a powerful sharp electric arc discharge into a rarified ionized noble gas.  These are the exact conditions that create plasmoids reliably.  Papp had created an engine using thorium sand and noble gases to drive pistons via the force of a coulombic explosion resulting from the quick destruction of a plasmoid created moments earlier.  His engine produced hundreds of horsepower.  John Keely had a century earlier invented essentially a steampunk version of the Papp engine: both derive their motive force from exploding plasmoids.

In the 1970's hobby electronics enthusiast John Hutchison undertook efforts to reproduce Tesla's Impulse experiments.  John had created his own Tesla disruptive discharge devices and had acquired numerous pieces of surplus military radio equipment.  Using a combination of the two John could rarely (at most once after a full day of trying) produce what he called the "Hutchison Effect".  This effect was able to make aluminum glow and bend like putty without being hot.  This effect allowed dissimilar materials to be welded together.  This Hutchinson Effect is one manifestation of the creation of plasmoids inside metals.

Kenneth R. Shoulders was an experimental physicist who worked at MIT, Stanford, and the CIA.  He was an early pioneer of electron beam lithography and inventor of numerous patents.  He's widely recognized as a founder of microelectronic field emission devices.  In the 1980's he committed himself to the study of the "Hutchinson Effect" after urging by Hal Putoff of SRI.  He initially called the phenomena "Electrum Validum" (EV) and later "Exotic Vacuum Objects" (EVOs) when he realized the underlying electromagnetic toroidal moment driving the key aspects of the unusual properties and effects.  He was an excellent experimentalist and successfully designed an apparatus to generate plasmoids on command and vary their intensity.  He wished to disclosed what he learned though was under CIA contract at the time and knew his research would be suppressed if he brought it to them.  To side-step this problem he wrote a book called "EV: A Tale of Discovery" and distributed copies to numerous people.  Since "the cat was out of the bag" it was not possible for his findings to be completely suppressed.  This enabled Ken to file several patents describing apparatus for creating plasmoids.  Even so, Ken's plasmoids remained just as undiscussed outside of fringe circles as Hutchinson, Papp, Bostick, Tesla, and Keely before him.

In 1989 Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons reported detecting excess heat during electrolysis experiments using deuterium-droped palladium electrodes.  This was then reported was "cold fusion".  Their apparatus only produced this effect infrequently.  The specific microstructure of the palladium mattered.  Although unreliable, this method occasionally produced plasmoids though they didn't know it.

In the 1990s Stanley Meyer invented a "water fuel cell" (WFC) that generated HHO gas by using high-voltage low-current pulsed disruptive electric discharges through pure water contained in a space between two steel plates.  The rate of the electric pulses varies the HHO production rate.  While Tesla used relatively much larger and more powerful mechanisms, Meyer used the smallest weakest mechanism that could get the job done.  Meyer's mechanism makes lots of microscopic plasmoids which quickly explode, splitting water as a side effect.

Also in the 1990's Japanese nuclear physicist Takaaki Matusmoto undertook to study the work of Pons and Fleischmann, trying to reproduce and make reliable their discovery.  Takaaki eventually succeeded at producing plasmoids reliably, which he at first called "itonic clusters" and later accepted was the same thing as "ball lightning."  Takaaki's efforts are well-documented in published scientific papers which are reprinted in a book titled "Steps to the Discovery of Electro-Nuclear Collapse: Collected Papers (1989-1999)."

Since circa 2012 Bob Greenyer has been studying Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions (LENR) as a researcher at the non-profit Martin Fleischmann Memorial Project (MFMP)  he formed.  He has a degree in engineering and is a serial entrepreneur with high intuitive genius and vision.  Bob Greenyer undertook empirical studies of artifacts produced in the material directly involved in "over unity" LENR devices and discovered regular shapes and kinetics that led him to intuit the shape and dynamics of the entity producing the marks.  Bob subsequently learned that these shapes and these effects had been produced by many people in many ways.  Bob Greenyer is arguably the most knowledgeable non-experimentalist with respect to plasmoids in the entire world.  If you want to learn about plasmoids you must subscribe to his work.

Plasmoids can be used as batteries/capacitors storing more charge per unit volume than any other known method.  Plasmoids charged with enough amps can be used as super compact coulomb bombs capable of producing nuclear-level explosions without requiring nuclear materials.  Plasmoids can split water.  Plasmoids can do fusion and fission.  Plasmoids sound like magic, hence why they get associated with "over unity" device claims.  Are plasmoid-driven devices "over unity" type "free energy" devices?  Sort of yes, mostly no.  If you only look at the input electricity vs. the output power, then yes they're very much over-unity.  Though in reality plasmoids perform nuclear chemistry and are powered by this.  Plasmoids are tiny little nuclear reactors with the best radiation shield ever devised surrounding them: closed-loop plasma.  Plasmoids consume whatever atoms are nearby (and relic nutrinos), fissioning and fusing them into new atoms.  Depending on the atoms getting fused these reactions can generate more or less energy, as in conventional fusion.

Almost all mainstream scientists accept the model of stars as being powered by fusion that was initiated by the effect of gravity on a large cloud of hydrogen.  Gravity is a very weak force.  If gravity can produce fusion why not the electromagnetic force that is about 40 orders stronger than gravity?  This is what plasmoids do: they harness the electromagetic force to do nuclear chemistry.

Context:

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/6026276/archived-for-posterity-physics-stanley-meyer-technology-water-fuel-cell-wfc

https://epistemology.locals.com/upost/6029891/physics-decoding-tesla-s-19th-century-language-radio-plasma-plasmoids

http://www.rexresearch.com/evgray/1gray.htm

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/6015937/physics-book-keely-and-his-discoveries

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/6011226/physics-vladimir-pavlovoch-torchigin-nuclear-siphon

https://epistemology.locals.com/upost/5884824/physics-the-white-house-acknowledged-classifying-whole-entire-areas-of-physics-in-the-nuclear

https://lenrdashboard.com/

http://lenrbot.com/

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/5780970/physics-bob-greenyer-on-charge-separated-material-with-extreme-multi-dimensional-multi-axis-hydrod

https://epistemology.locals.com/upost/5832133/physics-patent-tt-brown-type-asymmetric-capacitor-propulsion-demonstrated-at-alt-propulsion-confer

https://epistemology.locals.com/upost/5846404/physics-adrian-marsh-tesla-s-radiant-energy-and-matter

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/5234831/physics-who-was-kenneth-radford-shoulders-memorial-lecture-at-ivnc-2014

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/5273391/physics-kladov-cavitation-destruction-of-matter-lenr

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/5284887/physics-apparent-synthesis-of-nitrogen-and-oxygen-from-heavy-hydrocarbons-the-case-for-lenr

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/5172251/physics-podcast-guest-bob-greenyer-coherent-matter-matter-synthesis-lenr-an-interview-with

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/5136260/physics-plasma-focus-device-in-operation-shows-animation-of-plasmoid-formation

https://epistemology.locals.com/upost/5099065/physics-alexander-g-parkhomov-huge-variety-of-nuclides-that-arise-in-the-lenr-processes-attem

https://epistemology.locals.com/upost/5099071/physics-alexander-g-parkhomov-lenr-as-a-manifestation-of-weak-nuclear-interactions-new-approa

https://epistemology.locals.com/upost/4926436/physics-gravity-from-spinors-driven-by-push-of-relic-neutrinos

https://epistemology.locals.com/upost/4926740/book-dr-john-desalvo-the-complete-pyramid-sourcebook

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/5099081/physics-a-g-parkhomov-investigation-of-lenr-processes-near-incandescent-metals

http://www.rexresearch.com/roschin/roschin.htm

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/5043204/physics-alienscientist-uap-technologies-the-complete-de-classified-history

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/5050887/physics-fernando-de-felice-on-the-gravitational-field-acting-as-an-optical-medium

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/5050875/physics-c-histolinov-a-v-on-the-theory-of-tracks-of-strange-radiation

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/5050854/physics-study-g-c-dijkhuis-a-model-for-ball-lightning

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/4950157/physics-david-fryberger-a-model-for-ball-lightning

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/4950195/physics-david-fryberger-a-model-for-the-structureof-point-like-fermions-qualitative-features-a

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/4950183/physics-book-oliver-heaviside-electromagnetic-theory

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/4942359/physics-george-egely-faces-of-lenr

https://epistemology.localcom/post/4942921/physics-registration-of-high-energy-radiation-from-magnetised-water-exposed-to-scattered-sunli

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/4942963/physics-robert-nelson-hal-fox-ken-shoulders-electrum-validum-charge-cluster-energy-device

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/4942990/physics-bob-greenyer-what-really-is-new-fire-fuel

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/4943008/physics-bob-greenyer-notes-on-alexander-parkhomovs-woodpecker-strange-radiation-generator

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/4943972/physics-phd-thesis-timothy-andrew-raybould-toroidal-excitations-in-free-space-and-metamaterials

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/4943791/physics-book-ev-a-tale-of-discovery-by-kenneth-r-shoulders

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/4942978/physics-s-adamenko-mechanism-of-synthesis-of-superheavy-nuclei-via-the-process-of-controlled-e

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/4944155/physics-pavel-osmera-vortex-ring-fractal-structure-of-atom-and-molecule

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/4936066/physics-bob-greenyer-the-challenge-of-containing-the-active-agent-aa-in-low-energy-nuclear-re

https://www.nanosoft.co.nz/Fusion.php

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/4927856/physics-a-g-parkhomov-lenr-as-a-manifestation-of-weak-nuclear-interactions

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/4926436/physics-gravity-from-spinors-driven-by-push-of-relic-neutrinos

https://epistemology.locals.com/upost/4924245/physics-study-d-n-yue-dynamics-of-moving-electron-vortices-and-magnetic-ring-in-laser-plasma

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/4926506/physics-toroidal-models-of-electron-and-proton

Quest for zero point energy book moray b king:
https://epistemology.locals.com/post/4927907/title

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/4928276/physics-edmund-storms-relationship-between-the-burnishing-process-used-by-mizuno-and-the-storms

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/4927868/physics-p-m-koloc-the-engineering-physics-of-an-optimized-confinement-concept-the-plasmak-co

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/4928065/nikola-tesla-the-cosmic-rays-published-february-6th-1932-in-new-york-times

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/4924536/physics-lutz-jaitner-history-of-condensed-plasmoids-and-lenr-up-to-2019

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/4924541/physics-lutz-jaitner-the-physics-of-condensed-plasmoids-cps-and-low-energy-nuclear-reactions

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/4924550/physics-edward-lewis-health-risks-of-microplasmoids-in-transmutation-energy-generation-experime

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/4925433/physics-vortex-lattices

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/4926436/physics-gravity-from-spinors-driven-by-push-of-relic-neutrinos

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/4926069/boyd-bushman-of-lockeed-martin-on-antigravity

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/4924634/physics-study-observation-of-the-optical-and-spectral-characteristics-of-ball-lightning

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/4920922/physics-needing-more-study4

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/4924245/physics-study-d-n-yue-dynamics-of-moving-electron-vortices-and-magnetic-ring-in-laser-plasma

https://epistemology.locals.com/upost/4917234/physics-book-the-hutchinson-file

https://epistemology.locals.com/upost/4917242/physics-cavitational-destruction-of-matter-by-a-kladov

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/4917423/physics-v-e-zhvirblis-the-bagel-game

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/4917570/physics-a-m-zhang-experiments-on-bubble-dynamics-between-a-free-surface-and-a-rigid-wall

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/4919394/physics-j-reece-roth-ball-lightning-what-nature-is-trying-to-tell-the-plasma-research-communi

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/4919823/physics-patent-paul-m-koloc-method-and-apparatus-for-generating-and-utilizing-a-compound-plas

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/4916411/physics-study-toroid-moments-in-electrodynamics-and-solid-state-physics

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/4916255/physics-study-electromagnetic-toroidal-excitations-in-matter-and-free-space

https://epistemology.locals.com/upost/4895699/malcolm-bendall-s-investor-presentation-for-his-vortex-plasmoid-thunderstorm-generator-internal

https://epistemology.locals.com/upost/4883701/physics-book-ev-a-tale-of-discovery-kenneth-r-shoulders

https://epistemology.locals.com/upost/4883695/physics-book-steps-to-the-discovery-of-electro-nuclear-collapse-matsumoto-t

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/4878522/physics-needing-more-study3

https://epistemology.locals.com/upost/4878178/physics-string-vortex-solitons-svs-magnetotoroelectrical-radiation-mter-j-radiation-is-a-ty

https://epistemology.locals.com/upost/4873625/physics-needing-more-study2

https://epistemology.locals.com/upost/4873597/physics-needing-more-study

https://epistemology.locals.com/upost/4873343/physics-journal-of-condensed-matter-nuclear-science-experiments-and-methods-in-cold-fusion

https://epistemology.locals.com/upost/4871492/physics-1992-plasmoids-evo-ball-lightning-charge-cluster-intro-by-the-military-fusion-folks

https://epistemology.locals.com/upost/4861830/all-salvatore-pais-papers-as-of-november-2023

https://epistemology.locals.com/upost/4861819/book-charles-proteus-steinmetz-electric-discharges-waves-and-impulses

https://epistemology.locals.com/upost/4861456/salvatore-pais-room-temperature-superconducting-system-rtsc-for-use-on-a-hybrid-aerospace-unde

https://epistemology.locals.com/upost/4810069/my-theory-on-papp-s-noble-gas-engine-physics

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/3485383/book-beyond-the-light-rays-explanations-of-the-oscillations-of-radiant-energy-by-t-h-moray

https://epistemology.locals.com/upost/3038592/archive-revision-of-maxwell-s-equations-based-on-a-superfluid-medium

https://epistemology.locals.com/upost/3042081/archive-water-dissociation-in-a-radio-frequency-electromagnetic-field-with-ex-situ-electrodes-pro

https://epistemology.locals.com/upost/3042392/archive-water-cavitation-info

https://epistemology.locals.com/upost/3022299/was-a-magnetohydrodynamics-demonstration-craft-built-for-the-air-force

https://epistemology.locals.com/upost/3004805/what-causes-water-cavitation

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/2897271/podcast-steven-greer-on-uaps-ce5-skinwalker-ranch-and-disinformation

"Since the Hamas-led attacks in Israel on October 7, 2023, Israel has been executing a devastating assault on the civilian population of the Gaza Strip, blocking humanitarian aid, internally displacing 75% of Gaza’s population, systematically destroying civilian infrastructure, and otherwise bombing indiscriminately. To date, over 34,000 Palestinians have been killed, including over 9,500 women and over 14,500 children.¹ More than 10,000 additional Palestinians are missing under the rubble, and over 77,000 have been injured.²Children have been dying from hunger and malnutrition due to Israel’s use of starvation as a method of warfare.³

In a case brought against Israel by the government of South Africa, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has deemed Israel’s military operation a plausible genocide.⁴ The U.S. government under the administration of Joseph R. Biden has been absolutely complicit in Israel’s war crimes and crimes against humanity.⁵

In reporting on the situation, the American mainstream media has tended to start their timeline for reporting on October 7, with little to no historical context provided to help news consumers understand why Hamas’s armed wing would break through the armistice line fence surrounding Gaza to perpetrate what it called “Operation Al Aqsa Flood.”⁶

Editors at The New York Times even instructed journalists to avoid describing the West Bank and Gaza as “occupied territories” despite Israel being occupying power in both territories under international law, with its belligerent occupation ongoing now for nearly 57 years, leading UN bodies and international human rights organizations to describe itas an apartheid regime.⁷

Times reporters were additionally told not to use the term “ethnic cleansing” on the grounds that it is “historically charged,” even though about 80% of Gaza’s population are refugees or their descendants from the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine, which was the means by which the self-described “Jewish state” came into existence.⁸

The New York Times further instructed its reporters to restrict the use of the word “genocide,” along with “slaughter” and “massacre,” on the grounds that these words are “incendiary.”⁹ Meanwhile, TheNew York Times is fine with using the words “slaughter” and “massacre” when referring to Israelis killed by Palestinians. An analysis by The Intercept found that, in the pages of The New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times, “The term ‘slaughter’ was used by editors and reporters to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 60 to 1, and ‘massacre’ was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 125 to 2. ‘Horrific’ was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 36 to 4.” In fact, The Intercept found that as the Palestinian death toll climbed, mentions of Palestinians decreased.¹⁰

One particularly important piece of historical context that the mainstream media unsurprisingly omit from their reporting, with it only slipping out in very rare exceptions, is how the Israeli government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had long been effectively utilizing Hamas as a strategic ally to block any movement toward peace negotiations with the Palestinians.¹¹

In fact, Hamas had been essentially nurtured by Israel since its founding in the late-1980s, at which time the Israeli government utilized the group as a counterforce to Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which had dangerously joined the international consensus in favor of the two-state solution to the conflict.¹²

A heightened threat of terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians has always been a price that Israeli leaders were willing to pay to combat the threat of peace, which poses an obstacle to the Zionist regime’s territorial aims. Indeed, Israel has depended on the threat of terrorism to justify the persistence of its occupation regime and brutal oppression of the Palestinians.

The Founding of Hamas

In 1973, an Islamic charity organization named Mujama al-Islamiya was established in the Gaza Strip by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, whose family had fled to Gaza when Zionist armed forces ethnically cleansed their village during what is commonly known as the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.¹³ That is the war that resulted in the establishment of the state of Israel in 78% of the territory formerly known as Palestine.

The village where Yassin was born, al-Jura, was one of over five hundred Arab villages that the Zionists literally wiped off the map in furtherance of their goal to reconstitute Palestine into a demographically “Jewish state.” While the 1948 war is known to Israelis as the “War for Independence,” the ethnic cleansing by which Israel came into being is known to the Palestinians as Al Nakba, or “The Catastrophe.”¹⁴

The tale that we are routinely told by the Western mainstream media is that Arabs were the aggressors for having started the war by invading the newly created state of Israel. Supporting that narrative is the popular myth that Israel was established by the United Nations through a legitimate political process that the Arabs rejected for no other reason than that they hated Jews.

But that is all a lie. The truth is that UN General Assembly Resolution 181 neither partitioned Palestine nor conferred any legal authority to the Zionist leadership for their unilateral declaration of the existence of Israel on May 14, 1948, by which time over a quarter million Arabs had already been ethnically cleansed from their homes.¹⁵

The neighboring Arab states intervened to try to stop the ethnic cleansing, but they mostly failed. By the time it was over and armistice lines were drawn in 1949, approximately 750,000 Arabs had become refugees whose right to return to their homes was denied by the Zionist regime.

Having suffered a severe spinal injury at the age of twelve, Ahmed Yassin was a quadriplegic and wheelchair-bound for most of his life. In 1959, he went to Egypt and spent a year studying at university, but he lacked the funds to continue his academic career and returned to Gaza. The experience had left him deeply influenced by the Egyptian organization known as the Muslim Brotherhood, and he later became involved in the creation of a Palestinian branch of the group in Gaza.¹⁶

In 1978, Mujama al-Islamiya, or the “Islamic Centre,” was legally registered as a charity in Israel. The group built schools, mosques, and clubs in occupied Gaza.¹⁷“Crucially,” The Wall Street Journal reported in 2009, “Israel often stood aside when the Islamists and their secular left-wing Palestinian rivals battled, sometimes violently, for influence in both Gaza and the West Bank.”¹⁸

The internationally recognized leadership of the occupied Palestinian territories at the time was the secular Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) headed up by Yasser Arafat, a key founder and leader of the political party Fatah.

In 1984, Fatah tipped off the Israeli military that Yassin was stockpiling weapons, and he was arrested and jailed. According to David Hacham, who was then an Arab-affairs expert in the Israeli military, Yassin told Israeli interrogatorsthat the weapons were for use against his Palestinian rivals, not Israel. The following year, Israel released Yassin as part of a prisoner exchange agreement.¹⁹

In December 1987, a mass uprising of the Palestinian people against Israel’s military occupation began, which uprising became known as the first “intifada,” an Arabic word meaning “throwing off.”

In August 1988, a new organization founded by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin published its charter.²⁰ The group went by the name “Hamas,” an acronym for Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya, or the Islamic Resistance Movement.

Israel’s Initial Support for Hamas

At the time, The New York Times reportedhow Hamas had quickly become “a major force in the Gaza Strip,” causing “the first serious split of the nine-month-old Palestinian uprising.” Hamas was critical of the PLO, the Times explained, and posed a threat to its secular leadership. The Israeli government had “taken no direct action against Hamas,” which led to a belief among many Palestinians that Hamas was “being tolerated by the Israeli security forces in hopes of splitting the uprising.” This was a tactic, the Timesnoted, that Israel had used before.²¹

Israel viewed the PLO as a threat because of its movement away from armed conflict toward diplomatic engagement with the aim of establishing a Palestinian state alongside Israel in just 22% of the Palestinians’ historic homeland.

Demonstrating this policy shift, in 1976, the PLO supported a draft UN Security Council resolution recognizing the Palestinians’ equal right to self-determination and calling for a two-state settlement. It was vetoed by the United States.²² In November 1988, the PLO officially proclaimed its acceptance of what is known as the two-state solution, an independent state of Palestine consisting of the West Bank and Gaza alongside the state of Israel.²³ In December, Arafat again declared the PLO’s acceptance of the two-state solution before the United Nations General Assembly.²⁴

The “Palestinian peace offensive,” as it was called in 1982 by Israeli strategic analyst Avner Yaniv, was problematic for Israel since the Israeli government rejected the two-state solution, which is premised on the applicability of international law to the conflict.²⁵Accordingly, the two-state solution requires implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 242, which called on Israel in the aftermath of the “Six Day War” of June 1967 to fully withdraw its forces from the occupied Palestinian territories of Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.²⁶

Israel had no intention of withdrawing its forces to its side of the 1949 armistice lines, which are also called the “1967 lines” or the “Green Line” for the color with which it was drawn on the map. The government had no intention of giving up on the Zionist dream of establishing Eretz Yisrael, the Land of Israel, in all of the former territory of Palestine—but withoutthe Palestinians.

Consequently, at the time, the strategy adopted by Israeli policymakers was to try to disarm the threat of peace posed by the PLO by undermining its leadership. As Yaniv had elaborated on the “peace offensive,” a moderate PLO “could become far more dangerous than the violent PLO of the previous years.” so it was necessary to “undermine the position of the moderates.” Israel therefore aimedat “destroying the PLO as a political force capable of claiming a Palestinian state.”²⁷

To that end, during the First Intifada, Hamas was viewed as a useful tool to the Zionist regime.

This Israeli strategy was illuminated by Richard Sale of the United Press International (UPI) news service in an article published in 2001. Anthony Cordesman, a Middle East policy analyst for the Center for Strategic Studies, told UPI that Israel “aided Hamas directly—the Israelis wanted to use it as a counterbalance to the PLO.”

A former senior CIA official likewise told UPI that Israel’s support for Hamas “was a direct attempt to divide and dilute support for a strong, secular PLO by using a competing religious alternative.”

An anonymous U.S. intelligence source similarly told UPI that Israel was funding Hamas as a “counterweight” to the PLO and to enable Israeli intelligence to identify the most “dangerous hardliners” within the movement.²⁸

Escalating the Threat of Terrorism

The predictable consequence of Israel’s policy of blocking implementation of the two-state solution by undermining the PLO was an increased threat of terrorism, but that was an acceptable risk in the calculation of Israeli policymakers.

As former State Department counterterrorism official Larry Johnson put it, “The Israelis are their own worst enemies when it comes to fighting terrorism…They do more to incite and sustain terrorism than to curb it.”²⁹

This reality was more recently disclosedby David Shipler, The New York Times’ Jerusalem bureau chief from 1979 to 1984, who wrote a letter to the editor published on May 17, 2021, stating that,

“In 1981, Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, Israel’s military governor of Gaza, told me that he was giving money to the Muslim Brotherhood, the precursor of Hamas, on the instruction of the Israeli authorities. The funding was intended to tilt power away from both Communist and Palestinian nationalist movements in Gaza, which Israel considered more threatening than the fundamentalists.”³⁰

The U.S. State Department, in a cablefrom the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv to the Secretary of State dated September 29, 1989, acknowledged that, despite having outlawed Hamas and imprisoning Sheikh Yassin under “administrative detention” without charge or trial, “some Israel officials indicated that Hamas served as a useful counter to the secular organizations loyal to the PLO.” Consequently, the State Department noted, “Israeli forces may be turning a blind eye to Hamas activities.”³¹

As I wrote in the first chapter of my book Obstacle to Peace: The US Role in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,

“That the real threat to Israel has been that of peace achieved through implementation of the two-state solution is well evidenced by its policies and their predictable consequences. This is oftentimes the only rational explanation for Israel’s actions. Its continued occupation, oppression, and violence toward the Palestinians have served to escalate the threat of terrorism against Israeli civilians, but this is a price Israeli leaders are willing to pay. Indeed, the threat of terrorism has often served as a necessary pretext to further goals that would not be politically feasible absent such a threat.”³²

This was recognized within the Israeli government itself. In October 2003, for example, Moshe Ya’alon, the Chief of Staff of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), criticized the policies of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon because they served to increase hatred of Israel and strengthen terrorist organizations.³³

The following month, four former chiefs of Israel’s domestic security service, the Shin Bet, similarly criticized that Israel was headed in the direction of “catastrophe” and would destroy itself if it continued to take steps “that are contrary to the aspiration for peace,” such as the continued oppression of Palestinians under Israeli occupation. “We must admit that there is another side,” said Avraham Shalom, Shin Bet director from 1980 to 1986, “that it has feelings and that it is suffering, and that we are behaving disgracefully.”³⁴

Conclusion

When Hamas was first founded in the 1980s, the Israeli government viewed it as a useful force to advance its policy aim of undermining the PLO, which was seen as a threat because of its acceptance of the two-state solution. Israel therefore effectively treated Hamas as a strategic ally to divide the Palestinian leadership.

Right up until the Hamas-led attacks in Israel in October 2023, Benjamin Netanyahu, who first served as Israeli prime minister in the late 1990s and has again been in power since 2009, maintained the Israeli government policy of utilizing Hamas as a strategic ally to block any peace negotiations with the Palestinians because Israel has always rejected the two-state solution.

The threat of terrorism was preferable, in Netanyahu’s calculation, to the threat of peace, and while the mainstream media never put it into this proper context, it is important to recognize that Hamas’s “Operation Al Aqsa Flood” on October 7, 2023, was blowback for this Israeli government policy."

Source:

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/how-israel-supported-hamas-against-the-plo/

"On October 7th, a large group of armed fighters broke out of the Gaza Strip to launch an unprecedented attack – by air, land, and sea – in southern Israel, thousands of rockets were launched, military bases as well as kibbutzim were targeted and briefly seized.

During the operation, dubbed Al-Aqsa Flood, over a thousand people were slaughtered, including hundreds of military personnel and innocent civilians. In order to secure concessions such as the release of thousands of Palestinian prisoners held by the Israeli authorities, more than 200 prisoners including some soldiers were taken back to Gaza to be used as bargaining chips amid Israel’s ongoing relentless airstrikes.

Israel has occupied Palestine longer than the Soviet Union occupied Eastern Europe. The so-called “Palestinian Authority” (PA) is trained and supported by the Tel Aviv, London, and Washington, not the people. Essentially trustees in an Israeli prison, the PA is not a sovereign state of any kind. The people of Palestine live under a foreign military occupation.

Gaza, on the other hand, is a concentration camp which measures only 25 miles in length and five miles in width making it one of the most densely populated areas in the world. Crammed inside the camp are 2.3 million Palestinians, refugees in their own ancestral lands along with their descendants.

Since 2007, Israel has imposed a full blockade on Gaza from the air, land, and sea. Gaza is completely controlled by the Israeli military. For more than 15 years, food, potable water, electricity, medicine, building materials, etc. have been severely restricted by Tel Aviv. All the while, Palestinians besieged in the coastal enclave are routinely subjected to small as well as large-scale indiscriminate bombing campaigns.

This recent terrorist attack in Israel which saw so many civilians killed – including in crossfire with Israeli forces – was in fact a prison break led by Hamas, the armed militia which rules the Strip.

This horrible attack was blatantly, if unintentionally, provoked by Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party and his ruling coalition full of extremist settlers and Jewish supremacists bent on the de jure annexation of the entire West Bank, or “Judea and Samaria” as they call it.

It does not have to be this way at all.

Killing the Peace Process

Beginning in 1979 at Camp David, Israel promised to let the Palestinians have a sovereign state on the 22 percent of Palestine left after Zionist forces ethnically cleansed 750,000 Palestinian Muslims and Christians off their land in 1948, this was known as the “Nakba” or catastrophe. What remained was the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip illegally occupied by Tel Aviv since 1967.

By 1988, Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Leader Yasser Arafat, who headed the Fatah party, had recognized Israel within its 1967 borders. The Oslo Accords “peace process” began in 1993 and was supposed to implement this two-state reality.

It was a sham. All the while, even though the Fourth Geneva Convention says that it is illegal for one nation to transfer their own civilian populations into land seized in war and United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 says that Israel must withdraw from the occupied territories, hundreds of thousands of the Israeli Jewish colonists or “settlers” moved to the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, which they consider part of greater Israel. This has effectively made a sovereign state there impossible.

The Israeli government under Netanyahu, who used to play along with the narrative of an eventual two-state solution, in the last decade officially canceled the illusion that he would ever let this occur.

In fact, Netanyahu said in 2015 that, “I think that anyone who is going to establish a Palestinian state today and evacuate lands is giving attack grounds to radical Islam against the state of Israel. Anyone who ignores this is sticking his head in the sand. The left does this time and time again. We are realistic and understand.”

Netanyahu was then asked specifically whether he meant that a Palestinian state would not be established if he were reelected prime minister. He answered, “correct.”

Even though he temporarily relented on official annexation of the Jordan river valley, Netanyahu still vowed in 2020 that “Israel will retain security control on the entire area west of the Jordan River.” In other words, from the River to the Mediterranean Sea, Palestine will never be free.

So this is why B’Tselem, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International all finally came out in 2021–2022, after the 40-year illusion of “independence someday instead of freedom today” had finally crumbled, and officially declared that Israel was an “apartheid state.”

Jimmy Carter warned that if Israel did not let the Palestinians go, they would be stuck in this apartheid corner. So did former Prime Minister and Defense Minister Ehud Barakand former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

If the whites of 1920s Jim Crow Mississippi had said, “we will not end segregation and our two-tiered ‘rule of law,’ but we will let northern Mississippi become an independent black nation someday instead,” but then they never did that, that would be where Israel-Palestine is right now.

Ever since then, Western liberals – regulated by the Israel lobby – have only paid lip service to the two-state solution while Israel created “facts on the ground,” with the ever expanding settlements relegating Palestinians to noncontiguous Bantustans cut off from each other with the separation wall and networks of checkpoints run by Israeli occupation forces.

Imagine if someone said about South Africa in 1983 that, “DeClerk and the whites of South Africa have a right to exist. And they have the right to defend themselves. And the blacks, well they have the right to aspirations of having those rights.” This simply will not do.

Hamas Is the Likud’s Strategic Ally

That is not to say that Hamas is secretly controlled by Israel, but their seemingly antithetical interests are in fact closely aligned and serve each other’s purposes. AsBrian McGlinchey, Andrew Higgins, Robert Sale, and others have exhaustively detailed, for decades, Israel has provided Hamas and its precursors with both direct and indirect financial support.

The day after the October 7^th attack, Tal Schneider railed against this policy in Times Of Israel,

For years, the various governments led by [Netanyahu] took an approach that divided power between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank – bringing [PA] President Mahmoud Abbas to his knees while making moves that propped up the Hamas terror group.

The idea was to prevent Abbas – or anyone else in the [PA’s] West Bank government – from advancing toward the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Originally borne out of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, the right-wing Islamist movement was seen by Israeli leadership as an instrument to undercut the dominant opposition to the occupation, Arafat’s secular leftist PLO.

Beginning in the 1970s, Israel’s backing of Hamas and its predecessor, Mujama Al-Islamiya, or the Islamic Center, “was a direct attempt to divide and dilute support for a strong, secular PLO by using a competing religious alternative,” a former senior CIA official told Sale.

According to U.S. intelligence officials speaking with Sale, “funds for the movement came from the oil-producing states and directly and indirectly from Israel.”

In the early 1980s, the Islamist movement began radicalizing. This was precipitated by the rise of Hezbollah in opposition to the Israeli invasion and nearly two decade occupation of southern Lebanon, as well as the overthrow of the Shah Reza Pahlavi, the CIA-installed dictator in Iran, and the subsequent founding of the Islamic Republic.

The group known today as Hamas, or the Islamic Resistance Movement, was officially founded in 1987 and flourished during the First Intifada, or violent uprising against the occupation in Palestine.

Despite the group’s refusal for many years to ever recognize Israel’s “right to exist,” along with the PLO dropping that maximalist demand themselves, Israeli aid to Hamas continued apace.

This is because “the thinking on the part of some of the right-wing Israeli establishment was that Hamas and the other groups, if they gained control, would refuse to have anything to do with the peace process and would torpedo any agreements put in place,” a U.S. official told Sale. Indeed, Hamas condemned the PLO as traitors for going to the negotiating table with Tel Aviv in an attempt to work out a two-state solution.

As Higgins later wrote in the Wall Street Journal,

When it became clear in the early 1990s that Gaza’s Islamists had mutated from a religious group into a fighting force aimed at Israel – particularly after they turned to suicide bombings in 1994 – Israel cracked down with ferocious force. But each military assault only increased Hamas’s appeal to ordinary Palestinians.

Fatah also cracked down on Hamas during the 1990s over their tactics including suicide bombings, which led to further clashes and bad blood.

Following the Second Intifada, in which over 1,000 Israelis and 4,500 Palestinians were killed, Likudnik Prime Minister Ariel Sharon initiated a policy known as “disengagement” in the Gaza Strip. In the summer of 2005, Tel Aviv set about removing thousands of settlers and occupying forces.

The Israeli army was redeployed in the areas surrounding Gaza instead. On the surface, this may look like a concession, but Likud’s goal was to decisively kill the peace process and with it any hopes Palestinians had for their right of return or a future state.

As Dov Weissglass, Sharon’s senior adviser, bluntly told Haaretz almost two decades ago,

The significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process. And when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda. And all this with authority and permission. All with a presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress.

The disengagement is actually formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.

The disengagement plan makes it possible for Israel to park conveniently in an interim situation that distances us as far as possible from political pressure. It legitimizes our contention that there is no negotiating with the Palestinians.

And we educated the world to understand that there is no one to talk to. And we received a no-one-to-talk-to certificate. That certificate says: (1) There is no one to talk to. (2) As long as there is no one to talk to, the geographic status quo remains intact. (3) The certificate will be revoked only when this-and-this happens – when Palestine becomes Finland. (4) See you then, and shalom.

Hamas achieved a plurality victory against Fatah – now led by Abbas in the wake of Arafat’s death – in the Palestinian territories’ 2006 parliamentary elections. But before a coalition government could be instituted based on the results, George W. Bush and his neocon retinue – displeased with the results of the democratic election they had encouraged – attempted a coup, supporting Fatah against Hamas.

As David Rose reported in Vanity Fair,

[This outlet] has obtained confidential documents, since corroborated by sources in the U.S. and Palestine, which lay bare a covert initiative, approved by Bush and implemented by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams, to provoke a Palestinian civil war. The plan was for forces led by [Muhammad Dahlan, Fatah’s long-time resident strongman in Gaza], and armed with new weapons supplied at America’s behest, to give Fatah the muscle it needed to remove the democratically elected Hamas-led government from power…

But the secret plan backfired, resulting in a further setback for American foreign policy under Bush. Instead of driving its enemies out of power, the U.S.-backed Fatah fighters inadvertently provoked Hamas to seize total control of Gaza.

As a result of this proxy war, came Hamas’ complete takeover in Gaza which has been used to justify the blockade and the rest of Tel Aviv’s illegal collective punishment policies.

Ever since the siege was imposed, the fact that the Palestinians in Gaza voted for Hamas years ago is predictably trotted to justify Israel’s wars against the Palestinians trapped in the enclave. Gaza has no air defense, army, navy, or air force to speak of, but thousands of Palestinian civilians have been killed amid these canned hunts.

Half of the population in Gaza – approximately 1.15 million people – are children who were not even alive when Hamas won in 2006, and there was never another election.

As Israeli journalist Meron Rapaport hasextensively chronicled, this is exactly what Likud wanted.

“The split between Abbas’ Judea and Samaria and Hamas’ Gaza is optimal for Israel. When necessary, we can strike Hamas in Gaza and not be forced to withdraw to the Auschwitz borders in Judea and Samaria,” Erez Tadmor, a former head of Likud information campaigns, posted on Twitter.

“[Netanyahu] succeeded in disconnecting between Gaza and Judea and Samaria, and effectively shattered the vision of a Palestinian state in these two areas. Part of the achievement is linked to the Qatari money that comes to Hamas every month,” said Yonatana Orich, one of Netanyahu’s advisers and another Likudnik campaign manager.

Distal Abtaryan, former minister of information and current Likudnik member of the Knesset, put it this way,

Every home needs a balcony, and Israel is a home. The balcony of this home is Samaria… if Hamas crumbles, Mahmoud Abbas may rule [Gaza]. If he rules it, voices on the left will encourage negotiations, a political settlement, and a Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria as well… this is the real reason Netanyahu doesn’t annihilate Hamas, everything else is bullshit.

In 2019, Gershon Hacohen, a major general in reserves and an associate of Netanyahu,said, “We need to tell the truth. Netanyahu’s strategy is to prevent the option of two states, so he is turning Hamas into his closest partner. Openly Hamas is an enemy. Covertly, it’s an ally.”

That same year, Netanyahu boasted to members of his party in the Knesset,

Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas… This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.

Bezalel Smotrich, leader of Israel’s Religious Zionist Party and the current Finance Minister was even more explicit,

The [PA] is a burden and Hamas is an asset. On the same international field, in this game of delegitimization, and think about it for a moment, the [PA] is a burden and Hamas is an asset. It’s a terrorist organization. No one will recognize it. No one will give it status at the [International Criminal Court]. No one will let it put forth a resolution at the UN security council. Then would we need an American veto? Or would we not need an American veto? … Given that the main game, the central court, where we play now, is the international delegitimization, there [Abbas] is beating us in significant spaces. And Hamas, at this point in my opinion, will be an asset. I don’t think I have to worry about [Hamas].

The Netanyahu Doctrine

They thought it would work so well. In March, Smotrich proclaimed that there is “no such thing as a Palestinian people.” Last month, Netanyahu even presented a map of “The New Middle East” to the UN General Assembly with Palestine, from the river to the sea, completely erased.

“There’s no question: the Abraham Accords heralded the dawn of a new age of peace,” Netanyahu announced. “I believe we’re on the cusp of a more dramatic breakthrough: a historic peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia.”He continued, emphasizing “we must not give the Palestinians a veto over new peace treaties with Arab states.”

The Donald Trump and Joe Biden administrations, along with Netanyahu, also believed the Palestinians could be erased. They envisioned a Middle East where Washington’s long-time Arab dictatorship vassals would finally plant the Palestinians firmly under the bus, recognize Israel, and sign phony peace deals in exchange for American arms as well as other favors.

For instance, in 2020, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain became signatories of the Abraham Accords which is a thinly veiled foundation for a regional military coalitionled by the US and Israel eyeing Iran.

Under the accords, Gulf capitals such as Abu Dhabi or Manama recognize Israel – absent a Palestinian state or end to the apartheid regime – so they can receive increased access to advanced weapon systemsmanufactured by the US military-industrial complex.

Before Israel began its latest war on Gaza,killing hundreds of Palestinians every day, recent polling had already shown that as a result of Israeli massacres and war crimescommitted against the Palestinians, the Abraham Accords have become increasingly unpopular among the populace in Bahrain and the UAE.

In July, with the support of the Joe Biden administration, Israel’s security forcesinvaded and bombed the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank, killing a dozen people including five children. Israeli bulldozers tore up the camp’s roads, electricity, and water networks. 1,000 troopsparticipated in the raid, along with Apache helicopters, drones, and 150 armored vehicles.

Another point of contention in the region is Netanyahu’s policies of setting records this year for settlement expansion and construction in illegal Jewish-only colonies,further eviscerating even the pretense of a future Palestinian state.

Israeli forces and settlers have repeatedly desecrated, the Al-Aqsa Mosque this year. During the holy month of Ramadan, worshipers within, including women and children, were viciously beaten. Members of Netanyahu’s cabinet have also encouragedattacks against Palestinian Christians, which have escalated substantially.

For Palestinians, prior to this month, this year was already one of the deadliest on record. Before the end of September, more than 220 Palestinians had been killed by Israeli forces, including over three dozenchildren. That figure included 187 people who were murdered in the occupied territories and another 37 killed – mostly amidst a smaller bombing campaign – in the Gaza Strip.

Netanyahu and Biden were dead wrong. Peace in the region must be made with the Palestinians. But never again will any heads of state be foolish enough to believe Palestine and its people can be circumvented, erased, or ignored.

Slaughtering “Human Animals”

Since the October 7^th attack led by Hamas, Israel has pummeled Gaza indiscriminately with thousands of bombs so far killing more than 7,000 Palestinians, including nearly 3,000 children. Concurrently, in the West Bank, over 100 Palestinians have been killedby settlers and Israeli occupation forces.

Foreign ministers from Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar, Kuwait, Egypt along with Abraham Accords signatory states the UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco published a joint statement condemning Israel’s collective punishment against the Palestinians in Gaza. The diplomats implored the UN Security Council to implement a ceasefire immediately, as almost half of all residential units in the enclave are said to have been obliterated.

After 20 straight days of bombing, Mondoweiss reported,

• Around 219 educational facilities have been hit by Israeli bombardment, including at least 29 UNRWA schools.
• Approximately 1.4 million people in Gaza are internally displaced.
• 24 hospitals have received evacuation notices from Israel in northern Gaza.
• Hospitals are operating at more than 150 percent of their capacity.
• At least 130 neonatal babies dependent on incubators are at risk of death due to lack of electricity.
• There are approximately 166 unsafe births taking place per day in Gaza.
• 101 health personnel have been killed by Israeli strikes, over 100 others wounded.
• Gaza’s population of over 2 million, which continues to be carpet bombed, is still being denied fuel, clean water, and adequate food supply by Israel’s ongoing siege on the enclave.

The death toll of Palestinian civilians in Gaza may soon skyrocket, as Tel Aviv has cut off Gaza’s food, water, electricity, and medicine. William Schomburg, the head of the Gaza mission for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), has warned the al-Quds and al-Shifa hospitals, the Strip’s main medical centers, are “rapidly running out of fuel and medical supplies.”

He added, “during our visit to al-Quds hospital there were heavy airstrikes all around us and the entire hospital shook.” A third of Gaza’s hospitals are no longer functioning. The dire lack of fuel, water, and sanitation will soon break the back of Gaza’s healthcare system and may lead to outbreaks of infectious diseases like cholera.

The White House’s unconditional backing of this unprecedented Israeli onslaught against Gaza  threatens to drag Americans into a regional war with Hezbollah, Iran, and their Resistance Axis allies including in Iraq and Syria, where U.S. forces illegally occupy a third of the war-torn country.

The destruction of Washington’s Global War on Terror and regime change wars of the last 20 years will likely be dwarfed by such a conflict.

To put this in perspective, the American government’s wars in the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia during this century killed and caused the deaths of well over four million people.

Washington should immediately cut all military aid and ties with Tel Aviv, as well as cease its disgraceful diplomatic cover. American forces should not be in harm’s wayto “deter” other actors from getting involved, nor to defend this merciless regime. The Israeli government, currently waging siege warfare against Gaza, has declared the Strip is populated by “human animals.”

Tel Aviv is now readying for its ground invasion, the American people must swiftly demand a lifting of the siege and a ceasefire."

Source:

https://original.antiwar.com/connor_freeman/2023/10/26/netanyahus-support-for-hamas-backfired/