Terrified civilians are trapped inside the Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza as Israeli forces have encircled the medical facility, a senior official at the Ministry of Health tells Al Jazeera.

More than 100 people have been killed in strikes close to the facility, the ministry said on Tuesday.

“The Israeli occupation forces have laid siege to the hospital from all sides … We are targeted by gunfire and artillery shells,” said Munir al-Bursh, director-general of the Health Ministry in Gaza, speaking from inside Kamal Adwan.

“Patients, injured and those who took shelter in the hospital are gripped with fear; overwhelmed by horror,” he said.

One of the most deeply disturbing aspects of Israel’s war against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip which haunts me and gives ammunition to the right-wing media is the proliferation of rape stories emerging from the 7 October attacks. As a feminist, it has always been my initial instinct to believe every single woman who’s ever said she’s been raped or abused by a man. I suppose it was inevitable that friends in the media berated me for not condemning Hamas after the militarily-spectacular attacks launched on the occupation state of Israel from Gaza.

When news began to emerge a week later that Israeli women at the music festival and nearby kibbutzim had been raped, I admit I hunkered down and tried to write this article. I hated myself for even questioning the harrowing narratives that emerged and cussed the Zionist spin doctors and odious mouthpieces of the Israeli military who blatantly lied about various aspects of the Hamas operation.

Israel has a very long history of deceit

However, in my defence, Israel has a very long history of deceit and, in a rare moment of clarity, Benjamin Netanyahu spoke the truth when he admitted lying without a hint of irony at such honesty. Justifying his blatant lies to the world, he quoted the Bible: “As has been said, ‘by way of deception, thou shalt do war”, and that’s how we operate.”

Can you see my dilemma? It’s rather difficult not to question anything and everything that the Israeli prime minister says, especially because he is responsible for many atrocities and war crimes committed against the Palestinians which provide some context to what Hamas did. Netanyahu was quoting a verse from Proverbs, which is also said to be the motto of the Israeli intelligence service Mossad; he makes America’s own serial liar, the late Colin Powell, look positively angelic.

The Biden administration has tried hard to conceal the nature and quantity of the weapons it’s provided Israel for its war on Hamas, as I’ve reported for The Intercept. So it’s with a heavy heart that I must now report that an internal Defense Department list of the weapons has leaked (reproduced below).

The West has pledged to do whatever it takes to support Ukraine while also returning militaries to a war-ready status, but it is defense contractors in South Korea, Turkey and Israel which are reaping many of the early deals.

Arms makers in those countries, where governments sustain military investment and production pipelines to maintain their own security, made early gains in the months following the February 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia, according to the latest analysis of weapon sales and military services revenue from the world’s top 100 contractors carried out by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).

 Former President Donald Trump claimed on Monday that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was to blame for Florida State being left out of the College Football Playoff.

 At least four gold bars that federal investigators recovered during their search of Sen. Bob Menendez’s (D-NJ) home are directly linked to one of the men accused of bribing Menendez.

 A house in Arlington, Virginia, blew up on Monday night just minutes after police posted on social media that they were investigating the home over reports of someone shooting off a flare gun.

 Federal agents interviewed a priest and a choir director as part of an investigation into so-called Radical-Traditional Catholics as potential domestic terrorists, according to a new report from the House Weaponization Committee.

 A man was arrested late last week for planning a “mass casualty event” at Tesla’s headquarters in Texas during an event to celebrate the much anticipated release of the electric car company’s new Cybertruck, according to law enforcement officials.

 A federal court on Monday halted the prison sentence for Douglas Mackey, who was convicted earlier this year of election interference for posting memes that mocked Hillary Clinton voters to cast their ballot via text during the 2016 presidential election.

Israel is literally doing Battleship against Palestinian kids.

They created a grid, and they have an app telling people where to go on the grid.

Then when the people go there, they bomb them.

The post Covid boom is over for discretionary items.

When people were locked at home, and flush with stimulus cash, they all bought new furniture and redid their homes.

Furniture has insane markup. A table that costs $20 to make sells for $200 retail.

Different outlets have different definitions of Mass Shooting. For example, Gun Violence Archive and the New York Times study of every mass shooting in 2015 use four or more killed or wounded, not including the shooter. These fill up with a lot of “One Dead, Four Wounded in Shooting Outside Hip-Hop Concert.” The NYT found for 2015 that almost 3 out of 4 mass shooters and victims of mass shooters were black.

Over the weekend Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin explained to the American people what’s really wrong with US foreign policy. Some might find his conclusions surprising.

The US standing in the world is damaged not because we spent 20 years fighting an Afghan government that had nothing to do with the attacks on 9/11. The problem has nothing to do with neocon lies about Iraq’s WMDs that led untold civilian deaths in another failed “democratization” mission. It’s not because over the past nearly two years Washington has taken more than $150 billion from the American people to fight a proxy war with Russia through Ukraine.

It’s not the military-industrial complex or its massive lobbying power that extends throughout Congress, the think tanks, and the media.

Speaking at the Reagan National Defense Forum in California’s Simi Valley, Austin finally explained the real danger to the US global military empire.

It’s us.

According to Secretary Austin, non-interventionists who advocate “an American retreat from responsibility” are the ones destabilizing the world, not endless neocon wars.

The owners of Cup Foods and several other businesses near George Floyd Square are suing the city of Minneapolis, saying that concrete barricades and the lawlessness that flourished within those barriers cut their income and crushed their property values.

The lawsuit accuses Mayor Jacob Frey and other city officials of essentially abandoning the businesses and offering little more than lip service and weak financial help following the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in front of Cup Foods, now known as Unity Foods.

The lawsuit underscores lingering acrimony over the city’s response to the unrest that followed Floyd’s murder; more than three years later, proposed changes to the area around 38th Street and Chicago Avenue, from infrastructure to some form of permanent memorial, are still years off.

House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chair James Comer, R-Ky., on Monday released subpoenaed bank records showing that Hunter Biden used a business entity to make monthly payments to his father, President Joe Biden.

The payments to Joe Biden came after Hunter Biden's business account, Owasco PC, received money from Chinese-state linked companies and other foreign nationals and companies, according to financial records obtained by Comer’s panel.

"Hunter Biden’s legal team and the White House’s media allies claim Hunter’s corporate entities never made payments directly to Joe Biden. We can officially add this latest talking point to the list of lies," Comer said in a statement.

As a torrent of foreign money flooded into Hunter Biden-controlled accounts, a money laundering expert hired by a bank that handled the transactions concluded that the Chinese appeared to be buying political influence through the son of the man who was running for president.  The damning evidence was all laid out in a 2018 email that was kept under wraps.  Until now.

Some of the $5 million in Chinese cash eventually made its way into Joe Biden’s own bank account, although the check he deposited labeled it as a “loan repayment.”  What a coincidence.  Because the original $5 million was also portrayed by Hunter as a loan.  Except there was “no loan agreement document submitted,” said the bank.  Legally speaking, it wasn’t a loan at all.

This stunning information was released recently by the House Oversight Committee that is leading an impeachment inquiry against President Biden.  It corroborates the incriminating evidence already uncovered in other financial records, suspicious activity reports (SARs) kept by the Treasury Department, and testimony from Hunter’s former partners, as well as sworn statements by whistleblowers at the FBI and IRS.

Newly disclosed bank records, released on Monday as part of the House Republicans' ongoing impeachment inquiry into President Biden, indicate that Hunter Biden arranged direct, monthly payments to his father. The records show that at least one payment of $1,380 was sent from Hunter Biden’s Owasco PC to Joe Biden in September 17, 2018.

At the time, Hunter Biden’s Owasco PC account was receiving payments from Hudson West III, a joint venture set up with executives from CEFC China Energy. The joint venture appeared to be in the process of winding down after CEFC’s founder and chairman, Ye Jianming, was detained and disappeared in China earlier in 2018, according to emails obtained from Hunter Biden’s laptop.

This new revelation fits a pattern that has emerged in the House investigation into the President and his family’s business dealings. That pattern suggests that Joe and Hunter Biden’s finances were intertwined, while Hunter Biden was raking in millions from his foreign business deals.

The Gaza thing is what definitely killed the Ukraine war.

They were running out of men, but they could have held out for another year, and then after the election, the US could have sent in Polish and Romanian troops backed up by American special forces.

It’s really the funniest thing in the world that American foreign policy is defined by two groups of Israelis arguing over which wars we’re going to fight.

FYI, the US Congress is just an annex of the Knesset.

This frustration is a common sentiment. While official statistics report a modest 5% increase in food outside the home, many consumers, like this individual, perceive a more significant rise, possibly around 20%. It’s not just about the cost; there’s concern about diminishing quality in both food and service. The gap between official figures and lived experiences prompts skepticism about the accuracy of government CPI claims.

Godzilla Minus One: They’re SALTY That YouTubers LIKED It?!

Four of the gold bars Sen. Bob Menendez stashed at his home were previously stolen from the businessman accused of bribing the New Jersey Democrat, according to a report. 

The serial numbers on some of the gold found by the FBI during a June 2022 raid of Menendez’s Englewood Cliffs, NJ, home match identifiers that Fred Daibes reported to police after a 2013 armed robbery, according to NBC News. 

Robbers made off with $500,000 in cash and 22 gold bars from Daibes’ Edgewater, NJ, home during the 2013 heist, the outlet reports.

Police later nabbed four suspects and recovered the stolen gold. 

The matching serial numbers indicate that authorities have now directly linked at least some of the gold found in Menendez’s home to Daibes, a New Jersey real estate developer and Menendez fundraiser.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is due to face the resumption of his long-running trial on numerous corruption charges, after a pause due to the war in Gaza.

A court in Jerusalem is set to start hearing the case, which is focused on several corruption charges against Netanyahu, on Monday, according to reports in the Israeli media. The trial was paused on an emergency order from the country’s justice minister following Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7.

Netanyahu has been charged with fraud, bribery and breach of trust in three cases filed in 2019, known as Case 1000, 2000 and 4000.

In Case 1000, the prime minister, along with his wife Sara, is accused of receiving gifts, including champagne and cigars, from prominent Hollywood producer Arnon Milchan and Australian billionaire businessman James Packer in return for political favours.

The world's largest options market says it is investigating reports of unusual trading activity before last week's terrorist attacks in New York and Washington.

The Chicago Board Options Exchange declined to discuss the investigation.

But an independent check of publicly available options trading records shows unidentified investors placed exceptionally high numbers of put options - bets that prices would fall - on the stocks of United and American, the two airlines targeted in the attacks. There was no such trend involving other carriers.

Did Hamas Make Billions Betting Against Israeli Shares Before October 7 Massacre?
Giant gambles against Israel on the markets in Tel Aviv and Wall Street days before Hamas’ attack made billions. Somebody seems to have known about the plan in advance

The story is unfortunately pay-walled and I have yet to find an archive version of it. An archived version is now available.

We know that Batteridge’s law of headlines says:

Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.

It was thereby not Hamas which profited from unusual short positions but likely someone else.

The Haaretz story is based on a very recent study by two law professors with experience in market regulations from New York University and Columbia University.