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UK’s Sun features faces of 32 kids held hostage by Hamas
n the UK, The Sun features on its cover today the faces of the 32 Israeli children who have been held hostage by Hamas since October 7, under the banner: “Bring them home.”
“32 innocent children snatched by terrorists,” the paper declares in its main headline. “This is why Israel must fight evil of Hamas.”
All 32 were taken by Hamas terrorists when thousands of them broke through the border and slaughtered and abducted Israelis in southern Israel. Some of those kidnapped were taken alongside their families. Many had relatives killed before being abducted.
Hamas has not made any information available on their condition or allowed the Red Cross to visit them — along with over 200 other hostages.
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www.timesofisrael.com
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Several new testimonies by Israeli witnesses to the October 7 Hamas surprise attack on southern Israel adds to growing evidence that the Israeli military killed its own citizens as they fought to neutralize Palestinian gunmen.
Tuval Escapa, a member of the security team for Kibbutz Be'eri, set up a hotline to coordinate between kibbutz residents and the Israeli army. He told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that as desperation began to set in, "the commanders in the field made difficult decisions - including shelling houses on their occupants in order to eliminate the Hamas along with the hostages."
it appears that on October 7, Israel's military resorted to the same tactics it has employed against civilians in Gaza, driving up the death toll of its own citizens with the indiscriminate use of heavy weapons.
Israel's two Apache helicopter squadrons had 8 choppers in the air, "and there was almost no intelligence to help make fateful decisions, Mako reported. The squadrons did not reach full strength until noon.
As the wave of infiltrations from Gaza drove chaos on the ground, discombobulated Israeli pilots unleashed a frenzy of missile and machine gun salvos: "The Apache pilots testify that they fired a huge amount of munitions, emptied the 'belly of the helicopter' in minutes, flew to re-arm and returned to the air, again and again. But it didn't help and they understand it, Mako reported.
The Apache helicopters appear to have focused on vehicles streaming back into
Gaza from the Nova electronic music festival and nearby kibbutzes, attacked cars with apparent knowledge that Israeli captives. could be inside. They also fired on unarmed people exiting cars or walking on foot through the fields on the periphery of Gaza.
Photos of the aftermath of the fighting inside kibbutzes like Be'eri - and of the Israeli bombardment of these communities - show rubble and charred homes that resemble the aftermath of Israeli tank and artillery attacks inside Gaza. As Tuval Escapa, the security coordinator at Kibbutz Be'eri, told Haaretz, Israeli army commanders had ordered the
"shelling [of] houses on their occupants in order to eliminate the Hamas along with the hostages."
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