EXCLUSIVE PHOTOS: Empty Israeli Towns Near Border with Lebanon; 60,000 Remain Refugees
SHLOMI, Israel — Tens of thousands of Israelis remain refugees in their own country after attacks by Hezbollah, the Iran-backed terrorist army, forced the evacuation of communities near the northern border in October.
Hezbollah, which sits near the Israeli border in violation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1707 of 2006, has been firing mortars, anti-tank missiles, rockets, and ballistic missiles at Israeli communities ever since Hamas, which is also backed by Iran, launched the October 7 terror attack in southern Israel.
As Breitbart News reported in October, Israel was forced to evacuate some 60,000 or so northern residents within four kilometers of the border.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) initially responded to the Hezbollah attacks by targeting the sources of incoming fire, without escalating. More recently, it has carried out airstrikes sites deeper into Lebanon. On April 1, Israel killed the leading Iranian commander in the region, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) General Mohammad Reza Zahedi, as well as another general and six other Iranian military officials in an airstrike on Damascus, Syria.
The Israeli media reported, and Breitbart News confirmed, that IDF commandos have already begun to operate inside Lebanon, targeting Hezbollah positions near the border and possibly preparing for a broader military invasion. Thus far, Israel is focusing on completing its mission of destroying Hamas in Gaza — and, this past weekend, responding to the massive missile and drone attack by Iran, which Israeli air defenses intercepted with a 99% success rate.
Breitbart News visited some of the border communities on Monday, escorted by Israeli soldiers in an area normally off-limits to journalists. Much of what was seen cannot be published.
The scenes of empty streets and homes were striking.
In the kibbutz — collective farm — of Rosh Hanikra, once a bustling community in the northwest corner of Israel, the only signs of life were the Israeli soldiers who patrol the area, as well as stray cats and a mascot dog.
Rosh Hanikra is a popular tourist attraction, as it sits near beautiful cliffs and caves along the Mediterranean coast. The kibbutz had also recently built a swimming pool for residents, which it had hoped to open by the summer.
Now, the grass in the community is overgrown, as the families wait, month after month, for news about when they might be able to return.
A view south from Kibbutz Rosh Hanikra, empty since Israel was forced to evacuate northern communities due to fire from Hezbollah in Lebanon. April 15, 2024 (Joel Pollak / Breitbart News)
Inside the town of Shlomi, a nearby community in northwest Israel, on Monday, the homes and streets were also empty, with weeds sprouting up alongside the roads.
One home had been badly damaged by a direct hit from a 240-mm mortar shell, carrying 20 kilograms of explosives.
An Israeli home, damaged by a 240mm Hezbollah mortar, in the northern town of Shlomi, near the border with Lebanon. April 15, 2024 (Joel Pollak / Breitbart News)
The only sign of life was a tractor pulling a cart of avocados. Only farmers are permitted into the evacuated communities, so that they can tend their crops and take care of their animals.
An avocado farmer carts his harvest through the empty streets of Shlomi, Israeli, evacuated due to fire from Hezbollah in Lebanon. April 15, 2024 (Joel Pollak / Breitbart News)
Nearby, the mangled and burnt remains of a chicken coop, hit by a ballistic missile fired by Hezbollah, sat silently.
Breitbart News met with a specialized unit of commandos that guards the area. They form part of a new rapid reaction force whose mission is to prevent and detect Hezbollah infiltrations, so that what happened in the southern communities near Gaza on October 7 cannot happen in the northern part of the country.
A unit of reserve commandos on watch near Israel’s border with Lebanon, April 15, 2024 (Joel Pollak / Breitbart News).
The commandos are reservists who live in the northern communities and who have spent months away from their families, who have been evacuated to cities further south.
Many expressed frustration that the world’s attention is on displaced Palestinians in Gaza, and not on the displaced civilians of Israel.
Some also expressed disappointment that U.S. President Joe Biden, who pledged “unwavering” support to Israel in October, appears to be preventing Israel from achieving victory over its enemies.
They cannot understand why the U.S. is focused on humanitarian aid to Palestinians instead of the humanitarian plight of Israelis, who neither wanted a war nor started one.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, “The Zionist Conspiracy (and how to join it),” now available on Audible. He is also the author of the e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
Hamas Wants The Land of Israel, But It Also Wants Much More Than That
As I write this, more than one hundred, (mostly Israeli) Jews are still being held hostage. They have been imprisoned and are tortured 24/7. They are deprived of food; the males are beaten just for fun, and the girls, women, and boys are raped.
We know this thanks to Arabic language documents IDF soldiers found when they cleared out Hamas nests. The documents contain explicit instructions about how to torture and maim and the best way to kill a Jew with a knife by stabbing him in the neck and/or spine. The same orders tell the captors to keep the captured Jews on the most meager rations.
These instructions also order the captors to show no tolerance to any hostages who show even the slightest resistance or objection to doing what they are told. If they do, they must be killed.
The inhumanity of these orders illustrates the culture behind the people carrying out these cruel rituals: Domination and submission, and “oppression and humiliation,” are what the Koran demands.
Image: Muslim humiliation of female slaves in the 18th century by Charles Boulay. Public domain.
That is how Believers in the One True Faith, who hold that theirs is the correct religion of Ibrahim (whose name they chronically mispronounce), are supposed to treat Jews, and that was their relationship with Jews in their lands until 1948. For fourteen centuries, wherever Jews lived in a Muslim country, they were not citizens with rights equal to those of Muslims. They lived in ghettoes for centuries, long before that institution emerged in 16th-century Christian Europe.
Muslims view Zionism as the Jews’ impermissible rebellion against their Sharia status as dhimmi. Dhimmi must pay a hefty annual communal jezya tax for the “crime” of refusing to convert to Islam. Paying the jezya also means buying the right to continue practicing the Jewish faith for another year. Zionism, in Muslim minds, is the intifada of the Jews.
Beginning in 1968, when Muslims hijacked an El Al flight (the only time that’s ever happened) and kept Israelis hostage until Israel released 16 imprisoned terrorists, Muslims have been kidnapping Israelis, and the Israeli government has freed Muslim terrorists for their return. However, I am suspicious of the current, presumptive concern Hamas is said to feel for its brethren in Israeli prisons. The monsters of October 7 who hide behind women and children and use them as human shields will never be mistaken for their concern for others.
This ostensible “concern” for their brethren in Israeli prisons may not be the true engine powering their murderous and sadistic brutality. They don’t need that excuse. What these death cultists really want is to abuse, “oppress and humiliate,” soil, torment, horrify, and cause intense pain to Jews. To rape their boys, women, and girls, shoot them in the head at the same time, and, in the end, as the final insult, spill their seed into the corpse.
Of course, it’s possible that Yahya Sinwar may not really care all that much about freeing fellow Muslim Brothers from Israeli prisons in exchange for Israeli captives. He may want Israel to eventually understand that he will not free the captives for any price, so that the IDF will have no choice but to crash into Rafah to free the hostages and kill Sinwar and his minions. That act will turn Hamas terrorists into shahidin/martyrs, while killing thousands of non-combatant Believers.
That sacrifice is worth it because the Jews will then be painted with their victims’ blood and, in the eyes of a hostile world, will be exposed, not as Chosen People who think they are better than everyone else, but as guilty of genocide, just like the Nazis. They will be humiliated as the most evil agents of the Shaitan in the world (Arabic’s plagiarized mispronunciation of the Hebrew Sa-tanh.)
From the first day of Islam, its “prophet” plagiarized Judaism, Muslims have viewed Jews with murderous envy, worthy of an embittered, first-born son named Ishmael who lost his primacy to his younger half-brother Yitzhak when his father, the kindest man in the ancient world, expelled this violent man from the country G-d promised to Abraham’s seed.
The Koran is an antisemitic tract. The New Testament is undeniably anti-Jew but at least respects the Jewish Bible, while the Muslims dismiss it as a fraud. While both Islam and Christianity claim to be successors to Judaism, they are very different in their relationship to the parent religion. The New Testament purports to be a continuation of the Jewish people. Thus, the Roman Catholic Church calls itself Verus Israel, the true Jews.
Islam, however, claims that the Jewish Bible is bogus. Muslims deny that Moses brought the Ten Commandments down from Mt. Sinai and took dictation from the Almighty for the text of the first Five Books of the Bible. Instead, Muslims claim that Moses brought down the Koran and, when he descended from Mt. Sinai, the evil Jews snatched it away and re-wrote it.
This is how Muslims explain why the Koran contains numerous Jews and their stories, as recounted in the Jewish Bible, only re-written and changed. To explain the different versions of the same stories, Muslims say that, when Muhammad came into the world, he restored the original text (i.e., today’s Koran).
Therefore, Islam teaches that the Jews’ Five Books (Torah) are a corrupt plagiarization of the Koran. For one infamous example, Islam teaches that Avraham did not bind his son Yitzhak for a sacrifice as the Jews believe. He bound his son Isma’il (their mispronunciation), and the episode took place in Mecca. When the Jews say in the Bible that the son chosen was Yitzhak and it happened in Jerusalem, the Jews lie.
Hamas knows it has no ability to destroy Israel militarily, but it can “oppress and humiliate” Israel as the Koran demands. Hamas headmen have shamelessly said the hundreds of miles of tunnels they built are for the leadership to survive in, but surely, he also had in mind the kidnapping and raping, torture, and humiliation of the Jews, 24-7, as an end in itself. How “elated” the Muslims were, Douglas Murray said after viewing the IDF’s 47-minute video compilation of their October 7 horrors.
The great medieval Spanish Rabbi Abraham Ibn Ezra (1089-1167) lived all his life surrounded by Muslims and said that Arabic, which he surely spoke perfectly, was the bad Hebrew of larcenous, illiterate, nomadic, desert brigands.
Sha’i ben-Tekoa’s Phantom Nation: Inventing the “Palestinians” as the Obstacle to Peace is available at Amazon.com in hard cover or a Kindle ebook. His podcasts can be heard on www.phantom-nation.com.
Pro-Palestinian Protest in New York City Sees American Flags in Flames Again
During radical anti-Israel demonstrations in the heart of New York City, a pro-Palestinian protester waved a burning American flag as fellow activists cheered, while another set a counter-protester’s flag on fire, and yet another chanted “Death to America.”
As demonstrators rallied on Monday, one protester publicly set an American flag on fire outside the Brooklyn Borough Hall building in New York City.
The short clip was posted by Katie Smith, a local independent reporter and photojournalist who covers demonstrations and social movements in The Big Apple.
In another clip, pro-Israel counter-protesters waving American flags can be seen standing opposite the marching Palestinian supporters in front of the New York Stock Exchange, with one having his American flagged snatched from his hands.
Another clip shows a pro-Israel counter-protester’s American flag ignited, before being extinguished by police at the scene.
In the incident, a pro-Palestinian demonstrator can be heard calling for “Death to America.”
Demonstrations attacking Israel’s fight against Palestinian terrorists have long been accompanied by scenes of violence, as well as rhetoric against the United States and in support of terrorism.
In one shocking incident that triggered widespread outrage over Veterans Day Weekend in November, a pro-Palestinian mob was seen cheering on a protester who climbed a flagpole and tore down U.S. flags as demonstrators marched through central Manhattan.
Those demonstrations began the previous night in Columbus Circle and made their way to Grand Central Terminal, where protestors kicked in the doors as law enforcement sheltered inside. As they marched through the streets of Manhattan for the second night in a row, they briefly forced the closure of the transportation hub.
Last month, an American flag was seen aflame among protesters during New York demonstrations, where protesters were also heard chanting against the New York Police Department, comparing law enforcement as well as the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) to the Ku Klux Klan.
The scene was reminiscent of a similar video of pro-Palestinian protesters burning an American flag in January.
On Sunday, a video of anti-Israel protesters in Dearborn, Michigan, closing out Ramadan by chanting, “Death to America” and “Death to Israel,” during an International Al-Quds Day rally, went viral on social media.
The current conflict in Gaza began on October 7 after the U.S.-designated Islamic terror group Hamas, whose charter calls openly for the murder of Jews and the elimination of the Jewish state through relentless jihad, perpetrated the worst terrorist attack in Israel’s history in October, in an operation stemming from its radical beliefs.
The attack saw some 3,000 terrorists burst into Israel by land, sea, and air, gunning down participants at an outdoor music festival while others went door-to-door hunting for Jewish men, women, and children in local towns who were then subject to torture, rape, execution, immolation, and kidnapping.
The attack resulted in roughly 1,200 dead inside the Jewish state, over 5,300 more wounded, and at least 242 hostages of all ages taken — of which more than half remain in Gaza. The vast majority of the victims are civilians and include dozens of American citizens.
According to world-renowned military historian and professor Dr. Victor Davis Hanson, Hamas’ “death cult” relies on “useful Western idiots” to support the Palestinian cause, which has “fused with the leftwing DEI industry.” In addition, he argues, pro-Palestinian protests and support for Hamas in the U.S. have alienated many Americans and will all but ensure a tough conservative president in 2024.
Joshua Klein is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jklein@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter @JoshuaKlein.
Report: Iran’s IRGC Terrorists Backing Global Anti-Israel Protests
Iranian opposition activist Vahid Beheshti on Monday exposed a confidential letter written by a high-ranking officer in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, that revealed Iran has been secretly supporting anti-Israel rallies around the world.
“The IRGC is very clearly organizing and promoting these actions aimed at destroying our modern society, all the while our politicians continue to appease them, placing our values, stability and public order under great jeopardy,” Beheshti said on Monday:
When I have said from day one that the October 7th brutal massacre by Hamas received its order from Tehran, this is what I mean. When I have said from day one that the IRGC are behind the weekly protests in all major cities around the world under the pretext of supporting the Palestinians, this is exactly what I mean.
Iranians attend a gathering to express their solidarity with Palestinians after Hamas militants launched a deadly assault into Israel from the Gaza Strip on October 7, 2023, in Tehran, Iran. (Majid Saeedi/Getty Images)
To support his allegations, Beheshti published an alleged leaked confidential letter from IRGC Intelligence Security Organization (IRGC-IO) commander Brig. Gen. Mohammad Kazemi.
Kazemi is one of four senior Iranian officials that the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned in April 2023 for wrongfully detaining U.S. nationals in Iran. According to the Treasury Department, Kazemi also oversaw “the regime’s brutal crackdown against protests across the country in response to the killing of Mahsa Amini.”
In the alleged confidential letter, Kazemi discussed working with pro-Palestinian protest movements worldwide to politically isolate Israel. His correspondent was Col. Mohammad Sajedifar, a “cultural and psychological operations” officer of the IRGC.
Kazemi reportedly wrote:
Given the recent developments in the issue of Palestine and the psychological impact of the Al-Aqsa Storm operation on Palestinian communities in European and American countries, it was determined to implement significant support measures for April 15 and other rallies with the aim to achieve political isolation.
“Al-Aqsa Storm” is the name Hamas gave to its barbaric rape and murder spree against Israeli civilians on October 7.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW: Horror of the Hamas Terror Attack on Civilians at Kibbutz Be’eri in Israel
Joel B. Pollak / Breitbart News“April 15” refers to a wave of pro-Palestinian demonstrations on Monday that illegally blocked roads, bridges, and airports in the United States and other countries. The organizers described their stunt as an “economic blockade to free Palestine.”
“In each city, we will identify and blockade major choke points in the economy, focusing on points of production and circulation with the aim of causing the most economic impact,” said the organizers, a group called A15 Action.
In the United States, the pro-terrorist demonstrators managed to blockade the Brooklyn Bridge in New York, the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, O’Hare International Airport in Chicago, the main road leading to Seattle-Tacoma International Airport in Washington State, major roads in Philadelphia, and stretches of interstate highway in California and Oregon.
Pro-Palestinian demonstrators attend a protest against Israel’s attacks on Gaza on April 15, 2024, in Chicago, Illinois. (Jacek Boczarski/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Beheshti noted that Iran is keenly interested in causing “as much chaos and instability as possible” to “destroy the modern society and build a global Islamic state.”
Beheshti warned Israel on April 13 that Iran supports groups seeking to create divisions among Israelis the same way it supports disruptive left-wing protest movements in the United States and Europe.
“Now, I can see the fingerprints of the Islamic Republic everywhere in Israel, in order to create division and destroy the Israeli society from within,” he said. “They have penetrated Israel through various sources from within because the Islamic Republic cannot confront Israel through military means.”
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