Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 1/18/24 Max Blumenthal on the Lies Getting Gazans and Israeli Hostages Killed

Episode Date: January 20, 2024

Max Blumenthal returns to the show to talk about some of his recent reporting about Gaza. They first discuss some New York Times reports about October 7th that are not only completely free of evidence but are even disputed by the victims being featured. They then talk about some of the evidence of friendly fire. Blumenthal has been reporting on Israelis killed by the IDF on October 7th and later while being held hostage in Gaza. He has been demonized as an antisemitic conspiracy theorist, but now many Israel-friendly Western outlets admit he was right. Discussed on the show: “Screams without proof: questions for NYT about shoddy ‘Hamas mass rape’ report” (The Grayzone) “Israeli army gassed my son ‘like Auschwitz,’ mother of slain Israeli soldier says” (The Grayzone) Director and writer of “Killing Gaza,” Max Blumenthal is a senior editor of the Grayzone Project and the author Goliath, Republican Gomorrah and The 51 Day War. Follow him on Twitter @MaxBlumenthal. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Moon Does Artisan Coffee; Roberts and Robers Brokerage Incorporated; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; Libertas Bella; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, author of the book, Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and The Brand New, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism. And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2004. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton dot for you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube dot com slash scott horton's show all right you guys next up is the great max bloomenthal from the gray zone author of goliath and the 51 day war and uh hell it's on the tip of my tongue i forgot got a whole pile

of books by max back there uh welcome back to to the show how you doing ma'am good to be back what's the latest book again management of savagery oh of course jesus christ it's the max bloomithal version of enough already it's the exact same book only different by this great guy um i got what biden's got you have to forgive me that's no disrespect i love that book it's absolutely fantastic um uh and it is i as i've said before i was afraid that you and other people think that i was ripping you off since your book came out first because they're both so much alike, starting at 79 and all the way through and all the way through for all you Max Blumenthal fans. Get that book and read it. It's great.

And then Goliath is the masterpiece about Israel written back a decade ago, of course, and the 51-day war about 2014. And, man, you have just been doing such a great job reporting on the current conflict in the Gaza Strip there for, you know, since October. and especially debunking the war propaganda of the Israelis. And this is some serious stuff. And, well, we're going to talk about the deafening silence about it all a bit in a minute. But you have done such a great job deconstructing this story by Jeffrey Gettleman, who's usually mongering war in Africa, but in this case has come and written this thing, screams without words, how Hamas weaponized sexual violence.

on October the 7th. And then you have at the gray zone, your takedown with Aaron Matte. Mate, I always say it wrong. With Aaron Matey, screams without proof, questions for NYT about shoddy Hamas mass rape report. And you've been doing the rounds. I've seen a few interviews that you've done about this as well,

including on the Robbie Suave show and all that kind of thing. doing a really great job. So I don't know, I guess just basically take us through kind of overall the thrust. I guess we get the title of Gettleman's piece here. But what are his claims? What's his evidence? And what do you make of it? Well, I don't want to go down the rabbit hole too far. If you want to do that, read my questions with Aaron to the New York Times. But this article was supposed to sort of be the pinnacle of a propaganda campaign launched by the Israeli government, which is responsible for furnishing a lot of the so-called witnesses to New York Times and company, Gettelman and Company.

And it really began after the first prisoner swap, so far the only prisoner swap, which produced like the only happy moments of this war. was some in actually many ways these were deeply unhappy moments for large sections of the Israeli public and the Israeli government with Israelis coming out of captivity in Gaza and Palestinians coming out of torture and political imprisonment in Israeli jails. The Israeli women were coming out and smiling to their captors and waving goodbye and the Israeli government cooked up some lie that they'd all been put on Clonopin, which is why they didn't seem upset or terrified. And then they weren't allowed to give testimony to the public.

One woman who'd been released an old, 85-year-old woman named Yoheved Lipschitz had come out of captivity and delivered a press conference saying she was treated well and that the only threat she faced was from Israeli bombing. That was a disaster. So they had hoped that these women would come out and say, yeah, we were raped continuously and it was horrible and we need to keep the, you know, military campaign to destroy Hamas and everyone in Gaza's guilty. That's what the right-wing coalition government of Netanyahu had hoped. It didn't happen. So suddenly we start hearing that

Hamas used systematic sexual violence on October 7th. But it screams without words, in other words, screams without evidence. There are no direct testimonies. The Israeli government is unable to furnish one survivor, not only that, they're unable to point to any victims. The Israeli police, since the New York Times published this piece, have said that there's no physical evidence to corroborate the claims of the main police witness who's identified as a 24-year-old, 24-year-old accountant named Sapir in the piece. We pointed out that she said she saw Hamas militants displaying three decapitated heads of three rape victims. There is no physical record of any decapitations of women on October 7th.

And Sapir also claimed to have seen Hamas militants stand around and cut a woman's breast off with a box cutter and then play with it. I mean, these are just lurid, almost absurd scenes that just don't correspond with the reality of the moment you have a you know let me stop you right there for just for just one second i'm sorry to interrupt your train and thought that you know it really is what they call the big lie technique whoever is calling it that where you know what as absurd as it is isn't it more absurd that someone would make that up it just sounds believable because otherwise that's just crazy to make that lie up cutting children out of

wombs and putting them in ovens and 40 decapitated babies and hanging them on clothes lines and all of these atrocities when well you know I don't know and the thing is too Max isn't it important and nobody ever really talks about this

but they're not just lying to the American people for this they're lying to the people of Israel they're lying to people who lost their mothers and sisters and wives in that thing who are being led to believe that they were sexually tortured to death and all of this stuff when really they were just murdered, which is already the worst thing that could ever happen to someone, you know? So that's why the family of the person who is Exhibit A in this New York Times piece, the woman in the black dress, Gail Abdush, her sister and her brother-in-law came out and condemned the New York Times and said she was not raped. They just took up, took video and deduced or from the video, which doesn't show any real sign of rape, that she had been and that this was damaging the psychological health of her orphaned children, that her husband would have been present with her at the time, which made it basically impossible, and that the New York Times manipulated the family. into thinking they were doing a story just about her death, which was horrible enough, and instead

went with murder, rape, which they felt was this, you know, complete breach of trust. And the New York Times has never addressed this. Today, the Guardian has a separate story out, which claims evidence of mass rape by Hamas. But if you read into the story, there is no evidence. There's an acknowledgement that none of this rises even to the level. The evidence would not even produce a criminal investigation. investigation on normal circumstances. And the most irresponsible thing that the Guardian failed to report is that since the New York Times piece came out and since all these family members have come out and disowned the peace. And since the Israeli police have come out and said there's no physical evidence and they've put out a call for witnesses, the Israeli government has rejected a United Nations investigation invitation, an invitation to, participate in a UN investigation into sexual violence on October 7th on the grounds that

the investigation itself is anti-Semitic. So they don't want independent outsiders to actually come in because they don't have anything. And they just simply want the Western media, a bunch of suggestible dupes who are often ideologically aligned with Israel and its objectives to remain as their mighty world. to continue to lie to the American public and the Israeli public. And there's another element here, Scott, in this campaign for the domestic consumption, for the consumption of the Hebrew-speaking public. And it's that if they believe that these Texas chainsaw massacre-level crimes were committed

against their own people, it's going to lead them to reenact them in Gaza, which is what the Israeli military has been doing, and we've been seeing video of them doing this. the most heinous war crimes ever. Children are actually being beheaded in the Gaza Strip. Women are being killed in massive numbers. 70% of the 24,000 that we know are dead, many more are definitely dead, are women and children.

And so in order to maintain the morale of the Israeli military and to keep the public unified, this is what's necessary. Yeah, all right. There's so much, but I want to focus on one thing you said there. It was just like a throwaway line. As relevant as it is, no response from the New York Times. I mean, you did go ahead and go down the rabbit hole.

I don't think you did every single one of them, but you brought up major reasons to disbelieve a few of these claims already. This is, you know, it's a pretty neat kind of example of alternative media that they wish just did not exist. They wish that they could just dismiss as somehow some prison planet. crap or something but it's not it's you know you don't work for them but this is real journalism and you have got their ass here and then they have nothing to say geoffrey gettelman and the new york times and whoever's job it is they have no response to this whatsoever much less a retraction

or corrections or anything official like that but not even a tweet about well max maybe you have a point we're looking into it or anything Now, you know, they've started acknowledging us in the most insulting and condescending way possible. The New York Times tech correspondent, Shira Frankel, went down to southern Israel and met with the southern commander of Zaka, who's responsible for so many of these lives. Zaka is this Israeli ultra-Orthodox, so-called rescue organization that was in the southern communities that had been attacked by Hamas. They were there days after the attack.

and they collected body parts and then they spun out the lies of beheaded 40 beheaded babies a rival group claimed a baby had been baked in an oven completely false they said that fetus had been cut from a pregnant

woman completely false that children had been mutilated while their parents were killed and then the Hamas militants ate lunch in the next room which Tony Blinken the Secretary of State repeated in testimony before the Senate to justify rejecting a ceasefire.

And all these were just lies, complete lies. Are all those in Haretz? I know Horatz did a pretty good debunking of the worst of those. Yeah, they did a debunking after we did. So it's like they confirm the gray zone, like, because we can't be just trusted on our own unless some mainstream group does. You always show your work. The New York Times sent a reporter down to do a puff piece on the group that we had discredited.

solidly, which ironically was founded by someone that was known as the Orthodox Jeffrey Epstein in the Orthodox community because he was such a prolific serial rapist. And he committed suicide and died last year. I mean, he was running the organization until last year. So none of that is mentioned in this puff piece. And they refer to us as activists in the puff piece in the New York times. So activists have questioned the accuracy of Zaka's claims, but that's it. There's no, they don't recount the lies because they are so desperate to keep this narrative going. And what the, you know, what's so funny here, or sad, honestly, is that you clearly have these Jewish liberal reporters who hate what we're doing because they identify with Israel. But they also, you know, whether it's the

the New York Times staff or Jake Tapper, Dana Bash, the Washington Post sent some reporter to attack us, who is obviously a Jewish liberal Zionist. They also pine for the hostages and the captives in Gaza. They want them out. They don't seem to understand they're never coming out as long as the military operation continues. And that the Israeli military, and this corresponds with the other angle we've been working on since October 7th. The Israeli military is killing them day after day after day. And it appears they're doing so deliberately and more and more of the family members of these captives are saying it openly inside Israeli society. They're killing them to prevent a prisoner swap because they don't want to deal with Hamas.

and so while when these reporters are hyping up all this propaganda all they're doing is prolonging the war this is just war propaganda it's genocide propaganda and they're winding they're getting the captives killed the only way the captives are coming out is with a ceasefire yeah all right i want to go back to the seventh real quick here because you know i got to give uh charitable like kind of a guess about what people might be thinking listen to this that like well geez what about what they did do on October the 7th. And I saw you mentioned in one of these interviews that what Hamas did was murder civilians on October the 7th, including throwing grenades into shelters, I think you said, as well as, you know, killing people with, uh, with, uh, you know, bullets and with RPGs

and whatever, there's plenty of footage on telegram of what did happen there. And, you know, talking about throwing grenades into shelters. That's what our guys, that's what American GIs did at the Milai massacre in Vietnam. So it's only by embellishing all of this craziness that it makes that somehow pale in comparison to hanging babies on clothes lines and all of this stuff. But as I've told you before, I've mentioned before, I had an extended family member killed in this thing. She was a middle-aged woman, you know, clearly by definition, a non-combatant and was murdered along with a lot of other people. So no one should think that you or I are here to play down what actually happened.

But the point is, and you explain this to Robbie Suave on the show the other day, the rising, I guess it is, about, well, what difference does it make then? If they threw grenades into shelters with women and children in the max, then what difference does it make about all of this embellished babies on bayonets? Right. Well, first of all, close to 400 of those killed on October 7th were active duty Israeli soldiers who were enforcing the siege. They were basically guards of the prison camp, which is now a death camp. And to the extent that they were taken captive, they're prisoners of war. They're not hostages. Hundreds of non-combatants were killed as well. And not all of them were killed by Hamas militants. There were three waves of infiltration, and by 8.30 or so, almost all the Hamas commandos were either gone or involved in direct confrontation with Israeli special forces, often in captives where they were holding captives, and as we now know, Israeli tanks shelled them in order to kill everyone, because their orders were do not allow them to get back to Gaza. So, I mean, one of the most horrific killings on October 7th was of a Thai worker who was basically like an indentured servant on one of these Kiwitzim. And he was killed by people who were like riffraff who had come in from Gaza, who beat him to death with a shovel. Who knows who they are, you know, criminals, fanatics, but they weren't affiliated with Hamas. They were wearing plain clothes.

And some of the allegations that we have of sexual violence are against people who were said to be just common civilians. If you actually look at the casualty photos that Israel is displaying on their snuff sites to try to emphasize the horror of October 7th, you'll see actually piles of young men who had been burnt. Their bodies are completely scorched. And they don't appear to be Israelis. and they're wearing jeans. Okay, and this is around the Supernova electronic music festival. No one was, Israeli guys weren't wearing jeans at 6 a.m. while partying at a desert music festival.

And having been to Gaza, like, it's a cultural faux pas to not wear long pants, no matter how hot it is. So I suspect these were just common people would come in. And not all of them were there to murder either. This was like what they consider to be their land. that had been stolen from them. They were taking pictures. They were just common onlookers.

So the picture of October 7th is a lot more complex than we understand. But the main objective of Hamas Commandos was get as many Israelis back alive as possible. And inevitably, there is going to be crossfire. And now we know at least 70 vehicles were destroyed going back to Gaza. with all of their passengers killed inside by Israeli Apache helicopters and Israeli tanks, and these included many Israelis. So we don't know how many Israelis Hamas killed, but for sure there's evidence that they shot people, that they killed people. But the lurid stories were obviously necessary, as you said,

Scott, because it's the big lie that is really needed to sell the war. If you're going to lie, lie big. And that's what Israel has done here. What the evidence they have of Hamas commandos systematically killing civilians, obviously wasn't sufficient to move the public, especially the international public. So they had to do more. Yesterday, CNN claimed they had a video that cemented Israel's portrayal of Hamas's ISIS by showing a beheading. They actually aired this on prime time. And it just showed different jump cuts of a militant. wearing camouflage, and it appeared that he was checking on dead bodies, and at one point,

he has a knife, but it doesn't show any beheading. And they just say it's a beheading, because that's what the Israelis told them. It's just like, how long do we have to keep going on debunking this October 7th stuff when you have videos of, there are videos of, for example, Hamas shooting motorists trying to get through a checkpoint that Hamas had set up? Yeah, you know, which by the way is what is. the Israeli military does all the time in the West Bank. Sure. Hey, y'all, I got a new coffee sponsor.

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korea vietnam iraq war one syria afghanistan iraq war two libya syria yemen all of them but now you can get the e-book all the war lies by me for free just sign up the email list at the bottom of the page at Scott Horton.org or go to Scotthorton.org slash subscribe. Get all the war lies by me for free. And then you'll never have to believe them again. Searchlight Pictures presents The Roses, only in theaters August 29th. From the director of Meet the Parents and the writer of Poor Things comes The Roses,

starring Academy Award winner Olivia Coleman, Academy Award nominee, Benedict Cumberbatch, Andy Sandberg, Kate McKinnon, and Allison Janney. A hilarious new comedy, filled with drama, excitement, and a little bit of hatred, proving that marriage isn't always a bed of roses. See The Roses, only in theaters, August 29th. Get tickets now. Well, and you know, I remember, I think on the 8th of the 9th or whatever, there was footage of Hamas guys walking. I think it was a mom and a dad and their two daughters down the street. And then at the end of the street, there's their dead bodies in the next picture, all four of them. and they were already clearly

you know captives and civilians who were you know were just executed and they didn't show the actual execution it was pretty clear what had happened to them and um and anyway on telegram a friend of mine sent me a

this is the worst channel of it if you want to look at it all and I didn't look at it all but I looked at quite a bit of it and you know I don't know I think you're right that it must be right they judged that it wasn't bad enough for the full scale response that they wanted to launch here they could have done a

2014 type slaughter but they couldn't have done this without the 40 beheaded babies and all of that well and as you said too it was after the hostage thing is when they brought it back up again was when the hostages came out not having been raped is when they then did this big propaganda campaign about the seventh again. 36 Israeli captives have been killed in Gaza. It appears that all of them were killed by Israeli air strikes, except for three who were killed directly by the Israeli Golani brigade as they approached them shirtless waving a white flag,

screaming in Hebrew that they wanted to be rescued. The Israeli military has free fire orders on anything that moves in civilian nations. in civilian neighborhoods in Gaza. So they killed them just like they're killing Palestinians. But they need to keep us focused on October 7th. And that's why if you turn on CNN and you watch Jake Tapper, it's October 7th, hostages, hostages, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, hostages, Trump, hostages.

Nothing about the fact that just in the last, I don't know, 48 hours, Israeli troops on camera blew up 12 city blocks in Khan Yunus and celebrated. massacred 250 people, including through field massacres, blew up a major private university in northern Gaza, and then blew up what was left of Islamic University in Gaza. Can you tell me about the field massacres there that you mentioned? Yeah, I mean, on January 11th, there's multiple eyewitness accounts, as well as actual like documentation through the names of the victims and the, you know, injuries they suffered of a massacre north of Gaza City on Nasr Saladin Street, which runs north to south.

And they were, hundreds of people had gone to wait for one of the rare aid trucks that was reaching northern Gaza. And Israel attacked them with tanks and quadrocopters and gunned them down with machine guns from tanks and then started attacking them from the sky with quadrocopters which fire bullets. I mean, just imagine how dystopian that is. A quadrocopter drone descending on you, hitting you with bullets. 50 were killed and the rest of the crowd fled. You can easily find video of people fleeing, bombing in order to get flour in Gaza. This is happening all the time. I posted video of a field massacre in December outside the Aleppo school in Jabalia. A family had been sheltering there. They attempted to get out waving white flags and were shot at close range

by Israeli soldiers. And video showed the father still holding a white flag, surrounded by his family, all dead with a cat on top of him, eating his eyeballs. And Twitter X removed that video. That was, you know, what preceded the field massacre of Israeli captives who were attempting to escape by Israeli soldiers. Two of them were shot by a sniper, and one of them got away, and the Israeli army unit pursued him on foot and executed him at point-blank range. This is an Israeli. Yeah, they said he was hiding behind a wall, and he came out speaking Hebrew, and they still just blew him away anyway. You know, okay, so look, there's so much here, Max, of course, but let's go back to the Hannibal thing because, of course, you're ahead of the curve on this. There are two or three or four stories from, I think, beginning in October about the friendly fire, as you might call it, there on October the 7th.

And you have just been confirmed more and more by local reporting in Israel and especially now this new report in Wynet. so can you talk a little bit more about just what exactly is going on there and it's just so happens that today the feds released their report criticizing the police and yvaldi for standing around and doing nothing while this guy is killing pretty much toddlers five-year-olds um seems kind of fitting you know the the security forces the people that they never mind their brutality against the Palestinians for a moment or i guess it's it's part and parcel of it. But this is how the Israeli nation state, which is ultimately, supposedly, the security force of the citizens of Israel treats the citizens of Israel. Yeah, I mean, Uvalde is actually, I hadn't thought about that. Uvalde is a really good parallel for what happened in Kibbutzbury, which is where over 100 Israeli, Israelis died, mostly non-combatants. That community had been taken over by Hamas

commandos, and their intention was to basically just get as many people out and back to Gaza as possible. But many of them became kind of trapped in homes with captives. There was one home owned by a family called Pessie Cohen, where some 40 Hamas commandos had been holed up with about 15 captives, many of them were laying out on the front lawn, and it was surrounded by Israeli special forces. But hundreds of Israeli special forces had waited outside Kibbutzbury and were never given the order to go inside. And instead, a major general, I think it's major, Barack Hiram, who is now a huge figure

in the Israeli military, comes from the religious national. Camp is leading the assault on Gaza. He gave the orders to send in tanks and for the tanks to fire on the homes of Israelis with the Israelis inside in order to prevent the Hamas commandos from coming out or to prevent negotiations. And they fired two tank shells on the Pessie Cohen home and killed everyone inside. And then there were two children who were. killed in that assault from the Hitzroni family. They were both 12 years old. The Israeli foreign ministry then goes and uses those kids as poster children of Hamas savagery and says, you know, Hamas murdered them and executed these children. We know that's false because there were actually

somehow two survivors. One woman survived the shelling and another woman, Yasmin Porat, had actually been taken out of the building before by the lone Hamas commando who survived. And so they both provided eyewitness testimony of the tank killing everyone inside. But if you look at all the homes in Kibbutzbury, they all bear telltel signs of tank shelling. The tanks, there's now video we've seen a tank shelling all around the community. And that community has been turned into like the new Holocaust Museum, the new Yad Vashem, where every international visitor, Jared Kushner, Elon Musk, the lady who runs libs of TikTok, they come to Israel on their propaganda tour and they're all taken there. None of them ask questions about the friendly

fire orders. So we wrote about this and about the helicopters, obviously shelling people, cars with Israelis inside, people on the ground around the electronic music festival. I was relying on testimony published in Israeli media by the pilots who are basically admitting to this, came under a lot of attack. Haaret's called us conspiracy theorists. The Washington Post assigned a reporter to accuse us of disinformation. And then Wynette comes out with this blockbuster investigation. Wynette, the most mainstream, most widely read Israeli newspaper.

And that is a right-leaning paper or not? Right-leaning, but it's not pro-netting Yahoo. I mean, everything in Israel except for Ha-Orette-R-R-R-Tis is right-leaning. But it's like, I don't know what to compare it to. Well, compare it to the Jerusalem Post for us. Well, the Jerusalem Post is more caters to the Anglo settlers who live in Jerusalem and the West Bank mega settlements. And, you know, it's mostly for the English-speaking public. But Wynet is really like, you know, it's what the average middle class is.

Israeli gets up and reads in the morning. So this was published by Ronan Bergman, who also is a security reporter, security correspondent for the New York Times. And another security correspondent, it's citing official Israeli military sources and intelligence sources. And it concluded that Hannibal orders, though they didn't use the word Hannibal, but orders to fire on vehicles and targets, even if they contained Israelis, and especially if they contained Israelis, were handed out on a massive scale on October 7th, firing regulations were abandoned. So firing could take place at close range. And 70 cars were destroyed on their way back to Gaza, many with all of their occupants killed inside. And you can assume that these were cars with Israelis. Why do they want

to do this? Why do they want to prevent the Israelis from getting? back to Gaza. Because in 2011, Israel exchanged over 1,000 Palestinian political prisoners, including the future prime minister of Gaza who oversaw the October 7th operation, Yahya Senwar, for one Israeli soldier who had been captured, Gilad Shalit. And now there are over 200 Israelis. Well, right now there's 125 in Gaza. See, that's the only political leverage Hamas has in the entire world.

It's the only bargaining chip they have to negotiate for the release of all these Palestinian political prisoners who are being tormented in Israeli jails, including hundreds of children, thousands of women, as well as a relaxation of the siege. And so in order to deny Hamas political leverage, you want to kill your own people. You enact the Hannibal procedure. This to me is one of the, aside from genocide, which is a pretty big scandal, this is one of the biggest scandals of the war. Yeah, it's just the whole story is so crazy, including this latest one by you and Wyatt Reed, Israeli army gassed my son like Auschwitz, mother of slain Israeli soldier says, now, um, I read this is well I just fucking rephrase that what the hell is going on here max

well yeah the Israeli military had been batting around this plan to either flood the tunnels underneath Gaza there are some 450 kilometers of tunnels which make it hard for them to quote unquote eradicate Hamas or to fill them with poison gas And the families of the hostages had been begging Israel's war cabinet openly to not carry out these operations because it would kill their own children, but they did it anyway. And three Israeli soldiers who were captured on October 7th, including Ron Sherman, the son of this woman, were gassed to death. They know he was gassed to death because of the injuries that he suffered.

They got his body back and so on. his fingers were crushed he was trying to climb out of what his mother called his toxic tomb and the Israeli military admitted to using poison gas they did wait wait wait wait pardon me just to be specific here you're saying that the mother knows from legit toxicology reports on the sun that yes it was a poison gas and the Israeli government admitted using poison gas in this circumstance They have admitted using poison gas in Gaza. I don't know about this circumstance. Because I had read about, Max, I had read them saying that that was a plan, but that

had seen that they had not used that. So, I mean, it's very important that we know exactly what the evidence is for this, because that's a hell of a thing. But they're saying this wasn't just carbon monoxide or something. This was what? Well, I'm not saying it's, I don't know who Zyclon B. or carbon monoxide or what, but they've been using, they've been openly discussing using some form of noxious fume to get, as the U.S. did with the Viet Cong tunnels where they were

using flamethrowers to dislodge militants from these tunnels and the families have been begging them not to, but as I said, the mother has looked at her son's injuries along with, I guess, forensic pathologists. And the mother concluded that he was trying to escape while being suffocated. And obviously, there's no, there's nothing to gain for Hamas to just suffocate or execute these prisoners. I could go through other instances where the Israeli military actually tried to liberate, captured soldiers in Gaza. And it didn't go too well. Yeah.

Well, I mean, she explicitly accuses the Israeli government here. I wonder if, hey, I'm just a radio guy. You're the reporter. I wonder if you could follow up with her and how she knows that and the doctor, what told her about the injuries to his lungs, et cetera. Well, this is a huge scandal in Israel now. I mean, it's not contained. Oh, this particular story is taking off already on its own there. Yeah, I mean, you can go to times of Israel or any of the mainstream sites and see it being reported.

or I follow Hebrew telegram sites. And you know, you can do it too just with machine translation. And they're all talking about this because the mother had a tombstone made for her son accusing the Israeli government of abandoning him in Gaza and then killing him. And the Israeli authorities have removed that tombstone. And today, well, earlier today, because they're ahead of us. and their time zone is ahead of us, the mother went to hand inscribe the same tombstone

and place it where her son is buried because she's so determined to get that message across. And that's the message that's being conveyed also by hostages who are still in Gaza and by the father of Ron Sherman. Alex Sherman said at a rally that the only way to get the hostages out is through negotiations, essentially through a ceasefire. But we have so much documentation of Israeli military

air strikes, killing hostages one after another. The hostages know and their families know that the only way out of this is to end the strikes. And Hamas is not going to negotiate another temporary pause. They want a full ceasefire. All right. I know you're sure. on time and I am too today but you do such great work and I sure as hell appreciate it. That's Max Blumenthal at the gray zone.com. Thanks, ma'am. Thanks a lot, Scott. The Scott Horton show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA. APSRadio.com, antiwar.com, Scotthorton.org, and Libertarian Institute.org.