Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 12/7/23 Dave DeCamp on the Crimes of Hamas and the IDF

Episode Date: December 10, 2023

Dave DeCamp was back on Antiwar Radio this week to discuss the war in Gaza. He and Scott discuss the latest death count as well as the trustworthiness of the numbers we’re getting. They then talk about the ongoing war in Israel and the other flashpoints in the region. They also discuss new information we’re learning about the Hamas attacks on October 7th. Discussed on the show: “‘A mass assassination factory’: Inside Israel’s calculated bombing of Gaza” (+972 Magazine) “‘The Gospel’: how Israel uses AI to select bombing targets in Gaza” (The Guardian) “Israel Knew Hamas’s Attack Plan More Than a Year Ago” (New York Times) Dave DeCamp is the news editor of Antiwar.com and the host of Antiwar News with Dave DeCamp. Follow him on Twitter @decampdave This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; 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

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All right, y'all, welcome. the show. It is anti-war radio. I'm your host, Scott Horton, celebrating 25 years on the radio. That's how old I am now. And celebrating 13 on the radio here on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. I am the editorial director of anti-war.com, and I'm the author of the book, Enough Already. Time to end the War on Terrorism. You can find my full interview archive. Almost 6,000 of them now, going back to 2003, the very oldest one from 1999, there at Scott Horton.org, and you can sign up for the podcast feed there at all your favorite podcast catchers for all the interviews, not just those that run here on KPFK. All right. So introducing today's guest, it's our good friend and

anti-war.com's news director, Dave DeCamp. Welcome back to the show. Dave, how you doing? I'm good, Scott. Thanks for having me. Very happy to have you here. Lots of bad news to talk about. Let's start with Israel, Palestine. First of all, I'm interested in what are the best estimates of the casualties as of today, December the 7th, as far as you know, sir. So I just saw Gaza's health ministry just put out another estimate, and they say it's about 17,100. And according to their count, 70% are women and children. Now, the health ministry, they stopped putting out updates on November 10th, they said they just couldn't anymore because the communications broke down. But then during that, about one week pause that when Hamas and Israel were exchanging

hostages and prisoners, I guess they got some more accounts. So they started putting out updates again. And if you remember earlier in the war, lots of people were casting doubt on the numbers coming from the health ministry, including President Biden, who essentially accused the Palestinians of lying about the death toll. But after that, you know, the State Department said, you know, they actually think it's a low estimate. And it is, they say that themselves, the health ministry, because they're not counting all the people that are still under the rubble, which includes children. It includes probably Hamas, you know, fighters that were down in the tunnels that were hit with a bunker buster bomb or something. You know, they're not able to dig those people out.

And actually, I just saw Glenn Greenwell tweeted this, but the times of Israel reported yesterday that Israeli officials have admitted that it's an accurate count from the health ministry. So 17,000, and again, that seems to be a low estimate. I think it's safe to say the death tolls over 20,000. All right. It's Antisar War Radio, Scott Horton, talking with Dave DeCamp. And now, the health ministry does not differentiate in those raw numbers between Hamas fighters and or civilians. I guess you say they differentiate women and children, but when it comes to men, they don't differentiate who's a fighter and who's just some guy yeah no they don't so that's why like the conservative estimate of civilian casualties is basically 70% of their death toll and they uh

i believe the the number of children now is around 7,000 um which is just horrific yeah um all right well and is there any kind of independent reporting i know there was one thing in Israeli media where they were saying they thought they'd killed 20,000 people, almost all of them fighters. So you could throw that out. But is there any kind of estimate from any credible source about how many Hamas fighters have died in this thing? It would really be a shame if they just helped get all of these innocent civilians killed without getting a hair touched on their heads hiding deep underground. Well, I saw the Guardian recently reported that Israel estimated they killed between 1,000 and 2,000 Hamas guys, and that was last week. Another count from

Financial Times was 5,000. But again, these are just estimates from Israeli officials speaking to the media. So we really don't know. And if I'm sure you read that recent report in 972 magazine, which is I was just going to ask you about that. Yeah. So I mean, the important thing there, I mean, there's a lot. There's so much to that report. So let's try not to skip over anything. But when we talk about the number of civilians killed compared to the Hamas fighters, what that report revealed, which seemed pretty thorough to me, it cited Israeli intelligence sources, was that if there was instances where they think they're going to kill one Hamas fighter, but hundreds of civilians, not one or two or a few dozen, which is already a crazy amount. You know, how can you justify killing a few dozen people to kill one Hamas guy? But they're saying that they would authorize strikes where hundreds of civilians would be killed if they think one Hamas commander or something would be killed. So that's, it's a, it's a ratio of, you know, not two to one or three to one.

It's a very high ratio that that they are going with. It's anti-war radio. And the article I'm talking about here with Dave DeKamp is this thing in. 972 MAG, which is, that's the area code of Tel Aviv. So that's why it's called that. It's an Israeli publication. And this article is by Yuval Abraham. It's called a mass assassination factory. A mass assassination factory. In case you miss this, it's really worth the dive when you get a chance to look it up. A mass assassination factory inside Israel's calculated bombing of Gaza. And I dare say that there is a Guardian article that is a pretty

good companion piece that goes along with it called the gospel how israel uses a i to select bombing targets in gaza so i was wondering i mean if you uh have it in front of you or or you know i know that you wrote this up for antiwar dot com you already mentioned about the insane ratios that they openly admit adopting here of their willingness to inflict civilian casualties to catch hamas fighters But can you take us through this a little bit more? Because even what counts as a Hamas fighter is they'll wipe out a neighborhood to get just some schmuck with an AK who doesn't even have a rank, right? Like the lowest private, they'll kill his whole family, this kind of thing. Yeah, I mean, the report said, you know, if they want to destroy, say, a high-rise building, you know, they could basically find an excuse, find somebody that lives there or some office floor that's tied to Hamas to justify destroying the whole building.

And they call these, when they target high-rise buildings or other, like, public buildings, they mention universities, banks, things like that. They call them power targets. And what these Israeli officials said was the purpose of destroying these power targets was to put pressure on Palestinian civil society to put pressure on Hamas. That's what they say the strategy is. And they're intentionally damaging civilian areas. That's what all these officials quoted in. this report said. And, you know, again, basically if they want to destroy a building, they'll find a reason to do it. And it sounds like a terror campaign to me. And then the other type of target that they discussed were personal homes of Hamas members. And this is where the AI system seems to come in because they're talking about not medium level or high level officials that are mostly down in the tunnels. These are low level guys. And they target their homes where they live, whether or not It's a single family home or an apartment building. You know, they blow it up.

And this AI system basically finds all these targets for them at a much faster rate than any Israeli intelligence analysts can do. And they say that there's testimony from Palestinians that seems pretty convincing that in a lot of these cases, there's nobody related to Hamas when they destroy these homes. And this is something that Israel has done in previous wars is, you know, if a Hamas guy is sleeping in his bed, They'll just blow up his house, whether or not his family's there, as young kids are there. That's been a strategy of the Israelis for a long time. So this has kind of just been, you know, increased at such a level because they have this AI system now picking out targets. And there's one quote in that piece, and I know I saw you tweeting about this where

this is one Israeli intelligence source that basically says, everything is intentional. If a three-year-old girl dies, it's because the IDF decided. you know, it was worth it, the collateral damage was worth it, which they call it collateral damage, but how is it collateral if the majority of the people you're killing are civilians to kill one Hamas fighter? So it's just a really revealing report. And it, again, these guys are, these sources, this report is saying that Israel is intentionally targeting civilian areas to do damage to kind of as a psychological campaign.

Yeah. And I wanted to point out this too. So I don't know if everybody gets to the end of the article. because it's kind of stomach-churning thing. But two intelligence sources told 972 Mag that Hamas leaders, quote, understand that Israeli harm to civilians gives them legitimacy in fighting.

Of course, that's the whole purpose of terrorism anyway, right? Is to create a reaction, drive more people into your camp, to heighten the contradictions, of course. And then that becomes the excuse anyway. these power targets we're going to kill civilians deliberately and knowingly because we pretend to believe

even though we explicitly admit we know better we want to continue to pretend to believe that this will turn the people of the strip against Hamas their only armed force resisting on their behalf and they know they're lying

yeah and it reminded if you remember in earlier wars they used to warn people and to tell them to evacuate these buildings, these high-rise buildings that they would destroy. And I do remember when this thing first started, we saw some of that, but it seems like that has basically gone away them. You know, they're telling Palestinians to leave certain areas, but then they bomb the areas that they send them to anyway. I mean, it's just they don't have a chance of really going anywhere that's safe. And I believe it was in 2021 when Israel knocked

down this tower in Gaza that had an Al Jazeera office, an Associated Press office, Middle East Eye office, a big media office. And they claimed some kind of Hamas office was there as well, and they took down this building. This report said that building was a power target. So the purpose was to just destroy it. It wasn't because there was a real Hamas presence there. So, and that's just one thing I wanted to point out, because this is another strategy of the Israelis, is to attack the media they're killing journalists at an unprecedented rate and one thing that the u.s feared about that pause in fighting because of the hostage deal was that more journalists would be able to shine a light on the atrocities that were committed i mean they really said that officials this

was a report in politico i couldn't believe it that they actually said that and which is very close yeah this wasn't like a scoop exposing them this is them talking to their friends at the politico over there is incredible like yeah you know one thing we're really worried about is people we'll see what we've been up to. Yeah, well. And speaking of which, I was just going to say they found that Israel left, there was four babies left at a hospital in Gaza. And the hospital director, the nurses, doctors without borders, all, you know, told the Israeli military told the media when they left these babies behind that were hooked up to incubators. And then they were found decomposing during that pause. And this has been confirmed by the Washington Post now.

and the State Department was asked about it. And, you know, they just left these babies to die. I mean, that's how horrific. They forced those doctors to leave, to be clear. Those doctors had no choice but to leave. But they said, listen, there's babies in here. So, in other words, bring in a military doctor to care for these babies, you know? And then they just didn't.

Remember everyone. This is how they started Iraq War I was by lying and saying that Saddam Hussein stole the incubators and killed the Kuwaiti babies. That was how they got us into this whole mess 30 years ago. They could start a war with a lie about that, a snap of their fingers. Hear anybody talking about American baiting Israel now over this? Of course not. That, nope, we'll just look the other way since we're talking about real babies being murdered this way. That's different.

Yeah, Matt Miller, the State Department spokesman, he was asked about it the other day. He just basically shrugged his shoulders, deflected to Hamas, you know. That's right. Now, tell me about all, This area, they say, is the size of LAX airport where the entire civilian population of the Gaza Strip is supposed to go. Dave DeCamp. Yeah.

So this is in the southwest of the Gaza Strip. And apparently Israel is telling all the Palestinians in Gaza to pack in there, you know, over one million people, up to 1.8 million people. And now this morning, I just saw Israel's claiming Hamas is firing rockets from there. So, you know, there's the pretext for it to be a target. And if you're a Palestinian, it's just a wasteland too, by the way, it's just there's nothing there. It's just dirt, you know, sand and nothing. No, no flat ground to even build your tent city on at all. Yeah. And I mean, if you're a Palestinian, like, would you want to go be rounded up in this little area? You know, would you trust Israel isn't going to just bomb you? I mean, it's just, you know, I can't imagine what is going through their minds on the ground. Yeah. Sorry. Hang on just one second. Hey, y'all Scott Horton here. for Tennessee hot sauce company. Man, this stuff is so good.

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Rick Casali.com slash Ron Paul, and you'll see what I mean. Use promo code Horton and you'll save 25 bucks. And this show will get a little kickback too. That's Rickasali.com slash Ron Paul. Casali is C-A-S-A-L-I. Rick Casali.com slash Ron Paul. And there's free shipping too. All right. There's so much on this subject. We have to talk about there's these two reports in Harretz, one about how, man, they could have prevented this thing. Oh, my God. And this goes with another story from the New York Times a few days before, Dave, about how they had the full plan. And this is Ronan Bergman, the author of Rise and Kill First in the New York Times. They had Hamas's plan on paper, not the date of when they were going to do it, but the entire plan of what they're

going to do. Now Harretz follows up and says, they met the night before. They knew the attack was going to happen. And they did nothing. They did nothing to prevent the rave. And then on top of that, another Horarets piece where they debunk all of the most lurid accusations of atrocities, which is terror because they did commit atrocities and kill innocent men, women, and children, Hamas did on October the 7th. But the Israelis spun all these crazy yarns that their media now is completely debunking. So let me be quiet and have you explain, please, sir. Well, yeah, when it comes to kind of the atrocity propaganda, these are like the babies being beheaded, women having fetuses cut out of their bellies, really horrific stuff. They're saying, you know, there was mass rapes. And I'm not sure of what the evidence of, you know, when it comes to the sexual violence and stuff. But they're claiming it was at this huge scale. And this Heretz article basically debunked some, like you said, some of the most lurid tales about the babies being beheaded and all that. And now you basically see, the strategy that's happening right now is they keep bringing this up and making these accusations

about all these atrocities and horrors that Hamas committed on October 7th, kind of to distract this from what's happening in Gaza right now. It's a very, I think, powerful propaganda tool. Like, you just make the conversation about something else. Well, it's so cynical. They killed one baby. And look, to kill one baby is to kill a thousand. Like, fine. I believe in that. Like, I'm not going to apologize for that. But that's a lot different Then they killed 40 babies. They hung them from a clothes line and they cut all their heads off and this crazy stuff that bin Laden himself wouldn't do. You know, but that's what happened.

But then, nope, that didn't happen at all. They cut the woman's belly open and stole and killed the feet. And like, no, dude, completely made up. Completely made up. It was a huge deal. Like, how dare you deny any of these things? And it turns out that none of them were really right, you know, other than just the mass murder part. Yeah, and it was repeated by President Biden, the beheaded babies thing.

You know, that's how far this thing got up. And then the White House walked it back. But how many people saw the White House retraction? You know, this is the president on TV saying this. And the same thing, too, with the friendly fire. And look, I think I should be clear about this. I think some people are Palestinian side are willing to extrapolate out and say, oh, well, so all of the atrocities or almost all of them were made up or so. I don't think that's really right.

And then also, Dave, when it comes to these stories of the friendly fire, some of that, obviously, I want you to describe as much as you know about that, but it seems like people kind of glom onto that a little bit and make it sound like, geez, Hamas may be really only targeted fighters here. And that's really not right. And nobody needs to play down the extent of what Hamas did, while at the very same time not playing down the extent of the Israeli regime's cynical exaggeration. or the extent of the actual friendly fire that took place, including in it, right, that sort of the poster child, this little girl that was killed, that they really used as propaganda. She was killed by an Israeli tank round, not by Hamas at all, as we now know, right? Yeah, so that was reported by Max Blumenthal, and he's just citing Israeli media interviews with eyewitnesses with one woman that was there. She said that this little girl was killed by Israeli tank fire. They basically, she was taken out of the house by a Hamas guy who wanted to surrender. And then there was still Israeli hostages in the house with the remaining Hamas people

that were there. And then Israel just, they unloaded, you know, tank fire on this house and basically killed. I'm not sure if they killed all the Israelis that were in there, but most of them. And I'm not sure to what extent, you know, the, the Israelis were responsible for civilian deaths like at what scale. But there's certainly a lot of evidence that there was also Heretz reported that when Israeli helicopters finally responded to the Nova Music Festival, which according to the other Heretz report was after nine hours. And, and I mean, that report is really something, basically saying the night before Israeli officials met about this threat of a Hamas attack, Nobody told this music festival that was approved by the Israeli army that was actually approved to be extended one more day into Saturday earlier in the week. It wasn't even supposed to be held that day. But so when helicopters arrived, according to Heretz, they hit some Israelis as well. So, and you know, you see these pictures of burned bodies, burned Israeli bodies that they're saying Hamas was responsible for. And you have to wonder what, how could they have burned them like that? So there's kind of a lot of questions.

about that day and it's you know more and more slowly coming out you know it's it's really just crazy to think about how they would take you know whatever actually happened and add all these lies on top because as useful as that is for public relations for israel of course that's also what they're telling the families of these victims that your mom or your sister wasn't just killed shot but was brutally raped and tortured and et cetera, et cetera, this whole giant thing. And these families are being made to suffer through believing in these, you know, embellished tales just so that the government can get away with killing more people in Palestine. Man, it's the depth of cynicism.

It's the, you know, Dick Cheney levels of hatred for their own people on demonstration there. And it also completely destroys their credibility. So the people that finding out about all these lies that Israel told about that day are now more inclined to say, oh, I guess it was all fake. Hamas didn't kill any civilians. That's how they lead people to think. And it was actually the title of that Heretz debunking article basically said these stories feed the deniers that they call them, the people that are denying Hamas committed any atrocities. So that's where Heretz is coming from in debunking that. Yeah. Well, look, the truth ought to be plenty bad enough. And you know what, honestly, I'm not a let it happen on purpose guy, but it is important to note that at the very minimum, the level of criminal negligence and dereliction of duty by Netanyahu and the entire national security state there is such that one could easily extrapolate out if you want to jump to that conclusion that this must have been deliberate.

you have every piece of that puzzle that you need when we know that they knew the entire plan we know they knew that it was even going to happen they let all the kids keep dancing anyway they didn't call all the troops back from the west bank that they had deployed away and all this and we don't know who's making what decision and i'm a minimalist on this stuff i look at it as pure dereliction to the ent degree though criminally negligent homicide you know in the first degree at the very least. But in other words, it's an unbelievable level of negligence for Israel's supposed security force, the ones who have these poor people locked in the Gaza ghetto in the first place and then are unable to keep them locked in there and protect the civilian population of Israel from the danger that they've engendered. And it's just nuts. Anyway, while we're out of Dave, let me ask you one more here from the headlines on anti-war.com today, and this is again from Haaretz, Israeli police green light far-right march rallying for, quote, full Jewish control over the Temple Mount. What does this mean? So, you know, this is going to, there's often these

very, you know, provocative marches by Israeli far-right people who sometimes chant, you know, the flag march is one of them that happens usually every year. And they go around chanting death to Arabs and things like that. And this one that has been approved now by the Israeli authorities could really set something off in East Jerusalem and the West Bank because this is the Alaksa Mosque, the Temple Mount. It's a very, it's always been a sensitive area since Israel was founded. And this is what Hamas says they're responding to. They called their operation on October 7th, Al-AXA Flood. They said they started planning it in 2021 after Israeli forces stormed the Al-Aksa Mosque and teargast and beat Muslim worshippers.

So this could turn into something. It's 200 people, you know, these are extremists. It could turn violent. It could really set things off and things are already very tense in the West Bank. The violence has soared there. It was already very high before October 7th. than now even more so settlers driving people out of their homes, burning their houses down, threatening to kill them.

So this is just another thing that could add to the powder keg there. Man. And you know what? On this, this has got to be deliberate. I don't want to hear nothing about, oh, the police said this or that. Netanyahu's in charge. In fact, I just watched an interview the other day where an American journalist is asking him, man, you're teaming up with these radical right-wing religious cooks in your coalition here.

You're going to put this guy in charge of the police? and he says don't worry I'm in charge here I'm the one who calls the shots I'm King Beebe yeah well what does that mean then that they're going to allow this massive provocation on the

temple mount right now they're trying to spread the war to the West Bank they're trying to provoke a full scale intifada right this is the Israeli state moving a chess piece on the board

this is not just a bunch of religious cooks doing what they want. They're doing it as the headline says with permission from the state as directed by the state to do this. And at the same time, another headline from today is they're threatening Hezbollah more. When that, the tit for tat strikes on the northern border had calmed down previously, right, Dave, or not? Yeah, they did during the truce in Gaza. And it doesn't seem like there's been more recently, but doesn't seem like it was at the level that it was. But now you have Galant, the Israeli defense minister, saying we got to push Hezbollah back from the border. If we can't do it diplomatically, you know, we're going to use military force.

And he's previously, you know, threatened a major war in Lebanon saying that they could turn Beirut into Gaza. And the U.S. is worried that Israel was trying to provoke Hezbollah for an excuse as a pretext for war. So it looks like they are looking to expand the war even more. man um and you know what let's cram this in at the very end here give us an update dave de camp from antiwar dot com if you could please on the tip for tap back and forth between the americans deployed in iraq and syria and the various i believe all sheite militias that they've been

fighting so the attacks on u.s troops have continued uh you know these are rocket generally small rocket attacks on these u.s bases in iraq and syria they started on a October 17th in response to the U.S. support for what Israel's doing in Gaza, there's been over 70 attacks. No U.S. troops have been killed. There's been dozens of injuries, but, you know, this is a lot of attacks. It's happening. And the U.S. has launched several rounds of airstrikes now in eastern Syria and Iraq. They killed Ketheb Hezbollah fighters in Iraq, which is one of the big Shia militias. And they're not backing down. And the U.S. seems like they're are now willing to bomb these guys and kill a good amount of them.

I believe a few dozen have been killed on the U.S. airstrikes now. And it's just, you know, a situation that seems to continue to escalate. All right, y'all, we're all out of time. Sorry about that, but that's Dave DeCamp. He is news editor at antiwar.com. That's news. Dot antiwar.com. And he hosts the podcast, Anti-War News, which is on all your podcatchers and on YouTube as well.

Thanks so much for your time again, Dave. Thanks, Scott. All right, you guys. And that's it for Anti-War Radio for today. I'm Scott Horton. Editorial Director at Anti-War.com, host to the Scott Horton show at Scott Horton.org. And I'm here every Thursday from 233 on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A.

See you next week.