THE SET-UP: If you scrolled through TikTok, Instagram or Twitter* about four months ago, there’s pretty good chance you saw a viral clip of Miriam in Jerusalem. She participated in Corey Gil-Shuster’s “The Ask Project.” Gil-Shuster travels around Israel with a camera, finds willing participants and asks ‘em provocative questions.
The television news business refers to this oft-used element as the “MOS”— the “Man-on-the-Street” interview. Whether you’re looking for eyewitnesses to an incident or a random sampling of public opinion (or you just need to pad a thin story with another element), the MOS usually works because camera has a strange way of enticing people into outbursts of honesty.
That’s what happened to Miriam when Gil-Shuster asked her the question of the day: “How many civilians have been killed in Gaza?”
Without hesitation, Miriam, who looks like someone’s beloved grandmother and sounds like she grew up in the Tri-State area, simply said: “Who gives a shit?”
Gil-Shuster quickly followed-up with “…for example, children?”
Miriam again didn’t miss a beat: “Children grow up to be Arabs.”
She knew how it sounded, too.
“I shouldn’t say this,” she remarked … but she couldn’t resist.
Instead, she elaborated … as you can see beginning at the 3:30 mark of the episode, which is posted on The Ask Project’s YouTube page. In it, Miriam framed the suffering of Palestinian children as the logical outcome of their mothers using them as “human shields” to garner “sympathy” for the cause of what she regards as an invented people.
Said Miriam: “The natural instinct of a Jewish mother is to protect her child. Palestinian women do not have that.”
Miriam was asked for examples to prove her assertion … but, of course, she didn’t have anything more than a vague reference to “stories” she’d supposedly read somewhere. But that didn’t stop her from talking about Palestinian mothers like they are a different species.
Their dead children—like the forty-five recently killed in just two days of IDF bombing before it launched its current ground operation—were condemned by a circumstance of birth, like calves born to be beef. There is nothing to mourn in the loss of children brought into the world by the sinister, less-than-Jewish mothers of an invented people.
She inoculated herself against empathy.
Miriam is not alone, either.
Current US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee believes those children are “invented.” So, too, does HBO’s Bill Maher. Newt Gingrich infamously dismissed Palestinians as “invented” in 2011. And they are joined by Evangelical politicians and Christian Zionists in the United States who want Israel to spark Jesus’s return by toppling the Al-Aqsa Mosque.
Like Miriam, they, along with a majority of Americans, have been unmoved by Gaza’s children.
It didn’t matter when the IDF’s apocalyptic bombing campaign produced a new casualty category called WCNSF (Wounded Child No Surviving Family). It didn’t matter when The New Yorker reported on Gaza’s legion of newly-minted child amputees. And it didn’t matter when both AP News and Reuters found that Israel was (and perhaps is again) literally wiping entire families from the face of the Earth. Entire genetic lines were instantly truncated by 2,000 lb. bombs given to Israel by the United States.
It finally took a manufactured famine and pictures of emaciated children to move the Trump Administration. And that was probably a quid pro quo to keep a bevy of deals going with the Gulf Arab states. Trump had long-since stripped them of their humanity and their agency, as his scheme to shift them to Libya illustrates. And he’s still not doing a damn thing to stop the children of being killed in bunches.
What we have before us is a case study in dehumanization.
What we are witnessing is not a war. It’s a cull. - jp
TITLE: Destroying Gaza 'With Love': Israel's New YogiNazis
https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2025-05-18/ty-article-magazine/.premium/destroying-gaza-with-love-israels-new-yoginazis/00000196-d3c4-d048-a7d7-dbf6c43b0000
EXCERPTS: Rivka Lafair is a "facilitator of workshops, meet-ups and group sessions on yoga themes, teacher of feminine yoga and personal development." She lives in the settlement of Shiloh in the southern West Bank and terms herself a "proud Jew" who "thinks outside the box." Lovely. Also, she also wants to annihilate and expel two million human beings in the Gaza Strip.
Lafair belongs to a stream within Israeli Judaism that can be described as "YogiNazis": people whose spiritualism underpins their Nazism. They are a relatively new sub-stratum – albeit with deep roots in the local culture – that has gained popularity since October 7, largely because of its ability to weld together concepts that, on the surface, seem like polar opposites: spirituality and annihilation, empowerment and expulsion, yoga and starvation, retreats and carpet bombing.
Lafair is a person who believes that "music has the power to alter our consciousness," but also that expelling and annihilating two million Gazans begins with "altering one's consciousness." In order to succeed in this important cognitive switch, we have to understand that "we have an enemy here – whom we look in the eyes and eliminate." Yes, look them in the eyes – don't do it behind their backs, because we must be in direct and unmediated contact with those we're annihilating.
And to make it clear that by "enemy" she doesn't mean only Hamas terrorists, she clarifies: "We are committed to take revenge and destroy Gaza. From infant to old woman." She tops it off with an appropriate Bible verse: "Thou shalt blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven; thou shalt not forget."
And if Lafair's Nazi-spiritualism can be written off because she's a settler who's found an efficient solution for realizing the idea of Greater Israel, it's worth noting that this is a far broader phenomenon that isn't limited to the occupied territories.
One day before Holocaust Remembrance Day, for example, standup comedian and satirist Gil Kopatz, who has been flirting with spirituality and religion for years, posted the following: "If you feed sharks, they eventually eat you. If you feed Gazans, they eventually eat you. I support making sharks extinct and exterminating Gazans. Reflections for Holocaust Remembrance Day 2025."
After the post generated a "storm," Kopatz posted a clarification: "I don't have an ounce of compassion for the Gazans. For Arabs as a whole, yes, for human beings as a whole, yes, for sharks – no, and not for human beasts." Of course, his desire to eradicate millions of people doesn't imply he's a bad person. Indeed, "I consider myself to be a humane, liberal and moral person," he writes. To top it off, he ends the post with a bit of dark humor: "It's not genocide, it's pesticide, and its essential." A regular riot that one, eh?
Take M., for example, a woman from a large well-to-do city a few kilometers north of Tel Aviv. She runs a studio described as "a pleasant space, filled with inspiration," which espouses three values: "Creativity. Emotion. Experience."
In this pleasant space she facilitates "creativity groups for children – from the age of four and up; personal emotional guidance for children and youth – with a gentle, connecting and nurturing approach." All of this happens, of course, in "a homey, warm and professional atmosphere" (those interested are "lovingly invited").
Yet, when this same M. is shown a video showing a hungry child in the Gaza Strip, she asserts immediately: "Not credible. Sorry. I've seen how clips are staged – positioning, applying makeup, putting together a script." Never mind not credible, but the same woman who cares for children "with a gentle, connecting and nurturing approach" explains, "You know what? Even if it is real, after October 7, I don't have an ounce of compassion for anyone there. Not even for children."
There are many of these in present-day Israel. Spiritual people who view the annihilation of the other as a form of personal growth and the eradication of the enemy as empowerment. They live in one big retreat, where consciousness is so finely tuned that all noise disappears, all disturbances are muted, so that they are left with only themselves, them and their inner being – pure, compassionate, unsullied – and finally able to connect with what resided there all along, waiting to be revealed: The desire to annihilate and destroy millions of people, including children, women and the elderly. With great love.
TITLE: ‘Render it unusable’: Israel’s mission of total urban destruction
https://www.972mag.com/israel-gaza-total-urban-destruction/
EXCERPTS: In early April, just weeks after resuming its assault on Gaza, Israeli forces announced that they had taken control of the southernmost city of Rafah to create the “Morag Axis,” a new military corridor further dissecting the Strip. Over the course of the war, according to Gaza’s Government Media Office, the army had destroyed more than 50,000 housing units in Rafah — 90 percent of its residential neighborhoods. Now, the army proceeded to flatten Rafah’s remaining structures, turning the entire city into a buffer zone and cutting off Gaza’s only border crossing with Egypt.
Y., a soldier who recently returned from reserve duty in Rafah, described the army’s demolition methods to +972 Magazine and Local Call. “I secured four or five bulldozers [from another unit], and they demolished 60 houses per day. A one or two story house, they take down within an hour; a three or four-story house takes a bit longer,” he said. “The official mission was to open a logistical route for maneuvering, but in practice, the bulldozers were simply destroying homes. The southeastern part of Rafah is completely destroyed. The horizon is flat. There is no city.”
Y.’s testimony is consistent with those of 10 other soldiers who served at different times in the Gaza Strip and southern Lebanon since October 7, and who spoke with +972 Magazine and Local Call. It also aligns with videos published by other soldiers, on-the-record and off-the-record statements from current and former senior officers, satellite image analysis, and reports by international organizations.
Together, these sources paint a clear picture: the systematic destruction of residential buildings and public structures has become a central part of the Israeli army’s operations, and in many cases, the primary objective.
Just this week, Netanyahu made this link between the destruction of civilian buildings and forced displacement more explicit. “We are destroying more and more homes — they have nowhere to return to,” he reportedly said at a meeting of the Foreign Affairs and Security Committee. “The only expected result will be a desire for Gazans to emigrate outside the Strip.”
The main weapon in the army’s arsenal of destruction is Caterpillar’s D9 armored bulldozer, which has long been used to commit human rights violations in the occupied Palestinian territories. But soldiers who spoke to +972 and Local Call also described another favored method used to collapse entire residential blocks: filling containers or defunct military vehicles with explosive material, and detonating them remotely.
“In the end, the D9 [armored bulldozer] shaped the face of the war,” tweeted right-wing Israeli journalist Yinon Magal in early February. “It is what made the Gazans return south, after [they came north to their homes during the ceasefire and] they realized they had nowhere to return to … And this wasn’t a directive from the Chief of Staff or the General Staff — this was a policy of the ‘field,’ from division commanders, brigade commanders, battalion commanders, and even the military engineering teams who changed reality.”
Avraham Zarviv, a D9 operator who became known as the “Flattener of Jabalia” for the videos of destruction he uploaded to social media, explained his methods in an interview with Channel 14.
“I had never seen a tractor in my life, only in pictures,” said Zarviv, who in civilian life is a rabbinical court judge. The Givati Brigade, in which he served, decided a few months into the war to establish a specialized engineering unit for demolition operations. “We got on tractors, D9s, excavators… we learned the craft, we became highly professional. You don’t understand what it’s like to bring down a building — seven, six, five stories — one after the other.”
Between October 2024 and January 2025, Zarviv said that every week he destroyed on average “50 buildings — not housing units, buildings … In Rafah, they have nowhere to go, in Jabalia they have nowhere to go back to.” Zarviv recently returned to serve in Rafah. Ahead of the Passover seder in April this year, he uploaded a video from Rafah showing him against the backdrop of a street where some buildings were still standing. Zarviv did not specify in the video what exactly he was doing in Rafah, but said he had returned “to fight until victory, until settlement … We are here forever.”
While some D9 operators like Zarviv have proudly touted their war crimes, other soldiers don’t publicly discuss the destruction, according to Y. “There’s apathy: People are on their fourth or fifth deployment, they’ve gotten used to it.” But regardless of their level of zeal, Y. affirmed, soldiers understood how the bulldozers were meant to be used. “There was no formal order [to decimate Rafah], but the message is clear — we’re just going to destroy it.”
The army’s complete annihilation of Rafah came despite the fact, as Y. noted, that “there were no encounters [with Hamas fighters], we only ran into paramedics,” a reference to the incident in which Israeli soldiers killed 15 paramedics and firefighters in the city’s Tel Al-Sultan neighborhood.
Like Y., the other soldiers interviewed by +972 and Local Call said they did not see any written orders from the army’s General Staff to carry out the demolitions, and that usually such orders came from the brigade or division level.
H. served in the reserves in Gaza twice, the first time at the beginning of 2024, and the second between May and August as an operations room commander for a battalion stationed in the Netzarim Corridor. “During my first reserve duty, I was in Khirbet Khuza’a [a village near Khan Younis]. We destroyed everything, but there was a logic — to expand the contact line [buffer zone] because it was close to the border,” he said.
“[The second time,] the area we were in was along the Netzarim Corridor by the sea. There was no operational justification to demolish buildings. They posed no threat to Israel. It had become a routine: The army got used to the idea that when you enter a house, you blow it up.
In April 2025, Israeli journalist Yaniv Kubovich entered the “Morag Axis” — the strip of land the army cleared between Khan Younis and Rafah — and reported seeing the remains of an old armored personnel carrier (APC) near one of the destroyed buildings.
Soldiers explained to him that this was another method used to collapse buildings — one that causes extensive damage to the surrounding environment. “The IDF loads [the APC] with explosives and sends [it] autonomously into a street or building that the air force would have previously bombed. But after a year and a half of war, the explosive APC became the cheaper alternative.”
According to Kubovich, the remains of these explosive APCs can now be seen everywhere in the Strip, and it appears that their use has significantly expanded since the early stages of the war.
A., who served multiple tours in Gaza, told +972 and Local Call that this method isn’t limited to old APCs. “You take two giant containers, use dozens if not hundreds of liters of explosive material, and with a D9 or a Bobcat [small bulldozer], remotely controlled, place them at a predetermined point — and detonate. You take down an entire street in one blast.
“Once we entered a compound that used to be a youth educational center,” A. continued. “We stayed there for one night, and then they blew it up. We were a kilometer and a half away [from the explosion] and we still felt the shockwave pass over us, like a strong gust of wind. I thought the building had collapsed on me.”
A. said that sometimes this method was used for relatively operational goals: blowing up an area suspected of having an explosive device, for instance, or clearing paths for troops.
But Yotam described it as another tool primarily used to bring down buildings. “The mission is defined once you receive an allotted amount [of explosives] — then it’s, ‘Alright, go,’” he said. “Part of the ideological mission is to flatten buildings or render an area unusable.” Y., who recently served in Rafah, also testified that “Every night, they blow up one or two [of these APCs.] The force is insane — it flattens everything around it.”
As Israeli forces flatten Rafah, the tens of thousands of Palestinians forced to evacuate in April can hear the destruction of their homes from afar. Dr. Ahmed al-Sufi, the mayor of Rafah, told +972 and Local Call that when he returned to the city in January when the ceasefire began, he was shocked to see the extent of the destruction. Now, displaced again outside Rafah, he hears bombings from the air and nonstop explosions from the ground, and he fears the situation is much worse. “Nobody knows what the city looks like now, but we expect it to be completely destroyed,” he said. “It will be very difficult for the residents to return.”
“No one knows better than us that the Gazans have nowhere to return,” explained a commander, whose battalion was involved in the destruction of about a thousand buildings over two months in 2025. A soldier who served in the same battalion added, “The idea was to destroy everything. Just create strips of destruction.”
This logic of mass destruction has also been applied in the West Bank, albeit on a smaller scale. In fact, a military source told +972 and Local Call that the nature of the destruction in Gaza stems from the tactics the army developed in Operation Defensive Shield in the West Bank during the Second Intifada — “exposing the terrain” in military parlance.
According to a UN OCHA report from March 2025, since the beginning of 2024, Israel has demolished 463 buildings in the West Bank as part of military activity, displacing nearly 40,000 Palestinians from the Jenin, Nur Shams, and Tulkarm camps as part of “Operation Iron Wall.” In Jenin refugee camp, as +972 previously reported, the army has detonated entire residential blocks and bulldozed streets – part of a campaign to re-engineer the camp to suppress Palestinian resistance and undermine the right of return. The military recently announced plans to demolish 116 more homes in the Tulkarm and Nur Shams refugee camps.
Based on the figures provided by soldiers who served in Gaza, a single battalion in the Strip could destroy that many buildings in a week. But the underlying idea is the same. Destruction is no longer simply the byproduct of Israel’s military activity, or part of a wider military strategy — it appears to be the objective itself.
TITLE: Netanyahu says ‘minimal’ aid will go to Gaza to preserve U.S. support
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/05/19/israel-gaza-aid-netanyahu/
EXCERPTS: In a video posted on social media, Netanyahu said that while Israel was deploying “massive force to take control of all of the Gaza Strip … we cannot reach a point of starvation, for practical and diplomatic reasons.”
He said Israel’s “closest friends in the world,” including U.S. politicians who were “unwavering supporters of Israel for decades,” told him that they would arm Israel and defend it at the U.N. Security Council but that “they cannot handle pictures of mass starvation.”
In Israel, Netanyahu’s sharp pivot followed new public and behind-the-scenes pressure from the Trump administration. During a tour of Persian Gulf nations last week, Trump said that “a lot of people are starving” in Gaza. Israel was excluded from the itinerary, in which Trump visited Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.
“Trump’s people are letting Israel know, ‘We will abandon you if you do not end this war,’” said a person familiar with the discussions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press.
Netanyahu said that the move gives Israel leverage against Hamas, while also laying the groundwork for a more substantial military campaign in case ceasefire talks, underway now in Qatar, hit a dead end.
Netanyahu’s decision drew stinging criticism from across the political spectrum, including National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, who accused Netanyahu of making “a grave mistake.”
He “sold the idea of resuming aid in the Sunday night cabinet meeting by saying it was only a technicality,” said the person familiar with the discussions.
But the prime minister’s other coalition partners publicly supported the move, echoing the Israeli leader’s claims in the video statement that it would not affect Israel’s “interconnected” war aims of destroying Hamas and returning the 58 hostages still held in Gaza, 23 of whom Israeli authorities believe are alive.
The aid entering Gaza “will not reach Hamas,” far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said Monday. “It will allow civilians to eat, our friends around the world to continue providing us with international protection at the U.N. Security Council and The Hague, and us to keep fighting, with God’s help, until victory.”
Thank you JP.