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Resistance Report — 25 Feb 2024

Resistance factions work together to confront Israeli army, with Jon Elmer

Jon Elmer walks us through the latest videos that help us understand the fighting and resistance on the ground.

Nora Barrows-Friedman, Asa Winstanley, Ali Abunimah and Jon Elmer of The Electronic Intifada were joined by international human rights lawyer Craig Mokhiber; Dr. Thaer Ahmad, a Palestinian American emergency room doctor who recently volunteered in Gaza, on the day 138 livestream. You can watch the entire broadcast here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uc_TpTsd2VQ

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Full transcript
um and you are watching and listening to the electronic andat live stream we are now going to go to our contributing editor John Elmer for the latest in the resistance uh tactics against uh the Israeli Army hi John hi guys great show terrible terrible news but great show it was great to see Craig and and Dr T that's um incredible testimony I hope we can get him back to talk more about that because um you know it seems weird like that the media doesn't think like hey why don't we interview these doctors that have the personal experience with the people that are coming in uh to these hospitals and what condition people are in and what conditions people are living under unless it's the most obscene um dismantling um like we've watched over the last three weeks of Nasser hospital but this you know like Dr T said this is happening all to every hospital it's happened to every school at all levels um of Education um we've just watched them one by one just Dismantling in front of the entire world um these civilian institutions that are going to be impacted for years to come by this um it's just devastating and uh you guys did a great job of covering that so um yeah let's uh turn to the resistance um still going strong um despite um an avalanche of lies about Israeli progress there's really no indication of any of that um the Israelis moved into move back into uh Southern Gaza City uh in the last few days um and that's when we saw their casualties uh tick back up um because the fighters are still there in the north um the cassam Bri Gade still exist as a fighting force and as we're going to talk about today on the show um all the other groups that are involved uh in in the fight as well um so maybe we'll just start off with number one here tomorrow this is a tunnel operation that the cassam brigades um showed us last week um and we've been bringing you these the whole conflict but it's just incredible to see them being used um Fighters coming up from a tunnel and attacking Israeli forces um behind their positions and Abu ABA spoke the other day uh about this you know he said that you can't defeat fighters who will wait in their positions for months in their defensive positions before attacking um you know he's he said that uh that that kind of commitment um from from the fighters is what we're seeing because this is footage from con Yunis um so this is Fighters that have been waiting in conun uh in their battalions um for the Israelis to come um and and that uh attack that tunnel operation um shows you two casualties and again another uh Palestinian Resistance video that shows Israeli soldiers unlike Israeli uh videos that just show snuff films um bombing from the sky or capturing doctors um and and torturing them um and humiliating them and then putting them on on their television on their national television channels um so we just again the juxtoposition between the two uh couldn't be more Stark and in this video um they they had uh a fighter in this video he's sitting in his room in conun waiting for the battle um and and he addresses it he says the enemy says that it kills civilians because we Fighters are present among civilians no we actually as Fighters are in areas completely devoid of civilians the battlefield with which the enemy specified its location and from which they commanded people to evacuate um so just gives you again from the fight that we haven't been able to hear from um throughout this battle Kasam gave us that um in a video this week people he says the fighter says people did evacuate um and we saw that from the um you know when we talked about how the Israelis break up the entire Gaza Strip into this grid map and tell people to leave um so they're telegraphing where the fight is and the fighters are going there to confront them um but still he says that and we Fighters came for the enemy and the place that they evacuated but this cowardly and criminal enemy goes and kills our children in their homes kills our family in their safe houses kills them with f-16s and attacks them while they're safely in their homes we Fighters are here in the battlefield let us show you how to deal with fighters on the battlefield um asking for this um you know asking for this battle to involve uh the Palestinian Fighters and the Israeli Fighters not the hospitals not the schools schs uh all levels of schools all levels of Hospitals and healthare Clinics uh fight a battle against the fighters that you're saying um that you're in Gaza to battle and to destroy and dismantle um which we know uh isn't isn't happening um so maybe we go to number two here tomorrow this is the this is Kasam we've seen this before um oh this is them this is them setting up a um a remotely detonated device um and we're seeing them here use uh a backup camera from a car um which we've seen them use before um taking them off the car reappropriate them and here we're watching them place it uh in the entrance to a building um and we're watching I I'll give you the dialogue the next time it runs through but we're watching these Fighters watching from a third location um communicating with fighters on the ground as the Israelis come to this building deciding whether they're going to go for them and the fighter says death is coming to you God willing um they identify the soldiers um and then the phone rings we've taken the audio out of this but the phone rings and he says let the one behind get closer so they can entertain each other Hell the one in the back went to the tank four times the guy says and this guy can't even come into the room and the fighter says we've been waiting 100 days for this which again is what Abu abeda who is the spokesperson for the cassam brigades effectively the spokesperson for the Palestinian national Army um addressed um that Fighters have been waiting um for this Ambush which the Arabic text says there um killed um three Israeli soldiers uh commander of the Battalion um the acting company commander of the Battalion and another um uh Commander from the Battalion and again so there's a there's not backup cameras at every uh Ambush set up by the Palestinians so what we're seeing is just a snippet of of the operations that go on um and so this is a remotely detonated shaah device that we've talked about and we showed uh being hand delivered uh at previous times this is it remotely detonated um from a separate location um so another successful uh operation that and and when the fighter says he's gone back to his tank four times and this guy can't even get into the room um it shows you that the Israelis are afraid to go in these buildings they're not doing anything like fighting inside the buildings or inside the tunnels um they're not even on the street coming into these buildings um they're taking time to get in there um so there's nothing that's happening which we've been saying for four months um there's nothing happening like going into the tunnels um and fighting because this is this is this is outside um so these ambushes are set up in the tunnels as well um and when they lose soldiers like this they're not interested in continuing to do that um and so they shift their focus to Nasser hospital where they snipe people uh innocent people uh at the entrance of the hospital because they're not willing to do what we're watching on camera here um uh happen um they're not willing to pay that cost that's why they send uh quad copters with guns on them um instead of Simply like I'm not going to give the Israelis uh orders on on how to operate um but there's no reason that you have to Shell from from a distance uh Nasser hospital or cut off the power and food to the hospital if your if your uh supposition is that there's somehow some objective there um you don't have to kill people with standoff fire or suffocate people on ventilation machines uh it's just it's so depraved what we're watching and when you juxtapose it with the the resistance um I think it's just really Stark maybe we can go to number three tomorrow um this is the popular front for the liberation of Palestine the Abu Ali Mustafa brigades and this is our first uh video that we've seen of U the pflp in combat in this way we usually see this group uh firing rockets and mortars um these are the smaller Guerilla groups that operate uh within the Gaza Strip and if we kind of understand the cassam brigades the armed wing of Hamas to be the national Army um which it is and the way it's organized is as a national Army um after the national Army there's a number of Gilla groups um that operate Sarah Al kuds um the popular front for the liberation of Palestine um and I'll go through and and and show you some other groups but this is a a pflp operation uh in conun uh firing an RPG at a tank and um these other groups these smaller groups they don't have the information operations networks set up like the cassam brigades do um but the the pflp um the Abu Ali Mustafa brigades have talked about carrying out 100 of these operations throughout the Gaza Strip um and just to give you a sense the cassam Bri Gades have acknowledged more than a thousand something like 12 or uh 1300 of these kind of operations so it's a it's a matter of scale um but for Israel to um to claim victory uh in the Gaza Strip um we would stop seeing these videos of these groups like the pflp uh operating and we're not we're seeing them operating in all areas and like I said they Israelis reinvaded Gaza City the other day um and and now we're getting videos today um from Gaza City fighting so we're seeing these groups able to communicate um on the battlefield instantly this isn't a video from weeks and weeks ago um and we'll see in coming up videos that um that the fighters themselves indicate that these uh videos are are um they're new they're recent they're they're uh responding to the conditions um they're not saving these up and and Publishing them once a month um these are actual Battlefield reports that we're trying to bring to you and every video that we we're going to see again just to say every video that we're going to see today has happened uh only since the last time you saw us uh one week ago so we're still covering these videos um as the battle unfolds um so just to keep that in mind um as we're watching these um and again this is a unified uh command a unified front from these resistance groups and we've seen these groups all make statements throughout the war um and particularly lately related to the ceasefire that are all consistent they all speak in different uh language but they all say the same thing these Fighters uh whether they're islamists or leftists whether they're the national army or the Guerilla armies um are operating in uh a unified front with us with the same position one group isn't calling for uh a ceasefire under conditions that are different than the cassam brigades um are asking for or that Hamas is asking for on the national level um and so this kind of resistance um we haven't shown it for the for the main reason um because the national Army effectively The cambre Gates has shown us so much video and um there's so much week to week to break down that we haven't done so I wanted to bring this week uh some of these other groups that people have mentioned that they wanted to hear from so that's the pflp uh and an RPG attack so maybe we can go to the next one tomorrow is uh SEL kuds this is Islamic jihad's armed Wing um and they're again uh reconnaissance constant reconnaissance they're not disappeared in the north um this is Gaza City um the Israelis believe that they're the ones watching but they're actually being watched um and then you see an RPG attack on that Israeli position by S kuds um and here we see s kuds launching um a kamakazi drone a drone that effectively is itself a missile um and U carries a warhead and flies like a drone but then attacks like a missile um and we're seeing here mortar uh attacks and the same the thing is that just to say to the listeners uh who aren't following this um as close L um these videos that we're seeing of these mortar attacks these videos are constant they're happening we get them every single day of all the groups firing uh these mortar rounds and again the reason why I haven't brought these videos uh of mortars um is because we don't have time every week because of the the quantity of other videos to show that but the groups are operating um carrying out these U mortar attacks all the time and this is this suicide drone kamakazi drone that we're seeing um this is a change in Battlefield conditions too because this is now standoff fire as it's called firing from a distance um uh at Israeli positions that have moved back whereas previous weeks and months we were watching positions um attacking the Israelis from up close because the Israelis were in builtup areas um for for a large measure the Israelis have left the builtup areas um have and they've also shaped the landscape we've watch them with bulldozers uh bulldozing everywhere and essentially the Israelis are reshaping this battlefield as well and creating um massive dirt burms around their troops so that they are essentially protecting their tanks in the buffer zone um and because the Israelis have had now four months on the ground to shape um the landscape literally uh there was an an Israeli TV report yesterday that showed the highway that they're building from n oz to cut the Gaza Strip in half and they showed just openly on Israeli television how they liquidated dismantled and destroyed um the hospital that was beside uh this road that they're using to cut off um the Gaza Strip um so these are conditions that are changing uh on the battlefield by the Israelis um and the Palestinian resistance in Gaza this is in the north this is in Gaza City um is is able to respond um uh to those changing conditions and it shifts the way that the battlefield is looked at so just because the videos are different or just because we lose contact with a group for a couple of days um that's not indicating that the situation has completely changed um It's a situation that has gradually evolved um and the resistance re re um responds to that um yeah we can go to the next one tomorrow um so this is the this is the uh Cass Bri Gades operating again in in on Unice um and we we've seen these videos constantly Kasam um wasn't communicating these field reports um for a couple of days and Abu oeda came out and said that uh Battlefield conditions sometimes uh dictate um laying low um and and so people you know shouldn't shouldn't think that some kind of difference in communication is indicating somehow that the resistance has been um imp acted in ways that would prevent it from fighting uh in in these areas so this is a we're watching um Yassin attacks uh by cassam brigades Fighters uh against uh armored vehicles and some people because we don't see the aftermath of these um attacks uh maybe after this runs through we can go to the next one tomorrow um the um the effectiveness of this weapon which I showed last show uh the Israelis evacuating um somebody that was a tank commander um that was inside a tank um that was hit so we know that they're being killed inside their tanks by these vehicles we know that they're impacting um their bulldozers like we see U this footage right here that we're watching for the listening audience we're watching a a fighter shoot down an alley from I don't know what that is 30 feet away from the bulldozer um so not only are they not dismantled but right beside and so this is a video that um Al jaaz showed the other day of the cassam Bri Gades um research and development of the Yasin uh Warhead which the Palestinians have created a clone um of an existing Warhead uh Soviet Warhead they've created a clone of that weapon in the Gaza Strip using um what they have in Gaza which is largely unexploded ordinance um and then their Engineers um have cre created um through years of testing four years according to the Cassandra gauge of just this kind of testing um to get the exact um you know uh chemical um clone to get the efficacy so what you're looking there is alaz indicating that that 600 millimeters 60 cm 2 feet of uh penetration through concrete um an Israeli armor is a secret how thick Israeli armor is but it's not 650 millimeters thick in all places um and so when Palestinians are targeting um you know that just wanted to bring this for people who who wonder what we what what we what happens on the other side uh of these yasim launches that the fighters themselves are very quickly exiting and you can see actually I showed a couple weeks ago of uh of the fighters uh peeling away after they fire their RPGs and you can see the fighters in this video just uh just testing the weapon um that they're peeling away even in this R&D uh setting they're they're actually performing um in their military capacity you can watch this guy does it here even though he's even though he's watching uh he's W he they're testing here how many layers of this concrete it can go through and still the fighters um are peeling off so I just wanted to show people um that for the efficacy of it um maybe we can go to number six here tomorrow and this is also s kuds the armed uh wing of Islamic Jihad this is a long video that I edited shorter but you can see them uh tracking tanks and you can see that on the top of that tank there it's what's called a cope cage and we saw those um the Israelis added that to their tanks um uh before the invasion of Gaza and they were flat metal cages to protect against the suicide drones um that we Lo watched launched or the RPGs um fired from um from elevated areas and they came uh into Gaza with those cope cages and now they've changed those cope cages from being flat across the top to being uh a canopy um because of the efficacy of the Palestinian resistance firing down from elevated shooting positions which I've pointed out all through this war is a significant uh Advantage um for attacking the Army um and attacking the these tanks if you can attack them from above um they're they're not as strong and so what we're watching here is um Sarah Al Good's monitoring an Israeli Supply Convoy watching all of their listening devices we're watching them and those are the bmms that I talked about the Israelis have created that burm um and and then their Fighters are behind it and their armored vehicles are behind it and so what we're watching here is sah Al coulds monitoring that Supply Convoy for multiple days um figuring out the position exactly to where they are and then calibrating their mortar fire um so that it's not just firing um you know randomly at the border with their mortars hoping to hit Israeli positions on the other side of the Border um they're able to monitor U the movements calibrate where they are where that means that their their base is um and then get their mortars On Target like this video clearly shows um the Isel CS showing in this video um the metac flight by the Israeli Air Force to get their injured Fighters their injured soldiers out of these areas so there's the cop cage again you can see how it's a canopy now rather than flat across the top and that that is a is a response to the efficacy of the Palestinian resistance firing um from above so again we're seeing Battlefield conditions change this is operations in the buffer zone this is Israel not wanting to be in the builtup areas right now in this interim period between U the invasions of K Yunis and and Rafa which the Israelis say is pending um but if you give the resistance time as s kuds has had here um they're going to re-calibrate their resistance into the buffer zone they're going to attack these positions inside the buffer zone and it takes again these are all videos from this last week um if we were doing uh collections of videos from the whole month um you know we might show these Trends in a series of videos uh all at once but we're we're breaking these down week by week covering uh covering this conflict so this video shows that um the resistance is able to monitor all of these positions that Israel believes that they're monitoring from um and then successfully attack them and um even when we weren't getting as many field reports from the cassam Bri Gades uh for the last week um the Israelis were still uh leaking out their casualties uh one by one as they have been doing throughout this whole War they try not to group their casualties together to show that three and four and five soldiers are being killed uh at once um and we don't know the the outcome of this but it's clear from this met back flight that you'll watch uh come in here and then after that we can flip to the next one tomorrow um that the um that the positions that the mortar fire that we watch and we only see the cameraman showing uh the mortar there's the metac helicopter uh being flown out um so that's SEL coulds um and this this next one um is the popular resistance committees the Nasser Saladin brigades and they're showing you here that they're operating in the North and their rocket launchers uh capacity has been removed the cassam brigades as the national army they have their rocket launchers buried um and connected by tunnels and that's one of the things that has frustrated the Israelis is that they believe they know where these Rockets are being fired from and then they approach and they they don't see it because it's buried uh in the ground so the popular resistance committees here is showing us that they've lost their launchers um but they're firing those um those missiles those La those Rockets um without launchers and putting a sign there that says that the Naser salahadin brigades are still operating in the northern uh Gaza Strip so Israel hasn't even knocked out the smaller Guerilla groups in these areas um let alone um dismantling the national Army effectively that the cassam brigades um are so and again um the popular resistance committees same as all the other groups they believe no deal with without the end of the aggression so they're not saying temporary ceasefires um they're sticking to the position of the Palestinian national movement in the proposal that was submitted to um to the negotiators by Hamas um um which is communicating the cassam Bri Gades message from uh the Gaza Strip and we see the popular resistance committees um participating in that so that's uh another one of the uh groups in the Gaza Strip operating so you could see there with without their launchers um but still carrying on to fight which is something that the cassam brigades if they were to be dismantled as a national Army um could revert to a Guerilla group that would operate um with similar Effectiveness so um these are just lies U of the Israelis to say that they're dismantling these and and you know as Ali said trying to get a spectacle of Victory um out of essentially an attack um on a ghettoized population that has nowhere to go um so maybe go to the next one tomorrow this is U another two groups this is the U Democratic front for the liberation of Palestine uh a leftist group The National resistance brigades they're called the Martyr Omar kasum brigades um and they're operating with the alaxa martyrs brigades which is um a fata adjacent um resistance group um and they're carrying out a joint operation and on that sign that you see there well the fighters uh linking up uh the Rockets to fire without rocket launchers that sign um saluted an attack that happened from a Palestinian uh from East Jerusalem who carried out an attack um in southern Israel the other day and they're acknowledging that attack uh within 36 hours of that attack so these groups are not only communicating with the outside world um they're able to operate themselves and leave these uh messages for us so this is the dflp Democratic front for the liberation of Palestine and the al- AXA uh martyr Brigade so maybe we can go to the next one after this launch here tomorrow um so um it's one of the half a dozen um other groups that are operating uh in in in uh in Gaza and one more group that's operating this what we're watching here is uh a man portable air defense system now this is the um I think they're kind of colloquially known as stingers um but that's uh an sa7 that's an Israeli drone um these were weapons that we've talked about before on the program these were brought in from Libya uh after the collapse of the Gaddafi government um these weapons um 1970s uh and 80s anti-aircraft Weaponry that are able to be shoulder fired the same way as the yine um but fire a heat seeking missile um that can hit planes um so the collapse of the Gaddafi government let uh a bunch of these weapon systems that are you know more than a $100,000 weapon systems uh PR proliferated uh throughout the Middle East and many went to Gaza but the problem with them was that the batteries um were dated and that the whole system relied on these uh thermal batteries to work um and so essentially I think I described them previously without the batteries as effectively a stick um that you could maybe hit somebody with but um but that otherwise useless weapon so the Palestinians got these weapons from Libya as effectively useless weapons and then their Kasam engineering units set about uh building a battery pack for them and you can see at this shot right there that uh uh Rim shaped um uh what's the word whatever that is Horseshoe underneath the the scope there that's an Israeli Hermes drone that's their main drone that you hear buzzing over every single video there's a good shot of it you can see that at the front um that uh semi circle is the retrofitted batteries that the cassam brigades engineers have developed in Gaza to make these weapons that we don't know how many they have but at the time um the reporting at the time when Gaddafi was collapsing was about how there was thousands of these uh weapons um that had been uh looted from uh Gaddafi's uh stores so we're seeing this um for we saw Kasam Fighters bring this weapon on um October 7th and we've seen them fired a couple times in between then but this is the mujahadin brigades um the fighter that you're seeing there is a fighter from the mujahadin brigades who's using the Kasam weapon um and so they call that a joint operation um and so this is the mujahadin brigades also operating uh in the Gaza Strip and you can see from this video that the groups are operating together they're sharing their Weaponry um and the mujah deine brigades are also um have been fighting on all fronts uh of this battle as all these groups have that I've mentioned uh more than half a dozen of these groups operate you can see there on that shot the retrofitted battery um so that was a question that we had going into this war um if we were doing the show six months ago uh I would have talked about whether they had retrofitted these batteries and if it meant that the Palestinians had a uh anti-aircraft defenses um and so I guess we're seeing in this uh image that the the the answer to that is yes they do have these um and um we this is again something that we see when the Israelis are not in the urban areas um this kind of fire and you can see it towards a helicopter there they haven't hit anything yet uh but you can see that they're well within range of that and so the battery is needed for two parts it's needed for the launch but it's also needed to guide the missile in the air and so we've seen these weapons be used in Syria um where they didn't have quite the engineering um they didn't have the time um to to to to retrofit these um and we saw them be able to launch with makeshift batteries but not track but what we're seeing here is weapons that are able to track um so I just wanted to bring that to everybody so that people knew that there was other groups operating um to the layers of this resistance we've mostly been um following the cassam Bri Gades because the cassam Bri Gades operate effectively as a national Army at this point um and so following their operations is is uh akin to following the resistance operations but all of these smaller groups uh are operating themselves thanks for watching this video please subscribe to our YouTube channel hit like leave a comment these engagements help us with the YouTube algorithm and it helps us to get around Silicon Valley censorship as much as possible it does make a difference you can also support our journalism by going to electronic in.net and clicking on donate now thank you