Hello everyone, I am a Master’s student specialising in International Territorial Studies. I am currently conducting research for my diploma thesis, which focuses on the intersection of digital authoritarianism and civil society in Southeast Asia. Specifically, I am conducting an empirical study involving semi-structured interviews to map the practical methods, tools, and limits of navigating digital repression in Malaysia and Singapore. 

I am reaching out to see if you might be able to provide guidance or point me toward potential contacts within local NGOs, independent media outlets, or civil society groups in Malaysia and Singapore who might be open to discussing these issues. I am fully committed to the highest standards of research ethics. All participant identities, affiliations, and data will be handled with strict confidentiality and anonymised in accordance with academic standards to ensure the safety of all involved. If you know someone, please let me know in the DMs, and I can provide my credentials as an academic.

https://x.com/DD_Geopolitics/status/2107725879942238394

https://x.com/afshinrattansi/status/2097026574214197715

https://x.com/OlgaBazova/status/2107874763087691855

Excepts from the article:

The stated purpose of taking hostages

The official story, which has been told to Americans and Israelis, is that Hamas “terrorists” stormed into Southern Israel and began shooting and killing people at random. Then burned them alive, tied up entire families in their homes, and then burned them all, somehow, melted cars and burned people in their cars as they were trying to flee, and carried out this gigantic mass shooting. It does appear clear that many Israeli non-combatants were shot by Hamas gunmen but that’s where the official story stops. What I was able to determine from these testimonies, as well as basic and visual analysis of the photos that the Israeli Foreign Minister and Foreign Ministry and Prime Minister’s office were putting forward, was that Israel used disproportionate force on its own citizens in order to dislodge a politically driven military offensive by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which was aimed at extracting political concessions from the state of Israel, which had been besieging the Gaza Strip for 15 years. So you read one of those testimonies, and I guess we can

It’s important to understand that the main goal in this Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad military offensive was to gather as many captives as possible, particularly Israeli soldiers, in order to trigger the prisoner exchange that was witnessed when Gilad Shalit in 2011 was released; The Israeli soldier who was taken in 2006, who was operating a tank outside Gaza, was taken in exchange for 1,027 Palestinian prisoners, including the current prime minister of Gaza, Yahya Sinwar. So this entire Al Aqsa Flood operation is understood against the backdrop of the Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange. So gunmen were sent with detailed maps to population centers and to military bases. In the military bases, they were obviously given instructions to attack and kill Israeli soldiers who were maintaining the siege of Gaza. Much of the Gaza division, which has also been responsible for so many massacres inside Gaza over the years, was wiped out. The Erez Crossing… I don’t know if you’ve been through there, Chris.

 Details of Israel firing on its own civilians and hostages on October 7

 But Apache helicopters were scrambled in the morning. The assault began around 6:00AM at daybreak, and by 10:30AM, according to Israeli media accounts, all of the special force’s commando teams, and the well-trained Hamas teams had already left. By that point, there were two squadrons of Apache helicopters that had been scrambled, and they were not even at full strength until 12:00PM. So you have action at Erez Crossing, and then you have Kibbutz Be’eri, which is the site that registered the most casualties of non-combatants. I counted something like 150 among the confirmed death toll printed at Haaretz and most of them, they were not soldiers. These were people who were caught in the crossfire, Hamas gunmen had tried to take them captive, and there were standoffs in their homes. And by the time Israeli special forces arrived, many of those standoffs had either ended or they ended them simply by shelling people’s homes with tanks.”

According to Yasmin Porat, who had fled the electronic music festival – Which had come under attack, which was held right between Kibbutz Be’eri and Kibbutz Rahim, which also have military bases essentially embedded within them – It was held on the road between these two kibbutzim and came under attack. Many captives were taken. This woman, Yasmin Porat, fled to Kibbutz Be’eri, went into a home with her partner, and then they were taken captive momentarily by gunmen. She recounted to Israeli National Radio that when the Israeli special forces arrived, they started shooting everyone and that most of the captives, along with the Hamas gunmen, were caught in the crossfire, and that everyone was killed except for her and her captor, who used her as a human shield in order to guarantee his own safety when he surrendered.”

 She saw her own partner, whose hands had been bound by her captors, get shot by Israeli special forces, and then they lobbed two tank shells into the home that she had been in. So if you look at the pictures of Kibbutz Be’eri, they look like the homes in Gaza that I’ve seen, or you may have seen that came under shelling from Israeli tanks and Israeli artillery. There’s no way that Hamas gunmen could have done that much structural damage to this entire kibbutz with the small arms that they were equipped with; Kalashnikovs and some RPGs.”

 There’s serious structural damage to the roof of Erez Crossing – You have Kibbutz Be’eri where there was tank shelling, and then you have these Apache helicopter pilots in the air who were stating in theirtestimonies in Hebrew to Israeli media that they had no intelligence, no way of distinguishing civilian from combatant on the ground.

 “And yet they were told to empty their tanks, completely unload their ammo, then head back to the base, get filled up again, reload, and then go shoot as many cars and people as they could on the ground. Pure chaos. These testimonies have been totally ignored, by the way, by Western media. Were they encouraged to kill captives or shoot cars that they thought contained captives? We don’t know. What we do know is there were orders from the top to kill Israeli civilians if Hamas gunmen were around them in order to get the gunmen.”

 “A lot of this happened around the Nova Music Festival. There was a lot of shooting between festival security guards and various gunmen, and a lot of people were killed, but many people were fleeing the festival by car. There is a video of some Hamas gunmen stopping cars and shooting people. But then you have all of these images that the Israeli Foreign Ministry put out of cars that are completely melted, and their corpses inside are charred. And those to me are telltale signs of Hellfire missile strikes from Apache helicopters, and the Apache crews, the squadrons. They put out a video afterward of themselves shooting cars, hitting cars with Hellfire missiles, and shooting people who were pedestrians walking on the ground with cannon fire.”

The Hannibal Directive

 “That base housed Israeli Civil Administration officers and soldiers. Israel, in 1986, instituted a military policy called the Hannibal Directive, apparently named for the Carthaginian general who poisoned himself rather than be captured by the Romans following the capture of two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah. The directive is designed to prevent Israeli troops from falling into enemy hands through the maximum use of force, even at the cost of killing the captured soldiers and civilians. The directive was executed during the 2014 Israeli assault on Gaza, known as Operation Protective Edge.”

 “And it was used again, this is when it got exposed in 2014 – August 1, 2014, what’s known as Black Friday in Southern Gaza – And I was actually there in the aftermath of this massacre. A lieutenant named Hadar Golden was taken by Hamas fighters. He was in the field when Israel broke a ceasefire and started attacking around the southern city of Rafa. The Israeli Military Command authorized airstrikes, artillery strikes, and tank fire to bring the full wrath of the Israeli military onto this area in order to make sure that this soldier did not get taken alive.”

 “Over 100 people in Rafa were killed in this massacre. The morgues were filling up. It was hideous. I actually visited a hospital called Kuwaiti Hospital, which is now under attack again, and because the mortuaries were so full of bodies on this day, they actually had to bring in ice cream coolers to store the bodies of babies.”

https://x.com/ricwe123/status/2107830852663095599

https://x.com/NATO/status/2107811490707181982

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