Shujaiya, Gaza, after recent shelling and bombing by Israel

The current war on Gaza was started by Netanyahoo based on the racist frenzy he had created over the alleged kidnapping of three teenagers. The teenagers were killed by criminals a few hours after they were abducted. Netanyahho knew this but did not tell the public for three weeks falsely blaming Hamas. By then the public was in the mood for war. An Israeli official has now confirmed this in an on-the-record quote.

As Times of Israel reported on June 22, ten days after the “kidnapping”:

Netanyahu: Hard evidence Hamas behind kidnappings

Israel has conclusive evidence that Hamas is behind the June 12 kidnapping of three Israeli teenagers, and is passing that evidence on to several other countries before releasing it publicly, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday morning.
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Israel has “unequivocal proof that this is Hamas,” Netanyahu said ahead of the weekly cabinet meeting in Jerusalem. “We are sharing this proof and information to this effect with several countries. Soon this information will be made public.”

Netanyahoo lied but a gag order prevented the Israeli press from mentioning it. Then Max Blumenthal reported in the Electronic Intifada on July 8:

Netanyahu government knew teens were dead as it whipped up racist frenzy

Israeli police, intelligence officials and Netanyahu knew within hours of the kidnapping and murder of the three teens that they had been killed. And they knew who the prime suspects were less than a day after the kidnapping was reported.

Rather than reveal these details to the public, Israel’s Shin Bet intelligence agency imposed a gag order on the national media, barring news outlets from reporting that the teens had almost certainly been killed, and forbidding them from revealing the identities of their suspected killers. The Shin Bet even lied to the parents of the kidnapped teens, deceiving them into believing their sons were alive.
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On 12 June, three Jewish Israeli youths, Naftali Frenkel, Gilad Shaar and Eyal Yifrach, went missing while hitchhiking from Kfar Etzion, an illegal settlement in the occupied West Bank. At 10:25pm, Shaar placed a panicked call to Israeli police.

During the eerie call lasting two minutes and nine seconds, the supposed kidnappers can be heard ordering the youths to keep their heads down. Israel Radio plays in the background as Shaar repeatedly appeals for help. Then several gunshots can be heard followed by celebratory singing as the kidnappers remark, “We got three.” The teens had been killed.

Soon after the call the murderers car, but not the dead bodies, was found with blood and DNA of the killed teens all over it.

J.J. Goldberg confirmed the story on July 10 in the Jewish Daily Forward and added that Hamas was clearly not responsible:

How Politics and Lies Triggered an Unintended War in Gaza (Note: I seriously doubt the “unintended” claim  in the headline here)

Once the boys’ disappearance was known, troops began a massive, 18-day search-and-rescue operation, entering thousands of homes, arresting and interrogating hundreds of individuals, racing against the clock. Only on July 1, after the boys’ bodies were found, did the truth come out: The government had known almost from the beginning that the boys were dead. It maintained the fiction that it hoped to find them alive as a pretext to dismantle Hamas’ West Bank operations.
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It was clear from the beginning that the kidnappers weren’t acting on orders from Hamas leadership in Gaza or Damascus. Hamas’ Hebron branch — more a crime family than a clandestine organization — had a history of acting without the leaders’ knowledge, sometimes against their interests. Yet Netanyahu repeatedly insisted Hamas was responsible for the crime and would pay for it.

This week John B. Judis explained how the fake search for the teens developed into the war:

Who Bears More Responsibility for the War in Gaza?

The two men, as the Israeli government quickly discovered, were associated with a rogue Hamas family that had defied the organization’s leadership. The Israelis also strongly suspected that the boys had been killed, but they used the pretext of searching for the boys to arrest around 500 Palestinians, including Hamas’s West Bank officials and activists. There was sporadic rocket fire on Israel during June that seems to have come from non-Hamas Islamist groups, although the details are murky. Then on July 1, in the wake of the discovery of the three teenagers’ bodies, the Israelis launched 34 airstrikes on Gaza. On July 6, it bombed a tunnel in Gaza, killing six Hamas militants. On the next day, Hamas began taking responsibility for new rockets attacks, and the Israelis then launched Protective Edge.

All the three reports above did not name sources for the claims that Israel knew about the killing and that the murder was not Hamas related. Yesterday BBC journalist Jon Donnison was the first to get an on-the-record quote from an Israeli official:

Israeli police MickeyRosenfeld tells me men who killed 3 Israeli teens def lone cell, hamas affiliated but not operating under leadership1/2

Seems to contradict the line from Netanyahu government. 2/2

Israeli police spokes Mickey Rosenfeld also said if kidnapping had been ordered by Hamas leadership, they’d have known about it in advance.

It is obvious that Netanyahoo’s war on Gaza, which has so far killed over 1,000 Palestinians, is a war of aggression justified with false claims about a crime which had no connection whatsoever with Hamas or the people of Gaza.

But the United States government, and its various client states (who very likely knew all this since June 12) is still claiming that Israel is only exercising its “right to defend” itself and should be allowed to continue to do so.