Saturday, December 19, 2015

Don’t Be Fooled, Open Your Eyes - Thoughts of an IDF Soldier Serving in the West Bank

by Noga Gur-Arieh Jewish Journal of Los Angeles

Yoav, a reservist IDF soldier, serves in the West Bank. After seeing sights you don't read about in the news, he sat down to write this for you. His one request is for you to help spread the truth.

Back in April, I shared with you my thoughts in regards of the international media cover of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, from my point of view as an IDF reserve soldier.

I can honestly say that since then, nothing has really changed. With that being said, there is something interesting that's going on within the borders of Israel.

In the past couple of months we witness a disturbing uprising in Palestinian terrorism within the borders of Israel. Almost every day, still, you hear on the news about yet another brutal attack, usually committed by a young Palestinian with a sharp object, stabbing Israeli civilians. In almost every attack, though, you hear about an Israeli "mob" that was nearby, saved the victim's life, and either wounded or killed the terrorist.

The new generation of Palestinian terrorists are, as I pointed out before, young, and lack experience. But somehow they are the biggest threat to Israel's security, as they are either work here, or live here (some of the terrorists were Israeli-Arabs.) These young men and women, operating the way they do – are the biggest challenge the Israeli Defense Forces now face.

On my last article, I wrote about how the IDF is equipping its units with cameras, so that they can show the real footage (not the one produced and carefully edited by Pallywood) from the field, and to learn from and handle any wrongdoing by our forces.
Now, the foreign press has a problem with such footage, as it's not coming from Pallywood, or from leftist Israeli organizations like "B'Tselem," who equip Palestinians with cameras, asking them to take footage of the IDF in the territories, and usually frame it in whichever way suits them.

So they make stuff of their own…

Almost every Friday, we witness demonstrations by Palestinians and their supporters, along the Separation Fence and near the Palestinian villages. In many cases, after some Pallywood messengers taunt us soldiers in "demonstrations" things go out of hand, which means stones of Molotov Cocktails are being thrown. At this point, the entire area becomes a closed military zone. Then, we are forced to get things under control, which means using non-lethal riot control tools (tear gas and rubber bullets,) and the mob of "human rights activists" and journalists are required to clear the area. Sadly, in many cases- they refuse to evacuate.

This, right there, is the "money-time," with all cameras pointing at us, the soldiers, eager to track our every move, and catch us slipping up.

Now imaging something like that happening to your soldiers, your brothers and sisters, your children, your parents. What country in its right mind would not see this situation as intolerable and would take every matter possible to eliminate the threat?! This is where the "when Israel does it- it's wrong" double standards kick in, and this is the moment the cameras just love to catch.

Now stop reading for a second, and let in sink – the cameras there are not meant to capture a reality, but to make a certain reality happen, at all cause.

As terror continues to strike Israel, you hear and read almost daily on the news about a "young Palestinian boy who was beaten or shot by an Israeli mob. You see images of a young man, holding merely a screwdriver or a knife, lying on the ground, bleeding. That's before he is taken away to get treatment at an Israeli hospital, after committing a terror attack. And the "mob" are Israelis who saw a fellow Israeli being attacked, and decided to take a risk and help out. This, by no means, make a terrorist the victim. And no, this can't be called "self-defense" in some cases and "Israel is a terrorist country" in others.

Thanks to the age of "CCTV On Every Smartphone," we can see in the current terror wave, almost instantly, videos of the terrorists during the attack, followed by the response of the public, or the armed forces. The truth is out there, but this doesn't stop the international media from altering it.

Honestly, it hurts me to see it, those big headlines depicting only parts of the truth. I find this very disturbing, knowing that people who read headlines of such, and, like many of us, believe in the integrity of the media, form an opinion about Israel and the IDF accordingly. This happens to us, soldiers, in the Palestinian Territories almost every day, and now it is happening to Israeli civilians as well – we are being framed as the terrorists, instead of the fighters against terror. What's even more disturbing, is that when it comes to any other country – the framing all of a sudden changes. This breaks my heart, as I am fighting, day and night, for my country's safety.

I hope you keep this in mind the next time you open a newspaper…

Yours, Yoav.

Yoav, a reservist IDF soldier, serves in the West Bank. After seeing sights you don't read about in the news, he sat down to write this for you. His one request is for you to help spread the truth.

Back in April, I shared with you my thoughts in regards of the international media cover of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, from my point of view as an IDF reserve soldier.

I can honestly say that since then, nothing has really changed. With that being said, there is something interesting that's going on within the borders of Israel.

So they make stuff of their own…

This, right there, is the "money-time," with all cameras pointing at us, the soldiers, eager to track our every move, and catch us slipping up.

Now stop reading for a second, and let in sink – the cameras there are not meant to capture a reality, but to make a certain reality happen, at all cause.

I hope you keep this in mind the next time you open a newspaper…

Yours, Yoav.

Monday, December 14, 2015

Many who think they are pro-Israel are clueless.

From: Shirley Lewis <slewis46@att.net>

NO RESPONSE TO ME NEEDED THIS IS FYI

Is every single person you know signed up to get FREE Palestinian Media Watch bulletins in order to stay fully informed? Both mainstream media and Jewish American press refuse to cover what Abbas/Palestinian Authority/Fatah really is based on what it says to its own people. It's not a Left/Right issue. It's a two people cannot live side by side in peace if one side is inciting hate and violence all the time - never offering an ecumenical alternative.

It's not like you are asking for money. Just suggest to stay truly informed by getting the bulletins. Just click on the bottom where it says join our mailing list. If link does not work go to http://www.palwatch.org,/ upper right, one can sign up.

Bulletin

Dec. 4, 2015

Abbas' Fatah honors "heroic" killer of "11 Zionists"

http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001HmLAbP7EsaaXuGyhQKqRwiDLkid29djAXG3_eaO10X_DU7fCRJNEnovDhMx6vuFsSCNwGNfE94fQF-AupunHnVudR8m_cp-sMRaQXrupALcqDFPVCMc38uY8o18TxXgF0plOtSJe1n0l_2Mnzxf95u9n88xN6opIjaJcgKyviykX5wL1qvI-czaAkZE8OlTCEFr_WoiwJ5Um7iVDMn2q8A==&c=bK2c80pwURUmuKmK7b7sX2q5QSY_yB-1_fo22j3KI68pVsdarvj4ZQ==&ch=gXDJ28wEKoGPHP0u-LakV3QyceuUgw2uVBikjLGpdL_HGM7fUbJM9A==

Itamar Marcus and Nan Jacques Zilberdik

PA Chairman Abbas' Fatah movement never misses an opportunity to glorify terrorists who have murdered Israelis. Fatah found such an occasion last week, when the movement released a new photo of a "heroic" terrorist who killed 11 Israelis 13 years ago.

Thaer Hammad is a Palestinian terrorist who is serving 11 life sentences in an Israeli prison for shooting and killing 7 soldiers and 3 civilians with a sniper rifle from a hilltop in Wadi Al-Haramiya in the West Bank on March 3, 2002. Fatah posted two photos of the murderer Thaer Hammad on its official Facebook page:

Text on right picture: "The first day in captivity"

Text on left picture: "After 13 years in captivity"

Text below pictures: "The heroic prisoner Thaer Hammad, who carried out the Wadi Ah-Haramiya operation (i.e., terror attack), in which he killed 11 Zionists, in a new picture after 13 years in captivity. He is still sitting in the Zionist enemy's prison."

[Official Facebook page of the Fatah

Movement, Nov. 21, 2015]

This is in keeping with official PA and Fatah policy of glorifying all terrorists who have killed or tried to kill Israelis. Palestinian Media Watch has pointed this out for many years and this continues during the current wave of attacks. Significantly, Abbas himself has referred to the current wave of attacks in which many Israelis have been murdered as a "popular peaceful uprising" and he has not condemned even one of the attacks. Therefore it is not surprising that a terrorist who killed 11 during the PA terror campaign from 2000-2005 is also presented now as a "hero" and role model for today's terrorists.

This research was made possible by the support of readers like you. Donate to PMW now.

VISIT PMW VIDEO ARCHIVES

Shahada (Death for Allah) promotion	Holocaust denial and distortion
Success of Shahada promotion	Glorifying terrorists and terror
Promoting violence & terror	Demonization
Conspiracy libels	Israel's right to exist denied
Jewish history rewritten	Objective: Israel's destruction

p:+972 2 625 4140 e: pmw@palwatch.org

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Sunday, December 13, 2015

Defense experts back IDF’s 2014 Gaza campaign, claim critics are invoking wrong set of laws JUDAH ARI GROSS December 13, 2015

Report by international High Level Military Group blasts UN commission, says Israel set a standard no other army could match. ' Human rights law was not the right set of laws to govern this; the laws of armed conflict are'

MORE ON THIS STORY

Armies of the world would be rendered far less effective if they were forced to operate under the same restrictions as the IDF during last summer’s Gaza campaign, a group of former military and defense leaders from nine countries claim in a new report released Friday.

Following a months-long investigation into the 50-day conflict, the High Level Military Group — made up of retired generals and defense officials from Germany, Colombia, India, Spain, Australia, the United States, France, the United Kingdom and Italy — found that Israel not only abided by the laws of armed conflict, but far surpassed their requirements, despite damning reports by the UN and non-governmental organizations that accused the IDF of potential war crimes. dfp adslot

The group had already defended Israel’s actions in the Gaza Strip earlier this year, submitting their preliminary findings to the UN Human Rights Commission’s probe into the operation, but the group’s final 80-page report goes far beyond their initial assessment.

“Our findings were diametrically opposed to the UN report,” Col. Richard Kemp, one of the document’s authors and the former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, told The Times of Israel on Thursday, blasting the lack of military expertise by the United Nations commission that investigated the conflict. “The UN report was done too quickly and was done by the wrong people.”

The HLMG, which includes, the former chairman of the NATO military committee, the former chief of staff of the Italian army, a former US ambassador-at-large on war crimes and the former director-general of the Indian Defense Intelligence Agency, was formed by the Friends of Israel Initiative, a group created by former Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar in 2010 to fight an “unprecedented campaign of deligitimation against Israel.”

The UN and NGO reports were investigated by human rights experts, and not military personnel who are most familiar with the laws of armed conflict. Without that expertise, the commissions investigating the 2014 Operation Protective Edge arrived at biased and inaccurate conclusions, Kemp said.

The laws of armed conflict

A central issue in all of these reports is that of civilian casualties. One of the problems, the report found, was the UN accepted Hamas’s figures for combatant vs. civilian casualties, which put the ratio at close to 70% non-combatants of the 2,000 or so deaths, compared to the dramatically lower 50% that Israel claims.

The HLMG found Hamas’s numbers to be rife with inconsistencies, such as the “inclusion of duplicate names, incorrect ages, combat-related deaths caused by Hamas or its affiliate organizations, such as in the case of misfired rockets, and deaths not related to the hostilities but classified as such.”

Palestinians walk in front of buildings destroyed by the Israeli military in the northern Gaza Strip town of Beit Lahiya, Monday, August 4, 2014. (Emad Nasser/Flash90)

More problematic, however, is that the UN and NGO reports were researched from a human rights standpoint and treated the concept of civilian deaths as inherently wrong, even when those incidents occurred under legally acceptable circumstances, Kemp said.

“Human rights law was not the right set of laws to govern this; the laws of armed conflict are,” he added.

A sample of a warning leaflet dropped by the IDF over Gaza (photo credit: courtesy/IDF Spokesman’s Office)

Commissions investigating the conflict should have looked to see that everything feasibly was done to avoid the deaths of non-combatants, not that casualties didn’t happen, as they inevitably will in wartime. That standard of zero civilian deaths is an impossible one, Kemp said.

Nevertheless, the 11 former army and governmental officials found that Israel adopted a far higher level of restraint than other militaries, citing Israel’s now famous “knock on the roof” technique of dropping a non-explosive ordnance to alert residents that their building is about to be bombed, the telephone calls and leaflets dropped warning non-combatants to leave the scene of an impending attack and numerous examples of missions canceled due to potential non-combatant casualties.

“That threshold isn’t something other nations could handle,” Kemp said. “We can’t call everyone in Iraq before a strike.”

This standard, which is already beginning to be applied to other armies besides the IDF, is a hindrance to military expediency, Kemp argued. “You can’t achieve that aim and also be effective. It’s why we’re not being effective,” Kemp said, referring specifically to the current coalition campaign against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.

‘We can’t call everyone in Iraq before a strike’

Not only does that intense international scrutiny on every civilian death inherently hinder the IDF’s and other militaries’ ability to wage an effective war, it will also ironically endanger more citizens, as each civilian death can be perversely used by Hamas and other groups as a weapon on the public opinion “front,” Kemp claimed.

Anticipating war crimes, finding none

The group met with representatives throughout Israel’s defense and political structure, from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to enlisted soldiers who fought in Gaza, while gathering material for their report.

Kemp, who also previously led the UK Joint Intelligence Committee’s international terrorism team, has defended Israeli military actions against Gaza before, testifying before the UN’s Goldstone commission on Israel’s 2008-2009 Operation Cast Lead. The rest of the group, however, had only brief or tangential connections with the IDF, and many came in to the group anticipating to find indications of Israeli crimes, Kemp said.

Gen. Klaus Naumann, former Chief of Staff of the Bundeswehr and Chairman of the NATO Military Committee (Courtesy)

But the HLMG found practically none, laying the blame for the vast majority of civilian casualties — 50 percent of those killed in the conflict, according to some estimates — at the feet of Hamas instead, who they claim instituted a deliberate policy to cause as many Palestinian civilian deaths as possible in order to wage a PR war against Israel. The report lauded not only Israel’s aforementioned operational measures to avoid civilian casualties, but also its overall strategic and organizational structure, which required the constant involvement of Military Advocate General representatives to ensure that the laws of warfare and rules of engagement were respected.

In addition, the report noted that Israel tried multiple times to avoid and end the conflict through diplomatic means, only to be rebuffed by Hamas at every turn.

As all members of the group were retired, they did not represent their home countries, and Kemp explained that the potential for backlash and threat to their professional reputations kept the group independent and objective.

Though there was healthy discussion during the investigation, Kemp said, the group was united in its conclusions. “This wasn’t groupthink. If there was a person with a dissenting opinion, we would have heard about it,” he said.

Hamas PR: Censorship and manipulation

The report decries the terror organization’s use of human shields and confirms many of the allegations levied against Hamas, namely that they used hospitals, UN schools, ambulances and other “sensitive sites” in order to force Israel into compromising positions and bring about international condemnation against the Jewish state.

A shell lies on the ground at the heavily damaged Sobhi Abu Karsh school in Gaza City’s Shejaiya neighborhood, a Hamas stronghold, Tuesday, August 5, 2014. (Mohammed Abed/AFP)

In addition to the military aspects of last summer’s operation, the HLMG focused considerable attention on Hamas’s manipulation of the media, noting both censorship and “proactive fabrication” as tools in the terror group’s PR arsenal.

Hamas at times forcibly prevented the media from taking and publishing photographs of wounded fighters, only allowing pictures of wounded civilians, the report found. Hamas would also “prepare” the scenes after Israeli strikes, removing weaponry and fighters, before allowing journalists into the area in order to make it appear as though only civilians were hit in the attacks.

The HLMG blamed not only the terror organization for perpetuating these acts of bullying and chicanery, but also the international media for not being more forthright about the clearly distorted and censored view of Gaza that they were reporting. Though some news outlets later admitted to the manipulations, the HLMG found, the damage was already done.

The same, to an extent, can be said of the HLMG report. With reports by the UN, Amnesty International, Israel’s Breaking the Silence, Human Rights Watch and others, the High Level Military Group’s document may be too little too late.

Information Officer for the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights Rolando Gomez holds the report of the Commission of Inquiry on the 2014 Gaza conflict next to Commission chairperson Mary McGowan Davis, center, and Commission member Doudou Diene during a press conference on their report on June 22, 2015 at the United Nations Office in Geneva. (AFP / FABRICE COFFRINI)

In addition to their public release of the document, the group already has plans to discuss their findings with the US Congress, and members of the HLMG will also speak in their home countries. Though there are not yet official plans in the works, the group also hopes to present their findings to the UN, the International Criminal Court and other global bodies, Kemp said.

While it was important to the former military and diplomatic leaders to defend what the group saw as Israel’s legal and legitimate actions in Gaza out of a moral or ethical obligation, the 11 men also saw it with a sense of self-preservation, as the world changes its expectations of how to fight against terror groups and other non-state actors.

The 2014 Gaza conflict report is just the first in a wider study on modern warfare, Kemp said. “There will be a larger project about what can be done against this kind of insurgency.”

Tuesday, December 8, 2015

Buying labelled products

Recently the European Union decided to mark and boycott products that are made in Israeli settlements. Those products provide jobs for both Israeli and Palestinians in Judea and Samaria, and give the basis for a well established coexistence.

The Zionist Foundation For Israel and My Israel have published a list of these boycotted products.

They urge you to purchase these items to support these businesses in Judea ,Samaria and the Golan Heights.

They are calling for all of us everywhere to unite against BDS.

Buying labelled products

The Zionist Foundation For Israel and My Israel have published a list of these boycotted products.

They urge you to purchase these items to support these businesses in Judea ,Samaria and the Golan Heights.

They are calling for all of us everywhere to unite against BDS.

Sunday, December 6, 2015

HOW TO STOP MASS CASUALTY TERROR ATTACKS: TAKE VIOLENCE AGAINST JEWS SERIOUSLY

Liel Leibovitz Tablet December 1, 2015

http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/195425/stop-mass-casualty-attacks?utm_source=tabletmagazinelist&utm_campaign=2e9381a23b-Sunday_December_6_201512_4_2015&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c308bf8edb-2e9381a23b-206799761

The Brussels Jewish Museum shooter was connected to the mastermind of the Paris attacks. Meir Kahane’s assassin was funded by Bin Laden. Let’s start connecting the dots.

On May 24, 2014, a man wearing a dark baseball cap and carrying several bags walked into the Jewish Museum of Belgium, in the center of Brussels. It was 10 minutes to four. The man pulled out an AK-47 and started shooting. Ninety seconds later, three museum visitors were dead; a fourth, critically injured in the attack, would later die of his wounds. The shooter managed to escape on foot and was captured six days later, after a nationwide manhunt. He was revealed to be Mehdi Nemmouche, a 29-year-old French national who had traveled to Syria and served as a jailer for the Islamic State. When arrested, he was carrying a bag containing a Kalashnikov, a .38, cameras, a gas mask, and about 330 rounds of ammunition.

Nemmouche, we now know, wasn’t working alone. He was part of a network run by his friend Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a Belgian who had traveled to Syria and became an IS “Emir of War” in the Deir Ezzour province. Like Nemmouche, Abaaoud, too, returned to Europe with the intention of pursuing jihad. His efforts were more successful than his disciple’s, leaving 130 people dead in a series of attacks in Paris on Nov. 13.

Could Abaaoud have been stopped? Would a more aggressive investigation of Nemmouche have led to his operator and saved the lives of all those slain in the 11th arrondisement? It’s hard to tell for certain without access to the investigation’s files, but if you’re pondering the mindset of the Belgian authorities, consider the following statement by the country’s Justice Minister Koen Geens. The Paris attacks, Geens said a few days after the massacre there, proved that terrorists were now after different targets: “It’s no longer synagogues or the Jewish museums,” he said, “it’s mass gatherings and public places.”

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You don’t have to be Hercule Poirot to realize that a justice system headed by a man who doesn’t consider synagogue attendance as a gathering or Jewish museums as public places isn’t going to try especially hard to pursue justice when the victims are Jews. A year after the shooting in the Jewish Museum, Brussels was on an unprecedented four-day lock down following the shootings in Paris, with many of the suspects traced back to the same neighborhood and the same network that spawned Nemmouche.

And the Belgians are hardly alone. On Nov. 5, 1990, the Israeli rabbi and politician Meir Kahane finished a speech in the Marriott East Side hotel in Manhattan. He stepped off stage shortly after 9 p.m., surrounded by well-wishers and supporters. A man disguised as an Orthodox Jew emerged from the crowd, drew a .357 caliber pistol, and shot Kahane from close range, killing him. He was revealed to be El Sayyid Nosair, an Egyptian-born American citizen living in Jersey City.

Nosair, authorities soon learned, wasn’t working alone. He was part of a network run by Omar Abdel-Rahman, known as the Blind Sheik. So great was the jury’s contempt for Kahane, that they acquitted Nosair of murder and convicted him only of assault and possession of an illegal firearm, a decision that the trial’s judge, Justice Alvin Schlesinger, lamented went “against the overwhelming weight of evidence and was devoid of common sense and logic.” Nosair’s legal defense was paid by a wealthy supporter of Abdel-Rahman, one Osama Bin Laden. Three years later, several of Abdel-Rahman’s other disciples were arrested for attempting to blow up the World Trade Center.

Could Abdel-Rahman have been stopped? Would a more aggressive investigation of Nosair have led to his operator and curtailed not only the first attempt on the World Trade Center but also the second, and tragically successful one, on Sept. 11, 2001? And, more importantly, have we the mindset necessary to prevent the next attack?

Again, quotes may be the most useful signposts we have. In the aftermath of the Nov. 13 shootings in Paris, Secretary of State John Kerry compared them to the attack, earlier this year, on Charlie Hebdo. “There’s something different about what happened from Charlie Hebdo, and I think everybody would feel that,” Kerry said. “There was a sort of particularized focus and perhaps even a legitimacy in terms of—not a legitimacy, but a rationale that you could attach yourself to somehow and say, OK, they’re really angry because of this and that.”

We’ve seen this logic in play too often. It’s the logic of deluded men and women who are trying to organize a chaotic world into rational patterns and who are therefore willing to accept the indiscriminate slaughtering of Jews as somehow understandable, the consequence of some ancient blood feud having to do with a land and a faith far removed from the daily realities of most well-heeled westerners. To that crowd, the murder of a Jew is deplorable but rarely surprising; real shock is expressed only when the very same terrorists, literally speaking, who have orchestrated the killing of Jews turn their guns on other Belgians or Parisians or New Yorkers.

To the many—in government, in the media, in academia—who still hold this morally repugnant worldview, to those who endanger the well-being of us all by failing to seriously investigate and prosecute attacks on Jews because these can somehow be explained away by some imaginary rationale, it’s time to say no more. Understand this: The very same people who are coming for the Jews will soon come for you, too.

Every father who is killed on a road in the West Bank in front of his children, every old man who is stabbed in Jerusalem with a pair of scissors, will be killed again in Paris, in Hanover, in Washington. Terror doesn’t know any national boundaries. It doesn’t care about anyone’s religion. It couldn’t care less about the nuances of Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. Terror is a technique for attaining power, and it has its own logic, which is the logic of indiscriminate death. Jews are merely this demented logic’s first victims, but they are not, by a long shot, its last.

Friday, December 4, 2015

Long-Hidden Details Reveal Cruelty of 1972 Munich Attackers

By SAM BORDENDEC. 1, 2015

A Munich synagogue held the coffins of the victims of the attacks at the 1972 Olympics. Terrorists representing a branch of the Palestine Liberation Organization breached apartments housing Israeli athletes. CreditAssociated Press

In September 1992, two Israeli widows went to the home of their lawyer. When the women arrived, the lawyer told them that he had received some photographs during his recent trip to Munich but that he did not think they should view them. When they insisted, he urged them to let him call a doctor who could be present when they did.

Ilana Romano and Ankie Spitzer, whose husbands were among the Israeli athletes held hostage and killed by Palestinian terrorists at the 1972 Olympics in Munich, rejected that request, too. They looked at the pictures that for decades they had been told did not exist, and then agreed never to discuss them publicly.

The attack at the Olympic Village stands as one of sports’ most horrifying episodes. The eight terrorists, representing a branch of the Palestine Liberation Organization, breached the apartments where the Israeli athletes were staying before dawn on Sept. 5, 1972. That began an international nightmare that lasted more than 20 hours and ended with a disastrous failed rescue attempt.

Ankie Spitzer, the widow of the fencing coach Andre Spitzer, at the Olympic Village in 1972. She said she and family members of the other victims learned the details of how the victims were treated only 20 years after the attack. CreditAssociated Press

The treatment of the hostages has long been a subject of speculation, but a more vivid — and disturbing — account of the attack is emerging. For the first time, Ms. Romano, Ms. Spitzer and other victims’ family members are choosing to speak openly about documentation previously unknown to the public in an effort to get their loved ones the recognition they believe is deserved.

Among the most jarring details are these: The Israeli Olympic team members were beaten and, in at least one case, castrated.

“What they did is that they cut off his genitals through his underwear and abused him,” Ms. Romano said of her husband, Yossef. Her voice rose.

“Can you imagine the nine others sitting around tied up?” she continued, speaking in Hebrew through a translator. “They watched this.”

Ms. Romano and Ms. Spitzer, whose husband, Andre, was a fencing coach at the Munich Games and died in the attack, first described the extent of the cruelty during an interview for the coming film “Munich 1972 & Beyond,” a documentary that chronicles the long fight by families of the victims to gain public and official acknowledgment for their loved ones. The film is expected to be released early next year.

In subsequent interviews with The New York Times, Ms. Spitzer explained that she and the family members of the other victims only learned the details of how the victims were treated 20 years after the tragedy, when German authorities released hundreds of pages of reports they previously denied existed.

Ms. Spitzer said that she and Ms. Romano, as representatives of the group of family members, first saw the documents on that Saturday night in 1992. One of Ms. Romano’s daughters was to be married just three days later, but Ms. Romano never considered delaying the viewing; she had been waiting for so long.

Ilana Romano, left, the widow of the weight lifter Yossef Romano, with Spitzer in 2012. CreditJack Guez/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The photographs were “as bad I could have imagined,” Ms. Romano said. (The New York Times reviewed the photographs but has chosen not to publish them because of their graphic nature.)

Mr. Romano, a champion weight lifter, was shot when he tried to overpower the terrorists early in the attack. He was then left to die in front of the other hostages and castrated. Other hostages were beaten and sustained serious injuries, including broken bones, Ms. Spitzer said. Mr. Romano and another hostage died in the Olympic Village; the other nine were killed during a failed rescue attempt after they were moved with their captors to a nearby airport.

It was not clear if the mutilation of Mr. Romano occurred before or after he died, Ms. Spitzer said, though Ms. Romano said she believed it happened afterward.

“The terrorists always claimed that they didn’t come to murder anyone — they only wanted to free their friends from prison in Israel,” Ms. Spitzer said. “They said it was only because of the botched-up rescue operation at the airport that they killed the rest of the hostages, but it’s not true. They came to hurt people. They came to kill.”

For much of the past two decades, Ms. Spitzer, Ms. Romano and Pinchas Zeltzer, the lawyer, mostly kept the grisly details to themselves, though at least one prominent report about the images surfaced. When Ms. Romano returned home that first night, she told her daughters the pictures were “difficult” but said they should not ask her more about them. Her daughters agreed.

At various points over the next 20 years, Ms. Romano said, she did make occasional references to the mutilation of her husband, but she always kept the photographs of the episode hidden.

According to Ms. Spitzer, confusion about what had happened to the victims existed from the beginning. The bodies of the victims were identified by family or friends in Munich — Ms. Romano said an uncle of her husband identified his corpse but was shown only his face — and, as per Jewish law, burials were held almost immediately after the bodies were flown back to Israel.

Israeli and Olympics flags in 2002 near a plaque in honor of the members of the Israeli Olympic team killed during the 1972 Munich Olympics.CreditEnric Marti/Associated Press

Since much of the attention from Israeli officials after the attacks focused on security breaches and mistakes by German and Olympic officials that had allowed the terrorists to strike, consideration of the plight of the dead victims had been a priority only to their families.

“We asked for more details, but we were told, over and over, there was nothing,” Ms. Spitzer said.

In 1992, after doing an interview with a German television station regarding the 20th anniversary of the attack in which she expressed frustration about not knowing exactly what happened to her husband and his teammates, Ms. Spitzer was contacted by a man who said he worked for a German government agency with access to reams of records about the attack.

Initially, Ms. Spitzer said, the man, who remained anonymous, sent her about 80 pages of police reports and other documents. With those documents, Mr. Zeltzer, the lawyer, and Ms. Spitzer pressured the German government into releasing the rest of the file, which included the photographs.

After receiving the file, the victims’ families sued the German government, the Bavarian regional government and the city of Munich for a “deficient security concept” and the “serious mistakes” that doomed the rescue mission, according to the complaint. The suit was ultimately dismissed because of statute-of-limitations regulations.

Nonetheless, the families have largely focused their efforts on ensuring a place for remembrance of their loved ones in the fabric of the Olympic movement. After decades of lobbying, the victims’ families were heartened when the International Olympic Committee, led by a new president, Thomas Bach, agreed this year to help finance a permanent memorial in Munich. There are also plans to remember the Munich victims at the 2016 Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro.

At the moment, the victims will be included in a moment of remembrance for all athletes who have died at the Olympics; Ms. Spitzer and Ms. Romano continue to press for the Israeli athletes from Munich to be remembered apart from athletes who died in competition, arguing that their deaths were the result of unprecedented evil.

“The moment I saw the photos, it was very painful,” Ms. Romano said. “I remembered until that day Yossef as a young man with a big smile. I remembered his dimples until that moment.”

She hesitated. “At that moment, it erased the entire Yossi that I knew,” she said.

MILG-POPS