EXCLUSIVE: Hamas Turns Gaza Hospitals and Schools Into Torture Chambers as It Reestablishes Police State: Gazans Describe Horrific Interrogations, Beatings

From Free Beacon.com (June 10):

Hamas has built makeshift torture chambers inside Gazan hospitals and schools where its men are interrogating and abusing fellow Palestinians suspected of disloyalty. The reign of terror comes as Hamas moves aggressively to reassert its power over the Gaza Strip, according to video testimonials and official government documents reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.

More than eight months after a fragile ceasefire with Israel left Hamas badly wounded, the terror group has largely turned inward, establishing a strict police state and moving internal security operations—its dreaded "Interior Ministry"—back into the same civilian outposts it commandeered to wage war on Israel. Eyewitness accounts from three Gazans reveal that Hamas has again laid claim to al-Shifa hospital, the Gaza Strip's largest medical complex, the al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, and the al-Ma'amadani Hospital in Gaza City. The terror group has done the same with schools across Gaza, turning classrooms into prisons and detention centers where civilians are often subjected to brutal beatings and more creative forms of torture.

"They have prisons inside the schools, rooms that function like prisons," recounted one Gazan activist who says he was abducted by Hamas and beaten for several days. "The same goes for hospitals. They have rooms underground in the basement that they use as a prison, as if they were military and security sites." At the Nasser Hospital, said a second Gazan woman, "inside the Hind al-Daghma Dialysis Center, people are beaten and shot in the legs. If they send someone to the renal department at Nasser, it basically means it's over."

Jonathan Schanzer, a veteran regional analyst and executive director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank, said it is no surprise that Hamas is again staking claim to Gaza's most important civilian centers.

"Hamas has always exploited the civilian infrastructure that it has wielded to deter Israel from attacking its military structures," he said. "The co-opting of institutions is a long-standing practice of this terrorist organization dating back to its very founding."

Like others quoted in this report, the Gazan witnesses to Hamas's torture operation have asked to remain anonymous in order to protect themselves from Hamas retaliation. The video testimonials were secretly filmed inside Gaza by Jusoor News, an independent Arab-run media outlet that frequently documents life under Hamas control, and provided to the Free Beacon along with Hamas-run Interior Ministry documents that show civilians being summoned to hospitals for interrogation.

The testimonials and documentation provide some of the firmest evidence to date that Hamas is not only torturing Palestinians, but also continuing to breach international law by using civilian buildings as military outposts. Israel targeted several of the aforementioned hospitals during the war in Gaza and provided extensive evidence that Hamas used these medical facilities for its operations, with Hamas operatives often working alongside humanitarian aid workers.

At the same time, anti-Israel elements of the international community and the media have paid little attention as Hamas rebuilds its authoritarian state and have focused instead on criticizing Israel. The New York Times last month published a largely discredited opinion column by Nicholas Kristof, which alleged that Israelis were raping "Palestinian journalists" with carrots and dogs. [read more]

Evil sheep-screwing bastards!  President Trump should just let Israel destroy Hamas. The world (other than the crazy Mullahs) wouldn’t miss them.

Illegal immigrant who murdered Michigan woman sues Trump, demands $75M, public apology, US citizenship

From Fox News.com (July 20):

An illegal immigrant serving a lengthy prison sentence for the murder of a Michigan woman is suing President Donald Trump, alleging he faced humiliation when his case was used as a political talking point, and is demanding $75 million, a public apology, and U.S. citizenship.

Brandon Ortiz-Vite, 27, who was previously deported from the United States, is serving a sentence of 39 to 102 years in prison for killing Ruby Garcia in March 2024.

Garcia's body had several gunshot wounds and was found dumped along a road in Grand Rapids. The pair were in a romantic relationship and were engaged in an argument at the time of the slaying.

In a handwritten complaint filed in federal court, Ortiz-Vite named Trump and White House Principal Deputy Press Secretary Steven Cheung as defendants.

Fox News Digital has reached out to the White House.

Ortiz-Vite's case garnered national attention and was highlighted when Trump, who made combating illegal immigration a large part of his campaign, visited Grand Rapids in 2024. During his remarks, Trump labeled Ortiz-Vite as "America's problem."

He also featured Ortiz-Vite’s mugshot in commercials as an example of the "murderers, rapists , and drug traffickers" who resided illegally in the United States, The Midwesterner reported.

He was mocked by prison staff and other inmates, he said.

"I was put into a category. Who I was as a person no longer mattered! What only mattered was my race," Ortiz-Vite wrote. "My case and immigration status! Once again, it belittled me, shattered my dignity and what I was as a person."

"The shame it brought to my family name is a reality I have to live with now," he added. "I took full responsibility for my actions but for them to use my case for political gain on TV was unjust. Humiliating. When I thought it couldn't get worse, it did. I was center stage in front of a nation, public scrutiny at its finest!"

Ortiz-Vite, who acted as his own attorney, said his case came under intense media coverage, resulting in him living in a "nightmare".

"It all became clear to me when I first met with my court-appointed attorneys. They explained how my case had now gotten blown out of proportion and was now a high-profile case!" he wrote. "The shock in their eyes and the tears from mine were a reaction to my realization that I was living everyone's worst nightmare! To be publicly infamous—a target! To the United States of America, from here everything went downhill. I was now labeled a cold-blooded murderer in the eyes of the people of this nation."

"The anxiety and despair I felt compares to no other," he added.

Matthew Borgula, a criminal defense attorney and former federal prosecutor, said the lawsuit is unlikely to succeed, citing a range of factors, including presidential immunity.

"Federal law requires courts to screen prisoner suits before anyone is served. This complaint will likely not survive that screening," Borgula told Fox News Digital. "Also, Presidential immunity covers official acts, and campaign statements can fall outside it — but this suit fails for more basic reasons." [read more]

That's too bad. Count your blessings that Michigan didn't give you the death penalty. You claim you were humiliated?  Be thankful you weren't attacked or killed in prison. That choice wasn't ever given to Ruby Garcia. I hope this selfish bastard gets deported immediately if he ever gets released.

The ‘Far Right’ Is Surging In Europe Because The Left’s Version Of ‘Democracy’ Has Failed

From The Federalist.com (June 13, 2024):

Due to mounting dissatisfaction with the political establishment throughout the European Union, right-wing parties have made significant gains in the recent European Parliament elections. Perhaps most surprisingly, this surge in seats won was fueled not only by traditional older conservatives but also by younger voters who have sought to rekindle the spirit of nationalism within their homelands.

Before the European Parliament elections, 32 percent of French 18-to-25-year-olds said they’d vote for the “far right” National Rally party, closely reflecting the eventual election outcome. Led by Marine Le Pen, “the National Rally party is on course to win 31.5 percent of the vote—more than twice the 14.7 percent projected for [French President Emmanuel] Macron’s liberal Renaissance party.”

Meanwhile, Germany’s AfD party secured better-than-expected results, coming in second in Germany’s EU parliamentary election, winning nearly 16 percent of the vote. Notably, AfD gained significant ground among younger voters, surging 12 percentage points to 17 percent among 16-24-year-olds.

This political earthquake felt in France and Germany is not an isolated incident within these two countries. Feelings of Euroscepticism and discontent over immigration are rising all across Europe.

While a “centrist” (meaning leftist) pro-EU majority remains in firm control of the European Parliament, members of the Western ruling class are quickly realizing that the backlash against the globalist agenda, put into motion shortly after World War II, is escaping leftist containment and steadily growing.

This should surprise no one. We saw the first strong signs of this immune response to globalism in 2016 when Britain voted to leave the European Union. Yet ruling class members on both the left and right within the United Kingdom did not heed the message their voters sent as immigration surged.

One of the major promises of Brexit was to regain control of England’s borders, yet the number of legal arrivals has nearly doubled since Brexit. This surge has fueled a significant rise in anti-immigration protests by individuals desperate to preserve their culture and heritage. As a consequence, the Conservative Party in the U.K., which has been the primary governing party since 2010, is now set for historic losses ahead of the July 4 national elections due in part to its failure to control its borders.

Of course, according to leftist media, the rise of so-called “far-right” populism, manifesting itself through legitimate electoral wins, is positioned as a threat to democracy. But this is a rhetorical sleight of hand.

Democracy is not in danger. It’s their “democracy” that’s threatened as the right is beginning to flex its political muscles — finally acting as legitimate opposition to the status quo dominated by an establishment left and right that look and behave in a very similar fashion.

When liberals use the word “democracy,” they don’t mean the will of the voters. Rather, the word democracy is used as a substitute for leftist hegemony, or as Curtis Yarvin explained, “When they say democracy, they mean oligarchy.”

“Traditional” conservatives and “centrist” leftists both share the same immigration policy. That’s part of why the left is terrified of legitimate right-wing opposition as opposed to the traditional “opposition in-name-only” conservatism they are accustomed to defeating. In a recent New York Times analysis titled “Just How Dangerous Is Europe’s Rising Far Right?” author Roger Cohen alluded to the failure of leftist political containment strategies,

“Across Europe, the far right is becoming the right, absent any compelling message from traditional conservative parties. If ‘far’ suggests outlier, it has become a misnomer. Not only have the parties of an anti-immigrant right surged, they have seen the barriers that once kept them out crumble as they are absorbed into the arc of Western democracies.”

Much to the dismay of liberal elites, authoritarian “barriers” in the form of “hate speech” legislation, social stigmatization, corporate media exclusion, and outright censorship are proving ineffective because the reality of deteriorating social and economic conditions, due in part to mass migration across the West, is too great to ignore. After decades of prioritizing the well-being of immigrants over that of native-born citizens, the reinvigoration of traditional forms of nationalism through legitimate right-wing opposition was not only necessary but inevitable.

The surging popularity of the “far right” in Europe is shaking democracy to its core, as it should, exposing how unresponsive “democracy” has become to the needs of the people Western governments were meant to serve. [source]

Good. The Left likes to scare the public by using the term 'far right.' When in reality, the public gets tired of failed crazy socialist policies and wants sane policies back again.

Science 'Pleads the 5th'

From AFA.net (Aug. 10):

First and Second Samuel were originally a single book in the Hebrew Bible, known simply as Sefer Shmuel [Book of Samuel] and remained undivided in the Masoretic manuscript tradition. The book was divided into 2 parts when translated into Greek as part of the Septuagint, probably during the 2^nd century B.C.

Although the human authorship of 2 Samuel remains unknown, its vivid description of Absalom may preserve the testimony of someone familiar with David’s royal court, perhaps a prophet such as Nathan or Gad, or a royal chronicler whose records were later incorporated into the Samuelan tradition.

Second Samuel 14:25 records Absalom’s extraordinary physical beauty:

“But in all Israel there was none to be so much praised as Absalom for his beauty: from the sole of his foot even to the crown of his head there was no blemish in him.”

The next chapter reveals how Absalom converted physical appearance, insincere concern, and calculated flattery into personal loyalty. As 2 Samuel 15:6 concludes: “So Absalom stole the hearts of the men of Israel.”

In his classic The Life of David, written in the 1930s, A.W. Pink observes that Israel’s admiration for Absalom revealed the Nation's low spiritual condition. He possessed neither piety, wisdom, nor justice, yet the people were captivated by his handsome appearance. His wickedness was overlooked while his physical beauty was celebrated, feeding the arrogance that eventually brought about his ruin.

Pink saw the same spiritual disorder in his own generation: physical beauty and outward prowess were valued more highly than moral virtue and spiritual grace. He argued that Christendom had fallen into decline because it had become increasingly attracted to whatever appealed to the flesh. Churches wanted full pews and full treasuries; preachers wanted to retain the young; evangelists wanted visible results. Consequently, worldly attractions and high-pressure methods were employed to manufacture the appearance of spiritual success.

Such is seemingly the spiritual state of the Union in 21st-century America: a mile wide and an inch deep.

Which brings us to the ruse of the Gibeonite-like deception surrounding COVID-19 and Anthony Fauci, and the American people’s profound lack of spiritual discernment. The official narrative was advanced by a decadent secular culture and its antagonistic cultural Marxists, deeply entrenched across the spiritual, intellectual, educational, economic, and vocational mountains of influence and power in America.

Yet the Gibeonite deception reveals an even deeper failure. Joshua 9:14 tells of the fatal mistake of trusting physical evidence instead of seeking God’s guidance: “The Israelites sampled their provisions but did not inquire of the Lord.”

The evidence appeared persuasive: the worn garments, patched wineskins, old shoes, and moldy bread. Everything had been carefully arranged to produce the desired conclusion. Israel examined what the Gibeonites presented but failed to inquire of the One who could expose what appearances concealed.

In Gleanings in Joshua, A.W. Pink explains that Satan opposes the people of God in 2 distinct forms: openly, as a roaring lion seeking to devour, and covertly, as a subtle serpent practicing deceit. Pink contends that Scripture and Church history demonstrate that deception is far more dangerous and successful than open persecution. When force cannot exterminate or intimidate the faithful, Satan turns to secret schemes.

Whereas the roaring lion is easily recognized, the subtle serpent seldom is. Open persecution may awaken the Church, but deception enters quietly, clothed in authority, credentialed by experts, amplified by institutions, and presented as unquestionable truth.

That is the great warning running from Joshua through 1 & 2 Samuel and into 21st-century America: God’s people are rarely defeated by superior strength alone. More often, they are defeated when they fail to seek the Lord’s counsel, mistake appearance for character, and surrender spiritual discernment to the prevailing authorities of the age.

The COVID-19 crisis was therefore more than medical or political. It was spiritual, a test whether the American Church could distinguish the voice of truth from the whispers of the guileful serpent.

The postgame accounting must now be lawful, factual, public, and unsparing. Every relevant document should be released. Every financial interest should be disclosed. Every misleading statement should be examined. Every abuse of governmental authority should be exposed.

The actions of Dr. Fauci, NIH officials, pharmaceutical companies, media organizations, government agencies, and communications platforms should be subjected to full-scale, rigorous public examination. Wherever the evidence establishes deliberate deception, concealment, censorship, or unlawful conduct, those responsible must answer for it; not as an act of vengeance, but as a vindication of truth and a warning against its repetition.

Century-old family businesses were bankrupted. Employees and military personnel lost their livelihoods under mask and vaccination mandates. Churches were shuttered, and in places such as California, congregational singing was prohibited. Loved ones died alone in sterile hospital rooms.

These were not abstractions. They were grievous harm inflicted upon real people, real families, churches, and the Nation itself.

Yet the deepest scandal of COVID-19 was not merely that powerful institutions may have misled the American people. It was that a spiritually undiscerning Nation had become so enamored with titles, appearances, credentials, and institutional power that it no longer knew whom - or what - to believe.

Absalom stood before Israel in all his external splendor, captivating and without visible blemish. The Gibeonites stood before Joshua wearing old garments and carrying moldy bread. In both instances, appearance concealed reality.

And therein lies the warning to America: the serpent seldom announces himself with a roar. He comes handsomely dressed, impressively credentialed, officially approved, and carrying precisely the evidence he wants us to see.

The question now is not merely whether America was deceived.

The question is whether the church has recovered enough spiritual discernment to seek the counsel of the Lord, and prevent it from happening again.

Gideons or Rehabs have begun to stand. [source]

Science is about discovering the Truth. When it loses that purpose and becomes politicized and weaponized then trust becomes an issue. I hope and pray that day never comes.

How Government-Owned Streets Prevent Effective Law Enforcement

From Mises.org (Sept. 12, 2020):

“Your right to swing your arms ends where another person’s nose begins.” While this widely attributed quote sounds ostensibly libertarian in terms of respecting self-ownership, it’s actually quite misleading. One need not abide some lunatic swinging his arms about near one’s face, being forced to tolerate it as long as no physical contact is made. Rather, property owners may establish rules regarding the conduct of those who choose to enter their property, including prohibitions against swinging arms near other people’s faces. Individuals may then decide what rules they are willing to tolerate when they enter another’s property, and competition between property owners enables them to determine what bundle of rules various consumers prefer.

This is not the case on so-called public property—that is, land areas controlled by the state such as streets, roads, parks, government buildings—even if that state were perfectly constrained by a written constitution. In The Structure of Liberty, Randy Barnett articulates this problem well:

A society that includes extensive public property holdings is faced with what might be called a dilemma of vulnerability. Since governments enjoy privileges denied their citizens and are subject to few of the economic constraints of private institutions, their citizens are forever vulnerable to governmental tyranny. Therefore, freedom can only be preserved by denying government police agencies that right to regulate public property with the same discretion accorded private property owners. Yet steps to protect society from the government also serve to make citizens more vulnerable to criminally inclined persons by providing such persons with a greater opportunity for a safe haven on the public streets and sidewalks and in the public parks. (p. 220)

Barnett further notes that no one can be barred from public space controlled by the state; there is free access for everyone, even convicted criminals as long as they have served their sentences. Anyone must be tolerated up until the point they violate the criminal code. Some libertarians may think this is well and good since it limits the police’s authority to intervene. However, as Barnett explains, this leads to a tradeoff: we may be more free from arbitrary police enforcement, but we are also more vulnerable to victimization. Such constitutional constraints are not only restrictions on the police, but on everyone else as well: rules that would be enforced if public property were in the private domain cannot be enforced by private actors.

In this sense, on public property the rules of conduct are socialized. The unpleasantries of witnessing activities that might otherwise be prohibited on private property (depending on the intended purpose of that property), such as solicitation, panhandling, or protesting, must be tolerated on public property. The police are legally constrained in enforcing rules against such activities, as they are constitutionally protected or laws prohibiting them have been voided for vagueness by the US Supreme Court.

The manifestations of this problem are viscerally illustrated in the ongoing mostly peaceful protests/riots. While the US Supreme Court has opined that local governments can constitutionally impose some restrictions, such as requiring a permit if certain conditions are met, protestors are to be otherwise free to assemble, hold their signs, and chant. They are not free, however, to engage in the acts associated with rioting, such as vandalism, looting, and arson, among other crimes.

As such, protesting on public property is analogous to the supposed right of someone to swing their arms as long as they don’t hit someone in the face—it must be tolerated up to the point it becomes a riot. This presents a problem for police—they are prohibited from interfering with masses of people apparently peacefully assembling, but once those masses are assembled they are difficult to contain after they decide they want to hit another person’s nose by rioting.

Owners of shops and small businesses adjacent to the state-owned streets where mobs are allowed to gather are simply out of luck in terms of preventing such assemblies or receiving compensation from the state for failing to prevent such foreseeable consequences (though the lack of compensation may change if lawsuits in Seattle, among other cities, are successful). If violent mobs were allowed to assemble on private property with the similarly predictable outcome of the destruction of neighbors’ property, would we not consider the property owner who allowed it to be at least partially liable? Would it not also be reasonable for neighboring property owners to seek an injunction if this behavior continued night after night? A private property owner is not bound by the First Amendment to the US Constitution: they may exclude protestors no matter how peaceful they are.

In light of these considerations, the fact that riots are able to continue month after month would likely be impossible but for the institution of “public property.” If the streets where the mobs assemble were privately owned, assemblies that would likely result in property damage or even inconvenience for everyday people would be prevented from gathering together in the first place. Protestors blocking the streets, as well as the vehicle-protestor collisions resulting from them, would become a thing of the past. Property owners would be able to nip riots in the bud by preventing masses of people intent on rioting from assembling. There would be little need for masses of riot police, flanked by armored vehicles from war zones, staring down mobs of protestors, waiting for them to cross the line so that pepper spray, rubber bullets, and batons can legally be unleashed on them.

This is yet another example of why the privatization of streets is of interest for reasons of police reform alone. (Indeed, riots themselves are partly responsible for the militarization of police.) The failure of government policing to secure the streets not only leaves us more vulnerable to criminal victimization, but government is worse than useless when they criminalize the private defense of property. “Taking back the streets” ought to mean privatizing them and enabling property owners to defend their property. This would be the surest way to end the riots. [source]

Riots is what the far-Left wants, so the gov’t owning the streets serves the Left’s purpose.

Nature generates more data than the internet … for now

From PopSci.com (Sept. 22, 2023):

Is Earth primarily a planet of life, a world stewarded by the animals, plants, bacteria, and everything else that lives here? Or, is it a planet dominated by human creations? Certainly, we’ve reshaped our home in many ways—from pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere to literally redrawing coastlines. But by one measure, biology wins without a contest.

In an opinion piece published in the journal Life on August 31, astronomers and astrobiologists estimated the amount of information transmitted by a massive class of organisms and technology for communication. Their results are clear: Earth’s biosphere churns out far more information than the internet has in its 30-year history. “This indicates that, for all the rapid progress achieved by humans, nature is still far more remarkable in terms of its complexity,” says Manasvi Lingam, an astrobiologist at the Florida Institute of Technology and one of the paper’s authors.

But that could change in the very near future. Lingam and his colleagues say that, if the internet keeps growing at its current voracious rate, it will eclipse the data that comes out of the biosphere in less than a century. This could help us hone our search for intelligent life on other planets by telling us what type of information we should seek.

To represent information from technology, the authors focused on the amount of data transferred through the internet, which far outweighs any other form of human communication. Each second, the internet carries about 40 terabytes of information. They then compared it to the volume of information flowing through Earth’s biosphere. We might not think of the natural world as a realm of big data, but living things have their own ways of communicating. “To my way of thought, one of the reasons—although not the only one—underpinning the complexity of the biosphere is the massive amount of information flow associated with it,” Lingam says.

Bird calls, whale song, and pheromones are all forms of communication, to be sure. But Lingam and his colleagues focused on the information that individual cells transmit—often in the form of molecules that other cells pick up and respond accordingly, such as producing particular proteins. The authors specifically focused on the 100 octillion single-celled prokaryotes that make up the majority of our planet’s biomass.

“That is fairly representative of most life on Earth,” says Andrew Rushby, an astrobiologist at Birkbeck, University of London, who was not an author of the paper. “Just a green slime clinging to the surface of the planet. With a couple of primates running around on it, occasionally.”

As all of Earth’s prokaryotes signal to each other, according to the authors’ estimate, they generate around a billion times as much data as our technology. But human progress is rapid: According to one estimate, the internet is growing by around 26 percent every year. Under the bold assumption that both these rates hold steady for decades to come, the authors stated its size will continue to balloon until it dwarfs the biosphere in around 90 years’ time, sometime in the early 22nd century.

What, then, does a world where we create more information than nature actually look like? It’s hard to predict for certain. The 2110s version of Earth may be as strange to us as the present Earth would seem to a person from the 1930s. That said, picture alien astronomers in another star system carefully monitoring our planet. Rather than glimpsing a planet teeming with natural life, their first impressions of Earth might be a torrent of digital data.

Now, picture the reverse. For decades, scientists and military experts have sought out signatures of extraterrestrials in whatever form it may take. Astronomers have traditionally focused on the energy that a civilization of intelligent life might use—but earlier this year, one group crunched the numbers to determine if aliens in a nearby star system could pick up the leakage from mobile phone towers. (The answer is probably not, at least with LTE networks and technology like today’s radio telescopes.)

On the flip side, we don’t totally have the observational capabilities to home in on extraterrestrial life yet. “I don’t think there’s any way that we could detect the kind of predictions and findings that [Lingam and his coauthors] have quantified here,” Rushby says. “How can we remotely determine this kind of information capacity, or this information transfer rate? We’re probably not at the stage where we could do that.”

But Rushby thinks the study is an interesting next step in a trend. Astrobiologists—certainly those searching for extraterrestrial life—are increasingly thinking about the types and volume of information that different forms of life carries. “There does seem to be this information ‘revolution,’” he says, “where we’re thinking about life in a slightly different way.” In the end, we might learn that there’s more harmony between the communication networks nature has built and computers. [source]

Interesting. I guess the data race is on.

Octopus punches fish in the head (just because it can)

From Live Science.com (Dec. 23, 2020):

Why do octopuses have eight arms? The better to punch fish with, new research reveals.

These brainy cephalopods sometimes team up with fish to find food; hunting collaboratively like this allows them to cover more area, and it increases their chances of catching prey. However, when big blue octopuses (Octopus cyanea), also known as day octopuses, are displeased with their fish partners, they demonstrate their ire by suddenly punching the fish in the head.

The octopus lashes out using "a swift, explosive motion with one arm," in an attack "which we refer to as punching," scientists wrote in a new study.

Temporary hunting alliances between octopuses and coral reef fish have been documented for decades and can involve multiple participants of various species, the study authors reported Dec. 18 in the journal Ecology.

Sometimes, fish and octopuses will work together for more than an hour, with different species scouting different locations. Octopuses pursue prey that dart around rocks and into tight spaces in the reef, while bottom-feeding fish such as the yellow-saddle goatfish (Parupeneus cyclostomus) scour the seafloor, and other fish species patrol the water column, according to the study.

But those collaborations don't always work out so well for the fish, the new study shows. Between 2018 and 2019, researchers observed eight incidents while diving in Eilat, Israel, and in El Quseir, Egypt, in which octopuses suddenly punched out their supposed partners.

"I laughed out loud, and almost choked on my own regulator," said lead study author Eduardo Sampaio, a Ph.D. student at the University of Lisbon and the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior. His later reactions were more subdued, "but I still marveled at it every time I saw it," he told Live Science in an email.

"The fish would get pushed to the edge of the group, or would actually leave the group. Sometimes after a while it would return, other times it would not return at all. The octopus would leave the fish alone after displacing it," he said. Though octopuses were previously known to throw defensive punches when attacked by damselfishes or while fighting over food, this is the first time their punching has been scientifically described and linked to collaborative hunting, Sampaio said in the email. [read more]

Maybe, the octopus was annoyed by the fish. Then again, maybe the octopus was just being mischievous. Who knows.