Archive for January, 2025
Israel Defeated As A Million Palestinians Return to Northern Gaza From Exile in the South
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As a result of the ceasefire deal in Gaza, agreed to on January 15 — after 14 months of negotiations that were cynically and persistently blocked by Benjamin Netanyahu, with cover provided by the US — something truly remarkable is happening.
Now that the relentless carpet-bombing has stopped, and the child-killing snipers and armed quadcopters have withdrawn, along with the ever-present drones, the surviving Palestinians — no longer fearing death at every single moment of their lives — are beginning to reclaim their country, their land.
After two weekends in which, in exchange for 290 Palestinian prisoners, seven Israel hostages have been freed by Hamas — deliberately released in small numbers, eked out over at least three months, to prevent Israel from thinking that it can safely resume its previously uninterrupted genocidal assault — yesterday Israel was forced to confront the triumph of the Palestinians, despite 15 months of collective punishment, ethnic cleansing, genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, and the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives.
Gaza Hostage Exchanges: The 90 Freed Palestinian Women and Children Ignored by the Western Media
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On Sunday (January 19), as the ceasefire in Gaza began, so too did the first phase of the key peace-making element of the deal — the return, over six weeks, of 33 of the remaining 100 or so Israeli hostages seized by Hamas and other militants after they broke out of the “open-air prison” that the Gaza Strip became in 2007, when Israel, having withdrawn its forces and dismantled its settlements in Gaza itself, essentially sealed it shut, imposing a relentless blockade by land, sea and air, and rationing everything, and everyone permitted to enter or leave.
In exchange, Israel has agreed to release thousands of Palestinians held in its gruesome and ever-expanding network of prisons, solely for Palestinians, that it has established over the last 67 years of its illegal occupation of Palestinian land in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, known, collectively, as the Occupied Palestinian Territory.
251 hostages were seized and taken back to the Gaza Strip on October 7, 2023, a key aspect of the attacks whose purpose was largely obscured as Israel, and its compliant vassal states in the west, focused almost exclusively on the 1,139 people killed (mostly Israelis but also including 71 foreign nationals), and invented atrocities to justify the genocidal frenzy that followed; in particular, the notorious “40 beheaded babies” story that was pure fiction, as only 36 children were killed on October 7, only two of them were babies, and neither of them were beheaded.
No Return to Genocide As the Gaza Ceasefire Begins and the Extent of Israel’s Policy of Extermination Is Revealed
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As the ceasefire in Gaza began on the morning of Sunday January 19 (delayed for three hours by Israel, when another 19 Palestinians were killed in last-minute bombing raids), I found myself trying to imagine what it must have felt like to be free, for the first time in 15 months — or, at least, since the six-day “pause” for the exchange of hostages at the end of November 2023 — from the constant threat of death, through the devastating Israeli bombings using weapons of maximum destruction relentlessly replenished by Israel’s ever-obliging allies (the US and Germany, in particular, but with numerous other countries involved), through cynical targeting by IDF snipers, and through the equally cynical targeting by armed quadcopters, a specialty of the Israeli “defense” industry. I also tried to imagine how sweet the silence must have been in the absence of what was, by all accounts, the truly relentless buzzing of drones, spying, monitoring, intimidating, and seeking out targets.
Throughout Sunday, the survivors of what had, until the ceasefire was announced last Wednesday, seemed to be a genocidal assault without end, were finally able to begin returning home — on what, as if by some miracle, was a bright and sunny day, in marked contrast to the freezing torrents of rain to which they had recently been subjected. As they walked from the makeshift tent cities to which most of them (an estimated 1.9 million people in total) had been exiled through expulsion orders, as Israel systematically razed Gaza to the ground, from north to south, over the first eight months of its remorseless destruction, what greeted them was a post-apocalyptic landscape of almost unimaginable annihilation.
While some were able to locate their homes, or what remained of them, others were unable even to find where they used to live, as a result of Israel’s determined efforts to erase their homeland. Almost all, however, were primarily preoccupied with finding the remains of their loved ones, buried under the rubble, or shot in the streets — just one of the many dreadful legacies of this unprecedented, and unprecedentedly long assault on a trapped civilian population in which no one — no one — has survived without losing family members, and in which hundreds of entire extended families have been erased from the civil registry (the same civil registry possessed by the Israelis, who used it to maximize their extermination).
Video: “Guantánamo at 23”, My New America Event with Tom Wilner and Karen Greenberg, and My One-Hour Podcast Interview with Margaret Flowers
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On the last day of Joe Biden’s presidency, it seems appropriate to be posting a video and an audio recording marking the 23rd anniversary of the prison’s opening, on January 11, and appraising the pros and cons of Biden’s tenure in relation to Guantánamo, even though the news today is, understandably, dominated by the extraordinarily welcome news that, after 470 days of the most monstrous and persistent genocidal assault imaginable, a ceasefire has begun today in the Gaza Strip.
This has finally allowed the Palestinians, for the first time since the brief six-day “pause” in hostilities for the exchange of hostages that took place at the end of November 2023, to stop having to live in permanent fear of losing their lives from Israeli bombing, snipers, drones and armed quadcopters.
The sense of relief is, frankly, unimaginable for those of us who have been obliged to watch the atrocities unfold from afar, but many Palestinians, long displaced from their homes, are, for the first time, realizing the unprecedented extent of Israel’s destruction of almost the entire built environment, as they make their way through what appears to be a post-apocalyptic hellscape, in search of the remains of their homes, and of the remains of their lost and murdered loved ones.
Dare We Hope That the Gaza Ceasefire Deal Will End the Horror of Israel’s Extermination of the Palestinian People?
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Is it really true? After 470 days of the most grotesque, publicly-celebrated, western-backed atrocities that any of us have ever seen, dare we hope that a durable ceasefire has been agreed that will bring to an end the soul-draining horrors of Israel’s relentless efforts to exterminate the Palestinian population of the Gaza Strip?
On Wednesday (January 15), the Prime Minister of Qatar, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani, announced the agreement of a ceasefire deal, agreed to by Israel and Hamas, in negotiations involving Qatar, Egypt and the US. President Biden and the President-Elect, Donald Trump, both claimed responsibility for securing the success of the deal, although it was noticeable that the terms of the deal were almost identical to those agreed to by Hamas over eight months ago, on May 6, 2024, which Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, then refused to accept.
This suggests that, despite their protestations, neither Biden nor the US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, who also rushed to take credit for the deal, had actually done much at all in the intervening eight months, except to be publicly humiliated by Netanyahu, while continuing to send an extraordinary amount of deadly weapons to Israel, indicating that they were prepared to accept humiliation because they continued to unconditionally support Israel’s apparently never-ending hunger for Palestinians’ blood.
Photos and Report: Close Guantánamo Vigils Marking the 23rd Anniversary of the Prison’s Opening, January 11, 2025
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Saturday January 11 marked another gruesome and unforgivable milestone in the US’s ongoing long war on law and fundamental human decency — the 23rd anniversary of the opening of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, where, despite recent positive developments (the release of 15 men), another 15 are still held in varying states of lawlessness.
To mark the occasion, groups across the US and around the world, who have been admirably and diligently taking part in monthly coordinated “First Wednesday” vigils for the last two years calling for the prison’s closure, shifted the dates of their vigils to the anniversary — although normal service will be resumed next month, on Wednesday February 5.
Below are photos of the vigils in Washington, D.C., London, New York, San Francisco, Cobleskill, NY and Detroit. A planned vigil in Los Angeles had to be called off because of the wildfires, and other groups held vigils on other days — Portland, OR on January 1, and Mexico City on January 8 — with the vigil outside the European Parliament in Brussels taking place this coming Thursday, January 16. Groups involved include various Amnesty International groups, Witness Against Torture, the World Can’t Wait, Close Guantánamo, the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, the UK Guantánamo Network, and many other groups, with other organizations also supporting the vigils on an ongoing basis.
Video: I Discuss Guantánamo Past, Present and Future with David Swanson on Talk World Radio
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I’m delighted to be making available below the video of a half-hour interview that I undertook on Sunday with the great peace activist David Swanson, of World BEYOND War, for his Talk World Radio show, which is syndicated by the Pacifica Network throughout the US.
David and I have know each other for a long time, since my earliest visits to the US at the end of the Bush administration, and the start of the Obama presidency, although we haven’t seen each other for many years, and I haven’t before had the pleasure of being interviewed by him for his show, which he helpfully entitled, “Close Guantánamo While Its Victims Are Still Alive.”
Half an hour was a helpful amount of time to discuss a complicated story like Guantánamo with the attention to detail that it deserves, and I was more than happy to discuss the prison from its earliest days, as a facility designed to hold human beings without and rights whatsoever, and to torture them when the largely hapless individuals rounded up or bought in Afghanistan and Pakistan failed to provide the “intelligence” that those in charge of the “war on terror” demanded.
Wonderful News as Eleven Men Are Freed from Guantánamo and Resettled in Oman
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In what will forever be remembered as a truly significant day in Guantánamo’s long and sordid history, the Biden administration has freed eleven Yemeni prisoners, flying them from Guantánamo to Oman to resume their lives after more than two decades without charge or trial in US custody; mostly at Guantánamo, but in some cases for several years previously in CIA “black sites.”
All eleven men had been held for between two and four years since they were unanimously approved for release by high-level US government review processes, and, in one outlying case, for 15 years.
A deal to release them in Oman had been arranged in October 2023, but had been cancelled at the last minute, when a plane was already on the runway, because of what was described, when the story broke last May, as the “political optics” of freeing them when the attacks in southern Israel had just taken place — although Carol Rosenberg, writing for the New York Times about the releases yesterday, suggested that “congressional objections led the Biden administration to abort the mission.”
Guantánamo at 23: Global Vigils on January 11 and an Ongoing Photo Campaign Marking 8,400 Days on January 9
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UPDATE: Just after I posted this article, the news broke that eleven of the 14 men approved for release from Guantánamo have been resettled in Oman. My article celebrating this news will be published tomorrow, but the photo campaign and the vigils will, of course, be proceeding as planned, because 15 men are still held — three who have also long been approved for release, three “forever prisoners”, never charged, but never approved for release either, and nine others in the military commissions trial system. Here’s my article about the release of these eleven men, containing more information than you’ll find in the mainstream media!
With the plight of 14 men who have long been approved for release from Guantánamo but are still held dominating the thoughts of those of us who have spent years — or decades — calling for the prison’s closure, this coming week — which includes the 23rd anniversary of the prison’s opening, on Saturday January 11 — is a crucial time for highlighting the need for urgent action from the Biden administration, in the last few weeks before Donald Trump once more occupies the White House, bringing with him, no doubt, a profound antipathy towards any of the men still held, and a hunger for sealing the prison shut as he did during his first term in office.
This Thursday, January 9, marks 8,400 days since the prison opened, and, as I’ve been doing every 100 days for the last seven years, I’m encouraging people across the US and around the world to show their solidarity with the men still held by taking a photo with the Close Guantánamo campaign’s poster marking this grim milestone, and calling for the prison’s closure. The poster is here, and please send your photo here. If you don’t have a printer, you can bring up the poster on a phone, or on a tablet or laptop, and get someone to take a photo with their phone.
Normally, I also produce a separate poster marking the number of days that Guantánamo has been open on the anniversary of its opening, but this year, because the anniversary falls just two days after 8,400 days, I’m encouraging everyone holding vigils on January 11 to print off the 8,400 days poster and to use that. After 8,400 days, two days really make very little difference at all.
Who's still at Guantánamo?
