Gaza and the Palestinians’ Inalienable Right to Self-Determination

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Reflecting on Donald Trump’s tiny mind, in which he has the attention span of a toddler, and is only interested in simplistic outcomes that he can use to bolster his own delusional self-image as an extraordinary victor and savior, the peace deal for Gaza that he announced three weeks ago, including the ceasefire that began on October 10, is the most startling example of his solipsistic view of reality, and his inability to think deeply, or with any nuance, about any given topic for longer than it takes to draw in breath and exhale.

It is unreservedly commendable that the negotiations to end Israel’s two-year-long genocidal assault on the Gaza Strip have, for the last 20 days, prevented Israel from resuming, on a permanent basis, its merciless enthusiasm for the relentless aerial bombardment of Gaza, although it has broken the terms of the ceasefire deal on numerous occasions, requiring the intervention of US baby-sitters to keep it from breaking down, and, yesterday, embarked on its most violent violation yet, killing over a hundred Palestinians, including at least 46 children, and injuring over 250 more, in numerous air strikes.

Before these attacks, Gaza’s Media Office assessed that Israel had committed 80 violations since the ceasefire began, killing 97 Palestinians and injuring 230. Those totals now stand at more than 200 killed, and 500 wounded. The average daily death toll may be less than it was before the ceasefire began, when between 60 and a hundred Palestinians were being killed every day in direct attacks, but it is a sign of Israel’s arrogance, its sense of impunity and its complete contempt for the value of any Palestinian lives that it has killed and injured so many, claiming to adhere to the ceasefire deal while switching it on and off at will, without any repercussions.

The strikes seemed to deliberately target civilians, with Civil Defence spokesperson Mahmoud Bassal telling Agence France-Presse that they “targeted tents for displaced people, homes, and the vicinity of a hospital”, and his colleague Dr. Mohammed al-Mughir, the director of humanitarian support and international cooperation at the Civil Defence, telling the Guardian, “Among these attacks was the targeting of a cancer patient camp, the Insan camp.”

For the genocidal butchers of Israel, and their soul-dead supporters in the west, last night’s killings are mere statistics, but, as the aid charity the Sameer Project reported today, among the victims were Ameen Abu Dalal and his entire family — his wife, his young children, his three brothers, and his mother and father, all “sleeping peacefully in their building when an airstrike hit.” Ameen had been with the Sameer Project from the very beginning, and was an integral part of the team. As their post noted, “Quietly, without need for praise or recognition, but with purpose and love for his people, he worked day after day to serve. He didn’t want to take days off because the camaraderie he built with the rest of the team was so important to him.” The Sameer Project also noted that his children, Sham and Yahya, shown in the photo below, “were his world and he gushed with pride when we recently posted a picture of his beautiful daughter on our Instagram page — a representative of what should have been the future for Palestine.”

The attacks took place under the pretext of an alleged skirmish between Hamas and the IDF, and an Israeli claim that Hamas had been filmed “reburying” the body of a deceased hostage in order to “stage a false discovery” for the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Neither action, however, even if true, can justify the vengeful erasure of so many Palestinians’ lives. Instead, the attacks demonstrate the Israeli government’s pathological hunger for Palestinian blood, with the far-right ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, in particular, using every alleged infringement of the ceasefire by Hamas over the last 20 days to urge a full-blown resumption of the “war.”

After the initial release of the last 20 living hostages in exchange for nearly 2,000 Palestinians, delays in the return of the bodies of the 28 other deceased hostages have persistently been used within Israel to stir up calls for renewed hostilities. Hamas has so far located and returned the bodies of 15 of these hostages, but has, as the Guardian described it, “said it does not know the precise whereabouts of all the bodies, saying it has lost contact with several of its units that had been holding the captives and were reportedly killed during Israeli bombardments” — an assessment that should surely be taken at face value given the intensity of the destruction inflicted by Israel on the whole of the Gaza Strip over the last two years.

Today, the IDF said that it had “reinstated the Gaza ceasefire”, although, even if it holds, every other aspect of the “Peace Plan” that involves Gaza’s present, and, crucially, its future is fraught with potentially irreconcilable problems.

Israel’s continuing and deliberate restrictions on the delivery of humanitarian aid

At least as disturbing as Israel’s persistent violations of the ceasefire is its refusal to honor the agreement to allow 600 trucks of humanitarian aid into Gaza on a daily basis, and its refusal to reopen the Rafah Crossing with Egypt, not just for the delivery of humanitarian aid, but also to facilitate the departure of the vast numbers of seriously ill Palestinians who require treatment abroad, including “over 15,000 registered amputees”, according to Dr. Muneer Al-Boursh, the Director General of the Ministry of Health in Gaza, who spoke last week about how the health system in Gaza “is facing its worst collapse in history” after two years of Israel’s genocidal assault.

“The world”, as he stated, “must understand that a people subjected to systematic killing, ethnic cleansing, and genocide cannot recover without massive international support. We need borders open, medical aid flowing, and clean water restored.”

As the UN reported two days ago, there has been an increase in humanitarian aid in recent days, “with more than 300 truckloads of supplies collected from the Palestinian side of the Kerem Shalom crossing between Friday and Saturday”, which “included thousands of pallets of wheat flour, canned food, rice and supplies for hot meals, alongside medical equipment, tents, tarpaulins and winter clothing”, Including desperately needed “hygiene kits [and] post-partum kits.”

The UN Office for Project Services, which provides comprehensive emergency services, also announced that it had been able to distribute “329,000 litres of diesel to keep hospitals, telecommunications and food operations running”, and the UN added that “Humanitarian partners, working with 170 community kitchens, have now provided more than one million hot meals – mostly in southern and central Gaza”, while in Deir al Balah, Khan Younis and Gaza City, “15 UN-supported bakeries are producing tens of thousands of bundles of bread daily, distributed free to shelters and communities across hundreds of sites.”

Nevertheless, the amount of aid being allowed in is still not even close to the requirements in the peace deal, and, as the UN also pointed out, it remains the case that further significant supplies of “water, food and essential services are still desperately needed.”

Unfortunately, while the above demonstrates the scale of the UN’s essential operations, and may reflect pressure exerted on Israel since, just last week, the International Court of Justice delivered a sweeping condemnation of Israel’s deliberate starvation of the Palestinians for the last two years, and its groundless assault on UNRWA (the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East), which is the UN’s main agency in Gaza, both Israel and the US remain implacably opposed to the continuation of UNRWA’s essential work.

On September 24, the US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said at a news conference in Israel that UNRWA “is not going to play any role” in aid delivery in Gaza, because it had, as he put it, become “a subsidiary of Hamas.”

Rubio’s comments were reprehensible and frankly unforgivable after the ICJ had found, unambiguously, that “Israel has not substantiated its allegations that a significant part of UNRWA employees ‘are members of Hamas . . . or other terrorist factions’”, but, shamefully, his comments maintain the long-running scenario whereby the UN is persistently belittled, sidelined and attacked by just two of its member states — Israel and the US.

Just as alarmingly, the day before Rubio’s speech, Reuters reported that the Trump administration was currently considering a proposal for humanitarian aid delivery in Gaza — the” so-called Gaza Humanitarian Belt”, consisting of “12-16 humanitarian hubs positioned along the line to which Israeli forces have withdrawn within Gaza”, which “would serve people on both sides of the line.”

According to the plan seen by Reuters, “The hubs would also include ‘voluntary reconciliation facilities’ for militants to give up their weapons and receive amnesty, and forward operating bases for future forces with the planned international stabilization force to help demilitarize Gaza”, as outlined in Trump’s “Peace Plan.”

Officials involved in the plan seem to have blithely ignored comparisons with the “death trap” aid program run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which, as the ICJ noted, led to over 2,100 Palestinians being killed at or near its distribution sites from May this year when it was first established. Instead, the plan proposed that the GHF would be “absorbed” or “replaced” by two other organizations — a Red Cross project run by the UAE and Morocco, and Samaritan’s Purse, an aid organization run, disconcertingly, by evangelical US Christians.

While all of the above is disturbing enough, it is the contours of Gaza’s future governance that are the most troubling aspects of Trump’s “Peace Plan” in the long-term.

The shameful sidelining of Hamas and international collusion in designating it as a terrorist organization

According to the “Peace Plan”, “Hamas and other factions agree to not have any role in the governance of Gaza, directly, indirectly, or in any form.” In addition, “All military, terror, and offensive infrastructure, including tunnels and weapon production facilities, will be destroyed and not rebuilt”, and there will be “a process of demilitarization of Gaza under the supervision of independent monitors.”

Also, according to the “Peace Plan”, “The United States will work with Arab and international partners to develop a temporary International Stabilization Force (ISF) to immediately deploy in Gaza”, which “will train and provide support to vetted Palestinian police forces in Gaza” in consultation with Jordan and Egypt, “who have extensive experience in this field”, to establish a permanent force which “will be the long-term internal security solution.”

On the first points, since February this year, during the earlier ceasefire deal that was deliberately destroyed by Israel in early March, Hamas had openly declared that it was “willing to step aside from governing” Gaza, provided that a suitable Palestinian replacement government would be formed, but insisted that disarmament was “a red line that cannot be crossed”, at least while the reasons for an armed resistance were still required.

That position has not fundamentally changed. Speaking to Al Jazeera this week, Hamas’ chief negotiator Khalil al-Hayya (who Israel recently tried to kill in its unprovoked attack on Qatar) affirmed that Hamas has “no objection to any national figure residing in Gaza to manage the Strip,” insisting, “We want to move toward elections as a prelude to restoring national unity.”

He added that Hamas and other Palestinian factions agreed that the reconstruction of Gaza “will be run by a UN body”, and reiterated Hamas’s “commitment to a UN peacekeeping and monitoring scheme to oversee the borders and the implementation of the ceasefire.”

Regarding disarmament, however, he stressed that it remains dependent on Israel ending its presence — and its aggression — in Gaza. “If the occupation ends”, he said, “these weapons will be turned over to the state.”

Fundamentally, of course, al-Hayya’s position is both sensible and appropriate. Why should Hamas disarm when it has no guarantee that Israel will not resume its genocidal assault, and why should it face continued hostility when it has voluntarily offered to relinquish power?

The reason, of course, is that, in another parallel world, Israel continues to insist that Hamas is a terrorist organization, which launched an unprovoked attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023, and their removal from power is essential for Israel’s security.

The two glaring and unacceptable errors in Israel’s arguments are, firstly, its claim that the attacks on October 7 took place in a vacuum, whereas the reality is that they occurred in the context of resistance to a brutal occupation that began in 1967 when Israel seized and occupied Gaza. the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and, even earlier, from 1948, when the State of Israel was founded in blood, as 15,000 Palestinians were killed, and 700,000 forced from their homes and their land.

Shamefully, after October 7, the countries of the west mostly colluded with Israel to back up its implausible and genocidal claim that the attacks of October 7 had occurred in a vacuum, compounding their crime by adding, in unison, as if reading from a script dictated by Netanyahu, that Israel had an open-ended and undefined “right to defend itself”, even though that open-ended “right” is never applicable, and especially not when the country supposedly given that “right” is actually an occupying Power, under international law, which has sweepingly failed to fulfil its duty of care to those under occupation.

The second error, intimately related to the first, is Israel’s claim that Hamas is a terrorist organization, when it is, in fact, the administrative government of Gaza, which, as an occupied territory, persistently attacked by Israel, and besieged and controlled as an “open-air prison” since 2007, has the right to defend itself, through military force if necessary.

This fatal and deliberate error, which key western allies of Israel facilitated by designating the whole of Hamas, and not just its military wing, as a terrorist organization (including the US in 1995, Canada in 2002, the EU in 2003 and the UK in 2021), has persistently underpinned the blurring of the distinction between civilians and combatants since October 7.

As a result, Israel has felt free to murder anyone even tangentially connected to the administrative government, from judges to university professors and teachers, doctors, nurses, scientists, clerks, librarians, journalists, policemen, water and sewage engineers — the list goes on and on, an encyclopaedia of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, in which most of the west has been complicit.

In addition, and ironically for Israel and its allies, this deadly undermining of the functions of an administrative government serves only to confirm that a functioning administrative society cannot be imposed from above, and must, essentially, come from the Palestinian people themselves, through elections and a formal administrative process within Gaza, and not as bullet points in a plan for “the temporary transitional governance of a technocratic, apolitical Palestinian committee”, with “oversight and supervision by a new international transitional body, the ‘Board of Peace’”, headed by Trump, and “with other members and heads of state to be announced, including Former Prime Minister Tony Blair.”

Already, as a kind of peace has returned to Gaza, Hamas operatives have resurfaced to bring order to what would otherwise be the unbridled chaos of a shattered, ungoverned territory subjected to unprecedented civic destruction.

Alarmingly, there are already signs that Israel is actively and aggressively implementing plans to both retain a significant military presence within Gaza itself, and to destabilize the areas not under its direct control.

Under the “Peace Plan”, Israel is meant to withdraw from Gaza in three stages, but is already reinforcing the first stage, the “Yellow Line”, behind which it occupies and controls 58% of the Gaza Strip, with yellow concrete markers. Reflecting on this demarcation, Jeremy Konyndyk, the president of Refugees International and a former US aid official, described it as looking like “a de facto creeping annexation of Gaza.” Those who lived on what is now the Israeli side cannot return to their homes, for fear of being shot, and Netanyahu has insistently told his ministers, as the Guardian described it on October 26, that Israel “would decide for itself where and when to strike its foes and which countries would be allowed to send troops to police the truce.”

“Israel is an independent state”, Netanyahu said, in a speech that poured scorn on the “Peace Plan.” He added, “We will defend ourselves by our own means and we will continue to determine our fate. We do not seek anyone’s approval for this. We control our security.”

As the Guardian also noted, the line “is increasingly referred to in Israeli media as a ‘new border’”, and, in the newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, military correspondent Yoav Zitun predicted that it could evolve into “a high and sophisticated barrier that will shrink the Gaza Strip, enlarge the western Negev and allow for Israeli settlements to be built there.” As the Guardian also explained, “A BBC satellite analysis of the new yellow markers suggested they had been placed several hundred metres beyond the proposed line, representing a further substantial land grab.”

In addition, as a Sky News investigation revealed on October 25, Israel is arming and supporting four militias who “consider themselves part of a joint project to remove Hamas from power” — one of which is led by Yasser Abu Shabab, whose looting of aid was widely reported months ago. All are currently operating and building support behind the “Yellow Line”, but it is clear that Israel’s intention is for them to take their fight to the 42% of the Gaza Strip that is nominally controlled by Hamas, perhaps directly engaging Hamas militarily, but also, if the plan goes ahead, plunging the territory into a sectarian conflict that would only further Israel’s aims to destroy any notion of Palestinian solidarity.

The problems with establishing an International Stabilization Force

As for the International Stabilization Force envisaged in Trump’s plan, allegedly involving Jordan and Egypt, King Abdullah of Jordan effectively poured cold water on the proposal during an interview with BBC Panorama this week.

As King Abdullah explained, “What is the mandate of security forces inside of Gaza? We hope that it is peacekeeping, because if it’s peace enforcing, nobody will want to touch that. Peacekeeping is when you’re sitting there supporting the local police force, the Palestinians, which Jordan and Egypt are willing to train in large numbers, but that takes time. If we’re running around Gaza on patrol with weapons, that’s not a situation that any country would like to get involved in.”

King Abdullah also said that “he would not send Jordanian forces into Gaza because his country was ‘too close politically’ to the situation.” As the BBC described it, “More than half of Jordan’s population is of Palestinian descent, and over decades, the country has taken in 2.3 million Palestinian refugees fleeing earlier wars with Israel — the largest number in the region.”

Asked if he trusted Hamas to keep its promise to give up any political role in Gaza, the king said, “I don’t know them, but those that are working extremely close to them — Qatar and Egypt — feel very, very optimistic that they will abide by that.” He added, “If we don’t solve this problem, if we don’t find a future for Israelis and Palestinians and a relationship between the Arab and Muslim world and Israel, we’re doomed.”

Realistically, then, the only viable way forward is for Hamas’s demands for a UN-brokered transition to take place, leading to elections, after which, if Israel withdraws, they will disarm. The alternative is one in which they willingly make Gaza unacceptably vulnerable to its genocidal neighbour, and accept total defeat as though they — and not Israel — is the aggressor, an absurd humiliation that they will clearly not countenance.

While Israel itches to resume its slaughter, the other non-starter, also mentioned in Trump’s plan, is the proposal that an “economic development plan to rebuild and energize Gaza will be created by convening a panel of experts who have helped birth some of the thriving modern miracle cities in the Middle East.” This has echoes of Trump’s shocking proposal in February that the US should take over Gaza and remake it as “the Riviera of the Middle East.”

If that sounds fanciful, recall that, just a few days ago, as two real estate investors, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, and his Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, were interviewed on CBS’s “60 Minutes”, Kushner was visibly shocked as Witkoff let slip that Kushner had been working on master plans for the reconstruction of Gaza for two years, even though anyone paying attention will recall that, in March 2024, as the Guardian described it, Kushner “praised the ‘very valuable’ potential of Gaza’s ‘waterfront property’ and suggested Israel should remove civilians [to the Negev Desert] while it ‘cleans up’ the Strip”, at an event at Harvard University.

Between continued genocidal extermination at the hands of Israel, or forced displacement and genocidal gentrification under Kushner and Witkoff, is it any wonder that Hamas is unwilling to lay down its arms, and continues to demand that Gaza must be run by Palestinians — as, of course, the International Court of Justice asserted in a hugely significant ruling last July, in which it found that the entirety of Israel’s occupation of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem was illegal, and ordered it to withdraw.

For there to be peace, there is only one solution: Israel must confront and defeat the derangement of its addiction to supremacist expansionism, and Palestine must be free. As the leading US-Israeli genocide scholar Omer Bartov said just days ago, “Israel will become increasingly violent and repressive as long as it denies the crimes it has committed in Gaza and other parts of Palestine since 1948.”

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of a photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’, which ran from 2012 to 2023), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (see the ongoing photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo”, which you can watch on YouTube here.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and, in 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to try to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.

Since 2019, Andy has become increasingly involved in environmental activism, recognizing that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to life on earth, and that the window for change — requiring a severe reduction in the emission of all greenhouse gases, and the dismantling of our suicidal global capitalist system — is rapidly shrinking, as tipping points are reached that are occurring much quicker than even pessimistic climate scientists expected. You can read his articles about the climate crisis here. He has also, since, October 2023, been sickened and appalled by Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and you can read his detailed coverage here.

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