A Fragile Hope As A New Ceasefire Deal for Gaza Is Agreed
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Is it real? Dare we hope? Is there really going to be a ceasefire in Gaza? Will hostages be exchanged, will humanitarian aid be allowed to flood into Gaza, staving off mass starvation, and additional widespread deaths through the destruction of the healthcare sector and a rigid siege on vital medical equipment and supplies, and will there really be a durable end to Israel’s genocidal hostilities?
To secure the return of its remaining hostages, and to fulfil Donald Trump’s desire for a Nobel Peace Prize, will Israel really end its hostilities, and wean itself off what, for the last two years, has been its remorseless addiction to killing Palestinian civilians? On average, every 15 minutes, 24 hours a day for the last 731 days, Israel has been killing civilians — babies, children, women and men — all while falsely claiming that it is “defending itself”, seeking to “eliminate Hamas” and secure the return of all the hostages seized on October 7, 2023.
Will Israel really abandon its true aims — the steady, relentless extermination of the Palestinian people (behind a mirage of “voluntary migration”), and the complete destruction of the Gaza Strip to make it unliveable, so that its vile, long-cherished dream of colonizing the whole of Gaza — and then doing the same in the West Bank — can finally be fulfilled?
UN Report Confirms Genocide in Gaza, But the World Still Shrugs, Even As Israel Erases Gaza City
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Four days ago, ripples of concern briefly surfaced in the global media, as a UN Commission of Inquiry — the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel — issued a devastating 72-page report establishing, definitively, that the State of Israel is engaged in a genocide of the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip, and has been throughout the whole of the last 23 months.
The Commission of Inquiry — chaired by Navi Pillay, who, over the last 30 years has served as a judge on the International Criminal Tribunal dealing with the Rwanda genocide, and at the International Criminal Court, and who was also, from 2008 to 2014, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights — was established in May 2021 by the UN Human Rights Council to investigate violations of international humanitarian law in the territories illegally occupied by Israel since 1967, and its latest report follows on from other devastating reports over the last year.
One of these was in October last year, focusing on Israel’s exterminatory “war” on Gaza’s hospitals, and its extraordinarily brutal treatment of Palestinians in its prisons, which I wrote about in detail in two articles at the time — UN Report Confirms Israel Guilty of War Crimes and “Extermination” in Attacks on Gaza’s Hospitals and UN Report Condemns Unparalleled Violence, Including Torture, Rape and Murder, in Israel’s Unaccountable Prisons for Palestinians.
Israel Murders Anas Al-Sharif to Create a Media Blackout For Its Imminent Annihilation of Gaza City
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UPDATE: Please free free to check out my one-hour interview with Chris Cook of Gorilla Radio, recorded on August 13, in which we discussed the targeted murder of Anas Al-Sharif and his colleagues, Israel’s war on journalists and its persistent lies, as well as the self-inflicted problems created by the British government following its proscription of Palestine Action, a direct action group, as a terrorist organization.
Yesterday, at around 11.35pm, in a deliberate targeted attack on the press tent outside Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, Israel murdered the whole of the remaining crew of Al Jazeera Arabic in northern Gaza — the journalists Anas Al-Sharif and Mohammed Qreiqeh, the cameramen Ibrahim Zaher and Mohammed Noufal, and an assistant, Moamen Aliwa. Also killed was a freelance journalist, Mohammed al-Khaldi, and Al-Sharif’s teenage nephew Musab, who had hoped to follow in his uncle’s footsteps.
My heart sank when I read the news last night. Al-Sharif, 28, was probably the most hard-working journalist in history, relentlessly chronicling the genocide for 22 months with barely a break. It’s unimaginable how, hurrying from one atrocity to another, repeatedly reporting on shattered bodies and erased families, and always enveloped by the smell of blood, he carried on working.
Well known in the Arabic-speaking world, and with millions of followers on social media, where he posted in both Arabic and English, Al-Sharif, who leaves a wife and two young children he adored, kept going even though he must have known that his days were numbered. He was the last of the tireless and ever-visible Al Jazeera journalists, surviving as his closest friends and colleagues were picked off one by one — journalist Ismail Al-Ghoul and cameraman Rami Al-Rifi, who were killed on July 31, 2024, cameraman Fadi Al-Wahidi, who was paralyzed after an attack on October 9, 2024, and Hossam Shabat, who was targeted and murdered on March 24 this year.
Despite Condemnation of Mass Starvation in Gaza, Israel Steps Up Its Extermination and Plans to Annex the Whole of Gaza and the West Bank
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For a moment, there seemed to be hope.
After 21 months of Israel’s incessant bombing of Gaza, and the relentless flow of photos and videos of shredded babies, children and adults, which somehow failed to stir any noticeable outrage from the majority of those with power and influence in the west, photos last week of starving children in Gaza finally prompted a tsunami of criticism and even condemnation from world leaders, the mainstream media and prominent individuals worldwide.
In response, Israel reluctantly promised to lift some aspects of the genocidal siege it imposed on the whole of the Gaza Strip on March 1, claiming that it would allow airdrops of food (by Jordan and the UAE), and that it would create safe humanitarian corridors for aid deliveries by the UN and other aid organizations, while ceasing military activities for ten hours a day in three regions of Gaza.
This sounded positive. The recovering Zionist Shaiel Ben-Ephraim wrote on X that an IDF source had told him, “Everything we have done in the last few months has failed. The government has finally realized that. The pictures broadcast around the world have weakened our hand and strengthened Hamas.”
600 Days of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza: Has Humanity’s Light Been Forever Extinguished?
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Today, May 28, marks the 600th day of Israel’s ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip, a milestone of such shame and horror that the words to describe it adequately don’t even exist.
In the last six days, since my most recent article, Israel’s Ferocious Intensification of Genocide in Gaza Finally Alienates Key Allies, the growing discomfort with Israel’s increasingly savage treatment of the Palestinians over the last three months has not led to any of the “concrete actions” threatened by the UK, France and Canada in a strongly-worded statement, and has not lifted the starvation blockade condemned by 22 foreign ministers.
Instead, after Netanyahu barked insults in response, accusing Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron and Mark Carney of supporting Hamas, and ignoring the 22 foreign ministers’ entreaties to “allow a full resumption of aid into Gaza immediately and enable the UN and humanitarian organizations to work independently and impartially to save lives, reduce suffering and maintain dignity”, Israel has continued its merciless and unsupportable military attacks, still killing, on average, a hundred people a day — almost all civilians — and, yesterday, imposing a new humanitarian aid delivery system that immediately collapsed into violence.
The deaths over the last week have been horrific, including the bombing of a former school, where displaced families were sheltering, which led to dozens of deaths, and a grimly iconic image of the silhouette of a young girl, engulfed in flames, seeking to escape the inferno, and the targeting of the home of a renowned paediatric surgeon, Dr. Alaa Al-Najjar, killing nine of her ten children, whose charred bodies were delivered to Nasser Hospital while she was on duty.
Israel’s Ferocious Intensification of Genocide in Gaza Finally Alienates Key Allies
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In international relations, when your “friend” treats you with arrogant condescension, you have to calibrate your response based on your power relationship with them. If that “friend” is the US, then rocking the boat too much might have serious repercussions, but when your “friend” is Israel, a country that wouldn’t even exist without your economic backing, and which has been demanding and receiving “ironclad” and unconditional support for a 19-month long genocidal assault on a territory it has illegally occupied for the last 58 years and is now threatening to exterminate completely, not responding, in the end, seems to be nothing more than succumbing to patterns of bullying and abuse.
Since its blood-soaked founding in 1948, when it killed 15,000 Palestinians and expelled 750,000 others, Israel — with the support of the US and other countries in the west — has been allowed to carve out for itself an exceptionalism that has enabled it to consistently subvert international law without ever being held to account.
Despite illegally occupying the Palestinian territories of the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem since 1967, imposing a horrendous system of apartheid, strangling Gaza and illegally colonizing the West Bank, repeatedly murdering Palestinians with impunity and establishing a prison system of exceptional brutality and lawlessness, its status as the world’s pre-eminent victim, because of the Holocaust, has allowed it to behave like an indulged sociopathic teenager, or as an entire nation of indulged sociopathic teenagers.
Israel Wants to Kill Everyone in Gaza
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Israel’s latest plan for the Gaza Strip, approved by the Security Cabinet on May 5, has, astonishingly, managed to plumb new depths of screamingly illegal depravity in a 19-month genocidal campaign in which screamingly illegal depravity has, from the very beginning, been the norm.
The new plan, which theoretically aims “to destroy Hamas and rescue [the] remaining hostages” seized on October 7, 2023, has four main components: firstly, the permanent military occupation of the Gaza Strip; secondly, the forced displacement of the entire surviving population to a small portion of land in south; thirdly, the conversion of that small portion of land into a concentration camp; and, fourthly, the illusion of “voluntary migration”, behind which extermination — via direct killing, starvation and, probably most potently, medical neglect through the almost complete destruction of medical supplies and equipment — will continue until everyone is dead.
This isn’t how it’s being described in news reports, because it’s a truth that eludes most mainstream journalists and their editors, who have been cowed into submission by pro-Israeli bias for so long now that they have forgotten that their job is supposed to entail them analyzing information rather than simply regurgitating it unquestioningly.
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).
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.
The First Anniversary of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza: Depths of Moral Depravity Unmatched in Modern History
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Today is the first anniversary of a day that changed the world, when militants from the paramilitary wing of Hamas, the political and administrative organization responsible for the 2.3 million inhabitants of the Gaza Strip, 141 square miles of land sealed off from the outside world since 2007 by the State of Israel, broke out of their open-air prison, and, with militants from other organizations, embarked on a brutal killing spree in southern Israel.
The attacks left 1,195 people dead — of whom 739 were Israeli civilians, and 79 were civilians of other countries — although no one knows how many of the dead were killed by Israel itself, via the notorious Hannibal Directive, which advocates killing their own people to prevent them from being captured. 251 hostages were also seized and taken back to Gaza, where many have since died — some, undoubtedly, killed by Israel itself — because of their government’s refusal, since last November, to negotiate a ceasefire and the exchange of hostages for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.
The October 7 attacks were horrendous, but Israel’s response — launching a relentless all-out assault on the Gaza Strip, which has lasted for a whole year, and is still, malevolently, ongoing — has killed over 40,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians, a death toll so disproportionate, borne of destruction so remorselessly vindictive, that it has plunged us into depths of moral depravity that most of us have never witnessed.
Who's still at Guantánamo?
