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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.

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On the same day that the Israeli Knesset gave “preliminary approval to a bill to impose Israeli sovereignty on the occupied West Bank”, as Al Jazeera described it, accurately calling it “a move tantamount to annexation of the Palestinian territory, which would be a blatant violation of international law”, over 3,300 km away, in the Hague, the International Court of Justice delivered a blistering condemnation of Israel’s existing failures to “fulfil its obligations under international humanitarian law” as the occupying Power in the Occupied Palestinian Territory; namely, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, first occupied in 1967.

In an advisory opinion relating to the “Obligations of Israel in relation to the Presence and Activities of the United Nations, Other International Organizations and Third States in and in relation to the Occupied Palestinian Territory”, the Court’s eleven judges unanimously ruled that the State of Israel was required “to ensure that the population of the Occupied Palestinian Territory has the essential supplies of daily life, including food, water, clothing, bedding, shelter, fuel, medical supplies and services” — from all of which, despite persistent and risible protestations to the contrary by senior Israeli officials, the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip have been horrendously deprived, though various “sieges” on all essential supplies, for most of the last two years.

The Court also ruled, by ten votes to one, that Israel was required “to agree to and facilitate by all means at its disposal relief schemes on behalf of the population of the Occupied Palestinian Territory so long as that population is inadequately supplied, as has been the case in the Gaza Strip, including relief provided by the United Nations and its entities, in particular the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East [UNRWA], other international organizations and third States, and not to impede such relief.”

Unanimously, the Court also required Israel “to respect and protect all relief and medical personnel and facilities”, “to respect the prohibition on forcible transfer and deportation in the Occupied Palestinian Territory”, “to respect the right of protected persons from the Occupied Palestinian Territory who are detained by the State of Israel to be visited by the International Committee of the Red Cross” — an internationally agreed obligation that Israel’s far-right security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, sweepingly canceled for all Palestinian prisoners after October 7 — and “to respect the prohibition on the use of starvation of civilians as a method of warfare.”

This latter point seemed, in particular, to be a pointed reference to the arrest warrants issued for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then-defense minister Yoav Gallant by the International Criminal Court in November 2024 for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including, specifically, “the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare.”

In further votes, the majority of the Court also upheld Israel’s “obligation under international human rights law to respect, protect and fulfil the human rights of the population of the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including through the presence and activities of the United Nations, other international organizations and third States, in and in relation to the Occupied Palestinian Territory”, and its obligation “to co-operate in good faith with the United Nations by providing every assistance in any action it takes in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations, including the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, in and in relation to the Occupied Palestinian Territory.”

The Court also called on Israel to respect “the privileges and immunities accorded to the United Nations, including its agencies and bodies, and its officials, in and in relation to the Occupied Palestinian Territory”, to respect “the inviolability of the premises of the United Nations”, including those of `UNRWA, and to respect “the immunity of the property and assets of the Organization from any form of interference.”

Israel’s persistent attacks on UNRWA and the west’s shameful failure to defend it

The gulf between Israel and the ICJ could hardly be more pronounced.

In a devastating opinion in July 2024, the Court ruled that Israel’s entire occupation of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem was illegal, and ordered it to withdraw completely and to pay reparations to the Palestinians, also reminding every other nation on earth of their obligations not to do anything to facilitate Israel’s ongoing crimes.

Earlier, in January 2024, the Court had also warned Israel, in no uncertain terms, that it was “plausible” that its unprecedentedly violent assault on the Gaza Strip, following Palestinian militants’ attacks in southern Israel on October 7, 2023, constituted a genocide under the 1948 Genocide Convention, and issued provisional measures intended to prevent confirmation of a genocide.

Israel, however, responded with contempt to the ICJ’s provisional measures, immediately, and with breathtaking cynicism, not increasing supplies of humanitarian aid to Gaza, as ordered, but, instead, accusing UNRWA of harbouring 12 Hamas members (out of 13,000 employees in Gaza, and 40,000 in total) who, it alleged, without providing any evidence, were suspected of taking part in the October 7 attacks.

Western countries shamefully rushed to suspend funding to UNWRA, instead of demanding evidence from Israel, or showing any recognition that Israel’s hatred of UNRWA, which was founded by the UN in 1949 and began its operations in 1950, is because its entire purpose is to provide food, medical supplies and education to a population they have always sought to eradicate, and, moreover, also advocating for the Palestinian refugees’ right to return to their historic homeland, as affirmed repeatedly in various UN resolutions since the blood-soaked founding of the State of Israel in 1948.

Western countries eventually reinstated their funding for UNWRA, but their credulous acceptance of Israel’s unsubstantiated claims had inflicted severe reputational damage on the organization, as well as revealing these countries’ supine willingness to abandon their commitments to the UN Charter and the UN-mandated work of UNWRA in favour of unquestioning support for Israel.

Their complacency, or their direct complicity in Israel’s crimes, was even more damnable given the extent of verifiable reports, including by the UN, that Israel had, as the ICJ described it, undertaken “numerous attacks on school buildings and healthcare facilities in the Gaza Strip operated by the United Nations and others, including school buildings that had been directly hit”, and that, “between 7 October 2023 and 20 August 2025 at least 531 aid workers, including 366 United Nations personnel (360 of whom were employed by UNRWA), have been killed in the Gaza Strip”, with others seized and “disappeared” into Israel’s brutal and unaccountable prisons for Palestinians.

The January ceasefire and the horrors of Israel’s renewed genocidal assault

Emboldened by western indifference, as the ICJ explained in its opinion yesterday, the Knesset, in October 2024, passed two laws terminating its 1967 agreement to allow UNRWA to provide humanitarian assistance to Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, which came into effect in January this year, just after a ceasefire deal came into effect.

Under the ceasefire deal, as the ICJ noted, for 42 days “an increase of humanitarian aid was authorized to reach the Gaza Strip.” Then, however, Israel wilfully broke the ceasefire deal, imposing the most severe siege of all on March 2, which, until May 18, “completely prevented the entry of aid (including food and water) into the Gaza Strip and its distribution to the Palestinian population, with catastrophic consequences for [the] population.”

Israel sought to justify its actions based on claims that Hamas was “stealing supplies and using them to finance its operations”, although this was another blatant lie, designed to detract attention from the grisly truth that Israel had torpedoed the ceasefire deal to initiate an even more grotesque policy of extermination than that which it had been engaged in until the ceasefire began. Beginning on March 18, confirming its intent, Israel also “resumed military operations in and against the Gaza Strip” — again, with greater ferocity than had been seen since the earliest days of its genocidal operations.

Although Israel eventually allowed the UN to resume limited deliveries of aid to Gaza on May 19, most of its efforts at persuading the world that it was not deliberately starving the Palestinians to death were diverted to a new aid distribution system, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, established with the US, which, from the beginning, revealed itself to be a “Hunger Games”-style excuse for Israeli soldiers and US mercenaries to use starving civilians for target practice. With undue delicacy, the ICJ explained how “The United Nations, other international organizations and humanitarian non-governmental organizations considered that this new system did not align with humanitarian principles, did not meet people’s needs and put people at risk, and they refused to collaborate with it”, although, elsewhere in the opinion, the Court did manage to point out the horrendous death toll associated with the GHF operations, noting that, “According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, over 2,100 Palestinians have been killed at or near the distribution sites of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation since that system began operating on 27 May 2025.”

As the ICJ also noted, despite Israel allowing limited aid deliveries by the UN to enter Gaza, it “continued to impose substantial restrictions on the entry and distribution of aid and commercial goods into the Gaza Strip”, and by the end of August “the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip had become catastrophic, with evidence of famine, mass displacement, extreme levels of deprivation and a continued increase in civilian casualties, including children.”

Crucially, in response to Israel’s persistent claims that “a number of UNRWA employees had been involved in the 7 October 2023 attacks, that UNRWA premises had been appropriated by Hamas for military purposes and that UNRWA had long lost its neutrality”, the Court was resolute in its conclusions that, although the UN’s Office of Internal Oversight Services had reviewed Israel’s claims about UNWRA, which had “led to the dismissal of nine members of UNRWA personnel due to their possible involvement in the 7 October 2023 Hamas-led attacks against Israel”, that was “insufficient to support a conclusion that UNRWA as a whole is not a neutral organization.”

In addition, and just as crucially, the Court also found that “Israel has not substantiated its allegations that a significant part of UNRWA employees “are members of Hamas . . . or other terrorist factions.”

What needs to happen now

Following the Court’s ruling, Israel, predictably, responded with a hysterical tirade in which, to quote its foreign ministry, it imperiously declared that it “categorically rejected the advisory opinion”, as the BBC described it, calling it “entirely predictable from the outset regarding UNRWA”, and dismissing it as “yet another political attempt to impose political measures against Israel under the guise of ‘international law.’”

The ministry also continued to insist, implausibly, that Israel was “fully upholding its obligations under international law”, adding, in intemperate language that fully revealed its unsuitability to be considered as a credible member of the global family of nations, that it would “not co-operate with an organisation that is infested with terror activities.”

As the BBC rather breezily described it, the Court’s opinion “is non-binding, but it carries significant moral and diplomatic weight.” The Guardian’s coverage was less blasé, however, with its diplomatic editor Patrick Wintour stating that the opinion’s “stinging” rebuke to Israel’s claims of impunity “is bound to lead to further calls for Israel’s suspension from the UN.”

What needs to happen now is for the international community to step up to demand that Israel complies with its obligations to allow unfettered aid into Gaza to relieve the crushing humanitarian crisis that has not been adequately addressed at all since the new ceasefire began two weeks ago. As the Government Media Office in Gaza reported just two days ago, although, under Donald Trump’s “Peace Plan”, 600 trucks a day of humanitarian aid were supposed to enter Gaza, only 986 aid trucks were allowed to enter during the first eleven days, and, of those 986, only 14 carried cooking gas, and 28 delivered fuel, even though both are essential for sustaining bakeries, hospitals, and other critical infrastructure.

Responding to the Court’s ruling, Andreas Kravik, Norway’s deputy foreign minister, said that the ICJ decision “confirms that the UN should be responsible for delivering aid, and this is in line with what is set out in the Trump plan.” He added, “We would expect Israel now to comply and we hope that will mean that the UN will be granted full access. We now expect Israel in line with the court opinion also to grant access not just to the UN but to the NGOs who are ready, willing and able to help.”

Speaking to the BBC yesterday, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization, expressed his frustration that Israel was continuing to restrict aid supplies, and warned that “a massive increase in aid is needed to begin to address the complex needs” of the population, which, he added, is experiencing a health “catastrophe” that will last for “generations to come.”

He called on the US in particular to act, stating that, “since the US has brokered the peace deal it has the responsibility of making sure that all sides are respecting” it.

To their credit, the Trump administration has already acted to curb some of Israel’s ongoing resistance to the terms of the peace deal. When two Israeli soldiers died last week, after a bulldozer that was lawlessly demolishing buildings in the 58% of Gaza still controlled by Israel ran over some unexploded ordnance, the US was swift to rebuke Israel for falsely claiming that its soldiers had been attacked by Hamas, and threatening to once more cut off all supplies of humanitarian aid.

Israel’s refusal to reopen the Rafah Crossing with Egypt, however, is still in place, preventing not only the delivery of essential aid, but also the departure of the more than “15,000 registered amputees who all require treatment abroad”, as Dr. Muneer Al-Boursh, the director-general of the Ministry of Health in Gaza, recently explained, in an emotive appeal in which he also stressed that over 170,000 wounded civilians urgently need surgery for which supplies and equipment are unavailable.

In addition to the US’s recognition of Israel’s fundamental untrustworthiness, Vice President J. D. Vance, visiting Israel over the last few days, has also vocally maintained the US’s opposition to Israel’s plans for the complete annexation of the West Bank, reiterating Trump’s assertion, last month, that “I will not allow Israel to annex the West Bank.” As the Associated Press explained, Vance called the Knesset vote an “insult”, which “went against the Trump administration policies and efforts to ensure that the US-brokered ceasefire between Israel and Hamas holds in Gaza”, while the US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, has also been vocal in his opposition to the Knesset vote, calling it “counter-productive” and a “threat to peace.”

Nevertheless, if the ICJ opinion is to mean anything, the US needs to exert further pressure to ensure that Israel complies with its obligations to provide humanitarian aid to Gaza at the necessary scale, especially because, as was discussed in a report by NPR just yesterday, Israel is currently moving in the opposite direction, not only maintaining its ban on UNWRA “sending aid and staff to Gaza”, but also, right now, “taking unprecedented steps to de-register major nongovernmental aid groups for ideological reasons.”

As NPR explained, Israel has recently initiated a new process “requiring that all international aid groups re-register under new criteria, including approval by a committee which includes representatives from Israel’s Ministry for Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism.” As the broadcaster added, “Reasons for delisting aid groups include supporting ‘terrorist groups and activities in accordance with Israel law’ and ‘inciting racism’, according to COGAT, the Israeli military’s arm that is part of NGO approval process.”

UN and nongovernmental aid groups told NPR that many of their requests to enter Gaza, via the only two crossings from Israel that are currently open, “are routinely rejected, without explanation”, and, as NPR added, “The Norwegian Refugee Council, registered in Gaza since 2009, is one of the major aid groups unable to send in supplies or staff while its application is being considered.” Ivan Karakashian, the NRC’s communications manager in Jerusalem, told NPR, “We quickly realized that the intent behind the process wasn’t to facilitate the re-registration of humanitarian INGOs but rather to find a way to de-register us and to remove our ability to operate.”

Shamefully, western leaders have, for the most part, been silent in response to yesterday’s ruling. The US, despite its recent pushback against Israeli efforts to undermine the ceasefire, is an unreliable ally when it comes to defending the UN, but so too is the west’s largest bloc, the EU, which, just yesterday, was condemned by the Guardian’s Nathalie Tocci for failing to exert any meaningful pressure on Israel for the last two years, in an article that was aptly entitled, “The EU was complicit in the war in Gaza. Trump’s plan can’t be an excuse to dodge responsibility now.”

Those of us who care — and, as Tocci noted, “Israel’s violations of international law have triggered mass outrage among European people, but EU governments and institutions have lost touch with their own citizens, especially younger people” — need to continue to raise our voices in defence of the Palestinians, and in defence of the requirements of international humanitarian law, which Israel continues to flout so outrageously via its genocidal hysteria and its ongoing quest to, above all, find ways to evade any restraints in its pursuit of the only aim it now has a depraved pariah state lost to humanity — the continuing extermination of the Palestinian people.

* * * * *

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.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s new Substack account, set up in November 2024, where he’ll be sending out a weekly newsletter, or his RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, and the full military commissions list.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation via PayPal or via Stripe.

Please click on either of the ‘Donate’ or ‘Buy’ buttons below (via PayPal or Stripe) to make a donation towards the $2,500 (£2,000) I’m trying to raise to support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist over the next three months. To get links to all my work in your inbox, please also consider taking out a free or paid subscription to my new Substack newsletter.

 

UPDATE October 23: For anyone interested in hearing me talk about Donald Trump’s “Peace Plan” for Gaza, what it means and what the future may hold, please check out my latest podcast with Andy Bungay, recorded on Sunday October 19, in which, over 50 minutes, we discussed this and other topical issues; in particular, the rise of the far-right, and the lamentable role played in its promotion by social media.

What kind of peace deal is this, when those it affects — the Palestinians subjected to illegal occupation by Israel for the last 58 years — are not supposed to have any say in their future?

Although those of us who don’t subscribe to the all-consuming genocidal death cult that Israel has become over the last two years are overwhelmingly relieved that the non-stop bombing and destruction of the Gaza Strip has stopped as a result of the recently-agreed ceasefire, we refuse to endorse the back-slapping celebrations of those who undertook and facilitated the genocide, their ongoing efforts to sideline the Palestinians themselves in negotiations about Gaza’s future, and the failure of the international community to recognize that, right now, what is most important is the urgent delivery not only of humanitarian aid on an unprecedented scale, but also of significant amounts of ground-clearing and reconstruction equipment, to avert what, otherwise, will be a cataclysmic humanitarian catastrophe already set in place by Israel.

For all but seven weeks of the last two years, the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip have been subjected to a policy of genocidal extermination by the State of Israel that has been so sickening in its depravity that decent people around the world — in their billions — have become so thoroughly disgusted by its actions that they will never again sleep easily or know anything resembling joy until the Palestinians secure their own independent state, and until Israel’s leaders — including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, past and present defense ministers Yoav Gallant and Israel Katz, president Isaac Herzog and far-right ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir — are held accountable for their monstrous genocidal crimes.

For these billions of people worldwide, including the entire Muslim world and roughly two-thirds of the populations of the countries of the west, there can also be no peace until the leaders of those western countries who have supported and enabled the genocide — the same people hypocritically celebrating yesterday at Donald Trump’s “peace summit” in Egypt, and hoping to whitewash both Israel’s monstrous crimes and their own complicity in those crimes — are also held accountable.

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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?

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The world as we know it died two years ago today, on October 7, 2023 — but not, as we’ve been incessantly bludgeoned into believing, because Palestinian resistance fighters who broke out of the “open-air prison” of the Gaza Strip went on a killing spree in southern Israel in a desperate response to 75 years of persistent oppression, apartheid and murder by the State of Israel.

Those attacks — horrific as they were, with 1,195 people killed and 251 others taken hostage (although it should be noted that no one knows how many were killed by Israeli forces themselves under the notorious Hannibal Directive) — were portrayed by Israel as a genocide, and as an existential threat to their very existence by sub-human monsters, but that was clearly untrue.

In the long history of oppression and resistance since the blood-soaked founding of the State of Israel in 1948, when 15,000 Palestinians were killed and over 700,000 driven from their homes and permanently exiled, many, many times more Palestinians than Israelis have been killed in repeated one-sided “wars” on Gaza — euphemistically and unforgivably described by the Israeli authorities as “mowing the lawn” — or have been killed in random executions, often for nothing more than throwing stones at soldiers, while, at any given time, at least 5,000 Palestinians, including children, have been held in brutal prisons, reserved solely for Palestinians, in which any kind of internationally recognized due process and justice has been deliberately erased.

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Early on Tuesday morning, from 2am, and with no warning, and absolutely no justification whatsoever, Israel violently broke the two-month ceasefire deal with Hamas, launching numerous military strikes across the Gaza Strip that killed over 400 Palestinians — mostly civilians, and including 174 children, 89 women and 32 elderly people. Overwhelmed, Gaza’s hospitals, most barely functioning, struggled to cope with the influx of the dying and the wounded. 

Dr. Abdul-Qader Weshah, a senior emergency doctor at Al-Awda Hospital, told Drop Site News, “Since the morning, we were horrified and awoke to the screams and pain of people. We’ve been treating many people, children and women in particular.” He added that medical staff had had to transfer some of the wounded to other hospitals because of a lack of medical supplies, saying, “We don’t have the means. Gaza’s hospitals are devoid of everything. Here at the hospital, we lack everything, including basic necessities like disinfectants and gauze. We don’t have enough beds for the casualties. We don’t have the capacity to treat the wounded. X-ray devices, magnetic resonance imaging, and simple things like stitches are not available. The hospital is in an unprecedented state of chaos.” 

Dr. Muhammad Abu Salmiya, the director of Al-Shifa Hospital, told Al Jazeera Arabic, “Every minute, a wounded person dies due to a lack of resources.”

In a chilling statement issued shortly after the airstrikes began, Israel Katz, Israel’s defence minister, appointed in November as the replacement for the wanted war criminal Yoav Gallant by Israel’s other notorious wanted war criminal, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said that “the gates of hell will open in Gaza” and that Hamas would be hit with a force it has “never seen before” if it did not release all the remaining Israeli hostages.

Since the ceasefire began on January 19, after eight months in which its implementation was repeatedly scuppered by Netanyahu, Hamas, as agreed in the ceasefire deal, released 30 living hostages (25 Israelis and five Thai nationals), and also returned the bodies of eight others, while Israel, also as agreed in the deal, released 1,777 Palestinians from its brutal and widely-condemned network of prisons for Palestinians, including women, children, hostages seized in Gaza as bargaining chips after October 7, and hundreds of individuals convicted of crimes, with at least 130 of those released prisoners deported to Egypt.

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On March 13, a devastating report, “‘More than a human can bear’: Israel’s systematic use of sexual, reproductive and other forms of gender-based violence since October 2023”, was issued by the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel.

The report’s most alarming findings are that, since October 2023, as described in an accompanying press release, Israel has engaged in “acts which amount to the crime against humanity of extermination”, through the deaths of women and girls “from complications related to pregnancy and childbirth due to the conditions imposed by the Israeli authorities which have denied access to reproductive healthcare.”

In addition, “through the systematic destruction of sexual and reproductive healthcare”, which has “destroyed in part the reproductive capacity of Palestinians in Gaza as a group”, the Commission found that Israel has engaged in acts “amounting to two categories of genocidal acts in the Rome Statute and the Genocide Convention”; namely, “deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of Palestinians and imposing measures intended to prevent births.”

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Last Tuesday, the full delusional derangement of Donald Trump’s narcissistic opinion of himself as a god-like emperor entitled to reshape the world according to his whims was on full display.

At a press conference at the White House with the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — the first foreign leader that Trump has met with since he took office, despite Netanyahu being a wanted war criminal — he called for the complete ethnic cleansing, or, to put it another way, the forced displacement of the entire Palestinian population of the Gaza Strip, outrageous crimes under international law, which he nevertheless sought to dress up as a benevolent humanitarian intervention, and then, seemingly out of nowhere, pledged to take over the entirety of the Gaza Strip, and to rebuild it as “the Riviera of the Middle East.”

Middle East Eye helpfully transcribed and posted the whole of the press conference and the Q&A session that followed it, including the following section in which, in his typically rambling and frequently incoherent manner, Trump announced his ethnic cleansing plan:

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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.

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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.

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