Falsely Blaming Hamas, Israel Breaks the Two-Month Ceasefire, Resumes Genocidal Slaughter in Gaza
Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal. Please also consider taking out a free or paid subscription to my new Substack newsletter.
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.
UN Report Finds Israel Guilty of Genocide and Extermination Against Women and Girls in Gaza, Through “Systematic Destruction” of Reproductive Healthcare
Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal. Please also consider taking out a free or paid subscription to my new Substack newsletter.
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.”
Trump Unites the World in Support of the Palestinians Through His Call for Ethnic Cleansing and the US Takeover of Gaza
Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal. Please also consider taking out a free or paid subscription to my new Substack newsletter.
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:
Israel Defeated As A Million Palestinians Return to Northern Gaza From Exile in the South
Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal. Please also consider taking out a free or paid subscription to my new Substack newsletter.
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
Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal. Please also consider taking out a free or paid subscription to my new Substack newsletter.
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
Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal. Please also consider taking out a free or paid subscription to my new Substack newsletter.
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?
Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal. Please also consider taking out a free or paid subscription to my new Substack newsletter.
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.
Plumbing the Depths of Human Depravity: 450 Days of Extermination in Gaza
Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal. Please also consider taking out a free or paid subscription to my new Substack newsletter.
For 450 days, the State of Israel has been engaged in a sustained policy of vengeance and extermination against the trapped civilian population of the Gaza Strip, a “Holy War” driven by a vile supremacist settler colonial mentality masquerading as the fulfilment of an invented religious entitlement to the Palestinians’ land, involving a giddy and unfettered hatred of the Palestinians as sub-human, and specific revenge for the assault on Israel, on October 7, 2023, in which armed militants who had broken out of the “open-air prison” in which they had been confined for 16 years, went on a killing spree that left 1,068 Israelis and 71 foreign nationals dead, and also kidnapped 251 others.
At the barest minimum, over the last 450 days, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians — mostly civilians — have been killed, or will die, as a result of relentless bombing raids, in which block after block of residential housing, containing almost a quarter of a million homes, has been completely destroyed or damaged, mostly without warning, using bombs of such devastating ferocity that those killed have been torn apart, decapitated, crushed, hurled through the air like broken dolls, or buried alive.
Survivors, meanwhile, have been picked off by snipers, or by armed drones and quadcopters, or have died — and will continue to die — because of a “complete siege” imposed two days after the October 7 attacks, cutting off supplies of food and water, of fuel and of vital medical equipment and supplies. This, accompanied by the almost unimaginably cynical destruction of most of Gaza’s hospitals and health centres, has sentenced to death as yet untold numbers of the elderly, pregnant women, babies and children, those with existing medical conditions, and those with diseases created by the siege, as well as the complete destruction of Gaza’s water and sewage systems.
A Welcome Ceasefire in Lebanon, But No End to Gaza’s Genocidal Agony
Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.
While I was overjoyed, on Wednesday, to see displaced Lebanese people returning to their homes — or the ruins of them — in southern Lebanon as a fragile ceasefire began, following ten weeks of brutal attacks by Israel, my heart sank with the realization that it would make no difference whatsoever to Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, where, predictably, the non-stop atrocities of the last 14 months have continued.
Political maneuvering — particularly on the part of the Biden administration — brought about the ceasefire in Lebanon, harking back to earlier, pre-genocidal days, when it was acknowledged by all sides, however begrudgingly, that military conflicts almost always, eventually, have to come to an end through negotiation. For Gaza, however, no such option seems to exist anymore.
After a brief break in hostilities last November, when Israeli and foreign hostages taken to Gaza after the October 7 attacks in southern Israel were exchanged for Palestinian prisoners in Israel’s brutal, lawless prisons for Palestinians, attempts ever since to broker another, more permanent ceasefire have persistently failed. Even though Hamas has regularly agreed to the terms, Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has deliberately scuppered any deal, although the twisted western media and its politicians have relentlessly spun this as either being Hamas’ fault, or, if they’ve been feeling slightly less deceptive, a failure on both sides.
Israel’s Collective Genocidal Sickness, the West’s Complicity, and the Messianic Colonialism Behind It All
Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.
If your son or daughter was murdered, and you responded, in your grief, by suggesting that 2.3 million people should be murdered in retaliation, and if, moreover, you had the means to fulfil your vengeful fantasies, mental health experts would be alarmed, and would seek an urgent intervention.
This, however, is what happened not just to individuals, but, collectively, to almost the whole of Israeli society after the deadly attacks by Hamas and other militants on October 7 last year, in which, according to official Israeli figures, 1,068 Israeli citizens and 71 foreign citizens were killed, and 251 others were taken back to the Gaza Strip as hostages.
That is a significant number of people, and no excuse can be made for it — although strenuous efforts to claim that it occurred in a vacuum, as if through the exercise of pure evil for its own sake, fail, crucially, to recognize that it happened as the result of a multi-generational conflict between a colonial oppressor (the State of Israel) and an oppressed and occupied people (the Palestinians) that has been ongoing for 76 years, and that has involved, over the years, and before the latest horrors, the murder of tens of thousands of Palestinians, in numbers that dwarf the number of Israelis killed over that same period.
Who's still at Guantánamo?
