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.
Plumbing the Depths of Human Depravity: 450 Days of Extermination in Gaza
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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
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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
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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.
An Extraordinary Day for International Justice: ICC Issues Arrest Warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant for War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity
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In what will forever be remembered as an extraordinary day for international justice, the International Criminal Court (ICC) today issued arrest warrants, for war crimes and crimes against humanity, for Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minster, and Yoav Gallant, who, until recently, was the defense minister in Netanyahu’s coalition government.
In its press release, the Court stated that it had “issued warrants of arrest for two individuals, Mr. Benjamin Netanyahu and Mr. Yoav Gallant, for crimes against humanity and war crimes committed from at least 8 October 2023 until at least 20 May 2024, the day the Prosecution filed the applications for warrants of arrest.”
The announcement in May, by Karim Khan KC, the chief prosecutor of the ICC, that arrest warrants would be sought for Netanyahu and Gallant, as well as for three Hamas leaders (two of whom have subsequently been murdered by Israel), was greeted at the time with huge enthusiasm, and a great sense of relief, by those who had been calling, since 2015, for the ICC to hold Israel accountable for its long history of grave crimes against the Palestinians.
UN Report Condemns Unparalleled Violence, Including Torture, Rape and Murder, in Israel’s Unaccountable Prisons for Palestinians
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Three weeks ago, on October 10, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem and Israel issued a hugely significant report about Israel’s “war on hospitals” in the Gaza Strip over the last year, and its treatment of Palestinians in its accountable prison system, where torture, rape and murder are all widespread.
I wrote about the “war on hospitals” in a previous article, UN Report Confirms Israel Guilty of War Crimes and “Extermination” in Attacks on Gaza’s Hospitals, when I promised to follow up with a second article about the Commission’s findings regarding Israel’s prisons, and this article is my fulfilment of that promise.
When the State of Israel was founded in 1948, around 80% of the Palestinian population — 750,000 people — were ethnically cleansed from their homes in what is known as the Nakba (“catastrophe”), fleeing or being forcibly expelled as refugees into the West Bank (then controlled by Jordan), the Gaza Strip (then controlled by Egypt), Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. None of them — or their descendants — have ever been allowed to return.
Gaza: The Normalization of Genocide Through the Complete Complicity of the West and Its Colonization by Israel
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For a year and three weeks, all decent people around the world have been shocked and disturbed, to an extent unprecedented in our lifetimes, by the intensity of the genocidal fury unleashed by the State of Israel on the 2.3 million Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip, the Chicago-sized “reservation”, into which they were squeezed in 1948, as the nascent Israeli state, in a blood-soaked orgy of extraordinary violence, seized most of what had, for centuries, been Palestinian land.
For a year and three weeks, we have had to watch, powerlessly, as Israel has revisited the messianic genocidal intent that it first unleashed in an unfettered manner 76 years ago, when it erased Palestinian cities, towns and villages, murdering 15,000 civilians and expelling 750,000 others, based on an absurd historical and pseudo-religious claim to the land, dating back 2,000 years. Contextualizing this absurdity, some commentators have pointed out that Israel’s actions are the equivalent to the Italians laying claim to England because it was conquered by their ancestors — the Romans — 2,000 years ago.
This violent supremacism has underpinned the actions of the State of Israel ever since. Throughout the long years from 1948, Israel has refused to ever seriously consider that it should share this contested land with those who called it home. Those expelled — to refugee camps in neighbouring countries — were forbidden the right to return (despite that being a demand agreed upon by the United Nations from the very beginning), those in Israel had to struggle for years to even establish their right to exist as second-class citizens, while those in Gaza and the West Bank have been persistently targeted for marginalization, division, isolation and persistent depredation. Israel claims, risibly, to be “the only democracy in the Middle East”, whereas the objective reality is that it is a violent European settler colonial project enforcing a repulsive system of apartheid.
Where Will It End? The Limitless Depravity of the Renewed Assault on Northern Gaza
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A “genocide within a genocide” is taking place in northern Gaza, where Israel has specifically prevented any food, water, fuel or medical supplies entering since October 1, and where Israeli forces are involved in massacre after massacre, bombing and blowing up residential buildings and killing entire families, attacking and decommissioning the last three remaining partly-functioning hospitals, and picking off and killing anyone who dares to leave their homes via armed drones and snipers.
This is the manifestation of the “Generals’ Plan”, a diabolical initiative proposed by retired general Giora Eiland, which advocated for the enforced evacuation of the remaining 400,000 residents of northern Gaza — those unwilling or unable to obey previous evacuation orders — followed, after a week, by starvation and the execution of everyone who remains as a “terrorist.”
That plan was horrendous enough — especially because there is no legal basis whatsoever for regarding civilians who can’t or won’t leave a designated military area as “terrorists” — but its manifestation is even more horrific.
With Yahya Sinwar’s Death, Israel’s Genocidal Aims Are Exposed More Than Ever Before
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With the death of Yahya Sinwar, Israel’s mendacity and its genocidal intent stand exposed like never before.
Sinwar, the 62-year old leader of Hamas, who never abandoned his homeland, had been portrayed by Israel as hiding deep underground, surrounded by hostages, but in the end that was just another lie, to add to the mountains of lies that Israel has pumped out over the last year. In the end, Sinwar was killed in a chance military encounter in Rafah, not hiding out at all, but engaged in combat with the enemy — in military uniform, and with an AK-47.
His death was the opposite of the humiliation meted out by the US to Saddam Hussein or Moammar Gaddafi, when they were finally seized after the illegal invasions of Iraq and Libya. Nothing could be more inspiring for a resistance movement than for their leader to be killed in active combat, having refused to hide, or to be cowed by the enemy.
Don’t Look Away From the Inferno of Extermination in Northern Gaza
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On Sunday night (October 13), Palestinian civilians — including children and medical patients, and others displaced by Israel’s year-long genocide — were burned alive in a truly horrifying Israeli attack on the courtyard of Al-Aqsa Hospital, in Deir al-Balah in northern Gaza.
One of those burned alive — a young man who was also a medical patient — was captured in a video filmed by a Palestinian journalist, writhing in agony, consumed by flames, and still lying on his hospital bed with his IV drip still clearly visible.
Yesterday it was revealed that he was Sha’ban Al-Dalou, a 19-year old software engineering student at Al-Azhar University (before it was destroyed, like all of Gaza’s universities), who was on an IV drip after surviving an Israeli strike on a mosque where he was sheltering with his family a week earlier, in which 20 Palestinian civilians were killed. Handsome, kind and popular, Sha’ban loved playing the guitar, and had once had great hopes for his future, but he had been displaced five times since Israel’s genocide began. Although his father and his three younger siblings survived the attack, his mother was also killed.
Four people in total were killed in the inferno, although 70 others — mostly women and children — were wounded, with many suffering severe burns, which the hospital lacks the resources to deal with adequately.
Who's still at Guantánamo?
