Iran Ceasefire? From Trump’s Nuclear Threats to Israel’s Gaza-Style Extermination in Lebanon
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Yesterday, as perceptive observers marked two and a half years of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, Israel cemented its reputation as an unprecedented pestilential sickness on the face of the earth, contaminating everyone who comes into contact with it through its relentless barbarism, by launching almost a hundred devastating aerial attacks on Lebanon in the space of just ten minutes, rising to 137 in total in the space of just half an hour, in what the genocidal entity proudly proclaimed as “Operation Eternal Darkness.” Could the exercise of evil have a more transparently accurate name?
The attacks, in Beirut and across southern Lebanon, which rivalled in intensity the most violent attacks on Gaza in the early months of the Gaza genocide, were clearly indiscriminate — acts of terrorism, completely destroying numerous apartment blocks in Beirut, for example, and meant to kill as many civilians as possible, following the template established in Gaza, for which Israel has never been held accountable. At least 303 people were killed, and 1,165 wounded, and social media reports provided grim accounts not of murdered militants, but of unjustifiably slaughtered women and children.
Also, as In Gaza, the Israeli authorities sought to defend their actions by plying the complicit western media with unverified and clearly risible justifications for their actions, just as they have done so cynically and successfully in Gaza for the whole of their uniquely depraved descent into monstrous and devious inhumanity over the last 30 months.
Israel Plumbs New Depths of Depravity, as the Knesset Passes a Death Penalty Bill for Palestinians
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For the last two and a half years, the State of Israel has been engaged in an unspeakably horrific genocide in Gaza, in which, at a bare minimum, over 70,000 people — mostly civilians — have been murdered, as well as massively increasing the number of Palestinians, to over 9,000, who are held in a grotesque and largely arbitrary apartheid prison system, for Palestinians only, in which torture is mandatory, rape is widespread, and over a hundred Palestinians have been murdered in that same time period.
With Israel also engaged, over the last month, in the largely indiscriminate carpet-bombing of civilians in Lebanon and Iran, it’s hard to imagine that this brutal, sickeningly and knowingly lawless and permanently warmongering entity could sink any lower into the depths of depravity, but yesterday the Israeli Knesset managed just that, passing a “Death Penalty for Terrorists” amendment to its already bloated and draconian prison legislation regarding Palestinians.
As Amnesty International explained in a news release today, “The new law explicitly creates two legal frameworks for the use of the death penalty in the occupied West Bank, excluding the illegally annexed East Jerusalem, and in Israel.”
900 Days of Genocide in Gaza
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The ever-growing shadow of depravity engulfing the world has grown so huge in recent weeks — since the unprovoked and illegal war launched by the US and Israel on Iran, and, simultaneously, Israel’s renewed assaults on Lebanon, and an increase in its violence in the occupied West Bank — that it’s easy to overlook the fact that the original sin that led to this situation — Israel’s ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip — began 900 days ago today.
It’s also easy to overlook the fact that today also marks the first anniversary of Israel’s targeted assassination in Gaza of Hossam Shabat, the fearless 23-year old Palestinian journalist whose smile, and whose relentless energetic enthusiasm for recording Israel’s crimes, lit up phones and social media reports and news broadcasts around the world.
As he said in his final message to the world, written in anticipation that he would be killed, “If you’re reading this, it means I have been killed — most likely targeted — by the Israeli occupation forces. When this all began, I was only 21 years old — a college student with dreams like anyone else. For the past 18 months, I have dedicated every moment of my life to my people. I documented the horrors in northern Gaza minute by minute, determined to show the world the truth they tried to bury. I slept on pavements, in schools, in tents — anywhere I could. Each day was a battle for survival. I endured hunger for months, yet I never left my people’s side. By God, I fulfilled my duty as a journalist. I risked everything to report the truth, and now, I am finally at rest — something I haven’t known in the past 18 months. I did all this because I believe in the Palestinian cause. I believe this land is ours, and it has been the highest honor of my life to die defending it and serving its people. I ask you now: do not stop speaking about Gaza. Do not let the world look away. Keep fighting, keep telling our stories — until Palestine is free.”
The Horrors of AI-Driven Military Targeting, From Gaza to Iran
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Anyone paying attention knows that, since October 7, 2023, when the State of Israel began carpet-bombing the Gaza Strip on a scale so grotesque that it can only realistically be compared to the impact of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, all sense of proportionality in warfare has been eviscerated, and has been normalized to such an extent that Israel, and its lapdog the US, are now engaged in similarly disproportionate attacks on Iran, and with Israel also extending its depravity to Lebanon.
While some of this blatant violation of international humanitarian law can be traced to Israel’s relentless contempt for any attempts to restrain its military actions, dating back decades, the truly shocking and soul-shredding intensification of its military actions over the last 29 months, in which the US has finally moved from being Israel’s main backer to being a fully-fledged partner, has primarily been facilitated through both countries’ embrace of military targeting powered by AI (artificial intelligence), which has both promised and delivered military targets on a scale that is hundreds or thousands of times faster than what was previously possible, although, crucially, with little or no human oversight to address profound problems with the accuracy of the targeting.
To provide some necessary background, proportionality in warfare seeks to minimize the loss of civilian life during military operations, and its key definition comes from the 1977 Additional Protocol to the 1949 Geneva Conventions, which sought to apply rules governing warfare in the aftermath of the horrors of the Second World War. The Additional Protocol specifically addressed the protection of civilians, and, in Article 51, established protections against indiscriminate attacks on civilian populations, providing two particular examples of attacks that “are to be considered as indiscriminate”, which have subsequently provided a benchmark for assessments of proportionality.
Will the World Survive As US and Israeli Death Cults Unite to Rain Down Endless Apocalyptic Genocidal Destruction on Iran?
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It’s worse than we thought.
While dirty, demented grandpa Donald, increasingly unhinged, keeps failing asleep and then waking up and indulging in bouts of incoherent ranting, he has already accomplished what his minders always intended: to bring together the two most twisted, delusional, genocidal, pseudo-religious movements in modern history — Zionism and Christian Zionism — and to launch an apocalyptic war on their behalf.
Donald Trump, of course, as a malignant narcissist, has no God but himself, and the same is true of his chief Zionist manipulator, the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, a slippery devil of a being who has dominated Israeli politics for much of the last 40 years, and who has, over the last 29 months, finally emerged in his true colours, as the bearer of nothing but mass murder and destruction without restraint.
Using the Palestinian resistance movement’s attacks on southern Israel on October 7, 2023 as an excuse, Netanyahu, leading a political establishment and a population that are almost entirely supportive of his bleak vision, has drawn on violent Iron Age religious texts to finally manifest the true apocalyptic intent of the genocidal Zionist settler-colonial cult whose first victory was the blood-soaked establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.
Trump’s “Board of Peace” Meets, Promotes Its Dystopian Vision for Gaza’s Regeneration, as Hamas’s Disarmament Still Eludes Everyone
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On February 18, in the apocalyptic wasteland of the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian survivors of Israel’s ongoing 28-month genocide celebrated the start of Ramadan with astonishing ingenuity, crafting decorations from the recycled detritus of destruction, powering and stringing up lights, and holding communal meals drawing on the increase of food deliveries since the ceasefire that began four months ago.
This is in spite of the fact that Israel has persistently refused to honor the requirements for the delivery of 600 trucks of humanitarian aid a day under the ceasefire deal, which began on October 10, and which was trumpeted by the US as Donald Trump’s “Peace Plan”, even though most of the hard work had been done by negotiators from Qatar, Egypt and Turkey, working with Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff.
Much of what has been begrudgingly allowed into Gaza by Israel consists of commercial goods that are unaffordable for the majority of the population, who have been made homeless, are reduced to living in tents with few of their possessions left, and have little or no money.
While the Palestinians’ spirit contrasts buoyantly with the grimness of their surroundings, it cannot disguise that they continue to live in a landscape that is brutally shattered, to an extent that is almost beyond comprehension, and that no salvation is on the horizon. Voices from within Gaza emphasize that the majority of the displaced population haven’t been attending these communal meals, and numerous photos show much more wretched scenes, of families struggling to put together even the most basic meals in landscapes of utter destruction.
Israel Begrudgingly Re-Opens the Rafah Crossing, But With Onerous Restrictions on Palestinians’ Entry and Departure
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The re-opening, this week, of the Rafah Crossing, connecting the Gaza Strip to Egypt, and the only route in and out of Gaza that doesn’t pass through Israeli territory, was meant to provide a lifeline of hope for the estimated 20,000 medical patients in Gaza who need treatment abroad (including around 4,000 children, and about 440 critical cases in need of immediate attention) as well as for the more than 30,000 Palestinians who left Gaza in the early months of Israel’s genocide, and who, as the Council on Foreign Relations explained, “have registered their intent to return.”
Predictably, however, Israel has done all it can to to turn the re-opening into yet another example of its obsessive desire to control every aspect of the sealed death camp it has created in Gaza over the last 28 months, and its equally obsessive desire to humiliate Palestinians — when not killing them directly — at every opportunity.
According to the ceasefire agreement that Israel was reluctantly obliged to accept in October as part of Donald Trump’s “Peace Plan”, the Rafah Crossing was meant to re-open in the first phase of the deal, when Israel stopped its carpet-bombing in exchange for the return of the remaining hostages seized on October 7, 2023. It was, however, “an unmet requirement” of the first phase, as CPR described it, because Israel “delayed the reopening until it recovered the final hostage body from Gaza, which occurred last week.”
Gentrification Through Genocide: The Proposal for a Techno-Futuristic Beach Resort on the Toxic, Haunted Mass Grave of the Gaza Strip
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If just one photo captures the callous, ghoulish, cruel and heartless opportunism of those who see the world only through a lens of business opportunities and maximum profit-making for themselves and their cronies, it’s the photo above, an AI-generated vision of what was pitched to the world on January 22 as “New Gaza”, a futuristic high-rise coastal tourist resort on the shoreline of the Gaza Strip.
The image is from a PowerPoint presentation by Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, and a prominent real estate investor, at the official launch of Trump’s “Board of Peace”, which took place at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland.
Other slides in the presentation showed “New Rafah”, a brand-new city featuring 100,000+ “Permanent Housing Units”, and plans for the eventual expansion of this “new city” model across the whole of the Gaza Strip, with these new residential areas flanked by industrial complexes featuring “data centers” and “advanced manufacturing.”
Gaza: Caught Between Israel’s Ongoing Genocide, and Trump’s US-Led Neo-Colonial Takeover
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In the Gaza Strip, the remaining Palestinian population, who have survived two years and three months of the most diabolically well-publicized and even relentlessly celebrated genocide in history, which is still ongoing, albeit at a slower pace than before, are squeezed into just 42% of their homeland — 60 square miles in total, less than the size of Washington, D.C.
The rest, the other 58%, has been occupied by Israeli forces since a ceasefire was declared on October 10, when they withdrew to an arbitrary “Yellow Line” that was meant to be temporary, a phase in a staged withdrawal from the whole of the Gaza Strip, but which is regarded by the occupiers as a new and permanent border with Israel.
Under the terms of the ceasefire deal, which was mainly negotiated by Qatar, Egypt and the US, although Donald Trump, predictably, made it all about himself, even staging a “Peace Summit” in Egypt to which world leaders were invited to fawn over him, Israel was prevailed upon to stop its relentless bombing raids, and its ongoing and merciless ground invasion of Gaza City, in return for the immediate release of all the surviving Israeli hostages seized on October 7, 2023.
800 Days of Genocide in Gaza: The Equivalent of 3,500 9/11s Or Ten Million Dead Americans
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Sunday, December 14, marked 800 days of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, and yet you could be forgiven for not knowing anything about what is, by any objective measure, an unforgivably grim milestone, because no news network or newspaper in the western world could be bothered to report it.
If you’re reading this because of the headline, then yes, the death toll of the genocide is equivalent to 3,500 9/11s, or the equivalent of ten million Americans having been killed, but I’ll be discussing that in more detail at the end of the article, after running through every aspect of how the last two months of the “ceasefire” don’t constitute any meaningful kind of conclusion to Israel’s atrocities at all.
Since Donald Trump, to his credit, managed to stop Israel’s relentless carpet-bombing of Palestinian civilians two months ago, in return for Hamas handing over the last 20 surviving hostages seized on October 7, 2023, and, subsequently, all but one of the 28 dead hostages, most of the countries of the west, many of whom had started to become a little uneasy about Israel’s naked genocidal intent, have been behaving as though the genocide — or the “war”, as they manipulatively prefer to call it — is over, even though that is patently untrue.
Who's still at Guantánamo?
