Israel Defeated As A Million Palestinians Return to Northern Gaza From Exile in the South

The “Great March of Return” on January 27, 2025, as a million Palestinians began their return on foot, from the south of Gaza to their homes in the north. (Photo: Omar Al-Qattaa).

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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Now that the relentless carpet-bombing has stopped, and the child-killing snipers and armed quadcopters have withdrawn, along with the ever-present drones, the surviving Palestinians — no longer fearing death at every single moment of their lives — are beginning to reclaim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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Gaza Hostage Exchanges: The 90 Freed Palestinian Women and Children Ignored by the Western Media

Palestinian women prisoners, mostly held without charge or trial, and therefore hostages themselves, being released in exchange for three Israeli hostages on January 19, 2025.

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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other militants after they broke out of the “open-air prison” that the Gaza Strip became in 2007, when Israel, having withdrawn its forces and dismantled its settlements in Gaza itself, essentially sealed it shut, imposing a relentless blockade by land, sea and air, and rationing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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No Return to Genocide As the Gaza Ceasefire Begins and the Extent of Israel’s Policy of Extermination Is Revealed

As the ceasefire began on January 19, 2025, displaced Palestinians sought out their former homes, many deeply shocked by the extent of the devastation inflicted by Israel over the previous 15 months. One of the defining images from the first day of the ceasefire, by Omar al-Qattaa, it will, I hope, be so shocking that it will help to prevent any efforts on the part of Israel to resume what has been an incessant military assault of unforgivably brutal intensity.

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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).

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Dare We Hope That the Gaza Ceasefire Deal Will End the Horror of Israel’s Extermination of the Palestinian People?

An image I created when the ceasefire deal was first announced on January 15.

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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.

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Plumbing the Depths of Human Depravity: 450 Days of Extermination in Gaza

Recent apocalyptic images of the ongoing destruction of northern Gaza, as posted on X on December 27 by the Palestinian journalist Motasem A. Dalloul.

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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.

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Podcast: I Discuss the Shameful State of the World, and Resistance and Hope in 2025 with Andy Bungay for Riverside Radio

A screenshot from Andy Worthington’s latest monthly interview with Andy Bungay for his Riverside Radio show in London.

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If you have the time and the inclination, please check out my latest interview with my colleague Andy Bungay, posted below as a YouTube podcast, and originally broadcast, as the latest in an ongoing series of monthly interviews, during Andy’s shows last Saturday and Sunday on Riverside Radio, a community radio station in Wandsworth, in south west London, and subsequently made available on his Mixcloud page here and here. I’m pleased to note that Andy also played the latest live recordings by my band The Four Fathers, as well as ‘They Don’t Care’, the latest online single by my son Tyler, the beatboxer and singer known as The Wiz-RD.

In a freewheeling 80-minute discussion, we focused on some of the many profoundly dispiriting events dominating our lives as 2024 draws to a close — the imminent return as the US president of Donald Trump, the ongoing genocidal carnage being inflicted by Israel on the trapped Palestinian civilian population of the Gaza Strip, and the growing menace of catastrophic climate change.

All are thoroughly depressing topics, of course, but unlike last month, when my discussion with Andy, available here as ‘World on Fire: Gaza, Climate Collapse and the Collective Derangement of Western Politicians’, was rather dark (almost certainly because of the intensity of Israel’s “genocide within a genocide” in northern Gaza), this month’s conversation was threaded through with resistance and hope.

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A Welcome Ceasefire in Lebanon, But No End to Gaza’s Genocidal Agony

Lebanese people return to their homes after the declaration of a ceasefire, holding up images of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed by Israel two months ago.

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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.

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Israel’s Collective Genocidal Sickness, the West’s Complicity, and the Messianic Colonialism Behind It All

A photo from a rally in Helsinki on October 23, 2023 (Photo: rajatonvimma, via Flickr).

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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.

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An Extraordinary Day for International Justice: ICC Issues Arrest Warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant for War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity

Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, against whom arrest warrants have just been issued by the ICC for war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza Strip since October 2023.

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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.

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World on Fire: I Discuss Gaza, Climate Collapse and the Collective Derangement of Western Politicians with Andy Bungay

A screenshot of my recent interview with Andy Bungay of Riverside Radio on YouTube.

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If you have an hour to spare, and want to listen to the kind of political analysis of current events that is completely absent from mainstream media, I hope you’ll listen to me discussing the situation in the Gaza Strip, climate collapse and the collective psychic derangement of our politicians in the west with Andy Bungay, recorded last weekend and broadcast on Andy’s show on Riverside Radio, a community radio station in Wandsworth, in south west London.

Andy has interviewed me numerous times over the years, in connection with a variety of topics including Guantánamo and London’s housing crisis, and in July we spoke at length about the UK General Election, Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the right to protest and the release of Julian Assange, leading to a new arrangement whereby, once a month, we’ll discuss topic of concerns in a new hourly slot on Andy’s show.

In this first monthly interview, posted below via YouTube, and featured as part of Andy’s whole show here, we began by discussing Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, which allowed me to discuss at length the “genocide within a genocide” that has been taking place for the last month in northern Gaza, via a truly abhorrent new plan that mixes starvation with extermination, the destruction of hospitals and efforts to displace the surviving population through ethnic cleansing, prior to Israeli colonization. 

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Andy Worthington

Investigative journalist, author, campaigner, commentator and public speaker. Recognized as an authority on Guantánamo and the “war on terror.” Co-founder, Close Guantánamo and We Stand With Shaker, singer/songwriter (The Four Fathers).
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