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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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After nearly two years of the most horrific live-streamed genocide in history, the majority of the world’s eight billion people, shocked and appalled to varying degrees, want nothing less than an end to the ceaseless murder of Palestinian civilians and the total eradication of the Gaza Strip, the provision of humanitarian aid and medical supplies in vast quantities, and the reconstruction of Gaza.

They — we — also want the establishment of Palestinian autonomy so thorough that Israel can no longer treat Palestinians as vermin to be slaughtered in the pursuit of the malignant dream that has been the driver of its existence since its blood-soaked founding 77 years ago — the total control of all Palestinian land, and the complete subjugation, disappearance or extermination of the entire Palestinian population.

The 20-point “Peace Plan” unveiled by Donald Trump at the White House yesterday, which Benjamin Netanyahu, visiting after alienating most of the world at the UN General Assembly last Friday, seemed to accept, appears, at first glance, to finally offer the promise of an end to Israel’s relentless genocidal assault on Gaza’s trapped and starving civilian population.

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On the night of May 15, and throughout the darkest hours of the morning of May 16, the genocidal State of Israel, as it promised ten days before, launched “Operation Gideon’s Chariots”, a plan that is nothing less than its “final solution” to the “Palestinian problem”, a plan as inhuman and depraved as the “final solution” that the Nazis approved for the “Jewish problem” at the Wannsee Conference in Germany in January 1942, which led, in the years that followed, to the industrial-scale expansion of extermination camps.

It ought to be inconceivable that this is happening, because, for 15 and a half months, from October 2023 to January this year, Israel had already been engaged in relentless genocidal assaults on the trapped civilian population in Gaza, in which almost the whole of the built environment was destroyed with Hiroshima-like fury, and at least 50,000 people, mostly civilians, were killed.

For six weeks, from January 19 until March 1, the ceaseless slaughter and destruction seemed to have finally come to an end, via a ceasefire deal in which the bombing stopped and humanitarian aid resumed, and Israeli hostages, seized on October 7, 2023, were exchanged for around 1,700 Palestinian prisoners and hostages.

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Since the State of Israel broke the ceasefire agreement with Hamas after its first six-week phase ended on March 1, imposing a total ban on all supplies of food, water, medicine and fuel entering Gaza on March 2, and, on March 18, resuming its savage and largely indiscriminate bombing of a trapped civilian population, the silence of world leaders — and most of the world’s mainstream media — has confirmed their fundamental complicity in the most well-publicized atrocity that most of us have ever experienced in our lives.

Most of the world’s leaders and the mainstream media were already damned, of course, having failed to do everything in their power — or, in fact, anything at all — to stop Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza after the first few weeks, or certainly, the first few months of what was clearly a sustained project of extermination, incomparable in scale to anything except the original assault on the Palestinians in 1948 that led to the atrocity-soaked founding of the State of Israel, when over 15,000 Palestinians were killed, towns and villages were erased, to be replaced by new Israeli towns and villages, and 750,000 Palestinians were exiled permanently from their homes.

The erasure of Gaza, from those early months to the start of the ceasefire, 15 and a half months later, was so sustained that almost the entirety of its built environment was destroyed, including most of its housing, and, most cynically, its hospitals, its water supplies and its sewage treatment plants, and at least 50,000 people — mostly civilians — were killed, although the larger death toll, taking in indirect deaths, through disease, starvation, dehydration and the destruction of almost the entire medical and healthcare system, will run into the hundreds of thousands.

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I no longer know what to say or do.

Yesterday, Israel deliberately targeted and murdered Hossam Shabat, the brave, beautiful 23-year old journalist who somehow dodged death for over 17 months, reporting relentlessly from the front lines of Israel’s brutal attacks, including the four months from October last year until a ceasefire began on January 19, when Israel implemented an exterminatory “genocide within a genocide” in northern Gaza.

After hanging up his press vest and helmet two months ago, when the now aborted ceasefire began, he only put them on again four days ago, after it became abundantly clear that Israel had deliberately shredded the ceasefire, reimplementing a “complete siege” on all humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip on March 1, and then, under the cover of night on March 18, resurrecting its genocidal aims with renewed fury, launching a hundred simultaneous attacks across Gaza that killed at least 436 people, “including at least 183 children, 94 women, 34 elderly people, and 125 men”, as Al Jazeera explained, adding that at least 678 others were injured, “many critically, with more still trapped under the rubble.”

Just yesterday, Gaza’s beleaguered health ministry announced that these deaths — to which another 356 have been added in the following days, has pushed the official death toll to over 50,000 since October 7, 2023 — 50,021 in total, including 15,613 children, of whom 872 were under one year old. The health ministry added that over half of those killed were women and children. The figures don’t include 14,222 other people who are almost certain dead, their bodies “trapped under the rubble or in areas inaccessible to rescuers”, as Al Jazeera reported on February 3, noting that the total number of children killed or presumed dead at that time was 17,492.

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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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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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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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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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