Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu paid the asking price for Itamar Ben-Gvir’s return to the government in advance. Not out of his own pocket, of course, but with the blood of the 59 hostages whose fate could be sealed by the resumption of the war, which has already sealed the fate of hundreds of Palestinians, including women and children.
On Tuesday, Eliya Cohen, who was freed from Hamas captivity, called the renewed warfare a “death sentence” for the hostages. But that interests the prime minister less than his reward in the form of the homecoming of Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit party.
According to the statement released by Netanyahu’s office, the decision to strike Gaza was made with Defense Minister Israel Katz after “Hamas’ repeated refusal to release our hostages, as well as its rejection of all the proposals it has received from U.S. Presidential Envoy Steve Witkoff and from the mediators.”
But it must be said, loudly and clearly, that this is a lie. It was Israel, not Hamas, that violated the agreement. On its 16th day, the parties were supposed to begin discussing the second phase, which was supposed to end with the release of all the remaining hostages. Israel refused.
Israel also broke its promise to withdraw from the Philadelphi corridor between the 42nd and the 50th day of the cease-fire. Moreover, Israel announced that it was halting the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza and closing the border crossings. This decision, like the energy minister’s decision to halt the limited amount of electricity Israel provides to Gaza, explicitly violates Israel’s commitment in the agreement that aid will continue entering as long as talks on the second stage are ongoing.
All the proposals that Hamas received from Witkoff stem from Israel’s refusal to uphold its part of the deal. Consequently, the attempt to portray Hamas’ rejection of Witkoff’s proposals as a reason to resume the fighting is nothing but a dishonest manipulation.
Israel – not Hamas – is the one preventing the deal’s implementation and the hostages’ return. The statement issued by Netanyahu’s office also said that the goal of the renewed attack on Gaza is “to achieve the objectives of the war as they have been determined by the political echelon, including the release of all of our hostages, the living and the deceased.”
That’s another lie. Military pressure endangers the hostages, and of course also the lives of Israeli soldiers and Gaza residents, while also destroying what remains of the territory.
Netanyahu abandoned the hostages to save his government. The outcry from the hostages’ families and hostages who have returned interests neither him nor the members of his governing coalition. For them, the main thing is the approval of the state budget. Or as Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich told Ayala Metzger, whose father-in-law Yoram Metzger was abducted on October 7, 2023 and killed in Hamas captivity, “We heard you. Now get out. Thank you very much.”
A demonstration by most of the anti-government protest organizations is planned to take place in Jerusalem on Wednesday. The public must join the hostages’ families and demand a resumption of the cease-fire and the signing and implementation of the second stage of the deal. The hostages’ lives are in growing danger. We must save them.
The above article is Haaretz’s lead editorial, as published in the Hebrew and English newspapers in Israel.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Thursday that President Trump “fully supports” Israel’s renewed massive bombing campaign in Gaza, which has killed at least 200 children since Tuesday.
“The president made it very clear to Hamas that if they did not release all of the hostages, there would be all hell to pay. Unfortunately, Hamas chose to play games in the media with lives,” Leavitt told reporters.
The US and Israel are blaming Hamas for the lack of a continued ceasefire and hostage releases. But it was Israel that repeatedly violated the deal signed in January, which would have led to the release of all Israeli captives, a permanent truce, and Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.
US President Donald Trump meets with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington on February 4, 2025. REUTERS/Elizabeth Frantz
Leavitt said that President Trump “fully supports Israel and the IDF and the actions that they’ve taken in recent days.”
On Wednesday, the State Department also affirmed the administration’s unconditional support for Israel. State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce said the US will “stand with Israel in every circumstance.”
When asked about the massive child casualties in the Israeli bombing, Bruce pinned the blame on Hamas. “So it’s a shame that Hamas has allowed this to occur, but look nowhere else other than the people who have facilitated this suffering from the beginning,” she said.
Bruce claimed that the administration wants peace, but President Trump has emboldened Netanyahu and his government by supplying huge amounts of military aid and repeatedly calling for the permanent expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza instead of pressuring Israel to implement the deal it signed in January.
People mourn relatives killed by Israeli airstrikes in central Gaza on March 18, 2025.
(Photo: Hani Alshaer/Anadolu via Getty Images)
“This return to violence does not come as a surprise,” said one advocacy group. “Netanyahu has, from the beginning, signaled his intention to abandon the cease-fire process before it could become a lasting peace
A barrage of Israeli airstrikes across the Gaza Strip early Tuesday killed more than 400 people and left a fragile cease-fire agreement in tatters just over two months after it was reached, with Israel’s prime minister pledging “increasing military strength” in an enclave already decimated by more than a year of bombing.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed that the Netanyahu government consulted with the Trump administration ahead of the latest Gaza bombardment. Leavitt expressed the White House’s total support for Israel’s attacks.
While Israel had been carrying out more limited deadly attacks on Gaza despite the cease-fire deal—including strikes over the weekend that killed at least nine—Tuesday’s bombings were described as the “heaviest assault on the territory since the cease-fire took effect in January.”
The cease-fire was a multiphase agreement, with the first phase expiring earlier this month. Talks over the second phase of the agreement had stalled, and the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had attempted to impose an alternative deal on Hamas with the backing of the Trump White House. Israel imposed a total siege on the Gaza Strip earlier this month in an attempt to force acceptance of its alternative, leaving more than 1 million children in desperate conditions.
The New York Times reported that the Rafah crossing into Egypt “has been shuttered amid the renewed Israeli strikes. The border zone, the Times noted, “had been the main way for sick and wounded Gazans to leave the enclave during the cease-fire.”
Muhannad Hadi, humanitarian coordinator for the occupied Palestinian territory, said in a statement Tuesday that the fresh wave of Israeli airstrikes “is unconscionable” and that a cease-fire “must be reinstated immediately.”
“People in Gaza have endured unimaginable suffering,” said Hadi. “An end to hostilities, sustained humanitarian assistance, release of the hostages, and the restoration of basic services and people’s livelihoods, are the only way forward.”
“From before his first day in office, President Trump has endorsed the Netanyahu government’s return to war.”
Gaza health officials said the Israeli strikes killed at least 400 people, including women and children. Reutersreported that “in hospitals strained by 15 months of bombardment, piles of bodies in white plastic sheets smeared with blood could be seen stacked up as casualties were brought in.”
Netanyahu’s office said in a statement posted to social media that the Israeli military launched the large-scale strikes due to Hamas’ “repeated refusal to release our hostages, as well as its rejection of all of the proposals it has received from U.S. Presidential Envoy Steve Witkoff and from the mediators.”
Hamas responded that Israel is “fully responsible for violating and overturning the agreement.”
The Israeli strikes came over a month after the Trump administration approved a $7.4 billion sale of U.S. weaponry to Israel, which has repeatedly used American arms to commit war crimes in Gaza.
Sara Haghdoosti, executive director of the U.S.-based advocacy group Win Without War, said in a statement that “we are heartbroken and enraged at the Netanyahu government’s decision to break the cease-fire in Gaza and resume widespread, devastating bombing.”
“This return to violence does not come as a surprise, however,” said Haghdoosti. “Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has, from the beginning, signaled his intention to abandon the cease-fire process before it could become a lasting peace. From before his first day in office, President Trump has endorsed the Netanyahu government’s return to war. Indeed, we fear that Trump’s vile plan for ethnic cleansing in Gaza, so welcomed by the far-right members of Netanyahu’s government, will become the blueprint for the war as it goes forward.”
“Both the blockade and the return to bombing appear designed to create conditions in which Palestinians can no longer live in the Gaza Strip,” Haghdoosti added. “We, and every person of conscience around the world, condemn this campaign of ethnic cleansing unequivocally.”
Trump and Musk are on an unconstitutional rampage, aiming for virtually every corner of the federal government. These two right-wing billionaires are targeting nurses, scientists, teachers, daycare providers, judges, veterans, air traffic controllers, and nuclear safety inspectors. No one is safe. The food stamps program, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are next.
It’s an unprecedented disaster and a five-alarm fire, but there will be a reckoning. The people did not vote for this. The American people do not want this dystopian hellscape that hides behind claims of “efficiency.” Still, in reality, it is all a giveaway to corporate interests and the libertarian dreams of far-right oligarchs like Musk.
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There is a pressing reason to keep our attention focused on the role of the Hannibal directive, writes Jonathan Cook. It relates to what is happening right now.
Palestinians in Gaza on Jan. 29, after the ceasefire announced earlier in the month. (Jaber Jehad Badwan, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)
Those of us who keep banging on about Israel’s use of the so-called Hannibal directive on Oct. 7, 2023, — in which Israel killed its own citizens to stop them being taken captive by Hamas — have been smeared as excusing Hamas crimes that day.
That is not why we flag the issue.
In part, it is because some of the most horrifying images from Oct. 7 of charred bodies and wrecked cars and homes in Israel — adduced as evidence of an especial barbarism that is supposedly typical of Palestinians — were almost certainly caused by Israel invoking its scorched-earth directive that day.
Those images became central to the propaganda blitz launched by Israel and its apologists to justify the mass slaughter of Gaza’s children over the subsequent 17 months.
But there is also a far more urgent and pressing reason to keep our attention focused on the role of the Hannibal directive. And it relates to what is happening right now.
[President Donald Trump has issued military threats about the consequences of not handing over Israeli hostages that Hamas says, if carried out, break the terms of the ceasefire.]
Israel and the U.S. are still applying the Hannibal directive — against the Israeli captives held in Gaza.
The point of the directive has always been to stop the enemy being able to use Israeli hostages as leverage to draw Israel into negotiations — primarily to pressure it to hand over any of the thousands of Palestinian hostages it holds in its prison-torture camps. Many of them have never been charged or tried.
Israel and the U.S. tell us they need to carpet bomb Gaza — in what amounts to a “plausible” genocide, according to the world’s highest court — to force Hamas to return the Israeli captives. But in fact, Israel and the U.S. are recklessly killing those very same captives through their actions.
Why? So they don’t have to negotiate over a ceasefire. So they can carry on with the genocide, without pressure to deal with the fate of the Israelis held in Gaza.
“Bring Them Home” — a giant lights sign by artist Nadav Barnea at Charles Bronfman Auditorium, Heichal Hatarbut, Tel Aviv, Jan. 3, 2024. (Yossipik, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)
It was exactly the same reckless approach on Oct. 7, when Israel showed it was indifferent as to whether Israelis lived or died so long as they weren’t taken captive.
That’s why — in one instance we know about — the Israeli military fired into a home in Kibbutz Be’eri, knowing that there were a dozen or more Israelis inside, including children.
The army was completely indifferent as to whether those Israelis would be killed as a result. All but two were. Those witnesses are the main reason we know what really happened.
That’s why Israel’s Apache helicopters recklessly fired on hundreds of cars fleeing the Nova music festival, indifferent to whether the cars contained Hamas fighters or Israeli citizens.
Even the former defence minister, Yoav Gallant, admits the directive was invoked that day.
We’ll never know how many Israelis were killed – in part because Israel will never let us know. It’s even buried many of the destroyed cars to stop a forensic investigation.
But what we do know with certainty is that the Israeli military killed many Israelis on Oct. 7.
Western media have studiously refused to report on the issue of the Hannibal directive, even though it is all over the Israeli media. (See here, here, here and here.)
That is more than just a failure by Western media outlets. It is a crime against journalism — if not complicity in the genocide itself.
Western publics need to know that the Hannibal directive was invoked for a very simple reason: It is a crucial piece of information for assessing the credibility of Israeli and U.S. claims that they are trying to get the Israeli captives back alive and to properly weigh Israel’s motives in returning to the genocide in Gaza.
Notice how, in Trump’s latest deranged tweet, he accuses Hamas of “murdering” the Israelis held in Gaza. That’s pure, Israeli-inspired disinformation.
It is clear that most, if not all, of the dead captives were killed not by their Hamas captors but by Israel’s massive, reckless 15-month bombardment of the tiny territory of Gaza. That same bombardment, the equivalent of six Hiroshimas, has leveled Gaza and killed many tens of thousands — maybe hundreds of thousands — of Palestinians.
Why is Trump so eager to misdirect us?
Because he wants to win our support for Israel’s continuation of its slaughter of the people of Gaza and justify his own decision to supply, as his predecessor did, the weapons needed to continue that genocide.
After all, Trump makes his own genocidal intent expressly clear in addressing “the people of Gaza” and telling them that they will all be “DEAD” if the Israeli captives aren’t handed over. Yet “the people of Gaza” have no control over whether the captives are released.
Notice too that Trump calls Hamas “sick and twisted” for holding on to the bodies of dead Israeli captives, even though it is Israel that is violating the ceasefire agreement that would see those bodies returned.
This has become a further rationalisation by Israel and the U.S. for killing “the people of Gaza.” But Hamas learnt the value of using dead bodies as bargaining chips directly from Israel.
For years, the Israeli government has had a policy of refusing to return to their families the corpses of those Palestinians it has killed, including while in its torture camps. This violation of international law long predates Oct. 7. The Israeli courts have repeatedly approved the policy, accepting the government’s view that the bodies should be held as “bargaining chips.” It gave its backing again in January.
So if Hamas is “sick and twisted,” it is only because Israel is even more sick and twisted. If Trump thinks the people of Gaza deserve a genocide because of their leaders’ “sick and twisted” decisions, should he not be consistent and argue that the people of Israel deserve a similar fate for their own leaders’ “sick and twisted” decisions?
A campaign of lies and disinformation have helped to shred international law over the past year and half. And one of the biggest lies is the pretence that, in slaughtering Gaza’s children, Israel has been acting in the interests of Israelis held in the enclave.
Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist. He was based in Nazareth, Israel, for 20 years. He returned to the U.K. in 2021. He is the author of three books on the Israel-Palestine conflict: Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish State (2006), Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (2008) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (2008). If you appreciate his articles, please consider offering your financial support.
Israeli officials have admitted to The New York Times that Hamas’s claims about Israel violating the Gaza ceasefire are accurate.
The report, which cited three Israeli officials and two officials from mediating countries who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that Israel agreed to let in hundreds of thousands of tents as part of the ceasefire deal, which hasn’t happened.
Palestinians walk past the rubble of buildings destroyed during the Israeli offensive on a rainy day amid a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza City on February 6, 2025. REUTERS/Dawoud Abu Alkas/File Photo
Besides the blocking of promised aid, Israeli forces have also continued to kill Palestinians in Gaza. The Health Ministry said on Tuesday that since the ceasefire went into effect on January 19, Israeli forces have killed 92 Palestinians in Gaza and wounded 822.
Dr. Munir al-Barash, the director of the Health Ministry, also said that since January 19, 24 Palestinians have died of previously sustained wounds, meaning the total number of Palestinians that have died in Gaza due to Israeli aggression is at least 118. He said in the same time period, 641 bodies have been recovered from the rubble, and 197 remain unidentified.
Hamas had stayed relatively quiet about the Israeli ceasefire violations until after repeated calls by President Trump for all of the Palestinians in Gaza, which he says is about 1.9 million people (pre-war population was about 2.3 million), to be removed from the territory permanently as part of his plan for the US to take it over.
During Netanyahu’s visit, Trump dropped Washington’s sugar-coating of Israel’s 15-month genocidal destruction of Gaza. This was always about ethnic cleansing
US President Donald Trump and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrive at the White House in Washington, DC, on 4 February, 2025 (AFP)
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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the White House this week tore the mask off 16 months of gaslighting by western leaders and by the entirety of the western establishment media.
United States President Donald Trump finally dropped Washington’s sugar-coating of Israel’s genocidal destruction of Gaza.
This was always, he told us, a slaughter made in the US. In his words, Washington will now “take over” Gaza and be the one to develop it.
And the goal of the slaughter was always ethnic cleansing.
Palestinians, he said, would be “settled” in a place where they would not have to be “worried about dying every day” – that is, being murdered by Israel using US-supplied bombs.
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Gaza, meanwhile, would become the “Riviera of the Middle East”, with the “world’s people” – he meant rich white people like himself – living in luxury beachfront properties in their stead.
If the US “owns” Gaza, as Trump insists, it will also own Gaza’s territorial waters, where there just happen to be fabulous quantities of untapped gas to enrich the enclave’s new “owner”. Palestinians have, of course, never been allowed to develop their gas fields.
Trump may even have let slip inadvertently the true death toll inflicted by Israel’s rampage. He referred to “all of them – there’s 1.7 million or maybe 1.8 million people” being forced out of Gaza.
The population count before 7 October 2023 was between 2.2 and 2.3 million. Where are the other half a million Palestinians? Under the rubble? In unmarked graves? Eaten by feral dogs? Vaporised by 2,000lb US bombs?
Wrecking spree
Trump presented his ethnic cleansing plan as if he had the best interests of the Palestinians at heart. As if he was saving them from a disaster-prone earthquake zone, not from a genocidal neighbour he counts as Washington’s closest ally.
His comments were greeted with shock and horror in western and Arab capitals. Everyone is distancing themselves from his blatant backing for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza’s population.
If Trump tries to take over Gaza, Palestinians will die where they stand
But these are the same leaders who kept silent through 15 months of Israel’s levelling of Gaza’s homes, hospitals, schools, universities, libraries, government buildings, mosques, churches and bakeries.
Then, they spoke of Israel’s right to “defend itself” even as Israel caused so much damage the United Nations warned it would take up to 80 years to rebuild the territory – that is, four generations.
What did they think would happen at the end of the wrecking spree they armed and fully supported? Did they imagine the people of Gaza could survive for years without homes, or hospitals, or schools, or water systems, or electricity?
They knew this was the outcome: destitute Palestinians would either risk death in the ruins or be forced to move out.
And western politicians not only let it happen, they told us it was “proportionate”, it was necessary. They smeared anyone who dissented, anyone who called for a ceasefire, anyone who went on a protest march as an antisemite and a Jew hater.
In the US and elsewhere, students – many of them Jewish – staged mass protests on their campuses. In response, university administrations sent in the riot police, beating them. Afterwards, the universities expelled the student organisers and denied them their degrees.
And yet western politicians and media outlets think now is the time to express shock at Trump’s statements?
Still dying
Trump’s appalling, savage honesty simply highlights the depths of mendacity over the preceding 16 months. After all, who did not understand that the three-phase Gaza ceasefire, which came into effect on 19 January, was a lie too.
It was a lie even before the ink dried on the page.
Trump presented his ethnic cleansing plan as if he had the best interests of the Palestinians at heart
It was a lie because the ceasefire was officially intended not just to create a pause in the bloodshed. It was also supposed to allow for the mitigation of harm to the civilian population, bring the hostilities to an end, and lead to the reconstruction of Gaza.
None of that will happen – at least not for the Palestinians, as Trump has made clear.
Despite its claims, Israel has clearly not ceased firing munitions into Gaza. It has continued killing and maiming Palestinians, including children, even if the carpet bombing has ended for the time being.
In media coverage, these deaths and injuries are never referred to as what they are: violations of the ceasefire. Israeli snipers may no longer be shooting Palestinian children in the head, as happened routinely for 15 months. But the young are still dying.
Without homes, without access to properly functioning hospitals and with only limited access to food and water, Gaza’s children are perishing – mostly out of view, mostly uncounted – from the cold, from disease, from starvation.
Even Steve Witkoff, Trump’s envoy to the Middle East, says it will likely take 10-15 years to rebuild Gaza.
But the people of Gaza don’t have that much time.
This month Israel instituted a ban on the activities of the United Nation’s aid agency, Unrwa, in all of the Palestinian territories it occupies illegally.
Unrwa is the only agency capable of alleviating the worst excesses of the hellscape Israel has created in Gaza. Without it, the recovery process will be further hampered – and more of Gaza’s people will die waiting for help.
A blind eye
But in truth, Netanyahu has no intention of maintaining the “ceasefire” beyond the first stage, the exchange of hostages. Afterwards, he has all but promised to restart the slaughter.
When Israel decides to “go back in”, there will be no price to pay from the Trump administration, any more than there was a price to pay from the previous Biden administration.
Gaza is a Palestinian homeland, not Trump’s luxury resort
Even now, as Israel breaks the ceasefire, shooting at civilian vehicles because the inhabitants are unaware of the tripwire restrictions on their movements imposed by Israel, western politicians and media turn a blind eye.
And when Israel finally tears up the agreement, as it will, the West will echo Israel in blaming Hamas for being the one to violate it.
The ceasefire is a lie too because, having made Gaza uninhabitable, a death camp, Israel has switched its primary genocidal focus to the Occupied West Bank, where it is gradually introducing the same tactics employed for 15 months in the tiny coastal enclave.
Note that Israel is now targeting the West Bank even though it is run not by Hamas but by Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian leader who refers to his security forces’ collaboration with Israel in repressing all resistance to its illegal occupation as “sacred”.
Note too that the West Bank had nothing to do with the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023. But none of this should surprise us. These were only ever pretexts for the slaughter in Gaza.
And it breathes life into a new round of lies such as Biden’s suggestion last month that the ceasefire would allow the people of Gaza to “return to their neighbourhoods”. Except those neighbourhoods are gone. They don’t exist because the Biden administration sent billions of dollars worth of munitions to level Gaza.
Why, one might wonder, is the Trump administration seeking to send an additional $1bn worth of munitions to Israel, if not so it can continue the destruction and slaughter?
Blushes spared
The ceasefire is a lie because everything about the past 16 months has been a lie. It is the latest lie in a chain of lies, each meant to support the other lies to create a mendacious overarching narrative: the giant lie.
The giant lie tells of a decades-old “conflict” with the Palestinians, of Israel’s “war of survival” in the region. The giant lie obscures what is really at stake: the West’s last settler-colonial project to eradicate a native people, in this case in the strategically important oil-rich Middle East.
The giant lie obscures what is really at stake: the West’s last settler-colonial project to eradicate a native people, in this case in the strategically important oil-rich Middle East
According to that giant lie, Hamas “started a war” on 7 October 2023 when it broke out of the concentration camp Palestinians in Gaza had been living in for at least 16 years, deprived of the essentials of life by their Israeli oppressors.
According to that giant lie, Hamas are the terrorists – not Israel, which has been illegally occupying, settling and besieging the Palestinians’ homeland for three-quarters of a century. According to that giant lie, Israel’s slaughter of many tens of thousands of men, women and children and its maiming of many times that figure were necessary to “eliminate Hamas” rather than evidence of Israel’s genocidal intent, as every major human rights organisation has concluded.
Even Antony Blinken, Biden’s secretary of state, admitted – only, of course, as he was stepping down – that Israel’s extended killing spree had been entirely self-sabotaging. “We assess that Hamas has recruited almost as many new militants as it has lost,” he said. “That is a recipe for an enduring insurgency and perpetual war.”
This week officials in Gaza used the lull in Israeli attacks to reassess the death toll. They have revised it to nearly 62,000 after adding the names of those missing, presumed dead under the oceans of rubble. Many more deaths have doubtless still not been identified.
In the giant lie, the International Court of Justice’s ruling more than a year ago that there were “plausible” grounds for believing Israel was carrying out a genocide were airbrushed out of the picture by western politicians and media.
Not only that, but the West hurried to supply Israel with the bombs needed to carry out the very massacres that has led the World Court to put Israel on trial for genocide.
In that giant lie, Britain’s now-prime minister Keir Starmer presented Israel’s starvation of Gaza’s population as lawful – as “self-defence”.
Meanwhile, journalists and other politicians collude in avoiding mention of Starmer’s comments to spare his blushes, even after the International Criminal Court (ICC) charged Netanyahu and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, with crimes against humanity for that very same starvation policy.
Supine media
According to the giant lie, Hamas is holding hostages, while the many thousands of Palestinians abducted by Israel to be used as bargaining chips in the current swaps – including hundreds of doctors, aid workers and children – are “prisoners”, legitimately “arrested” as terror suspects.
According to the same giant lie, Israel’s government had to destroy Gaza to bring home the hostages, even as it spent the last days before the ceasefire went into effect intensifying its bombardment of the enclave, clearly indifferent as to whether it killed the hostages in the process.
How the West hides its Gaza genocide guilt behind Holocaust Day remembrance
In the giant lie, Israel’s levelling of Gaza, the aid blockade and starvation of 2.3 million people were somehow justified and “proportionate” rather intended to make the enclave uninhabitable, with the goal of forcing Palestinians out and into the neighbouring Egyptian territory of Sinai or other parts of the Arab world.
The “ceasefire” lie is perfectly of a piece with this giant lie.
The giant lie that claimed Biden had “worked tirelessly” for a ceasefire that he could have got days after 7 October 2023 with one call to Netanyahu. The “hard won” ceasefire that was available in exactly the same format last May, but had to be delayed because Israel needed longer to carry out its genocide.
The giant lie that hailed Biden and Trump for pulling off a diplomatic coup with the ceasefire when for more than a year millions of protesters in the West have been smeared, beaten by police and arrested as Jew haters for demanding precisely the same.
The giant lie that for decades has presented Washington as an “honest broker” when it is Israel’s biggest arms dealer, its most vociferous apologist, its most terrifying enforcer.
The grand lie that required physically hauling two reporters out of Blinken’s farewell press conference last month. Each tried to remind us that Emperor Biden had been naked all along.
For anyone wondering why the media have been so supine through the past 15 months – failing in the case of Gaza to summon up any of the passion and indignation they so readily evoked over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – here was the answer.
The other journalists kept their heads down or looked away sheepishly, fearful that they might lose their access should they be tainted by any association with these rule-breakers. Decorum had to be maintained inside the royal court, even in the midst of a genocide.
The giant lie needed to be protected at all costs.
Snake-oil salesman
Whatever western politicians and the media claim, the ceasefire has brought nothing to an end. It offers only brief respite to the Palestinian people from their most immediate pain and misery.
We must not allow it to bolster the narrative of the giant lie. Which is exactly what Keir Starmer, Britain’s prime minister and the oiliest of snake-oil salesmen, sought to do.
The truth is everything we have been told about Israel is a lie. Nothing can be repaired, nothing can heal, until the lies stop
In a statement on the prospect of the ceasefire last month, Starmer suggested that it would allow the people of Gaza what he called “a better future”, including the creation of “a sovereign and viable Palestinian state”.
Really?
No one wants to think through what the very best-case scenario for Gaza would mean – Starmer’s claim is based on the entirely fanciful notion that Israel actually wants a permanent ceasefire .
The reality is that it would take us back to 6 October 2023, when Israel was blockading Gaza, holding its 2.3 million people hostage. It was denying them the import of essential items while keeping them on a privation diet.
It was refusing the sick an exit to life-saving treatments they could only receive abroad. It was crushing the economy by denying businesses an export market. It was allowing the people of Gaza only a few hours of power a day, and surveilling them 24/7 through an army of airborne drones.
‘Banality of evil’: Artist turns Gaza settler dream into disturbing installation
On the very best-case scenario, Gaza would return to this – plus all the devastation wrought by Israel since: no homes, schools, universities, hospitals, bakeries, mosques, churches, homes; oceans of rubble to traverse; wrecked water and sewage systems; and vast swaths of the population needing medical treatment for serious injuries and disease; and nearly 40,000 orphans to care for.
Is that the “better future” Starmer was referring to?
What are the chances that Gaza will receive even this best-case scenario from hell when Israel is losing no time extending its genocidal policies to the West Bank?
The ceasefire is a lie because everything else we have been told is a lie: that Israel is a normal western liberal democracy, that Israel wants peace with its neighbours, that Israel’s army is the most moral in the world.
Israel is not just a standard-issue settler-colonial state – the kind that seeks to eradicate the native population whose lands it covets. Israel is the most lavishly armed, the most indulged settler-colonial state in history, and one addicted to its scorched-earth approach to the region it inhabits.
The truth is everything we have been told about Israel is a lie. Nothing can be repaired, nothing can heal, until the lies stop.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
Jonathan Cook is the author of three books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His website and blog can be found at http://www.jonathan-cook.net
President Trump on Thursday continued to push his idea of a US takeover of Gaza, claiming Israel would hand over the territory to the US at the “conclusion of fighting” and insisting the occupation wouldn’t require US troops.
“The Gaza Strip would be turned over to the United States by Israel at the conclusion of fighting,” the president wrote on Truth Social. The president’s comments suggest he expects Israel’s genocidal war to restart, which would be supported with US military aid.
After 15 months of heavy bombing and a ground campaign in Gaza, Israel failed to dismantle Hamas, and US intelligence believes the Palestinian group had even replaced most of the fighters it had lost in that time. That means even though Gaza has been reduced to rubble, Israel would still face stiff resistance if it attempts to conquer and ethnically cleanse the Strip.
In his post, Trump also called for the “resettlement” of Palestinians in Gaza and referred to Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) as a “Palestinian,” something he first did while on the campaign trail over Schumer’s calls for elections in Israel.
“The Palestinians, people like Chuck Schumer, would have already been resettled in far safer and more beautiful communities, with new and modern homes, in the region. They would actually have a chance to be happy, safe, and free,” the president wrote.
“The US, working with great development teams from all over the World, would slowly and carefully begin the construction of what would become one of the greatest and most spectacular developments of its kind on Earth. No soldiers by the US would be needed! Stability for the region would reign!!!”
Trump’s post again suggests that his idea is for the permanent expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza, although the White House said the idea was a “temporary” relocation. But even a temporary displacement would be resisted since Palestinians wouldn’t expect Israel to let them return.
Trump’s proposal has been resoundingly rejected by the Arab states in the region and the Palestinians themselves, who don’t want to give up their homes even as they lie in ruin.
Desperate to stay relevant, the faithful US-Israeli ‘handpicked leader’ has intensified his crackdown on Palestinians in the West Bank and pledged to work with Trump
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas speaks during the United Nations General Assembly at the UN headquarters in New York City on 26 September 2024 (Stephanie Keith/Getty Images/AFP)
Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas has been trying to stay relevant as events in Gaza, the West Bank and across the region have been moving at a much faster pace than the octogenarian politician is able to cope with.
This week, amid an Israeli genocide that has been unceasingly raging in Gaza for 14 months, Abbas’s security forces brazenly killed several prominent resistance fighters in Jenin in an attempt to appease the Israelis and their American benefactors.
When then-US President Donald Trump announced in January 2020 the so-called “deal of the century“, a proposal that was wholly aligned with Israel on all issues of contention, Abbas said: “I want to say to the duo – Trump and [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu – that Jerusalem is not for sale, and all of our rights are not for sale or bargaining. Your deal, the conspiracy, will not happen…we say a thousand times no, no, no to the deal of the century.”
Yet, when Trump was re-elected on 5 November, Abbas called to congratulate him and vowed to work with him on a political settlement that he himself rejected out of hand five years earlier.
This was followed by a deal the Egyptians struck two weeks ago between Hamas and Fatah, the Palestinian faction headed by Abbas. The agreement was to appoint an independent committee of prominent and professional Palestinians in Gaza to run its affairs and reconstruction after the war.
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It was a demand by the Zionist regime and the Biden administration in order to dislodge Hamas from any future role in ruling Gaza.
However, Abbas’s Fatah quickly retracted its approval as the Israelis rejected any role for or input from Hamas in the future of Gaza. It seems that such a deal would not play well in Netanyahu’s vow for a “total victory” over Hamas and the resistance.
So what’s Abbas’s end game, and where is he headed in his twilight years?
Hand-picked ‘leader’
In his 20th year of a four-year term, Abbas announced in late November, a few days after he turned 89, his succession plan.
He issued a decree that called for the appointment of the unambitious, uncharismatic and feeble Fatah leader, Rawhi Fattouh, as an interim president after Abbas.
Condoleezza Rice recounted how a handful of people in 2003 hand-picked Abbas to become the leader of the Palestinian people
The 75-year-old Fattouh is currently serving as the chairman of the Palestine National Council, the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) parliament in exile.
In 28 years, the PNC met only once in 2018.
Interestingly enough, Fattouh is also the same person who served as an interim president after the death of former PA President Yasser Arafat in November 2004 until Abbas was elected to replace him in January 2005.
For over a year, Abbas has been under American pressure to appoint a successor who will be as compliant and amenable to Israel and the US as he has been during his long tenure.
As recalled in her 2011 memoir, No Higher Honor, Condoleezza Rice, who served as US President George W Bush’s national security advisor, recounted how a handful of people in 2003, including her, Bush, CIA Director George Tenet, and Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister at the time, hand-picked Abbas to become the leader of the Palestinian people.
For much of 2002, Sharon refused to deal with Arafat but was eventually able to convince Bush to sideline the PLO leader in favour of Abbas as the more submissive and yielding Fatah leader.
Before he was appointed as a prime minister in 2003 as a result of American and European pressures, Abbas was publicly ridiculed by Arafat, who called him the “Karzai of Palestine”, a reference to Hamid Karzai, the former Afghan president, who was widely considered in the Arab world as a US puppet.
Abbas, aka Abu Mazen, had risen to the leadership of Fatah and the PLO almost by default.
Even though he was considered among the first generation of Fatah founders as he joined the movement in the early 1960s, he was not distinguished or appointed to senior positions until decades later.
‘Strategic asset’
It was not until most of the early founders and senior leaders of Fatah and the PLO, such as Khalil al-Wazir (Abu Jihad), Salah Khalaf (Abu Iyad), Sa’ad Sayel, Abu Yusuf al-Najjar, and many others, had been assassinated by Israel between the 1970s and early 1990s that Abu Mazen started to hold more significant positions within Fatah and the PLO.
When the PLO adopted its 10-point plan in 1974, paving the way towards a political settlement based on recognising Israel in exchange for a truncated Palestinian state, Abbas was known to favour abandoning any form of armed resistance to the Israeli occupation.
Why the Palestinian Authority’s biggest claim is a lie
Regarding this political ideology, Abu Iyad, who was considered to be next in line in the Palestinian movement after Arafat before his assassination in 1991 by the Zionist regime, quipped: “The thing that I fear the most is that treason would one day just become (normalised as) an opinion.”
When Israel failed to crush the First Intifada (1987-1991), it adopted a political track that would preserve its expansionist and settlement policies. This path culminated in the 1993 Oslo Accords.
Abbas was not only one of the few Palestinian interlocutors in this process but also the person who actually signed the accords on the White House lawn on behalf of the Palestinians.
Needless to say, the Oslo process was nothing short of a disaster that was doomed to fail from the start.
The Palestinian negotiators led by Arafat and Abbas surrendered their main card and strongest leverage at the outset, which was the recognition of the Zionist regime on 78 percent of the historical land of Palestine.
In exchange, Israel only pledged to engage in a vain political process that should have ended with an independent Palestinian state by 1999, or so thought the PLO leaders.
Yet, more than three decades after Oslo, the Zionist regime has not only killed the so-called two-state solution but consolidated its plans for a “Greater Israel”, including a more than six-fold increase of illegal settlers in the West Bank from about 115,000 in 1993 to over 750,000 today.
According to a 2015 International Crisis Group report, most Israeli officials consider Abbas their most important “strategic asset”.
The reason is quite clear.
It has been mainly through a political philosophy championed by Abbas that rejected decades of Palestinian resistance, prompting one expert to remark: “Abbas not once in his life did he adopt armed resistance, nor did he support it.”
He often mocked any notion of armed resistance by any group, including his own, even when Israel had killed scores of Palestinians unprovoked.
Brutal security force
His leadership style turned a relatively vibrant Palestinian national movement into a subsidiary of the Israeli occupation, often referred to as a “five-star occupation” since it had relieved the Zionist regime from appearing as the occupying power, while carrying out aggressive and domineering settler-colonial policies worse than South Africa’s apartheid regime.
During his tenure, he embraced the American dictate to change the security doctrine of the Palestinian security forces from policing and protecting Palestinian population centres into a brutal security force acting as the first line of defence of Israeli settlements and the occupation army against any form of resistance, including passive popular forms.
Why western plans for another Palestinian client regime will fail
Since his rise to lead the Palestinian Authority in 2005, he adopted the American plan under Lieutenant General Keith Dayton to train PA security forces, which engaged in suppression and silencing of dissent, as well as illegal arrests and torture, many times leading to death as in the case of Nizar Banat in 2021.
In coordination with the US and the Zionist regime, Abbas created a bloated security force whose primary mission was security coordination with the Israeli army to thwart any resistance or operations against the occupation.
He called this mission sacred and for decades refused to stop it even though Palestinian public opinion overwhelmingly condemns it.
Scores of Palestinian political bodies and factions have called on him to halt such disgraceful practices.
A detailed 2017 report found that the Palestinian security sector employed around half of all civil servants, accounting for nearly $1bn of the PA budget, and receives around 30 percent of total international aid given to the Palestinians, including most of the funds coming from the US.
The study further found that the Palestinian security sector spent more of the PA’s budget than the education, health, and agriculture sectors combined. It included more than 80,000 individuals, where the ratio of security personnel to the population is as high as 1 to 48 – one of the highest in the world.
In Abbas’s first encounter with Donald Trump in 2017, the US president bragged about the PA’s continued security coordination with Israel, as he praised its effectiveness in protecting the Israeli occupation, in which he said: “They get along unbelievably well. I was actually very impressed and somewhat surprised at how well they got along. They work together beautifully.”
‘Small-time dictator’
When Hamas won the 2006 legislative elections, Abbas coordinated with the Americans and Israelis, as laid out in detail in Rice’s account in her book, to obstruct the Hamas-led government from being able to serve as the democratically elected party.
In fact, it was Abbas’s security forces, again in coordination with the Americans, that tried in 2007 to topple Hamas’s government in Gaza, only to be outmanoeuvred by Hamas, which took over Gaza, effectively resulting in two separate Palestinian governments.
Palestinian resistance can always survive without outside support. Can Israel?
David Wurmser, a Bush administration official at the time, commented in a Vanity Fair article in 2008 that the Bush administration was engaged “in a dirty war in an effort to provide a corrupt dictatorship [led by Abbas] with victory”.
He added that Hamas had no intention of taking Gaza until Fatah forced its hand.
Wurmser further observed: “It looks to me that what happened wasn’t so much a coup by Hamas but an attempted coup by Fatah that was pre-empted before it could happen.”
Ever since this internal strife, Gaza has been living under a crippling Israeli siege with little interference from Abbas.
With the support of the Americans, Israelis and regional actors, Abbas took total control of the Palestinian political life. He started to unilaterally issue decrees like any small-time dictator of a banana republic.
His unconstitutional and unlawful decrees would dismiss governments, install prime ministers, cancel elections, spend billions, cover corruption by his cronies, family members and sons, and appoint a constitutional court in order to dismiss the Hamas-led legislative council.
But perhaps the behaviour that shocked most Palestinians was Abbas’s deafening silence during the early days of Israel’s genocidal war.
As the Israeli war of extermination and ethnic cleansing campaign intensified, Abbas would voice his strong but empty opposition to the Israeli brutality on the one hand, while continuing to have security coordination with the same vigour as if no genocide in Gaza, daily settler attacks across the West Bank, or routine Al-Aqsa compound incursions had been taking place for over a year.
With the Israeli genocidal war in Gaza entering its 15th month with no end in sight, and while Israel prepares its long-term occupation of Gaza, as well as aggressively pushing its policy of effective annexation of Area C in the West Bank, it appears that the current fascist Israeli government is on the verge of dumping Abbas in favour of a new security arrangement that would favour local Palestinian collaborators to govern the Palestinian populations.
A 2017 study found that the Palestinian security sector employed around half of all civil servants, accounting for nearly $1bn of the PA budget
It’s clear that the current Zionist regime, with its grand design to impose the Greater Israel project, wants to resolve its demographic Palestinian problem and decisively end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in its favour once and for all.
Hence, part of Israel’s grand strategy to realise this objective is not merely to be content with banning Unrwa, killing the two-state solution, or establishing Israeli hegemony in the region.
But in essence, it’s moving aggressively to redesign all the Palestinian institutions and sources of power that have defined the Palestinian struggle over decades.
Regardless of Abbas’s decree or what happens to him in the near term as he enters the twilight of his life, Israel will make sure that he is the last Palestinian leader who combines all the titles that define the Palestinian institutions – the PA president, the PLO chairman, the Fatah leader, and the president of the “State of Palestine”.
From an Israeli perspective, he has served his purpose, and it is now time for the final solution.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
Sami Al-Arian is the Director of the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA) at Istanbul Zaim University. Originally from Palestine, he lived in the US for four decades (1975-2015) where he was a tenured academic, prominent speaker and human rights activist before relocating to Turkey. He is the author of several studies and books. He can be contacted at: nolandsman1948@gmail.com.
Middle East Eye delivers independent and unrivalled coverage and analysis of the Middle East, North Africa and beyond. To learn more about republishing this content and the associated fees, please fill out this form. More about MEE can be found her.
On Tuesday, a Hamas official responded to President-elect Donald Trump’s warning that there would be “all hell to pay” if Israeli hostages in Gaza weren’t released by his inauguration on January 20, 2025.
Trump didn’t mention Hamas by name in his warning but appeared to threaten US strikes on the Palestinian group, saying, “Those responsible will be hit harder than anybody has been hit in the long and storied History of the United States of America.”
Basem Naim, a senior member of Hamas’s political bureau, said Trump’s threat should be directed at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, citing his efforts to sabotage a hostage and ceasefire deal. Israeli officials and media reports have also blamed Netanyahu for the lack of a deal.
“Hamas understands that Trump’s message is, in fact, directed primarily at Netanyahu and his government,” Naim said, according to The Palestine Chronicle.
Naim said the Netanyahu government had been using negotiations as a cover to advance its own agenda. “Netanyahu’s government must put an end to this deceptive charade,” he said.
Former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who was recently fired by Netanyahu, said that the prime minister sabotaged the chances of a hostage deal by demanding Israel maintain control of the Philadelphi Corridor on the Gaza-Egypt border.
“I can tell you what there was not, security considerations. The IDF chief and I said there was no security reason for remaining in the Philadelphi Corridor,” Gallant told hostage families on November 7. “Netanyahu said that it was a diplomatic consideration, I’m telling you there was no diplomatic consideration.”
There are believed to be 97 Israeli hostages remaining in Gaza, and Israeli media reported back in September that Netanyahu told a Knesset committee that only half of the hostages were believed to be alive.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported in October that the Israeli government was done with ceasefire talks and was instead focused on annexing portions of the Gaza Strip. There’s been some recent efforts by mediators to restart talks, but there’s no sign the effort is going anywhere, and there’s no end in sight to the daily slaughter in Gaza.
Footage shows a Palestinian man being used by the Israel Defense Forces as a human shield.
(Photo: Al Jazeera)
“The earliest testimony we have on it is from a soldier who was aware of it just a few weeks after the ground invasion began,” one human rights expert said. “The latest testimony we have on this is from the summer.”
The Israel Defense Forces routinely use detained Palestinians as human shields in Gaza, according to testimony from four Palestinians and one IDF soldier shared withThe Washington Post.
Their stories, published on Sunday, build on other accounts from Haaretz, Al Jazeera, the international press, and Defense for Children International to reveal a pattern of Israeli soldiers forcing Palestinians—including children—to enter buildings or tunnels ahead of them to check for militants or explosives, in clear violation of international law.
“This wasn’t something that happened just here and there but rather on a large scale throughout a number of different units, at different times, throughout the war and in different places,” Joel Carmel, advocacy director of Breaking the Silence, told The Washington Post.
“My hospital was turning into rubble, and they were asking me to demolish it with my own hands.”
The incidents recounted to the Post occurred between January and August. One man, 20-year-old Mohammed Saad, said he was detained by the IDF in June and interrogated for several days. Then, a new pattern began. Every day, he and two other Palestinian men were blindfolded and taken to a different location. They were made to wear IDF uniforms, given cameras, and told to enter buildings ahead of the Israeli soldiers to film and check for explosives. On the second day, an explosion went off after Saad had made his forced investigation.
“They tied my hands and threw me on the sand,” he recalled. “They took turns beating me. I still don’t know where the explosion came from.”
Another time, the captain of the unit he was detained by showed him an image of his family home destroyed by bombing.
“If you do not cooperate with us, we will kill all your family members like this,” the captain said.
On the 15th day of Saab’s ordeal, he was given civilian clothes and told to walk. As he did so, he felt a pain and realized he had been shot in the back.
The other three Palestinians interviewed by the Post were detained during the IDF’s raid on al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City in March. One was a surgeon at the hospital, while the other two were taken from their homes nearby. They were made to enter the hospital building ahead of IDF troops, remove any barriers, and take pictures of each room they entered.
“I was telling them that my hands are precious for my work; I am the only vascular surgeon here,” the surgeon, Omar al-Jadba recalled to the Post. “My hospital was turning into rubble, and they were asking me to demolish it with my own hands.”
The IDF soldier, who spoke anonymously, said that two Palestinian detainees were placed with his unit to make sure that buildings were safe to enter. One of them was only a teenager. His commander said the two men were terrorists, but then later said they could be released after the mission was over.
“At this point we understood that if we could release them, then they were not terrorists,” the soldier, a reservist, told the Post. “The officer just lied to us.”
“Every one of their accusations is a confession.”
Another group of soldiers questioned the use of human shields, telling a higher-level commander that it was against international law.
“He told us that international law is not important and the only thing that simple soldiers need to think about is the ethical code of the IDF,” the soldier told the Post.
However, the IDF said in a statement that its orders prohibit the use of human shields.
Breaking the Silence, a group that records testimonies from Israeli soldiers in the occupied Palestinian territories, said the reservist’s account was in line with others they had received.
“The earliest testimony we have on it is from a soldier who was aware of it just a few weeks after the ground invasion began,” Carmel said. “The latest testimony we have on this is from the summer.”
The Post reporting came the same day as a major Associated Press investigation into Israeli raids on three hospitals in northern Gaza at the end of 2023. Israel has often justified its hospital raids with the claim that Hamas operates from the inside, turning all the patients and doctors into human shields. However, the AP concluded that “Israel has presented little or even no evidence of a significant Hamas presence at the three” hospitals it considered: the al-Awda, Indonesian, and Kamal Adwan hospitals.
“What do [former U.S. President Donald] Trump and [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu have in common?” asked journalist Mehdi Hasan in response to the Post‘s reporting. “Many things but especially… projection. Every one of their accusations is a confession.”
Other commenters responded to the clear violations of international law and questioned why the U.S. continues to provide weapons and funding to the IDF while it engages in war crimes.
The Austin for Palestine coalition shared a quote from the article, noting that what it described was “paid for by our tax dollars.”
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