Israel destroys ceasefire in hours
Today, Israel slaughtered Palestinians and resumed siege. Not a "ceasefire"
You can read my new Guardian column on the Gaza genocide rebounding on the West here.
Ceasefire. What ceasefire? Within hours, Israel is back to massacring and starving Palestinians in Gaza - and the Western media is still regurgitating Israeli claims, after two years of daily war crimes and relentless, incessant lies.
At least seven Palestinians have been killed today in two different incidents.
How did the likes of Sky News report the Israeli army killing several Palestinian civilians? By essentially reading out an Israeli army press release, beginning sentences with “the Israel Defence Forces say this” and “the IDF says”.
We are told that “the suspects” crossed the “yellow line” where the IDF pulled back to. An IDF statement being uncritically carried across the Western media, including Sky News, says attempts were made to distance the so-called “suspects”, but that “The suspects did not comply and continued to approach the forces, and the forces carried out shooting to remove the threat.”
Read back that framing. The Palestinians killed by the Israeli army are called “suspects”, in deference to what the Israeli military have said. Suspected of what exactly? What does “suspects” mean in this context?
In one incident, Gaza’s medical services have reported that four Palestinians were killed in Gaza City’s eastern Shejaiya neighbourhood while inspecting their homes.
Here’s the thing. Sky News journalists have themselves done previous rebuttals of Israeli claims about their atrocities - for example, when Israeli troops massacred 15 paramedics and civil responders earlier this year. As I’ve noted before, the problem with this work is not just that it is too little and normally too late - that is, being published or broadcast when attention has moved away from the crime.
It’s that it’s detached from broader coverage. Even though Israel’s authorities demonstrably lie over and over again, which these journalists know - those media outlets go back to treating Israeli claims the next time as credible and plausible, in a manner they would never dream of doing with, say, Russian authorities.
As the Israeli newspaper Haaretz have previously published, the Israeli army created ‘kill zones’ defined by invisible lines, and when civilians cross them, they are then killed. Hearing talk of a “yellow line”, some might imagine an actual physical line. But none exists: it is invisible.
As Haaretz also reported, the Israeli army massacre unarmed civilians and then falsely claim that they were Hamas militants. In one case, they quoted an Israeli officer who says:
“Standard procedure requires photographing bodies and collecting details when possible, then sending evidence to intelligence to verify militant status or at least confirm they were killed by the IDF,” he explains. “Of those 200 casualties, only ten were confirmed as known Hamas operatives. Yet no one questioned the public announcement about killing hundreds of militants.”
As for the claim that these civilians didn’t comply with supposed attempts to warn them. This is the army which shot dead Israeli hostages who had stripped themselves down to underwear, who were yelling in Hebrew, and who were waving white flags and signs with ‘SOS’ scrawled on them.
What is really happening here is that Palestinian civilians are seeking to return to the homes destroyed by the Israeli army and being shot dead in the process. And then the Israeli army calls that a violation of the ceasefire. How Orwellian can you get.
Imagine if a single Israeli soldier - let alone civilian - had been shot dead by Hamas. That would be plastered all over the news as the ceasefire being broken. Israel would use it as a pretext for bombing raids.
But the IDF can kill Palestinians with impunity and it be ignored, because Palestinian life is judged worthless.
But all over the Western media - once again, Israel claims are simply regurgitated. Like LBC, which splashes on “’At least six’ dead after Israeli troops open fire on ‘suspects’ in Gaza as IDF claims ceasefire was breached”
Meanwhile the BBC news headline was “Gaza peace ‘is no small challenge’, UK PM says, as Palestinians fear ceasefire may not hold.”
If seven Israeli soldiers - let alone seven Israeli civilians - had just been killed by Palestinian militants, do you think for one second the BBC would be talking about a ceasefire holding?
And here’s something else related to Israel trying to torpedo this fictional ceasefire.
The agreement stipulates that Hamas should return the remains of dead Israeli hostages. We should note that the Israeli military have killed far more hostages than they rescued through military means, because they carpet bombed Gaza while their hostages were there.
Even Donald Trump acknowledged that recovering many of those bodies is going to be difficult, “because some of the bodies are going to be a little bit hard to find.” That’s because Israel has reduced most of Gaza to rubble with Israeli weapons.
But now the Israeli state has announced it won’t reopen the Rafah crossing and will halve aid deliveries because of the failure of Hamas to return all the bodies.
This is simply a ruse, a pretext to maintaining the deliberate starvation of Gaza - a grave war crime. What will all the pro-Israel apologists who have claimed there is no deliberate starvation say now, exactly?
We should note that the Israeli state has far more Palestinian bodies in its possession, which it openly uses as bargaining chips. They are not called hostages by Western media. According to a Palestinian human rights lawyer, they currently hold 750 Palestinian bodies - far, far more than the other way round.
And here’s another example of the dire, shamelessly racist Western media coverage. While there has been huge focus on the Israeli hostages who have thankfully been returned to their loved ones, there has been almost nothing, zero, on the Palestinian hostages. And they are overwhelmingly hostages. 1,700 of those being released are Palestinians kidnapped from Gaza and held without any charge. Just Palestinian civilians taken from their families for nothing,.
And we know from the overwhelming evidence that they have been systematically abused, tortured, starved and raped.
In one, reports Palestinian analyst Muhammad Shehada:
Israel had been holding hostage 71-year-old diabetic Gazan grandma, Siham Abu Salem, for 2 years
She was kidnapped from her hospital bed when the IDF raided Nasser hospital in Jan 2024
She was held without trial or charges as a bargaining chip & was released today
Her 2 sons were murdered by Israel
Just imagine a 71 year old diabetic Israeli woman was abducted by Hamas from her hospital bed for 21 months, and her sons killed, and she was now being released. That is all we would be hearing about.
In another example cited on al-Jazeera, a Palestinian hostage had been told by his captors that his wife and two children had been killed - as a form of psychological torture. He was filmed ecstatically being reunited with them.
If this was an Israeli hostage who had been told his family had been killed, imagine the response.
As journalist Barry Malone notes:
The difference in much of the Western coverage of the Israeli hostages vs the Palestinian hostages today was tough to watch. Israelis are portrayed as real people with lives and families and hopes and dreams.
Palestinians, if even mentioned, are just numbers.
Meanwhile, in the West Bank, Israeli settlers are burning cars, attacking Palestinian farmers while the Israeli army fired tear gas at Palestinian olive harvesters. Yet the Western media is simply ignoring what Israel is doing in its continued pogrom in the West Bank.
Throughout the genocide, the Western media has covered up Israeli crimes and whitewashed the genocide while regurgitating lies from the Israeli authorities. And so it continues.
Before the genocide began, Israel was routinely slaughtering Palestinians. In 2023, before 7th October, 240 Palestinians, 40 of them children were killed by the Israeli state. Their lives were ignored, treated as worthless by the Western media and by Western politicians.
And so it continues, as Israel traduces the ceasefire - with the full complicity of the Western media.
Less than it took Trump to leave Israeli airspace following his top of the bill role in extravaganza ego- feste of self congratulation of bringing Peace to the Middle East- Act 1, of the 19 promised, has been cancelled- Palestinians killed, too close to yellow line; if IDF could see them, they must have seen, from their tanks, they were unarmed- humanitarian aid halved, unreasonable demands for quick retrieval of bodies of hostages killed during intense bombing , judged by Israel as violation of the Ceasefire- Trump, from White House, threatens new violence against ' Hamas'."Dove of Peace is never free. Bought and sold, and bought again" Big Money.
Nothing has changed- beyond a whole bunch of global leaders willing to accept walk-on parts in what might turnout to be a mother of all con jobs.
No-one should be surprised by this level of duplicity, and we can be certain that Starmer will do nothing to remedy the situation. However, all of us who are wounded to our soul by what is happening in Gaza must be very careful not to play into the hands of these people so that they can claim a false air of victimhood. In particular we must avoid using broad racist or defamatory terms about Israel, of Zionism, or Jewry as a whole - they use it against us. History is on our side, let's keep it that way.