Israel resumes genocide in Gaza

Yet the Western media is suppressing the truth.

Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people of Gaza has resumed. Israel has announced a total siege on Gaza, blocking all humanitarian aid from getting in. It has done this, in theory, to unilaterally impose new ceasefire terms, in defiance of the deal that’s been agreed: in practise, clearly this is a deliberate attempt to collapse the ceasefire and unleash its greatest military mayhem yet, with the aim of implementing Donald Trump’s forced violent removal of the surviving Palestinian population of Gaza.

Indeed, Israel’s military attacks on Gaza resumed yesterday, and bear in mind dozens of Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli army since the so-called ceasefire began in January. All of this is being suppressed and misrepresented by most of the Western media, who once again, cannot do their basic in explaining the inarguable facts, because their coverage is so slanted in favour of pro-Israel narratives.

Yesterday the official Prime Minister of Israel account tweeted the following:

With the conclusion of the 1st stage of the hostages deal and in light of Hamas's refusal to accept the Witkoff framework for the continuation of the talks, to which Israel agreed, PM Netanyahu decided: as of this morning, entry of all goods & supplies to the Gaza Strip be halted.

This is a confession of a war crime. There is no ifs, there is no buts, there is no debate to be had, there is no other possible legal interpretation. This is a war crime - a grave one at that.

It is a war crime according to Article 33 of the Geneva Convention, which states: “No protected person may be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited.”

Succinctly, this prohibits the collective punishment of a civilian population. Furthermore, as per the International Court of Justice, which is the United Nation’s highest court, thus the highest court on earth - Gaza, like the West Bank and East Jerusalem, is under Israeli belligerent occupation. As noted by two legal experts in the Journal of Conflict and Security Law:

As an occupant asserting effective control over Gaza, in addition to having an obligation to provide humanitarian guarantees under international humanitarian law to the civilian population in Gaza, Israel has a duty to provide fundamental human rights (HR) under international human rights law.

Furthermore, as the legally binding provisional orders of the International Court of Justice ordered last year:

The State of Israel shall immediately take all effective measures to ensure and facilitate the unimpeded access to Gaza of United Nations and other officials engaged in the provision of humanitarian aid and assistance to the population of Gaza.

Furthermore, as if we need another ‘furthermore’, the core plank of the arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court against Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister, Yoav Gallant, focus on exactly this - “starvation as a method of warfare”.

Now even though the likes of Gallant at the very started announced a siege against what he called “human animals”, Israel spent the genocide gaslighting us about it. Despite in practise doing everything they could to impede the entry of aid into Gaza, and then impede the distribution of aid throughout Gaza, they kept pretending that they were allowing that aid into Gaza. Well they’re not doing that now. They are openly confessing to “starvation as a method of warfare” - they are stating they are blocking aid from entering in order to achieve their aims in negotiations.

In a televised speech, Netanyahu declared that are “no free lunches.”

Well, actually Israel is legally obliged to ensure Gaza’s civilian population has sufficient food and other crucial aid. That is the law, and Netanyahu’s flagrant defiance of that fact simply adds even more weight to the arrest warrant ordering his arrest.

According to Israel’s public broadcaster, Kan News, Gaza has enough food supplies for “four months”, so in order to enforce the siege, it is halting all fuel supplies - which is absolutely critical for, say, distributing aid to the population via trucks. It is also considering cutting off water to the whole of Gaza. I don’t need to explain the implications of that.

Indeed, while aid has been allowed into Gaza as part of the ceasefire deal, the strip is in a catastrophic situation after Israel’s strategy of annihilation. As Oxfam note:

When our teams assessed the conditions in Gaza in the wake of the January 19th announcement of a temporary ceasefire, they encountered apocalyptic scenes of complete destruction and famine-like conditions.

People in Gaza are in need of everything: lifesaving water, food, sanitation and other necessities, as well as equipment critically needed for restoration of water and electricity. The goods that were able to enter during the weeks of ceasefire have brought some relief, but remain a drop in the ocean.

Even in this ceasefire, Israel keeps blocking vital supplies, such as medical equipment, on the grounds they could have “dual use”, that is supposedly turned into weapons. The health care system has been ravaged. There is an acute lack of shelter for a population that has been repeatedly violently displaced, almost all of their homes destroyed or damaged beyond use. There is no sewage system, and human waste is overflowing, and Israel refuses to allow that to be removed.

The Israeli Finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, meanwhile, last month called for the “gates of hell” to be opened. Now he says this move was “the threshold of the gates of hell”, adding:

Now we need to open those gates as quickly and lethally as possible on the cruel enemy, until absolute victory.

But where is the coverage of this? Yesterday, the brilliant independent journalist Rachel Shabi rightly called out this out on the Sky News paper review, noting that none of the newspapers splashed on “Israel collapsing the ceasefire and blocking humanitarian aid to Gaza, which is a war crime.”

Sky News itself framed Israel ripping up the ceasefire deal and imposing an illegal siege like so: “Hamas rejects Israeli request to extend first phase of Gaza ceasefire deal”

Indeed, the CNN headline read as follows: “Israel stops humanitarian aid into Gaza after Hamas rejects extending ceasefire’s first phase.”

But this is a deceit. As Palestinian analyst Muhammed Shehada points out:

The agreement states phase 1 should be AUTOMATICALLY EXTENDED indefinitely as long as Phase 2 negotiations are ongoing.

Israel is trying to stop phase 2 of the ceasefire deal happening, which allows for a lasting ceasefire to end the war - indeed genocide. The Israeli state say they agreed to a proposal from Steve Witkoff, Trump’s Middle East envoy, to extend the first phase, rather than proceed to the second phase. According to Drop Site News’ Jeremy Scahill, it was announced that Hamas had rejected the deal before they’d even been briefed on it.

The job of the news should be to tell the facts. Yet BBC coverage merely says that Israel is “accused” of breaking international law? It is a fact that international law is being broken here. You can’t turn that fact into a subjective opinion. It is not a violation of objectivity to state the facts. If your house is on fire, and you say your house is on fire, and I say your house isn’t on fire, the job of a journalist is not to say, well one person says the house is on fire, but the other person claims it isn’t on fire. The job of a journalist in those circumstances is to state the truth.

Furthermore, BBC reporting frames this as Hamas rejecting an Israeli proposal to extend a ceasefire, rather than Israel violating the ceasefire agreement.

As for the European Union, they issued a statement which is a total disgrace. They condemned “the refusal of Hamas to accept the extension of the first phase of the ceasefire agreement in Gaza.” What are they on, exactly? Israel has unilaterally ripped up the ceasefire deal because the second phase moves towards a lasting ceasefire which Israel doesn’t want, because it wants to keep committing genocide.

Israel has further resumed armed attacks in Gaza, killing and wounding civilians in Rafah, Beit Hanon, Khan Honis amongst other places. A dental student in Gaza tweets an image of an explosion in the sky, adding:

Gaza rn from my window, it's getting worse. Feels like this is the end!

The resumption of genocide in Gaza isn’t the only horror being cooked up by Israel. Israel has been looking for excuses to invade Syria, using the pretext of defending the Druze minority there. Israel Katz, the defence minister, declared:

We will not allow the extreme Islamic regime in Syria to harm the Druze. If the regime harms the Druze, it will be struck by us.

Netanyahu and Katz specifically refer to what is being described as the Druze village of Jaramana, but as Syrian doctor Karim Alijian puts it:

“This is insane. I don’t know a single Syrian who ever considered Jaramana to be a “Druze village”. It’s not even a village, it’s a suburb of Damascus. In fact, you’ll find that besides Druze living there, it’s more predominantly populated with Iraqi Christians and Palestinian refugees who - indeed - fled from Israel’s genocide. The deceptive Israeli propaganda campaign against Syria has gone on complete overdrive.”

But Druze citizens of Syria have been protesting against Israel’s claims to be protecting them as an excuse to impose an occupation on Syria. Indeed, following an agreement with the Druze, Syrian General Security personnel entered Jaramah, themselves waving the Druze flag.

The news from the Middle East seems unrelentingly grim, not least as Israel resumes its genocide in Gaza, and as Donald Trump threatens the violent expulsion of the entire surviving population of Gaza.

But hope came in an unlikely place. ‘No Other Land’ was made by a Palestinian-Israeli collective of activists and journalists, about the Israeli state subjecting Masafar Yatta - in the West Bank - to violent displacement. That’s where one of the directors, Basel Adra, comes from.

Yesterday, the film won the Oscar for best documentary. The acceptance speech was delivered by Basel Adra and his co-director, Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, who I’ve interviewed about his journalism exposing Israeli war crimes.

In front of the whole world, Israel’s occupation, apartheid, ethnic cleansing and annihilation of Gaza was denounced.

Now as heartening as this Oscar win might be, some of you might reasonably ask - why does it offer hope? What is a documentary winning an award compared to Israel’s genocidal onslaught against the Palestinian people?

That Israel’s genocide is succeeding in the here and now is unquestionably and brutally true.

But a film about Israel’s murderous oppression about the Palestinian people won an Oscar - despite this being the height of a McCarthyite campaign against anyone who speaks out about the horrors being inflicted on the Palestinian people. This is a film which couldn’t find a distributor in the US - they all refused to have anything to do with it.

And what it signifies is that Western society is increasingly repulsed by Israel’s depraved behaviour. Israel is losing in the worlds of public opinion and culture. In time, those Western societies will force their governments to stop arming and supporting Israel, which Israel depends on to continue its hideous oppression.

Another thing, too, for those cheerleaders of Israel’s depravity. In the here and now, in this time of Israel’s critics being silenced, hounded, harassed, sacked, arrested - if an Oscar is being won for this kind of film, what happens next is nailed on: you are going to go down in history as depraved monsters. And there is nothing you can do about it.