Israel violates ceasefire, threatens more violence

Palestinians in Gaza are celebrating - but danger remains

Israel has violated the ceasefire and threatened to resume its genocidal violence against the Palestinian people, even as the people of Gaza sift through the rubble for the bodies of their loved ones. Israel-backed gangs, linked to ISIS, are attempting to foster violent chaos in Gaza - while the treatment of Palestinian hostages by both Israel and the Western media exposes, once again, the absolutely shameless racism which has defined this genocide.

Let’s start with Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister with an arrest warrant issued against him by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Yesterday, in a statement, he declared:

Through joint efforts we achieved enormous victories. Victories that astonished the entire world. And I want to say: Everywhere we fought – we won.

But in the same breath, I must tell you: The campaign is not over. There are still very great security challenges ahead of us.

Some of our enemies are trying to rebuild themselves to attack us again. And as we say – ‘We’re on it.’

Does this sound like a man who is preparing to end violence? This may mean many things - for example, a resumption of genocide in Gaza or a new attack on Iran, or both. The one thing it self-evidently does not mean is that he is committed to is peace.

Then listen to this from the Israeli defence minister Israel Katz:

“Israel’s great challenge after the phase of returning the hostages will be the destruction of all of Hamas’s terror tunnels in Gaza, directly by the IDF and through the international mechanism to be established under the leadership and supervision of the United States.

This is the primary significance of implementing the agreed-upon principle of demilitarizing Gaza and neutralizing Hamas of its weapons.

I have instructed the IDF to prepare for carrying out the mission.”

Donald Trump’s 20 point plan commits to the destruction of what is described as “all military, terror and offensive infrastructure, including tunnels and weapon production.” Aside from Hamas refusing to commit to disarmament, nowhere does the plan commit to the IDF destroying any tunnels. So what does that mean in practice, not least given the peace deal instructs Israel to withdraw from nearly half of Gaza?

Indeed, Katz subsequently wrote:

The urgent mission to which we are all committed now is to ensure the return of all the abducted bodies home.

Hamas’s announcement about the expected return of 4 bodies today is a failure to meet commitments.

Any delay or deliberate avoidance will be considered a gross violation of the agreement and will be responded to accordingly.

It’s already been made clear that retrieving all of the bodies of Israeli hostages will take time - as even Trump accepted. The danger, here, is that Katz is laying the foundations for renewed attacks.

Meanwhile there are reports that Israeli forces killed a Palestinian man in Khan Younis, in the south of Gaza. Just imagine that Hamas had killed an Israeli soldier. It would be all over the news, splashed as Hamas breaking the ceasefire, and lead to an Israeli military onslaught. Yet this killing is ignored across the Western media, because Palestinian life is deemed to have no real meaning.

In the central Gaza Strip, there is footage of Israeli tanks opening fire at Palestinian civilians.

Even when the ceasefire was supposedly being agreed, as the brilliant Drop Site News report, Israeli soldiers celebrated it by launching an arson spree in Gaza, burning down civilian infrastructure including an essential sanitation plant in Gaza City. They note testimonies of Israeli soldiers collected earlier this year, such as one explaining:

“Every Arab house we entered had olive oil [...] We poured the oil on the sofas, on anything flammable in the apartment, and then we ignited [it] or threw in a smoke grenade. This was a common practice.”

In the last few days, Israeli soldiers posted images of them burning buildings, with one posing in a picture in front of burning wooden pallets, writing:

“On Friday, just before departure. Burning food so that it won’t reach the Gazans, may their names be erased.”

In a photo of the burning sanitation plant, one soldier is photographed smiling, another adds: “[one] last memory”.

There is moving footage of Palestinians returning en masse to where they lived in northern Gaza.

But they are returning to homes that have been destroyed by the Israeli state. Footage from Associated Press shows apocalyptic ruin.

According to the United Nations Satellite Center, 83% of all structures in Gaza City have been destroyed or damaged by late September. That destruction is more comprehensive than that suffered by Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the nuclear bombs, and Dresden after its firebombing by the Allies. The destruction includes 97 percent of tree crops, 95 percent of shrubs and 82 percent of annual crops.

As Channel 4 News report, there’s 61 million tonnes of debris. Nobody with any honesty can claim that this was about recovering hostages - Israel killed more hostages than it retrieved by military means - or defeating Hamas - who are now retaking control of areas abandoned by Israeli forces.

As French President Emmanuel Macron last month, Hamas has replaced the number of Hamas militants killed by the Israeli state.

This was a genocidal war of annihilation, which is exactly what Israeli political and military leaders promised from the very beginning, because no crime has been so confessed to as it happened in history.

We have no idea how many Palestinians have actually been killed by the Israeli state, either directly, though military violence, or indirectly, through the destruction of healthcare and thus untreated illnesses and injuries, the destruction of homes, deliberate starvation, lack of fresh water, and so on. We know that hundreds of bodies are now being pulled from the rubble even without heavy machinery, and that Gaza’s civil defence agency estimates that up to 10,000 bodies are crushed under debris and collapsed buildings.

All of the living Israeli hostages held by Hamas have now been returned to their families - and that is a good thing, the taking of civilians as hostages is a grave crime whoever does it.

But today Israel is releasing 1,700 Palestinian hostages - and they are hostages, even if the Western media refuses to call them as such. As Palestinian analyst Muhammad Shehada puts it:

They were all kidnapped after Oct 7, held as “bargaining chips” without trial, charges or legal counsel

Any media outlet that calls them “prisoners” is morally bankrupt!

That includes women and children who were kidnapped. Many Palestinian hostages still remain in captivity, and they too must be freed.

As journalist Dominic Waghorn puts it:

The full force of Israel’s PR machine will be deployed over the coming days of hostage releases and Trump visit. Meanwhile Israel is banning press interviews with families of released Palestinian prisoners. This in a country that prides itself on democracy and press freedom.

There is a reason why Palestinian hostages’ families are banned from media interviews. Because there is overwhelming evidence that these hostages have been subjected to industrialised torture, rape, starvation. For example, back in April, 17 year old Palestinian child hostage Walid Khalid Abdullah Ahmad starved to death in captivity - one of dozens killed because of torture and abuse.

Note that the ceasefire agreement makes clear that for every Israeli hostage whose remains are released, Israel will release the remains of 15 deceased Gazans. In other words - a confession that Israel is holding dead Palestinians hostage.

Meanwhile, Israeli-backed gangs - who Israeli politicians themselves stated were linked to ISIS - are fighting Hamas. Those gangs looted aid among other crimes.

What next? Israel has banned foreign journalists from entering Gaza, claiming that’s because it’s an active war zone, even though journalists have reported from every other war zone in history. Without Palestinian journalists - who suffered the biggest slaughter of journalists in history - we wouldn’t know what Israel has done - but what excuse now for not letting in foreign journalists?

And what of reconstruction? Will an Israel which publicly committed to removing the Palestinian population from Gaza, which is set to occupy about half the territory, which is left depopulated, really allow it to be rebuilt? Without swift reconstruction, Palestinians will keep dying en masse in the ruins even if not a single new bomb is dropped on Gaza.

Will Trump really not let Israel resume the military phase of the genocide? It’s striking that he declared the reason for the agreement is that he told Netanyahu “Israel cannot fight the world, Bibi. They can’t fight the world”.

Trump knew that people across the West - including the US - have turned against Israel in revulsion at its crimes, and the hope is they can suppress the truth to turn that around. We cannot let them. We must document all the crimes that have been committed - and not look away from Gaza in the coming weeks and months.