Israel doesn't care about the captives. It always planned to reboot the genocide
It is President Trump and his administration that must be held responsible for every Palestinian death from here on out
What excuses has Israel given for renewing the genocide:
1. Israel says it is trying to force Hamas to release the captives in Gaza.
Yet, as we know from those already released, the indiscriminate bombing of Gaza only increases the chances the captives will be killed. There is no plausible scenario in which dropping US-supplied 2,000lb bombs across Gaza makes any Israeli held in the enclave safer or brings them home sooner.
In any case, there was a known and easy way for Israel to get the last of the captives back. They were due to be freed in the second phase of the ceasefire agreement, already well past its implementation date. But weeks ago Israel decided to tear up the agreement it had signed and impose new terms in which the rest of the captives would have to be returned – and without Israel either ceasing its fire or withdrawing from the enclave, as it had agreed to do.
What Israel’s return to genocide shows is that the Israeli government would rather kill the remaining captives – vaporising them with Trump’s latest shipment of 2,000lb bombs – than either make a concession to secure their release or place any limitation on its ability to slaughter the people of Gaza.
2. Israel claims Hamas was re-arming and planning a new attack.
As ever, Israel is inverting the truth. It was Israel that was re-armed by the Trump administration with the bombs now tearing apart Gaza's children. Hamas – isolated from the outside world – had no obvious route to re-arming.
And as for plans for another October 7, both Hamas and the world were shocked its fighters managed to break out of the tiny, besieged territory of Gaza the first time. Hamas assumed it would be a suicide mission. It succeeded only because Israel had grown so complacent in its 17-year siege of the enclave, it imagined the 2.3 million people there were permanently entombed.
Israel’s assumption was the Palestinians would never manage to find a way out of the giant concentration camp Israel had built for them. Israel will not likely drop its guard again any time soon.
In other words, Israel is flat-out lying about its reasons for renewing the slaughter. It is lying as it has done over and over again, throughout the past 18 months.
Israel always intended to reboot the genocide as soon as the Trump administration had been able to take credit for negotiating the ceasefire. Then they could work together to concoct a new set of pretexts – based on lies about who was violating the ceasefire – to justify why more of Gaza's children needed to be murdered.
Certainly, Joe Biden and his officials must be put on trial in the Hague for the first 15 months of the genocide. But it is Trump and his administration that are responsible for every Palestinian death from here on out.
[Many thanks to Matthew Alford for the audio reading of this article.]
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I can already see that there are people here who want to promote the idea that Israel let October 7 happen. That's a complete misunderstanding of how Israel operates. It's the US regional attack dog. It needs to constantly bare its teeth at all the states around it.
Even if you imagine that Netanyahu and the Messianic right saw some advantage in letting October 7 happen – in the hope they could use it as the pretext to begin the genocide – you would also have to believe that the Israeli general staff and military intelligence wilfully colluded in their own utter military humiliation and disgrace.
It would have required all of Israel's senior military echelons to have secretly agreed to make themselves look entirely incompetent to their American counterparts in the Pentagon and for not one of them to have blown the whistle.
The genocide in Gaza – plus the operations in Lebanon and Syria – are, in part, the Israeli military's desperate effort to restore its credibility with the imperial hub in Washington. To show that it has not gone soft and that it can still wreak havoc in the region. Indeed, over the past 18 months, the Israeli military does appear to have rehabilitated itself in Washington's eyes.
The same shit is back. Israel kills Palestinian women and children and the racist West, media and politicians, blame Hamas and let the Killers lie and lie and lie….