The Gaza Ceasefire Is Being Sabotaged By Israel, By Trump, And By The Media
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
The Gaza ceasefire (if you can even call it that) is already in grave peril.
Hamas has announced that it will be postponing the release of any more Israeli hostages in response to repeated ceasefire violations from Israel and consistent failure to meet its terms of the agreement. The IDF has been routinely killing Palestinians in Gaza ever since the so-called “ceasefire” went into effect, with 110 killed in less than three weeks according to the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor.
The first obstacle to the ceasefire holding was always that it depends on good behavior from individual IDF troops, many of whom (A) quite like murdering Palestinians and (B) hope the ceasefire ends so they can murder more. These troops could also be reasonably confident that they would incur no consequences from their superiors for those killings.
In response to the Hamas announcement, President Donald Trump told the press that if “all” hostages are not returned by Saturday at 12 PM, the truce should end and Israel should “let hell break out.”
It’s likely that Hamas was made more willing to risk the collapse of the ceasefire by Trump’s comments regarding the ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip over the last two weeks. The president said on Monday that he may cut off aid to Jordan and Egypt if they do not agree to take in Palestinians in what would amount to a forced evacuation of the enclave. Trump has also begun clarifying to the press that his plan to purge Gaza of Palestinians would indeed be a permanent removal and that its inhabitants would not be permitted to return after reconstruction, contradicting earlier statements from the White House that this would be intended as a temporary relocation.
If Hamas believes the US and Israel are going to permanently end the existence of Palestinians in Palestine, then they are naturally going to be less invested in extending this ceasefire.
Then you’ve got reports from Israeli media saying that Benjamin Netanyahu has returned from his weeklong tour of Washington determined to obstruct the ceasefire from moving on to its second phase, with one source telling Haaretz that “Once Hamas realizes there won’t be a second stage, they may not complete the first.”
And the mass media aren’t helping.
Imperial news outlets were already beginning to pound the drums of war before all this started in response to the emaciated appearance of three Israeli hostages released by Hamas this past Saturday, expressing outrage at the idea that the captives would have lost weight under a starvation blockade imposed by the IDF, without ever mentioning the evidence of starvation and torture in Palestinian hostages being released by Israel at the same time.
“What will anger at sight of gaunt hostages mean for a fragile ceasefire?” asks a headline by the BBC, who spent the last year and a half performing gold medal Olympian verbal gymnastics to minimize Israel’s daily massacres in Gaza.
“Israel decries ‘shocking’ images of gaunt, pale hostages freed by Hamas,” reads a headline from The Washington Post.
“Emaciated hostages show we need a ‘bomb the rails to Auschwitz’ plan,” reads the New York Post headline to an op-ed by the odious Bethany Mandel.
“I’ve got to be honest. My sympathy for ‘ordinary Palestinians’ is pretty low this morning,” tweeted the Mail on Sunday’s Dan Hodges regarding the hostages.
The idea the public is meant to ingest from this type of messaging, of course, is that it would be good and right for the ceasefire to end and the Gaza holocaust to resume as before.
Such manipulations are ramping up as the ceasefire becomes more tenuous. The New York Times just ran a piece titled “Hamas Postpones Release of Hostages ‘Until Further Notice’” and subtitled “Stalling the next release of hostages from the Gaza Strip, scheduled for the coming weekend, raises new challenges for the already tenuous six-week truce and chances for a lasting end to the war.”
If you noticed the complete absence of any mention of Israel’s ceasefire violations as Hamas’ reason for the move, you get an A in media literacy for today. Anyone skimming the news headlines on their social media feed would assume that Hamas is the provocateur in this standoff instead of Israel.
So the governments of the US and Israel appear to be ramping up to resume the incineration of Gaza, and the media outlets which administer propaganda for both of these tyrannical states are grooming the public into accepting this.
Here’s hoping sanity somehow finds a way to prevail.
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Featured image via Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs (CC BY-NC 2.0)
They're doing their best to distract us. Here in Australia, Anti-Israeli graffiti is now an act of terrorism.
I can remember when terrorists had bombs and we had free speech.
Now we no longer have free speech and it's our governments and their allies wielding bombs.
I absolutely HATE, DETEST, LOATHE, ...etc. the US Empire. I may be naive, but I believe the world will be a BETTER place WITHOUT the existence of this Empire. Now on to the REAL question -> WHO (and HOW) will someone/something rid the world of this monstrosity and incarnate evil that is the US Empire ???