Berlin, Germany (Weltexpress). After a full week of ceasefire and seven rounds of hostage and prisoner exchanges, Israel says 137 hostages are still being held by Hamas, including some Americans. Last week, a total of 110 Hamas hostages, mainly women and children, were exchanged for Israeli hostages from prisons, mainly Palestinian women and children, often less than six years old.
One wonders what six-year-old Palestinian children are doing in Israeli prisons, where they are kept inaccessible to their parents, possibly like animals. In a public address to his soldiers, the current Israeli war minister, Mr Galant, described the Palestinians as “human-looking animals” who should either be killed or expelled.
Qatar and Egypt reportedly pushed for the temporary pause in fighting to be extended for another two days, but the Netanyahu government, made up of extremist forces, balked. These criminals want to fulfil their public oath and complete their murderous work in Gaza. By resuming the indiscriminate bombing and destruction of the still intact neighbourhoods in the south of the Gaza Strip, they want to create so much fear and terror among the civilian population with the mass production of dead children and their families – as they did in 1948 during the Nakba – that a mass exodus of the 2.2 million inhabitants from Gaza will be provoked, either into the desert or across the border controlled by Egyptian soldiers to Egypt. That would be “Mission Accomplished”. The mission of ethnically cleansing Gaza of the “human animals”, regardless of whether they are Christian or Islamic Palestinians, would be accomplished.
Naturally, the Netanyahu government tried to justify the restart of its military machinery. To do so, they put forward two flimsy arguments, which were of course uncritically parroted by the pro-Zionist Western media. It was reported that Hamas had only offered hostages that the government was no longer interested in. According to CNN, for example, Israel was “not satisfied with the list of prisoners offered”. And this despite the fact that, as reported above, 137 hostages are still being held by Hamas, including Americans, according to Israeli sources.
As a further pretext to justify the resumption of the bombing, the Israeli government cited the terrorist attack carried out on Thursday by two armed Palestinians with machine-gun and pistol fire on a crowd at a bus stop in Jerusalem, in which three Israelis were killed and 16 injured. This was a breach of the ceasefire, Western media repeat the Israeli arguments. However, it remains unmentioned that the Israeli military has continued to carry out brutal operations against the population in the West Bank throughout the entire period of the Gaza “ceasefire”.
On Friday evening, the Western media, including the ARD Tagesschau, then disseminated a further “justification” for the resumption of the bombardment of Gaza, a city of over a million inhabitants, and for the continuation of the mass murder of civilians. According to the report, Hamas allegedly broke the ceasefire first and fired rockets into Israeli territory on Friday morning. Hamas denies this and the Israelis have not provided any proof. Because they know that all they have to do is claim something, no matter how outrageously unbelievable it is, and the pro-Zionist media in the West will spread it non-stop. Just think of the claim that Hamas allegedly beheaded 40 Israeli babies in the attack on 7 October. Although this has since been exposed as a lie even by Israeli non-governmental sources, there has been no correction in the Western media. This is because to question the official lies of the Israeli government would immediately be defamed as anti-Semitic.
What is actually behind the resumption of the Israeli mass murder of Gaza civilians is the fact that the pressure from extremists within Netanyahu’s own ruling coalition has increased to take the fight back to Hamas and follow through to the end on the promise made to their voters to eliminate Hamas, which means nothing less than razing Gaza to the ground.
The racist Itamar Ben-Gvir, Minister of National Security and representative of the fascist party “Otzma Yehudit” in Natanyahu’s governing coalition, has been against any ceasefire from the very beginning. In recent days, Ben-Gvir has even threatened to break up the governing coalition. However, if the government falls apart, Prime Minister Netanyahu will go to prison for corruption and other crimes. Only his current position in the government gives him the necessary immunity from prosecution. So Netanyahu will do anything to keep this mass-murderous government in power.
Ben-Gvir wrote this week in Hebrew on X (formerly Twitter): “Ending the war = the government falls apart.” However, a unity government is currently ruling under the regime of the declared “national emergency”, which is made up of all parties represented in parliament, including the parties of the more moderate opposition, which Netanyahu would prefer to see in prison. It therefore remains unclear whether the withdrawal of Ben-Gvir’s “Otzma Yehudit” from the “governing coalition of national unity” would also mean its collapse.
The words that Prime Minister Netanyahu addressed to US Secretary of State Blinken last Thursday appeared to be aimed at appeasing the rebellious voices in his cabinet that are strictly opposed to an extension of the ceasefire:
“I told him that we have sworn, and I too have sworn, to destroy Hamas. Nothing will stop us,” Netanyahu said at a press conference after the meeting with Blinken. Later that day, he issued a statement in which he responded specifically to Ben-Gvir and insisted that the war against Hamas will continue until Hamas is eliminated: “There is no situation in which we will not fight to the end. That is my policy. The entire security cabinet is behind it. The entire government is behind it. The soldiers are behind it. The people are behind it – that is exactly what we will do,” emphasised Netanyahu.
This is exactly what the Israeli pilots did on Friday morning, once again bombing civilian apartment blocks in the Gaza Strip from high altitude without endangering themselves. The critical journalist Max Blumenthal points out in a news item on X that the first attack by the Israeli bombers was aimed at the “Hamad Towers” in the Chan Younis neighbourhood, two apartment blocks financed by the Gulf state of Qatar and built for homeless Palestinians who had already lost their homes to Israeli bombers in 2021. Blumenthal also sees these actions as a political signal from the Israeli government to the Arab state of Qatar, namely to the Gulf state where the hostage exchange negotiations had taken place and which had lobbied hardest for an extension of the ceasefire. The moment of the destruction of the Hamad Towers is captured in a video that Blumenthal attached to his X-message and can be viewed via this link.
Also on Friday, the British Guardian reported in an article on how the Israeli military automatically selects targets for the Zionist bombers in the Gaza Strip using so-called “artificial intelligence (AI)” software called “Gospel”. According to Aviv Kochavi, the former head of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF), this AI system was first used in the bombing of the Gaza Strip in May 2021. He explained how much help the “gospel” provides: “To put this in perspective: In the past, we identified 50 targets in Gaza per year. Now this machine produces 100 targets a day, 50 per cent of which are attacked.”
During the conflict, which has lasted almost two months, Israel has destroyed over 15,000 targets in Gaza. According to the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, Israel has dropped more than 25,000 tonnes of explosives on the Gaza Strip. The IDF reports that it has only killed between 1,000 and 2,000 suspected Hamas members. At the same time, at least 15,000 civilians are said to have been killed, including an estimated 6,000 children. Researcher Richard Moyes, who heads the British NGO Article 36, said the images of Gaza prove that the Israeli bombardment of Gaza is not focussed on accuracy. “Look at the physical landscape of Gaza,” he explained. “We see the widespread levelling of an urban area with heavy explosives, so the claim of precision and controlled, limited violence is not borne out by the facts on the ground.”
Commenting on this, a reader on X (Twitter) points out that according to polls, “57.5 percent of Israeli Jews said they believed the IDF used too little firepower in Gaza; 36.6 percent said the IDF used an appropriate amount of firepower; while only 1.8 percent said they believed the IDF used too much firepower.”
If confirmed by other surveys, this paints a picture of a society that has completely lost touch with morality (and probably reality), says another reader. This needs to be studied in depth because it can easily happen elsewhere. When you start to completely dehumanise a certain group of people and live in an information environment where your own crimes and transgressions are ignored, it’s a recipe for immense human suffering, says Arnaud Bertrand.
What this means for the alleged moral superiority of the collective West was aptly explained by Professor Hasan Ünal from Bashkent University in Ankara in a Sputnik interview on 28 November. On the total loss of Western moral superiority and the emergence of a multipolar world order, he said: “Whenever people from the West use these words again, you know, words like democratisation, human rights, freedoms and all that, then in the future others will respond by saying, oh yes, we know it, we know it very well, democracy à la Gaza, democratisation à la Gaza, human rights à la Gaza, we know how criminal you can become, can you please stop and keep all this rubbish to yourselves?”
