Israel Katz, the IDF head, says the ‘game has changed’ in Gaza

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is particularly bold these days because he owns the occupant inside the White House, warned Gazans that the airstrikes that killed at least 430 — including reportedly more than 130 children — has only just begun.

Netanyahu blamed Hamas for refusing to release the remaining Israeli hostages and said: “I promised you many times… if Hamas persists in its refusal and does not release our hostages, we will return to fighting. And indeed, we have returned to fighting – we have returned to fighting with intensity,” Haaretz reported.

“Hamas has already felt our might in the past 24 hours, and I want to assure you and them: this is only the beginning,” he said.

The bombing in the early morning hours was said to be among the most extreme that Gazans have had to endure. The White House was aware of Israel’s planning, which raised some suspicion online that that is part of the reason that The Trump administration has been so fixated on crushing any criticism of Israel in the U.S.

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Catherine Russell, the head of the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), called Israel’s bombardment in Gaza the deadliest night yet for children who remain in the enclave.

“Some of the strikes reportedly hit makeshift shelters with sleeping children and families, another deadly reminder that nowhere is safe in Gaza,” she said, according to The Middle East Monitor.

The Times of Israel reported that there have been new airstrikes across Gaza on Wednesday — so Netanyahu has made good on his promise. At least 10 people were killed around Khan Younis in Gaza’s south.

The Israelis are beginning to sound like U.S. President Donald Trump with their rhetoric.

https://www.activistpost.com/netanyahu-after-deadliest-night-yet-for-gazan-children-this-is-just-the-beginning/

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

Israel has begun the final stage of its genocide. The Palestinians will be forced to choose between death or deportation. There are no other options.

This is the last chapter of the genocide. It is the final, blood-soaked push to drive the Palestinians from Gaza. No food. No medicine. No shelter. No clean water. No electricity. Israel is swiftly turning Gaza into a Dantesque cauldron of human misery where Palestinians are being killed in their hundreds and soon, again, in their thousands and tens of thousands, or they will be forced out never to return.

The final chapter marks the end of Israeli lies. The lie of the two-state solution. The lie that Israel respects the laws of war that protect civilians. The lie that Israel bombs hospitals and schools only because they are used as staging areas by Hamas. The lie that Hamas uses civilians as human shields, while Israel routinely forces captive Palestinians to enterpotentially booby-trapped tunnels and buildings ahead of Israeli troops. The lie that Hamas or Palestine Islamic Jihad are responsible — the charge often being errant Palestinian rockets — for the destruction of hospitals, United Nations’ buildings or mass Palestinian casualties. The lie that humanitarian aid to Gaza is blocked because Hamas is hijacking the trucks or smuggling in weapons and war material. The lie that Israeli babies are beheaded or Palestinians carried out mass rape of Israeli women. The lie that 75% of the tens of thousands killed in Gaza were Hamas “terrorists.” The lie that Hamas, because it was allegedly re-arming and recruiting new fighters, is responsible for the breakdown of the ceasefire agreement.

Israel’s naked genocidal visage is exposed. It has ordered the evacuation of northern Gaza where desperate Palestinians are camped out amid the rubble of their homes. What comes now is mass starvation — the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East said on March 21 it has six days of flour supplies left — deaths from diseases caused by contaminated water and food, scores of killed and wounded each day under the relentless assault of bombs, missiles, shells and bullets. Nothing will function, bakeries, water treatment and sewage plants, hospitals — Israel blew up the damaged Turkish-Palestinian hospital on 21 March — schools, aid distribution centres or clinics. Less than half of the 53 emergency vehicles operated by the Palestine Red Crescent Society are functional due to fuel shortages. Soon there will be none.

Israel’s message is unequivocal: Gaza will be uninhabitable. Leave or die.

Since 18 March, when Israel broke the ceasefire with heavy bombing, more than 700 Palestinians have been killed, including 200 children. In one 24-hour period 400 Palestinians were killed. This is only the start. No Western power, including the United States, which provides the weapons for the genocide, intends to stop it. The images from Gaza during the nearly 16 months of incessant attacks were awful. But what is coming now will be worse. It will rival the most atrocious war crimes of the 20th century, including the mass starvation, wholesale slaughter and levelling of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943 by the Nazis.

October 7 marked the dividing line between an Israeli policy that advocated the brutalisation and subjugation of the Palestinians and a policy that calls for their extermination and removal from historic Palestine. What we are witnessing is the historical equivalent of the moment triggered by the annihilation of some 200 soldiers led by George Armstrong Custer in June 1876 at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. After that humiliating defeat, Native Americans were slated to be killed with the remnants forced into prisoner of war camps, later named reservations, where thousands died of disease, lived under the merciless gaze of their armed occupiers and fell into a life of immiseration and despair. Expect the same for the Palestinians in Gaza, dumped, I suspect, in one of the world’s hellholes and forgotten.

“Gaza residents, this is your final warning,” Israeli Minister of Defence Israel Katz threatened:

The first Sinwar destroyed Gaza and the second Sinwar will completely destroy it. The Air Force strikes against Hamas terrorists were just the first step. It will become much more difficult and you will pay the full price. The evacuation of the population from the combat zones will soon begin again… Return the hostages and remove Hamas and other options will open for you, including leaving for other places in the world for those who want to. The alternative is absolute destruction.

The ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas was designed to be implemented in three phases. The first phase, lasting 42 days, would see an end to hostilities. Hamas would release 33 Israeli hostages who were captured on 7 October 2023 — including women, those aged above 50, and those with illnesses — in exchange for upwards of up to 21,000 Palestinian men, women and children imprisoned by Israel (around 1900 Palestinian captives have been released by Israel as of 18 March). Hamas has released 147 hostages, of whom eight were dead. Israel says there are 59 Israelis still being held by Hamas, 35 of whom Israel believes are deceased.

The Israeli army would pull back from populated areas of Gaza on the first day of the ceasefire. On the seventh day, displaced Palestinians would be permitted to return to northern Gaza. Israel would allow 600 aid trucks with food and medical supplies to enter Gaza daily.

The second phase, which was expected to be negotiated on the 16th day of the ceasefire, would see the release of the remaining Israeli hostages. Israel would complete its withdrawal from Gaza, maintaining a presence in some parts of the Philadelphi corridor, which stretches along the eight-mile border between Gaza and Egypt. It would surrender its control of the Rafah border crossing into Egypt.

The third phase would see negotiations for a permanent end to the war and the reconstruction of Gaza.

Israel habitually signs agreements, including the Camp David Accords and the Oslo Peace Agreement, with timetables and phases. It gets what it wants — in this case the release of the hostages — in the first phase and then violatessubsequent phases. This pattern has never been broken.

Israel refused to honour the second phase of the deal. It blocked humanitarian aid into Gaza two weeks ago, violating the agreement. It also killed at least 137 Palestinians during the first phase of the ceasefire, including nine people, — three of them journalists — when Israeli drones attacked a relief team on 15 March in Beit Lahiya in northern Gaza

Israel’s heavy bombing and shelling of Gaza resumed on 18 March while most Palestinians were asleep or preparing their suhoor, the meal eaten before dawn during the holy month of Ramadan. Israel will not stop its attacks now, even if the remaining hostages are freed – Israel’s supposed reason for the resumption of the bombing and siege of Gaza.

The Trump White House cheers on the slaughter along with Democratic Party leaders such as Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. They attack critics of the genocide as “antisemites” who should be silenced, criminalised or deported, while funnelling billions of dollars in weapons to Israel.

Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza is the denouement of its settler colonial project and apartheid state. The seizure of all of Historic Palestine — with the West Bank soon, I expect, to be annexed by Israel — and displacement of all Palestinians has always been the Zionist goal.

Israel’s worst excesses occurred during the wars of 1948 and 1967 when huge parts of historic Palestine were seized, thousands of Palestinians killed and hundreds of thousands were ethnically cleansed. Between these wars, the slow-motion theft of land, expansion of Jewish settlements, murderous assaults and steady ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, continued.

That calibrated dance is over. This is the end. What we are witnessing dwarfs all the historical assaults on Palestinians. Israel’s demented genocidal dream — a Palestinian nightmare — is about to be achieved. It will forever shatter the myth that we, or any Western nation, respect the rule of law or are the protectors of human rights, democracy and the so-called “virtues” of Western civilisation. Israel’s barbarity is our own. We may not understand this, but the rest of the globe does.

Republished from The Chris Hedges Report, 22 March

https://johnmenadue.com/the-last-chapter-of-the-genocide/

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.