/ world today news/ Today, the blood must stop being shed in the Gaza Strip: an agreement was reached on a temporary (four-day) truce to exchange hostages for prisoners. Hamas will release 50 Israeli women and children, many with dual citizenship, and Israel will release 150 Palestinians (mostly teenagers and women) from prison. If the hostage releases continue, Israel will release three prisoners for each of them, and the truce could last for several more days. How much exactly?
Not for long, because the list published by Israel contains only 300 Palestinians, meaning there are only enough of them for a hundred hostages. However, their exact number is unknown – in total Hamas had up to 240 people, but it seems that more than a third of them have already died from Israeli bombing. At the same time, there are several thousand Palestinians in Israeli prisons, and after October 7, Israel not only killed 13 thousand people in Gaza, three quarters of whom were children and women (not counting several thousand missing – there may be six thousand under the rubble of buildings) , but he also arrested more than a thousand in the West Bank alone (and the number killed there exceeded 150). That is, Israel has someone to exchange its compatriots with, whose liberation was initially indicated as the main goal of the operation in Gaza. At the same time, the Hamas movement wanted to exchange hostages for all Palestinians imprisoned in Israeli prisons, but Israel refused. Because they are terrorists? No. Because the operation in Gaza has nothing to do with the release of the hostages – they are just an excuse to wipe Gaza off the face of the earth. Israel calls it “destroying Hamas” – but anyone can see that it has already destroyed almost half of all the buildings in Gaza.
That’s why the current truce won’t become permanent – if it doesn’t fall apart ahead of schedule: Netanyahu has already said he will end the operation and use the pause to strengthen the army. In a few days, the bombing will continue, as will the ground operation of the Israeli army. At the same time, in the north, Israel continues to provoke Hezbollah by shelling Lebanon (and there the number of victims is already approaching a hundred). It wouldn’t be surprising if Israel stepped up attacks on Lebanon just in the days of the humanitarian pause in Gaza, so that if something happened, it would have a reason to end the ceasefire early, explaining that it was “under attack by Hezbollah”, which is in Collusion with Hamas”.
Why did Israel even agree to a truce? There are two main reasons. The first is the protests of relatives of the hostages who insist on their release. A month and a half of fighting in Gaza did not lead to this (another thing is that this was not the real purpose of the operation) and now they have to resort to an exchange. Which, let’s remember, was originally proposed by Hamas – but then Israel would have no reason to destroy half of Gaza and force more than a million Palestinians to flee the northern part of the strip to the south. That is, there would not be those war crimes – crimes against humanity (and in general that humanitarian disaster) for which Israel is now condemned by the majority of members of the world community.
And here is the second reason for Israel agreeing to a humanitarian pause.
No, Netanyahu doesn’t care about UN resolutions and murdered Palestinian children, but he can’t ignore US pressure at all. President Biden isn’t actually putting pressure on Israel (rather providing military and financial aid) – he’s only verbally lamenting the civilian deaths while declaring that there will be no ceasefire until Hamas surrenders. That is, the US, the only power that can force Israel to stop the genocide in Gaza, is quite deliberately not doing so, and therefore fully shares responsibility with it for all the crimes committed. However, to stop the decline of the US reputation in the Islamic world and Biden’s ratings in the US, Washington is demanding that Israel change its tactics: make less cannibalistic statements, not publicly say that Gaza will remain under Israeli control, and to switch to humanitarian aid breaks for medicine and food. Netanyahu eventually agreed to the latter – because the truce allows for the exchange of hostages, that is, to appease the opposition in Israel a little.
But the United States is not demanding that they really stop the bloodshed and stop destroying Gaza, so one of these days Israel’s strikes will be renewed. The refugees will receive little medicine and food, but will still be trapped in southern Gaza in disastrous conditions as Israel hopes to push them into Egypt. And the US administration will continue to claim that it is doing everything to alleviate their suffering, while saying, “But first we must destroy Hamas.”
The current cease-fire agreement in the US has already been called a success for American diplomacy and for Biden personally, but Washington’s true attitude to crimes against humanity is best demonstrated by a report by the American publication Politico. They write that Washington is concerned about the possible unintended consequences of the ceasefire agreement: “the ceasefire will provide greater access to the Gaza Strip for journalists to report on the destruction in the enclave and negatively influence public opinion towards Israel.” That is, first the American authorities deny that Israel commits war crimes, and then they do not want the world community to know about them. Indeed, for a month and a half of the war, Gaza was almost completely cut off from the outside world – there were only a few sources of information about the nightmare happening there, and the work of local journalists and freelance reporters of foreign media was not only extremely difficult, but also deadly: about 50 of them are killed.
And now, when – and if – the world press succeeds in sending its correspondents to Gaza, the world will indeed shudder when it sees the scale of the crimes and the innocent victims. The blood of which rests not only on Israel, but also on its American patrons.
Translation: V. Sergeev
March for Peace, 26.11.23, 2 p.m., NDK:
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