The Gaza "ceasefire" is a racist lie

Apparently a "ceasefire" means it's OK to slaughter Palestinians. This isn't even subtle racism

The so-called ceasefire in Gaza is a racist lie. It is important to discuss this, because this so-called ceasefire will, soon, give way to renewed genocidal violence from Israel. I’m sorry to have to state some gruesome truths here.

As Al-Jazeera reported on Tuesday, Palestinian security sources told them they had registered 266 violations of the ceasefire agreement, which came into force on 19th January, 32 days ago.

Now to be clear, I can’t verify all of these violation claims.

What I would note is these alleged ceasefire violations include the killing of at least 132 Palestinians, with more than 900 Palestinians injured. Data is provided about each of these killings, and indeed we can verify many of them from the public record.

Imagine if just one Israeli had been killed in Gaza in this period. If just one had been killed, our media outlets and politicians would not be talking about a ceasefire. Quite the opposite. The killing of that one Israeli would be plastered over news bulletins and front pages. Politicians would be denouncing it. Israel would use it as justification for pummelling Gaza all over again.

But Palestinian life is judged to be utterly meaningless, to have less value than the common housefly.

And when I say no Israelis have been killed during the ceasefire: well that’s not entirely true. An Israeli contractor, 39 year old Jacob Avitan, was killed last Tuesday. He was there “demolishing structures”, according to the Times of Israel. In any case, who killed him? Why the Israeli army of course, because they thought he was a Palestinian, underlining once more how Palestinian civilians have no chance, because the Israeli army has repeatedly killed its own. Indeed, in the first two months of Israel’s ground offensive, of the 170 Israeli soldiers killed, 29 were killed by so-called friendly fire and other accidents.

It’s worth just focusing on what may become the pretext to destroy the ceasefire and unleash genocidal fury against the Palestinian people of Gaza. And that is the tragic fate of the Bibas family, an Israeli family who were taken hostage on 7th October - that is their father, Yarden, who has now been released, and the mother, Shiri, 4-year-old Ariel, and baby Kfir.

I have been very clear about this from the very start. Taking civilians hostage is a grave war crime for which there is no excuse or justification. That particularly applies to children and this baby. They should never have been abducted - in this case, likely by the so-called Mujahideen Brigades, who are close to Islamic Jihad - and they should always been released. The parade today, featuring four coffins on a stage, was grotesque: it should be noted that as the Telegraph say:

The coffins on stage appeared to be props, as different coffins were seen being handed over to the Red Cross by masked Hamas fighters dressed in black.

Their bodies have now been returned to the Israeli authorities. Their fate has become a focus of those Israelis who wish to avenge their deaths with what in practise would mean the mass slaughter of far more babies, children, mothers, and other innocent civilians.

As the Palestinian analyst Muhammad Shehada, writing in Zeteo, notes, Eylon Levy - the former spokesperson of Benjamin Netanyahu, has vowed “hell” and “fury” if they came back dead.

Firstly, the Israeli state has known that Shiri Bibas and her two children have been dead for a very long time. In late 2023, Hamas said that the three Bibas family members had been killed an Israeli airstrike. To be clear, the evidence was not provided for that, we will come on to that. However, there was nothing to be gained from falsely claiming that they were dead.

As a senior Israeli official close to Netanyahu told Muhammad Shehada:

“He promptly conceded they were killed, denied that Israel was hiding their fate for propaganda purposes, and said the reason their fate wasn’t made official is purely bureaucratic. The military’s Chief Rabbi needs to make this call, and he hasn’t, the official said.”

Shehada asked other sources, including the Israeli opposition, who confirmed their deaths, as well as what he says were two senior Palestinian officials directly involved in ceasefire negotiations, who claimed they’d been killed in an ISraeli airstrike just prior to their planned release during the first temporary ceasefire of November 2023.

As Diana Magnay, a Sky News international correspondent, this morning reported, Hamas offered back in November 2023 to return the bodies of the Bibas family after stating they had been killed by an Israeli airstrike. Israel refused, stating it was “psychological warfare”.

Indeed the Israeli journalist Uri Misgav, is amongst those who have stated that the three were killed in Israeli bombings.

The charge is that the Israeli state knew all along that the three Bibas family members had been killed, and they have pretended otherwise as part of a cynical disinformation campaign - to focus Israeli minds on the alleged continued captivity of these children - with their deaths now being used to build support for a renewed genocidal onslaught.

To be clear, I do not know how the Bibas family members were killed. We do know that multiple Israeli hostages have been killed by the Israeli state. There was, notoriously, the three Israeli hostages killed in December 2023: shirtless and thus clearly unarmed, waving a white flag, and yelling in Hebrew.

We do know that last September, the Israeli army said there was a “high probability” that three hostages found dead in December were killed in an Israeli airstrike, which itself took place in November. It is striking that it apparently took that long for the Israeli army to confirm this.

In December, the Israeli military announced that the deaths of six hostages recovered from Gaza were probably linked to an Israeli airstrike against Hamas, near where they were being held. The bodies were recovered in late August: the airstrike took place in February.

In a statement, the IDF said:

"At the time of the strike, the military had no information, not even a suspicion, that the hostages were in the underground compound or its vicinity. Had such information been available, the strike would not have been carried out.”

Well, I hardly need tell you that if Israeli hostages are being killed in such attacks, with the Israeli army then claiming they had no idea they were there, what hope for Palestinian civilians?

An investigation by the Israeli-Palestinian media outlet +972 Magazine detailed the killing of Israeli hostages by Israeli attacks. As one Israeli intelligence source is quoted as saying:

While attacks were aborted when there was specific, definitive intelligence indicating the presence of a hostage, the army routinely authorized strikes when the intelligence picture was murky and there was a “general” likelihood that hostages were present in the vicinity of a target. “Mistakes definitely happened, and we bombed hostages,” one intelligence source said.

But +972 magazine also say the following:

However, +972 and Local Call have learned that the military’s claim that it had no intelligence that hostages were being held near Ghandour is false. Three security sources with knowledge of the attack’s planning revealed that the Shin Bet’s operations division, which led the strike, had received additional vague intelligence that could indicate a “medium likelihood” of hostages’ presence at the site.

They further say that according to Israeli intelligence sources:

The large gray area between having a positive indication of the presence of hostages, and being able to rule out their presence, enabled “dozens” of strikes that endangered and killed hostages.

Indeed when Israeli hostages were released during the December 2023 ceasefire, they repeatedly told media outlets that they were terrified by Israeli bombings, and feared the Israeli air strikes would kill them.

Well, let’s be blunt here, and this is really stating the obvious. The Israeli state has carpetbombed Gaza. Gaza is no bigger than east London. Israel has launched weapons against this tiny strip of land with the combined explosive power of several Hiroshima bombs. That has resulted in the mass slaughter of so many innocent Palestinians, including Palestinian babies, toddlers, children, teenagers, men, women, the elderly, the infirm, the disabled.

Clearly several Israeli hostages were always going to be killed given that level of bombardment. That doesn’t absolve the captors of the crime of kidnapping civilians. It is to point out that a genocidal frenzy which was justified by retrieving hostages actually endangered those hostages too, and that more Israeli hostages have been killed by the Israeli army than have been rescued by military means by the Israeli army.

In any case, he return of the bodies of the Bibas has reignited genocidal fervour.

The Republican majority of the House Foreign Affairs Committee in the US tweets:

Hamas executed a mother and her two children in cold blood.

This is barbarism. Israel has every right to finish the job and eradicate these terrorists from the face of the earth.

Notably, no evidence is provided that the family were executed. What “finish the job” means in practise, of course, is extermination.

The Israeli actor Yigal Adika posted: “If children are not coming back alive, Gaza has no right to exist.”

Other accounts variously say “Israel can do whatever they want to do to Gaza as far as I’m concerned”, “FLATTEN GAZA. I don’t give a fuck.”

Here’s the thing. I am on ‘Team Don’t Harm Children’, as well as ‘Team Don’t Harm Innocent Civilians’.

At the beginning of this year, according to the official figures, which expert studies have shown to be likely severe underestimates, 1,091 Palestinian babies have been killed since October 2023, including 238 babies who were born after 7th October.

Many of these have been in bombings where the Israeli army knows there are babies and indeed children who they are going to blow up. You see, they preferred to attack their targets - chosen through artificial intelligence and arbitrary criteria - when they came home. Often where their children were. And do you know what they called their automated system, tracking targeted individuals and blowing them up when they got home, as +972 Magazine exposed?

‘Where’s Daddy’.

So many Palestinian babies, burned alive, choked to death under rubble, their little frail bodies blown apart.

No fury, no outrage for those babies and children. Like little Osama, who liked to play with his parrots.

Like Aysal and Aser, baby twins. Their father went to get their birth certificate. As he left, the Israeli army blew up his home, killing those twins and their mother. He then had to go and get their death certificates.

Like 5 year old Hind Rajab and her 4 cousins, as well as their aunt and uncle. As an expert study by Forensic Architecture found, there’s no way the Israeli army could not have known who they were slaughtering. It was broad daylight, the tank was right next to the car, and the tank repeatedly fired on that car.

Which brings us back to the naked racism of all of this. If you are a decent human being, if you are humane, if you have the most basic moral compass, then you believe that all babies, all children, have equal worth, have equal value. You believe that the life a Palestinian baby has just as much worth as an Israeli baby.

Those now using the fate of the Bibas family to justify the renewed slaughter of Gaza don’t care at all about all those Palestinian babies. There is no emotional reaction whatsoever. And they are actively cheering on a renewed onslaught which they know - as a fact - would murder so many other Palestinian babies and children.

I will be honest with you. It chills me to my bone. It makes me nauseous. It disgusts me. Those people have allowed all of their humanity to rot away.

If you showed one of them a photograph of a slaughtered baby, and you told them it was an Israeli baby killed by Hamas, they would feel anger, disgust, grief, revulsion. If you then told them it was a Palestinian baby killed by the Israeli military, what would happen? Those emotions would immediately vanish. That’s the truth. How disturbing is that?

Indeed it fleshes out what the Palestinian-Canadian lawyer Diana Buttu said, about how nothing justifies 7th October but everything can be justified by 7th October

To those responding to the news about the Bibas family by making it clear they support flattening Gaza, unleashing hell against Gaza - in other words objective grotesque war crimes which would kill so many innocents: well, when Palestinian militants who committed war crimes on 7th October justified those crimes by pointing to Israeli atrocities, how did you respond to that exactly? In just 2023 alone, before 7th October, around 40 Palestinian children had been killed. And that’s without talking about decades of ethnic cleansing, brutal occupation, siege, colonisation and land theft, mass incarceration, the slaughter of thousands of Palestinians before 7th October.

In your case, you look at the fate of the Bibas family and say - unleash hell against Gaza, making clear you do not care who is killed as a consequence, but you would find such justifications for 7th October obscene.

The psychology of racism, the depravity and inhumanity of it, will never stop disturbing me.

This whole genocide has been a carnival of the most obscene racism, with Palestinian life, up to and including babies and children, treated as utterly meaningless, without any pretence.

Well, I am afraid that this so called ceasefire is going to fall apart when Israel finds an excuse to unleash vicious genocidal bloodshed, and the fate of the Bibas family will partly be used to justify that. This is genocidal racism, we should call it what it is.