Israel Prefers Killing Palestinians to Saving their Hostages – the Palestinian Resistance Should Act Accordingly
John Kirby, US National Security Council spokesperson, is on record as saying that he hasn’t yet seen an Israeli war crime or violation of international humanitarian law. Kirby’s determination not to see anything wrong with exterminating 50,000 Palestinians (at a minimum) extended to describing South Africa’s case at the International Court of Justice as ‘meritless’.
John Kirby – No Violation of Humanitarian Law
How have these apologists for genocide justified Israel’s latest atrocity? Al Mawasi, which was specifically designated by Israel as a ‘safe zone’? Israeli planes bombed the tents in this desolate area on the pretext of trying to murder Hamas leader Mohamad El Deif. Their response is to say nothing.
Israel Bombs Schools
As with Israel’s ignoring of the ICJ’s order not to enter Rafah, Western leaders once again demonstrate that their claims to moral superiority over Russia and China are as hollow as their words. Biden’s ‘red lines’ over entering Rafah vanished the moment the Israeli military entered.
Starmer’s selective condemnations of violence – his concern for Ukrainian children doesn’t extend to Palestinian children
Keir Starmer condemned Russia’s missile attack on a Kiev children’s hospital but there has been no mention, still less condemnation, of Israel’s strike on al-Mawasi, even though at least 3 times as many people died in the attack. Like you I am sure that this was just an oversight!
However you will be glad to know that Starmer found time to say “I am appalled by the shocking scenes at President Trump’s rally” where someone took a pot shot at Trump. Not once has Starmer said how appalled he was by Israel’s bombing and attacks on every single hospital and health facility in Gaza. It’s all a question of priorities.
Israel’s bombing of children in the ‘safe zone in Khan Younis of Al Muwasi
Today Israel flattened UNWRA’s headquarters in Gaza City. It is the 190th UNWRA facility that has been attacked. Why? Because UNWRA was specifically set up to support Palestinian refugees and Israel prefers them to disappear entirely.
Murder at al-Mawasi
Israel’s Missile Strike on a School Football Match
When Israel recently launched a missile strike on a school and football match in al-Awda school in Abasan al-Kabira they murdered 31 Palestinians, mainly children. Their excuse was that:
“A warplane, using precision munitions, attacked a terrorist from the military wing of Hamas who participated in the hideous massacre on 7 October,”
Seeking to kill Hamas leaders is the favourite excuse for Israel’s perpetration of massacres. An excuse Western leaders are happy to go along with.
Education Minister Yoav Kisch Threatens to ‘annihilate’ Lebanon – More Nazi Talk
The destruction of Hamas is being used as a pretext for the genocide and destruction of Gaza. There is no difference between this and the Nazis’ shooting of 100 hostages in response to the killing of a single soldier, except that Israel’s massacres far exceed a 100-1 ratio.
Nothing has been said by Starmer or Biden about Israel’s repeated attacks on Hospitals
The silence of politicians and newspapers about Israeli war crimes, the same people who were so eager to condemn Russia’s attack on a hospital, speaks volumes. It does not go unnoticed in the Arab world and the Global South. What Starmer, Biden, Blinken and Schultz are saying is that the end justifies the means. That the goal of eliminating Hamas justifies any and every atrocity. Which raises the question:
Is Hamas such a heinous terrorist organisation that any amount of destruction, including the murder of 40,000 Palestinians, which a letter in the Lancet says is far, far higher (186,000), justified? Because that is the sole Israeli declared war aim.
Hamas, which Israel was in large measure responsible for creating, has arisen because of Israel’s 57 year occupation of land that is not theirs. Israel’s occupation of Gaza is illegal. It doesn’t belong to them. There is therefore an international law right on the part of the indigenous population to resist that occupation in exactly the same way as the French resisted the Nazis and the Algerians resisted the French.
Israel and the imperialists brand the Palestinian Resistance as ‘terrorists’. This has always been the label that the West has applied to those who resisted colonisation. The Mau Mau in Kenya were called terrorists. Thatcher and Reagan described the ANC as terrorists. The Nazis too branded the Partisans as terrorists.
As Lord Carrington, Thatcher’s first Foreign Minister once remarked: ‘one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorists’.
British law, aka section 12(1A) of the Terrorism Act 2000, under which I was arrested last December, may proscribe Hamas as a terrorist organisation but that does not mean it is a terrorist organisation. The law may say that Black = White but that does not mean it is. All it means is that the law has incorporated a lie and made it a criminal offence to disagree.
We can rely on Britain’s police to prosecute opponents of genocide rather than prosecute war criminals like David Cameron for supplying Israel with weapons. Section 52 The International Criminal Court Act 2001 which makes conduct ancillary to an act of genocide a criminal offence seems to be a dead letter as far as the police are concerned.
It is Israel which is a terrorist state and the British and US leaders are the enablers of terrorism for supplying Israel with the means to commit mass murder.
The US has supplied some 14,000 2000lb bombs. Gaza is 365 square kilometers, compared to Britain which is a quarter of a million square kilometres, yet it has been pounded by high explosives for 9 months. More bombs, 70,000 lbs, have been dropped on Gaza than were dropped on London, Hamburg and Dresden in WWII. The US and British governments are accessories to mass murder as long as they supply Israel with weapons of mass murder.
We should be demanding that the new Starmer government immediately ceases supplying Israel with weapons to kill children.
Yet what has Starmer done? Contrary to previous reports he is refusing to withdraw the Tory government’s objection to the ICC issuing arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant.
This is despite Israel deliberately creating famine in Gaza. Aid lorries are no longer entering Gaza since the Rafah operation.
It is abundantly clear that Israel is not interested in any ceasefire that does not allow it to resume its genocide. Given the choice between killing Palestinians and saving its hostages it has chosen the former.
The hostages who have been released have all looked healthy and been well treated. Even the Israeli army, after freeing 4 hostages (and killing 200+ Palestinians in the process) stated that ‘the released hostages were all in good health.’
The hostages have all told how their main fear was of being killed by Israeli bombs. Contrast this with the emaciated bodies, wracked by torture, of Palestinian prisoners who have emerged from Israel’s dungeons. 54 Palestinians have died as a result of torture in Israeli prisons. Israeli doctors in Sde Teiman and elsewhere have, like the Nazi doctors of 80 years ago, participated in torture including the use of medical procedures without anaesthetic.
Hamas is anything but a terrorist organisation. This is simply a term of abuse. After October 7 Netanyahu spoke of ‘Hamas – ISIS’ yet this is one more lie from the world’s most infamous liar. ISIS beheaded those it captured. Hamas has fed them and done its best to keep them alive.
ISIS was elected by no one. It ruled by fear and terror. It was also a product of Britain and America’s illegal invasion of Iraq. Hamas won the Palestinian elections in 2006 but the Israel and the West didn’t like the outcome. Hamas is the most popular political current both in Gaza and the West Bank.
In 2001 Hamas’ military wing was proscribed under the Terrorism Act 2000. This was despite the fact that Hamas have never attacked a target outside Palestine/Israel. Another difference with ISIS (& Israel!). In 2021, for nakedly political reasons, under pressure from the Zionist lobby, Hamas’ political wing was proscribed. The justification for this was non-existent.
Under the Terrorism Act 2000 ‘terrorism’ is defined as
Under this definition the Israeli state should be proscribed. Its war against the Palestinians in Gaza is being conducted for racial, ideological and political reasons – settlement/ethnic cleansing. It has involved serious violence. So it is a political decision not to brand Israel a terrorist state.
During the Troubles in the North of Ireland the IRA was proscribed and still is. Despite Loyalist and Unionist pressure, the British government resisted the temptation to proscribe the IRA’s political wing, Sinn Fein. If Sinn Fein had been proscribed then the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 would not have happened. We would not have had a quarter century of peace in Ireland.
The decision of Priti Patel to proscribe Hamas’ military wing had no factual justification. It was profoundly undemocratic since it is the Palestinian people who elected them as its government in Gaza. Hamas is no more a terrorist organisation than the ANC or Sinn Fein was.
The question is what the Palestinian resistance should do in the current situation given that Israel and Netanyahu have made it clear that they oppose any permanent ceasefire. Israel is determined to continue its attacks on Gaza until it has achieved the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. In January 11 Israeli cabinet members and 15 members of the government attended a conference calling for the ethnic cleansing and settlement of Gaza.
People should remember that the Nazis started with ethnic cleansing and ended up with extermination. The same is true in Gaza which today is a death camp.
Israel has systematically destroyed all civilian infrastructure from schools, hospitals, universities, churches, mosques. It has deliberately killed Gaza’s doctors, 108 journalists, humanitarian and health workers. This has clearly been undertaken to destroy the Palestinians as a people, the classic definition of genocide under the Genocide Convention. Israel knows Hamas comes from the people and is therefore destroying the people. Is it seriously believed that Israel bombed the world’s third oldest church, the Greek Orthodox St. Porphyrius, because it was a Hamas base?
As the BBC reported,
Gaza is home to some of the oldest churches and mosques in the world, but many have not escaped the widespread destruction of Israel’s military offensive.
The Israeli army claimed that Hamas were using churches and mosques as bases to launch attacks from without providing one single iota of proof. In the case of St. Porphyrius Al Jazeera reported that
Israel’s military says it is reviewing reports on casualties after Hamas says the attack on the Greek Orthodox Saint Porphyrius Church in Gaza City killed and injured a ‘large number’ of people.
Suffice to say the Israeli military has not reported its ‘findings’. The IDF has a 100% record of acquitting itself!
The choice facing the resistance is quite simple. In a situation where the Israeli government has made clear its preference for ethnic cleansing and genocide over saving its hostages, then the Israeli people should be given a simple choice – either exchange their hostages for Palestinian hostages (of which there are some 10,000) or accept that they won’t be coming home.
Genocidal Zionist woman’s hilarious interview with Piers Morgan
The Palestinian Resistance should tell Israel that every time a Palestinian child dies, be it from a sniper, a missile strike or bombing then one of their military hostages will be shot. They should give them a list of who will be shot first. Israel would then face a choice of continuing to slaughter Gaza’s children and have its hostages die or immediately cease its campaign of mass murder.
In addition the Palestinian Resistance should inform Israel that until the aid lorries and food are allowed in unhindered, without Israel shooting those trying to receive it, that none of their hostages will be fed. Palestinian prisoners in Israel are on a starvation diet. The same should apply to Israel’s hostages. That way political pressure will build quickly for a ceasefire. At the moment Netanyahu is playing with the Palestinian resistance like a cat with a mouse.
The double standards of the West and its prostitute press are staggering. Just imagine that the Palestinian Resistance decided that Israel’s war criminals, Netanyahu, Gvir, Smotrich and Gallant should be assassinated and they planted bombs in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv to achieve that object, killing in the process dozens of Israeli civilians. You can be sure the BBC would not fail to document every gory detail. But when it comes to bombing schools, hospitals and tents, there is utter silence.
Our media is as complicit in Israel’s genocide as Biden, Blinken and Starmer. They bear the same relationship to them as Goebbels had to Hitler.
Tony Greenstein
