News Analysis
This is all happening without any evidence Israel’s weapons supplier and biggest ally the United States will do what is required to force Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to cease the reckless killings of Palestinians living in Israeli-occupied territory in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The U.S. also continues to supply Israel the means to kill even more, despite that the prime minister continues to defy the “red lines” about civilian safety in those regions.
The U.S. is also paradoxically advising Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas not to counterattack Israel over Netanyahu’s continuing wave of cross-border war crimes which recently resulted in the murder of Hamas political head Ismail Haniyeh last week in Tehran while he attended the inauguration of the newly elected president of Iran. Secretary of State Antony Blinken continues to ask for that restraint, despite his spokespersons acknowledging that if the wave of assassinations like the ones in which Israel murdered Iranian generals in Damascus, Syria, and this latest killing had happened to U.S. senior leaders both political and military, it would have been forced to strike back itself.
Meanwhile Israeli Defense Forces continue to batter and slaughter innocent civilians in Gaza, with no apparent end in sight other than the complete extermination or ejection of the Palestinian people from their lands.
Just since yesterday morning, for example, the Gaza Health Ministry reports that 40 people were murdered and an additional 71 injured in Gaza.
According to the latest report from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), many of those dead and hurt by Israeli Defense Forces during this time perished after its ground troops and aircraft shelled three schools where ordinary Palestinians were simply seeking shelter. Israel’s excuse for these needless deaths was once again that they keep looking for Hamas operatives said to have been hiding among the innocents.
Israeli Defense Forces also stepped up its airstrikes in eastern Khan Younis, once identified by Israel as a safe haven for refugees, and in central Gaza over the last few days.
This keeps happening without a single word coming from the White House or State Department declaring the savagery and criminal nature of what Israel continues to do in the region.
It has also been revealed from multiple sources that Israel told the U.S., after the rocket attack which killed Hamas political head Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran last week, that it was responsible for the killing. Not only has the United States refused to condemn the killing in Iran as an unlawful act, or even to suggest publicly that it could trigger a much broader war for all in the region, the U.S. itself continues to hide behind the statement that it did not know anything about the attack at the time of the murder. It also continues to deny publicly that it knows whether Israel was involved.
The United States’ evasion of responsibility in all these actions, even as it supplies the money and weapons to enable Israel to continue its illegal acts, makes it complicit in all the killing Israel is doing.
The United Nations’ inability to call Israel to account for its actions renders it complicit as well. It refuses to take the necessary steps to push Israel to halt its treacherous actions, either by enforcing multiple already-existing unequivocally-damning rulings by its International Court of Justice, by somehow getting the UN Security Council to direct Israel to stand down or face the placement of a UN-sponsored military presence to force the issue, or by ejecting it from the United Nations General Assembly for violating the fundamental terms member sates signed up to – to work to keep the peace rather than destabilize the world through war.
It is also giving Israel confidence that its practice of murdering targets it believes should be dead, in locations where it does not even have the legal right to be present let alone running bombing runs, will be supported by its American co-conspirators and the allies the U.S. drags along with it in the process.
Israel is also now convinced that when Iran does launch the reprisal attack it has promised for the death of Hamas Chief Haniyeh, it will have full force backing of the American military in the Middle East as it practices what it calls is its “right to defend itself” when the deadly onslaught from Iran arrives.
The latest evidence of Israel’s being convinced of its inherent right to inflict terror on its neighbors arrived yesterday when the decision was announced as to who would replace Ismail Haniyeh as the head of Hamas.
The individual Hamas’s leadership coalition named to become the new head of the organization’s political bureau is Yahya Sinwar.
He was elected “unanimously”, according to another senior Hamas official, Osama Hamdan.
“This shows that the movement is aware of the nature of the stage [where diplomatic negotiations on issues such as a potential ceasefire in Israel were handled],” Hamdan said in a brief interview yesterday with reporters about the appointment. “The negotiation was managed by the leadership and Sinwar was always present.”
New political chief Sinwar is the individual who managed much of the military operations for Hamas in Gaza. He is also understood to be the principal planner and leader for the October 7 attack at the music festival in northern Israel. Over 1200 people died in that attack, with most of them Israeli civilians.
Since the time of that incident, evidence and testimony from eyewitnesses and Israeli military willing to speak out has shown that many of those who died did so at the hands of the Israeli Defense Forces themselves. The IDF authorized its personnel to shoot to kill its own personnel and citizens under a directive known as the Hannibal Protocol, which allows the country’s troops to kill soldiers and ordinary civilians alike, if by doing so they avoid the capture of any of their soldiers.
As expected, Israel continues to deny this is what happen. The false story of Hamas as the group responsible for the deaths of the over 1200 then is simply a far too “convenient untruth” for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to continue to propagate, as he continues to use this as justification for now having murdered almost 40,000 Palestinians in Gaza.
After Sinwar’s appointment, Israeli spokesperson Daniel Hagari expressed his personal disgust over the decision to put Sinwar in charge, and at one point yesterday admitting this would just provide Israel with an opportunity for another assassination of a key leader Israel wants removed.
“There is only one place for Yahya Sinwar, and it is beside Mohammed Deif and the rest of the October 7th terrorists,” Hagari told reporters yesterday. “That is the only place we’re preparing and intending for him.”
It is a statement of conviction that Israel has full right to conduct yet another airstrike to kill Sinwar at will, and arrogance that it knows it will get away with it.
With the rising war crime and murder counts Israel continues to accumulate, and with no one else stopping it, Israel is doing everything in its power to prove to Iran that it believes it will never be held accountable for its war crimes by any country other than Iran itself.
The clock at this point is ticking as to when Iran will launch its expected major counterstrike on Israel. The last official intelligence reports said it would happen starting around August 12.