Relentless bombing. Mass displacement. Wilful slaughter. Ethnic cleansing. Calculated starvation. Systematic extermination.
Another year of genocide in Gaza.
And now, another false 'ceasefire' and round of spurious 'peace' overtures.
Despite some welcome respite for the suffering souls of Gaza, Trump’s ‘peace plan’ offers nothing authentic or useful. It’s a stage show, a performative prop, nothing more than a nominal ceasefire, with no route plan for Palestinian self-governance, self-authority or ultimate self-determination.
It’s as vacant as Trump’s own show of centre-stage narcissism in Egypt, issuing cringing inanities, as kowtowing leaders nodded like petrified subjects to his rambling bromides.
Grovelling and humiliated UK leader Keir Starmer, shameful EU compliant Gulf royals, and the rest of Trump's obsequious vassalage were seen lining up behind the White House 'emperor' to tell Palestinians how they are to be ruled - apparently under 'governor general' Tony Blair.
In a narrative straight out of 19th century imperialist map-making, this criminal crew are insisting that Hamas will have no governing role, that Palestine will have no armed forces, that any Palestinian 'state' will be totally conditional on the West’s technocratic rule, and subject to Israel’s 'security' approvals.
They have, of course, nothing say about sanctioning the apartheid regime itself, indicting its criminal leaders, or dismantling an actual genocidal state.
When Nelson Mandela was released from prison, as the regime was collapsing, the world didn't stand up and say: "apartheid South Africa has a right to exist". It was clearly understood that there could be no new South Africa under the same system, the same apartheid government, retaining the same criminal leaders, maintaining the same cruel and barbaric state apparatus.
Israel is not just an apartheid state, which should be enough to see it shunned and banished from the UN. It’s a genocidal state, acting in clear breach of the Genocide Convention.
In September 2025, a major UN Commission report made that unequivocal declaration, joining every major human rights group and the pre-eminent International Association of Genocide Scholars in asserting that truth.
In what moral universe can such an apartheid and genocidal entity be allowed continued protection, recognition and lawful existence? Such is the degree to which Israel's allies conspire in this monstrous crime.
In one of the most chilling cases of its open murder rampage this year, the regime targeted and executed 15 Palestinian Red Crescent ambulance medics and civil responders. Their bodies were later recovered from a mass grave, hidden by the regime.
A video film later recovered from the body of one of the executed medics clearly revealed, contrary to Israel’s claims, that all the ambulance lights were on as the convoy transited. The ensuing sound of mass gunfire, and repeated prayers of the doomed man, make for chilling viewing and listening.
In its default use of the 'past exonerative tense', the BBC’s headline announced: "Israel admits mistakes over medic killings in Gaza."
It should more accurately have read: "Israel caught lying over medic killings in Gaza."
In a second exonerative attempt, the headline was changed to: "Israel changes account of Gaza medic killings after video showed deadly attack." Again, it should have read: "Israel caught lying over medic killings tries to change its account after video showed clear evidence of deadly executions."
As Jonathan Cook noted:
"This was the perfect opportunity for BBC Verify to do a real investigation, piecing together an atrocity Israel was so keen to conceal. It was a chance for the BBC to do actual journalism on Gaza."
These kind of exonerating headlines and framing perfectly exemplify the many charges against the BBC of being party to the genocide. And they fit squarely with the exposure of the BBC’s chief Middle East news editor, Raffi Berg, in routinely guiding editorial presentation in protecting Israel.
The BBC's taking down of Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone - a fine film on the afflicted children of the Strip, and the blocking of its own Panorama film Gaza: Doctors Under Attack - on the testimonies of heroic medics there - are all indications of its cowering to the Israeli lobby.
The BBC's effective removal of sports commentator Gary Lineker, a brave critic of Israel, was yet another shameful act of appeasement.
Realising the contrary view and gathering shift in public reaction to the genocide, the BBC has sought to cover its complicity with token reports on the humanitarian suffering in Gaza. Seeing rising awareness of the genocidal horror, it has attempted to cover its establishment back. But it cannot hide the true extent of its complicity in Palestinian suffering, or escape its direct role in driving a narrative of 'Israel's righteous retribution' for 7 October, including a whole range of omissions, inaccuracies and distortions over the complex story of that day. On all those charges, and more, it must be held to account as a key enabler of the genocide which followed.
It also stands rightfully accused of betraying all the journalists targeted and murdered in Gaza. In another act of calculated evil, the regime assassinated two such revered journalists, Mohammed Mansour from Palestine Today and Al Jazeera’s Hossam Shabat. Again, shamefully, none of this was seriously reported or highlighted by the BBC or most other Western media. Just what, one wonders, does it take for Western journalists to stand in meaningful alliance with its 'fellow' reporters?
This is the normalising of death and destruction. Hell-on-earth images of bombing, of eviscerated people, of bodies literally flying through the air, seem to evoke little shocked reaction or credible counter-action from the regime’s Western political class and state media.
On 10 October 2024, a major UN report concluded that Israel’s systematic attack on hospitals and all other medical facilities in Gaza amounted to a crime of "extermination". Again, where was the big headline media coverage?
Gigantic atrocities have been happening in plain sight, with little effort to even acknowledge, let alone stop, them; an historic silence from the 'civilised order' to Israel's savage disorder.
Consider the horror fact, unacknowledged by the BBC, that Israel has murdered a child, on average, every 45 minutes. Just stop and think about that. In a powerful and poignant account, Al Jazeera charted the numbers and ranges of at least 17,000 children murdered, reflecting on their unrealised experiences, the pain of obliterated families, and how their place on this earth has been so wantonly denied.
Tuesday 18 March 2025 will also go down as a day of infamy, recording the greatest mass single killing of Palestinian children in history.
"On March 18, Israeli forces launched 100 simultaneous strikes across the Gaza Strip, shattering a two-month-old ceasefire with Hamas. Over the next 36 hours, 436 people were killed, including at least 183 children, 94 women, 34 elderly people, and 125 men."
By the following day, Israel’s killing of minors rose to over 200, the greatest ever slaying of children across one day by the regime.
Imagine the reaction if this was happening in a Western country. Consider the rightful shock when one child is murdered in the West. Yet, this vast killing of children has merited no such revulsion or appropriate action by 'our' governments and media. That indifference filters down, so normalised is the killing now, so conditioned are Western populations to Palestinians being treated as a distant 'other'. This is political and media-generated racism on a grand scale.
Meanwhile, the official overall death toll in Gaza has climbed inexorably higher:
"On February 3, the Government Media Office updated the death toll to more than 61,700, noting that thousands of Palestinians missing under the rubble were presumed dead."
As the UN’s Francesca Albanese has repeatedly stated, this genocidal assault on a population could not have happened without the support of our craven media, which makes it a specific party to the genocide.
In this way, notes Richard Sanders:
"the BBC continues to soften the most grotesque war crime for the Israelis."
From the directors of this establishment institution to the editors and journalists who transmit its power-serving output, the BBC stand damningly exposed for enabling the genocide.
Ceasefire breaking: the dismissal and undermining of international law
In January 2024, the International Court of Justice issued a ruling that Israel's military assault on Gaza constituted a "plausible" case of genocide. With that ruling came a set of "provisional measures" ordering Israel not to advance its military offensive.
Israel's disregard and violations of that ruling even before the January 2025 ceasefire are too voluminous to list. But in breaking that ceasefire, in clear violation of the ICJ's ruling, and contravention of the Genocide Convention, the regime had reached new levels of genocidal disregard for international law.
The deliberate wrecking of a ceasefire, in defiance of such provisional measures, is in itself a genocidal war crime. To kill all these people in breaking a ceasefire is a genocidal crime. To openly proclaim intent to carry out further elimination of a population in the process of breaking a ceasefire is a genocidal war crime. To order the repeated mass movement and forced displacement of a population in the course of breaking a ceasefire is a genocidal war crime.
Earlier this year, authors to the Sarajevo Declaration on Gaza Tribunal, a worldwide gathering of lawyers, human rights groups and activist others, laid out its damning indictment sheet, denouncing the conspiracy of Western silence to the Gaza emergency:
"The Gaza Tribunal was formally launched in London in November 2024 by a coalition of academics, intellectuals, human rights advocates and representatives from civil society organizations in response to what they described as “the total failure of the organized international community to implement international law” in Gaza."
In addition, on 22 October 2025, as noted by Craig Mokhiber, the ICJ issued another decisive ruling on Israel's failed obligations:
"The ICJ has just rejected all objections and (spurious) defenses and found that the Israeli regime is in violation of international law in its obstruction of aid, its attacks on UNRWA and other agencies, its mass murder of hundreds of UN staff, its violations of the rights of aid workers, civilians, and prisoners, its destruction of UN and other aid facilities, the use of starvation as a method of war, and that it must cease all such actions in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem."
Over 40 states and international bodies gave evidence against Israel in this case. And yet, for all these damning charges, the regime still shows blatant contempt for international law.
It is clear that Netanyahu is a monstrous war criminal, with warrants out for his and Defence Minister Gallant's arrests. How could this savage entity and its head executioner still be backed by the 'civilised West'?
Ceasefire wrecking: 1
It is also obvious that Netanyahu deliberately wrecked the ceasefire of January 2025 for his own political ends.
Phase one of the agreed ceasefire had come to its transitioning moment. All the agreed hostage/prisoner swaps had been concluded. The next phase involved the commencing of talks on the removal of troops from Gaza and further release of hostages/prisoners. Instead, facing an internal crisis in getting his budget passed and surviving in office, Netanyahu negated Phase 2 and resumed the bombing, cynically blaming Hamas for not releasing more hostages.
At no point was this wilful wrecking of the ceasefire decisively called-out by the US, EU, UK or any other of the regime's backers. Rightfully, Hamas had insisted on staying with the agreed ceasefire process.
Trump's green light and the West's effective nod to Netanyahu's resumption of the onslaught on Gaza allowed Netanyahu's fascist associates, Ben Givr and Smotrich, back into the government fold to assist with Netanyahu’s blood-soaked budget and deepening of the genocide. In effect, Netanyahu collapsed the ceasefire for his own nefarious ends, murdering thousands more Palestinians to do so, another mass genocidal war crime shamefully permitted by his Western allies.
Of course, the mass killing of children and women shouldn’t divert us from the horror of men being slaughtered. Nor is it actually appropriate to talk of ‘innocents’ - men, women or children - being killed. The occupying regime has no right to be dropping bombs and murdering any Palestinian.
In offering no opposition to genocidal war crimes is to be party to those genocidal war crimes, as evidenced by Starmer's and Lammy's continuing arming and political protection of the regime, alongside most of their European associates.
Again, the BBC's false framing of the genocide, omission of key context, and normalising of Israel's genocidal conduct is also a genocidal war crime. Here, Israel's deliberate wrecking of the ceasefire had been framed as a 'resumption of hostilities', as though the negotiations just irretrievably 'fell apart'. Likewise, the consequent mass murder of human beings was presented as 'resumed airstrikes'. And the bombing of hospitals continued to be soft-soaped, following Israel's own all too familiar narrative, as 'attacks on Hamas command posts'.
As Jonathan Cook has written on the unwarranted bombing of any hospital and any of its patients, the regime's standard claims of blowing up hospitals - and any other building - because of a 'Hamas presence' not only violates all international rules of war, the normalisation of such bombings by the media also reeks of outright racism.
Imagine, he says, any Israeli soldier being treated in a hospital in Israel. Would they be a legitimate target for attack? Consider the outrage in the West if that happened. The person murdered in this bombing of a Gaza hospital was actually a government official. But, for the regime, any Palestinian can simply be called 'Hamas' and eliminated.
We have witnessed the most cynical exercise in industrial killing and destruction imaginable, and this psychopathic leader and his regime face no censure from the 'civilised international order'.
Andrew Feinstein, veteran of the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, who lost large parts of his family in the Holocaust, now says that Israel’s genocide is precisely that: a psychotic holocaust of Palestinians.
Amongst the many admirable Jewish voices for Palestine, Holocaust survivor and eminent psychologist Dr Gabor Mate states:
"This ongoing daily cruelty, unspeakable cruelty, that we're witnessing in the face of media support and the political class in most of the Western world is just cheering it on. It's the darkest thing I've seen in my whole life."
The truth that dare not be told by the regime's Western protective class and media is that Israeli society at large - not just its leaders and military - is genocidally insane.
And, for Cook, Israel has provided the very blueprint for the fascistic turn across the West itself:
"These developments have not come out of the blue. They have been decades in the making.This should come as no surprise, because the main repository for the West’s fascist ideas since the Second World War has been hiding in plain sight: Israel. The West’s undisguised crackdown on the most fundamental of rights, such as political speech and academic freedom, is being carried out in the name of protecting Israel and those western Jews who cheerlead its crimes. Fascism is stepping out of the shadows in the US and Europe as Israel ostentatiously commits a genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza, armed and given diplomatic cover by its western patrons."
Trump's 'turn to peace'
The crime of genocide has two elements that must be proven: intention and execution:
"the petitioner has to be able to prove “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such,” in the language of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide."
The Genocide Convention states that alongside the actual wholesale killing in whole or part of a population, one of the conditions of proving that a genocide is taking place is the intent to carry out that mass killing of a population.
On 13 October 2025, the day Trump's 'peace deal' was signed, The National newspaper printed an entire catalogue of statements from senior Israeli figures proving their genocidal intent.
And while addressing the Knesset on the same day, Trump provided verbal confirmation of his own direct part in the genocide by boasting about the direct granting of Netanyahu’s request for weaponry.
In bringing their case to the International Court of Justice, South Africa provided a database, compiled by Law for Palestine, of 500 specific documents and statements showing the Israeli state's clear intention and incitement to commit genocide since October 7, 2023.
But it's also crucial to note that both the intent to conduct a genocide and execution of it could not have taken place without high levels of public support across Israeli society. A poll shows the disturbing extent of Israeli public support for the mass extermination of Palestinians.
The esteemed Jewish historian Ilan Pappe makes a vital point here about the Israeli educational process as the source of deep social and extremist conditioning:
"They got an education from a very indoctrinated country. And that’s the key. They were produced, if you want, engineered by the Israeli education system. I wrote an article in 1999 warning that, looking at the Israeli curricula, the next graduates of this system would be racist fanatics, extreme and dangerous to themselves and to others. Unfortunately, I was absolutely right."
For Pappe:
"This is the product of a very indoctrinated society from the cradle to the grave. You need to re-educate these people. You can’t just show them things and hope that this would move them. They can see dead Palestinian babies and say ‘Good, very good’. Dehumanisation is part of the Israeli DNA and it’s very hard to confront just by giving them more information."
The dark truth here is that Israeli society at large - not just its leaders and military - is of the very same genocidal mindset. There are a minority of Israelis, including army reservists, who bravely face authoritarian censure and social opprobrium for standing up against the genocide. But these are still few and marginalised voices.
Ceasefire wrecking: 2
Netanyahu's capacity for ruthless killing is matched only by the level of impunity he and his regime enjoy from his Western friends.
Within less than a day of the latest 'peace deal' being signed, Israel had killed 9 Gazans, injured 17 more, and halted aid again on the pretext that Hamas had not yet repatriated all the dead hostages, a task considered almost impossible by the Red Cross and international others.
In the first four days of the 'ceasefire', Israel killed 62 Palestinians. By 20 October, Israel had committed 80 clear violations and murdered 97 Palestinians. By the end of October, it had killed 226 people, including 97 children - nearly 40 per cent of all fatalities - and wounded a further 594.
All of this killing has been played out by the media as the "testing" of a "fragile ceasefire". Imagine the response if this had been multiple Palestinian violations and over 200 Israelis killed. Nor has the BBC been remotely ready to report the exposed claims made by Israel for its savage responses.
Likewise, the regime's cynical use of the remaining dead hostages to recommence the killing, almost from the outset of the 'ceasefire', could not have been more shamefully played down by the BBC. As Cook reminds us:
"Even if the sites can be identified and the rubble removed, Hamas may discover that the bodies no longer exist, that they have been vaporised, alongside Palestinian victims, by Israel’s bombs. And of course, there is a further likely problem: some of the bodies may be located in the more than half of Gaza Israel is still occupying and Hamas cannot access."
Meanwhile, the horrific condition of the returned bodies of abducted Palestinians merited no such international outcry or media attention. As Cook observed of that "gruesome and distressing task":
"Doctors noted that the returned bodies were still cuffed and blindfolded, executed with bullets to the head, and with clear signs that they had been tortured before and after their deaths."
Never has the regime shown any such immediacy in releasing the bodies of hundreds of Palestinians, held for years, preventing those families from properly grieving.
In yet another infamous image, Israeli Minister Ben Givr is seen standing over a line of face-down, hand-bound Palestinian prisoners, gloating over their torture and promising their imminent execution, a threat that has just been authorised by parliamentary approval.
In a further example of the regime's horror lust, Netanyahu expressed outrage over the leaking of video footage showing a Palestinian prisoner being tortured and raped, rather than denouncing the actual inhuman act. Likewise, the raping, torture and execution of Palestinians by Israeli soldiers appears to have considerable support across Israeli society.
Again, the plaintive question: why is 'our' and other Western governments supporting this abominable regime?
The great 'peace deal' deception
While much media attention has been on Trump's grotesque quest for self-glorification and the (eluded) Nobel Peace Prize, the same media have been busy peddling its own gross deception over the 'fragile ceasefire' and non-existent 'peace deal'. As Cook notes:
"Israel and the West’s rhetoric about "war" has been crucial in selling to western publics an equally dishonest rhetoric of a “ceasefire” and hopes for “peace”."
This, adds Cook, is "a familiar pattern":
"Israel killed at least 170 Palestinians during an earlier “ceasefire” negotiated by Trump, in January, which it then unilaterally ended weeks later so it could revive the genocide."
And, of course, Trump's supposed 'ceasefire' does nothing to address the key structural issues:
"The ceasefire may be a temporary lull in Israel’s genocidal, two-year assault on Gaza but it does nothing to cease Israel’s decade-long occupation of the Palestinian territories – the inciting cause of the “war”."
As the Occupation continues:
"It also does nothing to cease Israel’s system of apartheid rule over Palestinians, judged illegal by the world’s highest court last year. Then, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) demanded that Israel immediately withdraw from the occupied Palestinian territories, including Gaza, and that other states pressure it into such a withdrawal. The UN General Assembly gave Israel till last month to honour the ICJ’s ruling. Israel has not just ignored that deadline. Even during the current “ceasefire”, Israeli soldiers continue to be directly stationed in more than half of Gaza."
For Cook:
"None of this can, or should, be described as a war. The United Nations, every major human rights organisation in the world, including Israel’s B’tselem, and the world’s leading body of genocide scholars agree that what has happened in Gaza meets the definition of genocide - as laid out in the UN’s Genocide Convention, ratified by Israel, the US, Britain and the European Union."
It’s a measure of the ways in which the 'mainstream' political and media narrative is procured and disseminated - even as the literal dust settles, momentarily, over the deathly rubble of Gaza, with over 10,000 souls still beneath it - that this catastrophe and all those behind it can still be normalised.
Meanwhile, amid all this Trumpian talk of 'visionary reconstruction', the regime is still bombing and killing with total impunity. "The first ceasefire genocide in history."
Behind a concocted 'Yellow Line', its army and tanks still sit on 56% of Gaza. This isn't a 'cessation of war', a 'peace plan' or a 'peace process' led by 'peace-seeking' figures. It's a genocidal crime scene, still illegally occupied, and, with savage pogroms and ethnic cleansing across the West Bank, a land being prepared for total takeover.
The end times for Zionism
Nor is there any authentic peace movement inside the regime itself. As Cook reminds us:
"Large numbers of Israelis have taken to the streets to oppose Netanyahu’s actions in Gaza - but not, as polls show, because most care about the hundreds of thousands of dead and maimed Palestinians there."
Deep contradictions are now manifest inside this crisis-ridden, imploding society. It cannot endure. The 'ceasefire' and 'peace plan' narrative is actually a peace-denying diversion, a calculated deception. Those Israelis who have opposed Netanyahu's 'war' in the hope of bringing back their hostages show no interest in opposing the root problems behind it.
Nor do Israel's Western backers. There is no Western 'resolution' on the table. And herein lies the enduring issue and task. There can be no peace without removal of the primary and fundamental obstacle to it. As we mark two years now of this historic crime against humanity, the very highest of crimes, perpetrated by this savage regime, we must be equally concentrated on the continuing struggle for true justice and liberation, that which sees the ultimate ending of the real impediment to peace: Zionism.
As Cook correctly states, there is no meaningful distinction between 'competing' elements of Zionism, it is all essentially supremacist and fascistic:
"Israeli politics has ostentatiously divided itself between a so-called “liberal” faction and rightwing Zionism, as if there was some grand ideological struggle going on. But in truth, all Israeli politics is fascist in nature. Both wings of Zionism are premised on the notion that Israeli Jews - most of them recent immigrants - have superior rights over the Palestinian natives, and that any Palestinian who refuses to submit to permanent servitude should be punished. The debate within Zionism is not about whether this should happen. It is about where fine lines should be drawn. What is the extent of the territory in which Jews unquestionably enjoy superior rights, and how extreme should the punishments be for Palestinians who disobey? These arguments have largely reflected secular and religious splits within Israel, with parts of society prioritising western concerns about Israel’s reputation on the international stage."
For actual lasting peace to prevail, there can be no circumventing of this problem. There is no halfway resolve. There is no such thing as a 'two-state solution' in which one of those states continues as an apartheid state. There is no solution in which a genocidal state continues to exist.
Nor are purported 'variations' of Zionism of any help here. Indeed, there is no essential thing as 'liberal Zionism', a faux identifier serving only to mask the essential problem of Zionism. There is only Zionism, the gathering mutation of which, since '48, has seen the inevitable lurch towards apartheid, fascism and genocide. No less a figure than Albert Einstein made that very equation back then, in warning of its colonising, ultra-nationalist and fascistic tendencies, predicting the calamity that’s now come to pass.
Precisely nothing of real human existence, equality and peace can ever grow from this poisonous seed.
For Chris Hedges, this horrendous "last chapter of the genocide" has exposed every lie in the Zionist book:
"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 enter potentially bobby trapped tunnels and buildings ahead of Israeli troops. The lie that Hamas or Palestine Islamic Jihad (PIJ) 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 percent of the tens of thousands killed in Gaza were Hamas “terrorists.” The lie that Hamas, because it was allegedly rearming and recruiting new fighters, is responsible for the breakdown of the ceasefire agreement."
Ilan Pappe, giving due assessment as a scholar, rather than as an activist, believes that this genocidal phase of Zionism indicates its "death throes", the beginnings of its final demise:
"We are witnessing a historical process – or, more accurately, the beginnings of one – that is likely to culminate in the downfall of Zionism."
Despite much more genocidal horror to come from a regime in crisis, desperate to stem its terminal decline, the signs are now increasingly visible:
"Whether people welcome the idea or dread it, the collapse of Israel has become foreseeable. This possibility should inform the long-term conversation about the region’s future. It will be forced onto the agenda as people realize that the century-long attempt, led by Britain and then the US, to impose a Jewish state on an Arab country is slowly coming to an end. It was successful enough to create a society of millions of settlers, many of them now second- and third-generation. But their presence still depends, as it did when they arrived, on their ability to violently impose their will on millions of indigenous people, who have never given up their struggle for self-determination and freedom in their homeland. In the decades to come, the settlers will have to part with this approach and show their willingness to live as equal citizens in a liberated and decolonized Palestine."
The quest for one true, democratic and just resolution for all, in an authentic state of Palestine, goes defiantly on.
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