Israel Shatters the Gaza Ceasefire

The president owns the war in Gaza, and he is the one enabling the genocide now.

The Israeli government was already deliberately starving the population of Gaza with their blockade, and now they have resumed intense bombing:

Israel’s military launched a large-scale bombing campaign on the Gaza Strip early Tuesday, breaking the fragile ceasefire with Hamas that has been in place since late January. At least 404 people have been killed, with 562 injured, Gaza’s Health Ministry said.

The Trump administration was in a position to prevent this, but they have done everything they could to undermine the ceasefire and ensure that it collapsed. The Netanyahu government was never going to end the war in the absence of significant pressure from Washington, and there has been no pressure from Washington in recent weeks. Trump repeatedly signaled that he would back whatever Netanyahu wanted to do, and he and Rubio kept the weapons flowing.

Trump’s unhinged, genocidal threat against the people of Gaza confirmed that he couldn’t care less what Israel did to them. The president reportedly “green-lit” the resumption of the war this week. The president fully owns the war in Gaza, and he is the one enabling the genocide now.

There will probably be lots of attempts to spin Israel’s wrecking of the ceasefire, so we need to understand that this is something that Netanyahu and his allies chose to do. They were not forced into doing it. Amos Harel writes in Haaretz:

There's no other way to explain it: Israel knowingly violated the cease-fire agreement with Hamas – with American approval – because it didn't want to fully meet the terms it had committed to two months ago.

Trump was never likely to apply the pressure required to make the Israeli government honor its commitments. Instead he talked about seizing Gaza and expelling the population. Just like Biden, he refused to use the considerable leverage that the U.S. has to bring an end to the war. Just as he has done with the other wars he has inherited, he chose escalation.

The full resumption of the war is a catastrophe for the people of Gaza. They were already suffering intensely under Israel’s cutoff of food at the start of the month and then the cutoff of electricity and water last week. The genocide in Gaza continues with the full backing of our government.

Israel’s renewed bombing also puts the remaining hostages in greater peril, as there is now little chance that they will be released for the foreseeable future. Some of the hostages released during the first phase of the ceasefire have condemned the new bombing. If the Israeli government were truly interested in getting the remaining hostages back, they would not be resuming the war.

Netanyahu did this because prolonging the war is essential for his continued political survival. Resuming the war has already brought one of his far-right allies back into the government. His government will kill many more Palestinians with bombs and starvation so that he can cling to power for as long as possible. As long as he and his allies are in power, there will likely be no permanent end to the war.