Israel’s extensive and blatant flouting of international agreements and law presage a world where the law is whatever the most militarily advanced countries say it is.
See No Evil Hear No Evil Speak No Evil — by Mr. Fish.
By Chris Hedges
ScheerPost
CN at 30
First, it was Israel’s right to defend itself.
Then it was a war, even though, by Israel’s own military intelligence database, 83 percent of the casualties were civilians.
The 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza, living under an Israeli air, land and sea blockade, have no army, air force, no mechanized units, no tanks, no navy, no missiles, no heavy artillery, no fleets of killer drones, no sophisticated tracking systems to map all movements, or an ally like the United States, which has given Israel at least $21.7 billion in military aid since Oct. 7, 2023.
Now, it is a “ceasefire.”
Except of course, as usual, Israel only abided by the first of the 20 stipulations. It freed around 2,000 Palestinian captives held in Israeli prisons — 1,700 of whom were detained after Oct. 7 — as well as around 300 bodies of Palestinians, in exchange for the return of the 20 remaining Israeli captives.
Israel has violated every other condition. It has tossed the agreement — brokered by the Trump administration without Palestinian participation — into the bonfire with all the other agreements and peace accords concerning Palestinians.
Israel’s extensive and blatant flouting of international agreements and international law — Israel and its allies refuse to abide by three sets of legally binding orders by the International Cout of Justice (ICJ) and two ICJ advisory opinions, as well as the Genocide Convention and international humanitarian law — presage a world where the law is whatever the most militarily advanced countries say it is.
The sham peace plan — “President Donald J. Trump’s Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict” — in an act of stunning betrayal of the Palestinian people, was endorsed by most of the U.N. Security Council in November, with China and Russia abstaining. Member states washed their hands of Gaza and turned their backs on the genocide.
The adoption of resolution 2803 (2025), as the Middle East scholar Norman Finkelstein writes,
“… was simultaneously a revelation of moral insolvency and a declaration of war against Gaza. By proclaiming international law null and void, the Security Council proclaimed itself null and void. Vis-à-vis Gaza, the Council transmuted into a criminal conspiracy.”
Members of the U.N. Security Council on Nov. 17 voting in favor of resolution 2803 (2025) establishing “an international force to restore order in Gaza, protect civilians and open the way for large-scale aid and rebuilding,” (UN Photo/Loey Felipe)
The next phase is supposed to see Hamas surrender its weapons and Israel withdraw from Gaza. But these two steps will never happen.
Hamas — along with other Palestinian factions — reject the Security Council resolution. They say they will disarm only when the occupation ends and a Palestinian state is created. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed that if Hamas does not disarm, it will be done “the hard way.”
The “Board of Peace,” headed by Trump, will ostensibly govern Gaza along with armed mercenaries from the Israel-allied International Stabilization Force, although no country seems anxious to commit their troops.
Trump promises a Gaza Riviera that will function as a “special economic zone” — a territory operating outside of state law governed entirely by private investors, such as the Peter Thiel-backed charter city in Honduras.
This will be achieved through the “voluntary” relocation of Palestinians — with those fortunate enough to own land offered digital tokens in exchange.
Trump declares that the U.S. “will take over the Gaza Strip” and “own it.” It is a return to the rule of viceroys — though apparently not the odious Tony Blair. Palestinians, in one of the most laughable points in the plan, will be “deradicalized” by their new colonial masters.
But these fantasies will never come to fruition. Israel knows what it wants to do in Gaza and it knows no nation will intercede. Palestinians will struggle to survive in primitive and dehumanizing conditions. They will, as they have so many times in the past, be betrayed.
Trump, on right, at the White House on Feb. 4 announcing his plan for the U.S. to take over Gaza, with Netanyahu looking on. (The White House, Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)
Israel has committed 738 violations of the ceasefire agreement between Oct. 10 and Dec. 12, including 358 land and air bombardments, the killing of at least 383 Palestinians and the injuring of 1,002 others, according to the Government Media Office in Gaza and the Palestinian Health Ministry. That’s an average of six Palestinians killed daily in Gaza — down from an average of 250 a day before the “ceasefire.”
Israel said it killed a senior Hamas commander, Raed Saad, on Saturday, in a missile strike on a car on Gaza’s coastal road. Three others were also apparently killed in the strike.
The genocide is not over. Yes, the pace has slowed. But the intent remains unchanged. It is slow motion killing. The daily numbers of dead and wounded — with increasing numbers falling sick and dying from the cold and rain — are not in the hundreds but the dozens.
December saw an average of 140 aid trucks allowed into Gaza each day — instead of the promised 600 — to keep Palestinians on the edge of famine and ensure widespread malnutrition. In October, some 9,300 children in Gaza under 5 were diagnosed with severe acute malnutrition, according to UNICEF.
Israel has opened the border crossing into Egypt at Rafah, but only for Palestinians leaving Gaza. It is not open for those who want to return to Gaza, as stipulated in the agreement.
Israel has seized some 58 percent of Gaza and is steadily moving its demarcation line — known as “the yellow line” — to expand its occupation. Palestinians who cross this arbitrary line — which constantly shifts and is poorly marked when it is marked at all — are shot dead or blown up — even if they are children.
Protest in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 4 during Netanyahu’s visit to meet with Trump. (Diane Krauthamer, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Palestinians are being crammed into a shrinking, fetid, overcrowded concentration camp until they can be deported. Ninety-two percent of Gaza’s residential buildings have been damaged or destroyed and around 81 percent of all structures are damaged, according to U.N. estimates.
The Strip, only 25 miles long and seven-and-a-half miles wide, has been reduced to 61 million tons of rubble, including 9 million tons of hazardous waste that includes asbestos, industrial waste and heavy metals, in addition to unexploded ordnance and an estimated 10,000 decaying corpses.
There is almost no clean water, electricity or sewage treatment.
Israel blocks shipments of construction supplies, including cement and steel, shelter materials, water infrastructure and fuel, so nothing can be rebuilt.
Eighty-two percent of Israeli Jews support the ethnic cleansing of the entire population of Gaza and 47 percent support killing all civilians in cities captured by the Israeli military. Fifty-nine percent support doing the same to Palestinian citizens of Israel.
Seventy-nine percent of Israeli Jews say they are “not so troubled” or “not troubled at all” by reports of famine and suffering among the population in Gaza, according to a survey conducted in July.
The words “Erase Gaza” appeared more than 18,000 times in Hebrew-language Facebook posts in 2024 alone, according to a new report on hate speech and incitement against Palestinians.
The newest form of genocidal celebration in Israel — where social media and news channels routinely chortle over the suffering of Palestinians — is the sprouting of golden nooses on the lapels of members of the far-right political party Otzma Yehudit, Israel’s version of the Ku Klux Klan, including one worn by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.
They are pushing a bill through the Knesset which seeks to mandate the death penalty for Palestinians who “intentionally or indifferently causes the death of an Israeli citizen,” if they are said to be motivated by “racism or hostility toward a public,” and with the purpose of harming the Israeli state or “the rebirth of the Jewish people in its land,” the Israeli human rights group Adalah explains.
More than 100 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli jails since Oct. 7. If the new bill becomes law — it has been cleared through its first reading — it will join the wave of more than 30 anti-Palestinian laws enacted since Oct. 7.
The message the genocide sends to the rest of the world, more than a billion of whom live on less than a dollar a day, is unequivocable: We have everything and if you try and take it away from us, we will kill you.
This is the new world order. It will look like Gaza. Concentration camps. Starvation. Obliteration of infrastructure and civil society. Mass killing. Wholesale surveillance. Executions.
Torture, including the beatings, electrocutions, waterboarding, rape, public humiliation, deprivation of food and denial of medical care routinely used on Palestinians in Israeli prisons.
Epidemics. Disease. Mass graves where corpses are bulldozed into unmarked pits and where bodies, as in Gaza, are dug up and torn apart by packs of ravenous wild dogs.
We are not destined for the Shangri-La sold to a gullible public by fatuous academics such as Stephen Pinker. We are destined for extinction. Not only individual extinction — which our consumer society furiously attempts to hide by peddling the fantasy of eternal youth — but wholesale extinction as temperatures rise to make the globe uninhabitable. If you think the human species will respond rationally to the ecocide, you are woefully out of touch with human nature. You need to study Gaza. And history.
If you live in the Global North, you will get to peer out at the horror, but slowly this horror, as the climate breaks down, will migrate home, turning most of us into Palestinians. Given our complicity in the genocide, it is what we deserve.
Empires, when they feel threatened, always embrace the instrument of genocide. Ask the victims of the Spanish conquistadors. Ask Native Americans. Ask the Herero and Nama. Ask the Armenians. Ask the survivors of Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Ask the Indians who survived the Bengal famine or the Kikuyu who rose against their British colonizers in Kenya. Climate refugees will get their turn.
This is not the end of the nightmare. It is the beginning.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and NPR. He is the host of show The Chris Hedges Report.
This article is from Scheerpost.
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Helpful to add that Peter Thiel is CEO of Palantir
Technologies a pro-Israel high tech industry and
the main financial backer of President Trump’s VP Vance.
Glad to hear your powerful Christian prophetism,
sounds like “the beast is exercising its authority”
(Rev.13.5).
If you, your family, your children, your friends happened to stand in the way of whatever the Jewish supremacists wanted, you all would have been jailed, tortured, starved, shot in the genitals, and massacred exactly as the Palestinians have been. Never forget that. The Jewish supremacists are superior and view you and yours as essentially livestock and farm animals.
Indeed, with the help of quislings, Zionist crimes against humanity could definitely be impending directly on your circle just as I described.
I have been saying the same since the genocide began because my long day journey into night has revealed to me the evil intent, tho, I must admit, it took a long time for me to see Israel coming, since it was hidden, and only focused on what CIA was doing for corporations in other countries.
I always questioned why USA enjoyed such a luxurious lifestyle and others around the world were so poor. I know why. It influenced me to actually choose poverty, according to US standards, but still I am more rich, without vacations, salon visits, new cloths and most basic, albeit organic foods because I grow my own on land I do not own. I sat in my bed for 7 months after Oct 7, researching the why and developed bedsores. I could not understand why, after the defeat of Hitler, Western nations were supporting a genocide by Jews against Palestinians. I learned so much and bought so many books and I see behind the curtain the omnicidal class, as I like to call them, and how they operate. Mossad motto is so right on: “By Way Of Deception” and too many Americans have been deceived and propagandized and I see no way out against all this money and control. But they and their money are few and we are minions. Plus their weakness is they are counting on tech to corral and control.
It’s quite simple: Minions need to refuse the tech they are building. We must be willing to die for this republic but its hard to want to since it too based itself on colonialism/imperialism and used such European warped thinking in settling North America. All our peace makers were assassinated. Witness the 1960s and the promise and hope we were robbed of in one decade. They are still being assassinated/murdered. Witness Rob Reiner, the recent murder of an MIT professor, Tesla, the man, and others who have studied free energy, which the people who charge us for oil energy do not want us to have and don’t not want to save the world for us, but only themselves. We don’t seem to understand how deep and far the omnicidal class will go to make sure there is no peace on earth and that earth is destroyed or that we are destroyed and then and only then will they roll out their secretive control of free energy for the benefit of the Omincidal Class. I do not live under fear of the Samson Option, nor nuclear war. Why? Because if we can’t change the world’s trajectory under the Omnicidal Class, we are all doomed as the majority, Perhaps the only way to kill the evil is for all to perish. I’d rather the omnicidal class perish; those who kill the hope of the future and all life on earth should perish first, but they won’t. What is requires to stop their stupid and horribly directed wealth is for world wide minions to say “Give me liberty or give me death.” They can’t do it without the internet and technology.
Thankyou Paula. Very well stated. I too, live very frugally. But my life has been enriched by visiting many countries and seeing new cultures and learning new languages.