https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/israel-will-keep-killing-palestinians-ceasefire-or-no-unless-it-faces-consequences

“NOTHING is going to jeopardise” the ceasefire in Gaza, says US President Donald Trump.

Western politicians’ language when addressing the Israel-Palestine “conflict” — a conflict provoked entirely by Israel’s illegal and murderous occupation and colonisation of Palestinian land — regularly upends reality, but here Trump takes the biscuit.

Of course “nothing will jeopardise” a ceasefire if you can claim it is holding while one side kills 104 people, including 46 children, in overnight air raids.

In fact Israel has repeatedly violated the ceasefire since it took effect on October 10, both by direct attacks on Palestinians (Tuesday night’s raids bring the number killed by Israeli action in Gaza since the fighting has officially stopped to 211) and by allowing access only to a fraction of the promised humanitarian assistance.

It has refused to reopen the Rafah crossing (itself a violation) and continues to severely restrict the number of aid lorries, though the people of Gaza face famine as a result of its blockade, and a chronic shortage of medicines and medical equipment — when not only are hundreds of thousands seriously injured, but disease is spreading at what the World Health Organisation calls a “catastrophic” rate because of the destruction of health and sanitation infrastructure.

Israel’s continued restrictions on bringing machinery into Gaza are also partly responsible for the violations it blames on Hamas, since the Palestinian group points out that retrieving the bodies of deceased hostages from beneath the rubble of buildings or tunnels destroyed by Israeli bombs is a slow and complicated process.

It is this issue which prompted Israel’s resumption of bombing in a blitz rivalling the most murderous nights of its two-year invasion. Forensic analysts say human remains handed over by Hamas did not come from one of 13 hostages whose bodies are still to be returned, but from one whose body was retrieved by the Israeli military nearly two years ago.

Whether Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would have reacted quite so explosively if announcing a national emergency hadn’t conveniently cut short a hearing in his own ongoing corruption trial, we don’t know. But his decision to treat Hamas’s return, whether wittingly or not, of the wrong person’s remains as an outrageous breach of the truce has cost 104 people their lives.

As UN special rapporteur Dr Francesca Albanese puts it, Israel’s approach to a ceasefire is “you cease, I fire.”

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Continues at https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/israel-will-keep-killing-palestinians-ceasefire-or-no-unless-it-faces-consequences