Israel Continues Genocide Despite “Ceasefire”

Tehran (Qodsna-) Gaza ceasefire breaks down and the regime has violated the deal more than 130 times. The United States expressed its support for the Zionist regime's ongoing genocidal war against the Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip.

The Zionist regime has repeatedly proven that it has not adhered to any of its commitments and has always violated the ceasefire. It has also violated the Lebanese ceasefire many times.

The Zionist regime, which has the unconditional and comprehensive support of the United States, continues to violate the ceasefire and attacks again without any international trial or consideration of public opinion.

Qods News Agency (qodsna) interviewed with Kevin Barrett, Islamic scholar and former American academic. 

The interview comes as follows:

Qodsna: What is your opinion about the violation of the ceasefire by the Zionist regime and how do you assess its future? Will it be sustainable?

Kevin Barrett: Ignoring the fake ceasefire and with the implicit approval of US President Trump, Israel continued its accelerated genocide of Palestine on Wednesday, killing more than 100 people in Gaza, 46 of them children. Trump’s unwillingness to force Israel to comply with the ceasefire suggests that it is not a real ceasefire at all, but a public relations exercise designed to help Netanyahu politically by getting Israeli captives returned.

Israel’s latest massacre of civilians followed on the heels of more than 130 “ceasefire violations” during the first three weeks of the truce. A ceasefire that is violated on the average of six times every day is no ceasefire at all.

The October 29 massacre was even worse than the October 19 one, during which the Zionists killed 44 Palestinians and dropped 153 tons of bombs on Gaza. The pretext then was Netanyahu’s claim that Hamas had killed two Israeli soldiers. But even Western media and the American government admitted that was a lie. The soldiers were killed when their bulldozer, which was illegally demolishing buildings in Rafah, hit unexploded Israeli ordnance and blew up.

Netanyahu likewise tried to justify his October 29 slaughter of over 100 civilians by once again claiming that Hamas had shot and killed an Israeli soldier. That was almost certainly another lie.

If an Israeli soldier was in fact shot, it was probably a false flag by the Israelis, who are desperate to concoct excuses to resume their full-scale genocide. A shooting by someone outside of Hamas command and control is also a possibility.

While continuing to mass murder Palestinian civilians under cover of a fake ceasefire, the Zionists are also refusing honor their ceasefire obligation to stop starving Palestinian children to death. The ceasefire deal required Israel to allow 600 aid trucks a day into Gaza—the bare minimum to sustain a famine-stricken population. But during the first ten days, instead of the required 6,000 trucks, only about 500 were allowed to enter. So despite the promises, Israel’s genocidal starvation of helpless women and children has hardly even slowed down.

Qodsna: Will Israel resume its war in Gaza and Lebanon on a large scale?

Kevin Barrett: If regional countries including Turkey, Egypt, and Saudia Arabia fail to pressure the US into forcing Israel to abide by its ceasefire obligations, Israel will likely resume its full-scale attacks against Gaza and Lebanon. The Zionist leadership, especially Netanyahu, wants to return to all-out genocidal expansionism. Netanyahu knows that his cabinet partners Smotrich and Ben-Gvir will bring down his government if the ceasefire holds. Should that happen, the Israeli Prime Minister will likely spend the rest of his life in prison. So he will do almost anything to make sure the ceasefire, and Trump’s so-called peace plan, fails.

Trump presumably wants the ceasefire to hold, and the peace plan to succeed, or at least not fail too spectacularly. His ego is invested in his image as a peacemaker, and since his peace efforts with Russia are failing, he will look very bad if the Israelis thumb their noses at him and resume their all-out genocide.

The realists in the US foreign policy establishment would also like to rein in Israel, in service to preserving US influence in the region. That is why Egypt, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia need to make it clear to the US that ending the genocide of Gaza, and curtailing Israeli expansionism elsewhere, is an existential issue. These puppet leaders will eventually be killed, and their governments overthrown, if they are seen as complicit in ongoing genocide. They need to pre-empt that sorry fate by reading the US the riot act. Turkey should threaten to leave NATO, and all three countries should threaten to curtail relations with the US in favor of allying with Russia and China, if the Zionist war criminals keep committing genocide with US support. So the extremely dubious future of the American-sponsored so-called peace plan, including the ceasefire that Israel is largely ignoring, depends most of all on the actions of regional countries.

People in and around those countries need to pressure their leaders by holding figurative and perhaps even literal guns to their heads, making it clear to them that they personally, as well as their regimes, will not survive if they fail to summon up the courage to stand against US-sponsored Zionist genocide.