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by Jonah Valdez,
Long before this week’s deadly strikes, Israel failed to abide by the terms of its ceasefire deal with Hamas.
As families in Gaza slept early Tuesday morning, the Israeli military, with the support of the White House, bombarded the territory without warning, killing at least 404 Palestinians, including at least 174 children.
As horrifying images and accounts of maimed children and grieving mothers circulate online, media outlets in the U.S. spent the day trying to make sense of one of the most brutal single-day bombings of Israel’s war on Palestinians in Gaza.
Some explained Israel’s deadly airstrikes as a natural result of “fruitless negotiations” with Hamas, or as a bargaining tactic to “increase pressure on Hamas.” Other outlets simply repeated, without question or skepticism, Israeli and U.S. government claims that blame Hamas for the strikes.
“Hamas could have released hostages to extend the ceasefire but instead chose refusal and war,” White House National Security Council spokesperson Brian Hughes told reporters.
Crucially missing from such coverage, however, is the fact that leading up to Tuesday’s attacks, Israel had repeatedly violated terms of the ceasefire deal it agreed to in January. With support from the Trump administration, Israel refused to withdraw its soldiers from Gaza, as was required in the agreement. It continued its military operations and bombings, and it blocked humanitarian aid and electricity from entering the territory where more than 2 million Palestinians live, which amounts to violations of international humanitarian law.
“There hasn’t been a ceasefire as far as a stop to the violence against Palestinians from the moment that the ceasefire was announced to Tuesday when it was very clearly broken by the Israelis in escalating fashion,” said Yousef Munayyer, a senior fellow at the Arab Center Washington, D.C., who heads its Palestine/Israel Program.
“This is a constant pattern in the U.S. media where it’s almost as a matter of sacred belief that the Israelis can never be responsible for a breakdown of peace or negotiations.”
The first phase of the ceasefire, which took effect on January 19, included an exchange of Israeli hostages for Palestinian prisoners. But in that span, Israel continued military operations in Gaza, killing more than 150 Palestinians, including in a bombing that took the lives of journalists and aid workers. And at the start of the second phase on March 2, Israel continued to violate the agreement, refusing to withdraw its soldiers from the Philadelphi Corridor, a crucial crossing point between Gaza and Egypt. Instead, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu went back on the deal and presented Hamas with an alternate plan: the continued military occupation of the territory, the continued release of hostages, and setting aside talks toward a permanent ceasefire.
Hamas rejected the plan and in response, Israel blamed the group for talks crumbling and retaliated by blocking the flow of humanitarian aid — food and fuel — from entering Gaza. Days later, it cut the territory’s electricity. The blockades, likely war crimes, have strained hospitals’ ability to care for the sick and wounded, prompted concerns of food shortages, and cut off the water supply for thousands.
All the Times Israel Has Rejected Peace With Palestinians
“This is a constant pattern in the U.S. media where it’s almost as a matter of sacred belief that the Israelis can never be responsible for a breakdown of peace or negotiations,” Munayyer said. “It’s just something that the American media just seems incapable of comprehending, and so when you have situations like this, you end up with all these kinds of absurd headlines like, ‘Israeli bombardment of Gaza throws ceasefire into jeopardy’ — as if we’re not all watching the same reality.”
The United Nations and human rights groups have condemned Israel’s recent strikes on Gaza, as well as its ongoing blockade of the territory. Amnesty International said the blockade violates humanitarian law and “is further evidence of Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip.”
Amanda Klasing, national director of government relations and advocacy at Amnesty International USA, said her organization called for the end to both the taking of hostages and blockages of humanitarian assistance. But she also laid blame on the United States for its unceasing policy of arming Israel and for normalizing the use of atrocities as bargaining chips. Earlier this month, the Trump administration approved a new weapons deal with Israel worth about $3 billion in arms, including more than 35,500 MK-84 and BLU-117 bombs, also known as 2,000-pound bombs. Klasing said her organization plans to investigate whether U.S.-supplied arms were used in Tuesday’s bombings.
“Regardless of whether or not there’s a ceasefire in place, Hamas should be releasing hostages, full stop. Regardless of whether or not there’s a ceasefire in place, or hostages are released, Israel should not be blocking humanitarian assistance or implementing anything that is collective punishment, full stop,” Klasing said. “That message has been kind of lost, and it’s a real risk to civilians everywhere that there’s been this erosion and norms around those two things.”
For its part, the U.S. has also launched its own bombing campaign in Yemen in recent days, retaliating against Houthi rebels who have vowed to attack Israeli ships along its coast in response to Israel’s blockade on Gaza. U.S. strikes in Yemen have killed 53 people, including five children.
As U.S. media continues to spread Netanyahu’s and Trump’s line that such bombings are an inevitable result of bad-faith actors refusing to release hostages, Munayyer credited most Israeli media coverage for being more critical toward Netanyahu’s latest aggressions.
Their framing lays more responsibility on Netanyahu’s refusal to carry out phase two of the ceasefire agreement, which would have brought the remaining hostages home. The coverage, Munayyer said, casts Netanyahu as paranoid about holding onto power.
Families of the remaining hostages called the bombings a “decision to sacrifice the 59 captives” left in Gaza. Netanyahu has also faced backlash after firing top Israeli officials, including the head of Shin Bet, an intelligence agency that recently released a report blaming the Israeli government, including Netayahu, for failing to heed warnings of the October 7 attacks. The agency also is investigating the government’s ties with Qatar. Netanyahu is also on trial for corruption charges. Furthermore, Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition is under pressure to pass a budget by March 31. If it fails to meet the deadline, the Knesset, Israel’s legislature, would dissolve and new elections would be called, jeopardizing Netanyahu’s grip on power.
“It was no surprise to me that in this heightened moment of domestic political crisis, he chose to do the one thing that he always goes back to, which is the mass killing of Palestinians,” Munayyer said. The attacks on Tuesday already won favor of one key right-wing ally, former national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who said he would rejoin the government after he quit when the ceasefire deal was reached.
Munayyer said that if the political climate stabilizes, the Israeli government might be willing to continue negotiations, but until then he fears it will continue to escalate attacks on Gaza as a way to win further support from the U.S.
He hoped that pressure within Israel would continue. Large swaths of the Israeli public who see the return of hostages as a priority recognize that military aggression in Gaza has only brought death and destruction, while diplomacy has been effective in their safe return.
“The contrast between these two things was very clear to the Israeli public,” Munayyer said. “Only when the bombing stopped, only when an agreement was signed, only when prisoners were released, did Israeli hostages come back from Gaza. And so the contrast could not be clearer about which one of these two methods actually works, if your goal is a release of the captives, and which one does not.”
Source: https://theintercept.com
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