Spurred on by Trump’s green light and arms shipments Netanyahu harnesses genocide to stay in power
“This is the end. What we are witnessing dwarfs all the historical assaults on Palestinians. Israel’s demented genocidal dream — a Palestinian nightmare — is about to be achieved. It will forever shatter the myth that we, or any Western nation, respect the rule of law or are the protectors of human rights, democracy and the so-called “virtues” of Western civilization. Israel’s barbarity is our own.”
In a chilling, powerful March 23rd essay former New York Times Middle East Bureau Chief Chris Hedges outlined the stakes for Palestinians, who “are being forced to choose between death or deportation.” The number of slaughtered Palestinians has now soared above 50,000, with more than 400 killed by airstrikes - almost 200 of them children - and 500 injured on the single day of March 18, when Netanyahu proclaimedthat “from now on, Israel will act against Hamas with increasing intensity. Negotiations will take place only under fire. This is just the beginning.” Israel appears to be, in Gideon Levy’s words, “killing for the sake of killing.” Hanin Majadli writing in Haaretz called the killing of 200 children on March 18 “the largest child massacre” in Israel’s history. Over 17,000 children had been eradicated before the war resumed, thousands under the age of five. See the list of their names here.
On March 19, Israeli forces launched a ground invasion of the Gaza Strip, after depriving it since March 2 of humanitarian aid, including food, fuel, water, electricity and medical supplies. Once again, food is disappearing from the markets as Israel weaponizes starvation. Once again, the army has taken control of the Netzarim Corridor cutting off the north of Gaza from the south, and is issuing mass displacement orders, forcing 142,000 people to flee from the ruins of their homes and tented encampments by March 25. By this time the number of those killed since March 18 had reached 800. It is now approaching one thousand.
Partially functioning hospitals are, once again, overwhelmed. On March 21, Gaza’s only specialized cancer hospital, which was badly damaged in previous Israeli attacks, and the medical school adjacent to it were demolished by ferocious ground explosives. A few hours after two American doctors, Dr. Feroze Sidhwa and Dr. Mark Perlmutter, gave an interview on CNN, Nasser Hospital where they were working in southern Gaza was bombed. A 16-year-old patient that Dr. Sidhwa had operated on was among the five people who were killed. UN workers are again being targeted. This time the world body said it will be removing about a third of its international staff after a March 19 tank blast on a UN compound in central Gaza killed a UN staffer and wounded five others. More than 280 UN staff members have been killed in Gaza since Oct 7, 2023, and eight aid workers have died in a single week since Israel resumed its war, bringing the total to 399 according to OCHA. The army has fired on ambulances trying to reach the wounded in Rafah, causing many to bleed to death. It claimed they were “suspicious vehicles.”
Journalists are once again being executed. In a final message which was made public after he was killed on March 24 in northern Gaza, 23-year-old Hossam Shabat, a reporter for Al Jazeera and Drop Site News, wrote that “I fulfilled my duty as a journalist. I risked everything to report the truth, and now, I am finally at rest—something I haven’t known in the past 18 months. I did all this because I believe in the Palestinian cause. I believe this land is ours, and it has been the highest honor of my life to die defending it and serving its people.” Shabat’s editor Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Drop Site’s Jeremy Scahill have called Shabat’s killing a targeted assassination, saying that the journalist had been placed on an army death list last December. Palestine Today journalist Mohammed Mansour was also killed on March 24 as Israel shrouds its military offensive with news and power blackouts, bringing the number of journalists killed during the war to at least 208. See the Gaza Project, which documents Israel’s war on journalists.
The day after Shabat and Mansour were killed, hundreds of exhausted and hungry residents in northern Gaza called for Hamas to leave and the war to be brought to an end. One participant said the demonstration began out of a "sense of despair, due to their inability to endure the continuation of the war." The Guardian reported on March 29 that Hamas seems to have accepted an Egyptian-Qatari proposal that it free five hostages in return for a 50-day ceasefire. Israel says it has made a counteroffer.
In polls conducted in February 2025, nearly three quarters of Israelis wanted to move into Phase II of the ‘temporary ceasefire’ during which the remaining hostages would be released and the war brought to an end. Only 28 percent wanted the fighting to start again. Why did Netanyahu resume the slaughter at a time when the public was so tired of war that half the army reservists were failing to report for duty? The Prime Minister, his bloodthirsty Defense Minister Israel Katz and US Interim UN Ambassador Dorothy Shea at the Security Council tried to blame Hamas for the collapse of the ceasefire after it refused to accept a so-called ‘extension’ of Phase I during which the rest of the hostages would be released. The lies spun by Israel to justify the renewed war have been debunked by numerous political commentators and in an editorial inHaaretz.
For Netanyahu, resuming a genocidal war is a small price to pay for self-preservation and a delay in his corruption trial. On March 18, Itamar Ben-Gvir, who had quit Netanyahu’s cabinet to protest the ceasefire agreement and threatened to remove his far right ‘Jewish Power’ party from the coalition and bring down the government if it moved on to Phase II, re-entered the cabinet as National Security Minister. The return of Ben-Gvir strengthened Netanyahu in his attempt to fire the head of Shin Bet who is investigating the government’s role leading up to the October 7th attack and enabled the passage of the annual budget on March 25, preventing the collapse of Netanyahu’s rule. While the budget was being debated, protestors outside the Knesset demanded that the government make a deal to end the war and immediately bring the hostages home.
In addition to the Kahanist Ben-Gvir, Netanyahu now has a new ultra right Kahanist Chief of Staff, Eyal Zamil, who is determined to make conditions so desperately unlivable in Gaza that those who survive will ‘voluntarily’ leave. The far right turn Israel has taken was on shocking display during the Diaspora Affairs Ministry’s International Conference on Combatting Antisemitism held on March 26-27. It was attended by the leaders of far right European parties, while many organizations, including the Anti-Defamation League whose head Jonathan Greenblatt had been slated to speak, cancelled their participation. “Only people whose political roots are tainted by antisemitism are true friends of the new Israel,” wrote Carolina Landsmann in Haaretz, a newspaper that the Diaspora Affairs Minister denounced in his opening remarks at the conference as “antisemitic” and a “source of delegitimization and demonization of the State of Israel.”
The far right has made the takeover of the West Bank a priority. The Jordan Valley and northern refugee camps like Jenin Camp which is now “uninhabitable” are being emptied of Palestinians, settlements are rapidly expanding, and more than 80 Palestinian water wells have been destroyed and at least 60 Palestinian communities have been displaced since Oct. 7, 2023. This in depth CNN piece shows how settler ‘herding outposts’ have swallowed up at least 14 percent of the West Bank despite being illegal under Israeli law. Israel has reportedly seized more West Bank land in 2024 than in the previous twenty years combined. The outright annexation of Palestinian territory seems likely to be supported by the Christian Zionist Mike Huckabee, who acknowledged his support for annexation during his March 25th confirmation hearing to be US Ambassador to Israel.
Only rarely does the western media pay attention to the unchecked settler violence that has terrorized Palestinians and forced many off their land. But that media silence was broken when Hamdan Ballal, one of the four directors of the Oscar-winning documentary ‘No Other Land,’ was beaten by armed settlers accompanied by soldiers as he attempted to guard his home in Susya in Masafer Yatta from a settler attack. A bleeding Ballal was detained by the army and held bound outdoors overnight in freezing temperatures during which time he said he was “blindfolded while soldiers placed different objects on his head and mocked him, saying: ‘This is the Oscar-winning filmmaker.’”
“When the banality of evil becomes normalized, it grows unchecked.” UN Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese spoke these words in an interview published on March 22 in which she talked about the death threats and repression she experienced during a February speaking tour in Germany where she was labeled an anti-semite and some of her talks were cancelled.
As in Germany, in the US ‘antisemitism’ is being mobilized to silence criticism of Israel, undermine constitutional freedoms, and cripple institutions. As leading universities – see here and here – seek to ingratiate themselves with pro Israel/MAGA forces, foreign students are bearing the brunt of the onslaught on the so-called ‘Hamas Support Network’ outlined in the Heritage Foundation’s ‘Project Esther: A National Strategy to Combat Antisemitism.’ According to Axios, all campuses that have foreign students could be investigated and the State Department is considering preventing universities that do not stamp out pro Palestinian protests from having any foreign students. More than 300 foreign students have had their visas revoked, many on grounds that they are ‘pro Hamas’ and function as Hamas’ ‘propaganda arm.’ On March 18, ten days after being seized by DHS agents outside his residence and sent to a Louisiana detention center, Columbia graduate and green card holder Mahmoud Khalil managed to dictate this letter over the phone. On March 25, Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts University Ph.D. student, was abducted by six masked men from the street outside her Somerville residence and also sent to Louisiana. Despite the fact that Ozturk, a Turkish national studying child development, does not appear to have been involved in pro-Palestinian organizing, she – like Khalil – has been determined by Secretary of State Rubio to have engaged in activities with “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences” and has had her F-1 visa revoked. She came to the attention of Canary Mission when she, along with three others, wrote this articlefor the student paper in March 2024. Her ‘kidnapping’ has been denounced in large protests. Among other pro-Palestinian students facing deportation are Momodou Taal from Cornell and an unnamed student from the University of Minnesota.
Meanwhile, Trump is planning to give Israel an additional $8.8 billion arms package – including 35,000 massive 2,000 pound bombs - which Senator Bernie Sanders is attempting to stop. In addition to being used to annihilate the population of the tiny Gaza Strip, where Israel must surely be running out of targets to bomb, US arms shipments will enable Israel to sustain its ongoing attacks on both Syria and Lebanon, even as Israel joins the US in repeatedly bombing Yemen. While media attention has been focused on the Signal chat planning military strikes on Yemen to which Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic was inadvertently invited, relatively little has been said about how making war on a foreign country without Congressional approval violates US domestic law and the UN Charter. With Massachusetts taxpayers subsidizing military aid to Israel last year to the tune of $612,252,169 – that’s well over half a billion dollars - government contracts with the arms industry appear to have nothing to fear from Musk’s ‘cost-slashing’ chainsaw.
Nancy Murray, Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine
