Israeli truce to ‘improve’ killing op
A wounded girl receives treatment in the emergency room of
the Shifa hospital in Gaza City. (Photo: Khalil Hamra/AP)
The Israeli regime is cynically using “humanitarian ceasefires” as a way of luring Palestinian civilians into further killing zones with the diabolical aim of “improving” its genocidal operation, which has been dubbed with the Orwellian name “Protective Edge.”
On Friday morning, the Tel Aviv administration of Benjamin Netanyahu had declared a 72-hour truce. But the so-called cessation of Israeli violence was no reprieve for the death-trapped Palestinian population. Far from it.
In the next hours more than 40 Palestinians were slaughtered when Israeli tanks and soldiers started firing on the Rafah Crossing on the Gaza border with Egypt.
In another location, near Khan Younis in southern Gaza, a whole village was flattened by Israeli tanks, also on Friday. The number of dead is not yet known but media reports described the “stench of death everywhere.” In other words, a day of supposed “peace” was just another day of killing, wounding and destruction by Israeli forces.
The term “humanitarian ceasefire” is yet another Orwellian misnomer that means the opposite in reality. As noted in an earlier column, the Israeli forces are using these periods for reloading and refueling their killing machine - with fresh supplies from American government arms depots in the region. This is the third time that the Israeli regime has declared a truce since it began pounding the Gaza Strip on July 8.
Why bother calling these meaningless ceasefires? Partly, it is a bid by the criminal Israeli regime to deflect mounting international outrage over the obscene spectacle of innocent civilians being mass murdered. The slaughter of children while asleep in United Nations’ shelters has even prompted Israel’s sponsor in Washington this week to issue words of unusual rebuke (while also reloading the Israeli tanks and guns.) Partly, as noted above, these seeming pauses in Israeli state terrorism are also a logistical means of re-grouping and replenishing military forces.
But what is now becoming clear too, is that the Israelis are using the cover of “ceasefires” as a way to increase the pernicious efficiency of killing the Palestinian population. When a “humanitarian ceasefire” is called, obviously the 1.7 million Gaza population - at least 25 per cent of whom have been made homeless over the past three weeks - desperately grasp the chance to find meager food and water rations, or to find their missing loved ones, rush to hospitals, or try to flee to what they consider a safer location. As people circulate under a false sense of relative security, the Israeli killing machine finds more targets to eliminate. The killing of more than 40 people at the Rafah Crossing on Friday was nothing more than a gratuitous slaying of desperate civilians trying to find a safer refuge.
Earlier this week, the same murderous ploy was seen at Shujayea market when 15 people were killed by Israeli artillery. It was on the same day, Wednesday, that the UN school at Jabaliya was hit by Israeli tanks killing 20 civilians, including many children.
The Israelis that day had called a “humanitarian truce” and people reportedly ventured out to Shujayea market to eke out whatever basic supplies they could find. After the first Israeli shell struck the marketplace, an ambulance arrived to tend the injured. Within seconds, as graphic video footage shows, two more shells slammed into the street, killing and wounding many more, including the rescue workers.
As soon as Israeli ceasefires are called in Gaza, it is noticed that a temporary lull is accompanied by increased drone flights in the sky above the 40-kilometre-long coastal enclave. It can be safely surmised that these drones are relaying pictures of population movements. From the rubble of artillery-stricken buildings incurred over previous days, families will emerge to seek a safer shelter and basics of food and water at markets. That’s when the Israeli killing machine can then strike again with nefarious success.
For let’s be clear, when Netanyahu and his regime talk about “wiping out the Palestinian resistance” that purpose is not limited to militant groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad. The Palestinian resistance is the Palestinian people. The Zionist machine will never stop its murdering process while there are Palestinian people still alive on this earth. So while America, Egypt and other Arab states scurry from capital to capital issuing portentous words about “trying to implement a ceasefire” such diplomacy should be dismissed with contempt.
Washington and its Arab satraps are not honest brokers in the slightest. They are indulging a terrorist Israeli regime to give itself a diplomatic cover to continue its brutality, an opportunity to reload, and a means by which to target Palestinian people more efficiently. The US and pseudo Arab leaders are complicit in Israeli genocide. The whole notion of these protagonists implementing a ceasefire or mediating for Palestinians interests needs to be obliterated for the pathetic charade that it is.
There will be no genuine ceasefire leading to lasting peace in the land of Palestine until the American, European and Arab-backed Israeli regime is finally terminated and dismantled. This has nothing to do with killing Israeli civilians. It is simply a matter of recognising and understanding that the Zionist regime is an artificial and illegitimate state that has been unjustly imposed on the people of Palestine for the past 66 years. That historical crime, and its ongoing criminal, genocidal occupation, must be stopped. Peace cannot exist without justice.
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Finian Cunningham, originally from Belfast, Ireland, was born in 1963. He is a prominent expert in international affairs. The author and media commentator was expelled from Bahrain in June 2011 for his critical journalism in which he highlighted human rights violations by the Western-backed regime. He is a Master’s graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in journalism. He is also a musician and songwriter. For many years, he worked as an editor and writer in the mainstream news media, including The Mirror, Irish Times and Independent. He is now based in East Africa where he is writing a book on Bahrain and the Arab Spring. He co-hosts a weekly current affairs programme, Sunday at 3pm GMT on Bandung Radio.
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Source: PressTV. URL: http://www.a-w-i-p.com/index.php/2014/08/10/israeli-truce-to-improve-killing
