GHF dismantles Gaza sites where thousands of Palestinian aid seekers killed

Starving Palestinians were attacked by Israeli troops and US mercenaries on a daily basis as they were trying to receive aid

News Desk

OCT 10, 2025

https://thecradle.co/articles/ghf-dismantles-gaza-sites-where-thousands-of-palestinian-aid-seekers-killed

The US-Israeli Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) has begun to dismantle after killing thousands of Palestinians in the past months during a failed mission worth tens of millions. 

GHF began “dismantling their sites in the Netzarim Corridor in Gaza,” eyewitnesses told Quds News Network (QNN) on 9 October. 

Video footage circulating on social media showed bulldozers working near one of the GHF sites in Gaza. 

The news comes as a ceasefire deal has gone into effect, ending the two-year Israeli genocide against Palestinians, which unfolded after Operation Al-Aqsa Flood in October 2023. 

As part of the 20-point Trump plan announced last month, GHF’s mission will come to an end, and the UN and other international aid organizations will resume humanitarian aid deliveries across the strip. 

Around 3,000 Palestinians have been killed since GHF was established in May in an effort to bypass the UN, which, along with other organizations, refused to take part in the plan for ethical reasons. 

GHF failed to deliver adequate amounts of aid to starving Palestinians. For months, aid seekers were shot dead by Israeli troops on a near-daily basis as they approached the sites, which were run by US security contractors under extremely unorganized conditions. 

The US mercenaries also contributed to the violence, according to multiple testimonies from anonymous contractors. 

Washington provided $30 million in direct funding for the deadly aid scheme, which was frequently referred to as a “death trap.” GHF said it received a $100-million commitment from an unnamed foreign government donor. Reports from earlier this year also claimed Israel allocated about $280 million to GHF.

As the ceasefire took effect, thousands of Palestinians returned to their homes in different parts of Gaza, witnessing unprecedented destruction caused by Israel. 

The Israeli army has withdrawn from the strip’s population centers ahead of a prisoner exchange expected in the next 72 hours. 

Many of the ceasefire agreement’s details remain unclear, as Hamas has rejected Israel’s term that it must disarm. 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has threatened to resume the war if his demands are not met. 

It is the West, not Gaza, that needs to be deradicalized

Jonathan Cook

8 October 2025

https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/gaza-genocide-two-years-west-deradicalised-never-happens-again

Anniversaries are often a cause for celebration. But who could have imagined back in October 2023 that we would now be marking the two-year anniversary of a genocide, documented in the minutest detail on our phones every day for 24 months? A genocide that could have been stopped at any point, had the US and its allies made the call.

This is an anniversary so shameful that no one in power wants it remembered. Rather, they are actively encouraging us to forget the genocide is happening, even at its very height. Israel’s relentless crimes against the people of Gaza barely register in our news any longer.

There is a horrifying lesson here, one that applies equally to Israel and its western patrons. A genocide takes place - and is permitted to take place - only when a profound sickness has entered the collective soul of the perpetrators. 

For the past 80 years, western societies have grappled with - or, at least, thought they did - the roots of that sickness. 

They wondered how a Holocaust could have taken place in their midst, in a Germany that was central to the modern, supposedly “civilised”, western world.

They imagined - or pretended to - that their wickedness had been extirpated, their guilt cleansed, through the sponsorship of a “Jewish state”. That state, violently established in 1948 in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, served as a European protectorate on the ruins of the Palestinian people’s homeland.

The Middle East, let us note, just happened to be a region that the West was desperate to keep controlling, despite growing Arab demands to end more than a century of brutal western colonialism. Why? Because the region had recently emerged as the world’s oil spigot.

Tragedy, then farce

Israel’s very purpose - enshrined in the ideology of Zionism, or Jewish supremacism in the Middle East - was to act as a proxy for western colonialism. It was a client state planted there to keep order on the West’s behalf, while the West pretended to withdraw from the region.

This big picture - the one western politicians and media refuse to acknowledge - has been the context for events there ever since, including Israel’s current, genocidal endgame in Gaza.

Two years in, what should have been obvious from the start is becoming ever-harder to ignore: the genocide had nothing to do with Hamas’s one-day attack on Israel on 7 October 2023. The genocide was never about “self-defence”. It was preordained by the ideological imperatives of Zionism.

Hamas’s break-out from Gaza - a prison camp into which Palestinians had been herded decades earlier, after their expulsion from their homeland - provided the pretext. It all too readily unleashed demons long lurking in the soul of the Israeli body politic.

And more importantly, it released similar demons - though better concealed - in the western ruling class, as well as parts of their societies heavily conditioned to believe that the interests of the ruling class coincide with their own. 

Two years into the genocide, the West is still deep in its self-generated bubble of denial about what is going on in Gaza - and its role in it. 

“History repeats itself,” as the saying goes, “first as tragedy, then as farce.”

The same could be said of “peace processes”. Thirty years ago, the West force-fed Palestinians the Oslo Accords with the promise of eventual statehood. 

Oslo was the tragedy. It led to an ideological rupture in the Palestinian national movement; to a deepening geographic split between an imprisoned population in the occupied West Bank and an even more harshly imprisoned population in Gaza; to Israel’s increasing use of new technologies to confine, surveil and oppress both sets of Palestinians; and finally, to Hamas’s brief break-out from the Gaza prison camp, and Israel’s genocidal “response”.

Now, US President Donald Trump’s 20-point “peace plan” offers the farce: unapologetic gangsterism masquerading as a “solution” to the Gaza genocide. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair - a war criminal who, alongside his US counterpart George W Bush, destroyed Iraq more than two decades ago - will issue diktats to the people of Gaza on Israel’s behalf. 

Surrender document

Gaza, not just Hamas, faces an ultimatum: “Take the deal, or we will put you in concrete boots and sink you in the Mediterranean.” 

Barely veiled by the threat is the likelihood that, even if Hamas feels compelled to sign up to this surrender document, Gaza’s people will end up in concrete boots all the same. 

 

Gaza’s population is so desperate for a respite from the slaughter that it will accept almost anything. But it is pure delusion for the rest of us to believe a state that has spent two years carrying out a genocide can be trusted either to respect a ceasefire or to honour the terms of a peace plan, even one so heavily skewed in its favour.   

The farce of Trump’s peace plan - his “deal of the millennium” - is evident from the first of its 20 points: “Gaza will be a deradicalised terror-free zone that does not pose a threat to its neighbours.” 

The document’s authors no more wonder what might have “radicalised” Gaza than western capitals did when Hamas, which is proscribed as a terrorist group in the UK and other countries, broke out of the prison enclave with great violence on 7 October 2023.

Were the people of Gaza simply born radical, or did events turn them radical? Were they “radicalised” when Israel ethnically cleansed them from their original lands, in what is now the self-declared “Jewish state” of Israel, and dumped them in the tiny holding pen of Gaza? 

Were they “radicalised” by being surveilled and oppressed in a dystopian, open-air prison, decade upon decade? Was it the experience of living for 17 years under an Israeli land, sea and air blockade that denied them the right to travel or trade, and forced their children on to a diet that left them malnourished?

Or maybe they were radicalised by the silence from Israel’s western patrons, who supplied the weaponry and lapped up the rewards: the latest confinement technologies, field-tested by Israel on the people of Gaza.

The truth ignored in the opening point of Trump’s “peace plan” is that it is entirely normal to be “radicalised” when you live in an extreme situation. And there are no places on the planet more extreme than Gaza.

'Cockroaches' and 'snakes'

It is not Gaza that needs “deradicalising”. It is the West and its Israeli client state. 

The case for deradicalising Israel should hardly need stating. Poll after poll has shown Israelis are not just in favour of the annihilation their state is carrying out in Gaza; they believe their government needs to be even more aggressive, even more genocidal.

This past May, as Palestinian babies were shrivelling into dry husks from Israel’s blockade on food and aid, 64 percent of Israelis said they believed “there are no innocents” in Gaza, a place where around half of the population of two million people are children. 

The figure would be even higher were it reporting only the views of Israeli Jews. The survey included the fifth of the Israeli population who are Palestinians - survivors of mass expulsions in 1948 during Israel’s western-sponsored creation. This much-oppressed minority has been utterly ignored throughout these past two years.

Another survey conducted earlier this year found that 82 percent of Israeli Jews favoured the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza. More than half, 56 percent, also supported the forced expulsion of Palestinian citizens of Israel - even though that minority has kept its head bowed throughout the genocide, for fear of reaping a whirlwind should it speak up. 

In addition, 47 percent of Israeli Jews approved of killing all the inhabitants of Gaza, even its children.

The crimes overseen by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is so often held up by outsiders as some kind of aberration, are entirely representative of wider public sentiment in Israel. 

The genocidal fervour in Israeli society is an open secret. Soldiers flood social media platforms with videos celebrating their war crimes. Teenage Israelis make funny videos on TikTok endorsing the starvation of babies in Gaza. Israeli state TV broadcasts a child choir evangelising for Gaza’s annihilation. 

Such views are not simply a response to the horrors that unfolded inside Israel on 7 October 2023. As polls have consistently shown, deep-seated racism towards Palestinians is decades old. 

It is not former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant who started the trend of calling Gaza’s Palestinians “human animals”. Politicians and religious leaders have been depicting them as “cockroaches”, “dogs”, “snakes” and “donkeys” since Israel’s creation. It is this long process of dehumanisation that made the genocide possible.

In response to the outpouring of support in Israel for the extermination in Gaza, Orly Noy, a veteran Israeli journalist and activist, reached a painful conclusion last month on the +972 website: “What we are witnessing is the final stage in the nazification of Israeli society.”

And she noted that this problem derives from an ideology with a reach far beyond Israel itself: “The Gaza holocaust was made possible by the embrace of the ethno-supremacist logic inherent to Zionism. Therefore it must be said clearly: Zionism, in all its forms, cannot be cleansed of the stain of this crime. It must be brought to an end.”

Who needs deradicalising? 

As the genocide has unfolded week after week, month after month - ever-more divorced from any link to 7 October 2023 - and western leaders have carried on justifying their inaction, a much deeper realisation is dawning. 

This is not just about a demon unleashed among Israelis. It is about a demon in the soul of the West. It is us - the power bloc that established Israel, arms Israel, funds Israel, indulges Israel, excuses Israel - that really needs deradicalising. 

Germany underwent a process of “denazification” following the end of the Second World War - a process, it is now clear from the German state’s feverish repression of any public opposition to the genocide in Gaza, that was never completed.

A far deeper campaign of deradicalisation than the one Nazi Germany was subjected to, is now required in the West - one where normalising the murder of tens of thousands of children, live-streamed to our phones, can never be allowed to happen again. 

A deradicalisation that would make it impossible to conceive of our own citizens travelling to Israel to help take part in the Gaza genocide, and then be welcomed back to their home countries with open arms. 

A deradicalisation that would mean our governments could not contemplate silently abandoning their own citizens - citizens who joined an aid flotilla to try to break Israel’s illegal starvation-siege of Gaza - to the goons of Israel’s fascist police minister. 

A deradicalisation that would make it inconceivable for British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, or other western leaders, to host Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, who at the outset of the slaughter in Gaza offered the central rationale for the genocide, arguing that no one there - not even its one million children - were innocent. 

A deradicalisation that would make it self-evident to western governments that they must uphold the World Court’s ruling last year, not ignore it: that Israel must be forced to immediately end its decades-long illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories, and that they must carry out the arrest of Netanyahu on suspicion of crimes against humanity, as specified by the International Criminal Court. 

A deradicalisation that would make it preposterous for Shabana Mahmood, Britain’s home secretary, to call demonstrations against a two-year genocide “fundamentally un-British” - or to propose ending the long-held right to protest, but only when the injustice is so glaring, the crime so unconscionable, that it leads people to repeatedly protest. 

Standing together

Mahmood justifies this near-death-knell erosion of the right to protest on the grounds that regular protests have a “cumulative impact”. She is right. They do: by exposing as a sham our government’s claim to stand for human rights, and to represent anything more than naked, might-is-right politics. 

A deradicalisation is long overdue - and not just to halt the West’s crimes against the people of Gaza and the wider Middle East region. 

Already, as our leaders normalise their crimes abroad, they are normalising related crimes at home. The first signs are in the designation of opposition to genocide as “hate”, and of practical efforts to stop the genocide as “terrorism”. 

The intensifying campaign of demonisation will grow, as will the crackdown on fundamental and long-cherished rights. 

Israel has declared war on the Palestinian people. And our leaders are slowly declaring war on us, whether it be those protesting the Gaza genocide, or those opposed to a consumption-driven West’s genocide of the planet. 

We are being isolated, smeared and threatened. Now is the time to stand together before it is too late. Now is the time to find your voice.

‘Arm yourself’: Israeli right decries Gaza deal as Smotrich says war not over

Israeli settler leaders urge Netanyahu to attack Gaza again as soon as the captives are freed

By Nadav Rapaport in Tel Aviv, Israel

Published date: 9 October 2025

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/arm-yourself-israeli-right-decries-gaza-deal-smotrich-says-war-not-over

Though the Gaza ceasefire deal has prompted celebrations in Israel in anticipation that the remaining captives will soon be released, discontent is rumbling among the powerful Israeli right wing, with Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich insisting the war is not over.

The Israeli religious right, most prominently represented by Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, have for two years pushed for a total takeover of the Gaza Strip, including illegal Jewish settlement there, and fought against previous ceasefire deals.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet will vote on the first phase of the ceasefire plan - where 48 captives will be released in exchange for 2,000 Palestinian detainees and Israeli troops will partially withdraw - later on Thursday.

So far, Ben Gvir has yet to comment on the deal. Smotrich, meanwhile, posted a statement on X saying he will not vote for the agreement but nonetheless taking credit for it seeing all living captives - estimated to be 20 - being released at once and immediately.

He said there was a “tremendous responsibility to ensure that this is not, God forbid, a deal of ‘hostages in exchange for stopping the war,’ as Hamas thinks”.

“The State of Israel will continue to strive with all its might for the true eradication of Hamas and the genuine disarmament of Gaza, so that it no longer poses a threat to Israel,” he added.

The reaction among the two ministers’ supporters has been even more forceful.

Far-right WhatsApp and Telegram groups, where religious Zionist activists mobilise, lamented that Palestinian prisoners would be freed as part of the deal.

"A lot of joy mixed with a lot of sadness, the hostages are returning, but what about all the terrorists who will be released?" the admin of one group posted.

“We will not allow terrorists with blood on their hands to roam freely under our noses," he said, adding that activists will block the vehicles transporting Palestinians out of Israeli prisons.

'A resounding failure'

Settlement Minister Orit Strook, who belongs to Smotrich’s Religious Zionism party, called the ceasefire deal “Oslo 3”, associating it with the Oslo Accords of the 1990s, which right-wing Israelis see as a capitulation to the Palestinians.

Strook told Israeli news site Ynet that the agreement symbolises "giving up parts of the Land of Israel, because Gaza is part of the Land of Israel, and I am disappointed that Netanyahu did not explain it to Trump".

According to Strook, the cabinet set clear parameters for any ceasefire deal, which are “completely contrary” to parts of this agreement. "This completely turns back on the goals of the war," she added.

Limor Son Har Melech, an MP from Ben Gvir’s Jewish Power party, wrote an article for Channel 7 criticising the plan to free Palestinian prisoners – many of whom are women and children from Gaza detained without charge.

"A deal in which even a single Hamas supporter remains alive is a resounding failure," Son Hr Melech wrote.

Powerful far-right influencers are also lashing out at the plan.

Ayelet Lash, a prominent settler leader, wrote on X that she hopes that Netanyahu will order the army to begin attacking Gaza again immediately after the captives are released.

"But if Netanyahu signs this humiliating, dangerous, and crazy surrender deal and intends to stick to it, rebuild Gaza and give the Nazis there a complete victory, he must go home," she said.

Similar criticism was voiced by Elisha Yered, one of the most prominent members of the Hilltop Youth, the paramilitary settler group that systematically attack Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.

Yered said Hamas has succeeded in releasing prisoners, cancelling Israel's achievements in the Gaza Strip and bringing "the State of Israel to its knees after two years of castrated and handcuffed fighting".

"The bottom line is that Hamas is portrayed as a winner in the eyes of our enemies around the world," he said.

Cartoonist Or Reichert, meanwhile, has suggested the Israeli left wing, which has prioritised a deal to free the captives over continuing the war, is responsible for the agreement.

He posted a cartoon showing the yellow ribbon, which for two years has been a symbol for the captives taken on 7 October 2023, portrayed as a noose.

"Every retarded Arab will try to kidnap a Jew, because there is really no price. The only price is expulsion, occupation and settlement. Pray that we come to our senses. Arm yourself," Reichert wrote.

What kind of future does Gaza face, if Israel ends its war on it?

Palestinians in Gaza will have to wrestle with the enduring trauma of genocide.

By Mat Nashed and Maram Humaid

Published On 8 Oct 2025

https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2025/10/8/what-kind-of-future-does-gaza-face-if-israel-ends-its-war-on-it

Under the buzzing of Israeli drones and warplanes, Jihan Abu Mandeel watched her five young children play with toy animals in their tiny, makeshift tent in Deir Balah, Gaza. It was a brief moment of childhood amid Israel’s ongoing genocide in the besieged enclave.

United Nations experts and the International Association of Genocide Scholars have recognised the genocide, saying Israel has obliterated almost every source of life in Gaza, damaging or destroying 90 percent of buildings by razing hospitals, universities and entire neighbourhoods.

Israel has killed at least 67,160 people and injured 169,000. Thousands of corpses remain uncounted, buried under the rubble along with the hopes and dreams of the living and the dead.

“I just want the bloodshed to end,” Abu Mandeel, 41, told Al Jazeera, holding the youngest of her four boys on her lap.

Rebuilding a future

Civilians in Gaza are clinging to hope that a lasting truce is within reach as Hamas and Israel meet for indirect talks in Cairo, Egypt, to discuss a ceasefire proposal by United States President Donald Trump.

Israel has upended countless mediation efforts over the last two years, but Trump appears to be exerting greater pressure this time.

Yet, even if a sustainable ceasefire is reached, Palestinians in Gaza face the daunting task of rebuilding their homeland and communities.

The UN estimates that Gaza will require more than $50bn for reconstruction and that rebuilding the Strip to make it livable again could take at least 15 years.

This is assuming that Israel’s illegal siege does not pose major impediments to reconstruction, as it has after much briefer wars it waged on Gaza, according to a 2017 policy paper by the Brookings Institution.

Azmi Keshawi, an expert on and from Gaza currently based in Doha with the International Crisis Group, explained that any post-war scenario requires regional and international pressure on Israel to allow the entry of construction materials.

“Palestinians are capable of doing the utmost in order to regain their lives,” Keshawi told Al Jazeera.

“But simply having the will to rebuild is not enough… It doesn’t just depend on them,” he said.

Gangs and factionism

While rebuilding is essential for the future of Gaza, there are also fears that the enclave will descend into lawlessness and conflict if Hamas gives up power, which is a clause in the Trump plan.

“One of the advantages of having Hamas [govern] Gaza is that they enforce security,” explained Yaser al-Banna, a journalist still reporting from Gaza.

Throughout the genocide, Israel has deliberately killed Gaza’s security forces and propped up notorious gangs who have stolen the little aid allowed into Gaza to resell it for maximum profit.

While the gangs are a problem now, Keshawi does not think they will last if Israel leaves Gaza, believing that Palestinian society will sideline these elements that most people see as traitors.

However, factional conflict –  notably between Fatah and Hamas – could be a problem, he warns.

Fatah controls the internationally recognised Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank, while Hamas retains control of Gaza despite being heavily degraded from fighting Israel.

In 2006, tensions erupted between Fatah and Hamas shortly after the latter won an election to head the PA, an entity born out of the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords between then Palestinian and Israeli leaders.

The result stunned the US and European countries, which had designated Hamas as a “terrorist group” for refusing to recognise Israel or renounce armed resistance to end the occupation.

The US responded by backing Fatah to topple Hamas, leading to a brief civil war. By June 2007, Hamas had expelled Fatah from Gaza, solidifying a split in the Palestinian national movement.

The return of some exiled Fatah officials, backed by regional states and possibly Israel, could lead to score-settling against Hamas and its allies, said Keshawi.

“If Israel allows some of these people to return to Gaza … then they could go after people that supported Hamas,” he told Al Jazeera.

Forever trauma

Those forced to stay in Gaza will have to wrestle with the internal trauma brought on by the devastating genocide. Few, if any, had a moment to process everything they’ve lost  – family, friends, homes and a future – in Israel’s relentless onslaught.

In a survey conducted in 2022, before the genocide began on October 7, 2023, Save the Children found that four out of five children in Gaza reported living with depression, grief and fear.

The collective trauma inflicted on Palestinians from Gaza due to the genocide is unlike anything studied or seen in recent years, according to Doctors Without Borders, known by its French initials MSF.

Last year, an MSF psychiatrist, Ahmad Mahmoud al-Salem, treated children from Gaza at a clinic in Amman, Jordan.

He discovered that most suffered from vivid nightmares, depression and insomnia.

What Gaza’s children are experiencing now is unfathomable, Derek Summerfield, an honorary senior lecturer at London’s Institute of Psychiatry, told Al Jazeera.

He pointed out that there are at least 17,000 unaccompanied children in Gaza and that it’s unclear if they will ever experience a safe and stable environment.

“The future of these children doesn’t depend on their ability to overcome trauma because their trauma isn’t over,” he told Al Jazeera.

“It depends on what happens to the society around them. But their entire society is destroyed, and that’s why this is a genocide.”

Abu Mandeel just wants to provide her children with a semblance of a future, like all parents in Gaza.

Her school-age children have already missed two years of formal education due to the genocide, but the geography teacher says she is trying to give them some basic lessons so they don’t fall too far behind.

“I just want their future to be better than ours,” she said. “The constant killing makes me so afraid for my children.

“Honestly, I hope that I can get my children out of Gaza one day,” Abu Mandeel told Al Jazeera.

The US Spent Over $31 Billion Aiding Israel in the Past Two Years

The US has sent Israel over $21 billion in military aid and spent around $10 billion on wars defending Israel since October 7, 2023.

by Kyle Anzalone | October 7, 2025

https://news.antiwar.com/2025/10/07/the-us-spent-over-31-billion-aiding-israel-in-the-past-two-years/

The Cost of War Project at Brown University calculated that total US military support to Israel over the past two years has cost US taxpayers over $30 billion. Israel has received over $21 billion in military aid from the US and Washington has bombed Iran and Yemen for Tel Aviv. 

According to the study, the US has provided Israel with tens of thousands of bombs and other weaponry following the Hamas attack in southern Israel two years ago. The American arms have fueled Israel’s genocide in Gaza. 

The mass killing in Gaza with US weapons has pushed a growing number of Americans to oppose military aid and weapon sales to Israel. However, the growing opposition to the special relationship Washington has with Tel Aviv did not lead President Joe Biden or Donald Trump to curtail the flow of arms to Israel. 

Additionally, Israel’s aggression in the Middle East has drawn the US into other wars. Both Biden and Trump engaged in large-scale bombing operations in Yemen in an effort to force Ansar Allah to end its blockade of the Red Sea and stop attacking Israel. 

Ansar Allah enacted the policy in support of Gaza, and says the blockade and attack will end once Israel halts its genocidal onslaught in the Strip. While the bombing cost the US billions of dollars, it failed to force Ansar Allah to end the blockade. 

President Trump also joined Tel Aviv’s aggressive war against Iran and intercepted missiles targeting Israel. Overall, the US has spent between $10 and $13 billion helping Israel wage wars across the Middle East over the past two years. 

The author of the Cost of War study, William Hartung, notes that it only calculates the weapons that have been delivered to Israel and does not include weapons that the US has promised to deliver to Israel in the future. 

Last month, the White House approved a $6 billion arms sale to Israel that will be paid for with US military aid. Washington has promised to provide Israel with at least $3.8 billion in annual military assistance. After Israel started the onslaught in Gaza, the US approved an additional, $14 billion in military aid for Israel. 

 

Trump’s plan for Gaza rewards Israel’s genocide and punishes its victims

Joseph Massad

7 October 2025

https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/trumps-plan-rewards-genocide-punishes-victims

Two years on, complicit governments back a US plan to safeguard Jewish supremacy and mute global outrage, while Israel revives Nazi torture methods to force Palestinian surrender.

A few days ago, on the eve of the second anniversary of Israel's genocide in Gaza, the Trump administration issued its latest ultimatum to the Palestinian people, framed as a "peace plan". 

It threatens Palestinians with more genocide unless they acquiesce in the US-Israeli project to continue to destroy their lives and homeland. 

The Palestinian Authority (PA), along with European, Arab and Muslim-majority states such as Turkey, Pakistan and Indonesia - and even the United Nations and the Vatican's American pope - joined the chorus of support for this genocidal American threat, which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, its ostensible co-author, agreed to under the guise of an Israeli "compromise".  

Evidently, this international consensus on supporting, or at least accepting, Israel's right to be and remain a Jewish supremacist state agrees that Israel's genocide of the Palestinians is not only justified as a means of safeguarding Israel's Jewish supremacy but also deserves to be rewarded. 

US President Donald Trump and the governments backing his latest plan to complete the genocide demand that the Palestinian resistance surrender to the genocidal state, sparing the Israeli military the arduous effort and cost of continuing the slaughter and the expulsion of survivors. 

The Arab League, under US orders, had already called last July for the Palestinian resistance to disarm and leave Gaza. 

Unsurprisingly, it is the victims of genocide who must surrender their few weapons, while the war criminals slaughtering them must continue to be armed to the teeth by the US and Europe - with the notable recent exception of Spain.

Divide and re-educate

For Israel's defenders, disarming the victims of genocide is not enough. The editors of The New York Times not only support Trump's genocidal threats but also insist that the Palestinian victims be sent to re-education camps to learn how to love their oppressors and accept their fate without the right to resist those who seek their annihilation. 

To this end, The Times editors have endorsed a proposal prepared by the US government-founded Wilson Center, co-authored by a retired Israeli colonel and none other than retired American Lieutenant-General Keith Dayton.

This is the same Dayton who served as the US security coordinator for the PA from December 2005 to October 2010, and oversaw the training of its thuggish militias and the coup they staged against the democratically elected Hamas in 2007. 

Before coming to the West Bank, Dayton was busy fighting America's war against the Iraqi people in 2003. Today, his war against the Palestinian people continues unabated, as he strives to ensure that only unelected thugs govern them.

As "experts at the Wilson Center in Washington have argued", the editors of The Times tell us, the Trump plan's proposed billionaires who would run post-genocide Gaza "should create a program in schools, the media and elsewhere 'to remove Hamas's pervasive radicalizing influence over Gazan society'". 

Echoing Netanyahu's speech at the UN, the editors assure their readers that there are precedents for such re-education: "Deradicalization programs succeeded in Germany and Japan after World War II." 

Both the authors of the report and The Times editors are certain, however, that there is no need to re-educate Israeli society not to commit genocide.

In addition to forcing Palestinian victims into re-education camps, the Trump plan seeks to further splinter the people by separating the survivors of the genocide in Gaza from the rest of the Palestinians.

Whereas the first chapter of the Oslo Accords in 1993 required the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) to submit to Israel's will and surrender the vast majority of the internationally recognised rights of the Palestinian people, this latest chapter of the Oslo saga seeks the final separation of "Gazans" from the West Bank.

It follows the Oslo strategy of dividing the Palestinians within the 1967 territories from those Israel expelled in 1948, who live in exile, and those inside Israel. For its part, Israel - later joined by Trump during his first term - isolated the Palestinians of East Jerusalem from the rest. 

Meanwhile, the Netanyahu government is pressing ahead with plans to annex the West Bank, or at least 60 percent of it, encompassed by the so-called Area C outlined in the Oslo Accords. 

The first step of this annexation would be to execute the Israeli E1 settlement project, which stipulates that Israel take over 36 percent of Area C.

Trump's pledge not to permit annexation is belied by his endorsement during his first term of Israel's illegal annexation of East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights and characterisation of its illegal West Bank settlements as "not inconsistent with international law".

Blame reversal

Trump's plan was preceded by Netanyahu's speech to a nearly deserted UN General Assembly, in which he pledged to destroy Israel's "savage enemies". 

Netanyahu lauded the genocide, which has killed and injured upwards of a quarter of a million Palestinians to date, as the work of "the brave men and women of the [Israeli military]". 

Paving the way for Trump's post-genocide Gaza plan, Netanyahu deployed a familiar blame-reversal tactic, likening Palestinians to Nazis and insisting they be excluded from any role in Gaza's future.

He proclaimed: "Just imagine, for those who say Hamas has to stay, it has to be part of a post-war Gaza - imagine, in a post-war situation after World War II, allowing the defeated Nazis in 1945 to rebuild Germany? It's inconceivable. It's ridiculous. It didn't happen then, and it's not going to happen now." 

Netanyahu's reasonable position that perpetrators of major crimes should not be allowed to remain in power is not contested by Palestinians or their supporters. 

But given that only one party has been accused of genocide at the highest levels - including the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the UN, and human rights organisations - and has otherwise been the object of global condemnation, it is that party alone whose continued rule over its victims could be considered "inconceivable" and "ridiculous".  

Yet it is this perverse inversion that underpins Trump's plan, which demands that the Palestinians, once stripped of whatever paltry weapons the resistance has, must submit to the very state seeking to annihilate them. 

'Sonic torture'

Netanyahu's psychological assault was not confined to the UN stage. The indicted war criminal ordered his forces to use loudspeakers to broadcast his speech to the Palestinians, whom they are slaughtering and starving in Gaza.  

In case the loudspeakers were not loud enough, the Israelis also seized their mobile phones to ensure that Netanyahu's threats of further genocide and vow to achieve "total victory" over the mostly defenceless population, half of whom are children, would reach them through a livestream.

Human rights monitors have gathered testimonies from Palestinians in Gaza on how Israel has weaponised sound itself in its ongoing genocide. 

The report describes Israeli forces "broadcasting gunshots, [sounds of] armed conflicts, explosions, military vehicle movements, and occasionally songs in Hebrew and Arabic in order to psychologically intimidate civilians who live amid total darkness at night and total disconnection from the external world". 

A particularly sadistic tactic involves Israeli quadcopters broadcasting recordings of women screaming and children crying for help, a ploy to lure people into the open as targets. When residents went out to investigate, they were met with gunfire.

The weaponisation of loudspeakers against captive populations is an old tradition among aggressors and racial supremacists. The Nazis might have pioneered the use of sonic torture to psychologically "manipulate, intimidate and indoctrinate" prisoners. 

In the summer of 1933, work at Dachau was deliberately halted so prisoners could be forced to listen to broadcasts from the Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg, including "Nazi speeches and the menacing music that accompanied them". 

Walter Hornung, a former inmate, testified: "When the first sounds came from the speakers, we were sure that the modest amount of rest and quiet normally brought by the evening was gone forever." 

Blaring across the concentration camp were "parade marches and jingoistic music by Wagner", along with speeches of the Fuhrer, which the prisoners endured "with great difficulty". In November 1933, the loudspeaker system was deployed again during the parliamentary elections, playing hours of Hitler's speeches and march music. 

In subsequent years, loudspeakers continued to be used to demoralise prisoners and, as Nazi commanders themselves described, to "re-educate" them by instilling the values of the racial state.

During World War Two, "victory announcements from the German radio station were designed to break the inner resistance of the inmates". This eventually became routine practice in the death camps, where broadcasts were carried across the barracks to drown out the screams of those tortured and killed. 

A Zionist tradition

Netanyahu's use of loudspeakers also follows a long-standing Zionist tradition. 

In 1948, as Zionist militias carried out massacres and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, they adopted loudspeakers as tools of psychological warfare. 

Alongside Arabic-language radio broadcasts that spread propaganda and rumours of disease to provoke panic and flight, Zionist forces deployed loudspeaker trucks.

Israeli historian Ilan Pappe describes their use: "These would be used in the villages and towns to urge the Palestinians to flee before they were all killed, to warn that the Jews were using poison gas and atomic weapons, or to play recorded 'horror sounds' - shrieking and moaning, the wail of sirens, and the clang of fire-alarm bells." 

The Haganah Zionist militias also "rolled barrel bombs down from the hills and used loudspeakers to broadcast terrifying noises to frighten the population". 

In Acre, where the Zionists poisoned the aqueduct with typhoid germs, infecting scores of Palestinians as well as British soldiers, loudspeakers blared, "Surrender or commit suicide. We will destroy you to the last man" - a call not unlike the one that Netanyahu trumpeted at the UN last week. 

Throughout the war, the Haganah continued to use Arabic-language broadcasts and loudspeaker vans. Their radio announced that "the day of judgement had arrived". 

Even anti-Palestinian right-wing Israeli historian Benny Morris acknowledges that "the mortar barrages and the psychological warfare broadcasts and announcements, and the tactics employed by the infantry companies, advancing from house to house, were all geared to this goal. The orders of Carmeli's 22nd Battalion were 'to kill every [adult male] Arab encountered' and to set alight with fire-bombs' all objectives that can be set alight. I am sending you posters in Arabic; disperse on route'".

During the mass expulsions in Lydda and Ramleh on 11 July 1948, led by Yitzhak Rabin and Moshe Dayan, "all Arab men of military age were rounded up and penned into special enclosures. Israeli loudspeaker vans then toured the two towns announcing that neither food nor water would be provided and that the Arabs had 48 hours to get out to Transjordan. Israeli troops then began sacking both towns. On July 13, the loudspeakers gave final orders, naming the Kubah and the Hinda bridges as the exodus routes for Ramleh and Lydda respectively".

The tactic resurfaced during Israel's 1967 conquest of the rest of Palestine. In Bethlehem, Israeli jeeps drove through the city with loudspeakers, threatening and terrifying the population: "You have two hours to leave your homes and flee to Jericho or Amman. If you don't your houses will be shelled." 

Colonial confrontations

As is clear from these precedents, Netanyahu is in good company with his loudspeakers terrorising the Palestinians of the Gaza death camp. One could even imagine Trump himself arranging for loudspeakers in Gaza to broadcast his ultimatums and harangues to the subjugated population.

Two years into Israel's genocide, its slaughter has not only precipitated a showdown between the West and the Global South at the UN and in myriad international forums, but more recently pitted the US against its European subordinates over the theatrics of recognising a non-existent Palestinian state. 

Yet the confrontation between western colonial powers and the Global South over Palestine dates back to 1947, during the vote to partition the land between the Zionist colonists and the indigenous Palestinians. 

It further intensified amid decolonisation and the rise of the PLO in the 1970s. It was in that decade that the UN recognised the Palestinian people's right to self-determination, affirmed the PLO as their sole legitimate representative, and in November 1975 passed Resolution 3379, condemning Zionism as a "form of racism and racial discrimination". 

Israel's UN ambassador at the time, Chaim Herzog - who, eight years earlier, in 1967, had bulldozed Palestinian homes in the Magharibah neighbourhood of East Jerusalem and expelled thousands of residents - feigned horror: "Hitler would have felt at home... in this forum," he pontificated, adding that the UN had become the "world center of antisemitism".

This refrain has been a constant of Israeli diplomacy at the UN, echoed last week when Netanyahu denounced the body as a "house of darkness" and a "swamp of antisemitic bile".

In a theatrical move for which Israeli diplomats would become known at the UN, Herzog tore the "Zionism is racism" resolution in half - an act applauded by then US Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan, himself notorious for the racist 1965 report he authored on "The Negro Family".

Israel also retaliated by renaming every street and avenue originally named after the United Nations "Zionism".

Born in Ireland, Herzog went on to become Israel's president in 1983. Today, his son Isaac Herzog holds the same office. True to his father's legacy, President Herzog Junior announced to the world Israel's plans for genocide, declaring: "It is an entire nation out there that is responsible… It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved. It's absolutely not true."

He went further, insisting that Israel's genocidal war against the Palestinian people "is not only between Israel and Hamas. It's a war that is intended, really, truly, to save western civilisation, to save the values of western civilisation".

Rewarding genocide

The recent Trump plan, which continues the US tradition of denying the Palestinian people's right to self-determination, is engineered to undo the uninterrupted global condemnation of Israel's genocide in Gaza.

Extending from rulings at The Hague and UN findings to the belated declaration of genocide by the UN Office of Human Rights, as well as charges from groups including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and B'Tselem, Trump hopes to erase these condemnations.

His aim is to quash the growing public furor in the US and Western Europe over their governments' complicity in the genocide by rewarding Israel and lining up the US's Arab client regimes to do the same.

Colombian President Gustavo Petro's call last week to liberate the Palestinians demanded "a powerful army of the countries that do not accept genocide". He added: "That is why I invite nations of the world and their peoples more than anything, as an integral part of humanity, to bring together weapons and armies. We must liberate Palestine. I invite the armies of Asia, the great Slavic people who defeated Hitler with great heroism, and the Latin American armies of Bolivar."

Rather than join his proposed army of liberation, the Arab client regimes, including the PA, are lining up behind the Trump plan to deepen the suffering of the Palestinians.

That the same European and Arab countries, which have abetted Israel's campaign recently, recognised a phantom Palestinian state, demonstrates that their gesture is an act of support for Israel and its right to be and remain a Jewish supremacist state.

It is also, as I have written here, recognition of the unelected, collaborator PA and its role in repressing Palestinians. Their endorsement of Trump's plan simply adds yet another band of billionaires - the so-called "Gaza International Transitional Authority" - to preside over future Israeli and PA brutality and the destruction of what remains of Palestinian life and livelihood.

Hamas has decided to cleverly play the American game. Since the US floated ceasefire and prisoner-exchange proposals in May 2024, Hamas has invariably responded positively but with modifications, while Israel rejected each offer.

This time around, Hamas also agreed to a ceasefire, a prisoner exchange, Israeli withdrawal, the entry of food and provisions, and the creation of a committee of Palestinian technocratic administrators to run Gaza after the genocide. 

It also said it would hand over its arms, but only to a future Palestinian government in an independent Palestinian state.

Crucially, and contrary to Trump's demands, Hamas insisted that the future of Gaza and the choice of its leaders must be decided by Palestinians themselves, not by foreign overseers, and that it could not negotiate those questions on their behalf. This unexpected stance has spoiled Israel's plans. 

For now, Trump appears to have accepted Hamas's response, but his threats remain operative, and he could still backtrack, as he did in January. 

Those who support the Palestinian people's right to resist Israeli settler-colonialism and genocide should not waver in opposing Trump and Israel's threats and ultimatums, which aim to prolong Palestinian suffering for the foreseeable future.

They should instead support Petro's call for the liberation of Palestine and the Palestinians. That is the only path that offers even the possibility of a lasting peace.