AMY GOODMAN: Israel’s government has approved the first phase of the Gaza ceasefire deal, that includes a pause in Israeli attacks and the release of the remaining hostages held by Hamas in exchange for Palestinians detained in Israeli prisons — 20 living hostages were freed today coinciding with President Trump’s visit to Israel and Egypt.

According to the deal, 250 Palestinian prisoners serving life sentences and another 1700 people from Gaza detained in the last two years — and described as “forcibly disappeared” by the UN — would be released.

Hamas has demanded the release of prominent Palestinian political prisoner Marwan Barghouti, but his name was reportedly secretly removed from the prisoner exchange list by Israel.

Meanwhile, the US is sending about 200 troops to Israel to monitor the ceasefire deal.

The Israeli military on Friday confirmed the ceasefire had come into effect as soldiers retreated from parts of Gaza. Tens of thousands of Palestinians, including families that had been forced to the south, began their trek back to northern Gaza after news that Israeli forces were withdrawing.

Returning Gaza City residents made their way through mounds of rubble and destroyed neighborhoods, searching for any sign of their homes and belongings. Among them, Fidaa Haraz.

FIDAA HARAZ: [translated] I came since the morning, when they said there was a withdrawal, to find my home. I’m walking in the street, but I do not know where to go, due to the extent of the destruction.

I swear I don’t know where the crossroads is or where my home is. I know that my home was leveled, but where is it? Where is it? I cannot find it.

What is this? What do we do with our lives? Where should we live? Where should we stay? A house of multiple floors, but nothing was left?

AMY GOODMAN: Al Jazeera reports Israel’s army said it would allow 600 humanitarian aid trucks carrying food, medical supplies, fuel and other necessities daily into Gaza, through coordination with the United Nations and other international groups.

On Thursday, the exiled Hamas Gaza chief Khalil al-Hayya declared an end to the war.

KHALIL AL-HAYYA: [translated] Today, we announced that we have reached an agreement to end the war and aggression against our people and to begin implementing a permanent ceasefire, the withdrawal of the occupation forces, the entry of aid, the opening of the Rafah crossing in both directions and the exchange of prisoners.

AMY GOODMAN: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke today in Israel.

PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: [translated] Today, we mark one of the greatest achievements in the war of revival: the return of all of our hostages, the living and the dead as one. …

This way, we grapple Hamas. We grapple it all around, ahead of the next stages of the plan, in which Hamas is disarmed and Gaza is demilitarised.

If this can be achieved the easy way, very well. If not, it will be achieved the hard way.

AMY GOODMAN: In the United States, President Trump hailed his administration’s ceasefire plan during a Cabinet meeting on Thursday as concerns mount regarding potential US and foreign intervention in the rebuilding of Gaza.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Gaza is going to be slowly redone. You have tremendous wealth in that part of the world by certain countries, and just a small part of that, what they — what they make, will do wonders for — for Gaza.

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined by two guests. Diana Buttu, Palestinian human rights attorney and a former adviser to the negotiating team of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). She has just recently written a piece for The Guardian. It is headlined “A ‘magic pill’ made Israeli violence invisible. We need to stop swallowing it.” And Amjad Iraqi is a senior Israel-Palestine analyst at the International Crisis Group, joining us from London.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Diana Buttu, let’s begin with you. First, your response to the ceasefire-hostage deal that’s just been approved by the Israeli government and Hamas?

DIANA BUTTU: Well, first, Amy, it’s really quite repulsive that Palestinians have had to negotiate an end to their genocide. It should have been that the world put sanctions on Israel to stop the genocide, rather than forcing Palestinians to negotiate an end to it. At the same time, we’re also negotiating an end to the famine, a famine that Israel, again, created.

Who are we negotiating with? The very people who created that famine. And so, it’s really repugnant that this is the position that Palestinians have been forced to be in.

And so, while people here are elated, happy that the bombs have stopped, we’re also at the same time worried, because we’ve seen that the international community, time and again, has abandoned us.

Everybody is happy that the Israelis are going home, but nobody’s talking about the more than 11,000 Palestinians who are currently languishing in Israeli prisons, being starved, being tortured, being raped. Many of them are hostages picked up after October 2023, being held without charge, without trial, and nobody at all is talking about them.

So, while people are happy that the bombs have stopped, we know that Israel’s control has not at all stopped. And Israel has made it clear that it’s going to continue to control every morsel of food that comes into Gaza. It’s going to control every single construction item that comes into Gaza.

And it’s going to continue to maintain a military occupation over Gaza.

This is not a peace agreement. This is not an end to the occupation. And I think it’s so important for us that we keep our eyes on Gaza and start demanding that Israel be held to account, not only for the genocide, but for all of these decades of occupation that led to this in the first place.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the exchange of hostages, Israeli hostages, dead and alive, and Palestinian prisoners? According to the Hamas Gaza chief, I believe they’re saying all women and children, Palestinian women and children, picked up over these last two years — or is it beyond? — are going to be released. And then, of course, there are the well over 1000 prisoners who are going to be released.

DIANA BUTTU: No, not quite. So, there are 250 who are political prisoners who are going to be released, and that list just came out about a little over an hour ago.

But there are also 1700 Palestinians, solely from Gaza, who are going to be released. And these were people — these are doctors, these are nurses, these are journalists and so on, who were — who Israel picked up after 7 October, 2023, and has been holding as hostages.

These are the people that are going to be released. There are still thousands more, Amy, that are from the West Bank, that we do not know what is going to happen to them.

And so, while the focus is just on the people in Gaza — and again, there is no path for freeing all of those thousands of Palestinians who are languishing in Israeli prisons, being starved, being tortured, being raped.

What’s going to happen to them? Who’s going to be focusing on them? I don’t think that it’s going to be this US administration.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to talk about the West Bank in a minute. More than a thousand Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank just over the last two years. But I first want to get Amjad Iraqi’s response to this deal that has now been signed off on.

I mean, watching the images of tens of thousands, this sea of humanity, of Palestinians going south to north, to see what they can find of their homes in places like Gaza City, not to mention who’s trapped in the rubble. We say something — well over 60,000 Palestinians have been killed, but we don’t know the real number. It could be hundreds of thousands?

AMJAD IRAQI: Indeed, Amy. And to kind of continue off of Diana’s points, this is a deal that really should have been made long, long time ago. We’ve known that the parameters of this truce have been on the table for well over a year, if not since the very beginning of the war, what they used to define as an all-for-all deal, the idea that Hamas would release all hostages in exchange for a permanent ceasefire.

And the reasons for the constant foiling of it are quite evident. And it’s important to recognise this not for the sake of just lamenting the lives, the many lives, that have been lost and the massive destruction that could have been averted, but it needs to really inform the next steps going forward.

The biggest takeaway of what’s happening right now is that in order for a ceasefire to be sustained, in order for Gaza to be saved from further military assault, you need massive political pressure.

And we’ve seen this really build up in the past weeks and months. You saw this, for example, from European governments, which, even through the symbolic recognition of Palestinian statehood, was very much venting their frustration with the Israeli conduct in the war, the fact that the EU was actually starting to contemplate more punitive measures against Israel, such as partial trade suspensions, potential sanctions against Israel.

We saw this building up over the past few weeks. Arab states have started to use much of their leverage, especially after Israel’s strike on Doha or on Hamas’s offices in Doha. We started seeing Gulf and other Arab and Muslim states come forward to President Trump at the UN saying that Israel aggression cannot continue like this.

And most crucially is, of course, President Trump himself and Washington finally saying that it needs to put its foot down to stop this war, which we’ve heard repeatedly from Trump himself.

But this is really the first time since the January ceasefire agreement where Trump has really insisted that this come to an end.

Now, this — now there’s much to be sort of debated about the Trump plan itself, but this aspect of the truce cannot continue, and certainly cannot save Palestinian lives, unless that pressure is maintained.

The concern now is that that pressure will recede or alleviate, because there’s now a deal that’s signed. But, actually, in order to enforce it, that pressure really needs to be maintained.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you think was the turning point, Amjad? The bombing of Qatar?

Now, I mean, The New York Times had an exposé that Trump knew before, not just in the midst of the bombing, that Israel was bombing their ally to try to kill the Hamas leadership. But do you think that was the turning point?

AMJAD IRAQI: It certainly might have expedited, I think, a lot of factors that were already building up. As I said, pressure had been mounting against Israel for quite a while.

There was really outrage, not just at the continuance of the military assaults, but the policy of starvation, which was very evident on the ground, and Israel’s complete refusal to let in aid, its failed project with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.

So, this had all been building, but I do think the strike on Doha really pushed Arab states to say that enough is enough. To see them really meet all together with President Trump and create a bit more of a united position to insist that this really couldn’t go on, I think, has really signalled that Israel really crossed a certain line geopolitically.

Now, of course, that line should have been recognised as being crossed well before because of the facts on the ground in Gaza, but I do think that this has helped to kind of push things over the edge a bit more assertively.

There are also speculations about Trump, of course, trying to have his name in for the Nobel Peace Prize, and potentially other factors. But I do think that the timing of this, again, regardless of what ended up pushing it over the line, it is unfortunate that it has really taken this long.

And it’s really up to global powers and foreign governments to recognise that in order to make sure that this stays, that they really need to keep that pressure up.

AMY GOODMAN: And, Amjad Iraqi, the core demand of the ceasefire is that Hamas disarm and end its rule. What security guarantees is Hamas seeking for its own members to lay down their arms and not face a wave of arrests or assassinations?

How is this going to work? And talk about who you see running Gaza.

AMJAD IRAQI: So, these things are still a bit unclear. So, throughout the ceasefire talks, Hamas has kept insisting about the idea of US guarantees that Israel will not end the war.

But there’s never really any clear, concrete way to prove this. And as we’ve seen before, like in the January ceasefire deal and in much of the ceasefire talks, even if President Trump expresses his desire to see an end to the war, oftentimes he would still hand the steering wheel to Prime Minister Netanyahu.

And if Netanyahu decided that he wanted to thwart the ceasefire talks, if he wanted to relaunch military assaults, and the Israeli military and the government would back it, then Trump and Washington would fall into line and amplify those calls, and even President Trump himself would sort of cheer on the military assaults.

And so, this factor has certainly weighed a lot on Hamas, but I do think there’s a culmination of pressure, the fact that Arab states have insisted on Hamas to try to show, at least signal, certain flexibility, even though many of its demands have been quite consistent throughout the war.

But the fact that I think Hamas is now feeling that there’s also a bit more pressure on Israel to actually ensure that they at least try to take the gamble that they will not return to war.

And in regards to decommissioning and disarmament, publicly Hamas has placed a red line around this right to bear arms. But historically, and even recently, they do say that they are willing to have conversations about decommissioning, as long as it’s tied to a political framework, especially one that’s tied to the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Now, one can really debate how much this process is actually quite feasible, and obviously the Israeli government and much of the Israeli public is quite adamant in its opposition against Palestinian statehood, but Hamas may at least offer some space for those conversations to be had.

There are discussions about it potentially giving up what it might describe as its larger or more offensive weaponry, like rockets or anti-tank missiles. And there’s bigger questions around firearms.

But I think it’s important to put this question not as a black-and-white issue, as something that has to come first in the political process, as Israel is demanding, but one that requires trust building and confidence building in the rubric of a process of Palestinian self-determination.

This is important not just in the case of Palestine, but across many conflicts around the world where the question of decommissioning, about establishing one rule, one gun, one government for a society, requires that kind of process. So, it shouldn’t just be a policy of destroying and military assaults and so on. You do need to engage in these questions in good faith.

AMY GOODMAN: There are so many questions, Diana Buttu, in this first stage of the ceasefire-hostage deal, is really the only one that Netanyahu addressed in his speech.

You’re usually in Ramallah. You spend a lot of time in the West Bank. Where does this leave the Palestinian Authority? I don’t think the West Bank is talked about in this deal.

And what about the fact that we’re looking at pictures of Netanyahu surrounded by Steve Witkoff on one side and Jared Kushner, who has talked about — as we know — famously referred to Gaza as “very valuable” waterfront property?

DIANA BUTTU: Well, I think that this plan was really an Israeli plan, and it was repackaged and branded as a Trump plan. And you can see just in the text of it and the way that all of the guarantees were given to the Israelis, and none given to the Palestinians, it’s really an Israeli plan.

But beyond that, it’s important to keep in mind that when Trump was going around and talking about this plan, that he consulted with everybody but Palestinians. He didn’t talk to Mahmoud Abbas. He didn’t even let Mahmoud Abbas go to the UN to deliver his speech before the UN.

I’m pretty certain he didn’t speak to the UN representative, Palestine’s representative to the UN. And so, this is — once again, we’ve got a plan in which people are talking about Palestinians, but never talking to Palestinians. So, again, this is very much an Israeli plan repackaged as a Trump plan and branded as a Trump plan.

In terms of them looking at Gaza as being prime real estate, this is not at all different from the way that they’ve done it in the past, and this is not at all the way that Israel has looked at Palestine.

And this is because this is the way that colonisers look at land that isn’t theirs. They ignore the history of the place.

Gaza has an old history. It has some of the oldest churches, I think the second-oldest church in the world. It has some of the oldest mosques. It has an old civilization.

We want Gaza to be Gaza. We don’t want it to be Dubai or any other place. We want it to be Gaza. And so, the idea of somehow turning it into prime real estate, this is the mentality of somebody who’s coming from outside.

This is the way that colonisers think. This isn’t the way that the Indigenous think. And so, you can see in this plan that it’s not only the idea of the outside coming in, but they certainly didn’t consult Palestinians at all.

As for what’s going to happen to the Palestinian Authority, it’s clear that they don’t want the Palestinian Authority in the Gaza Strip, and it’s clear that they do want to have a foreign authority in the Gaza Strip.

But once again, Amy, when is it that Palestinians get to decide our own future? Are we really going back to the era of colonialism, when other people get to decide our future? And that’s what this plan is really all about.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’re going to be continuing to cover this story. President Trump is going to be there for the signing of the ceasefire in Sharm El-Sheikh in Egypt on Monday, and the hostages and prisoners are expected to be released on Monday or Tuesday.

Diana Buttu, I want to thank you for being with us, Palestinian human rights attorney, former adviser to the negotiating team of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, and Amjad Iraqi, Israel-Palestine analyst at the International Crisis Group.

Republished from Democracy Now! under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States Licence.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

COMMENTARY: By Caitlin Johnstone

It’s so revealing how Israelis keep begging Trump to end the killing in Gaza, because they understand that the US President has the power to force Israel to stop. It seems like Israelis understand this far better than Americans do.

Six former Israeli hostages and the widow of a slain hostage have released a video pleading with President Trump in English to support a comprehensive deal to make peace in Gaza so that the remaining hostages can be freed.

“You have the power to make history, to be the president of peace, the one who ended the war, ended the suffering, and brought every hostage home, including my little brother,” implores one of the hostages.

“President Trump, please act now before it’s too late for them, too,” pleads the widow.

This is not the first time Israelis have begged Trump to force an end to the slaughter.

Earlier this month more than 600 former senior Israeli security officials from Mossad and Shin Bet sent Trump a letter urging him to compel Netanyahu to make peace in Gaza. They did this because they understand something that many Americans do not: that the US President has always had the power to end the Gaza holocaust.

It’s crazy how many times I’ve encountered Americans telling me that this is “Israel’s war” and there’s nothing the president can do to end it.

It was mostly Democrats doing this back when Biden was president and I was slamming Genocide Joe for continuing this mass atrocity, and now that Trump is in office it’s his supporters who show up in my comments section white knighting for the president.

“It’s not our war and we should stay out of it,” they sometimes claim, mistakenly thinking that critics of the US-backed genocide are asking for some kind of US intervention.

But the call isn’t for the US to intervene, it’s for the US to stop intervening. To end the US interventionism that has been underway for two years. The Gaza holocaust can be ended by the US simply ceasing to add wood to the fire.

Israeli military insiders have been saying again and again that the onslaught in Gaza would not be possible without US support.

A senior Israeli air force official told Ha’aretz last year that “without the Americans’ supply of weapons to the Israel Defence Forces, especially the air force, Israel would have had a hard time sustaining its war for more than a few months.”

In November 2023, retired Israeli Major-General Yitzhak Brick told Jewish News Syndicate that, “All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs, it’s all from the US.

“The minute they turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting. You have no capability . . .  Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.”

Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert wrote the following last year:

“The entire Israel Air Force relies completely on American aircraft: fighter planes, transport planes, refueler planes and helicopters. All of Israel’s air power is based on the American commitment to defend Israel.

“We have no other reliable source for essential supplies of equipment, munitions and advanced weapons that Israel cannot manufacture on its own.

“In recent months, hundreds of American transport planes have landed at IAF bases carrying thousands of tons of advanced, vital military equipment and munitions.”

The Israelis clearly understand that they’ve been entirely dependent on the US for the IDF’s acts of butchery in Gaza this entire time, and they clearly understand that the US President has the ability to turn off the tap whenever he wants.

And now they are begging the president to do so with increasing urgency, because it’s been made clear to them that their own government isn’t going to stop until it is forced to stop. They can’t stop the gunman, so they’re turning to the man who’s feeding him the ammo.

It would be good if Americans understood this as well.

Trump is committing genocide in Gaza, just as surely as Netanyahu is, and he could end it at any time. The fact that he still has not chosen to do so makes him one of the most evil people on earth.

Caitlin Johnstone is an Australian independent journalist and poet. Her articles include The UN Torture Report On Assange Is An Indictment Of Our Entire Society. She publishes a website and Caitlin’s Newsletter. This article is republished with permission.

This article was first published on Café Pacific.

COMMENTARY: By Caitlin Johnstone

Benjamin Netanyahu said last Thursday that freeing the Israeli hostages in Gaza was not his top priority, suggesting instead that defeating Hamas should take precedence over a hostage deal.

“We have many objectives, many goals in this war,” Netanyahu said. “We want to bring back all of our hostages. That is a very important goal. In war, there is a supreme objective. And that supreme objective is victory over our enemies. And that is what we will achieve.”

Nothing the prime minister said here is true or valid  —  unless by “enemies” he means “all Palestinians in the Gaza Strip”.

Netanyahu Says Freeing Hostages Is Not His Priority
The Israeli leader said his ‘supreme objective is victory over enemies’
by Dave DeCamp@DecampDave #Netanyahu #Gaza #Israel #Palestinians #hostages https://t.co/jI1XBUkA9h

— Antiwar.com (@Antiwarcom) May 2, 2025

Netanyahu has been fairly transparent about the fact that Israel’s ultimate goal in Gaza is neither freeing the hostages nor defeating Hamas, but seizing Palestinian territory and removing its Palestinian inhabitants.

He has openly said that Israel will occupy Gaza via military force, completely ruling out the possibility of any form of Palestinian government for the enclave. He has openly said he wants to enact President Donald Trump’s ethnic cleansing plan for Gaza, which explicitly entails removing “all” Palestinians and never allowing them to return.

It was never about hostages . . .                Video: Caitlin Johnstone

So they’ve made this perfectly clear. This isn’t about Hamas, except insofar as an armed resistance group will make it difficult to forcibly remove all Palestinians from Gaza. And it certainly isn’t about hostages.

And yet, bizarrely, this is how the Western political-media class continues to frame this onslaught. They call it Israel’s “war with Hamas”, when it’s nothing other than an undisguised ethnic cleansing operation.

They prattle on about “October 7, hostages, and terrorism”, even though it has already been made abundantly clear that this has nothing to do with any of those things. They act as though the admission was simply never made.

There is absolutely no excuse for continuing to babble about hostages and Hamas after the US and Israel said the goal is the complete ethnic cleansing of Gaza. They told you what this is really about. They said it. With their face holes. They said it right to you. End of debate.

Israel has been seeking ways to purge Gaza of Palestinians for generations. That’s all this has ever been about. Not October 7. Not hostages. Not Hamas. Not terrorism.

Everything about Israel’s operations in Gaza have indicated that their real goal is to remove Palestinians from a Palestinian territory and not to free hostages or defeat Hamas. And then when Trump took office, they started openly admitting it.

Trump Says No Right of Return for Palestinians in Gaza Under His Plan
Egypt has called an emergency Arab summit in response to #Trump‘s repeated calls for the permanent displacement of Gaza’s #Palestinians
by Dave DeCamp@DecampDave #Gaza #Israel #Egypt https://t.co/Yg4hswznCU

— Antiwar.com (@Antiwarcom) February 10, 2025

How is this not the whole entire conversation every time Gaza comes up? How is this not the beginning, middle and end of every single discussion?

This is like a cop looking right into someone’s phone camera while strangling a black man to death and saying “I am killing this man because I am racist and I want to kill black people,” and then afterward everyone’s still saying “resisting arrest” and “we don’t know what happened before the video started recording”.

He said what he was doing and what his motives were with his own mouth.

You don’t get to babble about Hamas, October 7 or hostages in defence of Israel’s actions in Gaza anymore. That is not a thing. If you want to defend Israel’s actions in Gaza, the sole topic of conversation is whether or not it’s okay to forcibly purge an entire population from their historic homeland by systematically bombing, shooting and starving them while destroying their civilian infrastructure, solely because of their ethnicity.

That is what the discussion is about. Not anything else. That and that only.

Caitlin Johnstone is an Australian independent journalist and poet. Her articles include The UN Torture Report On Assange Is An Indictment Of Our Entire Society. She publishes a website and Caitlin’s Newsletter. This article is republished with permission.

This article was first published on Café Pacific.

COMMENTARY: By Eugene Doyle

Watching footage of Palestinian parliamentarian and hostage Khalida Jarrar emerge from Israeli captivity was jarring — a far, muffled cry from the sense of happiness and relief most of us felt seeing the young female Israeli soldiers released by Hamas around the same time.

What a study in contrast.

Khalida was clearly emaciated, traumatised and had turned, in the same period of time, from a powerful dynamic woman into a fragile, elderly human being who moved with difficulty.

What a difference it makes who holds you captive. It goes without saying I didn’t see this on any mainstream news outlet.

In a previous period of imprisonment — for being a member of the PFLP, a proscribed organisation — the Israelis wouldn’t even allow Khalida Jarrar to attend the funeral of her own daughter.

Instead she sent a message that was read at Suha’s funeral in 2021:

I am in so much pain, my child, only because I miss you.
I am in so much pain, my child, only because I miss you.

From the depths of my agony, I reached out and
embraced the sky of our homeland through the window
of my prison cell in Damon Prison, Haifa.
Worry not, my child.
I stand tall, and steadfast, despite the shackles and the jailer.
I am a mother in sorrow, from yearning to see you one last time.

Suha, my precious.

They have stripped me from bidding you a final goodbye kiss.
I bid you farewell with a flower.
Your absence is searingly painful, excruciatingly painful.
But I remain steadfast and strong,
Like the mountains of beloved Palestine.

No mainstream coverage
I searched online and found no mainstream outlet had covered Khalida’s release amid the flood of stories about the Israeli hostages. A search to see if Australian or New Zealand MPs had called for the release of their fellow legislator netted zero results.

To them, she is no doubt a non-person. Yet, Khalida Jarrar is a leading political activist and one of dozens of legislators imprisoned by the Israelis. She endured. She remained steadfast.

“The entire system of political imprisonment is based on suppressing Palestinian organising,” said Charlotte Kates, coordinator of Samidoun, the Palestinian Prisoner Support Network.

The four female Israeli “Offence” Force (IDF) soldiers, according to all the many images and reports, were fit, happy and well-fed after their 15 months in Hamas captivity.

In contrast Palestinian prisoners typically had lost 16kg by the time they were freed. The Israelis with all the food and resources in the world made a policy — an actual policy — of mistreating prisoners, reducing food to a minimum, often beating them, finding perverse ways to humiliate them and on many occasions sexually assaulting men, women, boys and girls who had been dragged into their custody without charge.

Many, an unknown number, died at their hands.

Israeli Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, called months ago for legislation to allow the execution of Palestinian prisoners “with a shot in the head” and said he would provide minimal food to them until the law was enacted. I couldn’t find a single Western leader who called for him to be arrested.

Israeli human rights report
These crimes are filling compendia being compiled by the United Nations, the ICC and multiple organisations worldwide. You can read some of it here in an Israeli human rights report, “Welcome to Hell, the Israeli prison system as a network of torture camps”.

Our media has a lot to answer for — for what was done to the thousands of Palestinian hostages because of its starring role in silencing Palestinian voices and hiding from view the realities of the Israeli prison system. Thousands were never charged with any crime — other than being Palestinian.

Entire congregations in mosques, groups of people in refugee centres, were indiscriminately swept up and tossed into Israeli concentration camps.

Were future historians to look back on these times and only have the mainstream media to go by, they would have lots of wonderful photos of the Israeli hostages, know them by name, see family hugs, biographical details, and listen to interviews with friends and relatives. In contrast, the Palestinians would turn towards History and we would see blank faces, erased of personality, all the detail of their stories rubbed out.

That’s why it is imperative to find better sources of news and information, like Middle East Eye, Palestine Chronicle, Electronic Intifada and Pearls & Irritations, that can enrich our understanding of our times and the experience of the victims of Western genocidal violence.

In his excellent article “The Other Hostages”, human rights lawyer Jonathan Kuttab says: “From the Palestinian perspective: there are about 13,000 Palestinian prisoners and detainees in Israeli jails who are just as worthy of our concern and also merit our sympathy, and whose families will rejoice at their long-awaited release.”

Turning a blind eye to Israeli mistreatment of prisoners — and the mainstream media bias in favour of all things Israeli — goes back decades. But let’s look at the months since October 7th.

No fact-checking
All the mainstream media and servile politicians raced to report without fact-checking the lies the Israelis and Americans, including President Biden, told about beheaded babies and mass rapes. Few had the decency to walk back the calumnies even after official retractions and international investigations disproved them.

In October 2023 I wrote one of my first stories post-October 7th on this very topic.

Within a month of October 7, eight BBC journalists wrote to Al Jazeera saying “the corporation is failing to humanise Palestinians . . .  investing greater effort in humanising Israeli victims compared with Palestinians, and omitting key historical context in coverage.”

CNN staff told British colleagues last year that their network’s pro-Israel slant amounts to “journalistic malpractice”.

Hats off to Novara Media, one of the larger alternative news and analysis platforms for its exposure of bias. What they found was that Palestinians are “killed” whereas Israelis are “massacred” or “slaughtered”.

Checking over 1000 articles by the UK’s supposedly progressive, left-leaning outlets — The Guardian, The Independent, Daily Mirror – Novara found that “all three publications favoured Israeli lives, narratives and voices.”

Taking a list of emotive words they cross-checked and found that 77 percent were about violence against Israelis and only 23 percent about Palestinians. Well over 95 percent of victims of violence are Palestinians, 100 percent of land thefts are by Israelis. Facts matter.

Journalism ‘used’ for racist war crimes
This is journalism being used in the service of racist war crimes, used to normalise the mistreatment of prisoners and other Palestinian untermenschen.

In the case of The Independent, it ran 70 stories on Israeli hostages (who at peak numbered about 250) and just one story on a Palestinian hostage (they number over 10,000).

British journalist Owen Jones deserves a medal for reports like: “BBC in Civil War over Gaza.” The report details the efforts of journalists within the organisation to deliver more balanced coverage but the extent to which those efforts are thwarted by powerful pro-Israel operatives within the corporation who ensure “systematic pro-Israel propaganda at the corporation.”

“This unprecedented slaughter could not have happened without powerful cheerleaders,” Jones said in a recent piece about media co-conspirators with Israel in the genocide. “Hold them to account.”

Damn right. I pray to whatever gods may be that justice will one day be served on all those who by their actions or by their “journalism” allowed these crimes to be committed.

I’ll give the last word to Khalida Jarrar as I wish her a full and speedy recovery:

“All I wanted was to bid my daughter a final farewell – with a kiss on her forehead and to tell her I love her as much as I love Palestine.”

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz