COMMENTARY: By Caitlin Johnstone

Last year I banged out an angry rant about the way Israel supporters would yell “release the hostages!” at anyone who talked about the latest massacre of Palestinian civilians, saying Hamas was to blame for the killing because of their refusal to release the Israeli captives, and that it would all stop once the hostages are free.

I’m remembering that essay today because the hostages are free, but the massacres are continuing.

On Friday Israel reportedly blew up a vehicle carrying a Palestinian family of eleven people, including seven children.

The IDF gave its usual excuse for the massacre: the civilians were deemed to have crossed an invisible line — the so-called “Yellow Line” — into a forbidden zone which made the Israeli soldiers feel unsafe. They did this exact same thing constantly during the last “ceasefire” as well.

In my polemic last year I argued that the slaughter we were seeing in Gaza plainly had nothing to do with pushing for the release of Israeli hostages, and that even if it did it would still be barbaric to massacre children until your enemies caved in to your demands.

But two years of genocide have made it clear that the Israeli military was never killing Palestinian civilians in order to push for the release of hostages or force Hamas to cave in to their demands.

What Israel Supporters Really Mean When They Say “Release The Hostages”

What they are saying is that they believe Israel should murder children, decapitate them, rip their guts out, dismember them, mutilate them, burn them alive, every single day, until its military demands are… pic.twitter.com/3VnffoYStb

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) August 26, 2024

The Israeli military kills Palestinian civilians in order to kill Palestinian civilians. The killing is the goal, and it always has been.

We see this illustrated over and over again, in all sorts of ways. Israel apologists always argued that the only reason the IDF had destroyed Gaza’s healthcare system with nonstop hospital attacks was because Hamas was using those hospitals as secret military bases.

But then multiple independent reports from Western doctors in Gaza confirmed that Israeli forces had been entering the hospitals after attacking them and systematically destroying individual pieces of medical equipment one by one in order to make them unusable. Hamas wasn’t the target in those hospital attacks, the hospitals themselves were the target.

They said the massacres would stop.          Video: Caitlin Johnstone

And now we are seeing the “Israel is killing people because Hamas has Israeli hostages” narrative debunked in exactly the same way the “Israel keeps bombing hospitals because there are Hamas bases in all of them” narrative was.

The hostages are free, but the massacres continue.

None of which will surprise anyone who was paying attention these last two years. Israel’s genocidal intent has been on full display every minute of every day, and it continues to be even during this joke of a “ceasefire” where the genocide was theoretically supposed to be on pause for a little while.

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.