Global Research

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Hamas is a legitimate political organization, not a terrorist group as falsely designed by Israel and Washington in deference to the Jewish state.

The shameful designation gives Israel an unjustifiable pretext to hold two million Gazans hostage under flagrantly unlawful land, sea and air blockade – an act of war by any standard.

Gaza’s Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades military wing is no match for the might of Israel’s IDF – nuclear armed and dangerous, along with powerful ground, sea and aerial weapons able to turn the Strip to rubble barely resisted.

The world community is a bystander in the face-off between Israel and all Palestinians – murdering, imprisoning, torturing, dispossessing, and otherwise brutalizing them with impunity.

What’s been ongoing for 70 years continues with no end of it in prospect because world leaders are indifferent about Palestinian rights, uncaring about their longstanding suffering – beholden to Israel no matter how egregious its actions.

As long as the Jewish state has US support, it’s free to get away with mass murder and much more – Hamas, other Palestinian victims, and others cross-border falsely blamed for Israeli high crimes committed against them.

Kites, flaming or otherwise, do not justify Israeli war on two million trapped Gazans – virtually defenseless in the face of its might.

Is this where things are heading – Israel’s fourth preemptive war of aggression on the Strip in the last decade?

Supplemented by cross-border tank and artillery shelling, Israel terror-bombed dozens of Gazan sites on Friday – after days of hostilities launched earlier.

For the 17th consecutive Great March of Return Friday, Israel used excessive lethal force against peaceful demonstrators – including against women, children, journalists and paramedics aiding the wounded.

Israel considers defenseless civilians legitimate targets. Terror-bombing and otherwise brutalizing them is standard practice.

Do IDF soldiers, airmen, and naval personnel ever question their high crimes? Have they no shame, no sense of decency, no idea of the difference between right and wrong?

Do they simply follow orders blindly, ignoring the rule of law? For decades, they committed the most egregious of high crimes – naked aggression against targeted nations and Palestinians menacing no one.

As long as the Jewish state exists, regional and world peace are threatened.

Israel’s sordid history is blood-drenched, unmatched in modern times along with Washington’s war on humanity.

The late Edward Said once called conditions in Occupied Palestine “a disheartening bloody impasse.” The Territories are a virtual isolated prison, an entire population being suffocated into submission or out of existence.

Israeli viciousness is unrelenting, a nation transformed into a killing machine, Palestinians subjected to ruthless state terror.

Zionism’s final solution is eliminating Palestinians by slow-motion genocide.

Israel and its “Zionist agencies, forces and terrorist gangs ruthlessly (conduct) a systematic and comprehensive military, political, religious, economic, and cultural campaign with the intent to destroy in substantial part the national, ethnical, racial, and different religious group (Jews versus Muslims and Christians) constituting the Palestinian people,” Francis Boyle earlier explained, adding:

“This Zionist/Israeli campaign has consisted of killing members of the Palestinian people in violation of Genocide Convention Article II(a).”

It continues causing “serious bodily and mental harm to the Palestinian people in violation of Genocide Convention Article II(b).”

The Jewish state deliberately and maliciously “inflicts on the Palestinian people conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction in substantial part in violation of Article II(c) of the Genocide Convention.”

Ilan Pappe explained

“(t)he  inhuman living conditions in (Gaza), the most dense area in the world, and one of the poorest human spaces in the northern hemisphere, disabl(ing) the people who live it to reconcile with the imprisonment Israel had imposed on them ever since 1967.”

The rest of Occupied Palestine fares little better, subjected to dozens of brutalizing community raids weekly, numerous arrests and detentions, an entire population held hostage to an occupying power treating them like subhumans.

William Cook’s book on “The Plight of the Palestinians: A Long History of Destruction” explains “methodical genocide in Palestine (since) the 1940s.”

James Petras earlier addressed “Israeli genocide and its willing accomplices” – Washington, complicit Western partners, rogue Arab regimes, and “major Zionist organizations.”

Richard Falk earlier asked is it an “irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with (Nazi Germany’s) collective atrocity? I think not,” he stressed.

Israeli Ziofascists threaten Gaza’s total destruction. Is Israeli naked aggression on the Strip coming?

Were days of terror-bombing, cross border shelling, and shooting peaceful Gazan demonstrators prelude to full-scale war?

On Saturday, hostilities stopped for now, an IDF statement saying “(a)t the end of an assessment by the southern command this morning, it was decided to maintain a full civilian routine in the communities close to the Gaza strip.”

Does it reflect a temporary calm before a full-scale storm? Israeli agreements are made to be breached.

It’s just a matter of time, maybe days, before Israel’s killing machine unleashes its venom again – maybe full-scale aggression on Gazans for the fourth time since December 2008.

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Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the CRG, Correspondent of Global Research based in Chicago.