"Israel’s much greater firepower today, provided by modern munitions supplied by the United States, has allowed Israel to realise what before it could only dream of doing: wiping Gaza off the map." Gaza is not an aberration - Israel planned this genocide decades ago. In October 2023, Israel found an excuse to breathe new life into an old story of slaughter and expulsion. The chief differences this time have been of scale and duration

A Palestinian girl wounded in an Israeli strike on a tent encampment for displaced families, according to medics, is carried at Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip on 25 May, 2026 (Reuters)

Jonathan Cook

11 June 2026

The truth slowly comes to light: Israel's genocide in Gaza was planned decades ago.

Listen to the testimonies of four Israeli soldiers who served in Gaza. 

Soldier 1: “Human lives didn’t matter. You could kill, there was no law. No one would say a word to you. But it’s not a good feeling. It mainly kills your humanity.”

Soldier 2: “At first I wasn’t willing to execute Arabs who weren’t resisting [that is, civilians]. Then we came to the conclusion that we had to kill. We went through the process of ceasing to see them as human beings.”

Soldier 3: “We caught guys, lined them up and eliminated them. In retrospect, it looks like murder.”

Soldier 4: “We would roam through refugee camps in Gaza and carry out purges... Every soldier who was there created a ‘concentration camp’, and they didn’t hesitate to kill people who caused a slight disturbance.”

No, these testimonies are not new. The whistleblowers did not serve in Gaza during the current, ongoing genocide there. These accounts are nearly 60 years old, published last week by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz under the headline "We were ordered to kill”. 

Israeli soldiers interviewed shortly after the 1967 war - often referred to as the Six-Day War - not only confessed that they and others routinely committed war crimes but they pointed out that they did so under orders from their commanders. 

The accounts were compiled into a book, The Seventh Day: Soldiers Talk About the Six-Day War, by Avraham Shapira, though many testimonies were not included because they were too shocking.

None of this should be simply of historical interest. These accounts are a vivid reminder that what Israel has been doing during its current, near three-year destruction of Gaza - levelling all homes, hospitals, schools, universities, bakeries and government offices; murdering tens of thousands, more likely hundreds of thousands, of Palestinian civilians; and blocking aid and starving the population - is part of a decades-old pattern of Israeli military conduct. 

Nothing “started” on 7 October 2023, when Hamas broke out for a single day of the Gaza “concentration camp” - the plight of Gaza’s Palestinians noted 59 years ago by Soldier 4. 

Rather, Israel found an excuse that day to breathe new life into an old story, one in which it has been slaughtering and expelling Palestinians for decades. The chief difference this time is simply one of scale and duration. 

Washington and other western capitals have given Israel the time and space to finish in Gaza what, earlier, it had only been able to achieve in part. Israel’s much greater firepower today, provided by modern munitions supplied by the United States, has allowed Israel to realise what before it could only dream of doing: wiping Gaza off the map.

Policy of starvation

The whistleblowing soldiers of 1967 admitted their job was not to “fight the enemy” - or “eradicate the terrorists”, as Israeli leaders now term it. It was to kill and terrorise Palestinian civilians under cover of war. 

Few soldiers were shy of saying why they were committing atrocities. Their task was to create a reign of terror, integral to Israel’s efforts to expel as many Palestinians as possible from the last remaining parts of the Palestinian homeland, the territories captured by the Israeli military in 1967 and then illegally occupied.

This was seen as a new opportunity to complete the ethnic cleansing campaign begun by Zionist militias in earnest in 1947 and 1948 as the British Mandate authorities withdrew from Palestine. By the end of that campaign, some 80 percent of Palestinians had been expelled from their homes inside the borders of the newly declared Jewish state. 

Many ended up in refugee camps in neighbouring states such as Lebanon and Syria. But some fled into the surviving pockets of historic Palestine in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza - the 22 per cent of their homeland that had been shielded from further Israeli advances in 1948 by Jordan and Egypt. 

The 1967 war was... READ MORE  https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/gaza-not-an-aberration-israels-genocide-gaza-was-planned-decades-ago

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Our complicity in Gaza has set the stage for a second genocide - in the West Bank ... the back story that utterly undermines Israel's "self-defence" narrative in Gaza by Jonathan Cook

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 https://x.com/Jonathan_K_Cook/status/1956325210505859098

Jonathan Cook

@Jonathan_K_Cook

There is a revealing back story to Israel's so-called E1 Plan, a massive settlement project that includes the building of many thousands of new homes. The plan’s goal is to irreversibly sever the illegally annexed eastern, Palestinian side of Jerusalem from the West Bank, and then break the illegally occupied West Bank into two separate territorial cantons, destroying any hope of future Palestinian statehood.

 

That back story utterly undermines Israel's "self-defence" narrative in Gaza.

 

The media are playing up the role of Bezalel Smotrich, the self-declared fascist minister in Netanyahu's government, in the E1 Plan – as though it somehow reflects his ugly and malign influence. That is pure misdirection.

 

In fact, this plan has been around since the 1990s and was first formulated by the supposedly "peacenik" Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. It was intended as a parallel move to the “peace accords” of that time negotiated in Oslo.

 

The Oslo accords had incited huge divisions in Israeli society because it was assumed that they would cede back to the Palestinians significant pieces of territory Israel was illegally occupying and colonising in the West Bank. Domestic opposition ultimately led to Rabin’s assassination.

 

In Rabin's eyes, E1 overrode those objections. It would protect the then largest of the illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank, Maale Adumim, incorporating it into the eastern side of Jerusalem, which Israel had already annexed and was furiously settling with Jews while displacing Palestinian communities there.

 

As an aside, let us note that Rabin, who won the Nobel peace prize along with Yasser Arafat for signing the Oslo accords, was expressly against the creation of a real Palestinian state. He wanted “ an entity which is less than a state” – a vision that appears to have viewed that “entity” as little more than a glorified local authority running schools and collecting the rubbish.

 

Notably, Rabin also drew up plans for a separation wall across the West Bank between Israel and its settlements, on one side, and Palestinian communities on the other. A successor, Ariel Sharon, a hawkish former army general, would be the one to build that wall nearly a decade later, imprisoning Palestinian communities behind steel and concrete fortifications, and in the process stealing vast swaths of their agricultural land. Western capitals, as ever meekly protested to zero effect.

 

After Rabin, every Israeli prime minister, whether they identified with the Zionist left or right, advanced the E1 Plan: Netanyahu, Ehud Barak, Sharon, Ehud Olmert.

 

And all helped build the initial infrastructure – the roads, and even a police station – to make E1 become a reality.

 

The plan was formally frozen in 2009 only after the US exerted huge pressure on Israel. Why? Because the realisation of E1 could mean only one thing: a permanent end to the pretence of a two-state solution. Israel's interest in "peacemaking" would be exposed as the hollow charade it always was, even under Rabin.

 

Smotrich has made precisely that point in his usual blunt way, saying E1 is necessary because it will “bury the idea of a Palestinian state”. It is the prelude to his ambition, one shared by the rest of the Israeli government and large parts of the public, to formally annex the West Bank.

 

Which is why the Guardian and other media are calling the E1 Plan " hugely controversial" – a predictable and hugely controversial understatement.

 

In fact, E1 is utterly illegal. 

 

It is the precise opposite of what the International Court of Justice – the world's highest court –

ordered last year. Which was for Israel to begin dismantling the settlements, end its system of apartheid rule over Palestinians that has been required to enforce decades of colonisation, and restore all of the territory stolen by the Israeli occupation regime from the Palestinian people.

 

Spinning this the best way he could for Israel, the Guardian’s veteran foreign affairs correspondent Peter Beaumont observed, as if he was some sort of rookie journalist: “It remained unclear on Thursday how much buy-in Smotrich has from Netanyahu and the Trump administration.”

 

“Buy-in”?! As noted, every Israeli prime minister has sought to advance E1 – Netanyahu at least as enthusiastically as the rest of them. There is nothing controversial about the E1 Plan inside Israel.

So how does all of this relate to Gaza?

 

Establishment media, including so-called liberal outlets such as the BBC and Guardian, would like you to digest the news from the West Bank and the news from Gaza as though they are happening in entirely different universes. As though what Israel does to Palestinians in Ramallah is unconnected to what it does to Palestinians in Gaza City.

 

That is patently ridiculous. The two territories, the two occupations, the two systems of apartheid, the two programmes of ethnic cleansing draw on exactly the same Israeli impulse for domination, the same Israeli desire for ethnic cleansing and colonisation, the the same racist Israeli disregard for Palestinian life.

 

Israel’s settler colonial project has been going on for decades. All too obviously, the West Bank and Gaza are only separate territories – disconnected parts of the same Palestinian homeland – because Israel enforced their separation.

 

All Israeli leaders have signed up to the same settler-colonial programme that requires the removal and replacement of the Palestinian people. In Gaza, that removal is being carried out to a tight deadline and has required an overt genocide. In the West Bank, it is – for the time being, at least – being carried out more by stealth, more incrementally, more obliquely.

 

But the intended fate of the people in the West Bank is ultimately no different from the fate of the people in Gaza – unless we in the West stop it by refusing to remain silent about what is happening.

E1 is the last phase in an apartheid system made concrete by Israel in the form of the checkpoints and walls it has built across the West Bank. E1 is that territory’s version of the military cage Israel built around Gaza in the early 1990s, when the E1 Plan was first on the drawing board. It will create the conditions for an intensified blockade of the West Bank, in the same way that the cage around Gaza made possible the siege of Gaza that began in 2007.

 

We know where Gaza’s siege led: to years of different forms of Palestinian revolt, including

non-violent protests at the perimeter of their cage. Ultimately it led to Hamas’ break-out on 7 October 2007, and Israel’s genocidal response.

 

When we continue to do nothing to stop the Gaza genocide, or actively assist it as our governments have been doing for the past two years, Israel feels more emboldened. Our complicity in Gaza is precisely why Israel is dusting off the E1 Plan for the West Bank now.

 

Israel will continue intensifying its oppression there until it creates conditions for open revolt, as it earlier did in Gaza. Israel will seize such a revolt, as it did in Gaza, as the pretext for committing a second genocide – this time in the West Bank.

 

We know what is coming. The question is: Have we learnt anything? This time, will we act?

"The goal was clear: to make Gaza entirely dependent on Israel's goodwill, of which there was almost none, and at the same time utterly dependent on aid. In tandem, Israel started waging a deceitful campaign claiming UN aid organisations were linked to Hamas "terror" in the hope it could use this as a rationalisation for impeding aid, as it has done with great ferocity " It was a genocide in Gaza from day one. Here's why- Here is a brief outline of some of the most pertinent factors by Jonathan Cook

 "1. In early 2008 – that is, 17 years ago – deputy defence minister Matan Vilnai, a former senior Israeli general, threatened that Gaza would face a "Shoah" – a word until then, strictly reserved for the Holocaust.

2. He did so shortly after Israel implemented what would become a near two-decade siege of Gaza. Israel had already surrounded the enclave with a heavily militarised fence, made its territorial waters off-limits, and bombed its only airport. From then on, food was tightly rationed, or what Israeli leaders called “ putting Gaza on a diet”, while swaths of the enclave were intermittently destroyed by Israeli bombing, or what Israeli leaders called “mowing the lawn”. Gaza was effectively turned into a

concentration camp

3. The siege was complemented by Israel's gradual destruction of Gaza's means of self-sufficiency: any fishing off its coast was stopped; Israel regularly sprayed herbicide on the enclave’s agricultural land; Israel eradicated Gaza's industrial sector by making exports almost impossible; and Israel regularly bombed Gaza's electricity and desalination plants, limiting the essentials of water and power.

 

4. The goal was clear: to make Gaza entirely dependent on Israel's goodwill, of which there was almost none, and at the same time utterly dependent on aid. In tandem, Israel started waging a deceitful campaign claiming UN aid organisations were linked to Hamas "terror" in the hope it could use this as a rationalisation for impeding aid, as it has done with great ferocity since 7 October 2023, and ultimately for taking over for itself all aid provision, as it has also managed to do in recent months with the creation of an Israeli-US front group, the “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation”.

 

5. With this as the background, the United Nations warned a decade ago that Gaza was likely to become uninhabitable by 2020. That was a major reason why Palestinians began mass protests at their concentration camp fence in 2018, which Israel responded to with lethal live fire. 

 

In one article in the Israeli media at the time, IDF snipers boasted about shooting “ 42 knees in one day”. Hundreds were killed and many thousands crippled as a result. Those same snipers are currently shooting children in the head, abdomen and testicles, as British surgeon Nick Maynard, who is volunteering in Gaza, has warned Let us note too that Israel’s almost complete, and malevolent, control over Gaza – and the fact that the world had lost interest in the enclave’s desperate plight – was a major factor in Hamas and other groups launching their lethal break-out on 7 October 2023.

 

5. In parallel to all this, and starting in 2007, Israel persuaded the US to join it in a pressure campaign on Egypt: to open its single, short border with Gaza so that the enclave’s people would flood into Sinai – an act of ethnic cleansing and a blatant violation of international law. Egypt refused to submit before 7 October 2023, and has continued to do so since.

 

In fact, forcibly removing a group from their homes through violence and by making life impossible for them where they live itself meets the legal definition of genocide – all the more obviously so if those doing the forcible removal say that is what they are doing, as Israeli leaders have been stating from the start of their genocidal slaughter and starvation campaign in Gaza.

 

Israel is committing a genocide to force Egypt and the Arab world to take the people of Gaza as refugees. If they refuse, Israel will continue with the genocide by killing more of Gaza’s people. If they relent, Israel will continue the genocide by dispersing what’s left of the people of Gaza to the far corners of the world. 

 

Either way, it is genocide. Either way, it must be stopped – now."

 

https://x.com/Jonathan_K_Cook/status/1948696269448196337 

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Jonathan Cook: Thirty years of Middle East lies just keep coming back to haunt us- The West’s ‘war on terror’ was built on a series of deceptions to persuade us that our leaders were crushing Islamist extremism. In truth, they were nourishing it

Gaza- Palestinian refugees

January 30 2025

The story: Did you believe it 30 years ago when they told you that the Oslo Accords would bring peace to the Middle East? That Israel would finally withdraw from the Palestinian territories it had illegally occupied for decades, end its brutal repression of the Palestinian people, and allow a Palestinian state to be created there? That the longest runing sore for the Arab and Muslim worlds would finally be brought to an end?

The reality: In fact, during the Oslo period, Israel stole more Palestinian land and expanded the building of illegal Jewish settlements at the fastest rate ever. Israel became even more repressive, building prison walls around Gaza and the West Bank while continuing to aggressively occupy both. Ehud Barak, Israeli prime minister of the time, “blew up” – in the words of one of his own main advisers – the US-backed negotiations at Camp David in 2000.

Weeks later, with the occupied Palestinian territories seething, opposition leader Ariel Sharon, backed by 1,000 armed Israeli troops, invaded occupied Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque – one of the holiest places for Muslims in the world. It was the final straw, triggering an uprising by Palestinians that Israel would crush with devastating military force and thereby tip the scales of popular support from the secular Fatah leadership to the Islamic resistance group Hamas.

Further afield, Israel’s ever-more abusive treatment of the Palestinians and its gradual takeover of al-Aqsa – backed by the West – served only to further radicalise the jihadist group al-Qaeda, providing the public rationale for attacking New York’s Twin Towers in 2001.... READ MORE  https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2025-01-30/gaza-middle-east-lies/

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Israel kills the journalists. Western media kills the truth of genocide in Gaza: Western publics are being subjected to a campaign of psychological warfare, where genocide is classed as ‘self-defence’ and opposition to it ‘terrorism’

Children who were injured during an Israeli attack in the Jabalia refugee camp await treatment at Al-Ahli Arab hospital on 21 October 2024 (AFP)

 

"Doubtless some Nazi concentration camp guards committed suicide in the 1940s after witnessing the horrors there – because they were responsible for them. Only in some weird parallel news universe would their "psychological burden" be the story. "

"The echoes from history are apparently entirely lost on officials: the UK is once again associating the Mandela family with terrorism. Before it was to protect South Africa’s apartheid regime. Now it is to protect Israel’s even worse apartheid and genocidal regime." 

 Jonathan Cook

25 October 2024 14:31 

 

Israel knew that, if it could stop foreign correspondents from reporting directly from Gaza, those journalists would end up covering events in ways far more to its liking. 

They would hedge every report of a new Israeli atrocity – if they covered them at all – with a "Hamas claims" or "Gaza family members allege". Everything would be presented in terms of conflicting narratives rather than witnessed facts. Audiences would feel uncertain, hesitant, detached.

Israel could shroud its slaughter in a fog of confusion and disputation. The natural revulsion evoked by a genocide would be tempered and attenuated. 

For a year, the global networks’ most experienced war reporters have stayed put in their hotels in Israel, watching Gaza from afar. Their human-interest stories, always at the heart of war reporting, have focused on the far more limited suffering of Israelis than the vast catastrophe unfolding for Palestinians.... READ MORE   https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/gaza-israel-kills-journalists-western-media-killing-truth-genocide

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Israel just keeps widening the circle of 'terrorists': from Hamas to the entire Palestinian people, to the United Nations, to the International Court of Justice, to the International Criminal Court.

The question you should be asking is: How long before I'm declared a terrorist?    Jonathan Cook

Israel rescues 4 hostages today - headlines world wide celebrate this... meanwhile Palestinian prisoners- hostages of Israel- are being raped: Since the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory in 1967, more than 800,000 Palestinians [including children] have been detained under Israeli military orders in the occupied Palestinian territory

June 2024: A massive demonstration took place in London to support the Palestinian people and condemn the brutal Israeli massacre in the Al-Nusairat refugee camp.

Omar Baddar عمر بدّار

@OmarBaddar

The Israeli military has now rescued a total of 7, & killed 70 of their own hostages. Their kill-to-rescue ratio stands at 10:1. You can only deem this a success if you share the Israeli government’s view that the destruction of Gaza is worth more than the lives of hostages.

 

Gaza June 2024: Part of the massive destruction in the Nuseirat camp in the central Gaza Strip has been caused by Israel's massacre and unprecedented bombing.

 

 

Did you know that as of August 2017, there were more than 6,000 Palestinian political prisoners held in Israeli jails?

Jonathan Cook

@Jonathan_K_Cook

Buried at the end of a long, 3,800-word New York Times article on Israel's secret torture prison are details that Palestinian inmates are being raped.

 

 To continue the Gaza genocide, Israel and the US must destroy the laws of war.   

 

An Israeli army battle tank operates in southern Israel near the border with the Gaza Strip on May 29, 2024-afp

The world's two highest courts have made an implacable enemy of Israel in trying to uphold international law and end Israeli atrocities in Gaza.

Separate announcements last week by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC) should have forced Israel on to the back foot in Gaza.

A panel of judges at the ICJ – sometimes known as the World Court – demanded last Friday that Israel immediately stop its current offensive on Rafah, in southern Gaza. 

Instead, Israel responded by intensifying its atrocities.

On Sunday, it bombed a supposedly "safe zone" crowded with refugee families forced to flee from the rest of Gaza, which has been devastated by Israel’s rampage for the past eight months. 

The air strike set fire to an area crammed with tents, killing dozens of Palestinians, many of whom burnt alive. A video shows a man holding aloft a baby beheaded by the Israeli blast.

Hundreds more, many of them women and children, suffered serious injuries, including horrifying burns. 

Israel has destroyed almost all of the medical facilities that could treat Rafah's wounded, as well as denying entry to basic medical supplies such as painkillers that could ease their torment... READ MORE  https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/gaza-genocide-continue-israel-us-must-destroy-laws-war

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If Americans Knew

Political Prisoners in Israel/Palestine

103 Israelis are possibly being held prisoner by Palestinians, while 9,000 are currently imprisoned by Israel.

Number of Political Prisoners Currently Being Held

103 Israelis (one, a Bedouin Muslim) are being held prisoner by Palestinians, while 9,000 Palestinians are currently imprisoned by Israel. (View Sources & More Information)

“Since the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory in 1967, more than 800,000 Palestinians have been detained under Israeli military orders in the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt). This number constitutes approximately 20 percent of the total Palestinian population in the oPt and as much as 40 percent of the total male Palestinian population… 8,000 Palestinian children have been arrested since 2000.”

– Addameer

 

Euro-Med Monitor

@EuroMedHR

#Infographic| Based on 100 testimonies of released Palestinian detainees from #Gaza, Euro-Med Monitor documents 42 forms of torture and inhumane and degrading treatment in Israeli prisons and detention centers. Full report https://euromedmonitor.org/en/article/6342