Illustration of Humpty Dumpty from Through the Looking Glass, by John Tenniel, 1871.

—Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

Not for the first time in the last 18 months, recent events in the Middle East and the United States have had me marvelling at the shiftiness of words.

On Saturday, March 15, three days before Donald Trump’s promised all hell once again broke loose in Gaza, I read in the Guardian that:

If conducting “an intensifying series of airstrikes that have killed dozens of Palestinians” is not a “return to war,” I exploded, then what was it?

The “ceasefire agreement” was announced on January 15—just in time for Donald Trump’s inauguration—and came into operation four days later. It was a funny sort of ceasefire. Hamas kept its side of the bargain and didn’t fire a single rocket into Israel during the truce. But between January 22 and March 11 at least 700 Palestinians were killed by the IDF or their bodies retrieved from areas medics could not access before.

Just one Israeli was killed in Gaza during that same period, a contractor Israeli forces “misidentified as [a] threat as he arrived at IDF post in civilian clothing” and shot.

Israel also failed to withdraw its troops from the so-called Philadelphi Corridor between Gaza and Egypt, as promised in the agreement. Instead of moving on to Phase 2 of the ceasefire, it demanded that Hamas accept a new proposal from Donald Trump’s special Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff to prolong Phase 1 through Ramadan and Passover in exchange for immediate release of half of Hamas’s remaining hostages, but with no guarantee that Israel would implement the already agreed terms of Phase 2 thereafter.

Hamas’s reluctance to accept this unilateral shifting of the goalposts was what the Guardian meant when it spoke of Hamas “hardening its negotiating positions.”

Although the agreement mandated the provision of humanitarian aid to Gaza, Israel obstructed the delivery of tents, prefabricated homes, and heavy machinery into the strip, where over 90 percent of the population have been (to use the media’s favoured euphemism) “displaced” and are attempting to survive the winter in the bombed-out hellscape in which their homes have been reduced to piles of rubble. While for a time Israel did allow the flow of food aid to increase, it continued to block everything else it considered “dual use,” from scalpels and scissors to scaffolding and generators.

On March 2 the Israeli government went further and decided “to prevent any entry of goods and supplies into Gaza”—whether from aid agencies or commercial sources—in order to pressurize Hamas to accept the Witkoff proposal. Since that date, no trucks have been allowed through the Gaza crossings, all of which Israel controls.

Tightening the screw, a week later Israel cut off all remaining electricity supplies (most had already been stopped after Hamas’s attacks on October 7, 2023), crippling the desalination plant that supplies Gaza’s already depleted supply of clean drinking water.

This reimposition of seige conditions on Gaza’s desperate civilian population was widely condemned internationally—though not, needless to say, by the United States. The foreign ministers of France, Germany, and the UK issued a joint statement warning that “Humanitarian aid should never be contingent on a ceasefire or used as a political tool.”

Britain’s Foreign Secretary David Lammy, normally a staunch defender of Israel, went so far as to tell the House of Commons on March 17 “This is a breach of international law.”

Prime Minister Keir Starmer soon slapped him down. A Downing Street spokesperson later clarified that in Britain’s view “Israel’s actions in Gaza are at clear risk of breaching international humanitarian law,” without accusing Israel of actually having done so. They added: “The government is not an international court, and … it is up to courts to make judgments.”

They neglected to mention that the world’s two highest courts, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC) have both (severally) ruled that Israel is in flagrant breach of international humanitarian law.

Four months ago the ICC issued an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including “the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare.” The indictment states:

These are the very things Israel resumed doing while the ceasefire was still in operation.

Two days after the ceasefire went into effect in Gaza, the IDF launched a major offensive in the occupied West Bank, attacking Jenin, Tulkarem and Nur al-Shams refugee camps and “displacing” 40,000 residents. Israeli defence minister Israel Katz told the troops to prepare for an “extended stay” of at least a year and “prevent the return of residents.”

Per UNRWA, this is “by far the single longest Israeli Forces’ operation in the West Bank since the second intifada in the early 2000s … causing the largest population displacement since the 1967 war.” As of March 4, 90 Palestinians, including at least 17 children, had been killed in the West Bank since the beginning of this year.

While for the Guardian all this still did not........

© Canadian Dimension