The Israeli government was already deliberately starving the population of Gaza with their blockade, and now they have resumed intense bombing:
Israel’s military launched a large-scale bombing campaign on the Gaza Strip early Tuesday, breaking the fragile ceasefire with Hamas that has been in place since late January. At least 404 people have been killed, with 562 injured, Gaza’s Health Ministry said.
The Trump administration was in a position to prevent this, but they have done everything they could to undermine the ceasefire and ensure that it collapsed. The Netanyahu government was never going to end the war in the absence of significant pressure from Washington, and there has been no pressure from Washington in recent weeks. Trump repeatedly signaled that he would back whatever Netanyahu wanted to do, and he and Rubio kept the weapons flowing.
Trump’s unhinged, genocidal threat against the people of Gaza confirmed that he couldn’t care less what Israel did to them. The president reportedly “green-lit” the resumption of the war this week. The president fully owns the war in Gaza, and he is the one enabling the genocide now.
There will probably be lots of attempts to spin Israel’s wrecking of the ceasefire, so we need to understand that this is something that Netanyahu and his allies chose to do. They were not forced into doing it. Amos Harel writes in Haaretz:
There’s no other way to explain it: Israel knowingly violated the cease-fire agreement with Hamas – with American approval – because it didn’t want to fully meet the terms it had committed to two months ago.
Trump was never likely to apply the pressure required to make the Israeli government honor its commitments. Instead he talked about seizing Gaza and expelling the population. Just like Biden, he refused to use the considerable leverage that the U.S. has to bring an end to the war. Just as he has done with the other wars he has inherited, he chose escalation.
Read the rest of the article at Eunomia
Daniel Larison is a contributing editor for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.
