Prisoner Exchanges and ‘Peace Deal’
It was with anger and sickness of heart that I watched the Israeli criminals in the Knesset yesterday applauding each other like performing seals for what seemed like an hour.
Meanwhile, devastating images of white buses bearing flags of the Red Cross snaked their way back to Gaza holding some of the 1700 released Palestinian prisoners. They travelled through a landscape of flattened rubble which must surely have had them in tears.
In Tel Aviv’s ‘Hostage Square’, other tears were simultaenously being shed for the released Israeli captives, some 20 of them.
The news broadcast returned to the Knesset and the beginning of Netanyahu’s speech. I listened for two minutes to the gloating and lies, then turned off. I cannot bear to listen to this war criminal masquerading as a politican.
Meanwhile, the Red Cross buses unloaded their human cargo and hundreds of men who had not seen their families for years or even decades embraced friends, wives and children. The painful strategy of Hamas has played out. A resolution has been accomplished. But the jets and drones still hung in the sky over ruined Gaza.
Only one thing has changed. The world sees Israel for what it is: a genocidal entity that occupies stolen land. This is the truth. No amount of clapping in the Knesset can conceal it.
Israeli plans show cunning, but they are the plans of the worst kinds of bullies and psychopaths who care not a jot for human life, not even for the lives of Israel’s captives in Gaza who have died by Israeli bullets and bombs over the past two years.
It only remained for Trump to speak, to laugh about the $21 Billion of weapons the US supplied and which the Israelis “put to good use” while smirking Jared Kushner and Witkoff sat in the wings like vultures awaiting their pickings.
The whole affair was brutally blatant. ‘Peace deal’ or not, Gaza remains the holocaust of our time, carried out by Israel, the USA’s Middle East proxy.
Jonathan Wonham (author of poetry books Ceasefire Now! and Dystopia Persecutia)