Continued murderous Israeli oppression in Gaza
All the excitement over the Epstein revelations seems to have fairly and squarely diverted attention from the situation in Gaza and the broader Middle East where Israeli expansionism and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians has been proceeding remorselessly, despite the fact that in theory a ceasefire is in place in Gaza. If it is in fact true that Epstein was a Mossad agent, as is being suggested in numerous quarters, then he must be laughing in his grave (assuming that is where he is) at how fantastically the diversionary tactic has worked out for Israel.
While the kill rate in Gaza, that stood at an average of 100 Palestinians a day from the start of the Israeli offensive until the ceasefire took effect, has dropped to a mere 32 or so a week, it is still the case that over 600 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since the ceasefire took effect and some 1600 injured. Bombings and gunfire on the part of the Israelis are a daily occurrence, and indeed hardly a day has gone by without Israel having committed serious breaches of the ceasefire agreement, while on the Palestinian side the terms, though unjust, have been scrupulously observed. The IDF is still occupying a ‘buffer zone’ that comprises over half of Gaza’s territory and contains most of its agricultural land. It is a no-go zone for Palestinians, so that any farmer who tries to return to his farmland to try to put it back into a cultivable state is risking his life.
Since Israel has destroyed almost all Gaza’s medical facilities and caused grievous injuries to many Palestinians through bombing and starvation, there are tens of thousands who need urgent medical attention. The Rafah crossing has been reluctantly reopened by the Israelis, but they remain in control of who passes through in either direction and, of the many thousands seeking urgent medical attention, only a handful have been allowed to pass. In the other direction, Palestinians trying to return home to see their families have been interrogated for hours, often handcuffed, blindfolded and abused.
Gaza is equivalent in size to the state of New Jersey (though New Jersey has nearly 5 times the population). What would be the uproar if 600 residents of New Jersey had met a violent death at the hands of the Israelis (or anyone else) in the 19 weeks from the start of the ceasefire to the present? And how great would be the indignation to learn that virtually all the residents had been rendered homeless by forced displacement and the blowing up of their homes, only to be left freezing in tents during the harsh winter weather, with the entry of supplies of caravans, prefabs and other temporary shelters offered by humanitarian sources being severely restricted by the occupying authority? And that the entry of medical supplies to support the starving, freezing population were being severely restricted? There would be an uproar that no dirty scandal among the rich and powerful could hide. But the misery being imposed by the ongoing siege of Gaza is being hidden.
And it’s not just Gaza.
Escalating Israeli crimes in West Bank and Jerusalem
Israel has stepped up its ethnic-cleansing measures also in the West Bank and among Arabs who hold Israeli citizenship – those whose ancestors were not successfully purged by the original Nakba genocide.
According to the United Nations Relief Co-ordination Office on 5 December 2025, “Between 25 November and 1 December [2025], four Palestinians, includingone child, were killed by Israeli forces, bringing the total number of Palestinians killed in the West Bank so far this year to 227.
“Nearly half of all fatalities in 2025 were recorded in the Jenin and Nablus governorates.
“Large-scale operations in Jenin and Tubas governorates alone affected more than 95,000 Palestinians last week.
“In Tubas, wide-ranging raids, curfews and bulldozer activity caused extensive damage to homes, roads and water networks, displacing families and cutting water supplies to nearly 17,000 people.
“Settler violence has also remained at high levels. So far this year, OCHA [United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs] documented 1,680 settler attacks across more than 270 communities – an average of five per day – with the current olive harvest season marked by widespread assaults on farmers, trees and agricultural infrastructure”. This violence has not abated since this report was made.
This represents an escalation of the persecution of West Bank Palestinians that had already reached record levels from the time Israel first launched its Gaza genocide: “Since the Gaza war began through the end of 2025, Israel has taken control of about 58,000 dunams (14,332 acres) of West Bank land, either by declaring it state land or allocating it for settlement and military purposes, according to data from the Wall and Settlement Resistance Commission” (Awad Rjoob, ‘What “State property” means in Israel’s expansion of West Bank control’, Anadolu, 16 February 2026).
And in mid-February the Israeli cabinet approved a plan to claim Palestinian lands in the West Bank as “state land”… All the land from which Palestinians have been driven out, however recently, will be subject to registration, which amounts in practice to confiscation by the Israeli state:
Under the Oslo Accords, the West Bank was carved into Areas A, B and C as an “interim” arrangement that was never meant to become permanent. Area C, the largest area containing the most land and resources, remained under full Israeli control while Areas A and B were left as fragmented Palestinian islands with limited Palestinian authority.
“As part of the new policy, land registration in Area C, which constitutes more than 62 percent of the West Bank, is to take place through the Land Title Settlement Administration, part of Israel’s Ministry of Justice. What this in effect does is shift Area C from military administration into direct Israeli civilian governance…
“Lands that did not have Palestinians physically present on them were absorbed through the Absentees Property Law.
“A similar dynamic is unfolding today in the West Bank, where physical displacement and restricted access are again being converted into legal dispossession. In the West Bank, the last two years have seen alarming rates of settler violence that have pushed thousands of Palestinians off their lands while other areas have been taken and declared closed military zones. This denied Palestinians access to their homes, farmlands and properties. Under Israeli law, these can all be considered absentee lands, even if their rightful owners are just a few metres away and unable to reach their lands due to Israeli hostilities…” (Mariam Barghouti, ‘The West Bank and the death of the Oslo Accords’, Al Jazeera, 19 February 2026).
Through this new land registration drive, Israel is trying to secure through paperwork what warfare alone has failed to deliver. It seeks to present the world with an ethnically cleansed Palestine as a fait accompli. All that stands in its way is the resistance of the Palestinian people themselves, and their regional and global supporters.
According to a UNHR Press Release of 18 February, “The decision by Israel’s security cabinet to expand land expropriation in the occupied West Bank will consolidate annexation, may amount to aggression under international law and will further entrench an occupation ruled illegal by the world’s highest court, a UN expert warned today.
“’These measures are not routine administrative adjustments. They are deliberate, incremental steps toward permanent annexation, advanced piece by piece, in broad daylight, and with total impunity,’ said Francesca Albanese, the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967…
“Albanese warned that the annexation of occupied territory is categorically prohibited under international law, and violates Article 2(4) of the UN Charter, the Fourth Geneva Convention, and the foundational principle that territory may not be acquired by force…”
Albanese has, of course, faced economic sanctions from the US State Department – an authority unchallengeable by any process of law – despite her Italian citizenship and United Nations position.
Marco Rubio posted the following official statement on the US government website on 9 July 2025: “Today, I am imposing sanctions on Francesca Paola Albanese, the United Nations Human Rights Council ‘Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories Occupied since 1967,’ pursuant to President Trump’s Executive Order 14203, ‘Imposing Sanctions on the International Criminal Court.’ Albanese has directly engaged with the International Criminal Court (ICC) in efforts to investigate, arrest, detain, or prosecute nationals of the United States or Israel, without the consent of those two countries. Neither the United States nor Israel is party to the Rome Statute, making this action a gross infringement on the sovereignty of both countries.
“The United States has repeatedly condemned and objected to the biased and malicious activities of Albanese that have long made her unfit for service as a Special Rapporteur. Albanese has spewed unabashed antisemitism, expressed support for terrorism, and open contempt for the United States, Israel, and the West. That bias has been apparent across the span of her career, including recommending that the ICC, without a legitimate basis, issue arrest warrants targeting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.
“She has recently escalated this effort by writing threatening letters to dozens of entities worldwide, including major American companies across finance, technology, defense, energy, and hospitality, making extreme and unfounded accusations and recommending the ICC pursue investigations and prosecutions of these companies and their executives. We will not tolerate these campaigns of political and economic warfare, which threaten our national interests and sovereignty.
“The United States will continue to take whatever actions we deem necessary to respond to lawfare, to check and prevent illegitimate ICC overreach and abuse of power, and to protect our sovereignty and that of our allies.
“Albanese is being designated pursuant to Section 1(a)(ii)(A) of Executive Order (E.O.) 14203.”
However, that is just one in a long list of breaches of international law committed by Israel – breaches tolerated and even encouraged by Israel’s imperialist masters in the US and Europe.
The fact that any UN body dares to raise such an issue demonstrates to US imperialism that the UN is not fit for purpose and needs to be fundamentally reformed or, better still, replaced. We will return to this topic in connection with Trump’s so-called Board of Peace, which may turn out to be less of a joke than it at present appears to be.
To further make life impossible for Palestinians in the West Bank, Israel has been purloining their tax revenue, seizing around 70% of Palestinian revenues, exacerbating the fiscal deficit and undermining the government’s ability to meet its obligations, foremost among them paying salaries and providing basic services.
In addition, Israel has since the start of the Gaza war arrested (interned, detained, illegally imprisoned, held hostage) no fewer than 22,000 people in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, a record even for them. This is particularly egregious, and scarcely mentioned by our press, when they relentlessly spewed bile about ‘Israeli hostages’ being justification for the US-UK-Israeli genocide.
Besides its general assault on West Bank Palestinians, Israel is renewing its takeover plans for the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. This year Ramadan started on 17 February, a signal for Israel to violate a six-decade agreement governing Muslim and Jewish prayer at Jerusalem’s most sensitive holy site. The Guardian of 20 February informs us: “A series of arrests of Muslim caretaker staff, bans on access for hundreds of Muslims, and escalating incursions by radical Jewish groups culminated this week in the arrest of an imam of al-Aqsa mosque and an Israeli police raid during evening prayers on the first night of Ramadan…
“In the run-up to Ramadan this year, the Jerusalem Waqf, the Jordanian-appointed foundation charged with managing al-Aqsa’s site as part of the status quo agreement, has come under increasing pressure. Waqf sources said five of its staff had been put in administrative detention (detention without charge) this week by the Shin Bet, while 38 staff members had been banned from entering the site. Six imams from the mosque had also been denied entrance, they said.
“They said six Waqf offices had been ransacked in recent weeks and the staff prevented from rehanging doors or doing other repairs. The Waqf has been prevented from installing sun and rain shelters or temporary clinics for worshippers. Officials allege they have even been prevented from bringing toilet paper on to the site” (Julian Borger and Emma Graham-Harrison, ‘“Al-Aqsa is a detonator”: six-decade agreement on prayer at Jerusalem holy site collapses’).
Expansion into Lebanon and Syria
While Israel continues to pursue its policies of ethnic cleansing in Palestinian areas, it has also taken advantage of the relative ‘peace’ of the ceasefire to further its expansionist plans in Lebanon and Syria. In Lebanon it has been bombing civilian areas, both from the air and, increasingly, from the sea. Its aim is clearly to drive the civilian population away from the areas in preparation for an Israeli takeover of the region. On top of that, it has been poisoning agricultural land: it has been alleged that “Thousands of hectares of agricultural land has already been destroyed, mainly using white phosphorus and tens of thousands of olive trees destroyed, the lifeblood of the south. This is all part of a broader plan; disarm the resistance, destroy civilian buildings and infrastructure, a war on construction vehicles all to make the land uninhabitable and pave the way for a Trump Economic Zone funded by the US and Gulf States [– and spoken of warmly by the old ‘new Labour’ war criminal and former British prime minister Tony Blair at the inaugural ‘Board of Peace’ meeting, held in Washington on 19 February 2026]. This sinister plan will see hundreds of thousands displaced to make way for a so-called regeneration project which is in reality a blueprint for ethnic cleansing, a Gaza 2.0.”
Meanwhile, in Syria, according to Middle East Eye “Since the fall of the Assad regime…Israeli forces have established a sustained physical presence beyond the 1974 disengagement lines.
“The Syrian state, in a period of political transition, is unable to exercise effective authority in the areas concerned.
“Most significantly, Israeli forces have demonstrated their capacity to control civilian movement, restrict access to land, conduct arrests and use lethal force.
“The classification of Israel’s actions as a de facto occupation carries concrete legal consequences, including international responsibility and accountability for violations.
“Yet the experiences of civilians – including detentions, killings, and restrictions on movement and access to land – provide concrete evidence of the exercise of authority by an occupying power, as well as of potential breaches of international humanitarian law in relation to protected persons” (Wesam Sharaf, ‘Why Israel’s expanding occupation in Syria presents a critical legal test’, 14 February 2026).
On 6 January 2026, the Israeli military destroyed the historic al-Golan hospital in Quneitra. On 20 January, the Israeli military demolished the historic al-Andalus Cinema in Quneitra and several reports documented Israeli planes this year spraying chemicals on Syrian farmland and forests in the Golan Heights, just as they have been doing in Lebanon.
The so-called Board of Peace
The United Nations Security Council on 17 November approved a ‘peace plan’ for Gaza, providing a legal UN mandate for US imperialism’s plans for the future of Gaza. The plan is intended to put imperialism in charge of the situation, which aims to stifle all Palestinian resistance to Zionist past and future takeover of their land and their lives, if possible by ‘peaceful’ means. China and Russia, who could have vetoed the Security Council’s resolution were outmanoeuvred by the US. According to Professor Marc Weller writing for Chatham House on 21 November 2025 (‘What is Security Council Resolution 2803, and what does it mean for the Trump Gaza plan?’), “The US sought to obtain the maximum international legitimacy from the UN, while trying to keep UN influence and control over the operation as small as possible…
“Washington calculated that few would want to put at risk a ceasefire that has, at least for now, largely ended the massive suffering in Gaza by delaying or even frustrating adoption of the text…
“The Russian delegation did put forward an alternative draft resolution which reflected the concerns of many other Council members. But the US deployed a counter-move, summoning the original supporters of the Trump plan from its conception in New York this September. Qatar, Egypt, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Pakistan, Jordan and Turkey supported the US draft resolution in a formal joint statement. That communique was in turn welcomed in a separate statement by the Palestinian Authority (PA).
“That manoeuvre allowed the more hesitant members of the Council to vote for the US text, despite their misgivings, arguing that they would not want to frustrate a venture that was supported by the regional states most affected by it.”
The Russians sourly commented: “Today is a sorrowful day for the Security Council,” Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, Vasily Nebenzya called the resolution “yet another pig in a poke” — something obtained without careful inspection first — and said the United States had got it through by “twisting the arms” of members of the Security Council.
Be that as it may, its passing constituted a major diplomatic victory for US imperialism, and a major defeat for the right of self-determination of the Palestinian people.
Trump wrote: “Congratulations to the World on the incredible Vote of the United Nations Security Council, just moments ago, acknowledging and endorsing the BOARD OF PEACE, which will be chaired by me, and include the most powerful and respected Leaders throughout the World.”
Thus did the so-called ‘Board of Peace’ come into being, its mission being to oversee the implementation of Trump’s 20-point ‘peace plan’ for Gaza. The composition of this Board of Peace is entirely at Trump’s discretion. Palestinians need not apply.
The first meeting of this Board of Peace took place on 19 February. Even the New York Times was not impressed:
“President Trump convened the first meeting of his new Board of Peace on Thursday, announcing $7 billion in pledges from nine member countries to rebuild Gaza while offering few details about how Hamas can be disarmed or when Israel might fully withdraw from the Palestinian territory” (Michael Crowley, ‘Trump’s Board of Peace promises billions for Gaza, with few details’).
There is no way round the sticking point that Israel will allow no rebuilding of Gaza unless and until Hamas and the rest of the resistance is disarmed, and they have no intention of disarming, at least not completely. In the interests of peace Hamas is willing to give up its long-range weaponry, but that’s not a compromise Israel is prepared to accept. There can be absolutely no doubt that the so-called Board of Peace is not going to pressurise Israel on this question.
Hamas is willing to accept the entry of Board of Peace peacekeepers from affiliated countries if it means the withdrawal of the IDF – how could any of them be any worse than the IDF? But it is not willing to disarm, and if the peacekeepers try to disarm them by force, then clearly there will be no peace! The various countries that did assure Trump that they would send troops to participate in an eventual 20,000-strong International Stabilization Force (ISF), which is intended to take over security from Hamas, are very unlikely to do so if they are expected to fight the Palestinian resistance to achieve what the IDF, with all the very best of resources at its disposal failed to achieve in more than a year of vicious assault.
However, Israel is not interested in the International Stabilization Force if it’s not going to fight, and the Palestinian resistance is not interested in it if it is. Most people think that the whole idea is dead in the water, and that it is only a matter of time before the IDF resumes its full-blown, if ill-fated, attempts to eliminate the resistance by force of imperialist arms.
Very few countries have volunteered to join the Board of Peace. Not even the UK or France, or any European country other than Hungary has put itself forward. This is not because they have had a change of heart, one assumes, but because of the sheer futility of it all. Nor are they happy about the US trumpeting that the Board of Peace can oversee the United Nations and make sure it runs properly [!] so that they can all officially become vassals of the US.
Conclusion
La lotta continua! The struggle goes on, and it will continue until justice is achieved, however long that might take. As the sheer criminality of the Israeli regime and of its imperialist backers are on the one hand worsening and on the other coming more and more to the fore so that they can no longer be ignored, the reactionaries are gradually isolating themselves, while the anti-imperialists of the world, learning from setbacks they have suffered, are getting stronger and wiser. The apartheid state of Israel, in particular, is very unlikely to be able to survive for very much longer.