No end to Israeli impunity in ‘might makes right’ world
What does it take to get Gaza out of the headlines and enable the genocide to continue once a ‘ceasefire’ has been declared?
Kill seven Palestinians a day, instead of the 90 per day that was the average body count of the previous two years. Insist the Israeli army is acting against ‘terrorists’ when it slaughters Palestinians, including children and a 70-year-old woman chased and annihilated by a drone, who approach or cross the shifting ‘yellow line’ that puts some 58 percent of Gaza’s territory in Israel’s hands. Israel’s military chief Gen. Eyal Zamir has declared this moveable boundary to be its ‘new border line.’
Maintain the pressure on Palestinian journalists — 29 of whom were killed by Israeli forces in 2025 alone — and Jewish Israeli journalists who engage in critical reporting. Refuse to allow foreign journalists to enter the Gaza Strip.
Intensify pressure on social media and news channels to block ‘anti-Israel’ stories. For the longer term, rely on a pro-Israel billionaire, Larry Ellison – on whose privately-owned Hawaiian island Netanyahu has vacationed – and other members of the Ellison family to create “a pro-Israel information empire with unprecedented reach.” Genocide can even be turned into a game and opportunity to make (or lose) money, as the gambling app Kalshi (in partnership with CNN) and Peter Thiel’s Polymarket are both doing.
No relief from deadly conditions
Some scenes from the Gaza Strip — a splendid mass wedding and determined students studying amid the ruins — seem harbingers of a better tomorrow. But lethal acute malnutrition still afflicts small children as an average of 140 aid trucks per day, not the 600 specified by the ceasefire agreement, have been permitted by Israel to enter Gaza in December. Many of them carry expensive commercial products which few people in Gaza can afford while sufficient supplies of nutritious food, fuel, water are barred entry. Many families are still eating only one meal a day and the number of newborns that die at birth is 75 percent higher than the pre-war figure.
OCHA reports that there are now 942 ‘active displacement sites’ where 1.5 million people are living among mountains of garbage, rivers of sewage and insufficient supplies of clean drinking water. Israel has only permitted the entry of about 40,000 tents when shelter for at least 300,000 people is urgently needed. The British foreign secretary condemned Israel’s year-long delay in allowing in the thousand tents provided by the UK. When the tents finally began to be distributed on Dec. 8, a catastrophic winter storm was bearing down on the Gaza Strip. Between Dec. 10 and Dec.12 the powerful winds of ‘Storm Byron’ ripped makeshift shelters to shreds and tents were flooded with up to a foot of frigid water. Buildings collapsed and some 27,000 tents were destroyed or swept away. In a 24-hour period 13 people perished, among them two infants and a nine-year-old girl who died of hypothermia.
According the Ministry of Health, Israel is still preventing the entry of doctors, medication and hospital equipment such as generators, lab equipment, operating room equipment, incubators, intensive care units and supplies of antibiotics and IV solutions. The UN said bottles for baby formula and syringes to vaccinate children were being barred as ‘dual use’ items.
Under the fraudulent ‘ceasefire’ the casualty toll continues to rise, with over 386 killed (about 140 of them children) and nearly one thousand wounded in 738 ‘ceasefire’ violations between Oct. 11 and Dec. 10. This brings the official death tally since Oct. 7, 2023 to more than 70,654 and the number of injured to over 171,000. On Dec. 7, three-year-old Ahed Tareq al-Bayouk was among those killed by soldiers as she was playing near the family tent in an encampment far from the ‘yellow line’.
On Dec. 3, Israel announced that it would soon re-open the Rafah crossing. It did not outline the paperwork and payment that would be demanded from those desperate for medical treatment and others who want to leave. Contradicting the Trump 20-point plan that stipulated that people should be able to leave and then return, Israel said it was for one-way traffic only.
As Guardian journalist Owen Jones pointed out the following day, “Israel has inflicted apocalyptic carnage on Gaza and made it deliberately uninhabitable….You can now bet on Polymarket as to whether there will be a ‘Gaza mass population relocation’ by the end of this year.”
On Dec. 5, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Türkiye, Indonesia, Pakistan, Qatar, and the UAE issued a statement underscoring “their absolute rejection of any attempts to expel the Palestinian people from their land” and emphasizing “the importance of moving forward with the full implementation of the ‘Trump Plan’ without delay or obstruction.”
Stumbling towards the Trump plan’s second phase
Moving forward without delay is unlikely to happen. The body of hostage Ran Gvili has not yet been returned to Israel and until that is done, Israel insists that phase one will not be complete. While attention is focused on Gvili’s remains, a CNN investigation revealed that soldiers used bulldozers to plough Palestinian bodies into the ground, leaving some to be eaten by dogs.
Things are not going smoothly in the US-run Civilian-Military Coordination Center (CMCC) in southern Israel from which, thanks to Israeli pressure, Palestinians along with some senior European diplomats working with the Palestinian Authority have been excluded. One diplomat said that “in the first two weeks, we saw openness from the Americans to acquire knowledge, since many of them didn’t know much about Gaza or the Palestinians….Since then, Israel’s influence over the center has grown.” The Dec 8th Guardian reported that Israel is conducting “widespread surveillance” of meetings that take place at the CMCC, which “has the feel of a dystopian startup.”
What to do about Hamas? Israeli officials have had to admit that Hamas “wasn’t defeated” and is re-establishing its power west of the ‘yellow line’. The slaying of Yasser Al-Shabab, the head of the Israeli-backed militia that it had groomed to take on the fight against Hamas, has further complicated Israel’s plans for the ‘day after.’ The confusion over the mandate and rules of engagement for the as-yet-unformed International Stabilization Force (ISF) was fully visible at the Dec. 7 Doha Forum, where Muslim countries expressed their reluctance to join the ISF if their main task was the disarming of Hamas. On Dec. 6 Hamas had said it would relinquish its arms to a Palestinian governing body if there were guarantees for a full Israeli withdrawalfrom Gaza and a path was cleared for establishing a Palestinian state.
According to unnamed officials, Trump had hoped to announce the composition of the new governing body for Gaza and the Board of Peace before Christmas, but that announcement could be postponed. One decision that seems to have been made is that the former British prime minister and Quartet member Tony Blair will not as previously announced serve on the Trump-headed Board of Peace.
Amos Harel in the Dec. 9th Haaretz reported that “an agreement has been reached on members of the technocratic government, and even though this won’t be said officially, it will include people connected to Hamas and to the Palestinian Authority and its ruling Fatah party.” Netanyahu may push back against this ‘agreement’ when he visits Trump at Mar-a-Lago on Dec. 29.
Supercharging the West Bank land grab
“An unprecedented allocation” of some $843 million (2.7 billion shekels) over a five-year period has been made by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich to expand settlements and buttress “all elements that strengthen Israeli governance,” according to the Dec. 8th Yedioth Ahronoth.
There are funds for extensive settlement building and security systems, for new access roads, for transferring army bases to the north of the territory, and for the creation of a West Bank land registration unit to ‘legalize’ the seizure of Palestinian land. While Smotrich expressed his pride in leading a “revolution that cancels the idea of dividing the land and establishing a terrorist state,” the International Middle East Media Center denounced his plan as “a blueprint for permanent colonization and annexation.”
The Israeli organization Peace Now is scathing about the plan, accusing the army of turning soldiers “into enablers of extremism.” The Dec. 10th Drop Site News details how “an integrated web of civilians and soldiers” is structured and armed “to attack and terrorize Palestinians in the West Bank.” The government is also beginning to build a 300 mile barrier from the Golan Heights to Eilat to further fragment Palestinian communities and accelerate the ethnic cleansing of the Jordan Valley. Israel, in Yedioth Ahronoth’s words, is “creating a reality future government will struggle to reverse.”
In what Drop Site News calls “a major expansion of state-backed propaganda,” Smotrich has set aside in the 2026 budget $750 million to fund social media campaigns and international media and political operations. The extreme brutality meted out by settlers that is featured in this harrowing +973 Magazine piece might be prevented from reaching international audiences in the future.
No stopping Israel’s war machine
Both Lebanon and Syria are being subjected to deadly Israeli military operations and occupation methods that are routine in the West Bank: night raids, land seizures, widespread arrests and beatings of people who appear ‘suspicious’. Despite this, nations that had initiated partial arms embargos against Israel when Gaza was in the headlines are now showing considerable interest in Israel’s ‘tested in Gaza’ technology. For instance, Germany ended its arms restrictions in late November and is one of the countries that recently signed contractswith Israel’s arms industry worth many billions of dollars.
If the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act passes both Houses of Congress Israel may not have to worry about future arms embargoes. A provision in its 3,000 pages stipulates that US officials assess how arms boycotts impact Israel’s arsenal and are prepared “to address defense capability gaps.” By keeping the weapons flowing, the US could defy majority sentiment not just in this country, but in the wider world as well.
Nancy Murray, Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine