Tag: Opinions

It is hypocritical to protest Israel but be silent on Syria and Yemen | Israel-Palestine conflict

Since the October 7 pogrom by Hamas – the worst atrocity committed against Jews since the Holocaust – the world has witnessed not an outpouring of grief for the 1,200 Israelis killed, but an alarming increase in Jew-hatred.

Pro-Palestinian demonstrations have taken place on university campuses across the US, with expressions of support for Hamas seen and heard at some of these. Mob-like behaviour as well as threats against Jews have been tolerated and, in some instances, even encouraged by faculty and administrations.

I have no issue with those who call for peace – even if I believe peace between Israelis and Palestinians is further away than ever before – nor with those who lament the loss of innocent Palestinian lives, which is undoubtedly tragic. Civilians invariably pay a disproportionate price in all armed conflicts, and there were many Israeli civilians, including babies and the elderly, among those killed and kidnapped by Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other armed Palestinian groups during their barbaric attack on October 7.

Palestinian civilians have suffered since October 7 – more than 15,000 people have been killed, including more than 6,000 children. But the protests that have erupted since that day are not just about calling for peace or expressing sympathy for the loss of Palestinian lives. These protests display a fury not seen in connection with any other conflict in the recent past, even when the scale of the death and destruction in those conflicts, and the length of time they have lasted, has been far greater than that of the current war in Gaza.

Since the Syrian civil war erupted in March 2011, more than 500,000 people have been killed by the Syrian regime. The vast majority were civilians. As many as 400,000 Yemenis are believed to have died as a direct or indirect result of the war in that country, with 70 percent of those deaths being of children under the age of five. Earlier this year, 10,000 people were killed and millions were displaced as a result of ethnic violence in West Darfur.

Where were the widespread, angry university protests about the loss of innocent lives in these countries? The response to these deaths – where there has been any at all – has been far more muted. For some reason, they do not seem to evoke the same spasms of moral outrage.

I cannot escape the conclusion that this is because Israel is held to a very different standard.

As the White House Middle East envoy from 2017 to 2019, I supported Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates as they waged what I believed to be a just war against the Houthis in Yemen. They and their Yemeni allies were faced with a similar choice to that now confronting Israel – kill or be killed.

Nations must be able to protect their populations from attack. It is a tragedy that innocent people are killed in the process. The loss of innocent Palestinian lives is tragic, just as the loss of innocent Syrian lives, Yemeni lives and Darfurian lives is tragic. But we must recognise that it is Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad who brought on this tragedy.

Israel has an obligation to defend itself. Wars have terrible consequences, but just wars must be fought. I can fully support Israel’s war on Hamas, under whose brutal rule Palestinians have suffered for decades, while lamenting the loss of innocent Palestinian lives. I recognise that Israel has been left with no other choice. The only realistic solution for Israel, the Palestinians and indeed the Arab world is to uproot groups like Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis. I unequivocally defend Israel’s actions and believe that what it is doing is necessary for its survival and will make the region and the rest of the world safer.

But to those who protest against it on university campuses, I ask: Where were you when Syrians, Yemenis or Darfurians were being killed? What is it that motivates you to protest so furiously now? I think the answer can be found in the fact that anti-Semitic attacks have reached shocking levels in the US. According to the Anti-Defamation League, from October 7 until October 23, anti-Semitic incidents rose by about 400 percent compared to the same period last year. It is hatred of Jews, hatred of Israel and support for Hamas – a group designated a terrorist organisation by the US, the UK and the EU, which has vowed to destroy Israel and to repeat the atrocities of October 7 again and again – that motivates you. It is time to acknowledge and speak this truth.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

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Israel deserves every bit of the global public criticism it is receiving | Israel-Palestine conflict

The ongoing explosion in public activism in the United States and the world for a ceasefire in Gaza and equal rights for Israelis and Palestinians is a battleground as important as the military face-off over Gaza in this century-old conflict.

It reveals the eroding efficacy of traditional pro-Israel propaganda in the face of more visible and explicitly apartheid policies by Israel and widespread, technically proficient mobilisations by pro-Palestine and pro-justice movements. It also signals how people across the globe recognise the Palestinians’ suffering and their battle for national rights as among the last anti-colonial struggles in the world.

Signs of this trend were visible even before the October 7 Hamas attacks on southern Israel, in which 1,200 people were killed and about 240 taken captive. But the unprecedented and brutal Israeli counterrampage against civilians and all institutions of life in Gaza that followed — killing 15,000 people and displacing almost 80 percent of the population — has clarified Israeli policies and their long colonial vintage and turned global sentiment against Israel’s aggressions.

That public pressure in turn forced even backers of the war in the West to reluctantly push for a week’s truce and negotiated exchanges of detainees by Israel and Hamas before the fighting resumed on Friday.

Perhaps the most compelling of the political developments that are now in flux and will shape the world’s view of the war and the configuration of the region has been the steady stream of students and young professionals in the United States and beyond standing up for equal rights for both Palestinians and Israelis. They have done this through global mass actions like demonstrations, legal suits, strikes, media campaigns, and public expressions of support by athletes, artists and others in society.

Not surprisingly, this has sparked countercampaigns by pro-Israel groups in the US and globally to shut down the voices of pro-Palestine activists and to criminalise elements of Palestinian identity itself — like displaying the Palestinian flag or wearing the keffiyeh headdress.

Many public discussions and meetings on the issue have been barred, and people who express any kind of sympathy for Palestine – even if in old social media posts – have been dismissed from their jobs. The ultimate cruelty was Israel banning public shows of joy by families and communities for young Palestinian prisoners freed from Israeli jails during the truce — a ban which, unsurprisingly, most Palestinians ignored.

Many reasons explain why public sentiment in the US and globally has been shifting away from a traditional, heavily pro-Israel stance to a more even-handed position that seeks to end Israel’s occupation and military savagery against Palestinians and demand accountability and redress for the past century of Zionist settler-colonial excesses in all of historic Palestine, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. These include notably Palestinian ethnic cleansing and forced exile, refugeehood, occupation, statelessness and fragmented nationhood.

Rising public support for Palestinian rights reflects Israel’s harsh, often criminal policies, which are now visible for the whole world to see every day – including the brutality in Gaza that jurists and scholars increasingly evaluate in the context of genocide.

Partnerships stitched together by Palestinian activists with progressive groups across the world have also amplified the calls for justice.

This expanded rapidly after the Black Lives Matter movement heightened people’s awareness and focus on social justice demands that persist among subjugated and colonised people in many countries. People across the world have made the connection between history, Zionism, Israel, the Palestinians and the consequences of how the US and United Kingdom totally and enthusiastically support Israel’s actions. Most of the world that suffered and remembers the pain and ignominy of Western colonialism instinctively recognised the Palestinians’ ongoing resistance to Israel as the world’s last anti-colonial struggle and seek to support it in any way they can.

Young people and university students lead this new wave of activism for social justice because on their cell phones and computer screens they see the damage being done to people’s lives everywhere by 19th century-type colonial policies, whether against African Americans in Missouri, Palestinians in Gaza or Jenin, or ethnic minorities in other countries.

When credible reports by international groups like Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch describe Israel’s policies to control Palestinians as apartheid, the world’s conscience – led by its youth and students – kicks into action to rid us of this scourge. Equal rights for Israelis and Palestinians is their goal, as happened in South Africa after decades of nonviolent and occasional military struggle.

Not surprisingly, this global wave of activism for Palestine has elicited some wild accusations that the protests – especially in US universities — are motivated by anti-Semitism or support for Hamas. This reflects more than anything else the desperation of Zionist and pro-Israel groups who recognise and worry that their traditional propaganda in the West is flailing.

Other arguments are being made about why the global wave of action for universal social justice and ending settler-colonial occupations is not sincere. Some say that activists unfairly pick on Israel but ignore other governments that treat people harshly. Others argue that Israel treats its Palestinian citizens well because a few of them are in parliament or that Israel is a good place because it respects LGBTQ rights.

Diversionary propaganda like this will mount, but it will fail as it has been failing in recent years – because the pain, cruelty and criminality of settler-colonial apartheid grab the attention and drive the activism of all decent human beings everywhere who want to work for a better world.

Israel does have many impressive qualities in science, education, agriculture and other fields, but they are drowned out by its soul-grinding settler-colonial apartheid reality we see on television daily.

So we march in the streets for social justice and liberty for all as good people have always done to fix their world’s weaknesses and right its wrongs.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

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Kissinger: A war criminal with a Nobel Peace Prize | Opinions

“No hay mal que dure 100 anos, ni cuerpo que lo resista”, a famous saying in Spanish goes. It translates to “There is no evil which lasts 100 years, nor a body that can bear it”. The former US national security adviser and secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, may have tried to prove it wrong, making it past his 100th birthday, before finally meeting his maker six months later, on November 29.

Following his passing, there was a flood of obituaries and encomiums in media outlets around the world, some calling him “controversial”, others praising his legacy.

Amid these attempts to whitewash Kissinger’s atrocities, we must not lose track of who he really was.

This is a man, who, through his actions, was directly responsible for the murders of between three and four million people during his eight years in office between 1969 and 1977, according to Yale University historian Greg Grandin’s book Kissinger’s Shadow. The bloody policies he promoted paved the way for America’s never-ending wars in later years.

Kissinger was seen as the architect of the United States efforts to contain the Soviet Union and communist influence around the world. To achieve this, he introduced the “bombs over diplomacy” approach, pushing for some of the most brutal bombing campaigns in modern history.

This approach was first applied during the Vietnam War when the US was trying to stop communists from taking power. Kissinger, who at that time served as President Richard Nixon’s national security adviser, pushed for carpet bombing not only Vietnam itself but also neighbouring Cambodia, where both Cambodian and Vietnamese guerrillas were operating.

In 1969, the military assault was approved secretly and proceeded without Congress being informed. In declassified Pentagon reports, it was stated that Kissinger personally approved 3,875 air raids which dropped some 540,000 tonnes of bombs in Cambodia within the first year of the campaign. To this day, innocent Vietnamese and Cambodians are being killed by remaining unexploded US ordnance.

Needless to say, the carpet bombing did not stop but rather facilitated the Vietnamese and Cambodian communists taking power. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge emerged victorious in the country’s civil war and went on to commit countless atrocities, including a genocide of between 1.5 and two million people. As TV chef, Anthony Bourdain, famously wrote, “Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands”.

For his role in the war in Southeast Asia, Kissinger was abhorrently awarded the prestigious Nobel Peace Prize in 1973. A war in which he secretly helped Nixon sabotage peace talks between the US administration and Hanoi. A war, in which only regret was that he had not applied more brutal force to secure US victory.

The peace prize was a slap in the face for the victims of Kissinger’s brutality and has been yet another affirmation that the West refuses to hold its own war criminals to account.

Kissinger’s crimes stretch beyond Vietnam and Cambodia. In South Asia, worried about a Soviet-leaning India causing the collapse of Pakistan, a US ally, Kissinger gave support to Islamabad as its forces were carrying out a genocide against the Bengali population of East Pakistan, today’s Bangladesh in the early 1970s. Despite receiving multiple warnings from US diplomats about atrocities being committed, Kissinger approved shipments of weapons that perpetuated them.

In 1975, Kissinger also gave the green light for the Indonesian invasion of East Timor in order to topple the communist-leaning Fretilin government. In approving the unfolding genocide, which resulted in more than 200,000 slaughtered, Kissinger advised Suharto, “It is important that whatever you do succeeds quickly.” It is estimated that up to a fifth of the Pacific island’s population perished in the Indonesian occupation which lasted until 1999.

Throughout Latin America, right-wing forces and coup plotters could also count on Kissinger’s support. In 1973, Salvador Allende, Chile’s democratically elected president, was overthrown in a coup with full support from the US and its secretary of state. Three years later, after the army overthrew President Isabel Peron in Argentina and established military rule, Kissinger gave the green light for the horrific human rights abuses it perpetrated.

In 2016, then-US President Barack Obama expressed his regret over the US’s role in the “dirty war” in Argentina. But within two months of this shallow apology, his administration gave the chief architect of these policies a “Distinguished Public Service” award.

Kissinger also proved to be a spoiler for peace in the Middle East. He not only sabotaged proposals for a settlement between Israel and Arab states that came from Moscow, but undermined even those that came from within Washington.

While being a staunch supporter of Israel, Kissinger showed shocking disregard for Jewish life. In a conversation with Nixon, he was recorded as saying: “The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy … And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.”

After he left office as secretary of state, Kissinger did not stop pushing for death and destruction across the world in books, interviews, articles and advice to US officials.

As an Iraqi, I find the criminal role he played in the Bush administration’s decision-making in the war on Iraq, particularly disturbing. Bush leaned on him as he rolled out his “shock and awe” strategy, deciding to carpet bomb Iraqi civilians, despite the bombing campaigns failing spectacularly in Cambodia and Vietnam.

Kissinger’s advice to the president in 2006 was simple, “Victory is the only meaningful exit strategy.” So Bush resorted to a US troop surge which led to a sharp spike in the number of civilian deaths. My own family in Baghdad had their homes raided by US troops in Baghdad and many of them had to flee to neighbouring Jordan and elsewhere.

Even while living his last days (peacefully, unlike his many victims) at his home in Connecticut, Kissinger could not stop himself from promoting war. In an interview with Politico following the October 7 attack in Israel, Kissinger proclaimed full support for the brutal Israeli war on Gaza, saying: “You can’t make concessions to people who have declared and demonstrated by their actions that they cannot make peace.”

The legacy Kissinger leaves behind is truly horrific. He shaped American politics and policy-making to entrench the belief that bloody and violent imperial policies pay off, that it is OK to defend the “national interest” at the cost of millions of lives. Today – as we are witnessing in Gaza – US officials continue to be convinced that carpet bombing and mass killing of a civilian population can yield the desired political results.

If Kissinger never faced justice, can we expect Israeli officials to ever be held to account?

Indeed, the real tragedy of his life and death is that he proved the powerful can get away with killing millions and still be celebrated after peacefully passing.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

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Renewed violence in Sierra Leone is a sign of fragility, polarisation | Opinions

Two decades after the end of its deadly civil war, Sierra Leone is once again teetering on the precipice of conflict.

On November 26, gunmen attacked a military barracks and a prison in the capital, Freetown, killing at least 20 people, including 13 soldiers, and leading the authorities to declare a nationwide curfew. In an apparent attempt to downplay the severity of the threat facing the country, the government initially said the incident was just a “breach of security”. It now says it was a “failed coup attempt” which intended to “illegally subvert and overthrow a democratically elected government”.

This raises much concern in a region where progress toward democracy seems to be offset by a wave of coups – four countries in West Africa are now under military rulers who took power through coups, and apparently have no immediate plans of returning their countries to civilian rule.

The armed attack on November 26 was the second “coup attempt” Sierra Leone witnessed in the five months since the contentious June 2023 presidential election in which President Bio narrowly avoided a run-off. In August 2023, the government had arrested several individuals, including soldiers and civilians, and accused them of planning to stage a coup.

It is unclear whether the two “attempted coups” or earlier violent incidents, such as the antigovernment riots in Freetown in August 2022, which claimed over 25 lives, are in any way connected. Either way, the undeniable uptick in violence in the past few months and years reflects Sierra Leone’s persistent fragility after investing in peace and state-building projects for two decades.

Especially since the 2023 elections, the state has been showing signs of deepening fragility. The main opposition All People’s Congress (APC) party’s boycott of the government (and their seats in parliament) on the grounds that the 2023 presidential elections were “rigged” have stalled the normal functioning of government and undermined President Julius Maada Bio’s legitimacy.

The two sides eventually signed an “Agreement for National Unity” under which the APC agreed to take up their seats in parliament, yet this did not fully resolve the situation, particularly as some in the APC continued to voice their dissatisfaction with the terms of the deal.

This political impasse, worsened by a biting cost of living crisis and declining living standards, likely helped create the space for dissidents to explore opportunities for unseating the government.

No organised political group has claimed responsibility for or been linked to the attack on November 26, or the alleged coup plot in August, but both incidents occurred in the context of myriad unsettled political grievances related to the June 2023 presidential election and were born of the country’s deeply polarised, partisan politics.

Despite having established sound legal frameworks to support inclusive democracy, the practice of politics in Sierra Leone is a winner-takes-all affair, and partisan affiliation has yet to transcend the ethno-regional divisions that emerged in the political contest to replace the British colonial administration following independence in 1961. Simply put, rather than representing platforms for the articulation of shared visions and policies, the two leading parties – the governing Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) and the opposition APC – largely represent platforms for the political expression of shared ethnicity.

This division is frequently reflected in election results, the controversies surrounding population censuses, government appointment and civil servant recruitment, and promotion mechanisms. Although power has been transferred twice (2007 and 2018) from one party to another, losing an election in Sierra Leone is not easily accepted as part of a healthy democratic competition. It also represents risks to jobs and livelihood, diminished access to opportunities, and marginalisation of one’s ethnic group in public life.

This explains why elections in Sierra Leone are fiercely contested. The recent 2023 elections brought this out more poignantly, challenging notions that Sierra Leone is a pluralistic democracy. Neither the SLPP nor the APC could freely campaign in the traditional heartlands of the other. For ordinary Sierra Leoneans concerned about key issues of governance and service delivery as a basis for political participation, supporting a political party that is not dominant among their kinsmen puts them at risk of being labelled as traitors.

President Bio’s new cabinet includes relatively younger politicians and technocrats from both regions. The inclusion of these young technocrats, from ethnic groups that hail from both the north and the south of the country, in the cabinet is likely a decision taken in response to the controversy surrounding the president’s re-election. Yet this did not prove sufficient to placate the political cabals on either side. The appointments created an upset in Bio’s own SLPP as senior grandees with deep connections to the party’s support base lost their cabinet jobs to relatively unknown young technocrats. Similarly, the APC leaders do not accept the appointment of young northerners to the cabinet as a move toward political inclusion; rather, they perceive those appointments as manoeuvres by Bio to co-opt members of their support base. Bio, thus, is faced with the serious task of maintaining elite stability, in addition to the regular task of governing and delivering services for everyday Sierra Leoneans.

The APC’s recent decision to accept the government’s legitimacy coupled with the news of the formation of a cross-party electoral reform committee signals Sierra Leone is finally on the path towards political stability, yet the “coup attempts” and “security breaches” experienced since the June election demonstrate that – without deeper political reforms and social cohesion –  security threats stemming from persistent fragility and extreme political polarisation are likely to linger for a while longer.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

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Israel has lost the war of public opinion | Opinions

In a new media landscape dominated not by Western media giants but by Instagram reels, TikTok videos and YouTube shorts, Israel’s ongoing war on the besieged Gaza Strip is more than televised.

Audiences across the world, and especially young people, have been watching the devastation caused by Israel’s indiscriminate bombardment of the Palestinian enclave on their preferred social media platforms, in real-time, for over a month. Anyone with internet access has seen countless videos of babies torn apart by bombs, women crushed under tonnes of concrete and mothers cradling the dead bodies of their children.

Israel, of course, still continues with its usual efforts – and more – to control the narrative about its bloody wars and decades-old occupation.

It does not hesitate to brand as “terrorists” and assassinate Palestinian journalists who work tirelessly to tell Gaza’s truth to the world. During this latest war alone, Israel killed at least 53 journalists and media workers, mostly in targeted air strikes alongside their family members, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Al Jazeera Arabic’s Gaza Correspondent, Wael Dahdouh, lost his wife, son, daughter and grandson in one such attack. He received the news while he was on air.

And Israel does not allow foreign journalists to enter Gaza and report on what they see freely either. CNN’s Fareed Zakaria recently admitted that the Israeli military currently only allows into the war-torn Gaza Strip foreign journalists who agree to “submit all materials and footage to the Israeli military for review prior to publication”. Zakaria said CNN agreed to these terms “in order to provide a limited window into Israel’s ops”.

Yet, despite all these efforts, thanks largely to social media, Israel is no longer able to conceal the truth about its conduct in Palestine. It can no longer control the narratives and the public opinion on Palestine. As mainstream media loses its ability to single-handedly decide what Western and, to a certain extent, global audiences get to witness about the situation in Palestine, the brutality of Israel’s occupation has been laid out in the open for everyone to see.

Now social media users are openly mocking Israel’s desperate attempts to control the narrative of its war on Gaza, and swiftly exposing the Israeli lies parroted by mainstream outlets. On November 29, the #WeWontBeSilenced campaign was launched across social media platforms, encouraging posting this graphic, or a picture with one hand covering one’s mouth, and a relevant message written on the other hand or a poster. Since its launch, it has received hundreds of thousands of impressions across platforms and will continue to gain traction as social media accounts feel the effects of shadow banning, censorship, and intimidation.

It’s not only Israel that knows it’s losing the PR war either – its biggest financier and enabler knows it, too. Last week’s announcement of a temporary ceasefire, which is due to expire soon, has revealed the US is as concerned about changing public opinion on the conflict as Israel.

Politico reported that senior Biden administration officials have been concerned about how the temporary ceasefire “would allow journalists broader access to Gaza and the opportunity to further illuminate the devastation there and turn public opinion on Israel.” In other terms, US officials are cognizant of the direction public opinion has shifted since the beginning of this episode of bombardment and are worried that an influx of journalists into the Gaza Strip could further expose the genocide Israel has been committing there with their permission and support.

Israel and the US, however, did not lose the all-important war on narratives just because of its latest war on Gaza. The current assault on Gaza has only expedited Israel’s weakening grip on the media narrative and public opinion. In March of this year, many months before the beginning of the latest round of violence, Gallup published data that, for the first time ever, revealed that, “Democrats’ sympathies in the Middle East now lie more with the Palestinians than the Israelis, 49 percent versus 38 percent.” This shift in Democrats’ sympathies is indicative of a weakening of the mainstream media monopoly on the narrative of Israel-Palestine. Meanwhile, many in the GOP have also begun to rethink the US-Israeli relationship vis-a-vis foreign aid. Former US President Donald Trump’s “America First” doctrine has made many Republicans question whether supporting Israel with regular military aid should remain a foreign policy priority for the party.

Since October 7, Meta’s reaction to accounts and posts that raise awareness of the mass murder of Palestinian civilians has largely been one of censorship, with reports of over 90 percent of pro-Palestinian content deleted. Now, there are concerns as to how X will respond to Israeli PR pressure.

This week, X CEO Elon Musk visited Israel and met Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a trip widely criticised as a form of “cleanup” after his endorsement of an anti-Semitic post on his platform. As part of the propaganda tour, an agreement was reached that Musk’s Starlink, a satellite internet service, can only be used in Gaza with the approval of the Israeli government. The Israeli occupation wields and controls the flow of water, electricity, food, humanitarian aid – and now Musk’s internet services – into Gaza, yet remains adamant it is not an occupier.

Israel has only itself to blame for its increasingly negative image in the international community.

It cannot expect the world to turn a blind eye to the genocide it is committing in plain sight, with the support of the US. The short ceasefire – which allowed some humanitarian aid to enter the besieged enclave and the Palestinians to bury their dead and wrap their wounds as much as they can – is expected to end soon. Israel will likely continue with its indiscriminate bombardment and suffocating total siege on Gaza in the immediate aftermath of the brief truce. Israel’s war on Palestinians may be far from over, but it has already lost the war of public opinion.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

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COP28: Israel should not be allowed to greenwash its war on Gaza | Environment

As its war on Gaza continues with no end in sight, Israel will be participating in the 28th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP28) which started on Thursday in Dubai. For the Israeli government, this will be an invaluable opportunity to engage in “green diplomacy”, promote its climate technologies, and divert the international community’s attention from its illegal occupation, apartheid and ongoing war crimes against the Palestinians.

Indeed, participating in the world’s top climate event while continuing to indiscriminately bomb an unlawfully besieged territory will allow Israel, which has long been trying to conceal its theft of Palestinian land and resources under a cloak of pseudo “environmentalism”, to push its extensive “greenwashing” agenda to dangerous new extremes.

Given the scale of atrocities Israel has committed in Gaza in the past few weeks, the presence of an Israeli delegation – no matter its size or the relative seniority of its members – will cast a shadow over COP28.

The Israeli government has said its delegation to the conference has been significantly “scaled down” due to “current events”, and that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his top ministers will not be in attendance. Nevertheless, it said Israel will still have a pavilion at the conference which will be used to promote its environmental start-ups and initiatives, especially those from the southern regions affected by the war.

Regardless of who in the Israeli government ends up attending the summit this year, however, they will struggle more than ever to sell the image of Israel as an environmental leader. The dissonance caused by Israel’s representatives suddenly switching from genocidal threats to eco-friendly jargon will be mind-breaking for global audiences.

Can anyone take seriously, for example, any recommendations on clean and sustainable energy from Israel’s Energy Minister Israel Katz, who at the start of the war stated: “Humanitarian aid to Gaza? No electric switch will be turned on, no water tap will be opened, and no fuel truck will enter until the Israeli abductees are returned home”? Or can anyone with any self-respect take ecological advice from Israel’s Agriculture Minister Avi Ditcher, who declared that Israel is “rolling out Nakba 2023” in Gaza?

Saying the genocide part out loud, the Israeli government cannot expect its rhetoric to not have long-term diplomatic, economic, and potentially legal consequences, or to not damage the country’s standing as a climate leader. Jordan, for example, has already pulled out of an energy and water deal with Israel which was hatched in COP27 due to what Jordanian Foreign Minister called “Israel’s barbarism in Gaza”.

The public relations fallout caused by Israel’s war will also make it difficult for it to sell its climate tech solutions as global audiences will find it hard to reconcile Israel’s supposed concern for the environment with its current actions in Gaza.

Israel’s air raids and total blockade of Gaza have left civilians on the verge of dehydration and starvation. The UN had to pressure Israel to allow clean water into the territory and refrain from using water as a “weapon of war”. More than 15,000 people in Gaza have been killed in indiscriminate attacks on residential areas, schools, and hospitals, including thousands of children. Those who survive are without adequate shelter, food, and medical care.

The Gaza Strip was barely habitable before Israel’s latest assault due to a years-long, relentless blockade. Now, Israel’s indiscriminate bombardment and total siege – its ongoing genocide – has also triggered an ecocide in Gaza. Even if the war ended today, it would take years for Gaza’s natural ecosystems to recover.

Of course Israel’s greenwashing efforts also did not start with this war. Israel has been trying to greenwash its occupation of Palestine and oppression of the Palestinian people since its inception.

Indeed, since the founding of Israel in 1948, the Jewish National Fund, Israel’s largest green NGO that controls 13 percent of state land, has been evicting Palestinians from their lands and destroying their villages under the pretence of protecting forests and preserving natural reserves. It has also uprooted hundreds of thousands of olive trees to destroy Palestinian lives and livelihoods.

Meanwhile, Israel’s national water company Mekorot created a “water apartheid” in the occupied West Bank, where Jewish settlers consume six times more water than 2.9 million Palestinians living there.

Despite its apartheid policies in the West Bank, in the international arena, Mekorot has managed to position itself as a leading contributor to the quest to achieve UN sustainability goals. It led a special session on water at COP27 and has been publishing annual environmental, social and governance (ESG) and corporate responsibility reports with little consideration or even mention of its practice of water apartheid against the Palestinians.

At last year’s COP27, Israel’s President Isaac Herzog, who recently supported the collective punishment of civilians in Gaza, promised that Israel would be “net zero” by 2050. Since he failed to mention Palestine and Palestinians in his speech, however, it is unclear whether the environmental consequences of the occupation, the apartheid, or the 40,000 tonnes of explosives dropped on Gaza (which amounts to more than two nuclear bombs) would be included as part of Israel’s carbon footprint this year.

Writer and analyst Zena Agha has described Israel’s environmental policy as “Janus-faced”, on the one hand promoting “environmental reform and technological development” and on the other, depriving “Palestinians of their land, water, and other natural resources”.

Amid the ongoing genocidal assault on Gaza, at COP28, this two-sidedness will reach new extremes.

COP28 is already under fire for maintaining strong connections to big oil companies while purporting a technical and diplomatic agenda to transition away from fossil fuels. The optics of an Israeli delegation at COP28 amid an ongoing offensive that inflicted unprecedented humanitarian and environmental damage on Gaza will undoubtedly damage the reputation of the conference further.

Indeed, the scale of the humanitarian crisis Israel created in Gaza has not only exposed Israel’s decades-old greenwashing strategies and tarnished its image as a climate solution leader, but also called into question the credibility of a state-centred approach to global warming that ignores human rights.

By allowing itself to become a venue for Israel to greenwash its increasingly more brutal attacks on Palestinian people, land and essential infrastructure, as well as its disregard for UN resolutions, institutions and staff (more than 100 UN employees have been killed in the Gaza war so far), COP28 threatens to undermine critical features of the global climate agenda, namely state compliance, accountability, and respect for international law and institutions.

While Israel’s attendance at COP28 exposes one of the many existing problems with our current approach to tackling global warming, it is not too late to change course.

Those committed to achieving climate justice should treat this conference as an opportunity to call out greenwashing and state the obvious connection between human rights and the climate emergency. As Greta Thunberg rightly said, there can be “no climate justice on occupied land”, and occupiers should not be allowed to use climate conferences to greenwash their wars.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

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Walking to America | Opinions

The isthmus of Tehuantepec, the narrow strip of land that separates the Gulf of Mexico from the Pacific Ocean in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, is known for its spectacularly fierce winds, which have toppled many a cargo truck navigating its thoroughfares. The isthmus is currently also playing host to mass human movement, as refuge seekers from Central America to Africa and beyond navigate the landscape in the hopes of eventually reaching the United States, still some 2,500 kilometers (1,550 miles) to the north.

And for these thousands upon thousands of humans in precarious transit, overpowering winds are but one of myriad existential obstacles.

I recently spent a few days in the isthmian town of Juchitán and took a taxi out to the nearby village of Santo Domingo Ingenio, where I met up with a 10-member Venezuelan family whose acquaintance I had made in early November in the neighbouring state of Chiapas, which borders Guatemala. Driving up the highway from Juchitán, the taxi lurched in the wind as we passed staggered groups of people heading in the opposite direction, some carrying babies or pushing strollers, others shielding their faces from the punishing sun overhead.

The family had joined up with the latest northbound migrant caravan to form in Mexico – although the caravan has since largely dissolved in accordance with divide-and-conquer tactics of the Mexican government and mafia outfits, which jointly profit from the United States’s criminalisation of migration. Lacking any money for food – much less to avail themselves of mafia-organised transport options or the inflated “migrant prices” unofficially implemented by Mexican bus companies – this family belongs to the class of refuge seekers that has basically been reduced to walking to America.

The extended family’s youngest member is an eight-year-old boy; there are also two 13-year-olds, a boy and a girl. I brought them some cash, water, and a heap of fried chicken from Juchitán, and we sat on the sheet of plastic that was serving as their bed in Santo Domingo Ingenio’s central pavilion, where the caravan was meant to camp out for the night.

They filled me in on all that had transpired since our last meeting in Chiapas, which included having various objects thrown at them by apparently xenophobic local residents and being forcibly separated by Mexican immigration officials. Thanks to this sadistic stunt by agents of the state, who bused the children and one of the women to an unspecified location hours away from the others, the family spent several sleepless nights before being able to regroup.

Most of the family members could barely walk, the soles of their shoes and feet having been torn up by hours of contact with the scorching pavement. One of the women laughingly showed me her innovative solution to the gaping holes in the bottom of her pink plastic clogs, which had been to utilise sanitary napkins as inserts. Somehow, they all maintained a distinct graciousness that, had I been in their shoes, would have certainly been long gone, pulverised somewhere on the road from Venezuela to Mexico.

At our previous encounter, the family had recounted their trek through the Darién Gap, the corpse-ridden stretch of jungle between Colombia and Panama, which they likened to “a horror movie”. In one scene, they said, they had investigated a hand sticking out from a tent along the way to find that it belonged to a dead pregnant woman inside.

The horrors of the jungle notwithstanding, the family reported that they would take the Darién Gap over Mexico any day. Hobbling, they escorted me back to my taxi, which was parked next to a couple of heavily armed, balaclava-sporting contingents of the Mexican National Guard, valiantly guarding the nation against asylum-seeking pedestrians.

Granted, US-bound migrant caravans have long elicited expediently sensational fear-mongering. When the first caravan set out from Honduras in 2018, then-US President Donald Trump took to Twitter to warn that “criminals and unknown Middle Easterners are mixed in” – a matter that amounted to a veritable “National Emergy[sic].”

And while Trump’s successor, Joe Biden, was supposed to pursue a nicer and less sociopathic migration policy, the US remains on “National Emergy” footing as Biden unabashedly expands Trump’s border fortification vision. Obviously, the US also continues to be responsible for wreaking much of the international political and economic havoc that causes people to leave their countries in the first place.

For his part, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) has dutifully enlisted Mexico in the US war on asylum seekers, and recently praised Biden for allegedly refraining from building border walls – a curious compliment, no doubt, for someone who is building up a storm.

Meanwhile, back in Juchitán, collaborative state-mafia extortion is going strong, and refuge seekers with access to money are being milked for all they are worth. When two Danish friends and I visited a certain hotel in the centre of town, for example, we found it jampacked with citizens of the African nation of Mauritania, many of them fleeing political persecution and fear of torture back home. In the hotel lobby, two women seated at a table handled passports, stacks of one hundred dollar bills, and a credit card machine.

Out front, a man from the Mexican state of Sinaloa who was involved in coordinating the operation openly told my friends and me that the Mauritanians – who had entered Mexico without visas – were being bused from Juchitán to Mexico City for “about 10,000 pesos” per person, or nearly 600 dollars. The buses would not be stopped by Mexican immigration personnel, we were told, as the obscene bus fare presumably made it possible to pay off all the proper people and still have plenty left over.

The same night that I visited the Venezuelan family in Santo Domingo Ingenio, I received word from them that the caravan had been dislodged from the village and moved to one even farther away from Juchitán – meaning their trek to the US border would now be that much longer.

Two days later, they were still in the same village, where reports had begun to surface that caravan participants were being kidnapped and held for ransom. Petrified, the family was planning to separate from what remained of the caravan, and to face being blown over by the winds of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec on their own.

If only winds could blow down borders and set humanity straight.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

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The truce in Gaza has been more painful than the 50 days that preceded it | Gaza

Many of us did not dare go out on the first day of the temporary truce in Gaza. We were too afraid it would not hold. On the second day, we gathered our courage and stepped out.

The daylight illuminated the destruction caused by Israel’s non-stop bombardment of Gaza over the past seven weeks. We did not recognise our neighbourhoods and streets.

There are whole stretches of land where there is not a single building standing. Nothing has been spared: houses, residential towers, shops, bakeries, cafes, schools, universities, libraries, children’s centres, mosques, churches.

The destruction was the first thing we saw. Then came the pain.

Amid the panic, alarm and scurrying to survive the bombs, many of us did not fully grasp the loss of loved ones, the wounds sustained, the lives, bodies and dreams shattered and destroyed. Many could not bury their dead. Many could not grieve.

As Sabri Farra, a medical student from Gaza, wrote in a post on social media: “The word catastrophe is insufficient to describe this. It is a collective inferno of extermination against the Palestinian people.”

I left my home in Gaza City during the first week of the war. I was lucky to have made it. On the same day, the Israeli army bombed a convoy of evacuees, killing at least 70 people.

The road that Israel designated as a “safe route” for people to evacuate from the north to the south has been anything but safe. Throughout the past seven weeks, people who made it south reported seeing harrowing scenes of bodies of civilians lying everywhere. The horror was documented on videos circulated on social media.

When the truce came into effect, more Palestinians decided to evacuate from the north, hoping it would be safe to do so.

But as they made their way south, they encountered Israeli army checkpoints, where they were stopped and searched and their belongings confiscated. Women in my family and friends told me that Israeli soldiers even took their gold. They were forced to walk with their hands in the air, carrying nothing but their IDs.

Those who made it through were lucky, as Israeli soldiers have also been systematically abducting evacuees. I have friends with siblings who were taken and are still missing after trying to evacuate through the designated “safe route”. The Israelis arrested even Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha. He was let go only after a massive international campaign for his release. We still don’t know the true number of those who have been abducted.

The walk from the north to the south is almost eight hours if you don’t stop. This is a trip many Palestinians are struggling to make as they are too old, too young, too tired, too starved and dehydrated, injured or disabled.

While going north to south can be risky and could lead to abduction, going in the opposite direction can cost you your life. The Israeli army dropped leaflets on us warning us not to attempt that trip. Israeli soldiers killed at least two people trying to go back to the north on the first day of the truce.

I, like hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, am banned from returning to my home in Gaza City. I am heartbroken that I cannot go and check on my house to see if it is still standing. Many others who have family and friends shot in the streets or stuck under the rubble cannot go retrieve their bodies and give them a proper burial.

Israel controls everything: where we go, what we do, how much we eat or drink, whether we can save the wounded or those stuck under the rubble for days. It even decides how we tend to our dead. Its army is forcing more and more of us into an ever-shrinking space before it resumes the indiscriminate bombardment and the genocide.

The trucks of humanitarian aid Israel is allowing to enter Gaza cannot alleviate the humanitarian disaster. We are barely surviving. If the bombs don’t kill us, the hunger, the thirst, the lack of medicine, the cold will.

This pause has been more painful than the 50 days before it. It is the first time the people of Gaza were able to look at their open wounds, martyred children, slaughtered families, destroyed homes and shattered lives. Just imagine living for six days just to prepare and wait for your death on the seventh.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.



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A ceasefire in a time of genocide | Israel-Palestine conflict

The bitter reality for us, Palestinians in Gaza, is that we are alone, beleaguered, under siege, and are seen as undesirables even by some of those who are supposed to be our brethren. Forty-five days of barbaric massacres have claimed the lives of more than 14,000 people, including more than 6,000 children and 3,500 women.

Among the thousands of men who have been killed are university students, doctors, nurses, shop owners and youth who were sent out by their families to search for food or water.

More than 7,000 are still missing, including 4,000 children – most of them are dead, buried under the rubble of their homes.

More are dying in bombed-out hospitals rendered unoperational and in the few that are still working but cannot cope with the tens of thousands wounded due to the lack of staff and medical supplies. Soon even more will be dying of disease, hunger and the winter cold.

Israel’s deliberate targeting of civilian homes has completely wiped out hundreds of families from the population register. Some 1.7 million people have been displaced.

For 45 days, Palestinians have been left alone to face the onslaught of the world’s fourth strongest army, which possesses 200 nuclear weapons, hundreds of F-16 jets, attack helicopters, gunboats, battle tanks and armoured vehicles, and hundreds of thousands of soldiers and reservists.

As the humanitarian tragedy in Gaza has reached unimaginable levels, some Arab regimes have done nothing more than issue timid statements, denouncing and condemning. Nothing more.

In fact, Arab regimes have let down the Palestinians since 1948, and to this day, official Arab positions are a combination of cowardice and hypocrisy. They have failed to bring an end to the Israeli siege on Gaza for 17 years now and are now failing to stop Israel’s genocide.

We in Gaza are now wondering how the timid expressions of support coming out of the streets and capitals of the Arab nations can be turned into concrete action in the absence of democracy. We wonder whether the Arabs living under the rule of authoritarian, oligarchical regimes can change them in non-violent ways.

We exhaust ourselves trying to figure out the possible means available to achieve democratic political change, because with the genocide in Gaza and the apartheid regime in the rest of Palestine, we have not seen any practical translation for the solidarity shown by some Arab peoples with Palestine.

Desmond Tutu, the late South African anti-apartheid activist and Anglican bishop, once said, “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”

As I argued during Israel’s brutal assaults on Gaza in 2009, 2012, and 2014, the United Nations, the European Union, and Arab states have not been neutral; they have remained largely silent about the atrocities the Israeli forces have committed. Since thousands of corpses of women and children have failed to convince them of the need to act, they have taken Israel’s side.

This state of affairs put two choices before the Palestinians in Gaza: dying dishonourably while thanking our killers for a trickle of food and water; or fighting for our dignity, for ourselves and the coming generations. It is now clear that after years of self-deception that portrayed slavery to the occupier as a fait accompli, we have chosen the second option.

But instead of recognising our resistance as such and seeing it in the context of the decades-long Palestinian struggle for freedom from occupation and apartheid, the international community is instead reducing it to a “conflict” between two “equal” sides.

The ongoing truce and the longer-term ceasefire initiative reflect this attitude. They in no way take into account that Israel has two clear objectives in its war on Gaza: the slaughter of the largest possible number of Palestinians by targeting Palestinian civilians; and the elimination of any possibility of resistance in order to maintain stability in this open-air concentration camp.

It appears that what the international community is requiring of Palestinians is to behave as “house slaves” and be grateful for the crumbs their white masters are letting them have. They are to appreciate the trickle of food and water that is allowed to sustain them barely alive and accept their slow death. They are to concede that if they die, it is their own fault.

But Palestinians in Gaza and beyond will not oblige.

Accordingly, any agreement that does not lead to the immediate lifting of the blockade, the reopening of the Rafah crossing and all the other crossings in a manner that allows the introduction of food, fuel, medicine, and all other needs – in conjunction with an agreement that ends the Israeli occupation and apartheid and upholds the Palestinian right of return – will not be acceptable to the people of Gaza.

The biggest source of concern for the Israeli “masters”, their Western allies, and their Arab lackeys, would be for us to raise the ceiling of our demands to that level; to demand that the conflict be put in the context of the multifaceted settler-colonial enterprise, the occupation, the apartheid, and the ethnic cleansing.

October 7 is a pivotal moment in Palestinian history. Gaza and the rest of Palestine yearns for a leadership that rises up to the level of this historic moment, a leadership that would take the following measures without any further delay:

Enacting a full cessation of security coordination with Israel;

Going to the International Criminal Court and suing Israeli political and military leaders for war crimes and crimes against humanity;

Reviewing all agreements signed with Israel, particularly the Oslo Accords and related agreements;

Declaring a clear position on any initiative that does not take into account the need for the immediate end of the siege, the reopening of all crossings, and the restoration of the full freedom of movement.

Any talk about improving the conditions of oppression in light of the great sacrifices of Gaza is a betrayal of the Palestinian martyrs. It is time to start discussing radical solutions away from the “interim programme” and the Bantustan-like state, and adopt a clear slogan: end the occupation, end the apartheid, and end settler-colonialism. This is the only way the loss of thousands of lives in Gaza would not have been in vain.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

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Fact or Fiction: The propaganda war won’t stop, even during a truce | Israel-Palestine conflict

After weeks of discussions on a “humanitarian pause”, there is finally a tenuous truce in place.

This has been a long road, largely because Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants a never-ending war — in part to defer his ongoing domestic political and legal woes, and in part because he claims to want to pursue the almost impossible task of eliminating Hamas.

Meanwhile, Hamas know their only hope for being perceived as victorious — however pyrrhic any such “win” might be — is to secure an indefinite ceasefire.

With that scenario unlikely, they must also maintain a narrative of escalation, and use rhetoric to ensure that their regional allies remain primed and ready.

Cue the rise of anti-diplomacy, which international security studies scholar James Der Derian characterises as a form of “war by other means”. It encompasses practices that effectively perpetrate a form of violence against the traditional process of diplomatic mediation and reconciliation.

Part of this anti-diplomacy is an increase in attacks on those advocating mediation, reconciliation and peace – often involving disinformation and propaganda. These attacks are multifaceted, occurring domestically, regionally and internationally.

On November 23, the Israel account on X, run by the country’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, posted an edited video showing an Israeli soldier purportedly navigating a Hamas tunnel near al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza — adding to a growing set of such videos. Intriguingly, the video references Qatar three times, specifically pointing out the tunnel’s proximity to the “Qatari compound” and the “Qatari building”.

The phrase “Qatari building” in the context of al-Shifa has only ever been used since November 16, with the earliest mention appearing to emanate from a video posted by the Israeli army. Usually, the Qatari building refers to the “Qatar Reconstruction HQ”, which lies 3km (1.9 miles) away.

The use of such language is no coincidence. With propaganda, nothing happens by accident. Word choices — especially the mention of particular countries or people, are carefully selected to convey certain messages.

In this case, it’s part of a broader attempt to try and link Qatar to Hamas and the Israeli narrative of al-Shifa serving as a command-and-control centre for the armed Palestinian group.

Why?

Qatar has been playing a leading role in mediating for peace amid the current war. Its work has been central to the negotiations that have led to the release of captives by Hamas and Palestinian prisoners by Israel, starting Friday.

By trying to undermine the mediator’s credibility, Israel hopes it can pressure Qatar into securing a better deal for itself — sometimes, even when its efforts are at odds with what the United States, its closest ally, is saying and doing.

In October, for instance, the Israeli army deleted a video critical of Qatar following US President Joe Biden’s commendation of Qatar for its mediation efforts, pointing to a tension between US policy and Israel’s internal politics.

In other words, Israel’s attempts at anti-diplomacy have run afoul of the US, which has emphasised its faith in Qatar’s role as a mediator.

Global anti-diplomacy

There are other examples, too, of anti-diplomacy at work. United Nations Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese has been the target of a smear campaign accusing her of violating the UN’s Code of Conduct.

Albanese, an international law expert and outspoken advocate of peace, publicly refuted accusations promoted by pro-Israel propagandists surrounding a trip to Australia, clarifying that the journey was officially funded by the UN as part of its mandate.

Albanese has emerged as one of the most eloquent and credible voices in calling for an end to the war through a ceasefire. Her snappy put-downs of ill-informed questions from journalists have frequently gone viral, earning her a growing social media following. In Australia, one pro-peace protester even held up a placard bearing her picture and the slogan “The real Albanese” — in a reference to the country’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

For Israel, the end of conflict may also mean the process of accountability beginning. This is why influential diplomatic voices like Albanese’s, calling for peace, are targets of disinformation.

With more than 100,000 followers on X, her reach and social media savvy make her a threat to Israel’s forces of anti-diplomacy. The war on attempts to bridge differences — diplomacy, in a broader sense — is playing out on college campuses in the US and Europe, which have become battlegrounds of public opinion. There have been allegations of college protests promoting anti-Semitism and anti-Palestinianism.

Yet these are also subject to anti-diplomacy campaigns designed to promote division and conflict. The University of British Columbia’s branch of Hillel, an organisation dedicated to promoting Jewish life on campus, reported that a contractor of theirs, without the organisation’s knowledge, had placed stickers around the campus with the message “I love Hamas”. The aim was clearly to manipulate anxieties and smear pro-Palestinian activists as necessarily pro-Hamas.

What about Hamas?

Hamas will have its own propaganda plans for this period of truce. And in the absence of a full ceasefire — with Israel making it clear that it intends to continue the war after the pause — Hamas might have reasons to worry.

At the moment, the global public mood, including in the West, seems to be in support of a ceasefire – although Western politicians seem less inclined to back that sentiment.

Mainstream media and social media are vital in shaping opinions. Hamas knows this, and that it needs relentless global pressure against the war.

Hamas doesn’t just need Gaza to remain in the news, but needs Palestinians to be humanised. Will the world stop caring as much if the temporary let-up in bombing slows down the tide of horrific social media videos of slaughtered civilians coming out of Gaza?

With Israel gunning for further war, Hamas must prepare both militarily and also rhetorically.

Enter anti-diplomacy, again. On November 23, after the truce had been announced and less than a day before it was to come into force, the military wing of Hamas released a video calling for “all resistance fronts” to escalate confrontation with Israel.

It may seem counterintuitive to call for an escalation right before a pause obtained through tough negotiations. But Hamas will not want the truce to send the signal to its allies in Yemen, Lebanon, Iraq and Iran that they can ease up in their support for the Palestinian group in the war against Israel.

The threat of regional escalation — yes, on “all resistance fronts” — has been one of Hamas’s trump cards in trying to encourage even reluctant US efforts to call for a truce.

So, what do I expect in the next few days?

Israel will seek to keep public opinion mobilised in support of war and undermine mediators or those calling for peace. For their part, Hamas will want to generate maximum sympathy for Palestinian suffering, while also maintaining a level of bellicosity to maintain support from their allies.

On November 25, the deal that has enabled a pause in fighting faced another crisis when Hamas delayed the release of captives, accusing Israel of reneging on aspects of the agreement.

It’s hard to say which side was to blame, or whether both shared responsibility — but the drama underscored the fragility of the truce.

The bombing may have been paused, but war by other means continues.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.



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