https://www.councilestatemedia.uk/p/ceasefire-deal-approved-israeli-ministers
But will the ceasefire actually hold?
Ricky Hale
and Council Estate Media
Jan 18, 2025

So we finally have confirmation that Israel has approved the ceasefire deal with Hamas, which should theoretically stop the genocide. I say theoretically because the genocide hasn’t stopped and there is no guarantee the ceasefire will hold, but anything is better than nothing, I guess. Anything that provides the opportunity to get some pain relief into Gaza…

Netanyahu does not seem happy about the agreement and wants to violate it immediately, according to ex-Israeli negotiator Daniel Levy. It looks like Netanyahu was backed into a corner, but we can be forgiven for being sceptical about the Trump administration’s true intentions here. I will not be celebrating until the bombs stop, and as of now, they are still falling.

Absurdly, Netanyahu has been accusing Hamas of violating the ceasefire that hasn’t begun while Israel has been dropping as many bombs as possible at the last minute.

By Thursday, at least 71 Palestinians had been killed and over 200 injured after the ceasefire was announced on Wednesday. A young doctor called Hala was killed along with her entire family when an Israeli bomb struck their home. One little girl, who was celebrating the ceasefire, suffered horrible injuries from shrapnel. I guess the young doctor and little girl were Hamas or something.

Remember, there is no military objective for Israel to fulfil at this point. It is widely understood the mission to destroy Hamas has been a failure because Hamas replaces every killed fighter with a new recruit. These bombs are being dropped for the sake of dropping them and innocents are being killed and injured for no other reason than spite.

Israel’s failure to kill Hamas fighters at least partly explains its determination to round up so many Palestinian men and pretend they’re Hamas. They had to look like they were achieving something so they just kept catching random guys and torturing them. The IDF were not fighting the people they were supposed to fight which is why you never saw footage of them engaging in gun battles.

Remember when Elon Musk said at the beginning that you can’t defeat an idea like Hamas and then he was flown to Israel and coincidentally changed his mind? Well, pre-blackmail Elon has been proven right. Just imagine how many other prominent figures would have been right if they weren’t so scared of Israel.

We live in a ridiculous world where journalists wouldn’t speak the truth because they would have been fired so don’t ever believe the lie about press freedom again.

By the way, it’s not just Gaza that Israel is still bombing: it’s Lebanon too, despite Israel agreeing a ceasefire there. Balls of fire have been lighting up the skies of southern Lebanon as Israel takes out yet more apartment buildings. Clearly, there is a risk that Israel gets the hostages home and immediately starts bombing Gaza again. However, if Israel does this, there is no credible justification anyone could come up with.

We have had 15 months of “release the hostages and this thing stops”. If the hostages are released and Israel doesn’t stop, it will be an admission this was never about the hostages. It will be an admission of genocide, something Joe Biden has basically already admitted.

Biden explained the ceasefire deal was similar to the one he had proposed last May, a deal that could have avoided a further eight months of bloodshed if Netanyahu hadn’t rejected it.

In one final, dementia-ridden interview, the outgoing president admitted to Israeli war crimes and his own complicity in those war crimes. He said:

“When I went to Israel immediately after the attack by Hamas […] and I told them we were gonna help, I said, ‘Bibi, you can’t be carpet-bombing these communities,’ and he said to me, ‘You did it […] you carpet-bombed Berlin, you dropped a nuclear weapon, you killed thousands of innocent people because you had to in order to win a war’. I said, ‘But that’s why we came up with the United Nations’.”

I think Biden meant the Geneva Conventions, but whatever…

Biden pointed out that Netanyahu was going after him for saying, “You can’t indiscriminately target civilian areas, even if the bad guys are there”. This news will come as a great shock to all the lunatics who’ve defended Israel’s bombing of hospitals…

Biden said he told Netanyahu, “You can’t kill two, ten, fifteen hundred innocent people to get the one bad guy”, alluding to the destruction of apartment buildings, refugee camps, and entire neighbourhoods if the Gospel AI decided a single Hamas fighter might have been nearby. Biden said he “pushed really hard” to reduce civilian casualties and get humanitarian aid in, effectively admitting the aid wasn’t being allowed in.

The International Criminal Court is going to have a field day with this one. We have confirmation of Netanyahu’s explicit intent to kill civilians to win the war (that he ultimately failed to win). We have confirmation the US president fully understood Netanyahu’s genocidal intent, his indiscriminate bombing, and his blocking of humanitarian aid, and continued to arm him anyway. This was not just a violation of international law but US law too.

Any way you look at it, this was a confession of war crimes, and while Biden might have occasionally expressed disapproval of Netanyahu throughout the genocide, calling him things like “a deep, dark son of a bitch”, he has now gone and called him ”brave” and his “friend”. It is hardly surprising that Americans have an even lower opinion of Biden than they do of George W. Bush. Bush might have been a monster, but we didn’t watch him commit a genocide on live stream.

Just look at what Palestinians have endured: hypothermia, starvation, lack of drinking water, lack of sanitation, lack of medicine, lack of shelter, and I’ve not even mentioned the bombs and bullets supplied by the west yet…

My heart breaks for this little boy and so many others like him who were let down by cowards in the west. This genocide has revealed who is the type of person who enables genocides to happen. It has shown there are an awful lot of cowards and monsters out there, especially in high positions. It has also shown a lot of people were prepared to stand up and be counted, often taking a real risk in doing so.

Respect to Max Blumenthal and Sam Husseini who boldly stood up to demonic ghouls Antony Blinken and Matthew Miller. Both journalists were thrown out of a press conference and I understand Husseini was arrested. Impressively, he still got his words out while security carried him away, asking: “Why aren’t you in the Hague?”
Journalist Sam Husseini gets carried out of press conference by security

Freedom of speech does not mean you are free to criticise Israel or its accomplices. I was genuinely scared throughout this genocide that my door would be broken down at six in the morning and my kids would be made to stand in the cold while their home was ransacked and their father was dragged away for interrogation for wanting Israel to stop blowing up kids. It’s genuinely insane that we had to live in such fear and I stand in solidarity with the likes of Sarah Wilkinson, Asa Winstanley, Richard Medhurst, and others who were treated as “terrorists” in the UK when no one seriously believed they had anything to do with terrorism. The establishment really went mask off and showed conclusively that its authoritarian and imperialist instincts are far from dead.

Of course, what we endured in the UK was nothing compared to what the heroic reporters in Gaza went through. Those people spent the whole genocide with a target on their backs, and they just continued on, showing a level of courage that is hard to comprehend.

Palestinian journalists are truly the bravest people on earth and deserve everyone’s admiration. We should remember the 217 or more journalists who gave their lives to reveal the plight of their people to the world. We should also remember poet Refaat Alareer and his family who were taken out by a guided missile because he was too popular on social media.

I would like to thank the few surviving Palestinian journalists from the bottom of my heart for risking everything to speak the truth. It really is a miracle they made it through 15 months of genocide when so many of their colleagues did not.

I would also like to thank every person who used their platform, no matter how small, to speak out. I would not like us to pat ourselves on the back though because despite our best efforts, we failed. We failed, even though a majority of the western population agreed with us. This shows just how difficult it is to take on established power: it is able to resist public opinion and international law. We’re gonna have one hell of a battle to rid ourselves of these bastards, but we already knew that.

We might have failed to stop the genocide from happening, but at least it might significantly slow down, and at least we know who the real ones are now. At least Palestinians know there is love and support out there, even if that love and support ultimately didn’t achieve much. I’m so sorry for our failures and I only wish we could have done better. I do not remotely see this ceasefire as a victory. I see it as a situation where Israel lost and Palestine lost. This is as clear a lose-lose as you will ever find.

Israel has destroyed its reputation and failed in all of its military objectives, apart from killing as many civilians as possible and causing as much destruction as possible. In the process, it has killed many of its own people and Israelis are well aware of this. Of course, many Israelis never cared about the hostages and they’re seething on social media that a deal has been reached. Some are out on the streets protesting against the ceasefire which says everything about who they really are.
Israelis protest against ceasefire, arguing it means surrendering to Hamas / source: Sky News

While this genocide has been a disaster at home for Israel, it has been even more of a disaster abroad because Jews are turning against Israel. Here are some crazy stats regarding Jewish teenagers in the US: one third sympathise with Hamas, 42% believe Israel has committed genocide, and 66% sympathise with Palestinians. Zionism is in serious trouble because it’s losing the Jewish youth and many Israelis are leaving their settler-colony. If even Israelis don’t want to live in Israel, and if young Jews are no longer supportive of Israel, it might not have much of a future.

We might be entering a time when the Joe Bidens of this world become as unelectable as they are evil. Given what happened to Kamala Harris, we are already halfway there. The era of undying western support for Israel could soon be over. This is hardly surprising, given we watched the genocide on live stream, and instead of addressing our concerns, our rulers called us “anti-Semites” and even “terrorists” for protesting, and then pretended ordinary people cared more about the price of groceries than children losing their limbs from our bombs. And then there is the US TikTok ban which might have done more to radicalise the American youth than anything else: young Americans now know freedom of speech is a lie.

Interesting times lie ahead because there is a huge disconnect between the rulers of western countries and the public, particularly the youth.

The big question now is what does the future hold for Gaza? Are we only seeing a temporary ceasefire until the hostages are released? Will Israel withdraw its weary troops only to continue bombing the hills of rubble they’ve bombed ten times over? Will they continue to create orphans out of spite? Or will Palestinians finally be given breathing space? Only time will tell…

We might never see real justice for Palestinians, but never let the world forget that Joe Biden, Sir Keir Starmer and many other western leaders are every bit as culpable for this genocide as Benjamin Netanyahu. These monsters might never see a jail cell, but that doesn’t mean they get to have an easy time. Let their crimes haunt them wherever they go. Hold up a mirror, remind them of the monsters they are…

Israel has committed so many war crimes with western support that it almost feels unnecessary to point them out, just like it feels unnecessary to point out individual horrors from the holocaust. We know the holocaust was horrific without further explanation, and we know the Gaza genocide was horrific without discussing all of the things Israel did on a daily basis that were so over the top in their barbarity, few would have believed it, if they hadn’t seen it with their own eyes.

The media spent 15 months referring to this mind-blowingly depraved massacre as a “war”, but I guess you could call it a war… a war on schools, a war on hospitals, a war on tents, a war on aid workers, a war on journalists, a war on children…

When I think of Gaza, one image will haunt me for the rest of my life: it is the badly burnt baby who could not stop trembling, excruciation etched into her tiny face as she awaited a skin graft that would never come. Just know that level of pain and suffering did not happen once, it happened hundreds of thousands of times over, and it happened because of us…

And that is to our eternal shame.