cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/34331174
Published date: 7 August 2025 11:52 BST
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected calls from senior ministers to advance ceasefire negotiations and deliberately restricted all aid to Gaza in order to force a surrender from Hamas, internal government transcripts published by Israeli news outlet Channel 13 have revealed.
The transcripts from an Israeli war cabinet meeting on 1 March show that Netanyahu ignored repeated calls from senior defence officials to move to the second phase of the ceasefire agreement in order to secure the release of Israeli captives, and then to renew hostilities after.
Netanyahu instead chose to unilaterally break the ceasefire in March and bar all aid to Gaza, in the hopes of forcing a surrender by Hamas.
This was despite Hamas complying with the talks, contrary to the war cabinet’s expectations.
Despite opinion and anger here, there’s a lot of truth to that. Imagine seeing your friends and family brutally murdered, or your friend shot in the kneecap as sport for some IDF fuck, and then saying you don’t support any kind of resistance.
And that sentiment, punctuated by Oct 7th, makes Israelis afraid, somewhat reasonably. The people they’ve oppressed will always be inclined to strike back. The people they’re genociding would be even happier to genocide Israelis.
The point is that there is no protagonist in this fight. There’s nuance and no easy answers.
None of that justifies the very clear and deliberate genocide Israel is carrying out. It was extremely clear this was their plan when they killed the World Central Kitchen people. They’ve planned this genocide, knowing exactly what they’re doing and the consequences.
It’s the nation-state equivalent of a schoolyard fight where one student pulls a knife and slashes the other’s throat. It doesn’t matter how the fight started, or what their motivations were at the beginning, we don’t stand for that kind of brutality. You have a right to defend yourself, but that is very clearly beyond justifiable.
I feel like the people speaking out for Palestine are often making the same mistake DARE did with drugs in the 1990s. You can’t make everything black & white, even with kids. The program would have been more effective had it acknowledged nuance and been more truthful.
Not that I think it’s a big difference. It might be impossible to stop the genocide regardless of our approach here.
Public sentiment here doesn’t compare to the anti-Vietnam War sentiment, and I don’t think changing the messaging slightly is going to change either that or the overall outcome.
I’m proud of the people who have put themselves at risk to speak out, the ones who face real world consequences like Mahmoud Khalil.