It was only a matter of time before Israel decided to definitively annihilate its ceasefire agreement with Hamas and resume all-out genocide in the Gaza Strip. Overnight, the Israeli army launched a wave of attacks that have thus far killed at least 404 Palestinians and wounded 562.
These numbers will no doubt rise as more bodies are recovered from beneath the rubble, and as Israel continues what Maltese Prime Minister Robert Abela has denounced as a “barbarous” assault on the Palestinian enclave.
But barbarism, after all, is what Israel does best. And unfortunately, there’s no end in sight to barbarous behaviour – particularly when the most the international community can muster are spineless statements of condemnation.
United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk, for example, declared that the Israeli attacks “will add tragedy onto tragedy”, and that “Israel’s resort to yet more military force will only heap further misery upon a Palestinian population already suffering catastrophic conditions”.
Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store concurred that the Israeli assault constitutes “a great tragedy” for the population of Gaza, many of whom “live in tents and the ruins of what has been destroyed”.
For his part, Dutch Foreign Minister Caspar Veldkamp took to the platform X to opine that “humanitarian aid must reach those in need, and all hostilities must end permanently”. Switzerland called for “an immediate return to the ceasefire”.
The United States, of course, found no need to condemn the renewed Israeli attacks on Gaza – an unsurprising reaction from the country that has from the get-go been aiding and abetting genocide, first under the Joe Biden administration and now under Donald Trump’s.
In an interview with Fox News, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed that the US had been consulted by Israel on the latest assault, adding that Trump had “made it clear” that Hamas and “all those who seek to terrorise not just Israel, but also the United States of America, will see a price to pay”. Paraphrasing a previous threat issued by Trump to Hamas, Leavitt warned that “all hell will break loose”.
And yet, by any objective standards, hell has already decisively broken loose in the Gaza Strip. With solid US backing, the Israeli military officially slaughtered at least 48,577 Palestinians between October 2023 and January 2025, when a tenuous ceasefire between Israel and Hamas took hold. In February, Gaza’s Government Media Office updated its death toll to nearly 62,000 to account for thousands of missing Palestinians presumed to be dead under the all-pervasive rubble.
And while Gaza ostensibly got a break from relentless Israeli bombardment with the implementation of the truce agreement, the Israeli military continued to kill Palestinians and otherwise violate the agreement accordingly. After all, a cessation of hostilities has never been Israel’s modus operandi.
When in early March Israel blocked all humanitarian aid deliveries to the Gaza Strip – a manoeuvre amounting to enforced starvation and an obvious war crime – the US predictably blamed the blocking of aid on Hamas rather than on the party actually doing it. The European Union followed suit by condemning Hamas for its alleged “refusal… to accept the extension of the first phase of the ceasefire agreement in Gaza”.
Given that Israel had straight-up changed the terms of the agreement, this was in reality not a case of “refusal” by Hamas but rather one of Israel unilaterally moving the goalposts – as it has done time and again. As an afterthought, the EU noted that Israel’s “decision to block the entry of all humanitarian aid into Gaza could potentially result in humanitarian consequences”.
But anyway, it was all Hamas’s fault.
Now, as condemnations of Israel’s renewed barbarism trickle in, it is not difficult to see why Israel might take international objections as slightly less than serious. At the end of the day, perfunctory slaps on the wrist and appeals for an end to “tragedy” in Gaza do nothing to impede Israel’s free hand as it starts and stops genocide as it pleases.
Many children are among today’s casualties of Israeli terror, and Israel has gone about issuing new forced displacement orders for various sectors of the Gaza Strip. The Gaza Health Ministry has issued an urgent appeal for blood donations. All in all, then, it appears a continuation of the ceasefire has been safely averted.
And there’s an added perk for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is currently on trial in no fewer than three corruption cases involving fraud, bribery, and breach of trust. As the Times of Israel reported today, Netanyahu’s scheduled testimony has now been “canceled for the day amid [the] shock Gaza offensive”.
According to the prime minister, prosecutors approved the cancellation to enable the government to conduct an “urgent security consultation” on renewed operations in Gaza.
And as barbarous tragedy unfolds once again in the Gaza Strip, the international refusal to put a stop to it is itself a barbarous tragedy.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
