COMMENTARY: By Caitlin Johnstone
In today’s news, Israel’s stupid genocidal rapists ran over an unexploded ordnance from their own evil carpet bombing campaign, blamed Hamas for the explosion, started bombing Gaza again, killed scores of civilians, said they were once again cutting off aid to the enclave, and then quietly backed down on urging from Washington.
Rather than report that Israel violated the ceasefire agreement as blatantly as any agreement could possibly be violated, the Western press have been referring to this as a “test” of the ceasefire.
Killing Palestinians is so normalised and accepted as a baseline expectation in the Western press that CNN called it the “first major test” of the ceasefire after Israel killed people in Gaza every single day since the ceasefire agreement was signed.
I hope the “WHY AREN’T YOU CELEBRATING?” crowd have gotten their answer by now. We weren’t celebrating because we know more than you.
We’ve actually been paying attention, so we know Israel is going to seek out every excuse to kill Palestinians and torch this fake “ceasefire”.
The Israeli government keeps issuing statements making it explicitly clear that Israel will not consider the “war” over until Hamas is fully disarmed and Gaza is fully demilitarised, terms that the Palestinian resistance has explicitly refused.
These mutually contradictory positions place Gaza on a collision course toward full-scale reignition of the genocide.
❖
Whenever I talk about the IDF massacring civilians for inadvertently travelling into zones Israel has banned them from in Gaza I’ve been getting Israel apologists bleating “but they crossed the Yellow Line!” at me, which I guess is the new hasbara narrative.
Imagine thinking this is a good argument. Imagine thinking it’s perfectly reasonable to blow up a car full of children if they cross a made-up invisible line.
For the last two years anyone who criticized these massacres would be told “tell Hamas to free the hostages then”. The hostages are free and the massacres are still happening. https://t.co/cn4rGXPW6L
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) October 18, 2025
Think about how dehumanised Palestinians would have to be in your mind to believe this is a sane and reasonable position to have. To feel that deadly force via heavy war machinery is a perfectly fine way of administering crowd control.
Imagine if that was happening in your country. If police just blew up your vehicle if you accidentally turned onto a one-way street or made an unauthorised U-turn.
If they could send a drone to go pick you off if you were walking down a street they didn’t think you should be on.
You’d never stand for it. You’d demand they find other ways to direct traffic besides deadly force.
“How about some signs?” you would say. “How about using verbal warnings and loudspeakers? How about road blocks? How about just not fucking murdering a vehicle full of kids for moving in an unauthorised way?”
But because it’s Palestinians, it never occurs to them that this should be the expectation. Palestinians deserve to be executed for the slightest transgression against the most arbitrary restriction.
Israel does this all the time, and its defenders are fine with it. During the aid distribution at GHF sites Israeli soldiers have told the Israeli press that they were ordered to fire upon anyone who moved in an unauthorised way, killing starving civilians every single day for seeking food.
During the last “ceasefire” at the beginning of the year civilians would routinely get murdered for taking a donkey cart down the wrong road or whatever.
That’s the sort of thing people support if they stand by Israel. Supporting Israel is an innately racist and murderous position, because you support murdering Palestinian civilians for reasons you would never accept your own people being killed for.
❖
Israeli right wingers have been filmed literally pushing their babies in front of aid trucks in order to block food from getting to starving civilians.
I mean. Israelis are something else.
❖
Israel cannot stop murdering and abusing and sowing chaos and destruction for even one day and the Western empire cannot stop supporting it for even an instant, but if you say anything about this people start making up weird stories about you hating the religion of Judaism.
❖
The Trump administration has ordered the repatriation to Colombia and Ecuador of the survivors of its attack on a boat in the Caribbean Sea, which punches some major plot holes in its claim that it has been blowing up these boats because they are full of Venezuelan “narco-terrorists”.
The US isn’t generally in the habit of sending terrorists home, so it’s clear they targeted innocent people and had no case against them.
Anyone buying into the war propaganda about Venezuela is a moron. The lies are dumb even by usual US warmongering standards, and US regime change interventionism is consistently disastrous.
People who say they want Trump to remove Maduro are admitting they never grew up.
Caitlin Johnstone is an Australian independent journalist and poet. Her articles include The UN Torture Report On Assange Is An Indictment Of Our Entire Society. She publishes a website and Caitlin’s Newsletter. This article is republished with permission.
