The increasingly unstable character of the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza was highlighted Feb. 10 when Hamas announced it was putting off release of three Israeli hostages set for Feb. 15 “until further notice.” This underscores why the reactionary group must be completely disabled by Israel.
The following day the Israeli cabinet voted unanimously that “if Hamas does not return our hostages by noon on Saturday, the ceasefire will end, and the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] will resume intense fighting until Hamas is decisively defeated.”
Two days later, Hamas backtracked, saying it would proceed with the hostage release.
Under the ceasefire accord, Hamas agreed to release 33 hostages over the first 42 days. The remaining 65 — of whom at least 35 are dead — are supposed to be freed in the deal’s second phase.
But the simple fact is every hostage should be released immediately, ceasefire or no ceasefire.
The second major threat to the existence of Israel and the Jews is Tehran’s relentless moves to create nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them.
Iran Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei calls Israel a “cancerous growth” that must be “uprooted and destroyed.”
A new Holocaust would be a historic defeat both for Jews and for working people the world over.
Hostages show marks of torture
The emaciated condition of hostages Eli Sharabi, Or Levy and Ohad Ben Ami, released by Hamas Feb. 8, was reminiscent of photos of starving Jewish survivors of Nazi concentration camps during World War II. Each of the three lost some 30% of their body weight during their 16-month captivity.
When the hostages were paraded by heavily armed Hamas thugs, a sign behind them said, “We’re the flood.” This is a reference to Hamas’ name for the pogrom they carried out on Oct. 7, 2023, when 1,200 people, most of them Jews, were murdered.
Sharabi and Ben Ami were kidnapped from Kibbutz Beeri, near the Gaza border. Sharabi’s wife and two daughters were murdered by Hamas death squads there that day.
Levy and his wife hid in a bomb shelter after Hamas attacked the Supernova music festival. The thugs threw grenades into it. Levy was captured; his wife Eynav was murdered.
Hamas is using the ceasefire to try to rebuild its battered forces, reassert its dictatorial control over Palestinians in Gaza and prepare more pogroms against Jews and actions aimed at destroying Israel. In exchange for the 16 hostages freed so far, Israel has released 670 Palestinians, including notorious terrorists.
One of those released is Iyad Abu-Shkeidem, who organized a double-suicide bombing in 2004 in a public square in Beersheba that killed 16 people and wounded over 100.
Hamas propaganda
A Hamas film crew carried out a degrading “interview” with the three as part of the stage-managed release ceremony. They were forced to thank their captors for “feeding” them, keeping them “safe” and “taking care” of them.
Once back in Israel they were able to speak the truth. They said they were often given only a rotten pita bread every few days and denied water for days at a time. At least one of them was shackled inside a tunnel for 15 months and not allowed to walk until shortly before his release.
They also reported that they had been tortured — hung upside down from the ceiling, burned with a heated object and gagged with cloth to the point of suffocation.
Hamas has plenty of experience with torture. That’s one of the weapons it has used against the Palestinians in Gaza since coming to power in 2006.
Israel exists because of the history-changing defeats that working people suffered in the 1930s and ’40s. Powerful revolutionary movements in Germany, Spain, Italy and Greece were betrayed by Stalinized Communist Parties that refused to organize working people to defeat fascist forces and to take power into their own hands.
In Germany, the Stalinist party allowed Adolf Hitler and the Nazis to come to power without a fight. The Nazis began expelling and then massacring Jews. By the time the war was over the Nazis and their accomplices had murdered 40% of the Jews in the world, two out of every three Jews in Europe.
The “democratic” imperialist powers, from Washington to London, turned away tens of thousands of Jews, condemning many to their deaths. And they kept turning them away after the war.
Where else were the Jews to go? Israel came to be as the only refuge for Jews anywhere in the world.
Before heading back home after a weeklong trip to the U.S. and meeting with President Donald Trump, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave an interview to Mark Levin Feb. 8 on Fox News. Levin asked Netanyahu about demands that Israel accept a Palestinian state on its border that’s being raised by some inside Israel and by “democratic” imperialist governments worldwide.
There was a Palestinian state, “it’s called Gaza under Hamas,” Netanyahu said. “It was used as a springboard in an attempt to destroy us.” Both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority “want to see the end of Israel,” he noted.
Israel is only 263 miles long, 72 miles across at its widest and only 9 miles at its narrowest point. If Israel is to exist, it can’t permit “an organization that is committed to our destruction” on its border, said Netanyahu.
Netanyahu noted the horrific price paid by the people of Gaza because Hamas uses them as human shields. “Hamas was firing from densely populated areas and forced us to take action,” he noted. They put booby traps “in every house.”
Despite the fact that its policies have left most of Gaza in shambles and tens of thousands have died, Hamas claims it won a great victory.
Even some of the terrorists freed by Israel under the accord are repelled by Hamas’ destruction. That includes Muhammad Al-Tous, a member of Fatah sentenced to life in prison for his role in several terror attacks. Thousands died in Gaza, he told Al-Mashhad TV, “for what?” He said he is telling his children and grandchildren not to join military operations against Israel.
A decisive defeat of Hamas would open the door to new political forces stepping forward and to broader class struggles that could bring workers of all nationalities and religions in the region into common actions.
U.S. rulers seek investments, profits
Netanyahu, a capitalist politician, seeks the support of U.S. imperialism, but he also knows that Israel must rely on itself.
The previous administration of Joseph Biden froze the delivery of crucial weapons to Israel, to press it to end the war with Hamas still intact. Some members of Netanyahu’s coalition government and high-ranking army officials bent to that pressure. “People said, we’re dependent on American arms,” Netanyahu reported. “Let’s stop the war.”
Netanyahu says he told his cabinet that even without U.S. arms, “we’ll fight with what we have. But if we become a vassal state, we will not survive.”
And that is what Israel did, dealing significant blows to Hamas and to Hezbollah in Lebanon, as well as destroying a large part of Tehran’s air defense system.
Under the Trump administration, Netanyahu hopes that Washington will not block Israel from doing whatever is necessary to defend its existence. The Trump administration has now released some weapons, including 2,000 pound bombs, which the Biden administration had frozen.
Netanyahu made it clear that Israel is not looking for U.S. military intervention. “Hamas attacked us. We’ll take care of them,” he told Levin.
Like every U.S. administration, the Trump White House’s goal is not the defense of the Jewish people, but advancing the U.S. rulers’ own domination and exploitation of the resources, land and labor in the Middle East.
Extending Washington’s reach lies behind Trump’s proposal that Arab regimes in the region take in Palestinians from Gaza so the territory can be turned over to the U.S. imperialist rulers to oversee its rebuilding, claiming this would bring stability and peace to the region.
Trump has said he wants to reach an agreement with the regime in Iran to stop its nuclear weapons development program.
To press for a deal, he reimposed stiff economic sanctions on Iran. But those sanctions increase the difficulties faced by working people there, who already face sky-high prices and worsening conditions. The toilers of Iran have taken to the streets in recent years to express their opposition to the regime and its military adventures. They’re the greatest ally of working people in Israel.