What Ceasefire? Trump Helps Netanyahu Kill Over 400 Palestinians in Gaza
The Trump administration backs war against Palestine abroad and repression against supporters of Palestine at home.
Americans watching horror again unfold in Gaza should make no mistake. This is our war, our body count. And it cannot be separated from the authoritarian advance at home that is rapidly choking off our fundamental political freedoms.
Late Monday, White House press secretary Karoline Levitt said Israel had consulted with the Trump administration before launching punishing pre-dawn airstrikes that killed more than 400 people, including multiple children. An Israeli official told the Washington Post that the resumption of violence was "fully coordinated" with Washington.
The ceasefire President Donald Trump brokered provided a hope that the nightmare would not return. Instead, the next phase of the combination Palestinian genocide and Middle Eastern regional war is taking shape. And the Trump administration seeded the bed for it with a surprising and cynical competence that did not characterize its prior term in office.
In January, Trump secured the ceasefire that the Biden administration promised for half a year was imminent but never delivered. But Israel – throughout 2024, the intransigent party – accepted the ceasefire without committing to its crucial second phase, wherein it would negotiate a military withdrawal from Gaza and a durable end to hostilities. During the ceasefire, Trump sold Israel billions worth of weapons and mused openly about ethnically cleansing Gaza. And when the ceasefire's first 42-day phase expired, Mideast envoy Steve Witkoff presented a proposal that recapitulated the terms of phase one, while Hamas insisted instead on progressing to phase two of the deal they thought everyone had obligated themselves. With that, the White House portrayed Hamas as the rejectionists. "Hamas could have released hostages to extend the cease-fire but instead chose refusal and war,” National Security Council spokesperson Brian Hughes said Tuesday.
By the time Israel resumed bombing Gaza, the Trump administration had escalated the regional war that emanated from it. Over the weekend, it intensified the US naval bombardment of Houthi-controlled Yemen to end Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping. Washington could have ended those attacks simply by getting Israel to accept phase two of the ceasefire – since the Houthis held Red Sea shipping at risk as long as Israel held Gaza at risk – but it instead dreams of delivering something like a knockout blow to a Houthi movement that has withstood an entire decade of Saudi, US, and occasionally Israeli bombardment. "There are specific effects that we’re trying to achieve. And there are specific targets that have been selected and approaches that we’re taking in order to achieve the President’s end state," Lt. Gen. Alex Grynkewich, the Joint Staff's operations director, told reporters yesterday.
The sea-air campaign against the Houthis has come complete with repeated threats against Iran, the US' main regional adversary, and the driver of post-October 7 attacks on US forces in the Middle East by militias receiving its patronage. Trump quickly stated that he would attribute Houthi counter salvos on US ships to the Iranians, and the Pentagon held open the possibility of direct US attacks on Iran. It was a sharp and perhaps decisive reversal from Trump's offer of negotiations with Iran earlier this month, and while Tehran already considered the offer disingenuous, the current leader of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps vowed to respond "decisively and destructively" should Trump make good on the threat. Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell praised the return of "moral clarity," a favored term of the Bush administration during the early years of the so-called “War on Terror” to justify a threat or deployment of US military force. Spark after spark is showering down on the tinder that is the post-October 7 Middle East.
But the conflagration that results will burn not only in the Middle East but here as well. Trump's embrace of war in the region is inseparable from his curtailment of basic political rights at home. The two projects feed on and strengthen one another.
Hours before Israel threw away what remained of the January 2025 ceasefire in Gaza, the Justice Department and the FBI formally unveiled a new task force to make Americans think twice before protesting this latest US-sponsored bloodshed in the Middle East.