Bi-Weekly Brief – April 28, 2025
Israel’s End Game: Extermination and Annexation?
Just hours after his brief meeting with Catholic convert J.D. Vance with whom he had a tense relationship, and shortly before he died early on Easter Monday, Pope Francis blessed the Easter gathering and then sat silently as his Easter message was read out to the crowd in St. Peter’s Square. “I think of the people of Gaza,” the Pope’s message proclaimed, “and its Christian community in particular, where the terrible conflict continues to cause death and destruction and to create a dramatic and deplorable humanitarian situation. I appeal to the warring parties: call a ceasefire, release the hostages and come to the aid of a starving people that aspires to a future of peace!”
Since his death, Pope Francis’ efforts to end Israel’s aggression in Gaza which he once referred to as “terrorism” have received scant attention. In the words of Guardian columnist Owen Jones, “political and media elites have sought to airbrush his record in life as in death – another plank of a strategy of eradicating scrutiny and accountability for this crime of historic proportions.” Take the statement issued by Joe Biden, the second Catholic president of the US, who earned the sobriquet ‘Genocide Joe’ during his time in office: “Pope Francis will be remembered as one of the most consequential leaders of our time and I am better for having known him.” Tell that to the people of Gaza. It took Bibi Netanyahu four days to issue his condolences to the Catholic Church and he sent only Israel’s ambassador to the Vatican to the Pope’s funeral, which was attended by both Trump and Biden among fifty world leaders.
Military attacks intensified
The final appeal of the Pope, who reportedly made daily phone calls to the families sheltering in Gaza’s Holy Family Catholic Church even when he was hospitalized, was issued shortly after Defense Minister Israel Katz announced on April 16 that Israel’s attacks would intensify with “tremendous force.” On the same day, bombs leveled the Gaza home of photojournalist Fatima Hassona, killing her along with ten members of her family. Hassona had just learned the day before that the documentary about her life had been selected to be shown at the Cannes Film Festival.
Over the following 48 hours Israel’s military strikes took nearly 100 Palestinian lives and left hundreds wounded. Among the dead were displaced residents forced to take refuge in the large tented encampmentin Mawasi, supposedly a ‘safe zone,’ where missiles set off a fiery inferno that charred beyond recognitionthe bodies of at least 15 people, eight of them children. Some 600 children have been killed in Gaza since Israel resumed its military strikes on March 18. Israel has long been using the Gaza Strip as a lab to test weapons and according to Drop Site, this is what it appears to be doing now with Elbit System’s fully autonomous SkyStriker suicide drone which has been incinerating tents around the Gaza Strip. The day before Easter Netanyahu claimed that Israel had “no choice” but to keep fighting until it had destroyed Hamas and freed the hostages. The city of Rafah has now been completely wiped out, as Israel apparently digs in to stay along the border with Egypt.
Starvation in Gaza
In his book released for the Jubilee 2025, Pope Francis expressed his concern about the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and stated that “according to some experts, what is happening in Gaza has the characteristics of a genocide. It should be carefully investigated….” More than 50 days after it totally blocked all food, water, medicine and other humanitarian aid from entering Gaza, Israel continues to deny that any such crisis is taking place. On April 22, responding to Senator Bernie Sanders’ claim that Israel was committing a war crime, Defense Minister Katz declared that “contrary to the Senator's statement, Israel is acting in full accordance with international law. The humanitarian condition in Gaza is constantly monitored and large quantities of aid were delivered.”
The minister would no doubt denounce as ‘fake news’ the claim of human rights agencies that thousands of Gaza’s children are malnourished and “most people are surviving on one meal a day or less” and that they are once again being forced to drink sea water as described in +972 Magazine. The World Food Program has run out of all food supplies warehoused in Gaza and is forced to close its food kitchens, while enough food to feed millions is stranded at Gaza’s closed border crossings. Residents cannot even go back to their ruined homes to try to plant vegetable gardens since 69 percent of the Gaza Strip is now off limits to Palestinians.
Here a member of the American Friends Service Committee’s Gaza staff describes what it is like to be subsisting on the edge of starvation: “My body is in constant, indescribable pain. Even that pain is starting to fade, not because it's gone, but because my body is too weak to feel it anymore…This famine is not just a crisis, it's a deliberate act of cruelty. It is heart-wrenching to wake up each day knowing there is no food, no help, and no hope on the horizon. The despair is suffocating. We are not dying quietly; we are being starved in plain sight, and the world is watching with indifference. How can humanity sleep at night knowing that entire families are wasting away behind closed wire fences and walls, their cries unheard, their lives dismissed?”
On April 16, Médecins sans Frontières warned that Israel is turning Gaza into a “mass grave of Palestinians.” As far as Katz is concerned, the total blockade on food and humanitarian aid is crucial to Israel’s war strategy and will be continued until the war is won. During his visit to the US this message was conveyed by National Security Minister Ben-Gvir, who has eight criminal convictions for incitement to racism and supporting a terrorist organization. He wrote about his April 15th dinner with Republicans (minus Trump) at Mar-a-Lago that “they expressed support for my very clear position…that food and aid depots should be bombed in order to create military and political pressure to bring our hostages home safely.” He did not appear to consider the possibility that bombing and starvation could be a death sentence for those hostages who are still alive. The following day Ben-Gvir, who was once shunned in the US, spoke at Shabtai, a Jewish society on the Yale campus co-founded by Yale alumnus Cory Booker, who received $120,000 from AIPAC in 2024.
On April 21, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich declared that the destruction of Hamas is a more important goal that securing the freedom of the hostages. On April 23, as the total blockade reached its 50th day, he threatened to bring down the government if humanitarian aid is resumed and gets into Hamas’ hands. On the same day the UK, France and Germany issued a joint statement calling for the immediate resumption of aid deliveries which Israel condemned as “ethically outrageous”. Two days after that, as he traveled to Rome for the Pope’s funeral, Trump said that he had told Netanyahu during an April 22 phone call that “we’ve got to be good to Gaza” and food and medicine must be allowed enter the Strip. So far these messages all seem to have fallen on deaf ears. The Israeli government also seems oblivious to the fact that the toxic pollutants from 100,000 tons of bombs dropped on Gaza could have serious health consequences for Israelis themselves, as described here.
Meanwhile, Gaza’s residents continue to be killed and wounded by unexploded ordnance among the 50 million tons of rubble, while Israel has targeted for destruction the heavy machinery used to clear the wreckage. There are reports that some Palestinians are receiving text messages from Israel telling them to get in touch with a ‘Captain Jalal’ on WhatsApp to consider options to leave. According to an Egyptian official and two Palestinian migrants, hundreds of people have recently left Gaza for ‘family reunification’ in Germany and France with the cooperation of German and French officials.
Jewish supremacy on the march
“Israel’s annexation of the West Bank is already here.” This is the headline of an April 22 editorial in Haaretz that is worth quoting at length: “By the time it is formally declared, it will already be too late to stop it – the process will have been completed. That is the modus operandi of the settlers and the government – to do everything short of a formal declaration, knowing that no one is paying attention and that no one really cares.” The editorial cites “a drastic increase in the number of building permits in settlements, the transfer of West Bank administration from the army to the settlers and their supporters, designation of state land at a dizzying pace and draconian enforcement against illegal Palestinian construction.” It then details various bills being considered by the Knesset to expand settlements and increase the legitimacy of “those who are actually doing the work of expulsion on the ground. As such, when the official annexation comes, there will be as few Palestinians as possible there.”
The escalating settler-soldier brutality targeting villages and herding communities – seen in the torching of both the northern village of Bardala on April 24 and Sinjil in the central West Bank which led to the death by heart attack of 48-year-old Wael Ghafari - has succeeded in clearing Palestinians from large areas of the Jordan Valley and other parts of the West Bank. Just how incapable many Israelis are of seeing Palestinians as full human beings is revealed by the vicious beating inflicted by the Border Police on members of the Manasra family while their homes were being destroyed in Wadi Fukin near Bethlehem. Meanwhile, the siege on refugee camps goes on. The army’s onslaught on Jenin, where home demolitions are now being carried out and military outposts established, has lasted for nearly 100 days while residents are not permitted to return. More than 800 West Bank Palestinians have been killed by settlers and soldiers since October 2023.
What of the future? With Christian Zionist Mike Huckabee, who has close relations with settlers, now confirmed to be US ambassador to Israel and Merav Ceren, who once was employed by Israel’s Ministry of Defense, appointed to oversee relations with Israel and Iran in the National Security Council, the Trump administration appears unlikely to put roadblocks in the way of Israel in its drive to expand its borders. Just where its supremacist yearnings could lead was displayed in a chilling AI-produced video that was recently posted on far-right Israeli platforms. It shows the destruction of Al-Aqsa Mosque in a Gaza-like massive explosion and the rise of the Third Temple on its ruins with the message “coming soon in these days.”
Nancy Murray, Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine
The Alliance invites you to PALESTINE RESISTANCE: AN UPDATE FROM THE GROUND featuring West Bank activist Fadi Quran, senior director at Avaaz, and Leila Farsakh, editor of Rethinking Statehood in Palestine. Thursday, May 8, 7 – 8:30 PM at Friends Meeting in Cambridge, 5 Longfellow Park (a 10-minute walk down Brattle Street from Harvard Square).