Israel attacks one of its prisoners of war in Gaza due to be released on Sunday
The ongoing Israeli attacks on Gaza is putting the lives of its prisoners at risk just before they are to be released.
The Israelis, as is their wont, have accelerated the pace of massacres in Gaza after the announcement of the ceasefire deal with the Palestinian resistance before it comes into effect on Sunday. In their seemingly unquenchable lust for Palestinian blood, the Israelis on Thursday — a day after the official announcement of the truce deal — also attacked one of their prisoners of war held in Gaza.
Abu Obeida, the spokesman of Al-Qassam Brigades — the armed wing of Hamas — issued a statement on Thursday, announcing the Israeli attack on the captive, who is set to be released among the first batch of prisoners on Sunday.
“After announcing the agreement, the enemy army targeted a place where one of the female prisoners of the first stage of the ceasefire deal was located,” Abu Obeida wrote on his Telegram account on Thursday evening. “Any aggression and bombing at this stage by the enemy could turn the freedom of a prisoner into a tragedy,” he warned.
Abu Obeida didn’t reveal the identity or the fate of the captive in question.
The Palestinian resistance has regularly declared that the genocidal Israelis have been imperilling the lives of their own captives. In one such announcement back in May last year, Abu Odeida said that the resistance lost track of four Zionist prisoners due to non-stop Israeli aggression. “As a result of the barbaric Zionist bombing over the past ten days, we have lost contact with a group of our fighters who were guarding four Zionist prisoners, including the prisoner Hersh Goldberg-Polin,” Abu Obeida wrote on May 13. Goldberg-Polin, an Israeli-American who served in the Israeli occupation forces until April 2023, survived the May assault from his own army but was killed in August.
In another message on September 2, Abu Obeida again warned the Israelis, writing: “Netanyahu and the occupation army alone bear full responsibility for the deaths of the captives, as they deliberately obstructed any prisoner exchange deals for narrow interests, in addition to intentionally killing dozens of them through direct airstrikes.”
Late last year, even the Israelis acknowledged that their murderous rampage in Gaza was proving deadly for their captives. But it never stopped the genocidal state from ceasing its unhinged barbarism.
Noa Argamani, the Israeli prisoner retrieved from Gaza after the Israelis and Americans committed a horrendous massacre that killed nearly 300 Palestinians in the Nuseirat refugee camp in June last year, made it clear that she felt more scared of Israeli bombings than of her Palestinian captors. “I was in a building that was bombed by the [Israeli] Air Force,” she wrote on Instagram after her release. Argamani added, “I emphasise that I was not beaten, but injured all over my body by the collapse of the building on me [as a result of the Israeli bombing].”
As the ceasefire talks dragged on for months with no end in sight, one Israeli captive even attempted suicide out of desperation earlier this month.
Hamas has released numerous videos of Israeli prisoners deploring the murderous raids of their army and begging them to stop as it puts their lives at risk. But their pleas have fallen on deaf ears as the genocidal Israelis have remained uncompromising on their stated goal of ethnic cleansing of the natives from the Gaza Strip even if it comes at the expense of the captured Zionists.
The impending ceasefire, which was announced on January 15 but won’t come into effect until January 19, has already given the Israelis four days to unleash more savagery on the helpless Palestinians. And they have accelerated the rampage as expected. According to the latest data published by the Gaza Civil Defence on Friday, “Since the announcement of the ceasefire agreement on Wednesday evening, the occupation airstrikes across Gaza have killed 117 Palestinians, including 32 women and 30 children, and injured 266 others.” A late Friday update from the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza revealed more sobering numbers: “The Israeli occupation committed four massacres against families in the Gaza Strip, from which 88 martyrs and 189 injuries have reached the hospitals during the past 24 hours.”
Going by the long Israeli history of ceasefire violations — including the most recent one in Lebanon where nearly two months into the truce deal with Hezbollah the Zionists continue to bomb multiple villages in southern Lebanon, having violated the terms of the deal over 1,000 times and killed dozens of Lebanese civilians while flattening vast swathes of numerous villages — they will continue to pound Gaza with more Western-supplied bombs right up to the moment of the prisoner exchange and afterwards. These last 15 months have firmly established that laws do not apply to the Jewish supremacist state. It does as it pleases. No one holds it to account.
Israeli media is already discussing all the ways Netanyahu is likely to subvert the three-stage deal, the first of which will see an exchange of 33 Israeli prisoners for over 1,700 Palestinians languishing in Israeli dungeons beginning Sunday. Once the Israelis receive their prisoners, they are likely to go on a rampage instead of negotiating the subsequent stages of the deal. One columnist in Haaretz questions the very existence of stages in the ceasefire and speculates that “the government does not intend to reach the second stage of the deal, and that its very existence indicates malicious intent. Indeed, this conclusion requires saving every hostage who can be rescued in the first stage as if there would never be a second stage… The aspiration to establish and entrench themselves in Gaza and the dream of settlement there have not disappeared, they have only been postponed for a few weeks.”
And when the Israelis inevitably restart their terrorism, the Trump administration will have their back. Mike Waltz, Trump’s National Security Adviser, has been unequivocal about unstinting American backing for the continuation of the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza, “We’ve made it very clear to the Israelis, and I want the people of Israel to hear me on this: If they need to go back in, we’re with them.”
Hamas is set to secure the release of some of its highly valued captives from the Israeli dungeons. The leading Palestinian resistance faction, however, hasn’t yet revealed the names of the living Israelis it will be releasing on Sunday. The continued Israeli barbarism in the Gaza Strip might just force them to change some names at the last minute.
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Unfortunately, this ceasefire is probably a big charade designed only to make Biden look good going out, and Trump look good coming in.
Unredeemably Cruel Bastards. And there's still $8 billion in "aid" from Biden for the "defense of Israel" in the works. I pray the whole world can stop the barbarity this time!!! 🇵🇸