(LifeSiteNews) — The Israeli army resumed its genocidal bombing campaign against the besieged Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip, marking its decisive departure of the ceasefire agreement the incoming Trump administration brokered in mid-January.
In the early afternoon local time on Tuesday, reliable reports from the Ministry of Health in Gaza stated that at least 404 Palestinians had been killed, including 174 children, 89 women and 32 seniors. Also wounded were 562 others when Israeli shelling struck displaced families sheltering in tents and homes absent any warnings or previous evacuation orders.
“Palestinian families awoke to horror,” reported Mondoweiss, a Jewish media outlet that specializes on Middle East policy. “We were sleeping when suddenly a volcano descended on my children’s heads,” Muhammad al-Sakani told the website outside Gaza City’s al-Ahli Arab Hospital this morning.
“They are not to blame,” he added while standing over the bodies of his two dead children. “Their only crime is that our enemy is a criminal who assassinates children and women as they sleep.”
Pictures and videos reveal the bodies of many killed children. Jewish American journalist Max Blumenthal tweeted, “New piles of murdered children in Gaza,” and contrasted these apparent war crimes with the Trump administration’s treatment of Mahmoud Khalil, the green-card-holding Columbia graduate student whom he describes as being “kidnapped, jailed and branded a terror-symp by the president’s men for protesting for his university to divest from this killing machine. Says it all about the regime we live under.”
These attacks come two weeks after Israel resumed a total blockade of all humanitarian aid, including food, water, medical supplies and temporary housing structures for the approximately 2 million Palestinians in the strip half of whom are children.
This blockade escalated Israel’s many violations of the Trump-brokered ceasefire agreement that was marked by Israel’s refusal to negotiate its second phase, and their army’s direct killing of over 130 Palestinians during the agreed-upon truce.
While Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz announced “the gates of hell will open in Gaza” shortly after the attacks began, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said, “Israel will, from now on, act against Hamas with increasing military strength.”
The office claimed Hamas “repeatedly refused to release our hostages and rejected all offers it received from the U.S. presidential envoy, Steve Witkoff, and from the mediators.”
For its part, Hamas responded, “Netanyahu and his extremist government are making a decision to overturn the ceasefire agreement, exposing (Israeli) prisoners in Gaza to an unknown fate” and that they were “fully responsible” for their “treacherous aggression on Gaza, and on the defenseless civilians and our besieged Palestinian people, who are being subjected to a brutal war and a systematic policy of starvation.”
The media office in Gaza called Israel’s attack “a blatant violation of all international and humanitarian conventions,” asserting the Israeli government “continues its massacres as part of the ongoing genocide against our Palestinian people, disregarding the ceasefire agreement.”
According to an analysis published by Mondoweiss, since the three-phase ceasefire agreement was brokered in January, “Hamas has largely adhered to the terms of the first phase, while Israel has systematically violated it,” charging the latter with “shifting the goalposts for the agreement by insisting that Hamas continue to release more Israeli captives without entering into negotiations over withdrawing or ending the war.”
Last December, advocacy groups Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International released extensive reports concluding Israeli authorities were deliberately seeking to bring about the destruction of the people of Gaza by various means, including the deprivation of necessities like water, food, energy and medical care, amounting to crimes of genocide.
READ: Genocide ‘only reasonable conclusion’ to Israel’s crimes in Gaza: Amnesty International
Additionally, in January 2024, the International Court of Justice delivered a preliminary ruling, finding the charge of genocide against Israel to be “plausible,” and last November the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and former Israeli defense chief Yoav Gallant “for crimes against humanity and war crimes,” including “starvation as a method of warfare; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.”
According to a rationale presented in a July Lancet study, one can conservatively estimate total deaths in Gaza, including indirect fatalities due to causes like starvation, lack of medicine or proper medical care, by multiplying direct deaths (48,928) by five to arrive at 244,640 total fatalities. And with a November UN Human Rights Office report identifying fatalities in Gaza comprising approximately 44% children, it is reasonable to estimate 107,642 total deaths of children.
According to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, President Donald Trump was notified of Israel’s plan to resume its massive bombing campaign of the Gaza Strip.
Throughout his campaign and even during his inaugural address, the 47th president repeated his intention to “be a peacemaker” and “stop all wars.” In the context of the massacres in Gaza, Trump said in April 2024, “let’s get back to peace and stop killing people.”
Yet on March 5, Trump issued a threat against the civilian population of Gaza, saying “people of Gaza” would be “dead” if the Israeli hostages weren’t released by Hamas immediately.
Since taking office less than two months ago, the Trump administration has supplied Israel with enormous levels of military aid, including the approval of nearly $12 billion from U.S. taxpayers to provide the Israeli military with hundreds of 2,000-pound bombs.
And during this time, the administration did not pressure Israel to honor the terms of the ceasefire agreement for which Trump himself took personal credit.
RELATED:
Is the Trump admin weaponizing the justice system against critics of Israel?
On Holocaust Memorial Day, Jewish group protests Israel’s ‘sadistic’ genocide in Gaza
