A license to kill and seek revenge with US blessing – Elijah J. Magnier
Wednesday, October 29, 2025 8:19 PM
Friends + Interlocutors,
As expected, the ceasefire “peace” agreement in Gaza is breaking down. It was a one-sided deal presented as a Diktat by Trump and Netanyahu. Hamas was forced to accept it because Palestinians were getting massacred from the air and Gaza was being reduced to rubble.
Below are two evaluations about where we are now. First, by veteran war-zone correspondent Elijah Magnier who has decades of experience in the Middle East. Second, is a Wall Street Journal editorial—Will Hamas Sink Trump’s Gaza Deal?—from yesterday. They represent alternative universes.
This is a multiple choice quiz. Well, there are only two choices. Which article do you think is more truthful, more accurate? I expect a score of 100 in favor of Magnier.
Is it any wonder that Americans are hopelessly confused and bamboozled?
BTW, have you noticed that Donald Trump likes to bully and kill people who are in his way? It’s embarrassing and grotesque but nevertheless a fact. The NYT quotes Trump today, speaking offhandedly on Air Force One somewhere between Japan and Korea: “Hamas is a very small part of peace in the Middle East, and they have to behave. If they’re not good, they’re going to be terminated.”
I first noticed this bloodthirsty character flaw during Trump’s first term when he ordered the assassination of Iranian General Soleimani with a drone attack on the tarmac at the Baghdad airport, vaporizing a dozen people who were in the vicinity.
True, Drone King Obama had been killing thousands all over the Middle East. So there was a White House track record to point to. But Soleimani was the #2 man in Iran and a genuine hero.The attack was out of the blue. It was an act of outright murder.
Soleimani was very effectively fighting Sunni terrorists throughout the Middle East, something Washington claimed to be doing. But Bibi Netanyahu wanted him eliminated for his own reasons. Need I say more? Mike Pompeo provided a lie to justify the hit, and Trump jumped to it.
The so-called “peace president” Donald Trump has granted Israel a blank cheque to continue its war under the false label of a ceasefire. In an extraordinary display of cynicism, the United States now blesses the idea that Israel can “defend itself” and even “seek revenge” for the death of one of its soldiers in Rafah, a southern Gaza city already flattened by months of occupation.
The phrase “seek revenge” has no place in the language of diplomacy or international law; it belongs to vendetta, not justice. Yet Trump used it casually, offering a green light to a military that has already destroyed most of Gaza’s infrastructure and killed tens of thousands. His words amounted to a presidential licence to kill.
This so-called “defensive right” is nothing more than a political instrument — a moral disguise for perpetual aggression. The ceasefire, celebrated by Washington as a triumph of diplomacy, has become a hollow performance, a carefully scripted illusion of restraint. In reality, it is a one-sided truce: Israel retains full freedom to strike, assassinate, and invade at will, while Palestinians are expected to remain silent, passive, and even grateful for their own subjugation.
Israel’s Defence Minister, Israel Katz, underlined this hypocrisy with open arrogance, declaring that “no Hamas leader will be safe,” a statement that effectively legitimises extraterritorial assassinations. His words were a barely veiled reference to Israel’s renewed campaign of targeted killings abroad — a campaign already stained by a recent botched attempt in Qatar.
Under this perverse logic, the ceasefire is not a pause in violence but a licence for selective murder, a slow-motion continuation of war disguised as peace. The United States, meanwhile, boasts of having “imposed calm,” yet in practice it has designed a system in which one side kills with impunity while the other is blamed for dying. It is a grotesque inversion of morality, a diplomatic lie constructed to shield criminality behind the rhetoric of peace.
Insisting Israel wait for the return of the slain hostages isn’t working. It has been a week since Hamas handed over any bodies, time it has used to solidify control over western Gaza. The terrorists again fired on Israeli troops on Tuesday and drew an Israeli response. This all should provoke some American rethinking: Hamas’s revival risks preventing any international stabilization force from getting off the ground.
There’s a difference between keeping peace in Gaza and enforcing it, King Abdullah of Jordan told the BBC on Monday. “If it’s ‘peace enforcing,’ nobody will want to touch that,” he said. “If we’re running around Gaza on patrol with weapons, that’s not a situation that any country would like to get involved in.”
The Saudis and Emiratis have said as much privately. The more Hamas restores its power, the more these Arab powers back away.
The terrorists know this and are dragging out the return of the dead hostages to create a fait accompli in Gaza. On Monday they gave not a new body, as the deal requires, but only missing parts from a hostage’s body that Israel had already retrieved in 2023.
An Israeli drone watched as Hamas dug a hole in Gaza City, dumped the hostage’s partial remains from a nearby building, buried it under mounds of earth and then staged a discovery for the Red Cross. The video footage is grim.
Gaza’s demilitarization can’t wait for Hamas to dribble out an arm or a leg a week. By that point it would be too late for an international force, which would be little more than a fig leaf for Hamas’s power. Demilitarization needs to proceed with the return of the slain hostages.
This requires Israeli military action, which resumed after the Hamas shooting Tuesday. Israeli forces may take some more territory from Hamas for now, but the pressing need is for regular intervention to pressure Hamas and disrupt its reconstitution.
The main virtue of the Trump plan was its realism, which dictated that Hamas free all the hostages up front and leave Israel in half of Gaza until Hamas disarmed. This way, when Hamas inevitably reneged on the peace plan, Israel would be in position to enforce it. If, however, the plan is to restrain Israel even while Hamas violates the deal and no stabilization force is ready, it will fail.
Economic development alone won’t defeat Palestinian terrorism. That was the “New Middle East” idea of former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres in the 1990s. It exploded in the suicide bombings of the Second Intifada (2000-05).
Mr. Trump seemed to recognize the risk on Saturday, when he gave Hamas 48 hours to comply with its obligations. Hamas blew past the deadline without consequence and now, in shooting again at Israelis, it flaunts its disregard for Mr. Trump’s deal. The President can let Israel enforce it or watch it sink.
