NOTHING that Israel does to the Palestinians should surprise the world.
The genocidal Zionist regime's goal has remained the same since its illegal creation in 1948: drive the Palestinians out or ethnically cleanse them if they refuse.
So there is no shock value in CNN's report that Israel is considering "limiting" humanitarian aid into Gaza after Donald Trump's inauguration on Jan 20. They have been doing worse.
The Israelis have bombed hospitals — their favourite target, and even the last one standing was one too many for the Zionists — where pregnant Palestinian mothers were waiting to deliver, the sick and weak were being treated.
Schools, clinics, homes and just about anything that can shield the Palestinians from the cold are legitimate targets for the genocidal regime. But what is ominous though is the link between humanitarian aid and Trump's inauguration.
Here, too, there is no shock value. Nothing good happened in the Middle East during the president-elect's first term, and we shouldn't expect anything now.
But why is this even news? There is no man-bites-dog stupefaction here, only a pretext to spin a false narrative. And which is: that humanitarian aid is not reaching the people who need it, but landing up in the hands of Hamas.
If so, why aren't the United Nations humanitarian agencies and other charities telling the same story? What's worse, Israel is not just stopping the flow of humanitarian aid to the Palestinians, it is killing aid workers.
Last year, Israel killed 178 Palestinian aid workers — 175 in Gaza and three in the West Bank. If a 14-month total since Oct 7 is needed, Al Jazeera provides one, quoting UN sources: 333 humanitarian workers in Gaza.
The implication in the CNN story is that Israel is not limiting humanitarian aid to the Palestinians. If that is true, then why was there a need for President Joe Biden's administration to send a letter in October to the Israeli government demanding it act to improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza within 30 days or risk violating United States laws governing foreign military assistance, suggesting, in the words of CNN, US military aid to Israel could be in jeopardy?
The world knows the 30-day deadline passed months ago and the weapons are still heading to the killing fields.
But here is the puzzle. The US never fails to tell the world that as a leader of the "free" world, it is all for the rules-based world order. Ditto, says the rest of the West. If so, why arm Israel, knowing fully well that it is using the weapons to massacre unarmed Palestinians?
Don't the lives of Palestinians matter? Or do these rules-based nations of the "free" world consider all Palestinians — be they infants, children or women — to be "terrorists", like the Zionist regime does? According to Al Jazeera, up to Friday, 45,518 Palestinians were killed and 108,438 were injured — most of them women and children.
Doesn't the ruling of the International Court of Justice that Israel is committing plausible genocide mean anything? The West continues to break its word.