Trump Gave Israel the ‘Green Light’ To Restart Large-Scale Bombing in Gaza

By Dave DeCamp – Antiwar.com

According to a report from The Wall Street Journal, President Trump gave Israel the “green light” to restart its genocidal war on Gaza by launching massive airstrikes on the besieged territory, which killed at least 404 Palestinians, including scores of women and children, on Tuesday morning.

The report, which cited an Israeli official, said Trump was given a heads-up before Israel began launching the strikes. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed that Israel consulted with Trump before launching the bombing and repeated the president’s threat that “all hell would break loose.”

In his nearly two months in office, President Trump has rushed military aid to Israel, approving over $12 billion in arms deals and sending 2,000-pound bombs. Trump has also repeatedly called for the permanent expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza, emboldening the members of the Israeli government whose goal is ethnic cleansing.

The US strongly backed Israel at the UN Security Council on Tuesday, claiming the blame for the escalation “lies solely” with Hamas. The US and Israel are justifying the escalation by pointing to Hamas’s rejection of a US proposal for a temporary ceasefire.

Hamas has maintained that it wanted the full implementation of the ceasefire deal reached in January, which would have led to an Israeli withdrawal, a permanent ceasefire, and the release of the remaining Israeli hostages in Gaza. Israel repeatedly violated the agreement, including by imposing a total blockade on aid and all other goods entering Gaza on March 2.

US Ambassador Dorothy Shay said Hamas had “steadfastly refused every proposal and deadline they’ve been presented over the past few weeks, including a bridge proposal to extend the ceasefire beyond Ramadan and Passover to allow time to negotiate a framework for a permanent ceasefire.”

The US and Israel are now demanding that Israel release all the hostages and threatening that the bombing will escalate. “Hamas must understand that the rules of the game have changed—if it does not immediately release all the hostages, the gates of hell will open, and it will face the full force of the IDF by air, sea and land—until its complete destruction,” said Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz.

According to Haaretz, the Israeli military is looking to hit civil infrastructure to hurt Hamas’s ability to govern. Drop Site News reported that the Israeli bombardment killed several members of Gaza’s government and a member of Hamas’s political bureau. Hamas said later in the day that five of its government officials were killed along with their families.

The Israeli strikes also killed a member of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, his wife, and other family members. Abubaker Abed, a Palestinian journalist in Gaza, said a total of six families were wiped out by the Tuesday airstrikes.

“We talk about families killed from the children to the old. The Gharghoon family was bombed today in Rafah. The strikes have killed the father and his two daughters. Their mom and grandparents along with their uncles and aunts were also murdered, erasing the entire family from the civil registry. We are talking about the erasure of entire families,” Abed said, according to Drop Site.