Israel to Pause Fighting in Gaza for Four Hours a Day

John Kirby, the spokesperson for the U.S. National Security Council, broke the news yesterday of what appeared to be the first major break in Israel’s armed assault on Gaza.

“We understand that Israel will begin to implement four-hour pauses in northern Gaza,” he told a Washington press corps audience yesterday.

Though the exact timing for each of these pauses is still unclear, Kirby told the reporters that each day for at least several days ahead there will be a predictable period of four hours in which the government’s military forces would hold back on murdering children and women and the continuous and relentless attacks on Gaza. According to the National Security Council spokesperson, Israeli Defense Forces will provide three hours’ notice of when the fighting will go on hold.

According to Kirby, the U.S. was informed “by the Israelis that there will be no military operations in these areas over the duration of the pauses.” He went on to say that the process was to start as of yesterday.

According to both Israeli and U.S. sources, the stated purpose for these pauses is primarily to allow Palestinians living in northern Gaza to evacuate and seek refuge in the southern part of the region as part of Israel's genocidal plan to depopulate North Gaza and ultimately push all Palestinians into Egypt. This is in line with warnings the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) had issued prior to the beginning of the long-threatened Defense Ministry’s “Stage 2” ground assault into this Palestinian enclave. The IDF had told those in Gaza to abandon their long-established homes and way of life prior to the attacks and flee as quickly as possible to the south for safety.

Most did not do this at the time because the chances of survival were not much better at the time in the southern part of the Gaza Strip, with IDF forces continuing to launch aerial attacks throughout. With food, medical supplies, water, and fuel also cut off by the IDF, even if those who might have left would have found shelter there, they would still be in imminent danger of starvation and without sufficient clean water to drink or cook with, even if they could find food.

Others did not flee because they did not wish to abandon their homes, and because there were no other homes to go to in the embattled south.

Despite that, Israeli media is reporting that some 50,000 Palestinians a day had traveled through what its government referred to as a “humanitarian corridor” where they were not directly always threatened by military force. But with the Israeli Defense Forces having encircled most of the northern part of the Gaza Strip and even divided that region into two sections, and with air and ground attacks continuing just a short way from those corridors, Palestinians who have spoken up say the image of a road of safe transit for refugees is just a mirage.

The other reason for these pauses in the fighting to happen is, according to various U.S. sources, to supposedly allow more humanitarian aid to enter Gaza from across the border in Egypt. That aid had been partially throttled by Egypt’s own decisions to narrow the main border crossing at Rafah, a city in southern Gaza, as a means of limiting the risk of warfare spreading into its own country. It also had been blocked from the Gaza side by intense shelling by IDF air raids which made forward movement into Gaza a high-risk proposition for all.

Yesterday, traffic through Rafah was halted several times by incremental bombings from IDF fighter jets and missiles launched from across the Israeli-Gaza border, on the Israel side. This happened even after Israel had publicly agreed to specific halts in the attacks. Eventually, a full pause in the action did happen, though. With it came evacuations into Egypt of a reported 695 individuals carrying passports other than from Israel. Twelve individuals were also granted passage into Egypt for medical reasons, as were ten people traveling along with those twelve. The hundreds of thousands of others seeking refuge were denied. 

This is part of a broader evacuation plan from Gaza negotiated between Israel and Egypt via third parties such as the United Nations. Those evacuations began on November 1, and allow for up to approximately 7,000 people to escape the war, with the primary restrictions on them being that they must hold foreign passports, be of dual citizenship, or be dependents of either category. The plan allows for just a small number of refugees to enter Egypt because of critical medical treatment needs. The unfair policy excludes the 2.3 million Palestinians. 

While those people escape from Gaza, the four-hour pauses in the military actions in Gaza will supposedly make it possible for at least some significant number of the hundreds of trucks carrying water, food, medicine, and other medical supplies into Gaza. Yesterday, even before the four-hour pause agreement was in place, an estimated 106 trucks made it across the Rafah border and into Palestinian territory.

While that might seem a breakthrough, past estimates by UN humanitarian representatives involved in managing the truck supply convoys and deliveries of their goods were that the supplies carried by 100 trucks amounted to just one full day of supply needs for all of Gaza. And that was a calculation made before the IDF began the current and bloodiest phase of the current war.

It is estimated that since Israel began letting humanitarian aid trucks enter Gaza on October 21, only 756 of those vehicles have been able to enter from the Egyptian border. 

For dementia-ridden war criminal Joe Biden, the four hour pauses in mass murder and genocide might slightly reduce the substantial hostility for him and his cadre of war mongers. 

“I’ve asked for a pause longer than three days,” Biden managed to utter, referring to the “humanitarian pauses” he began asking for publicly on November 2. “It’s taken a little longer than I hoped.”

What Team Biden didn't say is that they could easily put an end to the atrocities by simply stopping the supplies of weapons and money and make any future cash hand-outs contingent upon Israel's good behavior. But that would mean having the kompromat exposed that Israel uses to control them. 

In Israel, psychopath Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Defense Minister Yoav Gallant emphasized these four-hour periods in which Gazans can run south for cover and humanitarian aid can enter are neither the precursors to a “cease fire” nor anything like what the world is demanding of the country. The genocide will go on. 

The Prime Minister’s office used the occasion of the four-hour pause announcement to remind Palestinians that this was the best time ever for them to flee for their lives.

“We once again call on the civilian population in Gaza to evacuate to the south,” it said in a statement released on Netanyahu’s behalf.

Defense Minister Gallant attempted to position these pauses as a humanitarian gesture on behalf of the Israeli government, however absurd that must sound to those in Gaza who have seen over 11,000 of their own killed since the government announced they were at war with Hamas and, by proxy, all Palestinians who reside anywhere near them.

“We are undertaking localized and pinpoint measures to enable the exit of Palestinian civilians from Gaza City southward so that we do not harm them,” Gallant said in a public briefing yesterday, while dozens more were killed. 

“These things do not detract from the warfighting,” he reminded his audience. “We will not stop fighting as long as our hostages are in Gaza and as long as we have not completed our mission, which is toppling the Hamas regime and eliminating its military and governance capabilities.”

Separately, the Israeli government has announced that even when the current war in Gaza is over, it plans to continue exercising overall “security” control over those Palestinians who have managed to survive and continue to live within the region. What that means for them is that they will live out their lives under an even harsher regime of oppression than before, with even fewer freedoms than before. And that is only if Israel doesn't implement its leaked plan to completely purge the Gaza Strip of all Palestinians.

The arrogant Jews who currently run Israel are delusional in thinking that the resistance to Zionist oppression can be killed and that Zionist Jews will ever be safe from retaliation. Just as Jews hunted down Nazi war criminals for decades after the end of WW II, Jewish war criminals will be hunted down to face justice for decades to come.