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On Thursday, Israeli forces carried out a summary execution of two unarmed Palestinians in the West Bank after they had surrendered, in an event recorded live on video.
The victims, Yusef 'Asa'sah, 39, and al-Muntaser bel-lah 'Abdallah, 26, were shown in the video lifting their shirts to prove they had no weapons and lying on the ground in surrender. Israeli forces directed them to enter a building, had them lie on the ground then shot them multiple times in a hail of automatic rifle fire.
Since the start of the Gaza genocide, Israeli military forces and settlers have killed over 1,000 Palestinians in the West Bank, with the perpetrators given legal impunity for these murders. United Nations human rights office spokesperson Jeremy Laurence said that the "brazen killing" was "yet another apparent summary execution."
The shooting occurred as part of an ongoing assault on the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank. "Everyone saw that they were posing no threat to the Israeli forces," said Shai Parnes of Israeli human rights group B'Tselem, "yet the soldiers decided to shoot them and kill them on the spot."
The summary execution, a war crime under international law, was openly defended by Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who declared, "The [Israeli] fighters acted exactly as expected of them - terrorists should die."
The incident is the first time since the beginning of the genocide in Palestine on October 7, 2023 that footage has been released showing Israeli forces carrying out a summary execution using small arms. But eyewitness accounts and direct physical evidence point to the existence of dozens or hundreds of such murders.
In April 2024, nearly 300 bodies were discovered in a series of mass graves near Nazer Hospital in Southern Gaza. Many of the dead were handcuffed and showed signs of being shot at close range.
The victims of these executions are just part of the more than 60,000 Palestinians killed by Israeli bullets and bombs since the start of the Gaza genocide nearly two years ago, and the tens of thousands more who have died from hunger, disease and deprivation.
The fact that Israeli forces are not only executing unarmed Palestinians with TV cameras rolling, but that the cabinet of the Israeli government is defending these actions, exposes the fact that the "peace" deal signed by Israel and Hamas is nothing more than an enabling act for genocide throughout all of Palestine. Israel is in fact accelerating its plan to annex Gaza and the West Bank.
One week ago, Zohran Mamdani, the newly-elected mayor of New York City and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, stood and grinned behind US President Trump as Trump declared, "We actually have now for the first time, peace in the Middle East after 3000 years." Mamdani added, speaking of Trump's actions, that he "appreciate[s] all efforts toward peace."
Trump's claim, made by a leading architect of the Gaza genocide and a public advocate of ethnic cleansing, is a ridiculous fraud. But the US media has echoed Trump's lie of enacting "peace" in Palestine and has largely stopped reporting on Israel's mass killings in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon and Syria. The New York Times, for example, did not carry a story on Israel's execution in the West Bank on the front page of its Sunday edition.
Earlier this month, Trump's "peace" deal was given the imprimatur of the UN Security Council, which voted on November 17 to pass a resolution "welcoming the historic Trump Declaration for Enduring Peace and Prosperity" and praising the "constructive role played by the United States of America."
This shameful resolution was passed with the vote not only of the imperialist powers -- France, the UK, the United States -- but with the votes of the Arab bourgeois regimes of Algeria and Pakistan, and with the endorsement of the Palestinian Authority.
As Craig Mokhiber, former director of the New York Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, declared "Not a single member of the Council had the courage, principle, or respect for international law to vote against this US-Israel colonial outrage."
The Trump plan creates the framework for the permanent neo-colonial domination of Palestine, turning over the government of Gaza, in defiance of the right to self-determination, to a "board of peace" headed by the colonial powers, led by Trump and former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Under the plan, Israel retains control of more than half of the Gaza Strip, It is moving to make this occupation permanent as part of a systematic effort to annex Gaza.
Since the declaration of the "ceasefire" on October 10, Israel has violated its terms over 500 times, killing 350 Palestinians and wounding about 900 others. It has carried out near-daily attacks throughout Lebanon, and this week carried out an airstrike in Syria that killed 13 people.
The "peace" plan has, moreover, enabled Israel to turn its attention to the West Bank as part of a systematic project to annex the whole of Palestine into "greater Israel." The attacks on Lebanon and Syria are, moreover, preparatory to a war against Iran.
In September, Netanyahu announced a plan to expand Israeli settlements in the West Bank, effectively cutting the Palestinian territory in half. The settlement plan, in the words of Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, aims to "bury the idea of a Palestinian state."
In October, Israeli lawmakers voted 25-24 to advance a bill declaring that "the laws, judicial system, administration, and sovereignty of the State of Israel shall apply to all areas of settlement in Judea and Samaria."
These bills have been accompanied by a wave of settler violence against the Palestinian population in the West Bank. Over 1,000 Palestinians have been injured so far in settler attacks, double the rate of last year, and tens of thousands have been forcibly removed by the Israeli government.
The events since the announcement of the so-called Gaza "ceasefire" have thoroughly exposed those who have promoted Trump's "peace" plan -- including the corporate media, the Democratic and Republican parties, the imperialist powers of Europe, and the bourgeois regimes of the Arab world.
In the United States, it was launched by the Biden administration and the Democratic Party, and it is now being "completed" under Trump and the Republicans. This bipartisan unity was embodied in the grotesque display last week by Mamdani. A not insignificant factor in Mamdani's election was popular opposition to the genocide. Now, he pledges a "partnership" with its chief architect.
The genocide in Palestine is part of a far broader imperialist war, stretching from the Middle East to Ukraine to the Asia-Pacific. Stopping it requires the mobilization of the international working class, the only force capable of halting the war machine.
In the Middle East, this means waging a struggle for the political independence of the working class from all factions of the capitalist class and forging the closest possible unity in action with workers in the imperialist centers of North America and Europe. On this basis, workers throughout the region must fight for their democratic and social rights through the perspective of a United Socialist States of the Middle East -- a goal that depends on the international working class defeating imperialism through the socialist reorganization of society worldwide.
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