FOR several days this week, news reports around the world were dominated by rumours that Israeli forces had assassinated Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar.

These were accompanied by much Western media speculation, fed by President Biden and others, that his death could drastically improve the prospects for a ceasefire and peace in Gaza and Lebanon.
 
This hopeful scenario was based on the false premise that the Israeli government’s chief aim has been to eliminate the supposedly existential threat posed to Israel’s population by Hamas.
 
What’s more, we were told, the final decapitation of the Hamas leadership might also lead to the liberation of hostages held by Hamas and allied groups for the past 12 months.
 
Cue yet more film showings of the horrific attack by Hamas and allied militias on a kibbutz and a music festival a few miles inside Israel on October 7 2023, together with rarely shown footage of their successful assault on a military base.
 
And the architect of this provocation, which led to the death of 42,000 Palestinians and several thousand Lebanese? The very same Yahya Sinwar, we were solemnly informed.
 
So the message of all this was clear: killing him was a necessary act that could well clear the path to a just peace.
 
Yesterday, the rumours of Sinwar’s death were confirmed. The misnamed Israeli Defence Force had come across his body in a bombed-out building in Rafah, his dying minutes recorded on drone and body cameras.
 
At the same time, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu indicated that his own regime’s reign of terror and destruction in Palestine and Lebanon would continue full throttle.
 
Tracts of northern Gaza are to be depopulated and razed to the ground. As the invasion of southern Lebanon proceeds, Hezbollah resistance notwithstanding, the aerial offensive is being extended northwards.

The Yemeni people are being bombarded yet again in revenge for Houthi intervention in the conflict. The world awaits Netanyahu’s lethal response to Iran’s missile attack on Israeli military targets on October 1, itself retaliation for Israel’s assassination of Hamas and Hezbollah leaders in Iran and Lebanon.
 
And what will be the response of Western governments to the ongoing slaughter of Palestinian civilians sheltering in schools, hospitals, mosques, churches and refugee camps? To the deadly IDF attacks on aid workers, journalists and UN peacekeepers?
 
Doubtless, there will be the usual expressions of “concern,” the cynical appeals to minimise civilian casualties and remain (!) within the bounds of humanitarian law.
 
All the while, the US, Britain and other Nato states will continue funding and equipping the Israeli war machine as Israel exercises its right to “defend itself” by killing everyone else.
 
Above all, the supreme lie which justifies this horror will be perpetuated, namely, that the Netanyahu regime’s chief aims are to eliminate Hamas and neutralise any threat from Hezbollah.
 
In truth, as the past 12 months have demonstrated, they are to destroy Gaza as a Palestinian homeland and complete the colonisation of the West Bank. In short, genocide: the crime that dare not speak its name in the mouths of Western political leaders, including — to their eternal shame — most Labour and Tory MPs at Westminster.