Naftali Bennett Breaks Gaza Ceasefire On His Third Day In Office

Early this Wednesday morning Israeli warplanes launched a number of airstrikes on southern and Western Gaza, breaking a ceasefire that had ended an 11-day round of fighting between Palestinian armed groups and the Israeli military.

The Gaza-Israel ceasefire, which had gone into effect at 2AM on the 21st May, was broken after a decision made by Naftali Bennett, the new Israeli Prime Minister, during his second day in office. Also on Tuesday, Bennett’s government did not act to stop an extremist settler march which paraded through the streets of Jerusalem.

Where's the outrage? Israeli settlers storm a Palestinian area in Jerusalem chanting "death to Arabs" & calling for ethnic cleansing.

What do Israeli police do? Protect the racists and attack Palestinians.

The equivalent is racists in the US doing this in a black neighbourhood. pic.twitter.com/5Ku7akzU53
— Robert Inlakesh (@falasteen47) June 16, 2021

Naftali Bennett’s coalition partner, Yair Lapid, condemned the chants of “death to Arabs” by the fascist group of settlers, but the Prime Minister himself remained completely silent, despite the fact that settlers had even burnt his photo and chanted against him. The reason why the settlers, belonging to Kahanist groups, came out in such staunch opposition to Bennett, is due to his acceptance of Israeli political parties which are not considered as left-wing.

One of the reasons for last month’s escalation, causing what some called the “11-day war” on Gaza, was the extremist settler march planned to enter the al-Aqsa Mosque compound. The Israeli government reportedly sent a communication to Hamas through Egyptian contacts, informing them that the course of the settler march was changed to not include storming al-Aqsa. This decision in and of itself was considered by many Israeli’s as a confirmation that Hamas had been able to effectively achieve a level of deterrence with Israel from the battle branded by Gaza’s ‘Joint Room’ of resistance factions as Sayf al-Quds (Sword of Jerusalem).