Contributed by Joe Montero

The possibility of an agreement to a hostage deal looks very much the result of the immense pressure on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. We don’t know yet whether this is merely a mirage. At least the Israeli government is locked away discussing the matter.

Internally there is the impact of a very public five-day march to Jerusalem of relatives of those captured by Hamas. They are angry that the government hasn’t done nearly enough to secure the release of their loved ones, and tha6 the priority had been to capture Gaza and not the safety of Israeli’s. 

Approval of Netanyahu and his government is going south. Reports of divisions within the war cabinet don’t help. Israeli opponents of the war are starting to find their voice. The longer this goes on, the greater the fallout ill be.

Each day Israel’s international isolation deepens further. Images of dead children, the brazen attack on the    hospital, a body count now over 14,000, and more have horrified the world. Millions have taken to the streets in a growing movement that will have a long-term impact.

Image from Dr Omar Suleiman: The faces 35 of the Palestinian children killed by the Israeli in the 6 the first 6 months of the year and before the thousands killed in the current assault.

Efforts made by the extended arm of Israeli influence to silence critics with the use of the antiemetic label is weakening, and so is the use of fabricated stories, despite their being carried as fact by much of the mainstream media. Take the example of the claimed beheading of 40 children. This was proved to be false. There are many other false stories of this sort.

Much use has been made of the 7 November Hamas attack. Left out of the narrative is that much of what happened was the result of firefights between Hamas and the Israeli military, supported by militias. Now it is coming to light that a proportion of the Israeli’s deaths came at the hands of the Israeli military. This first appeared in Israeli media, due to release or exposure of official accounts.

Take the mass circulation Haaretz newspaper. It revealed that according to the findings of a police investigation, some events were not as reported, and that the number of Israeli deaths claimed included Palestinians. The official figure has been reduced from 1,400 to 1,200 and may be reduced further yet.

Keep in mind that this publication backed the government’s war from the outset, and even blocked out the world’s reaction against the blitzkrieg on Gaza. The shift is telling and an indicator of growing division within Israel.

Here is some more of the published information An Israeli attack helicopter that had first fired on Palestinians who had crossed the fence from Gaza, then attacked the nearby Nova music festival, where 364 people were reported killed. Video footage from both the military and police showed the Israeli armed forces were already there and opened fire. Not all the 364 young Israelis reported killed there died from the Hamas attack. How many we don’t know. The previous officially claimed toll was 260 dead.

Israeli artillery positions were already dug in at the Nova festival and they shot into the crowd according to reports now coming in

At the Be’eri Kibbutz and other places, tanks fired shells that indiscriminately took out everyone in the way. In Sderot, where Hamas operatives had taken over the local police station and held police offices inside captive, two Israeli tank shells demolished the building and killed everyone inside.

These are some examples of what looks like a conscious policy to build the body count. To systematically carry this out required orders from command, under the direction of the prime minister and his government.

this is what the Zionist ideology comes to.

This news has spread inside Israel and is now starting to filter to even the heavily censored western media, further undermining the legitimacy of the Israeli government and especially Netanyahu himself.

Israel is heavily dependent on the patronage of Washington. Support for Israel’s attack on Gaza has come in spades. The price has been that support for Joe Biden has plummeted. According to a new poll from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, a majority of Americans (63 percent) hold that Biden is mishandling the United Sate’s role in the conflict.

Support for a president facing re-election has never been so low.

Above all, there may be a growing realisation that the destruction of Hamas is impossible, that is it impossible to ethnically cleanse out the whole population, and that ongoing occupation at this level will result in being stuck in a quagmire and eventual defeat. But nothing is certain with a political leadership that has come to believe so much on its own fiction of invincibility and mission to colonise.