Biden fumbles ‘peace talks’ as Gaza death toll passes 40 000

Alameen Templeton

Israel’s genocide machine passed the 40 000 mark long ago. We’ve known this simply because there’s still “about” 11 000 dead Palestinians lying undiscovered and unreachable beneath Gaza’s rubble.
But numbers are important in the mind-numbing business of mass slaughter. So much so, that it even seemed as if the Zionists had in preceding days scaled back their murder rate as the Gaza Health Ministry’s death toll approached the 40 000 mark Thursday.
Israel’s leaders trooped off reluctantly to Doha for a “peace negotiation” under pressure from the United States that has valiantly strived to avoid seeing any numbers that might back the undeniable evidence it has enabled war atrocities for 315 unrelenting days of horror.
The US did its best Thursday to talk up the talks, saying they had a “promising start”, Al Jazeera reports, but Hamas refused to attend, because none of the promises made at other “peace talks” previously had been honoured.
So, the US found itself in an echo chamber in Doha with no one to talk to but the Qatari mediators, Egyptian minders and Israeli genocidaires, David Barnea, the head of Mossad, as well as Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar and General Nitzan Alon.
So, the Israelis went home too. Now, Qatar is calling it a “mediators meeting” – although the US is clearly not there to mediate, but to try and force its views onto the table.
US warnings before the meeting to Israel that the deal was a “yes-or-no” option seemed to go nowhere as usual as the “world’s only superpower” was left emasculated by Hamas’s absence. Joe Biden’s warnings that he’d lay the blame for a failure to reach a ceasefire deal at Benjamin Netanyahu’s feet just dribbled away into the empty void known as yesterday’s news while the Israelis trooped out the door.
Al Mayadeen reports the Qatari Foreign Ministry said in a statement that “the mediators’ meeting to end the war on the Gaza Strip is still ongoing, and will resume on Friday.”
Presumably, the phone lines between the White House and Tel Aviv were glowing red-hot as the White House scrambled to strain some election “wins” from the debacle. Whatever the upshot, Friday dawned with the news Netanyahu had fired his defence minister and co-accused at the International Criminal Court, Yoav Gallant.
But that didn’t stop the Israeli from announcing the start of a “new military operation” across Gaza.
Friday has arrived with no signs either Hamas or Israel will be in attendance in Doha.
The spokesperson for the Qatari Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Majed al-Ansari, added that “the efforts of mediators in Qatar, Egypt, and the United States are ongoing to reach a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, a prisoner exchange, and to bring in the largest possible amount of humanitarian aid to the Strip.”
In the meantime, Israeli settlers continued increasing tensions in Arabia with more deadly raids on the West Bank while the authorities sat back and watched. One Palestinian man was killed in the town of Jit, east of Qalqilya while settlers roamed the streets, hurling petrol bombs and firing indiscriminately.
Some of them burned cars and destroyed property.
The Palestinian Authority’s foreign ministry decried what it called “organised state terrorism” on Jit.