Once again, Israel is showing that it will respect no agreements or international laws! Despite having signed a Trump-sponsored ceasefire agreement with Hamas, Israel continues to kill Palestinians and assassinate Hamas leaders. On Saturday, December 13, an Israeli missile strike killed Raed Saad, a senior commander in Hamas’s armed wing, and three other people in the car with him. 

Hamas is a reactionary Islamic fundamentalist organization which has governed Gaza since 2007. Its October 7, 2023, attack on Israel included the war crimes of targeting civilians, killing hundreds and taking hundreds of others hostage. Yet this in no way justifies Israel’s campaign of assassinations, which is part of its far, far greater crime of waging genocide against the Palestinian people as a whole. 

Israel claims executing Saad was not a ceasefire violation because, according to them, the agreement allows it “to strike targets actively engaged in terrorism.” (Israel has offered no real proof of this charge.) 

A former Israeli intelligence officer told the New York Times: “[B]y killing Mr. Saad, Israel was hoping to set new ‘rules of the game’ in Gaza going forward—for Israel to enjoy ‘freedom of action’ to attack Hamas militants when it deemed fit, even in the context of the cease-fire.”

As Israel has already demonstrated, this also means the “freedom of action” to murder civilians as well. Since the Trump-sponsored ceasefire went into effect on October 11, Israel has killed at least 383 Palestinians in Gaza and wounded over 1,000 more. Plus, they continue to block life-saving aid, inflicting hunger, disease and homelessness in harsh winter conditions on people in Gaza.

Hamas has denounced Israel’s assassination as a criminal violation of the ceasefire agreement that threatens its viability. Its chief negotiator called on Trump to demand that Israel comply with the terms of the truce.

It is unclear how—or if—the Trump regime will respond to this blatant Israeli violation of the ceasefire. (According to Al Jazeera, Israel has violated the agreement some 738 times, with hardly a word of criticism from the Trump regime.) The U.S. and Israel do have real tactical differences on various issues, but overall they remain closely aligned in the violent subjugation of the Palestinian people and the peoples of the Middle East. The U.S. continues to pour huge amounts of political and military support into backing Israel's military death machine, and when Trump and Netanyahu talked earlier this month, they reportedly reaffirmed their joint “commitment to disarming Hamas and demilitarizing the Gaza Strip.”