On April 12, 1984, four Palestinian militants hijacked an Israeli bus of line 300 with 35 passengers, most of them Jewish settlers, in the Gaza Strip. In the rescue operation, one soldier and two of the four hijackers died. The other two hijackers were captured alive and were executed shortly after by agents of the Shin Bet secret services.

It can be said in many ways, but the meaning is the same: Benjamin Netanyahu is the one steering the ship of the war. Even many Republicans in the US, who are far from being anti-Zionist, understand this. The excellent Israeli journalist Barak Ravid, Washington correspondent, who often speaks by phone with Donald Trump, put it this way: with each passing day, Trump identifies more and more with Netanyahu.

Aside from the systematic killing of Palestinian journalists, Israel has effectively blacked Gaza by barring journalists from around the world from entering the country. This Thursday, the Catalan Journalists' Association officially endorsed the "Open Gaza to the International Press" appeal, urging Israel to allow journalists to work freely and independently. "Now more than ever, it is essential that international journalists be able to enter Gaza and document everything that is happening, denouncing how Israel violates the peace plan it committed to every single day," said Llúcia Oliva, the event's presenter.

One of the paradoxes of the post-Process and the peace The autonomist movement imposed by Salvador Illa is that international politics is being discussed more in Parliament than ever. Whether deliberately or accidentally. Sílvia Orriols spoke out completely consciously, appearing with a heart emblazoned with the Israeli flag on her jacket and unabashedly defending Benjamin Netanyahu's government's response to the Hamas attacks two years ago. Not even Ignacio Garriga of Vox dared to go so far. As for Junts, this Wednesday they voted in favor of an arms embargo on Israel and on Tuesday they stood up to applaud Pilar Castillejo, CUP deputy and Flotilla participant. However, neither their spokesperson, Albert Batet, nor Carles Puigdemont spoke. genocide. These are the balances of a party that lives between two waters.

"A gem!" exulted the Orfeó Català at the Barcelona Auditorium on Friday night with the OBC.Fried!", echoed in the concert hall. "Brothers, embrace, a great kiss sets the heavens ablaze," they proclaimed. And it was shocking, because you noticed that between Netanyahu, Hamas, Trump, Putin and others responsible for the deplorable state of the world, they had almost transformed the hearing of the Novena by Beethoven in an act of naivety.

The Israeli military assault on the peaceful and humanitarian flotilla that set sail from Barcelona to denounce the plight of Gaza is not a final point. It is a continuation. As long as the genocide in the Strip continues unabated, citizen pressure cannot cease, no matter how far the distance between the indignation and shame in the streets and the harsh global geopolitical reality remains. If it were still possible, the flotilla has made even more evident the collapse of multilateral diplomacy and, more specifically, the impotence of the UN and the lukewarmness of Europe. Instead of a civilian flotilla, a military force—Blue Helmets—should have been sent to Gaza long ago to make a ceasefire possible, to guarantee minimum survival conditions for the Palestinian population, and to facilitate negotiations for the release of the Israeli hostages and the disarmament of Hamas.

The headline's words are not mine, but rather those of Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who, during a real estate conference in Tel Aviv, did not hesitate to openly state the true motives for the invasion of Gaza City and the entire Strip: "The Gaza Strip. We have invested a lot of money in this war and we have already completed the first phase, which is the demolition. Now it's time for reconstruction." He predicted a time of "real estate boom" and stressed the fact that this was "a great market opportunity." Smotrich is 45 years old, openly declares himself a supremacist, a member of the far-right Religious Zionist Party, and trained at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Ono Academic College, an elitist private university in Kiryat Ono, where he was perhaps taught to express himself with that bluntness. Smotrich, in any case, personifies the profile of the triumphant young lion postulated by the global right: arrogant, cold, implacable, without moral scruples of any kind because he knows how to justify them all. For him, the idea that the Palestinians must be massacred in the name of democracy and Israel's right to defend itself is implicit and, as such, goes without saying. The rest is simply a matter of money. Lots of money.

Is anything fair in war? Unfortunately, if contemporary times have brought anything—especially since the 20th century—it has been unbridled warfare, targeting civilians: bombings of cities, sieges, starvation, rape... The Second World War marked a shift toward new forms of barbarism, with destructive air raids on test sites, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the extermination camps, and the gulags. Armies no longer just fought and continue to fight each other; they also punish defenseless populations, sometimes obsessively and fanatically, sometimes with calculated coldness. Technology—now with drones—has made the execution of terror daring and dehumanized.

The Israeli government's response to Hamas's acceptance of the terms of the latest ceasefire proposal—a sixty-day truce—which the terrorist organization had initially rejected, has been implacable: Netanyahu has mobilized 60,000 citizen reservists in the city to carry out the conditions of the conquest. And, without further delay, the assault began this Wednesday night.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has finally received the green light to militarily occupy Gaza. After a 10-hour meeting, he obtained the approval of his security cabinet to "defeat Hamas," beginning with an operation to occupy Gaza City, the Israeli government confirmed in a statement. It did not specify what will happen to the rest of the Strip, although this Thursday the prime minister declared his intention to extend the operation to the entire territory. He did so just before the cabinet discussion session began.

A group of 600 retired Israeli security officials, including former heads of intelligence agencies, have asked Donald Trump in a letter to pressure Israel to end the war in Gaza. The text is blunt: "Our professional judgment is that Hamas no longer poses a strategic threat to Israel." They also underscore the role that US President Donald Trump could play: "His credibility among the vast majority of Israelis increases his ability to lead Prime Minister Netanyahu and his administration in the right direction: to end the war, return the hostages, and end the suffering."

Since the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, speculation about the fall of Benjamin Netanyahu's Israeli government has been constant. First, due to the shock of the attack, in the greatest security blunder in the country's history. Later, due to the opposition of the ultra-Orthodox wing of the executive branch to halting the genocidal offensive in Gaza. Even in June, after the war with Iran, there was speculation that the prime minister would try to take advantage and call elections.

Benjamin Netanyahu has detractors all over the world. It weighs heavily on him. an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity for the atrocities committed in GazaBut he also has opponents at home, where He is criticized for his handling of the war and where criticism has recently increased for starving the population of the Strip. The animosity it arouses is such that, according to the Israeli television channel Kan, an activist was arrested for attempting to assassinate the Israeli prime minister.

United Torah Judaism and Shas, Israel's two major ultra-Orthodox parties, have announced they will leave Benjamin Netanyahu's governing coalition in protest at his failure to introduce legislation exempting young men from Talmudic schools from military service. If the split is finalized (the process requires 48 hours), the governing coalition would be left with 50 seats and its continuity would be in jeopardy. With less support in parliament, the prime minister is dragging out ceasefire negotiations to wait until the chamber's recess, which begins in August.

It hasn't rained yet. It's only been a bit. I would have liked a good, long, persistent downpour that would have saved me from watering for a couple of days. After about half an hour, there was a glimpse of sunshine. Then, the sky became gray again. A strange stillness settled in the afternoon. It will soon be dark, and today it will be earlier because it's overcast. I turn on a light and try to write these things. What will happen, I think, is that it will cool down. The sticky heat of these past few nights may fade and be permeated by a bit of fresh air. We'll see. Josep Maria Joan, whom I knew as a child in Figueres, has died. He owned a dry cleaner's shop. He never wanted to be a dyer. He trained as a quantity surveyor. But what he did was accumulate toys. So many that he could have built a museum, which is now a landmark. More than once I wondered what toy he had that might interest him. But he didn't have one. I've never been much interested in toys. Then, over the years, I saw him a few times. Then never again. And now he's dead. He was about my age.

1. The story. Trump bombs Iran and imposes a narrative in keeping with his appearance on the scene. From tragedy to comedy. After the vibrant narrative of the American bombing of Iran, with the alleged destruction of Iran's atomic force, which the news doesn't seem to confirm so forcefully, he takes the job for granted, with appeals for an end to hostilities in all directions. His appearance on the war scene, after several days flirting with ambiguity, would have opened a new era. Israel definitively establishes itself as the main power in the region, with no room for its adversaries to respond. Iran would come to do some good, and in the process, Gaza and the entire trail of criminal actions by a nihilistic Netanyahu would be forgotten, with the Palestinians cornered and missing.

More war. Now Israel-Iran. How far will this spiral of global warfare go? Mercè Rodoreda wrote in the prologue to her novel. How much, how much war, the last one he wrote: "A war serves to make everyone lose." And then, sooner or later, another comes to avenge the dead. And so on and so forth. Violence generates hatred and violence. It is the tragic spiral of human history. There is also a happy, collaborative spiral, where life and death intertwine to continue generating life, as happens in nature. War is a failure of natural human life. The human condition, the awareness of being alive and searching for meaning in existence, is a double-edged sword: it makes us gods and demons, it gives us a power that is both fabulous and terrible. Love and war. Eros and Thanatos. How can we sublimate the self-destructive instinct? Politics, sports, art, money, religion... How many things have we invented that have often turned against us, recovering our bastard instincts?

Gaza has become a killing field. Israel's revenge for the brutal Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, has surpassed all imaginable limits. In the apartheid that de facto The Israeli state has been practicing this for decades against the Palestinians living on its territory, or in the West Bank and Gaza, and has now added an unequal war against the population of the Strip, to whom it has been subjected to brutal military punishment: not since Vietnam and World War II have so many so many populated areas fallen on such small and populated areas. Netanyahu's Israel is unleashing its absolute anger, based on a historical sense of victimhood exacerbated by the harsh terrorist blow from Hamas.

The head of International Affairs, Francesc Millan, spent a week in Israel speaking with local people—both ordinary people and experts and analysts—and explains the paradoxes of a complex, divided society that has learned to live with war. In this Sunday's dossier, we analyze how Israeli lobbies operate in Europe and what strategies they use to impose their narrative. We also show how Western and other cultural intellectuals and philosophers analyze the situation.

Russia's war against Ukraine and the extermination or genocide of Palestinians at the hands of Israel have filled us with news—with stories—of crimes committed by the military against the civilian population, under the ever-vague excuse of the need to defend the homeland.