Israeli media shortly after midnight on Friday broke news that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Security Cabinet has approved a unilateral ceasefire to halt an 11-day military operation in the Gaza Strip. Shortly after this, Hamas confirmed via a spokesperson that it too would enter into a ceasefire and truce.
The decision came after some amount of U.S. pressure to halt the offensive, but not before a blistering riposte by Israel at the UN, equating Hamas’s actions to that of ISIS, calling out the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) for ‘deceptive lies’ and accusing a number of nations that it said had ‘demonised Israel’, especially Turkey, of anti-semitism disguised as anti-Zionism. The 11 days of fighting had come after a month of religious tensions between Jews and Arabs in Jerusalem, as Hamas, which runs a quasi-democratic militant government in the Gaza Strip began firing what turned out to be an almost unending arsenal of rockets towards civilian populations in Israel.
