Just a week before his expected inauguration for his second presidential term, United States of America President-elect Donald Trump has once again stirred a global audience with stinging threats if what he desires will not happen.
Even before assuming his second presidential term, Trump appointed Steve Witkoff, a special envoy, to get Israel to agree to a ceasefire in Gaza. Witkoff has already talked to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for this purpose. However, what President-elect Trump is targeting in his threat of making “all hell break out” is Hamas, if the group will not release the remaining Israeli captives.
Trump wants the ceasefire to happen just before he is inaugurated as the next US President on Jan. 20, 2025.
I wonder what Trump specifically meant by hell breaking loose in a place that has been burning like hellfire for more than 400 days as of January 2025. There is nothing more hellish than what Palestinian communities in different cities within and outside the Gaza strip have experienced since the carnage started on Oct. 7, 2023. Wide swaths of land where Palestinians used to live are now just huge piles of rubble, with both residential and social infrastructure having been razed to the ground. Hospitals have not been spared; television footage showed hospital ambulances being fired at, killing some rescuers and health workers in the process. The Israeli Defense Forces have also impeded the flow of assistance (food, health services and shelter), even cutting off electricity in many hospitals there.
Children were not even spared. In November 2024, Muhammed Haddad and Alia Chughtai of Al Jazeera reported that 17,400 children have been killed by Israeli attacks since Israel’s genocidal war started. This number translates to one child being killed every 30 minutes. And this does not include the parents of these children who have died, too, since the first volley of deadly missiles hit Palestinian communities in the Gaza Strip.
Gaza has become the contemporary world’s largest graveyard so far. This statement sounds eerily familiar. Former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte has claimed once in an interview that he advised Netanyahu to kill all Palestinians and make Gaza the world’s largest cemetery. Duterte said that if he were Netanyahu, he would have ordered the killing of all “troublesome” Palestinians, just like what happened in his deadly war on drugs here.
But given the previous unsuccessful attempts at demanding a ceasefire during the outgoing US President Joe Biden’s administration, and despite outgoing US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken’s optimistic views about getting to a ceasefire “soon,” the prospects of putting out the hellfire in Gaza remains bleak. It is possible that Israel will accede to a ceasefire of “limited scope” but will continue to work toward a full military victory by driving out or killing all remaining Palestinians in Gaza.
Trump’s sweeping statements of his soon-to-be formalized foreign policy are also received with some trepidation by different countries across the world. A Washington Post report on Saturday, Jan. 12, 2025, noted that Trump has been fixated on a policy of expansionism. He wanted to include Greenland, the Panama Canal, and Canada to be part of the territory of the United States of America.
Even during his first term as president of the world’s largest group of “international police agents,” Trump has always revealed his true, crass capitalistic greed (no surprise here, considering his corporate background). A week before he will be inaugurated, he is already making people, including leaders of other countries, quite wary of the US government’s expansionist agenda.
Leaders of other countries may not take him seriously though. However, given the calibrated levels of insecurity and instability of countries in different parts of the world, soon-to-be US President Trump might take advantage of this messy situation and succeed—who knows?
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