The First Anniversary of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza: Depths of Moral Depravity Unmatched in Modern History

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Today is the first anniversary of a day that changed the world, when militants from the paramilitary wing of Hamas, the political and administrative organization responsible for the 2.3 million inhabitants of the Gaza Strip, 141 square miles of land sealed off from the outside world since 2007 by the State of Israel, broke out of their open-air prison, and, with militants from other organizations, embarked on a brutal killing spree in southern Israel.

The attacks left 1,195 people dead — of whom 739 were Israeli civilians, and 79 were civilians of other countries — although no one knows how many of the dead were killed by Israel itself, via the notorious Hannibal Directive, which advocates killing their own people to prevent them from being captured. 251 hostages were also seized and taken back to Gaza, where many have since died — some, undoubtedly, killed by Israel itself — because of their government’s refusal, since last November, to negotiate a ceasefire and the exchange of hostages for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.

The October 7 attacks were horrendous, but Israel’s response — launching a relentless all-out assault on the Gaza Strip, which has lasted for a whole year, and is still, malevolently, ongoing — has killed over 40,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians, a death toll so disproportionate, borne of destruction so remorselessly vindictive, that it has plunged us into depths of moral depravity that most of us have never witnessed.

Big numbers can be confusing, so let me spell out what 40,000 dead means: it means that, over the course of an entire year, Israel has killed more than a hundred people EVERY DAY, on average; one every 15 minutes, for the last 365 days.

Within a week of the October 7 attacks, Israel had killed as many Palestinians as the number of Israelis killed on that day, and yet its death machine has continued its unending annihilation with no sign that there is any upper limit to the number of Palestinian deaths that will satiate its omnivorous hunger not only for vengeance, but also, if conceivable, for the complete erasure of the Palestinian people.

An unimaginable death toll

The latest figures released by the beleaguered health ministry in Gaza put the death toll at 41,689 people, of whom at least 16,800 were children and babies, and 11,400 were women. The Israelis have also killed — often through direct targeting — nearly 1,000 health workers, 174 journalists and 220 UN workers, and, in addition, 96,625 people have been injured, many severely so. The number of child amputees, for example, has most recently been estimated to be more than 3,000, far beyond any comparable injuries in any conflict throughout history.

Furthermore, at least 10,000 other people are unaccounted for, and are presumed dead, while secondary deaths — from the deliberate spread of disease, partly through the withholding of clean water and the destruction of sewage systems, the deliberate withholding of medical supplies and the destruction of hospitals — will far exceed the number of direct deaths, even if Israel stopped its attacks tomorrow. Analysis by medical experts indicated, in July, that it was reasonable to expect four indirect deaths for every direct death, meaning, that as of now, the total death toll is expected to be over 200,000, at least, although it could be much higher.

By any conceivable objective analysis, Israel’s actions over the last year have destroyed any notion of the efficacy of the “rules-based order” established by the coming together of the countries of the world, after the Second World War, as the United Nations, which was set up primarily to try to prevent the horrors of that particular conflict from happening again — and, very particularly, to try to prevent military conflicts from targeting civilians and then trying to describe their homicidal overreach as some form of acceptable “collateral damage.”

From the very beginning, as Israel’s leaders, pundits and media openly declared the vilest and most disturbing genocidal intent towards the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip, Israel’s military, taking advantage of a seemingly endless supply of horrendously powerful weapons supplied by the countries of the west — primarily the US and Germany — and the almost universal declaration, throughout western governments, of unquestioning support for Israel’s “right to defend itself”, undertook attacks of such sweeping and all-encompassing ferocity, involving bombing on a scale never seen before in a built-up urban environment, that the majority of homes in the Gaza Strip have been destroyed.

The bombs used, including 2000lb “bunker buster” bombs, destroyed entire apartment blocks, killing vast numbers of those living there — who, again, I must stress, were mostly civilians — by crushing them, burying them alive, decapitating them, tearing them in half, and, in some cases hurling their broken bodies tens of metres, to hang on trees or on walls like shredded dolls.

“There are no innocents in Gaza”

In an attempt to justify the genocidal intent that they had already openly declared, apologists for this unprecedented carnage claimed that they were specifically targeting Hamas militants, using an AI system that, as an investigation by +972 Magazine described it, “can ‘generate’ targets almost automatically at a rate that far exceeds what was previously possible”, and was described by a former intelligence officer as facilitating a “mass assassination factory.”

Those who spoke about it admitted that the targets didn’t just include senior Hamas commanders; they also included those described as “junior Hamas operatives.” As one insider explained, “Hamas members who don’t really mean anything live in homes across Gaza. So they mark the home and bomb the house and kill everyone there.”

Because Hamas is an administrative organization, responsible for governing the Gaza Strip, as well as having a military wing, the inevitable conclusion about the description of “Hamas members who don’t really mean anything” and yet who are all condemned to death, along with their families, is that none of them were militants at all, but were killed because everyone who worked for Hamas’s civilian infrastructure was also regarded as a terrorist.

This is thoroughly unacceptable, of course, and another nail in the coffin of the “rules-based order”, although, according to the genocidal logic expressed by Israel’s leaders, no justification really needed to be provided for killing everyone, because, as Prime Minister Isaac Herzog notoriously said in a particularly vile genocidal statement on October 14, “there are no innocents in Gaza.”

In April, +972 Magazine published a follow-up article about another AI system that had identified 37,000 targets in Gaza who were allegedly connected to Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad, with virtually no scrutiny about whether or not the assessments were accurate, and, as was also revealed, with extraordinary leeway given regarding “acceptable” civilian casualties during the targeting of these individuals.

Two of the sources told +972 Magazine that, “during the early weeks of the war they were permitted to kill 15 or 20 civilians during airstrikes on low-ranking militants”, while others explained that “the IDF judged it permissible to kill more than 100 civilians in attacks on a top-ranking Hamas officials.” As one source described it, “There were regulations, but they were just very lenient,” and, as another stated, “We’ve killed people with collateral damage in the high double digits, if not low triple digits. These are things that haven’t happened before.”

Experts in international humanitarian law who spoke to the Guardian for an accompanying article “expressed alarm at accounts of the IDF accepting and pre-authorizing collateral damage ratios as high as 20 civilians, particularly for lower-ranking militants”, and “said militaries must assess proportionality for each individual strike.” An international law expert at the US State Department added that they had “never remotely heard of a one to 15 ratio being deemed acceptable, especially for lower-level combatants. There’s a lot of leeway, but that strikes me as extreme.”

As the Guardian also explained, “Sarah Harrison, a former lawyer at the US Department of Defense, now an analyst at Crisis Group, said, ‘While there may be certain occasions where 15 collateral civilian deaths could be proportionate, there are other times where it definitely wouldn’t be. You can’t just set a tolerable number for a category of targets and say that it’ll be lawfully proportionate in each case.’”

That, however, is precisely what Israel did, as its AI systems not only produced tens of thousands of targets, but the pressure to eliminate these targets was so intense that there was almost no scrutiny whatsoever of what this meant. As one source explained, after 9/11 the atmosphere in the IDF was “painful and vindictive.” The source added, “There was a dissonance: on the one hand, people here were frustrated that we were not attacking enough. On the other hand, you see at the end of the day that another thousand Gazans have died, most of them civilians.”

One day, if the “rules-based order” is to survive, it will become startlingly evident that Israel’s entire targeting system was so sweeping, so unfocused and so unaccountable that it constitutes an unforgivably deadly combination of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. However, when we review Israel’s actions over the last 12 months, it’s abundantly clear that even the fig leaf of targeted intelligence was explicitly abandoned, over and over again, and with no attempt to even hide it.

Total destruction

From the beginning, Israel deliberately destroyed every aspect of the infrastructure in Gaza, which, as the 1948 Genocide Convention explains, involves “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”, in addition to “killing members of the group” and “causing [them] serious bodily or mental harm.”

As the bombs rained down, every school was shut down or destroyed, every university was destroyed, historic sites, judicial buildings, libraries, administrative buildings and police stations were destroyed, as were mosques, factories, agricultural land, sewage works, and Gaza’s already deliberately degraded water supplies.

After ground forces invaded at the end of October, much of this destruction was openly recorded by Israeli soldiers, demonstrating the lack of any military necessity in Israel’s actions, and therefore meaning, yet again, that they were war crimes. As the IDF occupied empty educational and administrative buildings, they planted them with mines, detonated them remotely, and then glorified their crimes on video. They also did the same with people’s homes, after the majority of Gaza’s population were ordered to evacuate to the south, making almost the entire population deliberately homeless. When not filming themselves looting, or dressing up in women’s lingerie, they mined people’s homes and destroyed them, or bulldozed them — all, again, without even a pretence of military necessity.

Their worst crimes, however, were reserved for Gaza’s hospitals, which were all systematically attacked, and mostly destroyed. To circumvent the absolute prohibition on attacking hospitals, Israel pretended that they concealed Hamas command centres, although they never provided any proof whatsoever for these outrageous claims. Instead, as they deliberately shut down these essential life-saving facilities, forcing often desperately ill patients to evacuate, or, in some cases, to remain in the decommissioned hospitals to die, as happened to a number of premature babies, they seized a significant number of doctors and medical staff, disappearing them into their unaccountable torture prisons for Palestinians, mostly located in Israel itself, about which an entire encyclopedia of atrocities can, and will one day be written.

In these prisons, whose population has doubled in the last year, from around 5,000 to 10,000 people, Israel has long shredded all international norms, seizing people (including children) arbitrarily, and sometime randomly releasing them, to sow terror amongst the Palestinian people. For those prosecuted, unaccountable military courts take the place of civilian law, and many are held indefinitely without charge or trial, via “administrative detention” policies that can be indefinitely renewed every six months. Since October 7, however, the violence of these prisons has markedly increased. Those suspected of involvement with any kind of militancy are held indefinitely, hooded and immobile, and subjected to extreme violence, including rape, without any effort made to establish whether or not they are actually guilty of any crimes. With specific reference to the doctors and medical staff seized, many still remain unaccounted for, while others — internationally respected surgeons, for example — have been murdered as their brutal interrogators have sought to get them to confess to non-existent connections to Hamas.

Elsewhere in Gaza, civilians, in untold numbers, have been randomly murdered by armed drones and armed quadcopters, operated from afar, and by snipers, who seem to delight in specifically targeting children, and allegations of summary executions have also been made. Meanwhile, the entire territory has also slipped into squalid subsistence-level survival through the effects of the “complete siege” imposed by the defense minister Yoav Gallant on October 9, when he declared, “We are imposing a complete siege on Gaza. There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything will be closed. We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.”

Although imposing a “complete siege” is also an evident war crime, western leaders again queued up to endorse it, and it has largely remained in place ever since, wreaking havoc on the Gaza Strip’s civilian population that is, quite genuinely, equivalent to the kinds of medieval sieges recorded in history books, or, for example, in the Nazis’ Siege of Stalingrad, where the only “human animals” are those imposing the siege, rather than those dying a slow death because of it.

In Gaza, starvation is widespread, communicable diseases are spreading because people are forced to drink contaminated water, which is often the only water available, and untold numbers of people are dying or have died because of the scarcity of medical supplies of every kind, not just for those with serious illnesses, but also, most devastatingly, for pregnant women, for whom the combination of a lack of hospitals, no medical supplies and starvation — as well as the mental distress of the ceaseless “war” — means an unaddressable epidemic of miscarriages, premature births, and babies dying because their starving mothers are unable to breastfeed them, and formula milk is unavailable. To revisit the Genocide Convention, all of the above fulfils another absolute prohibition: “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.”

The complete failure of the international community — through impotence or complicity

Faced with this ceaseless and unprecedented destruction, the international community has completely failed Gaza and its people — either through impotence or naked complicity.

Sadly and shamefully, the United Nations, the very body that was set up explicitly to prevent what Israel has been undertaking in Gaza for the last year, has found itself powerless to act, despite the majority of its member states opposing Israel’s actions.

In January, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), also known as the World Court, and one of the six main mechanisms of the United Nations, recognized, in response to a complaint submitted by South Africa, that something horrific was happening in Gaza. By a clear majority, its judges described what was unfolding as a “plausible genocide”, and ordered Israel to take steps to address their concerns via the imposition of provisional measures. The court, however, has no individual enforcement mechanism, and so Israel ignored it, as it has persistently throughout its blood-soaked 76-year history.

Enforcement can only happen via the UN Security Council, but because the victors of the Second World War — the US, the UK, France, Russia and China — gave themselves a permanent veto over the Security Council’s decisions, Israel is perpetually indulged — relentlessly by its staunchest ally, the US, but also by the UK and France.

As a result, the International Court of Justice is toothless. Although it will take many years for it to deliver a definitive ruling on Israel’s genocide, because the wheels of international justice always seem to move with glacial slowness, in July it issued a devastating opinion regarding an earlier submission about the legality of Israel’s occupation, since 1967, of the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, collectively known, legally, as the Occupied Palestinian Territory. The Court found that Israel’s continued presence in the OPT is illegal, and ordered it to end its occupation, but that too is unlikely to lead to enforcement, because the US will, as ever, exercise its veto at the Security Council to prevent any meaningful response, like sanctions or the imposition of a peacekeeping force.

Similarly, the International Criminal Court is also paralyzed. Although the chief prosecutor, Karim Khan KC, approved arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant (and three Hamas leaders) in May, on the basis that the Israelis had engaged in four war crimes and three crimes against humanity, including “extermination”, those warrants have not yet been issued, the fault lying not with Khan, but with the judges required to approve the arrest warrants, who, presumably, are being leaned upon, mafia-style, by Israel and its defenders.

Joe Biden’s crucial role in the genocide and the troubling complicity of other western leaders

As the entire credibility of the UN teeters on the brink of collapse, it is to the US that we need to look for the main culprit — Joe Biden, a fanatical supporter of Israel, who would have been ill-placed to rein in Israel even if he hadn’t been suffering from chronic mental collapse.

US leaders have always supported Israel, providing it with disproportionate amounts of weapons and aid, but they have also previously understood that they also wield the authority to prevent the kind of horrors that have been taking place over the last twelve months.

Biden, however, has, throughout Israel’s descent into unmatched depravity, been seemingly trapped in angry fantasies about atrocities on October 7 that never took place, as his mind has collapsed, and has allowed Israel to exploit and humiliate him, taking most of the rest of the western world with him, whose leaders follow the US’s cue, even when a vengeful sclerotic is in charge.

It remains difficult to explain quite what the combination of factors is that has enabled such unconditional support for Israel throughout the west, despite the naked abomination of its grave and almost countless crimes. It is not enough that Biden, and by extension, his fellow leaders in the west, all took at face value the outrageous lies peddled by Israeli about the attacks on October 7, especially the false claim that 40 babies were beheaded, when that definitely never took place, and the widespread but completely unsubstantiated allegations about systematic mass rapes.

These and other lurid claims have been the powerhouse of many of Israel’s shrieking, hysterical enthusiasts for genocide, and their counterparts in the west, who spend their every waking obsessed with rage-inducing phantasms. However, allegiance to the US, and a general anti-Arab animus don’t seem sufficient to explain quite how dogged has been western leaders’ determination to support Israel at all costs, even as it emulates the Nazis, and even as these countries’ own citizens greet their leaders’ unshakeable support for Israel with widespread revulsion.

Another glaring example of how, over the last year, Israel has been given licence to indulge in endless atrocities concerns its shameful rewriting of history, framing the October 7 attacks as having taken place in a vacuum, rather than as a response to 76 years of murderous oppression and apartheid. 15,000 Palestinians were killed, and 750,000 forcibly removed from their homes during the Nakba (catastrophe) of 1948, when the State of Israel was founded, forced into the Gaza Strip or the West Bank, or into neighbouring countries, where their descendants still live in refugee camps, and the oppression has never stopped since. In the 15 years before October 7, for example, as Israel regularly attacked the Gaza Strip, 6,407 Palestinians were killed compared to 308 Israelis.

In seeking to understand the west’s uncritical support for Israel over the last year, is there, as some of us suspect, a deep truth that, although guilt over the Holocaust plays a part, the main driver of support is that Israel is the last great European settler colonial project, and, as such, has openly revived a malevolent pride in the vilest cruelties of Europe’s own colonial days, when those who resisted conquest and occupation were slaughtered as brutally as Israel has been doing to the Palestinians for the last year?

Or is it that powerful forces — both Jewish and non-Jewish — in the west have spent so long cultivating support for Israel through being part of those countries’ political, business and cultural environments, and have also been heavily involved in buying support through political “donations”, as demonstrated most spectacularly in the US, that western leaders apparently feel no shame in promoting the interests of a foreign power above their own?

Replaying the destruction of Gaza in Lebanon and the risk of further escalation

These questions need answering, but for now, as we mark the anniversary of the genocide in Gaza, it is gut-wrenching to discover that, provided with total immunity, the messianic genocidal fanatics of Israel, while still slaughtering people with impunity in the medieval hell of Gaza, have now turned their successful template of annihilation through endless lying to Lebanon, a sovereign nation that they have invaded, and are busily bombing just as they did in Gaza, targeting resistance leaders with “bunker buster” bombs, despite colossal collateral damage involving hundreds of innocent civilians, lying that every home contains Hezbollah weapons, and brazenly bombing hospitals and targeting ambulances, doctors and medical staff.

As the very real prospect of war with Iran looms, which would be disastrous for everyone involved, is there any possibility that anyone who can will finally take steps to rein in Netanyahu? Shockingly, it still seems unlikely. Although Israel’s messianic genocidal fervour, and its violent assertion of its alleged “rights”, while still perennially whining that it is actually the only victim of note throughout human history, ought to scare everyone, its mania remains indulged.

In addition, its most virulent genocidal apologists, the criminal settler fanatics Itamar Ben-Gvir and Belazel Smotrich, and their closest supporters, like the settler fanatic Daniella Weiss, continue to push for the total annihilation of the Palestinians, and the complete colonization of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Even more than Netanyahu and Gallant, Ben Gvir and Smotrich, through their crucial role as government ministers keeping Netanyahu’s government in power, represent a worldview that is most closely akin to the butchers of ISIS than the laughable notion of Israel as “the only democracy in the Middle East.”

And yet, on the anniversary of October 7 attacks, and the start of Israel’s genocide, it seems plausible to consider that even worse is yet to come. Just three weeks ago, +972 Magazine reported plans for the definitive depopulation of the whole of northern Gaza, where between 300,000 and 500,000 Palestinians still live, having refused to leave, over the last year, or having been unable to leave. The plans call for their forcible removal, with the entire area to then be transformed into a “closed military zone”, prior, presumably, to the fanatical settlers finally fulfilling their malignant dreams of beach front colonization.

Although the plans were only speculative at the time, just yesterday a parliamentary member of Netanyahu’s Likud Party announced that the IDF had just “launched an operation in northern Gaza with the objective of completely eliminating all Palestinians from the area.” As reports arrive of targeted assassinations in the north, and of renewed violent bombing campaigns, it is perhaps not too far-fetched to state that, to celebrate the first anniversary of the October 7 attacks, and the start of the Gaza genocide, Israel is embarking on the Gaza genocide Part 2, in what might appropriately be regarded, via an intended analogy with the Nazis, as the definitive “final solution” to the perceived “problem” of the entire northern half of the Gaza Strip.

As we descend further and further into depravity on a scale that was unimaginable a year ago, and as western leaders, today, once more offer their unconditional support to Israel for its losses a year ago, while never, for a moment, mentioning the carnage inflicted on the Palestinians, I stand today with Owen Jones, who, in a post on X on October 3, mused about the depths of racism demonstrated by those in the west who still continue to unconditionally support Israel, and who still value one Israeli life over 40,000 dead Palestinians, and declared, “I don’t live in the same moral universe as these people. They now disgust me: I am repulsed by them.”

How we remove them from power, and how we stop Israel, are questions that, sadly, none of us can answer today, but it’s important, on this day in particular, to stand with the whole of humanity, and not with supremacists, whatever their background, who, over the last year, have persistently demonstrated that, while their lives matter, those they oppress, and who dare to rise up, must be dehumanized as “rats” and “animals” and “monkeys”, and thoroughly exterminated.

The answer ought to be simple: Israel cannot secure peace through endless killing and destruction. Peace will only come through recognizing the Palestinians’ right to their land — in the whole of the Occupied Palestinian Territory — and by allowing them independence and complete self-determination.

For 76 years, Israel’s obsessive dehumanization of the Palestinians has not only led to unprecedented slaughter and oppression; it has also eroded Israelis’ own humanity, and especially so over the last year. Without a reckoning with themselves — perhaps best prompted through economic collapse and their complete isolation from the rest of the world — and without a reckoning also taking place in the corridors of power in the west, the future looks irredeemably bleak, consisting of nothing but the endless, lawless expansion of war and terror, on the basis of fanatical, self-righteous delusions, which will drag us all down into exactly the kind of evil that consumed Germany from 1933 to 1945, and that was supposed to have led to a universal recognition that monstrous dehumanization and industrial-scale extermination were never meant to happen again.

As a humanitarian and a human rights activist, I have always believed in the sanctity of all life. We are all equal, and nothing will ever convince me otherwise. Fortunately, many millions of other people around the world think like I do. We may be powerless now, but I can only hope that a reckoning is coming for those who live only to kill, and that, one day, and sooner rather than later, we will overwhelm them.

Note: This is my 25th detailed article analyzing and commenting on Israel’s genocide over the last year, some of which I drew on for this latest commentary. Those articles, recording my ongoing perceptions of the horrors of the genocide, were published on October 11, October 17, October 24, November 1, November 8, November 14, November 18, December 3, December 17, January 18, January 26, February 1, February 18, March 20, April 5, April 16, May 6, May 15, May 27, June 9,  July 11, July 23, August 21 and September 1.

I’ve also been interviewed about Israel’s actions here, here, here, here, here, here and here, and hope, soon, to make a studio recording with my band The Four Fathers of ‘O Palestine’, a song I wrote last November, and recorded a preliminary version of, with our guitarist Richard Clare, and beatboxer The Wiz-RD, which is available here, in a video illustrated by photos from the extraordinarily well-attended Marches for Palestine in London.

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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (see the ongoing photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.50).

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and, in 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to try to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.

Since 2019, Andy has become increasingly involved in environmental activism, recognizing that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to life on earth, and that the window for change — requiring a severe reduction in the emission of all greenhouse gases, and the dismantling of our suicidal global capitalist system — is rapidly shrinking, as tipping points are reached that are occurring much quicker than even pessimistic climate scientists expected. You can read his articles about the climate crisis here.

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