600 Days of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza: Has Humanity’s Light Been Forever Extinguished?

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Today, May 28, marks the 600th day of Israel’s ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip, a milestone of such shame and horror that the words to describe it adequately don’t even exist.

In the last six days, since my most recent article, Israel’s Ferocious Intensification of Genocide in Gaza Finally Alienates Key Allies, the growing discomfort with Israel’s increasingly savage treatment of the Palestinians over the last three months has not led to any of the “concrete actions” threatened by the UK, France and Canada in a strongly-worded statement, and has not lifted the starvation blockade condemned by 22 foreign ministers.

Instead, after Netanyahu barked insults in response, accusing Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron and Mark Carney of supporting Hamas, and ignoring the 22 foreign ministers’ entreaties to “allow a full resumption of aid into Gaza immediately and enable the UN and humanitarian organizations to work independently and impartially to save lives, reduce suffering and maintain dignity”, Israel has continued its merciless and unsupportable military attacks, still killing, on average, a hundred people a day — almost all civilians — and, yesterday, imposing a new humanitarian aid delivery system that immediately collapsed into violence.

The deaths over the last week have been horrific, including the bombing of a former school, where displaced families were sheltering, which led to dozens of deaths, and a grimly iconic image of the silhouette of a young girl, engulfed in flames, seeking to escape the inferno, and the targeting of the home of a renowned paediatric surgeon, Dr. Alaa Al-Najjar, killing nine of her ten children, whose charred bodies were delivered to Nasser Hospital while she was on duty.

Israel made no comment on the deaths of Dr. Al-Najjar’s family, but risibly claimed, as it always does when rarely challenged to provide a reason for its relentless orgy of extermination, that the shelter was being used as “a Hamas and Islamic Jihad command and control centre”, as the BBC reported, in an article co-written by its online Middle East editor, Raffi Berg, a conspicuous defender of Israel’s ceaseless atrocities over the last 19 months.

On the aid front, after nearly three months of deliberate starvation, via a ban on the delivery of all supplies of food, water, medical supplies and fuel, imposed on March 2 after Israel broke the six-week ceasefire it had agreed with Hamas, yesterday a new US- and Israeli-backed organization, the mistakenly-named Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, launched the first of four planned food distribution points.

Israel’s relentless attacks on UNRWA

Israel has insisted, without ever providing any evidence, that a new program for aid delivery in Gaza is required — in particular in January 2024 after the International Court of Justice ordered it to avoid confirmation of a “plausible genocide” by fully reinstating the humanitarian aid on which it has imposed a complete siege on October 9, 2023, when the defense minister Yoav Gallant memorably declared, “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.”

Instead of obeying the ICJ’s order, Israel’s response was to immediately launch a cynical attack on UNWRA (The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East), the largest aid organization operating in Gaza and the rest of the Occupied Palestinian Territory, which has been supporting Palestinians’ needs for 75 years, via the 543,000 children enrolled in its 183 schools, 60 refugee camps (including those now destroyed in Gaza), and, also in Gaza, 22 health facilities and seven women’s centres, which had an average of 3.4 million visits per year.

As soon as the ICJ ruling was announced, Israel accused 12 UNWRA employees (out of 13,000 in Gaza, and 40,000 in total) of taking part in the attacks on October 7, 2023. Instead of demanding proof, which has never been provided, western countries, led by the US, immediately suspended funding to UNWRA.

Most of that funding was later restored after the hysteria had died down, but the damage had been done. UNWRA was fatally associated with Hamas, paving the way for Israel — which despises the organization not only for keeping Palestinians alive, but for also keeping alive their “right to return” as displaced refugees of the 1948 Nakba — to ban UNWRA from operating in Israel, a ban that took effect in January this year.

Driven by its hatred for UNWRA, and also for the many other well-established local and international aid agencies with a proven track record of catering to the needs of the Palestinian people trapped in Gaza since 2007 — and also relying on transparent lies that Hamas was stealing humanitarian aid, when the truth was that whatever theft was taking place was undertaken by Israeli-backed looters — the attempt by Israel and the US to impose a new food distribution system was bound to be a failure, although, in a truly sinister manner, that was the whole point.

The debacle of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation

Rather than seeking to feed desperately starving people, the new food distribution plan was deliberately engineered as an exercise in humiliation and control. Those who sought to avail themselves of its provisions yesterday were forced to march for miles under the burning sun before being corralled into pens that brought back the worst memories of the Nazis’ extermination camps.

Subjected, additionally, to intrusive interrogations and biometric screening, some individuals were abducted and “disappeared” by the US mercenaries and Israeli soldiers supervising the procedures, even before the desperation of thousands of people queuing in intense heat while starving prompted the entire operation to collapse.

Overwhelmed by desperate civilians, the security forces responded with gunfire, killing at least three people and wounding dozens more (with the death toll today rising to ten in total, with 62 wounded, according to Gaza’s Government Media Office), while those who made it out alive found that the promised aid, consisting entirely of Israeli products, mostly consisted of dried food, which was useless to them because of the continuing siege on supplies of water and fuel.

For UNWRA and other aid agencies, the collapse of the plan was obvious, as it also was for its executive director, Jake Wood, a US military veteran, who had resigned the day before, stating, “Two months ago, I was approached about leading GHF’s efforts because of my experience in humanitarian operations. Like many others around the world, I was horrified and heartbroken at the hunger crisis in Gaza and, as a humanitarian leader, I was compelled to do whatever I could to help alleviate the suffering.”

Wood added, “I am proud of the work I oversaw, including developing a pragmatic plan that could feed hungry people, address security concerns about diversion, and complement the work of longstanding NGOs in Gaza”.

“However”, he added, “it is clear that it is not possible to implement this plan while also strictly adhering to the humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence, which I will not abandon.”

He also said, “I urge Israel to significantly expand the provision of aid into Gaza through all mechanisms” while also urging “all stakeholders to continue to explore innovative new methods for the delivery of aid, without delay, diversion, or discrimination.”

Aid agencies respond

What will happen next is not yet known, but UNWRA and other aid agencies continue to point out that they still have the skills — and the supplies, blocked on the border or stored in Jordan and Egypt — to deliver aid to where it is needed, rather than setting up a program that only facilitates aid to the most able-bodied, and that, perhaps above all, was primarily intended as a trial run for imprisoning aid-dependent civilians in concentration camps prior to their illusory expulsion from Gaza altogether.

On May 21, over 9,000 trucks were stuck at the border, and, as Louise Wateridge of UNWRA explained in a video on May 20, filmed in a warehouse in Amman, UNWRA alone has “enough food to feed 200,000 Palestinians in Gaza for a full month”, enough medicine to cover the medical needs of 1.6 million people, as well as “blankets for 200,000 families” and “learning supplies for 375,000 children.” She added that more aid was warehoused in Egypt.

Just yesterday, discussing medical supplies, the World Health Organization sent out a desperate message, noting that “the majority of medical equipment stockpiles” in Gaza “have been depleted, with a severe shortage of 42% of essential medicines, including painkillers.” The WHO added that “stock levels have reached zero for 64% of medical equipment, 43% of essential medicines, and 42% of vaccines”, with “an acute shortage of intravenous fluids, syringes, and dressings, which hampers surgical treatments like fracture anesthesia”, and with “essential medicines such as antibiotics, painkillers, and medications for chronic illnesses” only “available in very limited quantities.” They added that “51 trucks carrying medical aid” were stuck at the border, “awaiting permits to enter Gaza” that persistently fail to materialize.

This is deliberate, of course, just as the GHF debacle shows that the new food delivery program isn’t meant to actually deliver food to starving people. However, instead of addressing concerns raised by western leaders, Israel is doubling down on its horrors.

The messianic fury of Netanyahu and Smotrich

Although former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is the latest high-profile critic of Israel’s actions, concluding that “the criminal gang headed by Benjamin Netanyahu” is  “committing war crimes” in “a war of devastation” that involves the “indiscriminate, limitless, cruel and criminal killing of civilians” as “the result of government policy — knowingly, evilly, maliciously, irresponsibly dictated”, Netanyahu and his far-right ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich are giddily cranking up their genocidal and messianic messages, as was particularly revealed just two days ago, during the annual Jerusalem Day celebrations, marking Israel’s annexation and illegal occupation of East Jerusalem in 1967, when it also seized Gaza and the West Bank.

As settler youth engaged in their annual rite of violently abusing Palestinians in the Old City, and shouting “Death to the Arabs” and “May their villages burn”, Netanyahu, provocatively, appeared in a video from a tunnel near Al-Aqsa Mosque, declaring that the whole of Jerusalem “is on our hands, and it will always remain in our hands”, and then, in a speech at the Mercaz HaRav yeshiva, declared, “This is a war of good against evil. It’s being fought against human animals, monsters. And we will defeat them. We will wipe them out. They will not remain.”

In another speech, Bezalel Smotrich declared, “We are being blessed with the opportunity, thank God, of seeing an expansion of the borders of the Land of Israel, on all fronts. We are being blessed with the opportunity to blot out the seed of Amalek, a process which is intensifying.”

The reference to Amalek, also frequently used by Netanyahu, and repeatedly cited by soldiers in videos from Gaza, exulting in their war crimes, draws on a passage in the first Book of Samuel in which God commands King Saul to kill everyone in Amalek, a rival territory, with the exhortation, “Attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.’”

600 days since Israel launched its genocide in Gaza, the whole world has failed the Palestinian people.

When I was a child, growing up in Christian family, and encouraged to read the Bible, it was the social justice and compassion in the words of Jesus that inspired me. The Old Testament, with its relentless smiting and vengeance, scared me, as it should anyone who believes that humanity cannot survive or thrive when weighed down by ancient hatreds.

For Israel, however, the bleak, violent, vengeful misery of the Old Testament is an ever-living statement of political intent, horrifically used to compel or entice countries abroad to endorse its deranged vision of a world reduced to an endless struggle to replay the horrors of Amalek until, apparently, no Palestinians are left alive.

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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”, which you can watch on YouTube here.

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. He has also, since, October 2023, been sickened and appalled by Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and you can read his detailed coverage here.

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