Gaza As a Death Camp, After 1,000 Days of Genocide

Please click on either of the ‘Donate’ or ‘Buy’ buttons below (via PayPal or Stripe) to make a donation towards the $2,500 (£2,000) I’m trying to raise to support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist over the next three months. To get links to all my work in your inbox, please also consider taking out a free or paid subscription to my new Substack newsletter.

 

Today marks 1,000 days of Israel’s genocide in the Gaza Strip, in which, at the most conservative estimate, almost a quarter of a million people have been killed or wounded. On June 29, Gaza’s shattered Health Ministry reported that the death toll stood at 73,058, and the numbers of those injured stood at 173,488, many of them gravely so.

These figures are devastating enough, as they constitute a death toll of 730 people every single day over the last 33 months, but they are, without any doubt, a serious undercount. The real death toll is at least double that figure, and maybe more, as I establish in my notes at the end of this article.

In addition, as was revealed last August, an official Israeli military intelligence database, keeping tabs on how many suspected militants had been killed in Gaza, revealed that, according the military’s own figures, only 17% of those killed in Gaza were assessed as having been militants: in other words, 83% were civilians, a figure that, as I discussed in my analysis at the time, could actually be as high as 95%.

Establishing a genocide

No one with any shred of credibility fails to recognize Israel’s actions over the last 1,000 days as a genocide, and that this has been the case almost from the beginning.

In my very first article about Israel’s attacks, just four days in, horrified by the uncritical support by western leaders for what was already, manifestly, an onslaught of unprecedented ferocity, I wrote, “Uncritically supporting Israel’s ‘right to defend itself’, at this particularly bleak moment, is not only an endorsement of war crimes; under Israel’s current leadership, it may actually end up endorsing Israel committing the most severe war crime of all — genocide.”

I was drawing not only on the visions of horror being broadcast from Gaza, as apartment block after apartment block was destroyed, and as grotesque videos and photos of mass slaughter were live-streamed on social media, but also on the unprecedented declarations of genocidal intent from Israel’s leaders; most noticeably, in those first few days, defense minister Yoav Gallant proclaiming, “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 will act accordingly.”

The day after, a huge roll-call of UN experts issued a stark warning to Israel that “indiscriminately killing civilians in the context of hostilities, with no regard for the principles of distinction, precaution and proportionality, is a war crime”, and a week later, on October 19, after Israel killed more than 470 civilians in a deadly strike at Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City, first raised the prospect of there being “a risk of genocide against the Palestinian People.”

The experts based their assessment on “statements made by Israeli political leaders and their allies”, accompanied by the “military action in Gaza”, which included the “complete siege” promised by Yoav Gallant, “cutting off drinking water, medicine, and essential food”, “coupled with unfeasible evacuation orders and forcible population transfers” of nearly half of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million people, as well as “the wilful and systematic destruction of civilian homes and infrastructure.” They also warned of an “escalation of arrests and killing in the West Bank.”

In the months that followed, the atrocities continued, with intensified attacks on Gaza’s hospitals, the targeted killing of journalists and prominent intellectuals like Refaat Alareer, the mass rounding-up of men and boys, who were then stripped to their underwear and “processed”, with many arbitrarily disappearing into Israel’s unaccountable prison system for Palestinians, from which independent outside scrutiny, via the ICRC (the International Committee of the Red Cross), had been banned immediately after October 7. There were also credible reports of summary executions by IDF soldiers.

On December 12, 2023, the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) recognized that Israel’s actions against the Palestinian people constituted “an unfolding genocide”, stating that “Palestinians are being killed every day, every hour, and their living conditions are unrelentingly becoming those of planned elimination”, with the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention following up with its own recognition of a genocide on December 29.

On January 26, 2024, responding to a genocide case submitted by South Africa, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) — the world court, and one of the six principal organs of the UN — was so alarmed that it issued provisional measures to Israel, to address its fears of a “plausible” genocide in Gaza, based on an accumulation of public incitements to commit genocide, made by prominent Israeli politicians and other influential figures, and through the devastating effects of its siege on adequate supplies of humanitarian aid.

As the Court described it, “In view of the fundamental values sought to be protected by the Genocide Convention, the Court considers that the plausible rights in question in these proceedings, namely the right of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip to be protected from acts of genocide and related prohibited acts identified in Article III of the Genocide Convention and the right of South Africa to seek Israel’s compliance with the latter’s obligations under the Convention, are of such a nature that prejudice to them is capable of causing irreparable harm.”

This, and subsequent provisional measures, issued in March and May 2024, were aggressively dismissed by Israel, and largely ignored in the west, which failed to do anything significant to punish Israel or to attempt to rein it in.

However, as the atrocities continued throughout the year — including, most horrifically, a “genocide within a genocide” in northern Gaza, from October 2024 onwards, which involved extreme military violence aimed at forcing the whole of the surviving population to move to the south, with those remaining regarded as “enemy combatants” who could be summarily executed — recognition that this was indeed a genocide continued to be published and publicized.

Amongst the most significant were a report by Amnesty International in December 2024, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese’s report, “Anatomy of a Genocide”, issued in March 2024, and reports by Médecins Sans Frontières and the Israeli NGOs B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel in July 2025, and by the International Association of Genocide Scholars in August 2025.

In September 2025, the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel — following up on a report in November 2024, describing actions “consistent with the characteristics of genocide” — published what I described at the time as “a devastating 72-page report establishing, definitively, that the State of Israel is engaged in a genocide of the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip, and has been throughout the whole of the last 23 months.”

Many, many more examples also exist, including, notably, prominent individual genocide scholars, including the renowned US-Israeli genocide scholar Omer Bartov, who, in July 2025, wrote an article for the New York Times, entitled, “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It.”

Israel’s lies to justify its genocidal assault

Despite the unassailable evidence of a genocide, Israel has resolutely refused to recognize it, pretending that the extraordinary number of genocidal comments made by senior politicians — and echoed throughout the Israeli media — inhabit a different world to the one in which the IDF is allegedly, and risibly, “the most moral army in the world.”

Israel has, from the beginning, sought to focus on the events of October 7, 2023 as uniquely horrific — as a genocide, which is as absurd as claims that Hamas wants to kill all Israelis or all Jews, especially as the attacks on October 7 showed its maximal capabilities.

October 7 has also been repeatedly framed as Israel’s 9/11 — an opinion that was obligingly endorsed by Joe Biden when he visited Israel on October 18, 2023, and claimed that, “for a nation the size of Israel, it was like 15 9/11s.”

As I explained at the time, using the same formula as Biden, what the Palestinians of Gaza had suffered in just a few short weeks since October 7, when many thousands had already been killed, far exceeding the death toll on October 7, was “the equivalent of 285 9/11s.” By December 14 last year, when I marked 8,000 days of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, I noted how it had become the equivalent of 3,500 9/11s, or ten million dead Americans.

Technically, October 7 was, as has been endlessly repeated, “the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust”, but it is disproportionate to compare the death of six million Jews under the Nazis, during their 12-year Reich, to 1,124 Jewish people (and 71 foreign nationals) killed on October 7, 2023, even without getting into the fraught topic of how many of those 1,124 people were actually killed by Israeli forces under the Hannibal Doctrine, which calls for Israelis to be killed by their own side to prevent them being taken hostage.

Israel has also persistently sought to draw comparisons with the Second World War, and the Allies’ war against the Nazis and the Japanese, firstly by repeatedly comparing Hamas to the Nazis, as Benjamin Netanyahu did on October 19, 2023, when he said, “Hamas are the new Nazis”, adding, absurdly, “They’re worse than the Nazis”, which, if you follow his logic, means that he was suggesting that the 1,124 Israelis killed on October 7 were somehow quantitatively more significant than the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust.

Netanyahu and other Israel officials have also extended their analogy by arguing that their actions are no worse than what the Allies did to Dresden, when in 1945, Allied bombers killed at least 25,000 civilians in the German city through intense carpet-bombing, or even the atomic bombs dropped by the US on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, in which at least 200,000 people were killed.

The problem for the Israelis is that not only are these arguably the worst war crimes committed by the Allies in the Second World War, but also that no valid comparison can feasibly be drawn between the Second World War — a war between nation states with vast armies and military arsenals — and the Palestinian people’s largely homemade and cobbled together resistance to what, as of October 7, 2023, was 75 years (now 78) of violent occupation and dispossession, apartheid, mass arbitrary imprisonment, and stupefyingly persistent murder.

Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza is not a “war”, any more than the attacks on October 7 gave Israel an open-ended “right to defend itself”, as though the rules governing warfare did not apply to it, but which western leaders all parroted in unison in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, as though they were collectively reading from the same pre-prepared script.

Initially, western media described the unfolding genocide as the “Israel-Hamas War”, hoping that no one would notice that no other “war” has been described in a similar manner. The US-led war on Afghanistan wasn’t described as the “US-Al-Qaeda War”, just as the Troubles in Ireland weren’t described as the “UK-IRA War.”

Even the eventual replacement description — “the Gaza War” — is fundamentally inaccurate, lending false credibility to Israel’s actions, because Gaza is not an independent autonomous country that launched a war on Israel, but, verifiably, an illegally occupied territory, whose people have the right to resist occupation.

The October 7 attacks didn’t take place in a vacuum; they followed 75 years of persistent oppression

More significantly, Israel’s vilest distortion of the truth — again parroted by pliant and complicit western media and politicians — was to suggest that the October 7 attacks occurred in a vacuum, that Jew-hating Palestinians, hell-bent on killing all the Israeli people, had launched their attacks as nothing less than a manifestation of unprovoked evil.

The reality, of course, is that the events of October 7 were just one incident in, as I noted, above, 75 years (now 78), in which Israel has engaged in the persistent and violent occupation of Palestinian land, the dispossession of its people, an apartheid regime of dehumanization, mass arbitrary imprisonment, and stupefyingly persistent murder.

The origins of October 7 date back 100 years, to September 29 1923, “marking”, as I described it in my first post-October 7 article, “the start of British control of Palestine, as part of the redistribution of territories formerly controlled by countries on the losing side after the carnage of the First World War; in this case, the Ottoman Empire.”

As I also explained, “Unlike all the other countries under this mandate system, however, where the stated aim was to administer these countries until they could become independent, the British Mandate for Palestine involved fulfilling a pledge made in 1917 by Britain’s foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, to Lionel Walter Rothschild, a leading figurehead in Britain’s Jewish community, to establish ‘a national home for the Jewish people’ in Palestine, fulfilling the aims of the Zionist movement, which had emerged in the late 19th century, in central and eastern Europe.”

“At the time of the Balfour Declaration”, as I also explained, “Palestinians made up more than 90 percent of the population of the country, but between 1920 and 1946, according to British records, 376,415 Jewish immigrants, mostly from Europe, arrived in the country”, the most violent amongst them establishing terrorist militias who, by 1948, when the UK’s mandate ended, founded the State of Israel in an orgy of sickening genocidal violence, killing at least 15,000 Palestinians, expelling around 750,000 from their homes, destroying over 500 towns and villages, and taking over all of Palestine except for the Gaza Strip, held by Egypt, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, held by Jordan, and the Golan Heights, held by Syria.

In 1947, the newly-created United Nations had sought to implement a two-state solution in Palestine, but the Palestinians rejected the proposals, for good reason. Although a third of the population was now Jewish, they owned just six percent of the land, but the UN’s plans “allotted about 56 percent of Palestine” to the Jewish settlers, “including most of the fertile coastal region.”

Although the US recognized Israel as a state on the day of its blood-soaked founding, the UN waited a year until it committed its second grave error, allowing it to join the UN, which it became a member of on May 11, 1949.

In the meantime, the UN General Assembly, on December 11, 1948, passed Resolution 194, protecting the “right of return” of refugees to their homelands, with, quite evidently, a particular eye on the Palestinians, and in Resolution 302, on December 8, 1949, tacitly acknowledging its failures with regard to the Palestinians by establishing UNRWA, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, to provide aid to the displaced Palestinian refugees, and to enrage Israel to this day by recognizing the Palestinians’ right to return, which Israel has always vehemently opposed.

When Israel finally seized Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights after the Six-Day War in June 1967, the UN General Assembly responded, in November, with Resolution 242, which called for the withdrawal of Israeli forces from all the recently occupied territories, and emphasized the “inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war.”

That has been the UN’s constant position ever since, although it has never been recognized by Israel, and, as various peace initiatives have come and gone and have failed to address Israel’s crimes, the International Court of Justice finally intervened, issuing a powerful advisory opinion in July 2024.

This established, definitively, that Israel’s entire occupation of the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem was illegal, with the Court ordering Israel to withdraw and pay reparations, and also reminding the rest of the world that it has an obligation not to assist Israel with its illegal occupation in any way. Predictably, this opinion, like the “provisional measures” in the South Africa case, was aggressively dismissed by Israel, and was also universally ignored throughout the west.

Although nominally legally binding, the Court’s opinions have no enforcement mechanism, as is largely the case with UN resolutions. The five permanent members of the UN Security Council — the US, the UK, France, Russia and China, the so-called “victors” of the Second World War — maintain a veto which the US, in particular, has persistently wielded in Israel’s favor, and the General Assembly has failed to address its inbuilt impotence by implementing the “Uniting for Peace” resolution of 1950, which, theoretically, would allow them to engage in military intervention to restore peace.

Crucially, when comparing October 7 to Israel’s response, it’s hugely important to note the contrast between the Palestinian and Israeli death tolls between 1948 and 2022. In that period, an estimated 4,000 to 5,000 Israelis were killed by Palestinians, while an estimated 100,000 to 130,000 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces.

This was a ratio of around 25 Palestinian deaths for every Israeli killed, over a period of 75 years, but since October 7 that ratio may now be as high as 40 to 1.

In addition, at least a million Palestinians from occupied Palestine have, since 1967, been seized, mostly arbitrarily, and held in Israel’s prisons, largely without charge or trial using forms of “administrative detention” inherited from the British, and thousands have been prosecuted and imprisoned in a parallel system of military courts, reserved solely for Palestinians, which have persistently, and with good reason, been accused of laundering evidence derived through the use of torture, and of being grotesquely unfair “show trials.”

Gaza as a death camp

So what are we meant to conclude as we reflect on the 1,000 days of Israel’s still-ongoing genocide in Gaza?

We’re not, apparently, supposed to be allowed to make comparisons between the Holocaust and the genocide in Gaza, but how, in all honesty, are we meant not to?

The most accurate analogy for Israel’s approach to Gaza is that it has been transformed from the “open-air prison” that it was from 2007, when Hamas took power and Israel shut it off from the outside world, into a giant death camp, reminiscent, in some crucial ways, but not others, to the death camps for Jews and others viewed as inferior and deserving of death by the Nazis.

In the death camps and elsewhere, the Nazis not only murdered six million Jews, but also murdered at least seven million other people in total, including 3.3 million Russian prisoners of war, at least two million Russians killed by starvation, nearly 300,000 Poles, 300,000 disabled people and 200,000 Romani people.

Israel doesn’t have gas chambers or the other sickening paraphernalia of mass extermination, but its equivalent is its relentless aerial bombing from October 2023 to January 2025, and from March 2025 to the eventual, if porous ceasefire in October 2025, when 70,000 people in total, including at least 20,000 children, were killed in the most brutal manner, crushed, incinerated and torn apart, mainly in relentless aerial attacks that exceeded, in intensity, the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Children were also deliberately targeted by snipers and by armed quadcopter drones, and seized and abused in Israeli custody, as well as having their education and their health imperilled or destroyed through Israel’s deliberate destruction of schools and hospitals. For a harrowing analysis, see “‘The essence of childhood has been destroyed’: Israel’s deliberate targeting of Palestinian children in the Occupied Palestinian Territory since 7 October 2023”, a new report by the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel, which was released on June 18.

Throughout most of the last 33 months, like a death camp, Gaza has been sealed shut, as the Israelis have engaged in deliberate mass killing, a policy that consists, demonstrably, of nothing less than the intentional extermination and annihilation of everyone and everything in Gaza.

Reinforcing the death camp analogy, consider the closure of the Rafah Crossing, the only crossing from Gaza to Egypt, in May 2024. Prior to the closure, an estimated 100,000 Palestinians in Gaza, who could afford to pay extortionate fess to Egyptian intermediaries, left Gaza.

When Israel closed the crossing, as part of their assault on Rafah — Gaza’s southernmost province, and the last to be destroyed, and then erased from the map, as Israeli forces moved from the north to the south of Gaza over the previous eight months —  Gaza was resolutely sealed shut as a death camp, and remained so for the next 21 months, until February this year, when, reluctantly and belatedly, Israel allowed the crossing to reopen, as was required under the terms of the October 2025 ceasefire deal.

However, Israel has only opened the crossing sporadically, and has failed to fulfil the minimum requirements of the deal, whereby, every day, 50 Palestinians in urgent need of medical treatment would be allowed to leave for Egypt, with companions, while 50 others who wanted to return to Gaza would be allowed back in.

With over 20,000 Palestinians in urgent need of medical treatment, including over 5,000 children, this only confirms Israel’s commitment to extermination, and it also, crucially, gives the lie to the claims, persistently made by Israeli politicians, that they support what they euphemistically describe as the “voluntary migration” of the Palestinian people to other countries.

Despite Israel hoping that Egypt could be prevailed upon to open up the Sinai Peninsula to take in the entire Palestinian population, and the desperate floating of plans for Indonesia to oblige, despite the logistical impossibility of doing so, as well as risible efforts to secure pliable but unstable and unsuitable countries in Africa, no realistic plan for this breathtakingly horrific program of mass forced displacement, or mass ethnic cleansing, far exceeding the Nakba of 1948, has ever emerged.

This is because, outside of Israel’s supremely arrogant insistence that the rest of the world should help it out with its Palestinian “problem”, no country wants to be involved in such a colossal crime, and western countries, in particular, have become aggressively resistant to immigration over the last decade or so, and explicitly so when it involves vast numbers of Muslims described as “human animals.”

The notion of “voluntary migration”, therefore, is nothing but an illusion, brandished to provide cover for Israel’s true purpose: the persistent and continuing extermination of the Palestinian people.

Genocide by every means possible

Sickeningly, all of the above barely scratches the surface of Israel’s genocidal crimes.

Its persistent sieges — on food, water, fuel and medical supplies — have all been designed to kill as many people as possible, with the most notable period of genocidal enthusiasm, via methods accompanying relentless carpet-bombing, occurring between March 2 and May 18, 2025, after Israel unilaterally broke a six-week ceasefire deal, when no aid deliveries were allowed into Gaza at all.

This was followed by the establishment of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a joint US-Israeli food distribution system, intended to replace UNRWA, which, hideously, saw starving people trudging for miles to food distribution points, only to be shot at by Israelis and and US contractors. The GHF was a uniquely depraved project that would no doubt have amused senior Nazi leaders overseeing the “Final Solution”, and by August 5, 2025, it had led to a situation in which at least 1,487 people had been killed and 10,578 injured while trying to collect food aid.

It also coincided with severe famine in Gaza, and accompanied seven months of sustained aerial assaults, and, latterly, ground forces seeking to erase the whole of Gaza City, that was only brought to an end with the ceasefire in October.

Since then, however, life has still not noticeably improved, and, in fact, while still killing and wounding Palestinians directly, with over 1,000 killed and over 3,000 wounded since last October, Israel has deliberately ramped up its efforts to continue the extermination of the Palestinians through indirect means.

Despite a commitment to allow 600 trucks of humanitarian aid to enter Gaza every day, only a fraction of that total has been allowed in. There still isn’t enough food and water, and fuel is restricted, as are essential medical supplies and medical equipment, all of which continues to fulfil Israel’s policy of extermination by stealth.

As a Ministry of Health representative told the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights last month, “The targeting of healthcare infrastructure, the destruction of the healthcare system over more than two and a half years, and the obstruction of the entry of medical equipment, medicines, and fuel have resulted in the widespread paralysis of essential treatment services, including cancer care, cardiac surgery, intensive care, dialysis services, physiotherapy, and emergency medical care.”

PHCR added that “doctors in various hospital departments told [their] researcher that patients suffering from cancer, cardiovascular diseases, kidney failure, congenital abnormalities, and blood disorders, as well as those with critical injuries, are increasingly losing their chances of survival due to the unavailability of the necessary treatment in the Gaza Strip and the denial of access to travel abroad for medical care.”

Moreover, Israel refuses to allow in any equipment that can be used to undertake reconstruction work in Gaza — renewing deliberately destroyed  water supply systems and sewage systems, clearing the mountains of toxic waste that has led to a massive infestation of rodents and other disease-carriers and threats to life, replacing makeshift tents with mobile homes, as well as beginning to clear the millions of tons of rubble, and to undertake the reconstruction of roads and buildings.

Gaza is, deliberately, still being maintained as a death camp, and while the US was deeply involved in securing the ceasefire deal last October, Trump soon lost interest, and has done nothing as Israel has continued to seize ever more Palestinian land rather than withdrawing, so that it now occupies over 60% of Gaza, and, according to Netanyahu, is seeking to expand that to 70%, squeezing the Palestinians into an ever more cramped and unsanitary shanty town close to the shore.

To get some idea of how severe the conditions are in Gaza, I follow Tamer Nahed, a journalist who is currently working with an organization providing water to people in desperate need. He writes regularly on X, and on June 7 wrote:

Gaza is taking its last breaths, and the situation we have reached is extremely dangerous.

Temperatures are rising to suffocating levels, and the tents where hundreds of thousands live have turned into ovens made of fabric and plastic. There is no electricity, no air conditioning, no fans, no cold water. People try to sleep, but heat, hunger, and fear make sleep seem like an impossible dream.

Clean water is scarce, cleaning supplies are almost nonexistent, and essential medicines are unavailable. Skin diseases are spreading in a terrifying way among children and adults, while garbage piles up and sewage mixes with displacement areas, spreading even more suffering.

Long lines form for food, yet many return empty handed. Aid is decreasing, and most relief centers have stopped or are no longer able to meet even the minimum needs.

At night, rats, insects, snakes, and scorpions crawl into the tents, while during the day people face unbearable heat and endless hunger. There is no safety, no privacy, and nowhere to go. Meanwhile, killings and destruction continue daily, while Gaza’s space shrinks day by day, forcing people into smaller and more overcrowded areas.

This is not life. This is not displacement. This is a complete collapse of everything that allows human beings to live with dignity.

What more is the world waiting for? How many children must go hungry? How many patients must die before the world acts? Do not stay silent. Speak about Gaza. Share what is happening.

Meanwhile, under Trump’s so-called “Board of Peace”, the planned establishment of a Palestinian committee to take over the day-to-day running of Gaza hasn’t happened, as Israel has blocked their entry, the intended International Stabilization Force hasn’t emerged either, and Trump’s farcical colonial administrator, the former UN official and Bulgarian politician Nickolay Mladenov, has taken Israel’s side, demanding Hamas’ unconditional disarmament before any further progress can be made.

Lost in the dunes of this ever-shrinking Gaza are the grandiose plans of Trump’s son-in law, Jared Kushner, to build a techno-futuristic beach resort and tech hub on the corpses of untold numbers of Palestinians, backed with Gulf money and global Zionist capital, and all that seems to remain in reach is the continuing slow strangulation of Gaza’s surviving population, as Israel’s fanatical settlers — like psychopathic hippies, the lost progeny of Charles Manson — salivate over the prospect of derailing the US’s plans and colonizing Gaza with their deranged breeding grounds.

Since Netanyahu talked Trump into attacking Iran four months ago, Gaza has fallen off the radar. Western countries, and even some Israelis, have become concerned by the ferocious fanaticism of state-backed settler depravation against Palestinians in the West Bank, and attention has also, understandably, been focused on Lebanon, where Israel, reiterating its Gaza template on a sovereign country rather than a besieged and demonized death camp, has shown its naked, genocidal, expansionist, Supremacist intent rather too clearly.

However, no exit route from Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza is visible. and it’s sickening beyond all measure that the death camp commandants in Tel Aviv, and their cheerleaders in Israel’s largely depraved and solipsistic society, continue to behave as though the rest of the world doesn’t exist, and that only through endless killing can they maintain the illusion that one day they will be safe.

The arc of the moral universe, described by Martin Luther King, Jr. as bending eventually toward justice, may look irredeemably broken, but it remains true, I believe, that no Nazi-style Supremacist project of securing peace through endless war and imaginable depravity will prevail in the long run.

Israel, embarking on its fanatical genocidal settler colonial project in 1948, just when the European colonizers were being obliged to withdraw from their own conquered territories, is more out of touch with the world than it can possibly imagine in its Supremacist bubble. Despite the rise of the far-right throughout the west, our populations are now so mixed and generally integrated that it’s no wonder that exponents of racial purity, like the State of Israel, stand out for their similarities to the Nazis, and will, like the Nazis, eventually, one way or another, collapse and wither and die.

* * * * *

Notes on Gaza’s death toll

In November 2025, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) suggested that the violent death toll at the time “likely exceed[ed] 100,000”, while research published in The Lancet in April this year, extrapolating from information provided by around 2,000 households in Gaza, indicated that the death between Oct. 7, 2023, and Jan. 5, 2025 was “75,200 violent deaths”, in contrast to the Ministry of Health’s figures, at the time, of 49,090.

On current Ministry of Health figures, that would indicate that the current number of violent deaths could be as high as 111,916.

On indirect deaths — those caused by what the Geneva Declaration Secretariat’s “Global Burden of Armed Violence” report, published in 2008, described as deaths resulting from “the loss of access to basic health care, adequate food and shelter, clean water, or other necessities of life” — the researchers estimated 16,300 non-violent deaths up until January. 5, 2025, which, today, through a similar scaling-up process, would be around 25,000, a total, therefore, of over 136,000.

The Geneva Declaration Secretariat’s 2008 report assessed that, “In the majority of conflicts since the early 1990s for which good data is available, the burden of indirect deaths was between three and 15 times the number of direct deaths”, but in the recent report in The Lancet, the researchers suggested that “non-violent excess deaths, although substantial, [were] lower than some projections have suggested.”

As they explained, “Information on non-violent excess deaths in the Gaza Strip remains scant. One analysis projected that non-violent deaths could be four times as high as violent deaths, whereas physicians working in the Gaza Strip claimed tens of thousands of deaths due to starvation and its complications. However, these estimates do not have empirical foundation.”

The analysis suggesting a ratio of non-violent to violent deaths was published in a letter to The Lancet in July 2024 by three medical researchers, which I wrote about here. The researchers had applied what they described as “a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death” to reach a plausible total of 186,000 deaths, based on official health ministry figures, which, at the time, stood at 37,396.

With the official death toll now nearly double what it was then, this means that, using that same “conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death”, the total death toll, which the researchers intended to be projected into the future as well as being based on current estimates, could be around 365,000, which would be 15% of Gaza’s pre-October 7 population of 2,375,259.

Crucially, no one can say with any certainty whatsoever what the true death toll is, because the shattered Health Ministry only counts those admitted to hospitals, matching them with its registry of the population. It has regularly been suggested that tens of thousands of people, otherwise unaccounted for, are buried beneath the rubble, which seems probable, but no one can assess quite how many other people have died without their deaths being formally recorded at all.

One way of ascertaining the truth would be for international journalists and independent monitors to be allowed into Gaza, but, unlike any other conflict, Israel has not only made sure that no one can run away from the bombs; it has also made any process of accounting and accountability impossible by refusing to allow anyone into the death camp of Gaza except for a small number of visiting foreign doctors (who it is now banning after they spoke out) and representatives of international aid agencies (who it has also been cutting off through onerous registration requirements that would endanger their staff).

The result is that Gaza has, uniquely, been sealed off from international scrutiny just as Israel has sealed off its grotesque gulag of torture prisons for Palestinians from outside scrutiny by banning the ICRC from visiting what, currently, are over 9,000 “security prisoners” held in its prisons.

No one so thoroughly hides what they’re doing for 1,000 days — on the “battlefield”, and in their prisons — unless what they’re doing is so soul-shreddingly vile that exposing it would make the world recoil. Israel has tried to dress up its actions publicly through sickening lies and distortions for the last 33 months, but its mask has fallen. We all see it for what it is, and no amount of bullying, or bribery, or paid propaganda will ever restore that mask.

The Nazis are alive, and they’re living in Israel.

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of a photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’, which ran from 2012 to 2023), 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.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s new Substack account, set up in November 2024, where he’ll be sending out a weekly newsletter, or his RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, and the full military commissions list.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation via PayPal or via Stripe.