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’s Ferocious Intensification of Genocide in Gaza Finally Alienates Key Allies
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In international relations, when your “friend” treats you with arrogant condescension, you have to calibrate your response based on your power relationship with them. If that “friend” is the US, then rocking the boat too much might have serious repercussions, but when your “friend” is Israel, a country that wouldn’t even exist without your economic backing, and which has been demanding and receiving “ironclad” and unconditional support for a 19-month long genocidal assault on a territory it has illegally occupied for the last 58 years and is now threatening to exterminate completely, not responding, in the end, seems to be nothing more than succumbing to patterns of bullying and abuse.
Since its blood-soaked founding in 1948, when it killed 15,000 Palestinians and expelled 750,000 others, Israel — with the support of the US and other countries in the west — has been allowed to carve out for itself an exceptionalism that has enabled it to consistently subvert international law without ever being held to account.
Despite illegally occupying the Palestinian territories of the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem since 1967, imposing a horrendous system of apartheid, strangling Gaza and illegally colonizing the West Bank, repeatedly murdering Palestinians with impunity and establishing a prison system of exceptional brutality and lawlessness, its status as the world’s pre-eminent victim, because of the Holocaust, has allowed it to behave like an indulged sociopathic teenager, or as an entire nation of indulged sociopathic teenagers.
Unparalleled Depravity as Israel Implements Its “Final Solution” for Gaza
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On the night of May 15, and throughout the darkest hours of the morning of May 16, the genocidal State of Israel, as it promised ten days before, launched “Operation Gideon’s Chariots”, a plan that is nothing less than its “final solution” to the “Palestinian problem”, a plan as inhuman and depraved as the “final solution” that the Nazis approved for the “Jewish problem” at the Wannsee Conference in Germany in January 1942, which led, in the years that followed, to the industrial-scale expansion of extermination camps.
It ought to be inconceivable that this is happening, because, for 15 and a half months, from October 2023 to January this year, Israel had already been engaged in relentless genocidal assaults on the trapped civilian population in Gaza, in which almost the whole of the built environment was destroyed with Hiroshima-like fury, and at least 50,000 people, mostly civilians, were killed.
For six weeks, from January 19 until March 1, the ceaseless slaughter and destruction seemed to have finally come to an end, via a ceasefire deal in which the bombing stopped and humanitarian aid resumed, and Israeli hostages, seized on October 7, 2023, were exchanged for around 1,700 Palestinian prisoners and hostages.
Israel Wants to Kill Everyone in Gaza
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Israel’s latest plan for the Gaza Strip, approved by the Security Cabinet on May 5, has, astonishingly, managed to plumb new depths of screamingly illegal depravity in a 19-month genocidal campaign in which screamingly illegal depravity has, from the very beginning, been the norm.
The new plan, which theoretically aims “to destroy Hamas and rescue [the] remaining hostages” seized on October 7, 2023, has four main components: firstly, the permanent military occupation of the Gaza Strip; secondly, the forced displacement of the entire surviving population to a small portion of land in south; thirdly, the conversion of that small portion of land into a concentration camp; and, fourthly, the illusion of “voluntary migration”, behind which extermination — via direct killing, starvation and, probably most potently, medical neglect through the almost complete destruction of medical supplies and equipment — will continue until everyone is dead.
This isn’t how it’s being described in news reports, because it’s a truth that eludes most mainstream journalists and their editors, who have been cowed into submission by pro-Israeli bias for so long now that they have forgotten that their job is supposed to entail them analyzing information rather than simply regurgitating it unquestioningly.
The Soul-Shredding Horror of Israel’s Unstoppable Genocide in Gaza
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Since the State of Israel broke the ceasefire agreement with Hamas after its first six-week phase ended on March 1, imposing a total ban on all supplies of food, water, medicine and fuel entering Gaza on March 2, and, on March 18, resuming its savage and largely indiscriminate bombing of a trapped civilian population, the silence of world leaders — and most of the world’s mainstream media — has confirmed their fundamental complicity in the most well-publicized atrocity that most of us have ever experienced in our lives.
Most of the world’s leaders and the mainstream media were already damned, of course, having failed to do everything in their power — or, in fact, anything at all — to stop Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza after the first few weeks, or certainly, the first few months of what was clearly a sustained project of extermination, incomparable in scale to anything except the original assault on the Palestinians in 1948 that led to the atrocity-soaked founding of the State of Israel, when over 15,000 Palestinians were killed, towns and villages were erased, to be replaced by new Israeli towns and villages, and 750,000 Palestinians were exiled permanently from their homes.
The erasure of Gaza, from those early months to the start of the ceasefire, 15 and a half months later, was so sustained that almost the entirety of its built environment was destroyed, including most of its housing, and, most cynically, its hospitals, its water supplies and its sewage treatment plants, and at least 50,000 people — mostly civilians — were killed, although the larger death toll, taking in indirect deaths, through disease, starvation, dehydration and the destruction of almost the entire medical and healthcare system, will run into the hundreds of thousands.
As Israel Murders Hossam Shabat, and the Gaza Death Toll Passes 50,000, Did you Know Israel Has Killed Over 500 Times More Children Than Were Killed on Oct. 7?
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I no longer know what to say or do.
Yesterday, Israel deliberately targeted and murdered Hossam Shabat, the brave, beautiful 23-year old journalist who somehow dodged death for over 17 months, reporting relentlessly from the front lines of Israel’s brutal attacks, including the four months from October last year until a ceasefire began on January 19, when Israel implemented an exterminatory “genocide within a genocide” in northern Gaza.
After hanging up his press vest and helmet two months ago, when the now aborted ceasefire began, he only put them on again four days ago, after it became abundantly clear that Israel had deliberately shredded the ceasefire, reimplementing a “complete siege” on all humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip on March 1, and then, under the cover of night on March 18, resurrecting its genocidal aims with renewed fury, launching a hundred simultaneous attacks across Gaza that killed at least 436 people, “including at least 183 children, 94 women, 34 elderly people, and 125 men”, as Al Jazeera explained, adding that at least 678 others were injured, “many critically, with more still trapped under the rubble.”
Just yesterday, Gaza’s beleaguered health ministry announced that these deaths — to which another 356 have been added in the following days, has pushed the official death toll to over 50,000 since October 7, 2023 — 50,021 in total, including 15,613 children, of whom 872 were under one year old. The health ministry added that over half of those killed were women and children. The figures don’t include 14,222 other people who are almost certain dead, their bodies “trapped under the rubble or in areas inaccessible to rescuers”, as Al Jazeera reported on February 3, noting that the total number of children killed or presumed dead at that time was 17,492.
Falsely Blaming Hamas, Israel Breaks the Two-Month Ceasefire, Resumes Genocidal Slaughter in Gaza
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Early on Tuesday morning, from 2am, and with no warning, and absolutely no justification whatsoever, Israel violently broke the two-month ceasefire deal with Hamas, launching numerous military strikes across the Gaza Strip that killed over 400 Palestinians — mostly civilians, and including 174 children, 89 women and 32 elderly people. Overwhelmed, Gaza’s hospitals, most barely functioning, struggled to cope with the influx of the dying and the wounded.
Dr. Abdul-Qader Weshah, a senior emergency doctor at Al-Awda Hospital, told Drop Site News, “Since the morning, we were horrified and awoke to the screams and pain of people. We’ve been treating many people, children and women in particular.” He added that medical staff had had to transfer some of the wounded to other hospitals because of a lack of medical supplies, saying, “We don’t have the means. Gaza’s hospitals are devoid of everything. Here at the hospital, we lack everything, including basic necessities like disinfectants and gauze. We don’t have enough beds for the casualties. We don’t have the capacity to treat the wounded. X-ray devices, magnetic resonance imaging, and simple things like stitches are not available. The hospital is in an unprecedented state of chaos.”
Dr. Muhammad Abu Salmiya, the director of Al-Shifa Hospital, told Al Jazeera Arabic, “Every minute, a wounded person dies due to a lack of resources.”
In a chilling statement issued shortly after the airstrikes began, Israel Katz, Israel’s defence minister, appointed in November as the replacement for the wanted war criminal Yoav Gallant by Israel’s other notorious wanted war criminal, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said that “the gates of hell will open in Gaza” and that Hamas would be hit with a force it has “never seen before” if it did not release all the remaining Israeli hostages.
Since the ceasefire began on January 19, after eight months in which its implementation was repeatedly scuppered by Netanyahu, Hamas, as agreed in the ceasefire deal, released 30 living hostages (25 Israelis and five Thai nationals), and also returned the bodies of eight others, while Israel, also as agreed in the deal, released 1,777 Palestinians from its brutal and widely-condemned network of prisons for Palestinians, including women, children, hostages seized in Gaza as bargaining chips after October 7, and hundreds of individuals convicted of crimes, with at least 130 of those released prisoners deported to Egypt.
UN Report Finds Israel Guilty of Genocide and Extermination Against Women and Girls in Gaza, Through “Systematic Destruction” of Reproductive Healthcare
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On March 13, a devastating report, “‘More than a human can bear’: Israel’s systematic use of sexual, reproductive and other forms of gender-based violence since October 2023”, was issued by the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel.
The report’s most alarming findings are that, since October 2023, as described in an accompanying press release, Israel has engaged in “acts which amount to the crime against humanity of extermination”, through the deaths of women and girls “from complications related to pregnancy and childbirth due to the conditions imposed by the Israeli authorities which have denied access to reproductive healthcare.”
In addition, “through the systematic destruction of sexual and reproductive healthcare”, which has “destroyed in part the reproductive capacity of Palestinians in Gaza as a group”, the Commission found that Israel has engaged in acts “amounting to two categories of genocidal acts in the Rome Statute and the Genocide Convention”; namely, “deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of Palestinians and imposing measures intended to prevent births.”
Trump Unites the World in Support of the Palestinians Through His Call for Ethnic Cleansing and the US Takeover of Gaza
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Last Tuesday, the full delusional derangement of Donald Trump’s narcissistic opinion of himself as a god-like emperor entitled to reshape the world according to his whims was on full display.
At a press conference at the White House with the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — the first foreign leader that Trump has met with since he took office, despite Netanyahu being a wanted war criminal — he called for the complete ethnic cleansing, or, to put it another way, the forced displacement of the entire Palestinian population of the Gaza Strip, outrageous crimes under international law, which he nevertheless sought to dress up as a benevolent humanitarian intervention, and then, seemingly out of nowhere, pledged to take over the entirety of the Gaza Strip, and to rebuild it as “the Riviera of the Middle East.”
Middle East Eye helpfully transcribed and posted the whole of the press conference and the Q&A session that followed it, including the following section in which, in his typically rambling and frequently incoherent manner, Trump announced his ethnic cleansing plan:
Israel Defeated As A Million Palestinians Return to Northern Gaza From Exile in the South
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As a result of the ceasefire deal in Gaza, agreed to on January 15 — after 14 months of negotiations that were cynically and persistently blocked by Benjamin Netanyahu, with cover provided by the US — something truly remarkable is happening.
Now that the relentless carpet-bombing has stopped, and the child-killing snipers and armed quadcopters have withdrawn, along with the ever-present drones, the surviving Palestinians — no longer fearing death at every single moment of their lives — are beginning to reclaim their country, their land.
After two weekends in which, in exchange for 290 Palestinian prisoners, seven Israel hostages have been freed by Hamas — deliberately released in small numbers, eked out over at least three months, to prevent Israel from thinking that it can safely resume its previously uninterrupted genocidal assault — yesterday Israel was forced to confront the triumph of the Palestinians, despite 15 months of collective punishment, ethnic cleansing, genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, and the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives.
Who's still at Guantánamo?
