600 Days of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza: Has Humanity’s Light Been Forever Extinguished?
Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal. 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, 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
Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal. 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.
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.
Israel Wants to Kill Everyone in Gaza
Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal. Please also consider taking out a free or paid subscription to my new Substack newsletter.
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.
No Return to Genocide As the Gaza Ceasefire Begins and the Extent of Israel’s Policy of Extermination Is Revealed
Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal. Please also consider taking out a free or paid subscription to my new Substack newsletter.
As the ceasefire in Gaza began on the morning of Sunday January 19 (delayed for three hours by Israel, when another 19 Palestinians were killed in last-minute bombing raids), I found myself trying to imagine what it must have felt like to be free, for the first time in 15 months — or, at least, since the six-day “pause” for the exchange of hostages at the end of November 2023 — from the constant threat of death, through the devastating Israeli bombings using weapons of maximum destruction relentlessly replenished by Israel’s ever-obliging allies (the US and Germany, in particular, but with numerous other countries involved), through cynical targeting by IDF snipers, and through the equally cynical targeting by armed quadcopters, a specialty of the Israeli “defense” industry. I also tried to imagine how sweet the silence must have been in the absence of what was, by all accounts, the truly relentless buzzing of drones, spying, monitoring, intimidating, and seeking out targets.
Throughout Sunday, the survivors of what had, until the ceasefire was announced last Wednesday, seemed to be a genocidal assault without end, were finally able to begin returning home — on what, as if by some miracle, was a bright and sunny day, in marked contrast to the freezing torrents of rain to which they had recently been subjected. As they walked from the makeshift tent cities to which most of them (an estimated 1.9 million people in total) had been exiled through expulsion orders, as Israel systematically razed Gaza to the ground, from north to south, over the first eight months of its remorseless destruction, what greeted them was a post-apocalyptic landscape of almost unimaginable annihilation.
While some were able to locate their homes, or what remained of them, others were unable even to find where they used to live, as a result of Israel’s determined efforts to erase their homeland. Almost all, however, were primarily preoccupied with finding the remains of their loved ones, buried under the rubble, or shot in the streets — just one of the many dreadful legacies of this unprecedented, and unprecedentedly long assault on a trapped civilian population in which no one — no one — has survived without losing family members, and in which hundreds of entire extended families have been erased from the civil registry (the same civil registry possessed by the Israelis, who used it to maximize their extermination).
Dare We Hope That the Gaza Ceasefire Deal Will End the Horror of Israel’s Extermination of the Palestinian People?
Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal. Please also consider taking out a free or paid subscription to my new Substack newsletter.
Is it really true? After 470 days of the most grotesque, publicly-celebrated, western-backed atrocities that any of us have ever seen, dare we hope that a durable ceasefire has been agreed that will bring to an end the soul-draining horrors of Israel’s relentless efforts to exterminate the Palestinian population of the Gaza Strip?
On Wednesday (January 15), the Prime Minister of Qatar, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani, announced the agreement of a ceasefire deal, agreed to by Israel and Hamas, in negotiations involving Qatar, Egypt and the US. President Biden and the President-Elect, Donald Trump, both claimed responsibility for securing the success of the deal, although it was noticeable that the terms of the deal were almost identical to those agreed to by Hamas over eight months ago, on May 6, 2024, which Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, then refused to accept.
This suggests that, despite their protestations, neither Biden nor the US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, who also rushed to take credit for the deal, had actually done much at all in the intervening eight months, except to be publicly humiliated by Netanyahu, while continuing to send an extraordinary amount of deadly weapons to Israel, indicating that they were prepared to accept humiliation because they continued to unconditionally support Israel’s apparently never-ending hunger for Palestinians’ blood.
The First Anniversary of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza: Depths of Moral Depravity Unmatched in Modern History
Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.
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.
The World As We Know It Came to an End on October 8, 2023, Not October 7
Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.
For the last 320 days — that’s just seven weeks short of an entire year — the State of Israel has been engaged in the most brazen and visible genocide in the whole of human history, publicly supported by most of the governments of the west, murdering the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip (mostly civilians, and half of them children) at an average rate of 125 a day, or five every hour, in an onslaught on a trapped civilian population that is unprecedented in its scale and ferocity.
These figures come from the most recent assessment, by the Gaza Strip’s shattered Health Ministry, that over 40,000 of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million (2% of the entire population, or 1 in every 50 of its inhabitants) have been killed over the last ten and a half months, although the true death toll is undoubtedly many times higher.
As Dr. Marwan al-Hams, the director of field hospitals at the Palestinian Ministry of Health, told the Guardian, “This number, 40,000, includes only bodies that were received and buried.” In addition, “About 10,000 airstrike victims were thought to remain entombed in collapsed buildings”, Dr. al-Hams said, “because there was little heavy equipment or fuel to dig through steel and concrete ruins looking for them.”
Horror Beyond Comprehension: Gaza Death Toll Realistically Assessed At 186,000, But Could Be As High As 600,000
Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.
Many thanks to three medical experts, research scientist Rasha Khatib, Professor Martin McKee and Professor Salim Yusuf, who have finally broken the global medical establishment’s silence regarding the true death toll of Israel’s genocidal assault on the Gaza Strip, now in its tenth month, pointing out, in correspondence printed in The Lancet, one of the world’s most respected academic medical journals, that, at a conservative estimate, the total death toll is likely to be at least 186,000, and maybe much higher.
The experts’ assessment is based on multiplying the known, direct deaths of Israel’s unprecedentedly brutal assault on the nearly 2.4 million inhabitants of the Gaza Strip (2,375,259, as of 2022), which is widely understood to be around 37,000 (37,396, as of June 19, according to the Gaza Health Ministry), by a factor of five, to include the indirect deaths that, as established through detailed research into armed conflict since the 1990s, always exceed direct deaths many times over.
The experts’ main source for indirect deaths in wartime appears to be the Geneva Declaration Secretariat’s ‘Global Burden of Armed Violence’ report, published in 2008 after the Geneva Declaration on Armed Violence and Development was adopted by 42 states at the conclusion of a ministerial summit in June 2007, which “recogniz[ed] that the fight against the global scourge of armed violence and the prospects for sustainable development are closely linked.”
A Million Palestinians Face Death by Starvation After Eight Months of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza
Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.
Eight months of unmitigated horror in Gaza demonstrates the absolute moral degradation of Israel, and the unparalleled moral failure of the west.
It’s eight months since Hamas and other militants broke out of the “open-air prison” of the Gaza Strip, where they, and the entire Palestinian population of 2.3 million people, had been subjected to a land, sea and air blockade for 16 years, and embarked on a brief but deadly killing spree in southern Israel, killing 1,068 Israelis (695 civilians and 373 members of the military and the police), as well as 71 foreign nationals, and kidnapping around 235 others, around half of whom were Israeli.
In response, as happened on numerous previous occasions when Israel was attacked by Palestinian military forces resisting the occupation of their land, Israel began carpet bombing the Gaza Strip, destroying key infrastructure, levelling apartment blocks with disproportionately heavy-duty bombs provided mainly by the US and Germany, and killing vast numbers of civilians.
In 2014, when Israel undertook the most savage of its many previous attacks on the Gaza Strip, a seven-week campaign killed over 2,300 Palestinians, wounded nearly 11,000 (including 3,374 children, of whom over 1,000 were permanently disabled), and led to the destruction of 7,000 homes, with an additional 89,000 damaged, before a ceasefire was finally reached.
End Times for Humanity, With the West Fully Committed to Israel’s Genocide of the Palestinians and to Complete Climate Collapse
Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been suffering from a state of exhaustion that made me wonder if I had some undiagnosed terminal illness. I’ve been unable to concentrate, and, as soon as I woke up, I was wondering when I could go back to bed again.
Yesterday, the fog finally lifted, and I realized that my exhaustion was almost certainly a result of the dire state of the world right now — primarily related to Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza (still, after the murder of over 37,000 civilians, largely supported by western politicians and the mainstream media), but also to the cascading climate collapse that these same politicians and media outlets don’t want to talk about.
On Gaza, I suspect that my exhaustion was primarily related to an overwhelming sense of futility and powerlessness regarding any hope that the relentless genocide might be stopped. For those, like myself, who have been watching this grotesque live-streamed genocide unfold for over six months — ever since Hamas militants and other Gaza-based militants broke out of the “open-air prison” of the Gaza Strip on October 7 and killed 695 Israeli civilians, 373 members of the military and the police, and 71 foreign nationals — there have only been a few moments when hope appeared to be in the ascendant, and on each occasion the aftermath, when that hope was crushed, has been difficult to negotiate.
Who's still at Guantánamo?
