
It hardly seemed possible, when a six-week ceasefire began in Gaza in January, after 15 and a half months of the most horrendous war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal actions undertaken by the State of Israel against the trapped Palestinian population, that the situation could get worse.
However, since the start of March, when Israel unilaterally broke the ceasefire deal without any justification whatsoever, the situation has indeed become worse, to such an extent that it is now appropriate to regard what is happening in Gaza as the “mass death” phase of Israel’s genocide.
Three particular developments have led to the current situation.
The first of these began on March 2, when Israel imposed a sustained siege on all supplies of food, water, medical supplies and fuel in Gaza, which has been deeper and even longer-lasting than the initial siege imposed in response to the attacks on southern Israel on October 7, 2023, when, notoriously, defense minister Yoav Gallant stated, “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.”

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.


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.

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’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.

I remember when I last had hope.
I last had hope for six weeks — from January 19 this year, until March 1 — when the relentless genocide in Gaza, the most soul-stripping depravity any of us have ever witnessed, seemed to have come to an end. Before that, I hadn’t had any hope for 15 and a half months — including the whole of 2024; every damned second of it.
Millions of us have felt the same; as though a noose was permanently around our necks, strangling all joy, the colour drained out of existence like a corpse, but we have been powerless to prevent Israel’s leaders, and our own complicit leaders, from doing anything to stop it, as though it was some sort of natural disaster.
Those six weeks of hope were the first phase of a ceasefire agreement, when Israel’s incessant bombing stopped, when humanitarian aid supplies resumed, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians returned from the south to the north in a defiant show of strength and solidarity, and when 33 Israeli hostages were freed in exchange for nearly 1,800 Palestinian prisoners and hostages.
Investigative journalist, author, campaigner, commentator and public speaker. Recognized as an authority on Guantánamo and the “war on terror.” Co-founder, Close Guantánamo and We Stand With Shaker, singer/songwriter (The Four Fathers).
Email Andy Worthington
Please support Andy Worthington, independent journalist: