Gaza As a Death Camp, After 1,000 Days of Genocide
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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 73 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%.
Israel’s New World Order: Nothing But the Threat of Endless Death
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For the last two and a half years, the State of Israel has unilaterally — and with jaw-dropping illegality — reimagined warfare as a religiously-mandated existential struggle against alleged “forces of darkness” in which there are no rules, and no sense of proportionality or restraint.
Everyone in the Gaza Strip — 2.3 million people at the start of this “conflict” — has been regarded as, in one way or another, “associated” with Hamas, the administrative government of Gaza whose military wing, along with other armed factions, broke out of the “open-air prison” of Gaza on October 7, 2023, killing hundreds of Israeli security personnel, and hundreds of civilians.
Completely supported by almost all the nations of the west, who approved the shamefully ill-defined notion that Israel had “the right to defend itself”, Israel has reinterpreted “self-defense” to mean genocide, inflicting such disproportionate destruction on Gaza that almost its entire built environment has been destroyed, and over ten percent of its population — a quarter of a million people — have been killed or wounded.
900 Days of Genocide in Gaza
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The ever-growing shadow of depravity engulfing the world has grown so huge in recent weeks — since the unprovoked and illegal war launched by the US and Israel on Iran, and, simultaneously, Israel’s renewed assaults on Lebanon, and an increase in its violence in the occupied West Bank — that it’s easy to overlook the fact that the original sin that led to this situation — Israel’s ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip — began 900 days ago today.
It’s also easy to overlook the fact that today also marks the first anniversary of Israel’s targeted assassination in Gaza of Hossam Shabat, the fearless 23-year old Palestinian journalist whose smile, and whose relentless energetic enthusiasm for recording Israel’s crimes, lit up phones and social media reports and news broadcasts around the world.
As he said in his final message to the world, written in anticipation that he would be killed, “If you’re reading this, it means I have been killed — most likely targeted — by the Israeli occupation forces. When this all began, I was only 21 years old — a college student with dreams like anyone else. For the past 18 months, I have dedicated every moment of my life to my people. I documented the horrors in northern Gaza minute by minute, determined to show the world the truth they tried to bury. I slept on pavements, in schools, in tents — anywhere I could. Each day was a battle for survival. I endured hunger for months, yet I never left my people’s side. By God, I fulfilled my duty as a journalist. I risked everything to report the truth, and now, I am finally at rest — something I haven’t known in the past 18 months. I did all this because I believe in the Palestinian cause. I believe this land is ours, and it has been the highest honor of my life to die defending it and serving its people. I ask you now: do not stop speaking about Gaza. Do not let the world look away. Keep fighting, keep telling our stories — until Palestine is free.”
The Horrors of AI-Driven Military Targeting, From Gaza to Iran
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Anyone paying attention knows that, since October 7, 2023, when the State of Israel began carpet-bombing the Gaza Strip on a scale so grotesque that it can only realistically be compared to the impact of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, all sense of proportionality in warfare has been eviscerated, and has been normalized to such an extent that Israel, and its lapdog the US, are now engaged in similarly disproportionate attacks on Iran, and with Israel also extending its depravity to Lebanon.
While some of this blatant violation of international humanitarian law can be traced to Israel’s relentless contempt for any attempts to restrain its military actions, dating back decades, the truly shocking and soul-shredding intensification of its military actions over the last 29 months, in which the US has finally moved from being Israel’s main backer to being a fully-fledged partner, has primarily been facilitated through both countries’ embrace of military targeting powered by AI (artificial intelligence), which has both promised and delivered military targets on a scale that is hundreds or thousands of times faster than what was previously possible, although, crucially, with little or no human oversight to address profound problems with the accuracy of the targeting.
To provide some necessary background, proportionality in warfare seeks to minimize the loss of civilian life during military operations, and its key definition comes from the 1977 Additional Protocol to the 1949 Geneva Conventions, which sought to apply rules governing warfare in the aftermath of the horrors of the Second World War. The Additional Protocol specifically addressed the protection of civilians, and, in Article 51, established protections against indiscriminate attacks on civilian populations, providing two particular examples of attacks that “are to be considered as indiscriminate”, which have subsequently provided a benchmark for assessments of proportionality.
Gaza: Caught Between Israel’s Ongoing Genocide, and Trump’s US-Led Neo-Colonial Takeover
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In the Gaza Strip, the remaining Palestinian population, who have survived two years and three months of the most diabolically well-publicized and even relentlessly celebrated genocide in history, which is still ongoing, albeit at a slower pace than before, are squeezed into just 42% of their homeland — 60 square miles in total, less than the size of Washington, D.C.
The rest, the other 58%, has been occupied by Israeli forces since a ceasefire was declared on October 10, when they withdrew to an arbitrary “Yellow Line” that was meant to be temporary, a phase in a staged withdrawal from the whole of the Gaza Strip, but which is regarded by the occupiers as a new and permanent border with Israel.
Under the terms of the ceasefire deal, which was mainly negotiated by Qatar, Egypt and the US, although Donald Trump, predictably, made it all about himself, even staging a “Peace Summit” in Egypt to which world leaders were invited to fawn over him, Israel was prevailed upon to stop its relentless bombing raids, and its ongoing and merciless ground invasion of Gaza City, in return for the immediate release of all the surviving Israeli hostages seized on October 7, 2023.
800 Days of Genocide in Gaza: The Equivalent of 3,500 9/11s Or Ten Million Dead Americans
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Sunday, December 14, marked 800 days of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, and yet you could be forgiven for not knowing anything about what is, by any objective measure, an unforgivably grim milestone, because no news network or newspaper in the western world could be bothered to report it.
If you’re reading this because of the headline, then yes, the death toll of the genocide is equivalent to 3,500 9/11s, or the equivalent of ten million Americans having been killed, but I’ll be discussing that in more detail at the end of the article, after running through every aspect of how the last two months of the “ceasefire” don’t constitute any meaningful kind of conclusion to Israel’s atrocities at all.
Since Donald Trump, to his credit, managed to stop Israel’s relentless carpet-bombing of Palestinian civilians two months ago, in return for Hamas handing over the last 20 surviving hostages seized on October 7, 2023, and, subsequently, all but one of the 28 dead hostages, most of the countries of the west, many of whom had started to become a little uneasy about Israel’s naked genocidal intent, have been behaving as though the genocide — or the “war”, as they manipulatively prefer to call it — is over, even though that is patently untrue.
Israel, the US, the UK and Germany Have Destroyed Human Rights
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Yesterday, December 10, was Human Rights Day, marking the anniversary of the proclamation and adoption by the United Nations, on December 10, 1948, of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a hugely commendable and aspirational template for a better world, in which, to quote from its Preamble, “the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family” were recognized as “the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.”
Translated into 577 languages, from Abkhaz to Zulu, the UDHR is, as the UN explains, “the most translated document in the world”, and is “generally agreed to be the foundation of international human rights law”, having “inspired a rich body of legally binding international human rights treaties.”
These include, as I discussed in an article year ago, entitled, Is Hope Still Alive on the Anniversaries of the Genocide and Torture Conventions, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?, the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (more generally known as the Torture Convention), which was adopted by the UN General Assembly on December 10, 1984, the 36th anniversary of the UDHR, expanding on Article 5 of the Declaration, which states, unequivocally, “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”
Gaza Horror: IDF Admits 83% of Those Killed Were Civilians, But the True Total May Be 95%
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On August 21, the day before the UN’s mechanism for assessing famine, the IPC (the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification) confirmed, in a devastating report, that the most severe famine conditions are occurring in the Gaza Strip, the Israel-based +972 Magazine and Hebrew Call, along with the Guardian, simultaneously published their own independent analyses of a revelatory document that they had received in May — an official assessment by the Israeli military, contained in a database compiled by Israel’s Military Intelligence Directorate, of how many Palestinian resistance fighters they believe the IDF had killed since their military assault on the Gaza Strip began following the deadly military incursion into southern Israel on October 7, 2023.
As Yuval Abraham explained for +972 Magazine, “Multiple intelligence sources familiar with the database said the army views it as the only authoritative tally of militant casualty figures.” As one of them said, “There’s no other place to check.”
The figure — of around 8,900 fighters — is revelatory, in the first instance, because it is consistently lower than figures regularly touted by Israeli government spokespeople, which have included, in November 2024, Benjamin Netanyahu putting the number “close to 20,000”, the outgoing Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi stating in his retirement speech in January this year that Israel “had killed 20,000 militants in Gaza since October 7”, and a report in June by the right-wing Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University, which “cited military sources claiming that the number of militant casualties in Gaza stood at 23,000.”
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.
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.”
Who's still at Guantánamo?
