The Slow But Significant Erosion of Israel’s Genocidal Impunity in the West
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As the second anniversary looms — in just nine days’ time — of the attacks on southern Israel by Hamas and other militants on October 7, 2023 and the start of Israel’s sickeningly disproportionate and still ongoing genocidal response, it seems increasingly unlikely that the occasion will be marked by even the tiniest fraction of the outpouring of collective support that was on display two years ago, when world leaders queued up to declare that Israel had an open-ended and irresponsibly undefined “right to defend itself.”
By now, the outright lies that fuelled approval for Israel’s genocide — lies about 40 beheaded babies and mass rapes — have been thoroughly debunked, and the scale of Israel’s revenge has been so horrific that none of its supporters can credibly ignore the blunt truth that, in response to the 1,195 people killed on October 7, 2023 (including an untold number killed by Israel itself under the Hannibal Directive), Israel has routinely been killing the same number of Palestinians every few weeks for the last 100 weeks (at least 60,000, officially, but almost certainly many times more), and that, despite their protestations to the contrary, the vast majority of those killed have been blameless civilians, amongst them at least 20,000 children, as I discussed in my recent article, Gaza Horror: IDF Admits 83% of Those Killed Were Civilians, But the True Total May Be 95%.
Israel has so carefully cultivated support in western governments and in the mainstream media — and has so flagrantly ignored UN resolutions without punishment for decades — that it thought it could exterminate the Palestinians, in response to October 7, and get away with it, seeking to hide the extent of its dehumanizing genocidal intent through its usual combination of lies, threats, distortions and self-pity, and also seeking to hide the appalling truth that its true purpose was to destroy the whole of Gaza to make it unliveable, while killing as many people as possible in the vain hope that those who somehow managed to survive would subject themselves to what was euphemistically described as “voluntary migration.”
Horror As Israel Implements the “Mass Death” Phase of Its Genocide in Gaza Through the Deliberate Starvation of the Entire Population
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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.”
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.
Israel’s Sickening and Depraved Options for Gaza: Extermination, Concentration Camps or the Illusion of “Voluntary Migration”
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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.
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:
Who's still at Guantánamo?
