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While the attention of the conscious world is, quite correctly, focused right now on Rakefet Prison, an underground detention facility inside Israel’s maximum-security Ramla Prison Complex, where the pediatrician Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya is held without charge or trial, brutalized and in fear of death, it’s important not to forget that, in the Gaza Strip, the surviving Palestinian population is still suffering from an acute and enduring humanitarian crisis.

The crisis is engineered solely by the State of Israel, which has failed to abide by the requirement, in the ceasefire deal agreed last October, to allow 600 trucks of humanitarian aid — containing, at a bare minimum, adequate supplies of food, water, fuel and medical supplies — to enter Gaza every day.

Insight into the humanitarian crisis can be found via regular updates issued by UNRWA (the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East), established in 1950, which remains the largest provider of educational and health support to the Palestinians, despite persistent efforts by Israel to destroy it.

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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%.

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Largely overlooked amongst the grotesque collection of messianic, supremacist enthusiasts for genocide who make up the leadership of the State of Israel — in particular, of course, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the two far-right ministers in his coalition government, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich — is the figure of Israel Katz, a longtime “hardliner” and ally of Netanyahu who was appointed as the defense minister in November 2024 after Netanyahu sacked his predecessor Yoav Gallant.

Now 70 years of age, Katz first emerged publicly as a far-right student agitator at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the 1980s, opposing what he saw as “Arab students’ campus violence”, when he was suspended for a year for tying the university’s rector, the renowned chemist Raphael Mechoulam, to a chair using a rope. A former solder, whose parents were Holocaust survivors from Romania, he has been a member of the Knesset since 1998, and had held numerous ministerial positions, mostly under Netanyahu, since 2003.

Israel Katz as the epitome of relentless genocidal intent

For the last 18 months, Katz has been the epitome of relentless genocidal intent. In a statement issued after his appointment, he spoke of his intention to secure “victory over our enemies and to achieve the goals of the war: the return of all hostages as the most important moral mission, the destruction of Hamas in Gaza, the defeat of Hezbollah in Lebanon, the containment of Iranian aggression, and the safe return of the residents of the north and south [of Israel] to their homes.”

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My detailed analysis of the current situation in the Gaza Strip, after Nickolay Mladenov, the “High Representative of Gaza” in Donald Trump’s “Board of Peace”, insisted that no reconstruction will take place in Gaza without the complete disarmament of Hamas, even though Hamas never agreed to that, and even though the humanitarian situation in Gaza, as controlled by Israel, remains dire. I draw extensively on interviews by Drop Site News with senior Hamas officials, and an article in Haaretz by the head of an Israeli NGO supporting the Palestinians, pointing out the complicity of the west in the ongoing humanitarian disaster.

962 days since Israel’s genocide in Gaza began, and 227 days since a ceasefire took effect through the implementation of the first phase of Donald Trump’s “Peace Plan”, Nickolay Mladenov, the Bulgarian former UN official who is now the “High Representative of Gaza” in Donald Trump’s “Board of Peace”, has alarmed those seeking a balance between Israel’s obligations under the ceasefire deal and an acceptable response by Hamas by telling the UN Security Council on May 21 that Hamas was the “principal obstacle” to the continued implementation of the next phase of the “Peace Plan” because “it refused to accept verified decommissioning, relinquish coercive control and allow a genuine civilian transition.”

Mladenov’s speech to the UN followed what Drop Site News, on May 22, described as a “15-point roadmap” that he delivered to Hamas in April, which “amounted to an ultimatum: If the Palestinian resistance does not surrender its weapons, no meaningful reconstruction will be permitted in Gaza and Israeli forces will not withdraw.” In his report to the UN Security Council, Mladenov described the total disarmament of Hamas and other resistance groups as “the single factor that unlocks every other element of the plan.”

As Drop Site News proceeded to explain, however, “disarmament was categorically not a part of the phase one deal signed by Hamas and Israel in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt in October 2025.” As they added, “Despite repeated claims by US and Israeli officials that Hamas agreed to all of Trump’s terms, [they] and other Palestinian factions did not sign an agreement beyond a ceasefire, exchange of captives, and an initial framework for the redeployment or withdrawal of Israeli forces from some parts of Gaza.” The limited deal, they added, “also included the opening of the Rafah border crossing with Egypt and the resumption of deliveries of life essentials and equipment to clear rubble and begin early reconstruction efforts.”

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As the beleaguered International Criminal Court seeks an arrest warrant for Bezalel Smotrich, Itamar Ben-Gvir, in charge of Israel’s torture prisons, and a key driver of legislation approving the death penalty for Palestinians, and establishing a special military tribunal to prosecute and execute those seized on Oct. 7 , 2023, continues to evade accountability.

When the Nazis held the Wannsee Conference on January 1942 to co-ordinate the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” — the extermination of all the Jews in German-controlled Europe — it was attended by 15 high-level administrators in the relevant government departments, and the SS.

When senior officials in Israel were planning the genocide of the Palestinian people of the Gaza Strip, after October 7, 2023, no single conference was convened to facilitate what it would be appropriate to call Israel’s “Final Solution to the Palestinian Question”, but key officials can be readily identified.

The first two are Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the former Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant, for whom arrest warrants were issued by the International Criminal Court on November 21, 2024, for war crimes and crimes against humanity — the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare, and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.

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For the last 16 months, campaigners around the world have, understandably, been highlighting the case of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, the brave director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahia, in northern Gaza, who kept the hospital operational for three months, from October to December 2024, when it was besieged and attacked remorselessly by Israeli forces during what was known as “the Generals’ Plan.”

This was the “genocide within a genocide”, when the whole of northern Gaza was placed under a violent siege, and everyone still living there, who had failed to cooperate with previous evacuation orders — either because they were unwilling or unable to leave — was told in no uncertain terms that, if they stayed, they would be regarded as “enemy combatants” who could be summarily executed.

During the siege, Dr. Abu Safiya survived the death of his son, and was wounded himself, and he was only finally seized by Israeli forces on December 27, 2024, when it was no longer possible to keep the hospital running. He subsequently disappeared into Israel’s brutal prisons for Palestinians, where he is held under Israel’s blatantly illegal “Unlawful Combatants Law”, introduced in 2002, around the same time that George W. Bush was setting up his “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay and defining those held there as “unlawful enemy combatants.”

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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.

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Yesterday, as perceptive observers marked two and a half years of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, Israel cemented its reputation as an unprecedented pestilential sickness on the face of the earth, contaminating everyone who comes into contact with it through its relentless barbarism, by launching almost a hundred devastating aerial attacks on Lebanon in the space of just ten minutes, rising to 137 in total in the space of just half an hour, in what the genocidal entity proudly proclaimed as “Operation Eternal Darkness.” Could the exercise of evil have a more transparently accurate name?

The attacks, in Beirut and across southern Lebanon, which rivalled in intensity the most violent attacks on Gaza in the early months of the Gaza genocide, were clearly indiscriminate — acts of terrorism, completely destroying numerous apartment blocks in Beirut, for example, and meant to kill as many civilians as possible, following the template established in Gaza, for which Israel has never been held accountable. At least 303 people were killed, and 1,165 wounded, and social media reports provided grim accounts not of murdered militants, but of unjustifiably slaughtered women and children.

Also, as In Gaza, the Israeli authorities sought to defend their actions by plying the complicit western media with unverified and clearly risible justifications for their actions, just as they have done so cynically and successfully in Gaza for the whole of their uniquely depraved descent into monstrous and devious inhumanity over the last 30 months.

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For the last two and a half years, the State of Israel has been engaged in an unspeakably horrific genocide in Gaza, in which, at a bare minimum, over 70,000 people — mostly civilians — have been murdered, as well as massively increasing the number of Palestinians, to over 9,000, who are held in a grotesque and largely arbitrary apartheid prison system, for Palestinians only, in which torture is mandatory, rape is widespread, and over a hundred Palestinians have been murdered in that same time period.

With Israel also engaged, over the last month, in the largely indiscriminate carpet-bombing of civilians in Lebanon and Iran, it’s hard to imagine that this brutal, sickeningly and knowingly lawless and permanently warmongering entity could sink any lower into the depths of depravity, but yesterday the Israeli Knesset managed just that, passing a “Death Penalty for Terrorists” amendment to its already bloated and draconian prison legislation regarding Palestinians.

As Amnesty International explained in a news release today, “The new law explicitly creates two legal frameworks for the use of the death penalty in the occupied West Bank, excluding the illegally annexed East Jerusalem, and in Israel.”

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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.”

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