Gaza: The Normalization of Genocide Through the Complete Complicity of the West and Its Colonization by Israel

Campaigners on the March for Palestine in London on February 2, 2024. (Photo: Andy Worthington).

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 a year and three weeks, all decent people around the world have been shocked and disturbed, to an extent unprecedented in our lifetimes, by the intensity of the genocidal fury unleashed by the State of Israel on the 2.3 million Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip, the Chicago-sized “reservation”, into which they were squeezed in 1948, as the nascent Israeli state, in a blood-soaked orgy of extraordinary violence, seized most of what had, for centuries, been Palestinian land.

For a year and three weeks, we have had to watch, powerlessly, as Israel has revisited the messianic genocidal intent that it first unleashed in an unfettered manner 76 years ago, when it erased Palestinian cities, towns and villages, murdering 15,000 civilians and expelling 750,000 others, based on an absurd historical and pseudo-religious claim to the land, dating back 2,000 years. Contextualizing this absurdity, some commentators have pointed out that Israel’s actions are the equivalent to the Italians laying claim to England because it was conquered by their ancestors — the Romans — 2,000 years ago.

This violent supremacism has underpinned the actions of the State of Israel ever since. Throughout the long years from 1948, Israel has refused to ever seriously consider that it should share this contested land with those who called it home. Those expelled — to refugee camps in neighbouring countries — were forbidden the right to return (despite that being a demand agreed upon by the United Nations from the very beginning), those in Israel had to struggle for years to even establish their right to exist as second-class citizens, while those in Gaza and the West Bank have been persistently targeted for marginalization, division, isolation and persistent depredation. Israel claims, risibly, to be “the only democracy in the Middle East”, whereas the objective reality is that it is a violent European settler colonial project enforcing a repulsive system of apartheid.

Read the rest of this entry »

Where Will It End? The Limitless Depravity of the Renewed Assault on Northern Gaza

Just some of the 73 civilians murdered in a bombing raid on the homes of six households in Jabalia on October 19, 2024, as posted on X by Anas Al-Sharif, who had to endure the news that at least 22 members of his extended family were killed in the attacks.

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.





 

A “genocide within a genocide” is taking place in northern Gaza, where Israel has specifically prevented any food, water, fuel or medical supplies entering since October 1, and where Israeli forces are involved in massacre after massacre, bombing and blowing up residential buildings and killing entire families, attacking and decommissioning the last three remaining partly-functioning hospitals, and picking off and killing anyone who dares to leave their homes via armed drones and snipers.

This is the manifestation of the “Generals’ Plan”, a diabolical initiative proposed by retired general Giora Eiland, which advocated for the enforced evacuation of the remaining 400,000 residents of northern Gaza — those unwilling or unable to obey previous evacuation orders — followed, after a week, by starvation and the execution of everyone who remains as a “terrorist.”

That plan was horrendous enough — especially because there is no legal basis whatsoever for regarding civilians who can’t or won’t leave a designated military area as “terrorists” — but its manifestation is even more horrific.

Read the rest of this entry »

With Yahya Sinwar’s Death, Israel’s Genocidal Aims Are Exposed More Than Ever Before

Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’ leader, who was killed by Israeli forces today, October 17, 2024.

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.





 

With the death of Yahya Sinwar, Israel’s mendacity and its genocidal intent stand exposed like never before.

Sinwar, the 62-year old leader of Hamas, who never abandoned his homeland, had been portrayed by Israel as hiding deep underground, surrounded by hostages, but in the end that was just another lie, to add to the mountains of lies that Israel has pumped out over the last year. In the end, Sinwar was killed in a chance military encounter in Rafah, not hiding out at all, but engaged in combat with the enemy — in military uniform, and with an AK-47.

His death was the opposite of the humiliation meted out by the US to Saddam Hussein or Moammar Gaddafi, when they were finally seized after the illegal invasions of Iraq and Libya. Nothing could be more inspiring for a resistance movement than for their leader to be killed in active combat, having refused to hide, or to be cowed by the enemy.

Read the rest of this entry »

Don’t Look Away From the Inferno of Extermination in Northern Gaza

A screenshot of the fire caused by Israeli attacks on tents for displaced Palestinians and medical patients outside Al-Aqsa Hospital on the night of October 13, 2024.

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.





 

On Sunday night (October 13), Palestinian civilians — including children and medical patients, and others displaced by Israel’s year-long genocide — were burned alive in a truly horrifying Israeli attack on the courtyard of Al-Aqsa Hospital, in Deir al-Balah in northern Gaza.

One of those burned alive — a young man who was also a medical patient — was captured in a video filmed by a Palestinian journalist, writhing in agony, consumed by flames, and still lying on his hospital bed with his IV drip still clearly visible.

Yesterday it was revealed that he was Sha’ban Al-Dalou, a 19-year old software engineering student at Al-Azhar University (before it was destroyed, like all of Gaza’s universities), who was on an IV drip after surviving an Israeli strike on a mosque where he was sheltering with his family a week earlier, in which 20 Palestinian civilians were killed. Handsome, kind and popular, Sha’ban loved playing the guitar, and had once had great hopes for his future, but he had been displaced five times since Israel’s genocide began. Although his father and his three younger siblings survived the attack, his mother was also killed. 

Sha’ban Al-Dalou, photographed on October 5, 2023, two days before the attacks on southern Israel and the start of Israel’s genocide. The 19-year old was just starting his second year at university, having achieved high grades in his first year.

Four people in total were killed in the inferno, although 70 others — mostly women and children — were wounded, with many suffering severe burns, which the hospital lacks the resources to deal with adequately.

Read the rest of this entry »

As the World Turns Away, Israel Renews Its Genocidal Assault on Northern Gaza

The aftermath of an attack on tents sheltering displaced people in the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza on October 9, 2024, in which numerous civilians were killed.

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, October 9, 2024, two days into the first anniversary of the start of the State of Israel’s genocidal assault on the Palestinian population of the Gaza Strip, almost unimaginable horrors are taking place yet again, in the devastated northern half of the beleaguered territory, where around 400,000 of its residents remain, as Israel implements a plan for its complete ethnic cleansing, prior to it becoming a “closed military zone.”

Those who remain are those who resisted, or were unable to comply with orders to evacuate the north, which were implemented a week after the genocide began, to the consternation of US State Department officials, whose concerns about war crimes and the trampling of international humanitarian law, revealed by Reuters last week, now look like missives from a lost world in which morality still existed.

Over the last three days, untold numbers of Palestinian civilians have been killed in relentless bombing attacks, or have been murdered in the streets by armed drones and quadcopters, assassinated by snipers, and, it appears, summarily executed in house raids. The area’s three surviving hospitals — brought back into operation through the tireless dedication and ingenuity of Palestinian workers after they were shut down last November — have been ordered to evacuate, even though there is no place for the seriously ill to go, while journalists have been relentlessly targeted, with several of those who have survived Israel’s relentless execution of journalists over the last year being shot and wounded by snipers, while others have been murdered.

Read the rest of this entry »

The First Anniversary of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza: Depths of Moral Depravity Unmatched in Modern History

“Stop!” A face-painted protestor on the March for Palestine in London on October 5, 2024 (Photo: Andy Worthington).

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Horror Beyond Comprehension: Gaza Death Toll Realistically Assessed At 186,000, But Could Be As High As 600,000

Medical experts, in a letter to The Lancet, have finally broken through the medical community’s silence regarding the deaths caused by Israel’s genocide in Gaza, adding an estimate of the number of indirect deaths to the confirmed number of direct deaths, indicating that the minimum total death toll will be 186,000.

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.”

Read the rest of this entry »

A Million Palestinians Face Death by Starvation After Eight Months of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza

Palestinians seeking food in Deir el-Balah in the Gaza Strip in December 2023. Israel’s “complete siege” on Gaza has meant widespread shortages of food throughout the last eight months, but repeated blocking of humanitarian aid deliveries by Israel has meant that it is now estimated that a million Palestinians face death by starvation by mid-July. (Photo: Majdi Fathi).

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Radio: I Discuss Israel’s Horrendous Prisons for Palestinians and the ICC Noose Tightening Around Netanyahu’s Neck on Gorilla Radio

A leaked photograph from inside Israel’s Sde Teiman prison, obtained by CNN, shows a blindfolded prisoner with his arms above his head in a crowded, open-air cell in which other prisoners are also blindfolded, as part of a regimen of unacceptable punishment in which, held without charge or trial and with the permanent threat of severe violence, they are permanently blindfolded and prevented from talking to one another.

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.





 

My thanks to the indefatigable Chris Cook, based in western Canada, for having me on his Gorilla Radio show to discuss Ending Israel’s Impunity for Genocide in Gaza, and the Threat to Those, Like Joe Biden, Who Are Most Complicit, my latest article on the defining horror of our times. Our discussion takes place in the second half of the one-hour show, available on Substack here, after an illuminating first half with Yves Engler, the Montreal-based political activist, whose latest book, co-authored with Owen Schalk, is ‘Canada’s Long Fight Against Democracy.’ I’m also pleased to note that Chris played my song ‘Forever Prisoner’, about Guantánamo prisoner Khaled Qassim, recorded with my band The Four Fathers.

Chris and I began by discussing Jonathan Cook’s latest article for Middle East Eye, The message of Israel’s torture chambers is directed at all of us, not just Palestinians, which drew on a detailed CNN investigation published on May 11, Strapped down, blindfolded, held in diapers: Israeli whistleblowers detail abuse of Palestinians in shadowy detention center, about Sde Teiman, a secret Israeli prison on a military base in the Negev Desert, where Palestinians seized in the Gaza Strip since October 7 are kept naked, blindfolded and handcuffed, and, permanently, “forced to remain motionless and silent”, as Cook describes it, adding, “At night, dogs are set on them. Anyone who speaks or moves risks being savagely beaten till bones are broken.”

The whistleblowers who spoke to CNN also explained that “doctors sometimes amputated prisoners’ limbs due to injuries sustained from constant handcuffing; of medical procedures sometimes performed by underqualified medics earning it a reputation for being “a paradise for interns”; and where the air is filled with the smell of neglected wounds left to rot.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Back to home page

Andy Worthington

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. Also, photo-journalist (The State of London), and singer and songwriter (The Four Fathers).
Email Andy Worthington

CD: Love and War

The Four Fathers on Bandcamp

The Guantánamo Files book cover

The Guantánamo Files

The Battle of the Beanfield book cover

The Battle of the Beanfield

Stonehenge: Celebration & Subversion book cover

Stonehenge: Celebration & Subversion

Outside The Law DVD cover

Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo

RSS

Posts & Comments

World Wide Web Consortium

XHTML & CSS

WordPress

Powered by WordPress

Designed by Josh King-Farlow

Please support Andy Worthington, independent journalist:

Archives

In Touch

Follow me on Facebook

Become a fan on Facebook

Subscribe to me on YouTubeSubscribe to me on YouTube

The State of London

The State of London. 16 photos of London

Andy's Flickr photos

Campaigns

Categories

Tag Cloud

Abu Zubaydah Al-Qaeda Andy Worthington British prisoners Center for Constitutional Rights CIA torture prisons Close Guantanamo Donald Trump Four Fathers Guantanamo Housing crisis Hunger strikes London Military Commission NHS NHS privatisation Periodic Review Boards Photos President Obama Reprieve Shaker Aamer The Four Fathers Torture UK austerity UK protest US courts Video We Stand With Shaker WikiLeaks Yemenis in Guantanamo