No Return to Genocide As the Gaza Ceasefire Begins and the Extent of Israel’s Policy of Extermination Is Revealed

As the ceasefire began on January 19, 2025, displaced Palestinians sought out their former homes, many deeply shocked by the extent of the devastation inflicted by Israel over the previous 15 months. One of the defining images from the first day of the ceasefire, by Omar al-Qattaa, it will, I hope, be so shocking that it will help to prevent any efforts on the part of Israel to resume what has been an incessant military assault of unforgivably brutal intensity.

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As the ceasefire in Gaza began on the morning of Sunday January 19 (delayed for three hours by Israel, when another 19 Palestinians were killed in last-minute bombing raids), I found myself trying to imagine what it must have felt like to be free, for the first time in 15 months — or, at least, since the six-day “pause” for the exchange of hostages at the end of November 2023 — from the constant threat of death, through the devastating Israeli bombings using weapons of maximum destruction relentlessly replenished by Israel’s ever-obliging allies (the US and Germany, in particular, but with numerous other countries involved), through cynical targeting by IDF snipers, and through the equally cynical targeting by armed quadcopters, a specialty of the Israeli “defense” industry. I also tried to imagine how sweet the silence must have been in the absence of what was, by all accounts, the truly relentless buzzing of drones, spying, monitoring, intimidating, and seeking out targets.

Throughout Sunday, the survivors of what had, until the ceasefire was announced last Wednesday, seemed to be a genocidal assault without end, were finally able to begin returning home — on what, as if by some miracle, was a bright and sunny day, in marked contrast to the freezing torrents of rain to which they had recently been subjected. As they walked from the makeshift tent cities to which most of them (an estimated 1.9 million people in total) had been exiled through expulsion orders, as Israel systematically razed Gaza to the ground, from north to south, over the first eight months of its remorseless destruction, what greeted them was a post-apocalyptic landscape of almost unimaginable annihilation.

While some were able to locate their homes, or what remained of them, others were unable even to find where they used to live, as a result of Israel’s determined efforts to erase their homeland. Almost all, however, were primarily preoccupied with finding the remains of their loved ones, buried under the rubble, or shot in the streets — just one of the many dreadful legacies of this unprecedented, and unprecedentedly long assault on a trapped civilian population in which no one — no one — has survived without losing family members, and in which hundreds of entire extended families have been erased from the civil registry (the same civil registry possessed by the Israelis, who used it to maximize their extermination).

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Plumbing the Depths of Human Depravity: 450 Days of Extermination in Gaza

Recent apocalyptic images of the ongoing destruction of northern Gaza, as posted on X on December 27 by the Palestinian journalist Motasem A. Dalloul.

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For 450 days, the State of Israel has been engaged in a sustained policy of vengeance and extermination against the trapped civilian population of the Gaza Strip, a “Holy War” driven by a vile supremacist settler colonial mentality masquerading as the fulfilment of an invented religious entitlement to the Palestinians’ land, involving a giddy and unfettered hatred of the Palestinians as sub-human, and specific revenge for the assault on Israel, on October 7, 2023, in which armed militants who had broken out of the “open-air prison” in which they had been confined for 16 years, went on a killing spree that left 1,068 Israelis and 71 foreign nationals dead, and also kidnapped 251 others.

At the barest minimum, over the last 450 days, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians — mostly civilians — have been killed, or will die, as a result of relentless bombing raids, in which block after block of residential housing, containing almost a quarter of a million homes, has been completely destroyed or damaged, mostly without warning, using bombs of such devastating ferocity that those killed have been torn apart, decapitated, crushed, hurled through the air like broken dolls, or buried alive.

Survivors, meanwhile, have been picked off by snipers, or by armed drones and quadcopters, or have died — and will continue to die — because of a “complete siege” imposed two days after the October 7 attacks, cutting off supplies of food and water, of fuel and of vital medical equipment and supplies. This, accompanied by the almost unimaginably cynical destruction of most of Gaza’s hospitals and health centres, has sentenced to death as yet untold numbers of the elderly, pregnant women, babies and children, those with existing medical conditions, and those with diseases created by the siege, as well as the complete destruction of Gaza’s water and sewage systems.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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UN Report Confirms Israel Guilty of War Crimes and “Extermination” in Attacks on Gaza’s Hospitals

Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, the largest hospital in the Gaza Strip, attacked by the Israeli military in November 2023, and, again in March 2024, when it was almost completely destroyed. (Photo: Omar al-Qattaa).

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With grimly appropriate good timing, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem and Israel issued a hugely significant report on October 10 in which it found that, as described in an accompanying press release, “Israel has perpetrated a concerted policy to destroy Gaza’s healthcare system as part of a broader assault on Gaza, committing war crimes and the crime against humanity of extermination with relentless and deliberate attacks on medical personnel and facilities.”

The timing was grimly appropriate because, although its focus on Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s hospitals only covers the period from October 7, 2023 to August 2024, a terrible, genocidal version of Groundhog Day is currently taking place yet again in the Gaza Strip, where, although its relentless slaughter has not stopped for the last year, it is currently amplifying its horrors in northern Gaza, ordering the evacuation of the last three remaining partly-functional hospitals there, as part of a new plan to ethnically cleanse the whole of the north — where an estimated 400,000 civilians remain, having refused, or been unable to comply with evacuation orders issued a year ago — with a renewed depravity plumbing previously unthinkable depths.

Because the wheels of international justice revolve so slowly, it has taken over three years for the Commission’s report to be compiled and published. It was initially commissioned by the UN Human Rights Council in May 2021, with a brief to investigate “all alleged violations of international humanitarian law and all alleged violations and abuses of international human rights law leading up to and since 13 April 2021.”

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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, singer/songwriter (The Four Fathers).
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