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.”
Why The UN Resolution For Trump’s Colonial Takeover of Gaza Is Wrong, and Will Fail
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Over two days last week, the United Nations, formed in 1945, with its primary motive being “to maintain international peace and security”, sadly demonstrated all of the weaknesses that have prevented it from fulfilling that core aim of its Charter over the last 80 years.
On November 18, the UN General Assembly, which represents all 193 member states of the UN, overwhelmingly passed a worthy resolution affirming “the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination”, including “the right to their independent State of Palestine.”
The resolution was introduced by Armenia, China, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Norway, the Russian Federation and Viet Nam, with Egypt’s contribution undertaken on behalf of the 57 member states of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation.
164 countries voted in favor of the resolution, with just 7 votes against (including the US and Israel), and nine abstentions.
Gaza and the Palestinians’ Inalienable Right to Self-Determination
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Reflecting on Donald Trump’s tiny mind, in which he has the attention span of a toddler, and is only interested in simplistic outcomes that he can use to bolster his own delusional self-image as an extraordinary victor and savior, the peace deal for Gaza that he announced three weeks ago, including the ceasefire that began on October 10, is the most startling example of his solipsistic view of reality, and his inability to think deeply, or with any nuance, about any given topic for longer than it takes to draw in breath and exhale.
It is unreservedly commendable that the negotiations to end Israel’s two-year-long genocidal assault on the Gaza Strip have, for the last 20 days, prevented Israel from resuming, on a permanent basis, its merciless enthusiasm for the relentless aerial bombardment of Gaza, although it has broken the terms of the ceasefire deal on numerous occasions, requiring the intervention of US baby-sitters to keep it from breaking down, and, yesterday, embarked on its most violent violation yet, killing over a hundred Palestinians, including at least 46 children, and injuring over 250 more, in numerous air strikes.
Before these attacks, Gaza’s Media Office assessed that Israel had committed 80 violations since the ceasefire began, killing 97 Palestinians and injuring 230. Those totals now stand at more than 200 killed, and 500 wounded. The average daily death toll may be less than it was before the ceasefire began, when between 60 and a hundred Palestinians were being killed every day in direct attacks, but it is a sign of Israel’s arrogance, its sense of impunity and its complete contempt for the value of any Palestinian lives that it has killed and injured so many, claiming to adhere to the ceasefire deal while switching it on and off at will, without any repercussions.
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.”
UN Report Confirms Genocide in Gaza, But the World Still Shrugs, Even As Israel Erases Gaza City
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Four days ago, ripples of concern briefly surfaced in the global media, as a UN Commission of Inquiry — the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel — issued a devastating 72-page report establishing, definitively, that the State of Israel is engaged in a genocide of the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip, and has been throughout the whole of the last 23 months.
The Commission of Inquiry — chaired by Navi Pillay, who, over the last 30 years has served as a judge on the International Criminal Tribunal dealing with the Rwanda genocide, and at the International Criminal Court, and who was also, from 2008 to 2014, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights — was established in May 2021 by the UN Human Rights Council to investigate violations of international humanitarian law in the territories illegally occupied by Israel since 1967, and its latest report follows on from other devastating reports over the last year.
One of these was in October last year, focusing on Israel’s exterminatory “war” on Gaza’s hospitals, and its extraordinarily brutal treatment of Palestinians in its prisons, which I wrote about in detail in two articles at the time — UN Report Confirms Israel Guilty of War Crimes and “Extermination” in Attacks on Gaza’s Hospitals and UN Report Condemns Unparalleled Violence, Including Torture, Rape and Murder, in Israel’s Unaccountable Prisons for Palestinians.
It’s Official: UN Declares Catastrophic Famine Conditions in Gaza; Israel Still Denies It
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Today, in an extraordinary declaration, delivered from Geneva with articulate, controlled fury and indignation, Tom Fletcher, a British diplomat, and, since October last year, the United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, confirmed to the world what has been increasingly apparent over the last six months: that the most severe famine conditions are occurring in the Gaza Strip, that this is an “entirely man-made” disaster, deliberately engineered by the State of Israel, and that it can and must be “halted and reversed”, via an immediate ceasefire “to allow humanitarian aid to reach everyone in the Gaza Strip.”
According to the devastating new report by the IPC (the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification), which Fletcher was presenting to the world, 514,000 people, roughly a quarter of Gaza’s surviving population, are experiencing famine, with the number rising to 641,000 by the end of September unless immediate action is taken.
The IPC sets stringent conditions on the evidence required for a famine to be declared. Famine (Phase 5) requires an area to have 20% of households facing an extreme food shortage, 30% of children to be acutely malnourished, and two adult non-trauma deaths or four child non-trauma deaths for every 10,000 people to be taking place every day “due to outright starvation or to the interaction of malnutrition and disease.”
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.”
Gaza Hostage Exchanges: The 90 Freed Palestinian Women and Children Ignored by the Western Media
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On Sunday (January 19), as the ceasefire in Gaza began, so too did the first phase of the key peace-making element of the deal — the return, over six weeks, of 33 of the remaining 100 or so Israeli hostages seized by Hamas and other militants after they broke out of the “open-air prison” that the Gaza Strip became in 2007, when Israel, having withdrawn its forces and dismantled its settlements in Gaza itself, essentially sealed it shut, imposing a relentless blockade by land, sea and air, and rationing everything, and everyone permitted to enter or leave.
In exchange, Israel has agreed to release thousands of Palestinians held in its gruesome and ever-expanding network of prisons, solely for Palestinians, that it has established over the last 67 years of its illegal occupation of Palestinian land in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, known, collectively, as the Occupied Palestinian Territory.
251 hostages were seized and taken back to the Gaza Strip on October 7, 2023, a key aspect of the attacks whose purpose was largely obscured as Israel, and its compliant vassal states in the west, focused almost exclusively on the 1,139 people killed (mostly Israelis but also including 71 foreign nationals), and invented atrocities to justify the genocidal frenzy that followed; in particular, the notorious “40 beheaded babies” story that was pure fiction, as only 36 children were killed on October 7, only two of them were babies, and neither of them were beheaded.
Is Hope Still Alive on the Anniversaries of the Genocide and Torture Conventions, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?
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For anyone concerned with human rights and international humanitarian law, two dates in 1948 — December 9 and December 10 — are of crucial importance, as these are the dates when the recently-formed United Nations, via its General Assembly, idealistically and optimistically adopted, on December 9, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (the Genocide Convention), and, the day after, adopted and proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which established, for the first time, fundamental human rights to be universally protected, and which, as the UN explains, “inspired, and paved the way for, the adoption of more than seventy human rights treaties.” Ever since, December 10 — today — has been known and celebrated as Human Rights Day, while December 9 is marked as the International Day of Commemoration and Dignity of the Victims of the Crime of Genocide and of the Prevention of this Crime.
One of those subsequent treaties is the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (the Torture Convention), which, after decades of wrangling, was finally adopted by the 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.”
The Genocide Convention, and the long quest for accountability
The Genocide Convention, drawing on the work of the Polish Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, who first coined the term during the Second World War, defines genocide as “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” — “killing members of the group”, “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group”, “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”, “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group”, and “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
Who's still at Guantánamo?
