.
Gaza was a concentration camp – ran by Israel to imprison, humiliate and terrorise Palestinians. It is now an extermination camp where Israeli forces will shoot anything that moves in an ongoing genocide. Half a million at least are now starving to death and another 1.5 million are at imminent risk.
The number of people that Israel has killed grows every day. With Gaza’s health and administrative infrastructure devastated and many of its staff murdered or arrested, even keeping track of the dead is now becoming impossible – the last figures list 18,800 murdered including 8,000 children and 6,200 women and over 51.000 injured. How many more lie buried under rubble, dumped into mass graves or just lost in the chaos? We may never know.
The only discriminating factor for those murdered is that they happened to be Palestinians or were trying to help or bear witness to their suffering.
Categories of people Israel has murdered include:
- Over 100 UNWRA agency workers
- 92 journalists
- Over 300 medical staff with 57 ambulances directly targeted
- A USAid contractor and his entire family killed by an Israeli air strike
- Two Catholic Women shot in cold blood and without warning inside a Gazan church
- 483 Palestinians in the West Bank – killed by settler violence or by Israeli armed forces
- Countless hundreds in attacks on refugee camps across Gaza
- Women and children who were sheltering in a school – executed at point blank range
- Hundreds of innocents trying to flee Northern Gaza in civilian convoys
- Premature born babies – left to die after Israel forcibly cleared the Al Nasr Children’s Hospital
- Bulldozed refugee tents at Kamal Adwan hospital – burying dozens of refugees alive
- The Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer killed by an Israeli air strike
- Entire extended families in mass graves as Israel demolished cemeteries and confiscated the dead
This is but a fraction of the industrial erasure of the Palestinians that is unfolding in Gaza. We rely on such details that emerge from a city now entirely without basic services and in which being a journalist now carries a death sentence.
But even innocent Israeli citizens have been killed in this orgy of murder. There is gathering evidence that Israeli gunfire killed many innocent Israelis on October 7th. Yesterday Israel shot and killed three bare chested and unarmed men who were holding a white flag – commonplace in Gaze – except these were Israeli hostages.
Israel has managed to terrorise, starve, maim and kill just about everyone else in Gaza but like poor marksmen they keep missing the touted target – Hamas. The promised defeat of this small resistance force has been extended months and perhaps years into the future.
The reasons for this disparity between the effortless Israeli efficiency at killing civilians and their glacial progress at destroying Hamas are fourfold with the fourth being by far the most important:
(1) The Israeli Army has never been very good at fighting people who shoot back.
(2) Urban warfare is notoriously difficult and slow.
(3) Civilians in Gaza are trapped and defenceless.
(4) Israel doesn’t want to destroy Hamas – for it needs Hamas to excuse their mass displacement and genocide.
Religious zealotry, entrenched racism, western geopolitical expediency, the short-term political survival of the Netanyahu government and the oil and gas reserves off the Gazan coast all contribute towards the new Nakba.
Israeli violence races to kill Palestinian innocents but crawls to kill Hamas fighters for a reason – Hamas are very useful to Israel but Palestinians are just in the way.
Once again we see the truth of another western funded bloodbath. Just as in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Libya and Ukraine – the powerful criminals at work don’t give two figs for democracy, international law, nationalism, religious sentiment or basic morality – they just weaponise these things to sell more weapons and to extend / defend their power.
Israel is a pet project of western settler colonialism and genocide a tactical gambit. There is no war in Gaza only a mass slaughter and the biggest battle being fought is between powerful elites and those who insist the killings must stop and those responsible are held to account.
If moral people across the globe lose this battle for the human soul then we will take a fork in the road that leads to a brutal dystopia, one in which truth and human life are utterly subservient and expendable to the demands of elite privilege.
Make no mistake – the blood of Gaza will paint a picture for all our tomorrows.
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