Six months on, the Israeli genocidal war machine continues its daily slaughter of innocent Palestinian men, women and children, relentlessly and remorselessly. At the time of writing, nearly 34,000 Palestinians are known to have been murdered in cold blood; another 5,000 are missing, probably buried in the rubble to which Gaza has been reduced through indiscriminate bombing by the Israeli air force; and a further 6,500 excess deaths are expected as a result of injuries and disease – bringing the total by the middle of April 2024 to 45,500 done to death in this continuing genocide being perpetrated by the ethno-racist zionist regime, driven by the racist, antisemitic and reactionary zionist ideology which serves as the principal reactionary tool of Anglo-American imperialism in the middle east.
The majority of the dead are women and children. Moreover:
- Seventy-five thousand more people have been wounded, under conditions of totally inadequate medical provision to cater for their injuries.
- The IDF has destroyed or badly damaged all thirty-six of Gaza’s hospitals, as well as 100 clinics and health centres. Children are the biggest sufferers, since they fall victim to infectious diseases at a rate 23 times higher than average. Ninety percent of children under the age of five in Gaza are now suffering from one or more infectious diseases.
- 1.1 million people in Gaza are experiencing catastrophic food insecurity; a third of children under five are malnourished in the north of Gaza. The levels of hunger and malnutrition now reached in Gaza are “unprecedented in modern history” according to US humanitarian experts.
Even Samantha Power, former US representative to the United Nations and presently the administrator of USAid – the USA’s highest humanitarian official – has for the first time publicly stated that famine is already underway in parts of Gaza. Her statement was made during a hearing of the House of Representatives in reply to a question by Rep Julian Castro (Democrat, Texas) about news reports that some USAid officials had sent a cable to the National Security Council (NSC) warning that a famine was probably already occurring in parts of Gaza and that death due to hunger would in all likelihood “accelerate in the weeks ahead”. (‘Unprecedented in modern history’: US aid experts warn Gaza likely already experiencing famine by Akbar Shahid Ahmed, Huffington Post, 2 April 2024)
This contrasts with the lying assertions that NSC spokesman John Kirby made on Tuesday 5 April that the state department has “found no evidence of Israel violating humanitarian law”. Just like state department spokesman Matt Miller, Mr Kirby is so lacking in common decency, let alone humanity, that he can hardly be considered a human being.
With the aim of ethnically cleansing the whole area of its Palestinian population, Israel is denying food, electricity, water and medical supplies to Gaza – in brazen violation of the decision of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which ordered Israel not to impede these supplies and to prevent genocide.
Under Section 62 of the US Foreign Assistance Act, the USA is prohibited from supplying military assistance to states impeding the delivery of humanitarian assistance. To bypass this provision, all the members of the Biden administration, from Genocide Joe Biden all the way down to the lowest minion, are busy lying through their teeth and denying that Israel is violating international humanitarian law or that it is engaged in committing genocide, although it is clear even to the blindest that this is precisely what Israel is doing – and that it is doing so intentionally in order to destroy as many Palestinian lives as it can.
To find a parallel to Israel’s continuing genocide in Gaza, one has to go back to the genocides perpetrated by the Hitlerites in the 1940s against jews, Russians and several other peoples. With an ideology similar to that of the Nazis, the zionist rulers of Israel are the true successors of the Nazi regime in trying to implement genocide as the ‘final solution’ to their ‘Palestinian problem’. But the Israeli fascists will be no more successful in their monstrous design than were the Hitlerites.
In pursuit of this aim:
- Israel has so far killed 224 aid workers, the purpose being to starve Palestinians. As this article was bring written, 90 children were dying every day in Gaza.
- Israel has slaughtered some 20 journalists every month since October – the purpose being to prevent the spread of information about the zionist regime’s murderous activity. By way of contrast, one journalist a year is killed in Ukraine.
Murder of western aid workers stirs western politicians and media
What suddenly awoke the imperialist political and journalistic establishment to Israel’s mass slaughter of Palestinians through bombing and the blocking of humanitarian assistance was the Israeli drone strike that targeted a three-car convoy belonging to the World Central Kitchen, killing seven aid workers, six of whom were westerners. The aid vehicles had agreed their route with the IDF and were clearly marked with the charity’s logo.
The IDF described what was quite obviously a deliberate strike as a “grave mistake” and it suspended a colonel and a major in the unit involved in the attack. Israeli president Isaac Herzog had to apologise for the incident.
The reason for this sudden volte face was simply this: founded by celebrity chef José Andrés, the WCK has very close connections with the White House administration. In addition, of the victims of this atrocity, all but one held western passports and, to put it in blunt terms, were white. One of the victims was an American, one Australian, three British, one Polish and one, the driver, was Palestinian. These seven victims received greater attention than did the 34,000 Palestinians bombed into obliteration by the Nazi-style blitzkrieg of the zionist air force.
Australia’s prime minister, whose conscience had not been troubled by the slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians, showed his outrage at the murder of an Australian by placing a 20-minute telephone call to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in which he expressed his anger. His foreign minister Penny Wong characterised the IDF attack on the aid convoy as “outrageous and unacceptable”.
Only with this latest atrocity have the IDF’s actions become ‘outrageous and unacceptable’ in the eyes of imperialist politicians. This reveals their hypocrisy and disregard for truth, to say nothing of their lack human decency and their blatant racism.
Refusing to be mollified by this sudden surge in feigned concern for his employees, WCK’s José Andrés characterised Israel’s actions as a “war against humanity” conducted via starvation and murder. WCK, notwithstanding its connection with the White House or the silence it had previously maintained concerning the genocide, was nevertheless seen by the fascist rulers of Israel as an obstacle to its war aim of starving the people of Gaza so as to ethnically cleanse the land of its people.
This is what forced Andrés to state: “Israel attacked systematically, car by car.” Since this murderous attack, WCK has suspended its operations in Gaza, as has another aid organisation.
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine (Unrwa) had already been banned by the Israeli government from entering northern Gaza, and has been defunded by the USA and other imperialist powers, all to facilitate the fascist genocide in Gaza.
Systematic targeting both of people and of every basis of their existence
Israel is targeting all and every Palestinian on the flimsiest of pretexts, and often with none at all. On Wednesday 11 April, the IDF murdered three sons and three young grandchildren of Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas.
Just as guilty in this indiscriminate slaughter are Israel’s imperialist backers, especially the USA, which are facilitating this genocide through the supply of vast amounts of military and financial aid, and by providing diplomatic cover for Israel’s actions in Gaza and the wider middle east. As per the latest 2024 US spending bill, the USA is disbursing over $20m a day directly to or because of Israel, the combined total for the year coming to $7.5bn.
While paying lip service to a ‘two-state solution’ to the Palestinian question, the USA continues to block Palestine’s application to be accepted as a member state of the United Nations. Although recognised by 140 countries, Palestine continues to have merely observer status. The USA has consistently exercised its veto in the UN security council to prevent the admission of Palestine as a UN member state.
On top of destruction through bombing, Israel is now prioritising the wholesale elimination of Palestinians through starvation, famine and disease.
Attacks designed to destroy Gaza’s education system are also being consistently carried out. As a result of the 17-year siege of Gaza this system was under severe stress long before October 2023, with schools operating double shifts in order to meet demand, overcrowded classrooms and school hours curtailed.
The horrors of regular Israeli attacks before had also taken a severe toll on children’s mental wellbeing, with four out of every five afflicted with depression, grief and fear even before the latest and most brutal escalation of genocidal violence.
The war has now put an end to education in Gaza’s 813 schools. The schools whose buildings are still useable (76 percent have been damaged) are now being used to house displaced people. The disappearance of Unrwa, formerly the biggest UN agency working in Gaza, which had been responsible for running 183 schools serving 300,000 students, has made a dire situation far worse. Following bogus Israeli allegations, Unrwa’s funding was frozen by the USA, Britain and several other imperialist countries.
Five out of six of Gaza’s universities have also been completely or partially destroyed, including the Islamic University of Gaza, one of the largest in the strip that formerly served some 20,000 students. University president Sofyan Taya, a scientist and prolific scholar in the field of optics, was murdered in Israeli air strikes alongside his wife and five children.
Israa university was reduced to rubble on 17 January – blown up by Israeli soldiers who had used it as a base for 70 days. Israa, a non-profit institution founded in 2014 that taught medicine, engineering, finance, law and humanities to some 4,000 students, has likewise been destroyed.
Ninety-five academics and researchers, including 77 PhD holders and three university heads have so far been murdered by Israeli air strikes.
“The systematic nature of attacks, the number of persons killed and schools damaged, demonstrate clear intent,” says Neve Gordon, an Israeli professor who teaches international law at Queen Mary university in London. The destruction of houses and electricity have inevitably disrupted online education as well.
The murder of cultural figures, teachers and university professors is an incalculable loss – the destruction of Gaza’s educational and cultural elite. Palestine has long boasted the highest literacy rate (98 percent) in the Arab world, in spite of decades of occupation and the brutal 17-year blockade on the Gaza Strip. According to a September 2023 report of the Palestinian Bureau of Statisticsh, the literacy rates and educational standards of Palestinians are comparable to those of the wealthy Gulf states.
Education is highly prized in Palestinian society. Many manage to complete masters’ degrees and doctorates in the west and come back to Palestine to work or teach. Misrays Alrayyes, a young doctor with an MSc from King’s College, London, was murdered in an Israeli air strike on 6 November along with his parents and other relatives.
Tariq Phabet and a dozen more members of his family were wiped out on 29 October. He had been a specialist in economic development. Talented 14-year-old violinist Lubna Algaan was murdered with dozens of family members on 21 November. She had been attending the Edward Said Conservatory of Music in Gaza and received lessons from globally-renowned musicians such as Tom Suarez, a former member of the Baltimore and American symphony orchestras.
“I just want to stay with you so we can die together when we are bombed,” said a girl of six to her mother, having lost her previous love of learning.
Israel is trying to denude the Palestinian people of their educated and intellectual assets, for it views knowledge and science as obstacles to its programme of wiping out the basis for Palestinian society. This goes far beyond the infamous book burning of the Nazis in 1930s Germany.
By pursuing this desperate quest to wipe out the flower of Palestinian youth and destroy the nation’s intellectual cream, the zionists will only end up radicalising a new generation. Those who have survived after their entire families have been killed “will never forget or forgive”, according to al-Azhar university’s politics professor Mkhaimar Abusada.
Israel has already lost the war in Gaza; it has lost the war against the Lebanese resistance movement Hezbollah on its northern border; it has lost the war against Iran. As the incidents of the recent weeks have demonstrated, it has lost its deterrence advantage. This was clearly revealed by the successful assault mounted by the resistance on 7 October against southern Israel and, most spectacularly, by Iran’s assault on Israel using drones and missiles, which penetrated the most protected place on the planet – the Nevatim defence base and its intelligence centre on the occupied Golan Heights.
The settler-colony’s economy is in tatters; the morale of its soldiers and civilians has received a battering. And to cap it all, Israel has lost the battle in the court of world public opinion. It is now clearly seen everywhere, including increasingly in the imperialist countries, for what it is – ie, as a genocidal, racist and ethno-supremacist colonial-settler regime, surviving only thanks to the support of Anglo-American imperialism, whose attack dog in the middle east it has always been.
And last, but not least, large numbers of jews in the USA and Europe are refusing to support this genocidal regime, which employs artificial intelligence to target tens of thousands of Palestinians and their families. Israel is hurtling at an accelerated pace towards self-destruction, and its strength is draining away, no matter how great its bravado and hyperbolic rhetoric.
At every turn, it is lifting a rock only to drop it on its own feet. All in all, to paraphrase Chairman Mao Zedong’s words: there is chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent.
Out of the carnage and chaos created by the combined efforts of the zionist entity and neo-nazi Nato from Ukraine to the middle east, a beautiful world is emerging, bringing with it joy to the popular masses of the world. Our response must be: Seize the day! Seize the hour!
Victory to the resistance!
