The skies over Gaza are filled — after a seven-day truce — with projectiles of death. Warplanes. Attack helicopters. Drones. Artillery shells. Tank shells. Mortars. Bombs. Missiles. Gaza is a cacophony of explosions and forlorn screams and cries for help beneath collapsed buildings. Fear, once again, is coiling itself around every heart in the Gazan concentration camp.
By Friday evening, 184 Palestinians — including three journalists and two doctors — had been killed by Israeli air strikes in the north, south and central Gaza, and at least 589 injured, according to the Ministry of Health in Gaza. Most of them are women and children. Israel will not be deterred. It plans to finish the job, to obliterate what is left in the north of Gaza and decimate what remains in the south, to render Gaza uninhabitable, to see its 2.3 million people driven out in a massive campaign of ethnic cleansing via starvation, terror, slaughter and infectious diseases.
The aid convoys, which brought in token amounts of food and medicine — the first batch was shrouds and coronavirus tests according to the director of al-Najjar hospital — have been halted. No one, least of all President Joe Biden, plans to intervene to stop the genocide. Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Israel this week, and while calling for Israel to protect civilians, refused to set conditions that would disrupt the $3.8 billion Israel receives in annual military assistance or the $14.3 billion supplemental aid package. The world will watch passively, muttering useless bromides about more surgical strikes, while Israel spins its roulette wheel of death. By the time Israel is done, the 1948 Nakba, where Palestinians were massacred in dozens of villages and 750,000 were ethnically cleansed by Zionist militias, will look like a quaint relic of a more civilized era.
Nothing is off limits. Hospitals. Mosques. Churches. Homes. Apartment blocks. Refugee camps. Schools. Universities. Media offices. Banks. Sewer systems. Telecommunications infrastructure. Water treatment plants. Libraries. Wheat mills. Bakeries. Markets. Entire neighborhoods. Israel's intent is to destroy Gaza's infrastructure and daily kill or wound hundreds of Palestinians. Gaza is to become a wasteland, a dead zone that will be incapable of sustaining life.
Israel began to bomb Khan Younis on Friday after dropping leaflets warning civilians to evacuate further south to Rafah, located on the border crossing with Egypt. Hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians had sought refuge in Khan Younis. Once Palestinians are pushed to Rafah, there is only one place left to flee — Egypt. The Israeli Ministry of Intelligence, in a leaked report, calls for the forcible transfer of Gaza's population to Egypt's Sinai Peninsula. A detailed plan to intentionally displace the Palestinians in Gaza and push them into Egypt has been embedded in Israeli doctrine for five decades. Already, 1.8 million Palestinians in Gaza have been driven from their homes. Once Palestinians cross the border into Egypt — which the Egyptian government and Arab leaders are seeking to prevent despite pressure from the U.S. — Palestinians will never return.
This is not a war against Hamas. It is a war against Palestinians.
Israeli strikes are generated at a dizzying rate, many of them from a system called "Habsora" — The Gospel — which is built on artificial intelligence that selects 100 targets a day. The AI-system is described by seven current and former Israeli intelligence officials in an article by Yuval Abraham on the Israeli sites +972 Magazine and Local Call, as facilitating a "mass assassination factory." Israel, once it locates what it assumes to be a Hamas operative from a cell phone, for example, bombs and shells a wide area around the target, killing and wounding tens, and at times hundreds of Palestinians, the article states.
"According to intelligence sources," the story reads, "Habsora generates, among other things, automatic recommendations for attacking private residences where people suspected of being Hamas or Islamic Jihad operatives live. Israel then carries out large-scale assassination operations through the heavy shelling of these residential homes."
Some 15,000 Palestinians, including 6,000 children and 4,000 women, have been killed since Oct. 7. Some 30,000 have been wounded. Over six thousand are missing, many buried under the rubble. More than 300 families have lost 10 or more members of their families. More than 250 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since Oct. 7, and more than 3,000 injured, although the area is not controlled by Hamas. The Israeli military claims to have killed between 1,000 and 3,000 of some 30,000 Hamas fighters, a relatively small number given the scale of the assault. Most resistance fighters shelter in their vast tunnel system.
Israel's playbook is the "Dahiya Doctrine." The doctrine was formulated by former Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Chief of Staff Gadi Eizenkot, who is a member of the war cabinet, following the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Dahiya is a southern Beirut suburb and a Hezbollah stronghold. It was pounded by Israeli jets after two Israeli soldiers were taken prisoner. The doctrine posits that Israel should employ massive, disproportionate force, destroying infrastructure and civilian residences, to ensure deterrence.
Daniel Hagari, spokesman of the IDF, conceded at the start of Israel's most recent attack on Gaza that the "emphasis" would be "on damage and not on accuracy."
Israel has abandoned its tactic of "roof knocking" where a rocket without a warhead would land on a roof to warn those inside to evacuate. Israel has also ended its phone calls warning of an impending attack. Now dozens of families in an apartment block or a neighborhood are killed without notice.
The images of mass destruction feed the thirst for revenge within Israel following the humiliating incursion by Hamas fighters on Oct. 7 and the killing of 1,200 Israelis, including 395 soldiers and 59 police officers. There is a sadistic pleasure voiced by many Israelis over the genocide and a groundswell of calls for the murder or expulsion of Palestinians, including those in the occupied West Bank and those with Israeli citizenship.
The savagery of the air strikes and indiscriminate attacks, the cutting off of food, water and medicine, the genocidal rhetoric of the Israeli government, make this a war whose sole objective is revenge. This will not be good for Israel or the Palestinians. It will fuel a conflagration throughout the Middle East.
Israel's attack is the last desperate measure of a settler colonial project that foolishly thinks, as many settler colonial projects have in the past, that it can crush the resistance of an indigenous population with genocide. But even Israel will not get away with killing on this scale. A generation of Palestinians, many of whom have seen most, if not all, of their families killed and their homes and neighborhoods destroyed, will carry within them a lifelong thirst for justice and retribution.
This war is not over. It has not even begun.
Reader Comments
Coincidentally, the term seems to have been coined by The Daily Kos (blech!) back in 2014. [Link]
It's time the Zionazis go. For good.
Aided and abetted by UK ,USA and Germany.
A Slaughter of the innocents.
Out of the 1200 Israeli Occupiers that were killed on or about Oct 7th, How many were killed by the IDF
with their now,well known penchant for shelling and bombing harmless civilians.?
A real Soldier would or could not behave like this and be described as disciplined.
Only Cowards.
Surely Russia and China are counselling restraint (think China and Sun Tzu’s Art of War). Arab states have in the past gone in for knee jerk response war actions that have never served them well. There must be growing tensions between those states that don’t have the emotion raising ethic and religious ties to the the Palestinians who are doubtless counselling restraint and those states that would like to destroy Israel for its actions in Gaza.
We have to hope that alliances hold and that they all play the long game. Clearly though Israel’s actions in Gaza are testing restraint to the limit and will continue to do so.
Palestinians in Gaza are the sacrificial lambs of the new multipolar world order. A better and fairer world will emerge from the ashes of Gaza.
Gaza of course may not be the last battle ground in the multipolar world order war.
Lets face it,'MORE SLAUGHTER' looks so bad on the ballot form. So anyone left or right who has not taken action to achieve a ceasefire and not reported Israel for it's genocide or who has not reported Hamas for Genocide is guilty under Article 3 paragraph 6 of aiding and enabling that same genocide.
This is what the UN act against genocide clearly states. If a person does not act to stop a genocide while being an official or representative of a public body ,and have been made aware of said genocide they are just as culpable. Great Britain is a fully signed up member to The United Nations act to bring all the guilty parties to trial.
You will not see this on TV. TV is not your friend.
All the Zionists are saying and it is very simple,is we are meaner more selfish and uncaring than anyone else coz we are the Gods children.
Not God the way I see God, but the vengeful unforgiving grasping round the throat kind of a way to anyone who opposes it.
Mad as bees on a barbacue.
Just to give you real confidence how many know that microsoft is now run from Israel.
I know it is not much however it is Lawful as all Parties signed up in Parliament and a full vote was made Way back when they adopted this. United Nations has International Laws which are enforceable.
Or are Pirates running the Ship of State.?
Does Nat Turner's battle cry of "Kill all whites" count as genocide ... I don't think so
The United Nations Convention against Genocide is a significant international treaty that aims to prevent and punish the crime of genocide. It was adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on December 9, 1948, and entered into force on January 12, 1951. The convention defines genocide as acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. These acts include killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm, deliberately inflicting conditions of life to bring about the group's physical destruction, imposing measures to prevent births within the group, and forcibly transferring children from the group to another group. The convention has been ratified by a large number of countries and has played a crucial role in establishing genocide as an international crime. It obligates states to prevent and punish genocide within their jurisdiction and provides a framework for cooperation between states in prosecuting and extraditing individuals accused of genocide. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a direct link to a PDF of the United Nations Convention against Genocide. However, you may be able to find the full text of the convention on the official website of the United Nations or through other legal databases. Please note that the information provided here is based on search results and snippets from various sources. For more detailed and accurate information, it is recommended to refer to the official United Nations documents and resources.
The alleged Hamas atrocities at the rave or kibbutz appear to have been indiscriminate killing of people of many different nationalities