Chris Hedges: Israel’s Assassination of Memory
This is Kabuki theater — a way, when the genocide is over, for these Western leaders to insist they stood on the right side of history, even as they armed and funded the genocidal killers, while harassing, silencing or criminalizing those who decried the slaughter.
August 23, 2025, By Chris Hedges ScheerPost, https://scheerpost.com/2025/08/23/chris-hedges-israels-assassination-of-memory/
As Israel ticks off its list of Nazi-like atrocities against the Palestinians, including mass starvation, it prepares for yet another – the demolition of Gaza City, one of the oldest cities on Earth. Heavy engineering equipment and gigantic armored bulldozers are tearing down hundreds of heavily damaged buildings. Cement trucks are churning out concrete to fill tunnels. Israeli tanks and fighter jets pummel neighborhoods to drive Palestinians who remain in the ruins of the city to the south.
It will take months to turn Gaza City into a parking lot. I have no doubt Israel will replicate the efficiency of the Nazi SS Gen. Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, who oversaw the obliteration of Warsaw. He spent his final years in a prison cell. May history, at least in terms of this footnote, repeat itself.
As Israeli tanks advance, Palestinians are fleeing, with neighborhoods such as Sabra and Tuffah, cleansed of its inhabitants. There is little clean water and Israel plans to cut it off in northern Gaza. Food supplies are scarce or wildly overpriced. A bag of flour costs $22.00 a kilo, or your life. A report published Friday by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classifications (IPC) , the world’s leading authority on food insecurity, for the first time has confirmed a famine in Gaza City. It says more than 500,000 people in Gaza are facing “starvation, destitution and death”, with “catastrophic conditions” projected to expand to Deir al-Balah and Khan Younis next month. Nearly 300 people, including 112 children, have died from starvation.
European leaders, along with Joe Biden and Donald Trump, remind us of the real lesson of the Holocaust. It is not Never Again, but, We Do not Care. They are full partners in the genocide. Some wring their hands and say they are “appalled” or “saddened.” Some decry Israel’s orchestrated starvation. A few say they will declare a Palestinian state.
This is Kabuki theater — a way, when the genocide is over, for these Western leaders to insist they stood on the right side of history, even as they armed and funded the genocidal killers, while harassing, silencing or criminalizing those who decried the slaughter.
Israel speaks of occupying Gaza City. But this is a subterfuge. Gaza is not to be occupied. It is to be destroyed. Erased. Wiped off the face of the earth. There is to be nothing left but tons of debris that will be laboriously carted away. The moonscape, devoid of Palestinians of course, will provide the foundation for new Jewish colonies.
“Gaza will be entirely destroyed, civilians will be sent to…the south to a humanitarian zone without Hamas or terrorism, and from there they will start to leave in great numbers to third countries,” Israel’s Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich announced at a conference on increased Jewish settlement in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
All that was familiar to me when I lived in Gaza no longer exists. My office in the center of Gaza City. The Marna boarding house on Ahmed Abd el Aziz Street, where after a day’s work I would drink tea with the elderly woman who owned it, a refugee from Safad in northern Galilee. The coffee shops I frequented. The small cafes on the beach. Friends and colleagues, with few exceptions, are in exile, dead or, in most cases, have vanished, no doubt buried under mountains of debris. On my last visit to Marna House, I forgot to return the room key. Number 12. It was attached to a large plastic oval with the words “Marna House Gaza” on it. The key sits on my desk.
The imposing Qasr al-Basha fortress in Gaza’s Old City — built by Mamluk Sultan Baibars in the 13th century and known for its relief sculpture of two lions facing each other — is gone. So too is the Barquq Castle, or Qalʿat Barqūqa, a Mamluk-era fortified mosque constructed in 1387-1388, according to an inscription above the entrance gateway. Its ornate Arabic calligraphy by the main gate once read:
“In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, Most Merciful. The mosques of God shall establish regular prayers, and practice regular charity, and fear none except God.”
The Great Omari Mosque in Gaza City, the ancient Roman cemetery and the Commonwealth War Cemetery — where more than 3,000 British and commonwealth soldiers from World War I and World War II are buried — have been bombed, and destroyed, along with universities, archives, hospitals, mosques, churches, homes and apartment blocks. Anthedon Harbor, which dates to 1100 B.C. and once provided anchorage for Babylonian, Persian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman ships, lies in ruins.
I used to leave my shoes on a rack by the front door of the Great Omari Mosque, the largest and oldest mosque in Gaza, in the Daraj Quarter of the Old City. I washed my hands, face and feet at the common water taps, carrying out the ritual purification before prayer, known as wudhu. Inside the hushed interior with its blue-carpeted floor, the cacophony, noise, dust, fumes and frenetic pace of Gaza melted away.
The razing of Gaza is not only a crime against the Palestinian people. It is a crime against our cultural and historical heritage — an assault on memory. We cannot understand the present, especially when reporting on Palestinians and Israelis, if we do not understand the past.
History is a mortal threat to Israel. It exposes the violent imposition of a European colony in the Arab world. It reveals the ruthless campaign to de-Arabize an Arab country. It underscores the inherent racism towards Arabs, their culture and their traditions. It challenges the myth that, as former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak said, Zionists created, “a villa in the middle of a jungle.” It mocks the lie that Palestine is exclusively a Jewish homeland. It recalls centuries of Palestinian presence. And it highlights the alien culture of Zionism, implanted on stolen land.
When I covered the genocide in Bosnia, the Serbs blew up mosques, carted away the remains and forbade anyone to speak of the structures they had razed. The goal in Gaza is the same, to wipe out the past and replace it with myth, to mask Israeli crimes, including genocide.
The campaign of erasure banishes intellectual inquiry and stymies the dispassionate examination of history. It celebrates magical thinking. It allows Israelis to pretend the inherent violence that lies at the heart of the Zionist project, going back to the dispossession of Palestinian land in the 1920s and the larger campaigns of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948 and 1967, does not exist.
The Israeli government bans public commemorations of the Nakba, or catastrophe, a day of mourning for Palestinians who seek to remember the massacres and expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians carried out by Jewish terrorist militias in 1948 for this reason. Palestinians are even prevented from carrying their flag.
This denial of historical truth and historical identity permits Israelis to wallow in eternal victimhood. It sustains a morally blind nostalgia for an invented past. If Israelis confront these lies it threatens an existential crisis. It forces them to rethink who they are. Most prefer the comfort of illusion. The desire to believe is more powerful than the desire to see.
Erasure calcifies a society. It shuts down investigations by academics, journalists, historians, artists and intellectuals who seek to explore and examine the past and the present. Calcified societies wage a constant war against truth. Lies and dissimulation must be constantly renewed. Truth is dangerous. Once it is established it is indestructible.
As long as truth is hidden, as long as those who seek truth are silenced, it is impossible for a society to regenerate and reform itself. The Trump administration is in lock step with Israel. It too seeks to prioritize myth over reality. It too silences those who challenge the lies of the past and the lies of the present.
Calcified societies cannot communicate with anyone outside their incestious circles. They deny verifiable fact, the foundation on which rational dialogue takes place. This understanding lay at the heart of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Those who carried out the atrocities of the apartheid regime confessed their crimes in exchange for immunity. By doing so they gave the victims and the victimizers a common language, one rooted in historical truth. Only then was healing possible.
Israel is not only destroying Gaza. It is destroying itself.
Never Forget The Lies They Told About Gaza. Never Forgive Them.
Caitlin Johnstone, Aug 24, 2025, https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/never-forget-the-lies-they-told-about?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=171797262&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
A joint investigation by The Guardian and +972 Magazine found that the IDF’s own records show that civilians make up at least 83 percent of those killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza. The report notes that the real number is likely significantly higher, since the number given doesn’t include the thousands upon thousands of dead civilians who are still unaccounted for in Gaza because they are trapped under the rubble, or those killed by indirect means such as starvation or disease.
The pro-Israel spin machine frantically tried to discredit this report as soon as it came out, but their arguments have been soundly debunked.
They claimed that Israel has a phenomenally low civilian-to-combatant casualty ratio, then Israel’s own data proved that civilians comprise the vast majority of those killed by the IDF.
They denied that Israel is starving Gaza, then the IPC came out with a report saying that Israel is starving Gaza.
They tried to claim that the skeletal children we’re seeing in Gaza looked that way because of pre-existing conditions, then the Israeli press published an extensive report showing that children with no pre-existing conditions are being starved.
They tried to deny that Israeli soldiers were massacring civilians at aid sites, then the Israeli soldiers themselves told the Israeli press that they were being ordered to massacre civilians at aid sites.
Never forget all the monsters who tried to gaslight you and convince you that you are crazy and hateful for saying these things are happening. Never, ever forgive them.
The IDF has admitted to uprooting thousands of olive trees in the West Bank on Thursday. The routine destruction of Palestinian olive trees is not the most shocking or evil thing that Israel does to the Palestinians, but it does speak to what its true intentions are in a unique way.
Similar to the way white people killed off all the bison to help eliminate the American Indians, killing olive trees deprives Palestinians of an important means of earning a living, and strikes at an important aspect of Palestinian identity and culture.
Olive trees can live for thousands of years; people with a strong attachment to the land treasure and protect them, while the Israelis who claim to be “indigenous” to the area are destroying them and replacing them with highly flammable foreign plants. You can tell who the actual indigenous population is by watching their behavior.
Normal person: Genocide is bad
Crazy person: Woah hey, let’s not get political
Right wingers are like “No no you don’t understand, Israel is protecting western civilization. If we don’t help Israel genocide the Palestinians and starve their children and burn their babies and bomb their hospitals and demolish their cities, one day we could wind up ruled by evil murderous savages.”
Normal person: Oh no those people over there are committing genocide!
Crazy person: Okay but what religion are they?
The way Zionists talk about Palestinian hatred of Jews you’d think the Palestinians immigrated to Israel from somewhere else in 1948 in order to attack Jewish people.
In 1937, Winston Churchill stated the following while arguing in favor of allowing Jews to settle in Palestine:
“I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to those people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, or, at any rate, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place. I do not admit it. I do not think the Red Indians had any right to say, The American Continent belongs to us and we are not going to have any of these European settlers coming in here. They had not the right, nor had they the power.”
Churchill knew exactly what he was looking at in the Zionist agenda to colonize Palestine. There was no confusion whatsoever. It wasn’t until much later that history was revised through propaganda to spin this as something other than the western settler-colonialist project that it has always been.
The other day I wrote the following in a rant about religious Zionists:
“Someone like Mike Huckabee is never telling the truth or saying what he really thinks is going on when it comes to Israel and the Palestinians, he’s just making whatever mouth noises he needs to make to help fulfill a Biblical prophecy and secure his eternal reward. Such people have no place in the conversation. They should be completely excluded from the debate, because they are not actually participating in it. They’re just lying and manipulating for reasons that have nothing to do with truth or morality.”
The very next day, Antiwar published an article titled “Mike Huckabee Claims Israeli Settlements in the Occupied West Bank Are Not Illegal Under International Law”.
Like I said. Huckabee does not believe this obvious falsehood, he’s just saying whatever words he needs to say to help advance the agendas of his weird Christian cult. These freaks consider themselves so pious and righteous, but in reality they are some of the most conniving, unethical deceivers our world has ever seen.
It just occurred to me that at some point in the future they’re going to try to demand that we condemn whatever radicalized groups and militias wind up emerging as a result of the Gaza genocide.
That’s gonna be cute.
Children at gravest risk as full-fledged famine unfolds in Gaza
23 August 2025 AIMN Editorial, Plan International Australia , https://theaimn.net/children-at-gravest-risk-as-full-fledged-famine-unfolds-in-gaza/
As famine grips Gaza, putting over a million children at risk, Plan International is demanding a ceasefire and unrestricted humanitarian access.
Famine has taken hold in Gaza Governorate and will expand to Deir al-Balah and Khan Younis without urgent action, according to a new report from the UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) published today, Friday 22 August.
Preventable catastrophe
Responding to the IPC’s latest report, Dr. Unni Krishnan, Global Humanitarian Director at Plan International said:
“The fatal consequences of Israel’s weaponisation of hunger and blocking of humanitarian aid are devastatingly clear for all to see. No conflict should ever reach this point. What we are seeing in Gaza today is an entirely man-made and preventable catastrophe that is leaving more than a million Palestinian children – and 2.2 million people in total – struggling to stay alive.
Famine in Gaza is not a failure of logistics or aid – it is the outcome of brutal war and deliberate starvation.”
Dr. Unni Krishnan, Global Humanitarian Director at Plan International:
“Plan International has recently managed to deliver urgently needed aid into Gaza, but far more is needed. The continued illegal blockade of life-saving supplies means children and families are being condemned to die, painfully and needlessly.
Profound impact on generation of children
“Children in Gaza are not only being starved, they are also being maimed and permanently disabled in staggering numbers due to the Israeli army’s excessive use of force and newly intensified military campaign. Since the escalation of conflict in Gaza, disabilities have risen by 60% and Gaza now has the highest number of child amputees in the world. Hunger, injury and forced displacement into militarised zones are all highly traumatic events and will have a profound impact on an entire generation of children.
“The world cannot look away. Every hour lost costs more lives. Famine in Gaza is not a failure of logistics or aid – it is the outcome of brutal war and deliberate starvation. We demand – without delay – an immediate and sustained ceasefire, a complete halt to arms transfers to Israel, and the full lifting of Israel’s illegal blockade on humanitarian aid. This must include safe and unrestricted humanitarian access, so that we can reach more children and families with food and the basics needed for survival.”
The Trump Administration’s Halt on Medical Evacuations From Gaza Is a Death Sentence for Palestinian Children
August 21, 2025 , By Bilal Irfan and Alyssa Seliga / Mondoweiss, https://mondoweiss.net/2025/08/the-trump-administrations-halt-on-medical-evacuations-from-gaza-is-a-death-sentence-for-palestinian-children/
The Trump administration’s decision to halt all visitor visas for Palestinians from Gaza, which came after pressure from right-wing activists, will be a death sentence for children who require life-saving medical treatment.
The U.S. State Department’s decision this weekend to halt all visitor visas for people from Gaza, which includes the medical-humanitarian visas that have brought injured children to American hospitals, will cost Palestinian lives. Officials say this process will be subject to a “full and thorough review”. For a child with infected burns or a deep trauma wound, a pause is a verdict on their life. The freeze did not arise from new intelligence or any novel identification of problems in the temporary visitor visa pathway. It followed a social-media panic with the circulation of mischaracterized videos of injured children arriving under the care of a U.S. nonprofit being labeled as a “security threat,” rhetoric amplified by political allies. The State Department then announced it was stopping visas while it re-examines procedures.
The racism and misinformation at the heart of that panic deserve naming. Some have labeled the process of evacuating children with amputations and burns as being potentially linked to terrorism and even characterized their joyful cries as “jihadi chants.” That is textbook dehumanization: take a population of wounded kids and code them as a threat to justify exclusion. Many have commented on the chain reaction from such posts to the administrative action. The line from a viral smear to a federal policy that blocks chemotherapy, skin grafts, or prosthetics for children should shame us, and the speed with which it occurred.
It also wildly overstates the scale of what has actually happened. In total, many of the NGOs running these U.S. transfers report a few dozen total children to date, not a “flood”. Individual city stories have been about twos and threes: a pair treated in Dallas; several children welcomed in Boston. This is the opposite of a large-scale pipeline; it’s a narrow, highly vetted corridor that exists because Gaza’s health system has been shattered.
To understand how few make it here, you have to understand the pathway. First, a physician in Gaza refers a child for care that no longer exists at home. The case goes to a Ministry of Health committee, then to the World Health Organization (WHO) for medical triage. Only after a receiving hospital issues a formal acceptance, often after weeks of back-and-forth with surgeons, translated records, and imaging, does the family usually even begin the paper chase: passports, exit permissions from the Israeli military’s Coordinator for Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), Jordanian clearances when the bridge route is used, U.S. visa appointments, and finally a WHO-escorted convoy. Each step is a separate queue with its own failures and reversals; a single “not yet” in any queue can kill the case.
The numbers give us a picture of why this corridor matters. According to WHO and OCHA, as of mid-August more than 14,800 people in Gaza need urgent medical evacuation outside the Strip. Since October 2023, about 7,560 patients, including roughly 5,248 children, have been medically evacuated abroad, with most of those transfers occurring before Israel’s closure of Rafah last year made departures far rarer and slower – in fact, a 92% decrease was recorded in successful evacuations thereafter. On August 13, the WHO managed to move 38 patients, 32 of them children, to care options in Belgium, Italy, and Türkiye. Such operations are far smaller than the need. Pausing the U.S. share of that global effort may look like a minor adjustment from Washington, yet for an injured child in Gaza, it reads as a door slammed shut – and possibly a death sentence.
American hospitals have long accepted international charity cases. Pediatric centers have taken on many cases from around the world, because these are areas where some U.S. teams are among the best in the world and where outcomes can be life-changing and transformative. Now, it is only anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobia that are preventing U.S. hospitals from playing a similar role with children from Gaza. Other countries and regions have been accepting far more cases than the United States. Since October 2023, the top five referral destinations have been Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Turkey, and EU countries. The cases include children with trauma wounds, patients with cancer, congenital anomalies, cardiovascular issues, and even ophthalmology-related needs.
Behind every statistic is a child and a clock. We have seen and heard of many such cases. For example, Fatima (anonymized name for safety), a child with multiple burn injuries, cleared one hurdle after another: hospital acceptance in the U.S., COGAT approval, a slot on a convoy list. Starvation and infection outpaced the paperwork.
She died just days ago, after being pushed from one evacuation list date to another as her body gave way. Another girl whose cases moved with unusual speed from referral to hospital acceptance to even getting family clearances was now seeking an expedited passport to submit her DS-160s when the U.S. freeze hit. Try explaining to her mother that a stranger’s tweet now stands between her child and a reconstructive surgeon.
And yet, these are not isolated incidents or tragedies. Gaza’s health system has been bombed, besieged, and starved into dysfunction. Key Palestinian medical specialists have been killed or abducted by the Israeli military, and hospitals where care could have been provided have been repeatedly attacked. That is why children who could once be treated locally now need referrals abroad for prosthetics, complex orthopedics, neurosurgery, oncologic care, and skin reconstruction. The pathway is not some loophole, rather it is one of the only viable medical options for these children. Prior to the current genocide, 50-100 patients were leaving Gaza daily for medical treatment abroad.
The pathway is, in fact, fraught with ethical dilemmas. Children are frequently separated from their caregivers or loved ones, and families are separated or torn apart as some relatives are denied exit approval (often men) by Israel, leaving others to stay behind. We have met such families and children who have come to the U.S., have heard from their stories and the trauma they have endured – the physical scars and the psychological ones – and the ones that cannot even be named.
What should happen now is simple. First, immediately reinstate the processing of medical-humanitarian visas for children and their companions. Second, we should push towards affirming the right of return for these children – many families fear never being able to return to Gaza after accepting treatment abroad, with some even choosing to stay in Gaza out of such fears. Third, restoration of medical corridors for Palestinian patients in Gaza to occupied East Jerusalem and the wider occupied West Bank, so that they do not need to leave their country and homeland just for treatment if it is available. Finally, stop letting demagogues dictate whether a Palestinian child gets to live. The moral bar here is not high.
How sad it is that the government in Washington can be spurred by a bad-faith tweet to close a lifeline for children, any shred of decency as Americans should compel us to open it.
Jeffrey Sachs: The US Can End the Gaza Genocide Now
August 21, 2025, By Jeffrey D. Sachs and Sybil Fares / Common Dreams, https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/how-to-end-gaza-genocide
President Donald Trump wants a Nobel Peace Prize, and his efforts toward peace in Ukraine, if successful, could possibly help him earn one—but only if he also ends US complicity in the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Under Trump, as under former President Joe Biden, the US has served as Israel’s partner in mass murder, annexation, starvation, and the escalating torment of millions of Palestinians. The genocide can, and will, stop if Trump wills it. So far he has not.
Israel is committing genocide—everyone knows it, even its staunchest defenders. The Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem has recently made a poignant acknowledgment of “Our Genocide.” In Foreign Affairs, former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew recently admitted that extremist parties in Netanyahu’s government openly aim to starve Palestinians in Gaza. Lew frames his piece as praise for the former Biden administration (and for himself) for their supposedly valiant efforts to prevent mass starvation by pressuring Israel to allow minimal food entry, while blaming Trump for easing that pressure.
Yet the actual importance of the piece is that an ardent Zionist insider certifies the genocidal agenda sustaining Netanyahu’s rule. Lew recounts that in the aftermath of October 7, Israelis frequently pledged that “not a drop of water, not a drop of milk, and not a drop of fuel will go from Israel to Gaza,” a stance that still shapes Israel’s cabinet policy. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) can use Lew’s article as confirmation of Israel’s genocidal intent.
The genocide in Gaza, coupled with the annexation in the West Bank, aims to fulfill the Likud vision of a Greater Israel that exercises territorial control between the Sea and Jordan. This will destroy any possibility of a Palestinian state, and any possibility of peace. Indeed, Bezalel Smotrich, the extremist minister of finance and minister in the ministry of defense, recently vowed to “permanently bury the idea of a Palestinian state” while the Knesset has recently called for annexation of the occupied West Bank.
The US aids and protects Israel every day in these horrific crimes against the Palestinian people. The US provides billions of dollars in military support, goes to war alongside Israel, and offers diplomatic cover for Israel’s crimes against humanity. The vacuous mantra that “Israel has the right to defend itself” is the US pat excuse for Israel’s mass murder and starvation of innocent civilians.
Generations of historians, psychologists, sociologists, philosophers, and inquiring minds will ask how the descendants and co‑religionists of the Jews murdered by Hitler’s genocidal regime came to become genocidaires. Two factors, deeply intertwined, come to the fore.
First, the Nazi Holocaust lent credence among Jews to the Zionist claim that only a state with overwhelming military power and ready to use it can protect the Jewish people. For these militarists, every Arab country opposed to Israel’s ongoing occupation of Palestine became a dire foe to be crushed by war. This is Netanyahu’s doctrine of violence, which was first unveiled in the Clean Break strategy, and which has produced nonstop Israeli mobilization and war, and a society now gripped by implacable hatred even of innocent women and children in Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria. Netanyahu has dragged the US into countless devastating and futile wars out of Netanyahu’s blindness to the reality that only diplomacy, not war, can achieve Israel’s security.
Second, this non-stop resort to violence reignited a dormant strain of Biblical Judaism, notably based on the Book of Joshua, which presents God’s covenant with Abraham as justification for genocides committed in conquering the Promised Land. Ancient zealotry of this kind, and the belief that God would redeem his chosen people through violence, fueled suicidal revolts against the Roman Empire between 66 and 135 AD. Whether the genocides in the Book of Joshua ever occurred (probably not ) is beside the point. For today’s zealots, the license to commit genocide is vivid, immediate, and biblically ordained.
Aware of the danger of self-destructive zealotry, the rabbis who shaped the Babylonian Talmud proscribed Jews from attempting to return en masse to the promised land (Ketubot 111a). They taught that Jews should live in their own communities and fulfill God’s commandments where they are, rather than seeking to recapture a land from which they had been exiled following decades of suicidal revolt.
Whatever the fundamental reasons for Israel’s murderous turn, Israel’s survival among nations is at risk today as it has become a pariah state. For the first time in history, Israel’s Western allies have repudiated Israel’s violent ways. France, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada have each pledged to formally recognize the State of Palestine at the upcoming UN General Assembly in September. These countries will finally join the will of the overwhelming global majority in recognizing that the two-state solution, enshrined in international law, is the true guarantor of peace.
The majority of the American people, are rightly revulsed by Israel’s brutality and are also turning their support massively to the Palestinian cause. In a new Reuters poll released today, 58% of Americans now believe that the UN should recognize the State of Palestine, against just 32% who oppose that. American politicians will surely note the change, at Israel’s peril, unless the two-state solution is rapidly implemented. (Logical arguments can also be given for a peaceful one-state, bi-national solution, but this alternative has essentially no backing among UN member states and no basis in the international law regarding the Israel-Palestine conflict that has developed over more than seven decades.)
This Israeli government will not change course on its own. Only the Trump administration can end the genocide through a comprehensive settlement agreed by the world’s nations at the UN Security Council and UN General Assembly. The solution is to stop the genocide, make peace, and salvage Israel’s standing in the world by creating a Palestinian state alongside Israel on the June 4, 1967 borders.
Trump must force Israel to see reality: that Israel cannot continue to rule over the Palestinian people, murder them, starve them, and ethnically cleanse them. For decades, the entire Arab and Islamic world has supported the two-state solution, and advocated to normalize relations with Israel and guarantee security for the entire region. This solution is in full accordance with international law, and was again espoused clearly by the UN General Assembly in the NY Declaration last month at the conclusion of the United Nations High-Level International Conference on the Peaceful Settlement of the Question of Palestine and the Implementation of the Two-State Solution (July 29, 2025).
Trump has come to understand that to save Ukraine, he must force it to see reality: that NATO cannot expand to Ukraine as that would directly threaten Russia’s own security. In the same way, Trump must force Israel to see reality: that Israel cannot continue to rule over the Palestinian people, murder them, starve them, and ethnically cleanse them. The two-state solution thereby saves both Palestine and Israel.
An immediate UN Security Council vote to grant Palestine permanent membership in the UN next month would put an end to Israel’s zealous delusions of permanent control over Palestine, as well as its reckless territorial ambitions in Lebanon and Syria. The focus of the crisis would then shift to immediate and practical issues: how to disarm non-state actors within the framework of the new state and regional peace, how to enable mutual security for Israel and Palestine, how to empower the Palestinians to govern effectively, how to finance the reconstruction, and how to provide urgent humanitarian assistance to a starving population.
Trump can make this happen at the UN in September. The US, and only the US, has vetoed the permanent membership of Palestine in the UN. The other members of the UN Security Council have already signalled their support.
Peace in the Middle East is possible now—and there is no time to lose.
Israeli Military To Call Up 60,000 Reservists as It Prepares for Gaza City Ethnic Cleansing Campaign.
Under the plan, the IDF will forcibly evacuate over 1 million civilians from the city, then spend over a year destroying it.
by Dave DeCamp | August 19, 2025, https://news.antiwar.com/2025/08/19/israeli-military-to-call-up-60000-reservists-as-it-prepares-for-gaza-city-ethnic-cleansing-campaign/
About 60,000 Israeli reservists will receive call-up orders that the Israeli military will issue tomorrow as it’s preparing for a major offensive on Gaza City, The Times of Israel reported on Tuesday.
The report said that reservists will have two weeks before they need to report for duty and that not all of them will take part in the offensive on Gaza City since some will replace IDF troops deployed in other areas of Gaza.
The Israeli military’s plans to take over Gaza City involve the ethnic cleansing of over 1 million Palestinian civilians from the area. Since civilians are expected to remain in the city after evacuation orders, the IDF is prepared to use artillery strikes as its means of forcibly moving them, according to Haaretz.
While the IDF hasn’t yet launched its ground offensive, it has ramped up strikes on Gaza City in recent weeks with a focus on the eastern Zeitoun neighborhood. Thousands of Palestinians have already fled the area, and an investigation from Al Jazeera found that many of the Israeli attacks were hitting displacement shelters.
Once the city is taken over, the IDF plans to spend more than a year destroying it, similar to how it made the northern cities of Beit Hanoun, Beit Lahia, and Jabalia uninhabitable. The IDF will demolish homes in Gaza City under the guise of “dismantling Hamas infrastructure,” but Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has previously told a Knesset committee that the IDF’s destruction of homes would force Palestinians to leave Gaza altogether.
The idea of the Gaza City offensive is to force all the Palestinians to the south, and from there, Israel will pressure them to leave Gaza, but it remains unclear where they could go. Israel has reportedly been in talks with several countries on taking in a large number of Palestinian refugees, but so far, none have publicly committed to the idea.
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Stopping The Gaza Holocaust Is The First Step Toward A Healthy World
Caitlin Johnstone, Aug 13, 2025, https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/stopping-the-gaza-holocaust-is-the?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=170832055&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
Nicole on Facebook writes, “I would love to hear you explain how Palestine is the moral question of our time. Why it’s so important. How it’s related to every movement and should be a concern to everyone.”
Palestine is the moral question of our time because the abuse of the Palestinians is the most glaring, in-your-face symptom of the imperial disease. You can see the effects of so many of the empire’s abusive dynamics in how this thing is playing out, from racism to colonialism to militarism to war profiteering to mass media propaganda to empire-building to government corruption to suppression of free speech to ecocide to the heartless, mindless, soul-eating nature of the capitalist system under which we all live.
But there’s more to it than that. The primary reason to place Palestine front and center as the moral issue of our time is because if we can’t sort out the morality of an active genocide backed by our own western governments, we’re not going to be able to sort out anything else. Stopping the Gaza holocaust and bringing justice to the Palestinians is the very first step toward a healthy civilization.
Palestine is the moral issue of our time for the same reason if you saw someone in your family torturing another member of your family to death, it would be the most urgent matter happening in your life at that moment. You’d have other problems in your life, but that would come first.
If we’re the sort of society that would allow a live-streamed genocide to take place with the support of our own government and its allies, then we’re not the sort of society that can steer away from its trajectory toward dystopia and armageddon. If you’re the sort of individual who would allow a live-streamed genocide to take place with the support of your own government and its allies, then you’re not the sort of individual who can help steer our species away from disaster.
Gaza is not the only thing that matters in the world. But if you’re not forcefully opposing the Gaza holocaust, you definitely don’t have a healthy enough conscience to address any of the world’s other problems.
I sometimes see Israel supporters refer to pro-Palestine sentiment as “virtue signaling”, which is funny because it means they view themselves as holding the unpopular, unvirtuous position. But really there’s nothing particularly virtuous about supporting Gaza, and it’s not some cool, special thing you’d want to signal about yourself. It’s just what you do when you’re not an extremely shitty person. It’s the basic, bare-minimum expectation of normal human morality.
I don’t want to be friends with anyone who doesn’t oppose the Gaza holocaust. I don’t want to follow any commentators or analysts who don’t speak out against the Gaza holocaust. At this point I don’t even want to listen to any music or read any poetry from people who don’t take a stand against the Gaza holocaust. Since 2023 I’ve moved from rejecting anyone who actively sided with Israel to rejecting anyone who is even complicit in their silence.
The other day I saw some Australian influencer forcefully trying to assert that it’s okay not to take a position on Gaza, and nobody in her replies was buying it. Supporting Israel and aligning with US foreign policy comes with a lot of career benefits for high-profile individuals, and you don’t get to both enjoy those perks and also keep ethical people interested in what you have to say. You can’t have it both ways. You have to choose between the perks and the people. You actually do.
Opposition to the Gaza holocaust is the very first step in assessing if someone is worth my time. If you can’t even meet the basic, bare-minimum expectation of opposing an active genocide, then you are too callous and apathetic to be my friend. If you can’t even get this basic, kindergarten-level moral question right, then your mind is too shallow and your heart too hardened for me to be interested in your analysis, your ideas, your politics, or your art.
There are so many terrible things in our world, and there is so much work that needs to be done to address them. I don’t know what ideas, strategies and movements will get us out of this mess, but I do know that if any are going to emerge they’re going to come from the people who’ve been taking a strong stand against Israel and its western allies these last two years. Those are the individuals, movements, and political factions to pay attention to going forward. Nobody else is equipped to help.
Over 100 Children Have Died of Severe Hunger Amid Israeli Siege: Gaza Health Ministry.
“People are being starved, children are being killed, families have lost everything,” said the United Nations agency for Palestinian Refugees.
Brad Reed, Aug 11, 2025, https://www.commondreams.org/news/gaza-children-starvation-2673875979
The Gaza Health Ministry announced on Monday that more than 100 children in Gaza have died of severe hunger during Israel’s siege of the territory.
As Al Jazeera reported, the Hamas-run Health Ministry said that a total of 222 Palestinians have died from hunger during the siege, including 101 children. The vast majority of these deaths have come in just the last three weeks when the hunger crisis in Gaza started to garner international media attention, the ministry said.
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East on Monday emphasized the direness of the situation in a statement calling for a cease-fire to allow more aid into Gaza.
“People are being starved, children are being killed,” the agency said. “Families have lost everything. Political will and leadership can stop an escalation and end the war. Every heartbeat counts.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed that there is no starvation crisis in Gaza and has said such reports are part of a “fake” propaganda campaign waged by Israel’s enemies.
However, it isn’t just the Gaza Health Ministry warning of a hunger crisis in the region, as international charity Save the Children last week said that 43% of pregnant and breastfeeding women who showed up to its clinics in Gaza last month were malnourished, which represented a threefold increase since March, when the Israeli military imposed a total siege on the area.
The latest numbers about starvation in Gaza come as the Israeli government is pushing forward with a plan to fully invade and occupy Gaza, which experts have warned will only exacerbate the humanitarian crisis among its people.
“If these plans are implemented, they will likely trigger another calamity in Gaza, reverberating across the region and causing further forced displacement, killings, and destruction,” said Miroslav Jenca, the United Nations assistant secretary general, over the weekend.
Slaying and Censoring the Journalists: The Murder of Anas al-Sharif
12 August 2025 Dr Binoy Kampmark, Australian Independent Media
“Assassination,” wrote George Bernard Shaw in The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet, “is the extreme form of censorship.” Such extremism visited Al Jazeera journalist Anas al-Sharif and his colleagues in Gaza City late on August 10. Resting in a tent located outside the main gate of Gaza City’s al-Shifa Hospital, he was killed alongside Al Jazeera correspondent Mohammed Qreiqeh, camera operators Ibrahim Zaher, Mohammed Noufal and Moamen Aliwa, and freelance reporter Mohammed al-Khaldi.
Palestinian journalist Wadi Abu al-Saud recalls the drone attack taking place at 11.22pm. Having entered the tent opposite, he had raised his phone to make a call when an explosion occurred. “A piece of shrapnel hit my phone. I looked back and saw people burning in flames. I tried to extinguish them. Anas and the others had died instantly from the airstrike.” In two subsequent videos, al-Saud vows to “return to my life as a citizen. The truth has died and the coverage has ended.”…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
The murder of al-Sharif and his colleagues by Israeli forces constituted the effective wiping out of Al Jazeera’s team, one of the few able to offer consistent, unsmothered coverage about the IDF’s remorseless campaign in Gaza. Since the October 7, 2023 attacks by Hamas, Israel has prohibited foreign reporters from entering Gaza except under strict invigilation by the Israeli military. Those accompanied by the IDF have been at the mercy of Israeli selectiveness as to where to go and barred from speaking to Palestinians. ………………………………………………. https://theaimn.net/slaying-and-censoring-the-journalists-the-murder-of-anas-al-sharif/
Israeli military plans to occupy Gaza City in major escalation of war
The plan will “take months, lead to the death of the hostages, the killing of many soldiers, cost tens of billions to the Israeli taxpayers, and lead to a political collapse,”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu suggested earlier that Israel’s military will ‘take control of all Gaza’.
Israel’s security cabinet has approved a plan by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the military occupation of Gaza City, located in the north of the Palestinian enclave.
“The [Israeli military] will prepare to take control of Gaza City while providing humanitarian aid to the civilian population outside the combat zones,” Netanyahu’s office said in a statement early on Friday announcing the takeover plan.
Two Israeli government sources told the Reuters news agency that any resolution by the security cabinet would now need to be approved by the full government cabinet, which may not meet until Sunday.
Occupying Gaza City marks a major escalation by Israel in its war on the Palestinian territory and will likely result in the forced displacement of tens of thousands of exhausted and starving residents who are experiencing famine conditions as Israel continues to block humanitarian aid from entering the territory.
United Kingdom Prime Minister Keir Starmer said Israel’s plan to escalate the assault on Gaza was “wrong”.
“This action will do nothing to bring an end to this conflict or to help secure the release of the hostages. It will only bring more bloodshed,” he said in a statement.
Axios news reporter Barak Ravid, who first reported the security cabinet’s approval of the plan, quoted an unnamed Israeli official as saying the operation will involve the forced displacement of “all Palestinian civilians from Gaza City to the central camps and other areas by October 7”.
“A siege will be imposed on the Hamas militants who remain in Gaza City, and at the same time, a ground offensive will be carried out in Gaza City,” Ravid wrote on X, citing the official.
On Thursday, in advance of the security cabinet meeting, Netanyahu said Israel would “take control of all Gaza”.
In a television interview with US outlet Fox News, Netanyahu also said Israel does not want to be “a governing body” in Gaza and would hand over responsibility to an unspecified third party.
“We don’t want to keep it. We want to have a security perimeter. We don’t want to govern it,” he said.
Netanyahu’s comments followed reports in Israeli media earlier this week that the Israeli leader would imminently announce plans to fully occupy the entirety of the Gaza Strip.
Hamas said Netanyahu’s comments “represent a blatant reversal of the negotiation process and clearly expose the real motives behind his withdrawal from the last ceasefire round, despite our nearing a final agreement.”
“His plans to expand the aggression confirm beyond doubt that he seeks to abandon his own prisoners, sacrificing them to serve his personal interests and extremist ideological agenda,” the group said in a statement.
Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid said the decision to take over Gaza City was a “disaster that will lead to many more disasters”.
The plan will “take months, lead to the death of the hostages, the killing of many soldiers, cost tens of billions to the Israeli taxpayers, and lead to a political collapse,” he wrote in a post on X.
“This is exactly what Hamas wanted: for Israel to be trapped in the field without a goal, without defining the picture of the day after, in a useless occupation that no one understands where it is leading.”
Shihab Rattansi, Al Jazeera’s correspondent in Washington, DC, said Israel’s move to occupy Gaza has been “telegraphed for several days now”.
“Donald Trump has all but greenlit whatever Benjamin Netanyahu wants to do. He said it would be up to the Israelis,” Rattansi said.
It is unclear how many people still live in Gaza City, the enclave’s largest population centre before Israel’s war on the territory that has now killed more than 61,000 Palestinians since October 2023.
Hundreds of thousands of people fled Gaza City under forced evacuation orders issued by the Israeli military in the opening weeks of the war, but many returned during a brief ceasefire at the start of this year.
A major ground operation in Gaza City could displace many thousands and further disrupt efforts to deliver food to the famine-stricken territory, where almost 200 people have now died from starvation and malnutrition.
“There is nothing left to occupy,” Gaza resident Maysaa al-Heila said on hearing of the planned takeover of the city.
“There is no Gaza left,” al-Heila told The Associated Press news agency.
1,500 Killed While Seeking Aid in Gaza Since May: UN.
August 5, 2025, https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20250804-1500-killed-while-seeking-aid-in-gaza-since-may-un/
Around 1,500 people have been killed in Gaza since May while seeking humanitarian aid, the UN said Monday, Anadolu reports.
“The Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs says that many people reportedly continue to be killed and injured, including people seeking food along the UN convoy routes and militarized distribution points. Some 1,500 people have been reportedly killed since May,” Farhan Haq, UN deputy spokesperson, told reporters.
He added that a health care worker with the Palestine Red Crescent Society was killed Sunday in an Israeli airstrike in Khan Yunus, southern Gaza.
Since May 27, a US- and Israeli-backed aid scheme in Gaza has been widely criticized as being ineffective as well as being a “death trap” for starving civilians.
Asked by Anadolu whether the UN secretary-general believes the UN’s reputation and effectiveness can be salvaged given its failure to stop Israel’s actions, including plans to expand the annexation of Palestinian land, Haq responded: “He certainly does.”
Haq said the UN’s record includes “successful diplomatic negotiations” and humanitarian aid that continues to “keep billions of people alive.” He emphasized that lack of international unity, particularly within the UN Security Council, hinders the organization’s effectiveness.
Gaza’s Government Media Office said Monday that Israel had allowed in just 674 aid trucks since July 27 – only 14% of the strip’s minimum daily requirement of 600 trucks.
It said most of the 80 trucks that entered on Sunday were looted amid what it called “a deliberately engineered climate of chaos and starvation,” accusing Israel of weaponizing hunger to undermine Palestinian resilience.
Rejecting international calls for a ceasefire, the Israeli army has pursued a brutal offensive on Gaza since Oct. 7, 2023, killing nearly 61,000 Palestinians, almost half of them women and children. The military campaign has devastated the enclave and brought it to the verge of famine.
Israel Preparing To Escalate Military Offensive in Gaza
An Israeli official said Netanyahu is pushing for ‘the release of hostages as part of a military resolution’
by Dave DeCamp | August 3, 2025 https://news.antiwar.com/2025/08/03/israel-preparing-to-escalate-military-offensive-in-gaza/
The Israeli military is drawing up plans to escalate its genocidal war in the Gaza Strip that will soon be presented to Israeli political leadership, Haaretz reported on Sunday.
An Israeli official said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “is pushing for the release of hostages as part of a military resolution,” and he is set to discuss the matter with his cabinet on Tuesday. According to the Haaretz report, the idea is to extend ground operations into sensitive areas, including Gaza’s central refugee camps, where Israeli captives are believed to be held.
Israeli officials are now claiming that Hamas doesn’t want a deal, even though the group has long said it is willing to release all remaining Israeli captives in exchange for a permanent ceasefire. Officials are pointing to Hamas’s denial of a claim by US envoy Steve Witkoff, who said the group was willing to disarm. Hamas responded that it would only give up its weapons if an independent Palestinian state were established.
Witkoff was in Israel on Friday and Saturday and met with family members of Israelis being held in Gaza. He told them that President Trump no longer seeks a temporary ceasefire deal but wants a comprehensive one that will free the remaining 20 living Israeli captives. However, Netanyahu hasn’t shown interest in a deal, and there’s no sign that Trump is willing to put pressure on him.
The family members of Israeli captives in Gaza want a diplomatic solution and are against military escalation. The Hostages and Missing Families Forum has criticized the reported plans for the expansion of military operations, warning that “expanding the war endangers the lives of the hostages, who are already in immediate danger of death.”
Netanyahu claimed on Sunday that the videos of two emaciated Israeli captives released by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) show that Hamas “doesn’t want a deal” and vowed that he would work to “eliminate” the Palestinian group. For its part, Hamas insisted that the Israeli prisoners eat “what our fighters and our people eat” and said that the Red Cross could deliver aid to them if Israel permanently opened humanitarian corridors and halted airstrikes during aid deliveries.
Israel has been under significant international pressure to allow more aid into Gaza as Palestinians are starving to death due to its blockade. The Haaretz report said that the US and Israel appear to be moving toward expanding Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) distribution points in north Gaza, which would require Israel to occupy more territory.
Nearly 1,000 Palestinians have been killed by the IDF near GHF distribution sites, according to the UN. Anthony Aguilar, a retired US Army Green Beret who worked at GHF sites, has blown the whistle on the operation and says that the sites were designed purposely so Palestinians seeking aid would have to walk through combat zones where they can be killed. He said that he witnessed the IDF commit war crimes by firing into crowds of hungry civilians.
Despite the massacres near GHF sites, the operation has received a resounding endorsement from the Trump administration. On Friday, Witkoff and US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee visited a GHF site, a move that was criticized as a PR stunt.
Chris Hedges: The Gaza Riviera
Text originally published July 26, 2025.
Scheerpost, By Chris Hedges / The Chris Hedges Report, August 4, 2025 , https://scheerpost.com/2025/08/04/chris-hedges-the-gaza-riviera-2/
TRANSCRIPT:
Israelis do not see the images of skeletal corpses of Palestinian children who they have starved to death as a curse. They do not see the slain families they gun down at food hubs — designed not to deliver aid but lure starving Palestinians into a massive concentration camp in the south of Gaza in preparation for deportation — as a war crime. Israelis do not look at the savage bombing and shelling that kill or wound dozens of Palestinian civilians, where an average of 28 children die daily, as anything extraordinary. They do not see the wasteland of Gaza, pulverized by bombs and methodically being torn down by bulldozers and excavators, leaving virtually the entire population of Gaza homeless, as barbaric. They do not see the destruction of water purification plants, decimation of hospitals and clinics, where doctors and medical staff are often unable to work because they are weak from malnutrition, as savage. They do not blink at the assassinations of doctors as well as journalists, 232 of whom have been murdered for trying to document the horror.
Israelis have blinded themselves morally and intellectually…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
The genocide in Gaza signals the abolition, for Israelis as well as Palestinians, of the rule of law. It marks the obliteration of even the pretense of an ethical code. Israelis are the barbarians they condemn. If there is any warped justice in this genocide it is that Israelis, once they finish with the Palestinians, will be forced to live together in moral squalor. https://scheerpost.com/2025/08/04/chris-hedges-the-gaza-riviera-2/
Chris Hedges: The Gaza Riviera
July 27, 2025 ,By Chris Hedges / ScheerPost, https://scheerpost.com/2025/07/27/chris-hedges-the-gaza-riviera/
Israelis do not see the images of skeletal corpses of Palestinian children who they have starved to death as a curse. They do not see the slain families they gun down at food hubs — designed not to deliver aid but lure starving Palestinians into a massive concentration camp in the south of Gaza in preparation for deportation — as a war crime. Israelis do not look at the savage bombing and shelling that kill or wound dozens of Palestinian civilians, where an average of 28 children die daily, as anything extraordinary. They do not see the wasteland of Gaza, pulverized by bombs and methodically being torn down by bulldozers and excavators, leaving virtually the entire population of Gaza homeless, as barbaric. They do not see the destruction of water purification plants, decimation of hospitals and clinics, where doctors and medical staff are often unable to work because they are weak from malnutrition, as savage. They do not blink at the assassinations of doctors as well as journalists, 232 of whom have been murdered for trying to document the horror.
Israelis have blinded themselves morally and intellectually. They view the genocide through the lens of a bankrupt media and political class that tells them only what they want to hear and shows them only what they want to see. They are intoxicated by the power of their industrial weapons and license to kill with impunity. They are drunk on self-adulation and the fantasy that they are the vanguard of civilization. They believe that the extermination of a people, including children, condemned as human contaminants, makes the world, especially their world, a happier and safer place.
They are the heirs of Pol Pot, the killers that carried out the genocides in East Timor, Rwanda and Bosnia and, yes, the Nazis. Israel, like all genocidal states — no population since World War II has been dispossessed and starved with such speed and ruthlessness – has a final solution that would have earned the stamp of approval from Adolf Eichmann.
Starvation was always the plan, the preordained final chapter of the genocide. Israel methodically set out from the beginning of the genocide to destroy sources of food, bombing bakeries and blocking food shipments into Gaza, something it has accelerated since March, when it severed nearly all food supplies. It targeted the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) — on which most Palestinians depended on for food — for destruction, accusing its employees, without providing evidence, of being involved in the attacks of Oct. 7. This accusation was used to give funders such as the United States, which provided $422 million to the agency in 2023, the excuse to halt financial support. Israel then banned UNRWA.
Over 1,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli soldiers and U.S. mercenaries in the chaotic scramble to get one of the few food packages distributed during the brief blocks of time, usually an hour, at the four aid sites set up by the Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, according to the U.N. Human Rights Office.
Once Gaza was turned into a moonscape after 21 months of saturation bombing, once Palestinians were forced to live in tents, under crude tarps or in the open air, once clean water, food and medical aid became nearly impossible to find, once civil society was obliterated, Israel began its grim campaign to starve the Palestinians out of Gaza.
One in three people in Gaza are going multiple days without eating, according to the U.N.
Starvation is not a pretty sight. I covered the famine in Sudan in 1988 that took an estimated 250,000 lives. There are streaks in my lungs — scars from standing amid hundreds of Sudanese who were dying of tuberculosis. I was strong and healthy and fought off the contagion. They were weak and emaciated and did not.
I watched hundreds of skeletal figures, ghosts of human beings, trudge at a glacial pace across the barren Sudanese landscape. Hyenas, accustomed to eating human flesh, routinely picked off small children. I stood over clusters of bleached human bones on the outskirts of villages where dozens of people, too weak to walk, had laid down in a group and never got up. Many were the remains of entire families.
The starved lack enough calories to sustain themselves. They eat anything to survive — animal feed, grass, leaves, insects, rodents, even dirt. They suffer from constant diarrhea. They have trouble breathing because of respiratory infections. They rip up tiny bits of food, often spoiled, and ration it in a vain attempt to hold off the gnawing hunger pains.
Starvation reduces the iron needed to produce hemoglobin, a protein in red blood cells that carries oxygen from the lungs to the body, and myoglobin, a protein that provides oxygen to muscles, coupled with a lack of vitamin B1, which affects heart and brain function. Anemia sets in. The body, in essence, feeds on itself. Tissue and muscle waste away. It is impossible to regulate body temperature. Kidneys shut down. Immune systems crash. Vital organs atrophy. Blood circulation slows. The volume of blood decreases. Infectious diseases such as typhoid, tuberculosis and cholera become an epidemic, killing people by the thousands.
It is impossible to concentrate. Emaciated victims succumb to mental and emotional withdrawal and apathy. They do not want to be touched or moved. The heart muscle is weakened. Victims, even at rest, are in a state of virtual heart failure. Wounds do not heal. Vision is impaired with cataracts, even among the young. Finally, wracked by convulsions and hallucinations, the heart stops. This process can last up to 40 days for an adult. Children, the elderly and the sick expire at faster rates. This is the future Israel has preordained for the two million people in Gaza.
But it is not the future Israelis see. They see paradise. They see an ethno-nationalist Jewish state where Palestinians, whose land they stole and occupied and whose people they have subjugated and forced into an apartheid existence, do not exist. They see cafes and hotels rising up where thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of bodies lie buried under the rubble. They see tourists frolicking on the Gaza beachfront, a vision enhanced by an Artificial Intelligence-generated video uploaded to social media by Israeli Minister of Innovation, Science and Technology, Gila Gamliel. It is what a Gaza devoid of Palestinians would look like, echoing the absurdist AI video posted by Donald Trump.
In the new video, carefree Israelis eat at seaside restaurants. Anchored in the sparkling Mediterranean are luxury yachts. Gleaming hotels and office high rises, including a Trump Tower, dot the beachfront. Attractive residential neighborhoods stand where now there are broken, jagged mounds of concrete. The video shows Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife, Sara, as well as Trump and Melania, strolling along the seaside.
Gamliel, like other Israeli leaders and Trump, cynically uses the term “voluntary emigration” to describe the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. This omits the stark choice Israel actually offers the Palestinians — leave or die.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has called for a “security annexation” of the northern Gaza Strip and vowed that Gaza will become an “inseparable part of the State of Israel.” He made the remarks at a Knesset conference called “The Gaza Riviera — from vision to reality,” which presented proposals for the building of Jewish colonies in Gaza. Smotrich said Israel would “relocate Gazans to other countries,” and that Trump endorsed the plan.
Israeli Minister of Heritage Amichai Eliyahu, who once proposed dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza, declared that “All Gaza will be Jewish.” The Israeli government “is racing ahead for Gaza to be wiped out,” Eliyahu said. He described Palestinians as Nazis. “Thank God, we are wiping out this evil. We are pushing this population that has been educated on ‘Mein Kampf.’”
Genocidal killers embrace fantasies of eradicating a native population and expanding their ethnonationalist state. The Nazis carried out their genocidal assault, which included mass starvation, on Slavs, Eastern European Jews and other indigenous people, dismissed as Untermenschen, or subhumans. Colonists were then to be shipped to Central and Eastern Europe to Germanize the occupied territory.
These killers do not reckon with the darkness they unleash. The upscale beachfront properties dreamt of by Israel will never appear, just as the modern, exclusively Serb capital, with its golden domed cathedral, imposing presidency building, 15-story clock tower, state-of-the-art medical center and national theater with a 72-foot revolving stage was never built on the ruins of Bosnia.
Rather, there will be ugly apartment blocks, populated by the usual miscreants, proto-fascists, racists and mediocrities who live in the Jewish colonies in the West Bank. These ultranationalists, who have formed rogue militias to seize Palestinian land and joined the Israeli army in murdering over 1,000 Palestinians in the West Bank since Oct. 7, will define Israel. They are the Israeli version of the 3-million-strong Pancasila Youth — Indonesia’s equivalent of the Brown Shirts or the Hitler Youth — that in 1965 helped carry out the genocidal mayhem that left half a million to one million dead.
These rogue militias, equipped with automatic weapons provided by the Israeli government, lynched Saifullah Musallet, a 20-year-old Palestinian-American, who was attempting to protect his family’s land two weeks ago. He is the fifth U.S. citizen killed in the West Bank since Oct. 7.
Once these Israeli goons and thugs are done with the Palestinians, they will turn on each other.
The genocide in Gaza signals the abolition, for Israelis as well as Palestinians, of the rule of law. It marks the obliteration of even the pretense of an ethical code. Israelis are the barbarians they condemn. If there is any warped justice in this genocide it is that Israelis, once they finish with the Palestinians, will be forced to live together in moral squalor.
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