Thursday, July 2 marked the 1,000th day of the U.S.-Israeli genocide against the Palestinian people of Gaza.

On October 7, 2023, several thousand fighters from the Islamic fundamentalist organization Hamas carried out a surprise attack in southern Israel killing some 1,200 people and taking another 251 hostage. 

Israel seized on this reactionary attack by Hamas to launch an all-out genocide targeting every dimension of life and society of the 2.2 million Palestinians in Gaza. Whole families were slaughtered. Children were executed. Homes, hospitals, schools, work places, and sanitation plants were bombed, as Israel largely cut off food, fuel, medicine and other life-giving goods from entering the territory. 

Houses were demolished and when people fled to live in tents, their tents were set on fire. People were bombed, shot, starved. Parents pulled their dead children out of the rubble, and children watched their parents blown apart. Bombing after bombing, week after week.

Gaza has been reduced to a Hiroshima-like hellscape by 223,000 tons of American-made bombs dropped by Israel. This is the equivalent of 14-16 times the explosive power of the atom bomb the U.S. dropped on that ill-fated Japanese city during World War 2.

This time, though, the genocidal terror was livestreamed into the phones of people around the world.

This genocidal killing spree didn’t come from nowhere: it was a monstrous leap in the 75-plus years of Israeli terror, mass murder, oppression, and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. (Go here and here for more.)

Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza has been fully supported by the U.S. imperialists to the tune of more than $21.7 billion in military assistance since October 2023 alone. Why? Because the U.S. sees Israel as a key military asset and outpost in the Middle East, a region crucial to U.S. imperialism’s global power and dominance. 

The Phony U.S.-Brokered Ceasefire—Cover for Ongoing Genocide

In October 2025, the fascist Trump regime brokered a so-called ceasefire between Israel and Hamas that was supposed to halt the fighting. This was a lie and cover-up. Israel continued its killing and genocide, just at a low enough level to avoid international condemnation.

Today, the situation in Gaza is beyond a nightmare. But now, the videos are censored and the terror on the ground largely silenced and ignored.

Over the past 1,000 days at least 73,066 Palestinians have been killed—21,500 of them children, 1,022 of them babies! Nearly 10,000 people are missing, likely most still buried in the 68 million tons of rubble littering Gaza from the destruction of 90 percent of its homes and buildings.¹ Another 173,514 Palestinians have been wounded.

Hospitals and ambulances have been targeted. Some 1,700 medical workers and hundreds of journalists and aid workers have been killed, often deliberately; more than 2,700 families—including some whole extended families—have been entirely wiped out, erasing them from the civil registry.²

As millions were celebrating the World Cup, on June 29 Israeli soldiers shot Saleem Al-Ashqar, 32, a well-known soccer player. The Palestinian Football Association said 1,009 sports figures had been killed since October 7, 567 of them soccer players.

More than 1,000 victims have been killed after the U.S. “ceasefire” was declared, along with nearly 3,500 more wounded.

And the living? Although the outright famine that engulfed Gaza last August has receded, hunger, malnutrition and food insecurity continue to stalk Gaza, and Israel continues to block most humanitarian supplies from coming in; most medicines are out of stock; over 2.1 million cases of infectious diseases have been documented; and life expectancy has fallen dramatically to a mere 40 years. The number of orphaned children—with just one or no parents left—has tripled to more than 64,400.

“Displaced families are crammed into rodent-infested shelters and tents eroded by severe heat and rain,” ReliefWeb reports, “with open sewage running beside them. Skin diseases are rampant among children due to the overcrowding and poor sanitation…. [M]ost people get to eat fruit less than once a week, and some families still go entire days without eating anything at all. Thousands of children need treatment for malnutrition every month.”

No statistic can capture the enormity of the unspeakable horrors, traumas, and personal and societal tragedies that have intentionally been inflicted on the people of Gaza by Israel and the U.S.

Looming: A Further Escalation of the Genocide

When the ceasefire was signed in October 2025, Israeli forces controlled roughly half of Gaza. The plan was supposedly that they would gradually pull back. Instead they’ve steadily expanded their grip on Gaza to the point now where Israel has grabbed more and more territory and is now occupying between 70 and 80 percent of Gaza. 

Israel’s fascist finance minister Bezalel Smotrich is now demanding the immediate establishment of Israeli settlements in northern Gaza.³ There are also reports that Israel plans to force Gazans into enclosed “humanitarian shelters”—in other words concentration camps—to be controlled by a multinational police force run by Trump’s “Board of Peace.” Meanwhile Israel would “continue to maintain and deepen its hold” on the rest of Gaza.

This Trump-controlled Board of Peace was formed in January, supposedly to oversee the “ceasefire,” direct reconstruction, and govern Gaza. Now, according to the Guardian, it’s “planning a sweeping grant of legal immunity for itself.”⁴ It is also demanding free “public premises and facilities” in Gaza, which could “open the door to illegal confiscation of Palestinian property.”

1,000 Days Ago Protests Surged on Campuses…Why the Silence Now? 

In October 2023—some 1,000 days ago—campus protests began against the U.S.-Israeli genocide in Gaza shortly after it was launched. This resistance grew and spread into the next year. By spring 2024 this resistance took a leap when defiant protest encampments sprang up on campuses across the country. 

By the end of May, the Crowd Counting Consortium at Harvard University had documented “more than 3,700 days with pro-Palestinian protest activity at over 500 U.S. schools since October 7, 2023, including encampments at more than 130 of them.”

This massive and unprecedented surge of protest against the U.S.-Israeli assault on the Palestinian people compelled millions to rethink what they had always been led to believe about Israel and, to a degree, the U.S.

The U.S. rulers responded with outrageous lies and slanders against the protesters, and vicious repression. This repression intensified even more when the fascist Trump came to power in January 2025. 

In March, 2024, the revolutionary leader Bob Avakian analyzed why the U.S. rulers had reacted so furiously and what it showed about this entire system in his social media message REVOLUTION #17: “American Exceptionalism: further exposing the reality behind the myth”:

Colleges, and especially “elite” universities, have been a focus of this repression—repression which has crudely violated supposed “rights of free speech” and “standards of academic freedom.” Students and faculty have been targeted, and even university presidents have been driven out of their positions for failing to fully repress these protests.

Why is this happening? Because fundamental interests of U.S. capitalism-imperialism are at stake. Because Israel plays a “special role” as a heavily armed bastion of support for U.S. imperialism in a strategically important part of the world (the “Middle East”). And Israel has been a key force in the commission of atrocities which have helped to maintain the oppressive rule of U.S. imperialism in many other parts of the world.

And this repression is happening because representatives of the ruling class in this country have a definite sense that if youth especially at “elite” universities begin to seriously question and act against what this system is doing—if the system “loses the allegiance” of large numbers of those students—that can be a big factor in creating a real crisis for the system as a whole, as happened in the 1960s: a crisis that, now more than ever, this system really cannot afford, when the whole country is already being torn apart by deep divisions, with bitter clashes right among the ruling powers.

This Ongoing U.S.-Israel Genocide Must Be Stopped! And This Must Be Done as Part of Revolution Against the System That Spawned It.

By 2025, the U.S. rulers had largely suppressed this powerful and courageous upsurge against Israel’s U.S.-backed genocide in Gaza. A huge part of this, certainly, was the fascistic repression. But there has also been some demoralization and disorientation resulting from how thoroughly the U.S. and Israel have been able to carry out this genocide of the Palestinians, how intensely this genocide continued despite the protest, confusion about the source of this genocide, and how much more difficult the road to liberation has proven to be than most people involved were led to believe. To those of you who still refuse to accept the horror that drove you to act, we challenge you with the following from Bob Avakian:

To understand why we are confronted with the situation we are, it is necessary not merely to respond to—and in effect be whipped around by—what is happening on the surface at any given time, but to dig beneath the surface, to discover the underlying mainsprings and causes of things, and arrive at an understanding of the fundamental problem and the actual solution. This means coming to the scientific understanding that we are living under a system, and what that system actually is (the system of capitalism-imperialism); working to grasp the deeper relations and dynamics of this system and how this is setting the framework for how different sections of society spontaneously think and react to events in society and the world; and what is the possible way forward to transforming all of this in the interests of the masses of humanity and ultimately humanity as a whole.

STOP THE U.S.-BACKED ISRAELI GENOCIDE OF PALESTINIANS

THIS WHOLE SYSTEM IS ROTTEN AND ILLEGITIMATE! 

WE NEED AND WE DEMAND A WHOLE NEW WAY TO LIVE AND A FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT SYSTEM!