Palestinian child injured by Israeli airstrike in Deir al Balah, Gaza Strip, October 10, 2024. Photo: AP
“Every day, we experience anguish over our relatives, neighbors and loved ones. We are suffocating … we are dying! Every day, we grieve the killing of someone new. Girls killed. Children torn to pieces. They are all gone. Put an end to this war, we can’t take it anymore.”
—A Palestinian’s man reaction to an Israeli drone missile attack on the Maghazi refugee camp in central Gaza, October 12, 2024
A Year of “Extermination”
For a solid year, Israel waged what a report from the United Nations calls a war of “extermination” in Gaza. Meaning, a crime against humanity that at its core is “the intentional infliction of conditions of life [such as] the deprivation of access to food and medicine, calculated to bring about the destruction of part of a population.” (Emphasis added) (See box, “UN Commission of Inquiry Exposes, Condemns Israel’s Crime of 'Extermination,'" below for more on this report.)
Already this genocide has killed, at minimum, 42,000 people in Gaza—more likely around 120,000. This includes—again, at minimum—17,000 children. Another 50,000 children are orphaned or separated from their families. Thousands of kids lost limbs! 625,000 children have missed an entire year of school.
About one million refugees from Israeli violence now live on a strip of beach in Gaza at al-Mawasi that Israel calls a “safe zone.” But it is not “safe”: Israel has attacked it at least 18 times. It is infested with raw sewage, disease-spreading insects, with people living in tents in heat and cold. According to Doctors Without Borders (MSF), “Access to water, healthcare, and safety is already almost non-existent...”
Yet it is still “safer” than the rest of Gaza, a virtual free-fire zone for the Zionist military (the IDF, or Israeli “Defense” Force) which—among other crimes—shoots small children in the head as a regular practice. (See witness testimony and X-rays here.)
The “Generals' Plan” for Ethnic Cleansing
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Now Israel has launched a new wave of genocide. It began in north Gaza (including Gaza City), once home to over a million people. About 400,000 live there still. They have survived Israeli assaults which destroyed nearly 70 percent of all buildings in the north, along with roads, schools, medical facilities, farms and bakeries. They survived a terrible famine last summer.
On October 1, 2024, Israeli forces sealed off all incoming supplies of humanitarian aid to the north. Soon after, the World Food Programme announced that it could no longer distribute food to families. All the smaller food distribution groups also shut down.
On October 6, Israel ordered nearly all 400,000 Palestinians to evacuate north Gaza and travel to the al-Mawasi “humanitarian area.” BBC reports: “The heart of the message is that the IDF will be using ‘great force … for a long time.’ In other words, don’t expect to come back any time soon.”
This “message” is being widely viewed as the beginning implementation of what is known as the “Generals’ Plan.” This is a plan pushed by Giora Eiland (former head of national security) and other Israeli military and political leaders, to completely empty northern Gaza of all Palestinians and declare it a “closed military zone.” After that, any Palestinians would be considered “enemy combatants” (even more than they are now!).
The stated aim is to isolate and destroy what is left of Hamas in the north, probably to be followed by moving Israeli settlers in. And the exiled Palestinians would never return.
Faced with this, so far most people have stayed put or moved to what they hope will be safer parts of north Gaza. Some remain because they are disabled or too poor to undertake the endless trek from one “safe” area to another, stalked by thirst and hunger, under the eyes—and sometimes the bullets and bombs—of the invaders… only to be driven out again a few weeks or months later.
But there is also a grim defiance in the mix, born of seemingly endless, merciless Israeli oppression. A young woman explained the stubborn refusal of her and her parents, siblings, nieces and nephews to leave: “We refuse to flee only to die in humiliation. Death is death, whether we die here or elsewhere. So let’s die with dignity in our home.”
Laying Siege to Hospitals and Refugee Camps
On October 7, the bombing began. The prospects for fleeing became infinitely more dangerous. Israeli forces concentrated attention—as they had previously—on the Jabaliya refugee camp, north of Gaza City, 50-100,000 people crammed into about half a square mile. Already deemed “destroyed” by Israeli bombs and troops in previous attacks, some residents had stayed and others who fled returned. Now Israeli forces declared (without evidence) that Hamas forces were “regrouping” in north Gaza, including Jabaliya.
Israel threatened “systematic strikes and the radical destruction of [alleged] terrorist structures”… and they delivered on their threat. On Monday, October 7, 15 people were killed in an air strike on a tented encampment. On Tuesday, air strikes killed at least 18. On Wednesday, armed troops stormed into the camp with a “fire at anyone who moves” stance. Tanks surrounded Jabaliya. On Thursday, 22 people were killed there. On Friday, dozens of homes were blown up by explosive robots. The Gaza health ministry stated that by Friday night, 200 people had been killed in the north.
Palestinian woman mourns relatives killed in Israeli airstrike in Deir al-Balah, October 2, 2024. Photo: AP
Attacks also intensified in central Gaza. Democracy Now! reports that on October 8, the Bureij refugee camp near Deir al-Balah was bombed, killing 25 people including at least five children. On October 8, a school being used as a refugee center in Deir al-Balah was bombed, killing 28.
On October 8, soldiers surrounded the three remaining, barely-functioning hospitals serving the area—Kamal Adwan, Indonesian, and Al-Awda—and demanded that they evacuate their staff and patients, which included small children on ventilators, elderly people on dialysis, and 80 war-wounded people in intensive care. These patients could not be safely moved and could not find treatment nearby in any case.
Reportedly, “Israeli forces had surrounded the Kamal Adwan hospital and opened fire on its administration office.” The hospital director refused to shut Kamal Adwan down and evacuate, declaring “I’ve been here since the genocide started, and I am determined to continue helping my people.” Finally, the Medical Aid for Palestine group (MAP) was able to move some of the children out, but the ambulances were detained at IDF checkpoints! By October 12 the situation at these hospitals was called “catastrophic.” MAP warned, “The world must act before Gaza is erased entirely.”
In an attempt to “justify” its shocking attacks on hospitals serving a huge and desperate population, Israel trotted out its standard boilerplate rationale: that Hamas is using hospitals (or schools, or residential buildings, or whatever they just blew up) as “command centers.”
Another example of this disgusting bias towards the forces of genocide on the part of the U.S. mainstream media: The New York Times recently wrote that on the basis of these “command center” allegations, Israel “has raided and attacked several [hospitals] in Gaza over the course of the war.” What exactly do they mean by “several”? The day before the Times wrote this, the UN documented 498 Israeli attacks on 110 medical facilities, killing 747 people over the past year. Or, you know, “several”!
Here we just have to say that these claims are utterly worthless: Israel allows no independent forces to investigate its assertions; it bars non-Palestinian journalists from Gaza almost entirely and is killing off Palestinian journalists at a horrifying pace (at least 128 killed so far, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists). It never even explains what a “command center” is (a militant with a cellphone maybe?)… And even if it were true in some instances, this can in no way justify the slaughter of dozens, hundreds and thousands of innocent men, women and children. Yet these claims are taken seriously by the entire pro-Israel U.S. media!
***
After reading the accounts in this article of the continuing U.S.-backed slaughter in Gaza—which, as horrific as they are, only scratch the surface of what Israel has done in just week of genocide… can anyone really deny the truth of this “timely provocation” from revolutionary leader Bob Avakian?
The following is a companion to my statement that: After the Holocaust, the worst thing that has happened to Jewish people is the state of Israel.
Israel has done something truly incredible—Israel has managed to turn Jews into Nazis!
This is the terrible but unavoidable conclusion that has to be drawn from the whole history of Israel, in its murderous oppression of the Palestinian people, and the current genocidal actions of Israel, along with the statements of high officials of the Israeli government, as well as backers of Israel, in attempting to justify all this.
It also has to be said that none of this could have happened without the full, unwavering support of U.S. imperialism for Israel’s continuing crimes against humanity and war crimes: its ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people, its apartheid rule over them for generations, and now the heightened genocidal slaughter in Gaza and the mounting violence of illegitimate settlers, backed by the Israeli army, against Palestinian people in the West Bank.
UN Commission of Inquiry Exposes, Condemns Israel’s Crime of “Extermination”
On October 10, the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory issued a damning report on the first year of Israel’s war on the Palestinian people.
The Commission accused Israel of “Extermination,” a “crime against humanity.” (page 18, paragraph 89, and page 19, paragraph 94) This charge (and others in the Report) was based on four months of review of thousands of pieces of evidence and witness interviews.
What exactly is the crime of “Extermination”? Legally it is defined as “the intentional infliction of conditions of life, inter alia [for example] the deprivation of access to food and medicine, calculated to bring about the destruction of part of a population.” (Emphasis added)
The Report called out many other violations of international law (and human decency) by Israel (as well as by Hamas and Islamic Jihad). Among the Israeli crimes the Report exposes (all emphasis below is added):
- “Israel has implemented a concerted policy to destroy the health-care system of Gaza. Israeli security forces have deliberately killed, wounded, arrested, detained, mistreated and tortured medical personnel and targeted medical vehicles.” (page18, paragraph 89);
- Israeli attacks “against health-care facilities directly resulted in the killing of civilians, including children and pregnant women, who were receiving treatment or seeking shelter and indirectly led to deaths of civilians owing to the resulting lack of medical care, supplies and equipment.” (page 19, paragraph 94);
- Israeli security forces “deliberately created conditions of life that have resulted in the destruction of generations of Palestinian children and the Palestinian people as a group.” (page 20, paragraph 96);
- “Detention [of Palestinians] in Israel has been characterized by widespread and systematic abuse, physical and psychological violence, sexual and gender-based violence, and death in detention.” (page 20, paragraph 101);
- Inmates were “subjected to consistent mistreatment, including lack of sufficient food and appropriate hygiene facilities, beatings, abusive language and being forced to perform humiliating acts. Israeli security forces committed those acts with the intent to inflict pain and suffering, amounting to torture as a war crime and a crime against humanity.” (pages 20-21, paragraph 102.)
This is just a sampling of the 22 paragraphs, each focusing on a distinct aspect of Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people over the past year. Taken together these constitute the foundation and the validation of the overarching crime against humanity: “Extermination” of a substantial part of the Palestinian people. And they make even clearer that silence or passivity in the face of crimes of this magnitude is complicity in those crimes and is intolerable.
We encourage people to check out the Report for yourselves.