On May 31, Genocide Joe Biden claimed that Israel had made a ceasefire proposal to Hamas. And, with the blood of well over 10,000 Palestinian children on his hands, Biden had the obscene hypocrisy to point the finger of blame at Hamas and say, “It’s time for this war to end and for the day after to begin.” 

A ceasefire would be a ceasefire in a place filled with bodies and unexploded bombs under the rubble; in a place of destruction and starvation. Still, it might provide at least some space for people to breathe.

But Biden’s claim that it is Hamas who has been holding up a ceasefire is ridiculous and obscene. The U.S. has repeatedly blocked calls in the UN for a ceasefire, and every time Israel has blatantly defied those calls, the U.S. has done nothing. And no sooner had Biden finished calling for a ceasefire than the office of Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu—Netan-Nazi—denounced it, saying that "conditions for ending the war have not changed.” Those conditions being "the destruction of Hamas military and governing capabilities, the freeing of all hostages and ensuring that Gaza no longer poses a threat to Israel."

Genocide Joe and Netan-Nazi have their real differences over how to maintain Israel as a stable Jewish-supremacist, apartheid enforcer for U.S. imperialism. But they are both framing what is going on in a grotesque distortion of reality. What is going on in Gaza did not “start” on October 7, and it is not essentially a “war” between Israel and Hamas. It is a one-sided slaughter of overwhelmingly defenseless Palestinians. 

Israel seized on Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel—which included the war crimes of taking hostages and the murder of civilians—to attempt to deal with what Israel’s rulers see as an existential threat. That is: in the area now ruled by Israel (the state of Israel and territory it occupies), Jews are a minority. Israel’s objective in the current genocidal assault on Gaza is to reduce the Palestinians to such a state that they can no longer pose any threat to Israel’s existence as an apartheid, Jewish-supremacist state. (Note, for example that Netan-Nazi defines Israel’s objectives as “ensuring that Gaza”—not Hamas—“no longer poses a threat to Israel.”) 

That genocidal death, destruction, imposed famine and disease, and attempt to crush the very existence of the Palestinian people has been hellishly escalating for eight months now.

In just these past ten days…

• Israel’s massive invasion of the city of Rafah is shrouded in what a veteran Al Jazeera journalist on the ground called a “media blackout.” But aerial photos, on-the-ground photos of massive clouds of black smoke from bombs, reports by residents of tanks and troops seizing a key area in the center of the city, and the fact that one million desperate, starving people have fled the city points to a massive, murderous, destructive Israeli invasion of Rafah—exactly what Genocide Joe Biden claimed would cross a “red line.” And yet it is happening, and U.S. arms and aid continue to fuel it.
  
  The invasion began on the east side of Rafah where Al Jazeera is reporting entire neighborhoods have been cleared of any residential buildings. Israel seized and shut down the Rafah crossing from Egypt into Gaza which has been the only consistent channel for aid as Israel regularly shuts down truck entry directly from Israel to Gaza. On May 31, Al Jazeera reported that eyewitnesses described tanks and armored vehicles, with artillery shells reaching as far as a tent camp for displaced people in the western part of the city. And on May 31, Israel again targeted and killed medical workers, a paramedic crew attempting to reach victims of an Israeli bombing attack in Rafah.
  
  For background, see Genocide Joe Lies, Palestinians Die, as Israeli Invasion Turns Rafah into a Death Camp.

• More emerges on the hellish inferno in Rafah caused by an Israeli bomb. Over the past week, new details emerged on the hellish fire set off by an Israeli bomb on May 19 in a densely packed area outside the city of Rafah that massacred 45 people, many burned alive. Israel and the U.S. claimed that this was a small “precision” bomb that nobody could have expected would burn people alive. 
  
  Those are lies. This was a U.S.-supplied 240-pound bomb configured to explode before hitting the ground, which guaranteed it would create damage and death over a wider area. A weapons expert told CBS News that the type of bomb used caries a “severe risk” to civilians, especially in the conditions of people packed into tents pitched side-by-side.
   
• People returning to Jabalya in northern Gaza are finding stunning devastation after three weeks of Israeli bombardment and rampage in May. The Washington Post reported that desperate people attempting to rebuild life there described “complete destruction” of the refugee camp near the city. The camp, in the form of what was an overcrowded housing project, was home to people driven from what is now Israel during the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 that drove over 750,000 Palestinians from their homes. One man said, “I did not know where my house was or where its borders were. The area has no house suitable for living at all.” The school where people had sheltered was destroyed. People are eating stale bread they find on the ground as they search for bodies of relatives buried in rubble.

• Famine sweeps through Gaza. Israel has systematically destroyed Gaza’s capacity to bake bread and access drinkable water. Due to the lack of fuel, more than 98 percent of Gaza’s bakeries have been forced to close, cutting off a key food source. And devastation resulting from Israel’s invasion has caused more than 700 water wells to stop functioning.
  
  On May 31, the UN reported that more than four out of five children in Gaza “did not eat for a whole day at least once in the three days.” “These are children under five who are not getting food all day,” said WHO spokesperson Dr. Margaret Harris. “So, you ask, ‘Are the supplies getting through?’ No, children are starving.”

• Before October 7, people in Gaza relied on three major desalination plants that removed salt from sea water to make it drinkable. All three have been destroyed by Israeli bombs or are shut down because Israel has choked off fuel going into Gaza. On May 22, aid agencies reported that many people in Gaza are living on three percent of the minimum amount of water needed to drink, wash, and cook. Lack of clean water and sanitation facilities have significantly increased acute watery diarrhea among children under five, and water-borne diseases including hepatitis are quickly spreading among families who cannot access sources of clean water.
   
• Hospitals destroyed, degraded. On May 30, the World Health Organization reported that only about 12 of Gaza’s 36 hospitals are still able to function at all. Those that remain are battered, massively overcrowded, without sanitation and supplies as basic as hand soap for surgeons who are operating on patients. Mortality rates for victims of Israeli bombs and missiles are as high as 80 percent in hospitals.
  
  Displaced Palestinians, many having fled violence four or five times during the war, are struggling to get by in crammed shelters with few hygiene supplies. The overcrowding is causing infectious diseases to spread rapidly, according to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), and there are not enough vaccines or medication to meet people’s needs. “We need safe and unrestricted access”, said the agency, whose distribution center in Rafah is now inaccessible. The few hospitals that are still able to provide care in Gaza are quickly running out of vital supplies.
   
• Education decimated. More than 80 percent of Gaza’s schools have been severely damaged or destroyed by fighting, according to the United Nations, with 212 “direct hits” on schools that destroyed at least 53 of them, as of March. Many other schools are being used as shelters for displaced families. Damning evidence that Israel’s rampage in Gaza is aimed at crushing the Palestinian people, their culture, their very existence as a people is that all 12 of Gaza’s universities and colleges have been destroyed along with priceless architectural, historic, and cultural spaces. In the case of Israa University, Israeli troops seized the campus, used it as a detention/torture center and as a sniper position to fire on Palestinian civilians, then blew it up.
   
• “Settler” and Israeli military escalates terror and death in the West Bank. The area of historic Palestine west of the Jordan river (on the east side of what is now Israel) has been carved up into walled-off concentration camps over the past decades, and the Palestinian population has been subjected to continuous terror by heavily armed, rabidly racist “settlers.” That terror and death went to another level after October 7, and is escalating as you read this.
  
  Since October 7, more than 500 Palestinians, including at least 130 children, in the West Bank have been killed, and nearly 5,000 have been injured by “settlers” and the Israeli army. On May 30, Israel’s powerful rabidly fascist finance minister Smotrich threatened to turn Palestinian towns in the West Bank “into ruins like the Gaza Strip.”
   
  On May 30, Israeli forces blew up a market in Ramallah, the largest city in the West Bank. The destruction of this fruit and vegetable market is consistent with destroying food production, infrastructure like sewage systems, and other war crimes clearly directed at the civilian population of the West Bank, while Israel claims they are targeting terrorists.

Every one of these crimes has been enabled by massive economic, diplomatic, and military “aid” from the United States. An urgent demand is posed to those of us in the belly of this imperialist beast, for whom Israel is a key link in and enforcer of a global empire of exploitation and oppression. The challenge to everyone who is outraged, sickened, heartbroken over what is going on is concentrated in the conclusion of A Crucial Crossroads in the Struggle to STOP the U.S.-Israeli Genocide of Palestinians… A Historic Moment in the World: How Do We Go Forward? —A contribution from the Revcom Corps for the Emancipation of Humanity:

For the people of Palestine. For the direction of this country. For the future of the world. It is no exaggeration to say that the lives of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians now starving in Gaza, the future of the Palestinian people as a whole, and the prospects for an emancipated world for all of humanity will be impacted by what we do. Let us all bring our best understanding to the table and struggle vigorously over the big questions before us. Let us do it with principle and substance and free of ego. Let us measure every idea and program up against the reality we face and whether it will advance the cause of liberation or work against it. Through doing this, let us forge deeper unity of will, lasting relationships, and fighting determination to act with daring and clarity to call forward the broadest, most determined and mightiest struggle seen in generations. Let us settle for nothing less than complete liberation for the people of Palestine and for all the world’s peoples.