This street, which is full of displaced people from Beit Hanoun and from all over the Gaza Strip, was hit by a missile … [killing] women and children selling water. As you can see, here’s the blood, and here’s the shrapnel. We are innocent people sitting in our homes, not knowing when this war, this genocide by the Israeli occupation army, will end. Enough, people. Enough, world. Wake up....—Gaza City resident Osama Mortaji¹

This past week, the latest, and perhaps last, phase of Israel’s genocidal campaign against the Palestinian people of Gaza began in Gaza City. 

Gaza City has existed for most of recorded history. It was founded around 3,000 BC along a key trade route. It’s now Gaza’s largest city and currently home to as many as one million or more of Gaza’s 2.2 million people. 

Now Israel is threatening to destroy it, starting with Zeitoun, the largest quarter of the Old City of Gaza, and the Al-Sabra neighborhoods.

An Ancient City, Its Historic Neighborhoods Now Under Israeli Bombardment 

Last week, after claiming it would evacuate civilians before the fighting started, Israel immediately launched intense bombardments from the air and the ground, terrorizing an already starving population. 

Between August 11 and 15, entire residential blocks and at least 300 homes were destroyed. More than 300 people were slaughtered. Israel fired on emergency workers and ambulances, preventing them from reaching the thousands of people trapped in their houses or under rubble in the residential Zeitoun neighborhood. The Israeli military and much of its media lied, calling these “terror targets” and “terror operatives.”

One man said: “Tanks fired shells at houses, and several houses were hit, and the planes carried out what we call fire rings, whereby several missiles landed on some roads in eastern Gaza.” Another said it was “a full dismantling of civilian life to ensure that people will never be allowed back into this area.”

The Worst Is Yet to Come

This is only the beginning of Israel’s atrocities.

Much of Gaza City had already been destroyed leaving “narrow corridors between heaps of rubble and the remains of buildings' walls” with only “the skeletons of high-rises remaining,” Haaretz reports. Furthermore: 

In areas that are not all destruction, open spaces have become makeshift living centers. Parks, sports fields, schoolyards and groves are now filled with endless rows of tents housing displaced Palestinians. Facing the threat of the city's occupation, they are left wondering where else they can possibly flee.

The Israeli military will issue evacuation orders, but “many people are expected to remain in the city and seek shelter inside buildings, despite the risk to their lives. Most residents are exhausted from previous displacements, and it has become increasingly difficult to find a place to pitch a tent.” 

Israel’s solutions?

More bombings and artillery barrages, which will massacre many and terrify people into leaving. Ongoing forced starvation, combined with the targeted assassination of journalists to prevent the truth of this genocide from getting out. Over the past 22 months Israel has already killed 238 journalists. It continues to threaten those still living, including Saleh Aljafarawi, who is now being threatened in the same way the Al Jazeera journalist Anas al-Sharif was before Israel assassinated him.²

Encircle, De-Populate, Destroy

Israel’s plan is to encircle, de-populate, and then destroy Gaza City. 

This is part of a larger plan, ratified by Israel’s security cabinet to launch a massive new military offensive to seize all of Gaza, starting with Gaza City in the north, then central Gaza, then anything left. The Palestinian population is to be forced south and squeezed into concentration camp conditions in the 14 to 20 percent of Gaza not already under Israeli military control or evacuation orders.

After that, Israel’s military reportedly plans to take total control of all of Gaza within a few months. Israel is already lobbying other countries, including war-torn, deeply impoverished South Sudan, to accept Palestinians violently displaced from their historic homeland. 

Israel’s Crimes More Blatant—Trump Regime’s Support More Unwavering

Israel’s plan is nothing short of a major leap toward the complete and total decimation of Gaza and the genocide of the Palestinian people. And the Trump fascist regime is supporting it on all fronts—militarily, politically, ideologically, and more.³

Just this past week:

• Trump told Axios news that he'd had a "good call" with Netanyahu on August 10 about “Israel's plans to take control of the remaining Hamas strongholds in Gaza in order to bring an end to the war through the release of the hostages and the defeat of Hamas." Here, Trump is repeating Israel’s big lie that they are just fighting Hamas rather than targeting the entire Palestinian population and destroying their society, while giving a big thumbs-up to Israel escalating its genocide.
• Secretary of State Rubio continued Trump’s theme of backing Israel’s genocide, stating that he backed Israel, and that the international community was “unduly focused on Hamas propaganda concerning the humanitarian crisis rather than the hostages,” and that “as long as Hamas exists, there will be no peace in Gaza. That's a fact.... And the sooner we grasp that and the sooner people grasp that, the sooner they understand what the objective has to be here."

• When asked about Israel’s assassination of five Al Jazeera journalists the week before, State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce first dismissed it as just something that happens in war. Then she repeated Israel's outright and proven lies justifying the massacre: “Israel has released evidence al-Sharif was part of Hamas and was supportive of the Hamas attack on October 7. They're the ones who have the evidence."
• The annual State Department report on human rights around the world was radically recast to reflect the Trump/MAGA fascist program. This report was always a cover for going after regimes the U.S. doesn't support but had to make some pretense toward critiquing some violations of "human rights" in general. The changes included slashing the report by over 80 percent and gutting nearly all the criticisms of Israel, and making no reference to the humanitarian catastrophe Israel’s blockade of Gaza has caused.⁴
• U.S. ambassador to Israel and Christian fascist Mike Huckabee has been outspoken in his support for fascist Jewish fundamentalists including by denying that there is a Palestinian people, and by supporting Israel’s annexation of the West Bank. He recently attacked British Prime Minister Starmer for criticizing Israel’s new offensive. Huckabee defended Israel’s Gaza onslaught and compared it—favorably—to the 1945 firebombing of Dresden, Germany, by the U.S. and Britain during World War 2. This notorious firebombing burned alive tens of thousands of German civilians. 

The Nakba Then. An Even Bloodier Nakba Now

Israel was founded on Palestinian blood. Some 15,000 Palestinians were killed, 750,000 were driven from their homes and 530 Palestinian villages and cities were destroyed in 1947-49 in order to establish the Zionist state of Israel.

Palestinians called it the “Nakba,” or catastrophe, and rightfully so. 

Over the past 22 months, Israel has carried out an even bloodier Nakba in Gaza. It has already killed four times more: at least 61,827 murdered, 155,275 people wounded or injured, and many thousands still uncounted and buried under rubble.⁵

It has starved 2.2 million Gazans, bombed and bulldozed vast swaths of the territory, destroyed Gaza’s infrastructure, and taken control of at least three-quarters of the land. 

Israel’s 22-month assault on Gaza, and its new offensive, represents a horrific turning point, a major leap in the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people—with full U.S. backing and approval.

What we are seeing now is an even further leap and the threat of an extremely deadly conclusion to Israel’s U.S.-backed, all-out genocide. It must not stand.

Stop the U.S.-Israeli Genocide Against the Palestinian People!

As we wrote last week: This isn’t simply an Israeli genocide—and it never has been. It’s a U.S.-Israeli genocide. The U.S. has provided all the planes, and the bulk of the bombs, the missiles, the weapons, and more, as well as the political and diplomatic support, without which Israel could not carry out its depraved slaughter and starvation! 

The U.S. is disproportionately responsible for the genocide in Gaza—and so we in this country have a disproportionate responsibility to mobilize, protest, and speak out demanding the genocide end! 

Trump is enabling and fueling this genocide. He has given a green light and outspoken support for wiping out all of Gaza. The fascist Trump/MAGA regime is viciously repressing protesters who've spoken out against the genocide—and is rapidly moving to crush all dissent and protest. 

So all those righteously enraged by and protesting Israel’s actions also have an urgent and disproportionate responsibility to become part of the urgent, existential battle to drive the fascist Trump regime from power through mass, nonviolent, sustained protest. Starting yesterday.

End the Siege on Gaza Now!

Stop the U.S.-Israeli Genocide Against the Palestinian People!

In the Name of Humanity, We Refuse to Accept a Fascist America!

The Trump Fascist Regime Must Go—NOW!