As I open the Sunday New York Times this week, Israel’s genocide in Gaza is absent from the front page of the print edition. Same thing on Saturday. But while Israel’s genocide in Gaza is being buried, distorted, and lied about by the “mass media” (programming the masses in service of U.S. capitalism-imperialism), the REALITY is that this genocide is not only getting worse—it is "on track" to get even MORE horrific.

On May 7, Israeli tanks rolled into Rafah and shut down the Rafah crossing with Egypt. Rafah is on the southern tip of tiny Gaza (7 miles wide at the widest, 25 miles long). The next day, Israel closed the Kerem Shalom crossing that brings in aid directly from Israel. Between them, aid coming through these crossings enables life, such as it is, in Gaza, hour-by-hour. 

Israel followed up on the initial invasion of Rafah with bombing, randomly massacring families, and filling the sky with smoke. More than 800,000 people, already refugees from one, two, three, or six other places, exhausted, without resources, and with nowhere to go have been driven from the city. 

While Gaza is whited out in U.S. media, the death toll of Palestinians killed in Gaza by Israel is at least 35,386. On one day alone last week, May 14, 82 Palestinians were killed by Israel, the highest toll in weeks.

Weeks into Israel’s genocidal onslaught, revcom.us cut through the lies, bullshit, and distortions to get to the core reality of what was happening:

Despite Israel's claims this is all focused on destroying Hamas, a reactionary Islamic fundamentalist group that rules Gaza, this is a genocidal assault on an entire people—not a “precision-guided war” targeting a rival political organization. 

The Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (aka Netan-Nazi) and Israel’s rulers are seizing on Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel—which included the war crimes of taking hostages and the murder of civilians—to attempt a “final solution” to the “Palestinian problem.” This means, at a minimum, reducing the Palestinians to such a state that they can no longer pose any obstacle to Israeli objectives. Beyond that, it could mean mass expulsion and/or slaughter on a massive scale, beyond even what they are now carrying out. (See “Calls for Genocide of Palestinians Grow in “Democratic” Israel, as U.S. Continues Arming Israeli Military” for documentation of assertions that the objective is just that from top government officials in Israel).

Recent developments point to that “final solution” taking shape. Funded, armed, enabled, and covered up by the United States.

If that is true, and I will make the case that it is, then the response, of all of us—particularly those of us in the belly of the beast that enables and needs Israel—must confront and respond to that reality. This means spreading and intensifying resistance into every corner of U.S. society. And just as important, there must be a debate throughout society over why the U.S. is supporting all this, how that support forms a linchpin in U.S. domination of a world of exploitation and oppression, and how we, the masses of people, could overturn that world and bring forward something truly emancipating in its place.

Starved, Driven Out of Rafah into Rubble and Death

As this is posted, the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt remains closed. Israel claims to have reopened the Kerem Shalom crossing from Israel on May 15, but Israel then shut down the Gaza side, so that Israel (and the U.S.) could tell the world the crossing is “open” even though nothing is going through it. In a May 17 update on the status of Kerem Shalom, the spokesperson for the UN Secretary General said “we’re trying to get things through, but it’s not happening.” 

From May 7 through May 17, only 310 trucks of aid entered Gaza! That is an average of 30 a day. That is nothing! As a baseline, before October 7, it took 500 trucks a day, to keep Gazans from starving. That was when Gaza had insufficient but functional farming, fishing, and food production capacity—every bit of which has been systematically destroyed by Israel.

People who were driven out of Rafah in search of shelter are now attempting to return to the city of Khan Younis in the south, or Gaza City and the Jabalia Refugee Camp in the north. They are finding heartbreak, destruction, death. And new assaults by the Israeli military. 

Defenders of Israel will claim that civilians killed and wounded in these massacres are the fault of Hamas for using civilians as “human shields.” That turns reality upside down. Israel, as a matter of practice and unwritten but consistent policy, uses the excuse that Hamas or aligned operatives may be in an area in order to massacre civilians even when there is nothing remotely resembling Hamas activity at all in the area of the massacre (See War Crimes Enabled and Whited Out by USA State Department). 

Three incidents from last week expose the essential target of Israel’s assault on these cities:

• Rafah: On May 13, fire from an Israeli tank killed Col Waibhav Kale, a UN staff member, as he traveled in a clearly marked UN vehicle, along a route approved by the Israeli military near Rafah. Whether a conscious assassination by Israel, or a product of routine Israeli protocols that are a green light for commanders to order attacks on relief agencies, the killing was part of a pattern of attacks on relief operations. Doctors Without Borders, World Central Kitchen, and the UN’s relief agency that is the main channel for distributing aid in Gaza have all been targeted by Israel. This systematic killing of international aid officials and workers is not simply random acts of inhumanity and war crimes. These attacks are putting in place links in a chain that makes Palestinians in Gaza totally dependent on Israel for aid, when Israel is carrying out genocide against them.
• Gaza City: Very early in Israel’s massacre in Gaza, Israel systematically and completely destroyed Gaza’s Internet access. Since then, some very spotty Internet connections have resumed, and been shut down over a dozen times. When word spreads that Internet access is available, people gather to try to connect with loved ones, get reliable news, and tell the world what is going on. That’s what drew a large crowd to an Internet access point in Gaza City on May 15. According to many sources, an Israeli drone opened fire on the crowd, killing at least four people including a child.
• Jabalia: On May 11, Israel launched a major invasion of the Jabalia Camp, the most densely populated place in northern Gaza, with terror and relentless bombing. 

On May 15, an Israeli airstrike killed journalist Hayel Al-Najar and three family members. Killing journalists is always a war crime, but Israel has taken that to new levels. Almost no outside journalists are allowed into Gaza by Israel. What truth emerges about what Israel is doing relies in large part on local journalists like Hayel Al-Najar. The Committee to Protect journalists documented at least 105 journalists and media workers were killed in Gaza since October 7, 2023.

On May 19, Hossam Shabat, a Gaza journalist in Jabalia posted: “The situation in Jabalia refugee camp continues to worsen. The camp has been under bombing and fire for the past 8 days. Many residents killed arrive at the hospital in small pieces, not as whole bodies. Families have to search through these body parts to identify their loved ones.” (Hossam Shabat’s post includes graphic and heartbreaking video explicitly documenting that cruel horror).

A “Corridor” to Enforce a Final Solution

A May 17 article in the Washington Post titled “What Israel’s strategic corridor in Gaza reveals about its postwar plans” connects the dots on a series of moves Israel is making to be able to entrench itself permanently in Gaza with extremely ominous implications.

This corridor, the Netzarim Corridor, stretches from the east edge of Gaza (the border with Israel) to the western edge (the Mediterranean Sea). It carves Gaza into two parts. The only two north-south highways in Gaza go through the corridor, forcing anyone moving between Gaza City and areas to the south to pass through dangerous, degrading Israeli checkpoints. 

A Palestinian man, Jumaa Abu Hasira, 37, said Israeli soldiers fired shots in the air as he approached the corridor last month during a lull in the fighting, when there were rumors that families could go north. He was detained, blindfolded, hit with a rifle butt, beaten and interrogated for eight hours. When questioned about his treatment by the Washington Post, the Israeli military responded that Israeli soldiers used “cautionary fire” as “armed terrorists,” approached the corridor. 

Mohammed Abu Mughaisib, deputy medical coordinator for Doctors Without Borders, said that aid personnel on trucks attempting to cross the corridor are typically, “waiting for three to four hours,” after which “you can be sent back, you can be arrested.” And the United Nations has said that Israel’s choking off aid going through the corridor is contributing to the full-blown famine in the north.

Another link in the chain being tightened by the Netzarim corridor is the much-publicized floating pier constructed and manned by the U.S. military to channel aid into Gaza. The intent is apparently to bypass and cut out the international aid agencies, including the UN, that have the capacity, the courage, the legitimacy, and the credible neutrality to be able to actually get aid to people.

This U.S. military pier connects into Gaza through the Netzarim corridor! Meaning that aid will be handed off from the U.S. military to the rampaging, mass-murdering Israeli military to distribute through, and out from a militarized Israeli-controlled port within a militarized corridor! Already, food distribution organized by Israel resulted in a massacre by the Israeli military of more than 100 people in the “flour massacre” near Gaza City on February 29.

One thousand buildings have been razed by Israel to make this corridor. One of them was the farmhouse of Abdel Nasser. He said, “It used to be a haven for my family and me … where we spent countless beautiful moments together… About two weeks ago, my neighbors informed me that the entire area had been destroyed, and all the surrounding agricultural land had been bulldozed.” He hasn’t been able to bring himself to tell his wife yet. 

The corridor is built on land seized from Israa University. The university included a law school and housed an institution called the Palestinian Center for the Independence of the Judiciary and the Legal Profession. More women than men were enrolled there, before Israel drove them out. On January 17, Israel blew up the university. 

The university administration issued a statement charging that Israeli troops had seized and operated out of the university and used it as a base for snipers shooting civilians, as well as a detention center. The statement said that before blowing up the university, Israeli soldiers and officers looted rare artifacts. And it condemned Israel for destroying the university as part of excluding Palestinians from “keeping up with the march of knowledge and civilization, killing scientists and expelling minds and pillars of society outside Palestine.”

The corridor is also on land seized from the Palestinian Palace of Justice, which was blown up, destroying hundreds of thousands of vital legal documents.

And the corridor includes the building which housed the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital, which specialized in treatment for cancer patients. Israel shut down the hospital in November with nearby airstrikes, and by depriving it of fuel. Thousands of cancer patients were abandoned without care in order for Israel to use the hospital as a military base. 

Hold that in your head: Israel is not even hiding the fact that it drove out the medical staff at this hospital and is now using it for sniper attacks on the Palestinian people! The depraved hypocrisy of Israel and the U.S. accusing Hamas (to date, without credible evidence) of using hospitals for military operations is, of course, lost on defenders of Israel’s genocide even as Israel has violently taken over a hospital to use as a military base in plain sight.

Most strategically, the corridor allows Israeli ground troops to travel the entire width of Gaza (four miles at the point of the corridor) in seven minutes, giving them unimpeded ability to kill throughout northern and central Gaza. 

An Israeli Cabinet Minister told CNN that the corridor will “'make it easier' for the Israeli military to launch raids north of Gaza City and south, to the central area of the Gaza Strip.” The minister said the corridor, when completed, will have three lanes: one for heavy tanks and armored vehicles, another for lighter vehicles and a third for faster movement.

This massive Israeli military outpost and chokepoint may be the beginning of more of the same. The Washington Post reported that “Military experts say [the corridor] is part of a large-scale, long-term reshaping of Gaza’s geography, harking back to past Israeli plans to carve Gaza into easier-to-control cantons [administrative districts].” 

And the Israeli cabinet minister quoted in the CNN report said a second corridor further south that he called the Sufa Corridor is under discussion by the Israeli government. CNN reported that while the Sufa plan has not been formally adopted, “it includes elements that are coming into existence.”

The emerging picture is one of endless direct Israeli military destruction, terror, and death operating out of the corridor and possibly other forts, locking down, terrorizing, and making life even more unlivable for the Palestinian people in Gaza.

Biden Answers with $1 Billion MORE in Arms to Israel

Despite Biden’s claim that he was going to pause the pipeline of U.S. death machinery “IF” Israel invaded Rafah (a bullshit claim he made even as that invasion was underway), he is moving to send an additional billion dollars of weapons shipments to Israel including tanks and artillery shells. These weapons will be used to continue and escalate Israel’s ground invasion of Rafah and beyond. 

Biden is doing this despite the cost to (the torn and tattered) U.S. claims to be the “good guys” in the world. They like to posture as “champions of human rights”—but the blood of Palestinians drips from Biden’s jaw every time he opens his lying imperialist mouth. And he keeps doing this—even as it looks possible that this could cost him the election.

In his social media dispatches, the revolutionary leader Bob Avakian (BA) zeroes in on the real reason why:

Why is Biden, and basically the entire government and ruling class of the U.S., supporting Israel in carrying out genocide against the Palestinian people, before the whole world? Here is the answer to that crucial question:

This is not because of “the power of the Jewish lobby”—or because of some ignorant, ridiculous and outrageous notion that “Jews are controlling everything.” It is 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 BA goes on to conclude that social media post with this:

It’s the system! This system of capitalism-imperialism that embodies and enforces white supremacy, patriarchal male supremacy and other brutal oppression— this system resting on ruthless life-stealing exploitation of masses of people in this country and literally billions of people worldwide, including more than 150 million children—all enforced with massive violence and destruction, of people and the environment, posing a very real threat to the future and the existence of humanity.

This system that needs to be overthrown at the soonest possible time, through an actual revolution.