The situation in north Gaza right now is worse than it has been at any time in Israel’s 13-month escalated genocidal assault. And the U.S. continues to fund and arm that genocide. 

Grieving Survivors in North Gaza: We Are the Ones Who Are Dead

Israel is dropping U.S.-supplied bombs and missiles on civilians who are in the most desperate, apocalyptic conditions. People are starving. People are without shelter. Israel and its godfather, the United States, have all but abandoned the pretext (pretended explanation) that this is about “targeting Hamas.”

Watch the following video. It shows the aftermath of an Israeli attack in the city of Jabalia, in north Gaza on November 10. Israel killed 36 members of the same family. The dead included a 70-year-old man and an 8-year-old girl. The girl had written “Noor, the love of Dad and Mum” on her arm so she could be identified if (and when, as it turned out) she was killed. 

The attack that killed Noor and dozens of others came with no warning at 6 am, as people were waking up. It hit a civilian home. It felt like an earthquake. Bodies were blown apart, and pieces of human bodies were scattered under rubble. People dug through the wreckage with their bare hands to recover bodies. 

Don’t turn aside, watch:

Grieving survivors said, “We are the ones who are dead.”

Starvation with the Aim of “Eradicating” the Palestinian People

A November 10 report from the UN-sponsored relief agency ReliefWeb sketches an overview of Israel’s use of starvation to exterminate the Palestinian people in north Gaza. ReliefWeb reports that over a little more than a month, Israel bombed hundreds of homes and shelters in north Gaza, killing approximately 1,900 Palestinians and injuring over 4,000 more. ReliefWeb reports that Palestinians trapped in north Gaza are “deliberately and continuously bombed, and are without food, water, and medical supplies.” And ReliefWeb reports, “Anyone who tries to flee in search of these necessities is targeted by Israeli drones and killed.”

And the report poses this challenge: “Since Israel has been committing the crime of starvation and using it as a means to carry out its genocide against the Palestinian people with the goal of eradicating them, the world is accountable for the famine crisis that Israel has caused in the Gaza Strip.” (See “As Israel insists on using starvation as weapon, famine in northern Gaza must be officially declared.”)

The world is accountable. Hold that thought. What are the implications of that for those of us living in the belly of the beast that sits atop, dominates, and rules that world? I will return to that.

Killing Journalists to Cover Up Genocide

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), at least 129 Palestinian journalists and media workers have been killed in Gaza since the beginning of the Israeli genocide. Other credible estimates say the death toll is much higher, at 188. In the first 10 weeks of Israel’s slaughter in Gaza, more journalists were killed than had been killed in any country over an entire year.

But as Israel’s genocide intensifies in northern Gaza, the situation has become even worse. Israel has explicitly put a target on the backs of several of the remaining Al Jazeera journalists in Gaza, charging they are associated with Hamas without providing any credible evidence. The CPJ said in a statement following the accusations that Israel had “repeatedly made similar unproven claims without producing credible evidence.”

In an op-ed in the New York Times, journalist Kavitha Chekuru points out: “The timing of the accusations against the six is impossible to ignore, coming during one of the most intense and devastating phases of Israel’s war in Gaza yet. Israeli officials have ordered about 400,000 people to leave their homes in the north, with no true guarantee of safety or return. The entire population is at risk of starvation, and each new statement from U.N. officials and the few remaining doctors there is increasingly dire. With Israel continuing to bar foreign media from entering Gaza independently, the burden of documenting this war has fallen almost entirely to Palestinian journalists. With every journalist killed, another voice is silenced, and the world’s window on Gaza becomes even smaller."

U.S. State Department Finds "No Violation" in Israel's Starvation by Genocide 

On October 13, the Biden-Harris administration supposedly gave Israel a “warning” that it might suspend military aid to Israel if Israel did not begin to allow at least food aid into northern Gaza within 30 days. It set a minimum requirement of 350 aid trucks a day going into Gaza. 

After 30 days, Israel reported allowing twenty-two aid trucks a day into Gaza. And relief agencies report that even those were essentially derailed and turned over to looters by the Israeli army when they entered Gaza. 

When asked about this at a press conference on November 14, U.S. State Department spokesman Verdant Patel said that the State Department had “not made an assessment… that the Israelis are in violation of U.S. law.” In the obfuscating (cover-up) language of double-speak and double-negatives, the State Department basically said: no, Israel is not allowing aid in. And yes, Israel is starving people to death. But, so what? Did you think we were serious?

Needed More Than Ever: STOP the GENOCIDE in GAZA

Unconstrained mass murder of civilians; terrorism by any definition. Starving the civilian population of Gaza to the point of death; terrorism by any definition. Systematically and openly targeting journalists who are exposing this to the world. And then finding that none of this is a reason to stop sending bombs, missiles, and intel to make it all happen.

And this is under the Democrats, who shed crocodile tears about the deaths and destruction while they enable it, but who are now pledging and working to hand off all this to fascists who care even less about covering up these crimes! For the entire ruling class (both the MAGA fascists and the “traditional” imperialist Democrats), Israel is a rabid attack dog whose existence is critical to their domination of the Middle East, and the world.

That’s America! That’s this system at work. If enabling Israel’s crimes against humanity was the only thing wrong with this system, that would still be reason enough to overthrow it and replace it with something much different and better—what is outlined in We Need and We Demand: A Whole New Way to Live, a Fundamentally Different System. But this is the way this system has worked since its beginning in genocide of native people and slavery, and through world wars, use of atomic bombs, and genocidal wars from Indochina to Iraq. 

There is no hyperbole or rhetoric in this from revolutionary leader Bob Avakian: 

We, the people of the world, can no longer afford to allow these imperialists to continue to dominate the world and determine the destiny of humanity. They need to be overthrown as quickly as possible. And it is a scientific fact that we do not have to live this way.