Amidst massive bombardment and an intensive ground assault into Gaza, Israel has enforced an 80-day blockade of food, water and medical supplies. Nothing has gotten into Gaza. Just this past week, Israel finally allowed in 90 trucks of aid—of the 9,000 lined up, ready, and needed.
This tiny trickle of aid was too late for 29 children and elderly people who had already died of starvation in recent days. It was too late for the 326 people who had died due to malnutrition and the lack of medicine since March. And it may be too late for the 14,000 babies in Gaza in danger of starving to death.
The head of the United Nations called it a “teaspoon of aid” when a flood was needed. “The entire population of Gaza is facing the risk of famine … The Israeli military offensive is intensifying with atrocious levels of death and destruction.”
For months Israel has been insisting that there’s plenty of food in Gaza. But this past week, Israel admitted that there's a looming famine. And then they admitted that they let in this tiny amount of aid in so that they could escalate their genocidal assault, take over all of Gaza, and force the Palestinian people out!
On May 19, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (aka Netan-Nazi) said in a video message aimed at his fascist social base explaining why they had to let some aid in:
"We cannot get to a situation where there is famine... we will not be supported and we will not be able to complete the mission of the victory."
Think about that. We cannot let thousands of people, including babies and children starve to death, because Israel will lose support!
Netan-Nazi continued, “Our best friends in the world—senators I know as strong supporters of Israel—have warned that they cannot support us if images of mass starvation emerge... It is for that reason, in order to achieve victory, we have to somehow solve the problem..."
Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s fascist finance minister, admitted that “The [aid] that will enter Gaza in the coming days is the tiniest amount." He continued, "Truth be told, until the last of the hostages returns, we should also not let water into the Gaza Strip. But the reality is that if we do that, the world will force us to halt the war immediately, and to lose. It would be winning the battle, and losing the war. I'm committed to winning the war." Smotrich specified what that means: “We are disassembling Gaza, and leaving it as piles of rubble, with total destruction [which has] no precedent globally.” And letting this tiny amount of aid in allows this to go forward. Israel can continue its campaign to force Palestinians south “and from there, God willing, to third countries, as part of President Trump's plan. This is a change of the course of history—nothing less.”
Slaughter, Starvation, Destruction and Displacement: Israel’s Escalating Apocalypse in Gaza
Starving Palestinians struggle to receive food in Khan Younis, in the Gaza Strip, May 23, 2025. Photo: AP
As we wrote last week, Israel launched its Operation “Gideon’s Chariots”—escalating its bombings, expanding its ground operations, and stepping up its murderous destruction and massive displacement of hundreds of thousands so far. With over 80 percent of Gaza now off limits or under evacuation orders, the Palestinians in Gaza have nowhere to go. (See Israel Launches “Final Solution” In Gaza - Palestine’s Existence Hangs in the Balance… What Are YOU Going to Do?, revcom.us, May 19)
Israel’s mass slaughters, its use of starvation as a weapon, its destruction of Gaza’s infrastructures and land, and its repeated displacement of the population are all woven together by a single aim: making it impossible for the Palestinian people to continue to live there, and to force them to leave. And increasingly, Israel’s rulers are becoming more and more open about it.
Netan-Nazi has openly said that’s their plan; now they’re just working to find countries to take in the expelled Palestinians.
This past week, Trump’s special envoy for hostage affairs, Adam Boehler, again reaffirmed the Trump regime’s support for Israel’s new “Gideon’s Chariots” offensive.
The Razing of Gaza: “I don’t think they’ll be able to return here for at least 100 years.”
NEWS ALERT:
As we go to press, Israel bombed forcibly displaced Palestinians sheltering in Gaza City, killing at least 25 people. The scenes of children in a fiery inferno are a system-caused horror. Do not look away.
Children killed, wounded in Israeli attack on Gaza City school | Al Jazeera English
Young girl running through the fire trying to get out. Screenshot IG Motaz Azaiza
There’s rightly been much focus on the slaughter and the devastating bombing campaigns Israel has carried out in Gaza. But in many ways its bulldozers are more devastating than its fighter planes, and its destruction of growing swaths of Gaza—literally razing them to the ground—is even more ominously genocidal than its mass killings.
Last week we reported on the razing of the city of Rafah in southern Gaza, where 73 percent of the buildings are completely destroyed, and only some four percent of the infrastructure remains undamaged.1
This past week Israel turned its sights on Khan Younis, relentlessly bombing the city and demanding 80 percent of the town be evacuated, and on the Jabaliya refugee camp in the north. “After already destroying everything, the Israeli army has returned to invade Jabaliya for the fourth time since the war began.”
“Render it unusable”: Israel’s mission of total urban destruction
A new exposure by +972 Magazine paints a horrifying picture of how Israel is systematically razing Gaza to the ground in order to make it unlivable—for decades to come.
In northern Gaza, Israel bombed a family home in the Jabalia refugee camp, leaving some 50 people dead or missing, May 18, 2025. Photo: AP
“ 'Render it unusable': Israel’s mission of total urban destruction" is based on interviews and accounts by soldiers involved in bulldozing and explosively demolishing vast swaths of urban Gaza. “While airstrikes account for mass casualties, bulldozers and explosives are flattening Gaza from the ground—what soldiers say is a systematic campaign to make the Strip unlivable.”2
Avraham Zarviv is one of the bulldozer operators. In civilian life he’s a rabbinical court judge, but in Gaza he’s known as the “Flattener of Jabalia” for all the videos he proudly posts online. “Between October 2024 and January 2025, Zarviv said that every week he destroyed on average ‘50 buildings—not housing units, buildings… In Rafah, they have nowhere to go, in Jabalia they have nowhere to go back to.’”
The soldiers make clear that very little fighting is taking place in the areas they’re carrying out these demolitions in, and there are no military objectives—only political ones—a conscious, strategic decision to “flatten the area,” to ensure that “the return of people to these spaces is not something that will happen,” as one soldier put it.
“There’s nothing left, not a single wall higher than a meter,” one soldier said. “The scale and intensity of the destruction is so massive—it’s indescribable.”3
“It is the systematic destruction of Gaza’s urban space that is laying the groundwork for the ethnic cleansing of the Strip—referred to in Israeli political discourse as ‘implementing the Trump Plan,” +972 sums up.
An Israel military commander explained the goal: “In the end we’re not fighting an army, we’re fighting an idea. If I kill the fighters, the idea can still remain. But I want to make the idea unviable. When they look at Shuja’iyya [one of Gaza’s largest neighborhoods]4 and see there’s nothing there—just sand—that’s the point. I don’t think they’ll be able to return here for at least 100 years.” (Emphasis added)
The Future of the Palestinian People Hangs in the Balance—We Must Stand Up Against Slanders, Lies, Threats, and Repression to Stop This Genocide!
Israel’s genocide in Gaza continues to intensify as we write, growing more openly and blatantly criminal by the day. Military and political support for this towering crime against humanity by Israel’s U.S. imperialist patrons overall and the Trump fascist regime in particular continues.
What's needed urgently, what must grow urgently is mass protest reaching into every corner of society, growing broader, deeper and more determined demanding that this genocide must stop now!
As we wrote last week, In Regard to the Two Israeli Embassy People Killed in Washington, D.C.:
The answer to this genocide—and what is urgently necessary, in contrast to the harmful action that was carried out against two Israeli embassy staff people—is non-violent but massive and unrelenting protest and resistance against this genocide, protest and resistance which must not give in to slander and intimidation from government authorities (U.S. and Israeli), and the dominant media, but must be steadfast and determined in opposition to this horrific genocide, and its continuing support by the U.S. government—including the open declaration and moves now by the Trump fascist regime, along with the genocidal Israeli regime, to forcefully remove the Palestinian people from their home in Gaza (and ultimately from Palestine as a whole).
Stop the U.S./Israeli Genocidal Slaughter of the Palestinian People!
This Whole System Is Rotten and Illegitimate—We Need And We Demand: A Whole New Way To Live, A Fundamentally Different System!
A Day in the Gaza Genocide, Friday, May 23:
In Gaza, medical officials reported that more than 750 people had been killed and 2,000 injured in the past week. At least 16,503 children have been killed in Israeli attacks since October 7, 2023. Some 916 were under a year old. Over 4,365 were between the ages of one and five. (The total death toll is at least 62,614, with another 111,588 injured.)
Every day has been a worse nightmare than the day before. To get a sense of the scope, let's look at just one day of this:
- Pediatrician Alaa al-Najjar was at work in the al-Tahrir hospital in the city of Khan Younis, treating victims of Israeli attacks, when she heard her neighborhood had been hit by a massive Israeli airstrike. She rushed home, and when she got there she saw rescue workers pulling the charred remains of her children from the wreckage. Seven were killed. Two others were missing and presumed dead, buried under the rubble. Her husband and one of their children were injured. Her oldest child was 12, the youngest only six months.
- In the north, Israel bombed a family home in the Jabalia refugee camp leaving some 50 people dead or missing. Witnesses told Al Jazeera, “the Israeli military is killing civilians for fun.”
- The Israeli military claimed it had attacked “military compounds, weapons storage facilities and sniper posts” and “struck over 75 terror targets throughout the Gaza Strip.” Apparently, Alaa al-Najjar’s children were one of Israel’s “terror targets.”
Bob Avakian: Israel has done something truly incredible—Israel has managed to turn Jews into Nazis!
In November 2023, the revolutionary leader Bob Avakian (BA) made this provocative, and tragically profound, statement. Since then, with the escalation of Israel’s savage genocide, one could—unfortunately—fill a book with examples of its truth. Here are three (of many) from the last few weeks.
** Israel’s Parliament debates humanitarian aid. The issue of lifting Israel’s 80-day blockade and allowing some humanitarian aid into Gaza was recently debated in Israel’s Knesset (parliament). At one point a member of parliament who’s a doctor from a humanitarian organization said: "I think that even everyone sitting around this table doesn't want a suffering child to be unable to receive painkillers or minimal medical treatment."
The response to this seemingly non-controversial remark from many of the lawmakers present? Outrage and opposition! As the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz summed up, Knesset Debate Reveals Not Everyone Thinks Starving Gazan Children Is a Bad Thing.
** Israeli doctor compares killing Palestinians to “eliminating cockroaches.” The Middle East Eye reports that, “An Israeli doctor serving as an army reservist has compared killing people in Gaza to ‘eliminating cockroaches’ in a post on social media.”
In a May 18 post on X, Sabo Amos, a surgeon in Israel’s public healthcare system, said he viewed Israel’s military operations a matter of “public health” because, “After all, we’re talking about eliminating cockroaches and other loathsome insects.” (The post has since been deleted.)
** “Every child is an enemy.” From May 20 Instagram post: Former Israeli MK [Member of Knesset] Moshe Feiglin this morning on Channel 14: “Every child, every baby in Gaza is an enemy. The enemy is not Hamxs… We need to conquer Gaza and colonize it and not leave a single Gazan child there. There is no other victory.”
***
Here is Bob Avakian’s statement in full:
A Timely Provocation from 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.