“The end of the calm today feels like our execution.” 

—Palestinian in Southern Gaza¹

At 7:00 in the morning of Friday, December 1, Israel’s U.S.-backed war of mass murder and genocide resumed in Gaza, after a seven-day pause that began on November 24. (Deadly attacks on Palestinians by Israeli soldiers and reactionary settlers in the West Bank had never let up.) The thunder of Israel’s made-in-the-USA bombs, artillery, tanks and warplanes returned, leaving air choked with black smoke and debris. 

Within hours, there were reports of Israeli air strikes on Jabalyia refugee camp in the north and shelling in central Gaza. In northern Gaza, a block of over 50 residential buildings in al-Shujaiya was demolished, leading to hundreds of civilian casualties.

As of Sunday, it is being reported that more than 700 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza during the last 24 hours—one of the highest daily death tolls since October 7.²

In the past few weeks, Israel told people in the north to evacuate to the south. But bombing has increased all over the central and southern parts of Gaza, from Khan Younis to Rafah. 

Making matters more dire, Gaza’s border with Egypt was again sealed, cutting off any flow of life-saving water, fuel, food, and medicine.³

As the bombings intensify, with outright carpet bombing in some instances and the regular use of 2,000-pound bombs by Israel, people are left with nowhere to go but face certain death, destruction and maiming.

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu declared Israel is going after “Hamas strongholds,” that Israel would fight Hamas to the end, and that “nothing would stop us.” 

These claims—that Israel’s war is exclusively focused on destroying Hamas, the reactionary Islamic fundamentalist group that rules Gaza—are lies. In reality, Israel is waging a genocidal war on an entire people. 

As we said two weeks ago: 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 Israel’s objectives. Beyond that, it could mean mass expulsion and/or slaughter on a massive scale, beyond even what Israel is now carrying out.

This past week, U.S. officials issued a number of statements urging Israel to do more to protect civilians. And while there are real differences between the U.S. and Israel over exactly how to carry out this war, once it re-started, Secretary of State Antony Blinken declared the U.S.'s support for Israel’s decision: “Israel has the right to do everything it can to ensure that the slaughter that Hamas carried out on October 7 can never be repeated,” Blinken said. “[Hamas] cannot remain in control of Gaza. It cannot retain the capacity to repeat that carnage.”⁴

“The Pace of Death During Israel’s Campaign Has Few Precedents in This Century” 

More evidence of the genocidal nature of Israel’s war emerged this past week.

In the 47 days of its air, land and sea assault on Gaza, Israel killed over 15,500 Palestinians, more than 6,000 children. Another 30,000 to 35,000 have been wounded.⁵ According to the United Nations, up to 1.8 million people—about 80 percent of the population—have been forced from their homes. More than 60,000 buildings have been damaged or destroyed, and some 60 percent of all the buildings in Gaza City and northern Gaza have been destroyed.

A New York Times analysis found that “the pace of death during Israel’s campaign has few precedents in this century,” because of the scale of the attacks (15,000 strikes in 47 days) and Israel’s use of massive 2,000-pound bombs in densely packed civilian areas. (emphasis added)

Shockingly, women and children account for nearly 70 percent of all deaths in Gaza—even though the Hamas fighters Israel is supposedly targeting are overwhelmingly men. “More children have been killed in Gaza since the Israeli assault began than in the world’s major conflict zones combined—across two dozen countries—during all of last year,” including the war in Ukraine. (emphasis added) 

A report by +972 Magazine found that the protocols that Israel uses to decide military targets consciously justify destroying whole buildings and killing children in order to kill even just one Hamas commander. They have a conscious strategy to deliberately attack civilian targets, like homes and schools, in order to exert, mass “civil pressure” on Hamas. According to one former intelligence officer, Israel’s military has turned into a “mass assassination factory,” with a “total disregard for Palestinian civil life.”

An anonymous source within the Israeli intelligence forces told +972 Magazine, “Nothing happens by accident. When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed—that it was a price worth paying in order to hit [another] target.... Everything is intentional. We know exactly how much collateral damage there is in every home.”⁶

Israel Turns Hospitals—Protectors of Life—into Graveyards

Israel’s campaign of genocide has targeted hospitals and medical care (as documented by the World Health Organization). In northern Gaza the few hospitals left are now basically shelters—with no functioning equipment, electricity, or water. Hospitals in southern Gaza are increasingly overwhelmed, and now they too are becoming targets.

This past week decomposing bodies of premature babies were discovered in the al-Nasr pediatric hospital. They had been left to die after Israeli forces attacked the hospital, shut off power, and blocked access to the intensive care unit. They then ordered medical staff to evacuate. Film footage shows the lifeless babies still attached to ventilation and intravenous tubes.⁷

At a different hospital, Kamal Edwan Hospital in northern Gaza, one doctor was left by himself and seven babies died. 

“We Went Back to the Stone Age”

Israel’s blockade of goods coming into Gaza combined with its relentless bombings and missile strikes have left Gaza’s 2.3 million people facing acute, life-threatening shortages of food, water, medicine and fuel. This past week’s pause and increased aid deliveries did nothing to fundamentally change that. 

There is hardly any gas or other fuel remaining in Gaza, forcing people to burn doors, window frames, even cardboard or grass to cook. The mineral water trucked into Gaza meets only four percent of the need. The north has no drinkable water sources left. Wheat flour, cheese, eggs, dairy products, and mineral water have disappeared from markets. The trickle of food coming into Gaza since Israel’s war began has led to a “massive food gap and widespread hunger.”

Life for most in Gaza has been reduced to a full-time daily hunt for food and water. One Gazan describes waking up at 4 a.m. every day and going out to hunt for water for his extended family. When he’s “lucky” he brings home enough to give each family member a glass a day. “We went back to the Stone Age,” he says.⁸

Collectively punishing the civilian population and depriving it of food, water and medicine is a blatant, indisputable war crime!

No Pause in Fascist IDF Attacks and Settler Rampages in the Palestinian West Bank

There was no “pause” in the Israeli military’s and settlers’ violent, genocidal rampages in the Palestinian West Bank.

On November 29, two Palestinian children in the Jenin refugee camp were shot dead by Israeli soldiers during a raid. The soldiers then blocked medics from trying to save them. Earlier in the week the Israeli “Defense” Forces (the IDF) killed at least eight other Palestinians and destroyed at least two homes, roads and water mains. Since October 7, the Israeli army and Israeli settlers have killed at least 242 Palestinians in the West Bank.⁹

One West Bank resident writes: 

In the West Bank, increasingly violent assaults on villages have forced at least 16 Palestinian communities—more than 1,000 people— to flee their homes since Oct. 7…. settlers have attacked Palestinians in more than 250 incidents in the West Bank.... In my village and in other villages around us, settlers have been raiding homes and harassing us relentlessly, sometimes multiple times a day.¹⁰

A Tale of Two Hostage Releases

Before and during the “pause” in fighting, Hamas released some 105 Israeli and international hostages they’d held since October 7. Their release was cause for joy, relief, and public celebration by their families, friends and communities. 

Israel released some 240 Palestinian prisoners and detainees, but decreed there would be no public celebrations for them. The Israelis even shot dead one Palestinian youth and wounded four others on November 29 simply for gathering outside Ofer Prison to welcome prisoners being released. 

Right now, there are over 7,000 Palestinians languishing in Israel’s prisons—2,500 without charges under Israel’s so-called “Administrative Detention” laws. One recently released prisoner described widespread abuse, even rape in Israel’s dungeons.¹¹

Piling outrage on top of outrage—since October 7, some 3,325 Palestinians have been arrested or detained on the West Bank—more than 10 times the number Israel has released!¹²

The Grave Danger of Wider War… and Why the U.S. Rulers Are Risking It 

This past week there have been a number of high-level meetings between U.S. Secretary of State Blinken and Israeli officials about the war in Gaza, and the situation in the West Bank and across the Middle East. The U.S. is reportedly counseling Israel not to repeat its devastation of northern Gaza in the south. These reports represent real concerns that Israel’s blatant mass murder and open contempt for international law and Palestinian lives could uncork mass upheaval across the region, and perhaps even trigger a regional war. (See A U.S.-Iranian Miscalculation Could Lead to a Larger War, Officials Say, New York Times, November 29.)

These are all real concerns for the U.S. imperialists. But in the end, the U.S. continues to green light Israeli genocide and its war to crush Hamas and the Palestinian people. Why? In Bringing Forward Another Way, the revolutionary leader Bob Avakian spelled out why Israel plays such a unique and critical war for the U.S. imperialists: 

There can't be any wavering or even the appearance, or suggestion, of more "even-handedness" in dealing with Israel, on the one hand, and the Palestinians (and others in the region) on the other hand. You have to have your ducks in a row. You have to have your priorities very clear. You have to have a regime there, at the center of your policy for that region, which is completely reliable for U.S. imperialism.

If you look at any other regimes in the region, Saudi Arabia and Egypt are big allies of the U.S. But in Saudi Arabia and in Egypt, the situation is very unstable and potentially very volatile: there are serious tremors beneath the throne, so to speak—there is the growing danger of "social earthquakes" that could threaten to topple, or actually topple, those regimes. You don't have that in Israel.

Since these words were written, Iran has risen as a regional power and opponent, the Middle East has been shaken by widespread upheaval over the past 10-15 years, and the U.S.’s contention with rival imperialists Russia and China—including in the Middle East—has greatly escalated. All this makes Israel even more central to U.S. efforts to maintain its stranglehold on the region—including by green lighting genocide!