Israel has halted all humanitarian relief coming into Gaza. Aid trucks at the Egypt-Gaza crossing, March 2, 2025. Photo: AP
The ceasefire between Israel and Hamas is holding for now. But on March 2, Israel imposed a total blockade on the people of Gaza, denying them food, medicine and other life essentials. And this past week, Israel and the U.S. issued ominous new threats to unleash even more devastating slaughter in Gaza in the days or weeks to come.1
Israel is reportedly developing a “Hell Plan” to further tighten its strangulation of Gaza and isolate it even more. “The plan would involve cutting off electricity and remaining water supplies, and moving Palestinians in northern Gaza back down to the south, to pave the way to the potential resumption of full-scale war,” The Guardian reports.2
Gaza is a tiny strip of land twice the size of New York City. Between October 2023 and January 2025, “the impact of Israel’s U.S.-supplied bombs has been more intense, more destructive per square mile, and more deadly than all of the bombs dropped by the U.S. and Britain on Germany in World War 2,” Alan Goodman wrote on revcom.us in December.3
Now, Israel’s military is preparing to resume its Gaza campaign, this time under a new chief of staff who’s advocated using even more overwhelming force than even what Israel unleashed in the first 15 months of war!
Trump: “To the People of Gaza… you are DEAD!”
Beit Lahiya in northern Gaza Strip, a hellscape of destruction from Israeli air and ground attacks. Photo: AP/Mohammad Abu Samra
Meanwhile, on March 5, Trump threatened the entire population of Gaza with extermination: “To the People of Gaza: A beautiful Future awaits, but not if you hold Hostages. If you do, you are DEAD!”
This comes after his MAGA fascist government fast-tracked another $4 billion in weapons to Israel (including over 35,000 2,000-pound bombs). This brings the total amount of weapons shipments to Israel approved by the Trump regime over the last five weeks to $12 billion.4
Here it has to be said that the depth of the silence from Americans that followed this open threat of GENOCIDE is beyond shameful; and the fact that those students who DID protest are being punished for it makes it even worse! Unlike the Germans who largely remained silent as the Nazis carried out genocide against Jewish people during World War 2, Americans will not be able to say, “But we didn’t know.” He just told you.
Israel’s Ongoing War by Starvation and Disease
Israel may not have resumed its murderous ground and aerial assault on Gaza so far, but its current blockage of all goods, fuel, and humanitarian aid coming into Gaza is still a form of warfare—war by starvation, disease and deprivation against Gaza’s 2.2 million Palestinians.5
For the last year and a half, Israeli officials repeatedly denied they’d severely restricted humanitarian shipments into Gaza or deliberately created a massive health and food crisis. Instead, they blamed Hamas for supposedly hoarding food. Now, they’re once again claiming that plenty of food has already been delivered into Gaza over the past six weeks of the ceasefire—even enough, they add mockingly, for “an obesity epidemic.”
This is yet another depraved lie. The aid Gaza has received during the ceasefire is “a drop in the ocean,” compared to what’s needed, according to the aid group Oxfam.
Israel had destroyed or damaged 70 percent of Gaza’s structures and 80 percent of its hospitals and other healthcare facilities, along with most of its farms, water, and sewage systems. It’s slaughtered over 48,000 people according to official figures, including some 18,000 children and displaced—often more than once—nearly two million Gazans from their homes.
So now, over a million Gazans face emergency levels of food insecurity or worse, according to the United Nations. “The health situation in the Gaza Strip is a catastrophe,” according to one Palestinian aid organization. And food prices have doubled since Israel imposed its March 2 siege on Gaza.
Israel’s blockade is “a reckless act of collective punishment, explicitly prohibited under international humanitarian law,” Oxfam states.6
Ceasefire or No Ceasefire, Israel Keeps Killing
The ongoing ceasefire has not stopped Israel from continuing to kill Palestinians in Gaza. There are deaths from hunger, disease, and lack of shelter. And Israel is killing Palestinians in bombings and drone strikes: this past week alone, two were killed on March 4 and two more on March 8 in strikes on Rafah in the south; three more on March 7 in the north.
“How do they say there is a truce?” one Palestinian woman declared. “Where is the truce while they are killing people? [The victim] went to see his house next to al-Amina station [in Rafah], and they killed him.”7
Step Up the Struggle Against U.S.-Israeli Genocide
All this underscores the urgency of continuing and spreading the struggle against Israel’s U.S.-backed genocide in Gaza. As we wrote last week:
The past week or so has seen the beginning revival of the movement against this oppression on campuses. What is urgently required now is broadening this movement to encompass all those opposed to the genocide and to the repression on the campuses… digging into and debating the real causes of it… and linking this powerfully to the overall struggle against the fascist Trump/MAGA regime now openly celebrating the possibility of “ethnically cleansing” Palestine of non-Jews.
