More than 8,000 Palestinians, overwhelmingly civilians—including over 3,000 children—have already been killed since October 7 by Israel’s thousands of indiscriminate airstrikes and artillery barrages. Over 19,000 have been injured. Nearly half the homes in Gaza have been destroyed and over 600,000 people have been displaced and are now forced to seek shelter near hospitals or schools. Mass starvation and disease loom in Gaza as Israel refuses to allow anything but an obscene trickle of aid to enter. Unimaginable trauma and terror grip the 2.2 million human beings held hostage in the open air prison that is Gaza.¹

Millions around the world are now demanding a ceasefire and an end to the slaughter. But Israel and the U.S. will have none of it. Instead, they are escalating the war on Gaza—which promises to make the devastation and killing worse, potentially far, far worse.

On Friday evening, October 27, Israel escalated its bombing and artillery campaigns. All communications in Gaza were cut off for at least two days. According to the Israeli military, Israeli forces “went into the Gaza Strip and expanded the ground operation where infantry, armor and engineer units and artillery with heavy fire are taking part.” Israel again warned people in northern Gaza to flee, even as many who’ve heeded Israel’s warnings are being bombed and killed. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the incursion the beginning of “the second stage of the war.” He warned it would be “long and difficult”—that is, bloody. He called it Israel’s “second war of independence”—ominously referring back to 1948 when Israeli terror and massacres forced 800,000 Palestinians from their homes—never to return.²

After Israel’s escalation, U.S. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and Britain's foreign secretary publicly “affirmed Israel’s right to self-defense”—in short, green-lighted this escalating genocide. Meanwhile, the U.S. dispatched a second aircraft carrier strike group, the USS Eisenhower, to the Mediterranean, giving further military backing to Israel. 

As revcom.us wrote last week,

Nobody, including Israel, knows what will happen when it launches its assault. What will other regional powers do? What will the Palestinians do—those grouped under Hamas but also those who do not affiliate with Hamas but hate oppression and will fight bravely when under attack? What IS known is that the Israeli assault will be severely brutal and on a whole other order of the genocidal assaults they've launched in years past.

The Reality on the Ground in Gaza: Mass Murder and Terror from Above

Since Hamas’ reactionary attack of October 7, the Israeli military has launched more than 7,000 airstrikes and massive artillery bombardments of one of the most densely populated areas on Earth. 

An average of 400 Palestinians are being killed every day, and the mounting toll is staggering. At this writing, 8,005 people, overwhelmingly civilians, have been killed in Gaza since October 7, with 40 percent of them—3,342—children. Another 19,734 have been injured. Another 1,650 are missing, including 900 children, many likely buried under the rubble left by Israeli bombs. 

Stop. Think about 3,342 children.

Then think about how the numbers don’t begin to do justice to the horrors Israel and the U.S. are criminally inflicting on the Palestinian people:

• Whole families are being decimated: The first 88 names on the list from Gaza’s Health Ministry belong to the same extended family in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip.³
• Gaza residents report the bombs come mostly without warning, hitting indiscriminately. “You can’t imagine the feeling,” one Palestinian author said. “You are not safe. All places are targets, so you think of dying at any time.”⁴
• The strikes have flattened mosques, hospitals and schools. They’ve demolished homes with families inside without warning. They’ve leveled entire blocks in northern Gaza.
• Nowhere is safe. “They say: ‘Go to a safe place.’ But then they strike the place they told us to flee to,” one Gazan researcher said. “This is intentional. There’s no mercy and it’s massacre after massacre and the world is just watching it happen.” Some 70 of her relatives had been killed by Israeli airstrikes.⁵

Mass Displacement 

Israel’s bombing campaign has destroyed nearly half the homes in Gaza and forcibly displaced over 600,000 Palestinians. Most have sheltered at some 150 schools, many run by the UN—where they’re guaranteed no protection. Over 40 UN institutions have suffered damage and five have been hit directly by Israeli bombs. 

Looming Starvation

On October 9, Israel ordered “a complete siege” on Gaza. “No electricity, no food, no fuel” were to enter, and needed water from Israel was also cut off.

Now the humanitarian crisis is reaching deadly proportions. Supplies of fuel, food and water are running out, according to the UN. Gaza had “almost exhausted its fuel reserves,” meaning operations at hospitals and other critical civilian infrastructure had to be cut back or halted. “We are on the brink of collapse,” said the official in charge of the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, the largest aid organization in Gaza.

“Gaza is being strangled,” another UN official said. “Basic services are crumbling. Medicine is running out. Food and water are running out. The streets of Gaza have started overflowing with sewage. Gaza is on the brink of a massive health hazard, and the risk of diseases are looming.”⁶

This strongly smacks of what happened to the Jews forced into the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943-44—with Israel now cast in the role of the Nazis who trapped Jewish people and marked them for extermination, and the Palestinians in the role of those Warsaw Jews.

Gaza’s Hospitals and Medical System—On the Brink of Catastrophe

Just 23 of Gaza’s 35 hospitals are now functioning, many far above capacity. The other 12 have shuttered after they were hit by Israeli airstrikes or ran out of fuel. Fuel shortages now threaten all of them. The roughly 50,000 pregnant women in Gaza would face grave risks if hospitals can’t attend to them.

Some 101 health workers have been killed. Communications blackouts have made it difficult if not impossible for people to call ambulances or find places to shelter or for hospitals to contact their staffs.

The scenes inside the hospitals convey the gruesome horror of Israel’s war on the Palestinian people. Some 130 newborns at Al Shifa Hospital were orphaned just as they were born. After their pregnant mothers were pulled dead or dying from the rubble of an Israeli airstrike, doctors pulled the infants from their mothers’ bodies. Born premature, they were placed in incubators in the hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit—most the only survivors in their families. One doctor said, “When the fuel runs out tomorrow, this hospital will rapidly become a mass grave.”

Hospitals have even been forced to come up with a new category of patient: “wounded child with no surviving family.” This refers to the over 50 children pulled from collapsed buildings and brought to Al Shifa.

The U.S.-Israeli War of Genocidal Lies: Preparing the Ground for Mass Slaughter of Civilians 

U.S. and Israeli officials have repeatedly lied about not targeting civilians… about providing humanitarian aid… about Hamas supposedly having bases under hospitals... even about how no one should believe the horrifying numbers of civilian casualties being reported from Gaza. 

• An Israeli military spokesperson said Israel was “expanding the humanitarian effort” to bring water and medicine into Gaza and that Gazans in the south “will receive assistance." A UN official in charge of relief dismissed this claim: “These few trucks [entering from Egypt] are nothing more than crumbs that will not make a difference for the 2 million people in the street. We should avoid conveying the message that a few trucks a day means the siege is lifted for humanitarian aid. This is not true.”⁷
• Israel called a press conference to claim that Hamas command centers are located under Al Shifa Hospital. Israel has provided no evidence for this claim, which has been debunked by the doctors, hospital staff and international aid workers. But this is very ominous. Some 60,000 people have sought shelter near the hospital and now could be targeted by Israeli airstrikes.⁸
• Israel claims to be blocking fuel shipments because Hamas would steal them and it already holds major stockpiles of fuel, so Gaza doesn’t need it. One UN aid worker ridiculed the claim: “Look, I'm not seeing any evidence that Hamas is stockpiling fuel. What I can say is, I know what we're doing with the fuel that we have got.”⁹
• This week President Joe Biden claimed, “I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed. I’m sure innocents have been killed, and it’s the price of waging a war.” Gaza’s Health Ministry immediately issued a detailed report with the names and identification numbers of over 6,700 victims of Israeli airstrikes. An official from Human Rights Watch stated, “I think it’s worth noting that this creates a fog of war, a fog of misinformation, which can provide political cover for more large-scale atrocities to take place.”¹⁰ 

Step Up the Struggle—Stand Against Israel’s Escalating Genocide in Gaza

It is very important right now to be in the streets calling out U.S. and Israeli crimes and demanding that Israel’s U.S.-backed onslaught stop. And questions must be posed and answered to the thousands of people coming into the streets and millions more suddenly paying attention. 

• WHY does the U.S. stand so steadfastly with this incredibly sadistic and destructive attack and why does it even oppose a ceasefire? Why do both major parties back Israel so firmly, despite their differences? Since they so clearly do not care one bit for the lives of Palestinian children, what IS driving their actions? 
• WHAT is it about the Democratic Party and Biden that accounts for their bloody-jawed behavior and their attempts to squash even the mildest dissent in their ranks?
• What does it say about the “democracy”—and what does it say about dictatorship—in this country when people are threatened, doxxed, fired, slandered, and blackballed for speaking out?  
• Why is Hamas NOT revolutionary, and not a group to be supported… but why is Israel, with the U.S. right behind, by far the greater oppressor and threat to humanity, and why must the political fire be overwhelmingly directed at Israel and the U.S.?
• And finally, what does this truly horrific war being waged by Israel, fully backed by the U.S., have to do with other intensifying conflicts in the world, as well as overall problems like climate disasters and the sharpening and irreconcilable conflict within the U.S. itself between the Christian fascists and the Democrats?

The answers to these burning questions can be found in this issue of Revolution, revcom.us. If you are reading this issue, follow the links below to these articles, spread them, take them with you to demonstrations, gatherings. 

• Some Basic Truths About the U.S.-Supported Israeli War Against Palestine, by Bob Avakian

• Gaza: As the Horror Heightens, the U.S. Gambles with Humanity’s Fate
  THE URGENT NEED FOR—AND INCREASED POSSIBILITY OF—REVOLUTION IN THIS TIME

• From the Revcoms: U.S. and Israel, Hands Off the Palestinian People!

• The REAL Problem Is Not Biden... And It’s Not Even Trump...The REAL Problem Is the Goddam Imperialist SYSTEM That Produced Them 

• Joe Biden keeps telling us: “If Israel Didn't Exist, the United States Would Have to Invent It.” WHY?

• Bloody-Jawed Uncle Joe: “Killing Innocents Is the Price of Waging War”

• What Is Hamas? by Alan Goodman

• America, Self-Proclaimed Bastion of Press Freedom, Calls for Censoring Coverage of Israel’s War on Gaza

• Chilling Clampdown on Artists’ Protest Against Israel’s Genocidal War on Gaza