“As aid has dried up, the floodgates of horror have reopened. Gaza is a killing field – and civilians are in an endless death loop.” 

This is how the head of the United Nations described the situation in Gaza, where Palestinian men, women, and children are being plunged deeper and deeper into a genocidal hell by Israel and the U.S.

Israel is slaughtering civilians from the air and the ground. It’s enforcing starvation, thirst, and disease by blockading urgently needed food, water, medicine and other needed goods. The U.S. is backing all this with bombs, money, words and much more.

None of this is random. As we wrote last week, Israel is unleashing an even more murderous and barbaric stage of its genocide in Gaza. That genocide was accelerated by Trump and Israeli prime minister Netanyahu when they met last week and both reaffirmed their support for Trump’s vision of a Gaza emptied of Palestinians. 

“I think it’s an incredible piece of important real estate,” Trump said of Gaza, “And I think it’s something that we would be involved in… controlling and owning the Gaza Strip.” Netanyahu applauded Trump for his “bold vision… We’re working on it.”

Working indeed. This past week Israel accelerated its forced displacement of hundreds of thousands and its seizure of nearly half of Gaza as “security zones.” 

“Conquest, Expulsion, Settlement,” is how one analyst described Israel’s strategy. 

Slaughter from the Sky, Kill Zones on the Ground

It’s hard to keep up with the daily count of people slaughtered: 56 on Monday, April 7; 58 on Tuesday. On Wednesday, an Israeli missile attack on Gaza City’s Shuja’iyya neighborhood killed at least 35 and wounded 55. Some 80 more were trapped under the rubble. Children were massacred, some torn to pieces. On Friday, 10 were reported killed in the south, including seven children, and two more in the north. In all, Israel reportedly struck 370 targets this past week in its murderous assault. 

The United Nations documented 224 Israeli strikes on residential buildings and tents housing displaced people between March 18 and April 9. “Overall, a large percentage of fatalities are children and women,” they found. In 36 instances, those killed were only women and children. 

Israel isn’t just bombing residences: they’re also targeting hospitals and schools, where people fleeing bombs—or Israeli evacuation orders—are often forced to shelter. 

The World Health Organization reports that 33 of Gaza’s 36 hospitals had been attacked since Israel began its onslaught in October 2023. Only 21 have remained partly operational. An education task force analysis found that “88 percent of the schools in Gaza (499 out of 564) have taken direct hits during the war and … 62 percent of the school buildings used as shelters for displaced persons have also taken direct hits."

Since Israel broke its ceasefire agreement with Hamas on March 8, 1,542 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, and 3,940 have been wounded. The UN has sounded a horrific alarm: Israeli attacks are now killing or injuring “100 children a day.”

“I swear to God, if we don’t die from airstrikes, we will die of hunger,” one woman in Gaza said. “We are not safe. The whole world, listen to us, we are really not safe. We move from one soup kitchen to another with danger. I swear to God, they are striking everywhere. If I don’t die in these strikes, I will die of hunger with my children. What shall we do? Where shall we go? Look at us. Find us a solution. We’ve been in this torture for a year and a half. We are tired.” 

"Gaza has become a deathtrap"

Israel is carrying out war crimes by massacring civilians, and war crimes by blockading the life-saving aid 2.1 million Palestinians have been forced by Israel to rely on. But now food, medicine, water, fuel, shelter supplies, and vital equipment are all piling up at the border—stuck.

There is a severe shortage of tents and fuel. Israeli forces are refusing to quickly repair the water pipeline supplying some 70 percent of Gaza's consumption. Vital medical supplies are being blockaded, and now 600,000 Palestinian children are in danger of contracting polio and being permanently paralyzed because Israel refuses to let the polio vaccine in.

Most Palestinians in Gaza survive on one meal a day, which does not provide enough calories and essential nutrients. The UN reports that 60,000 children are at risk of malnutrition, with people forced to forage for food as community kitchens run dry.

What does this do to children? Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, a U.S. doctor who volunteers in Gaza told Haaretz that all the people he met suffer from grave nutrient deficiencies, particularly of proteins, but this is especially dangerous for children:

Children need protein to develop their brain, protect them from infections, and produce antibodies. Without proteins, the muscles begin to atrophy, which is what we see." Sidhwa said he had operated on a boy of 16 who had hardly any muscles, even though, according to his parents, he had been very active and played soccer often. This is caused solely by protein deficiency.

The End of Rafah? Israel Forcibly Displaces Nearly 400,000, Seizes Half of Gaza

Rafah is a major city in southern Gaza. It’s been a gateway to Egypt and home to 200,000-250,000 Palestinians. At the end of March, Israel ordered everyone to evacuate. This past week Israel announced it was taking control of Rafah and turning it into part of its security “buffer zone.” Whether or not Israel will completely level the city, as it has with other “buffer zones” it has created, is unknown. 

This itself is an outrageous crime against the Palestinian people. “Permanently displacing the civilian population within occupied territory amounts to forcible transfer, a grave breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention and a crime against humanity under the Rome Statute,” the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights said this week.

Rafah and the surrounding area comprise roughly 20 percent of Gaza. In addition, Israel has created a new "security corridor" between Rafah and Khan Younis to the north which they're calling the "Morag Corridor." This is named for a previous Israeli settlement in Gaza, which signifies their larger intention to seize Gaza for Israelis to live in. These areas, along with the Philadelphi corridor along Gaza’s border with Egypt and the near-one mile wide “buffer zone” Israel has created along its border inside Gaza, amounts to half the total area of Gaza being seized by the Israeli army with Palestinians forcibly pushed out. 

Since mid-March, Israel has issued 21 orders to Palestinians to evacuate their homes and cities or face death at the hands of Israel’s military in order to create these “security zones.” 

This is ethnic cleansing: clearing more and more Palestinians from more and more territory, breaking the population up into smaller and smaller groups in separate areas, and giving Israel total control of Gaza. Israel may call this “voluntary migration,” but there’s nothing voluntary when there’s a gun at your head, you have nowhere to live, and your children are starving.

"Israel has done something truly incredible—Israel has managed to turn Jews into Nazis!"  —Bob Avakian

While Israel repeats the lie that they are "targeting Hamas," it's clear that their targets are the whole of the Palestinian people. In a damning report from an Israeli organization of veterans against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, Breaking the Silence, soldiers talked openly about the genocidal logic of the slaughter in Gaza for the last year and a half. 

The report focuses on the systematic clearing of the "perimeter" around the border of Gaza where soldiers created a "kill zone," which the Palestinians did not even know about. When asked, "During briefings, is there talk about civilians who might be in the area?" A soldier answered, "There is no civilian population. They're terrorists, all of them." This includes children and babies and the elderly—all targets for slaughter. 

Similarly, when discussing the vast demolition that the Israeli army has undertaken, this exchange is chilling:

Soldier: What is a building demolition?... The bulldozer drives and mows down everything in its path. It's not something unusual or something you make special preparations for. You're going somewhere, that's the excuse. Essentially, everything gets mowed down, everything.

Interviewer: What is "everything"?

Soldier: Everything is everything. Everything that's built.

Interviewer: Orchards?

Soldier: Yes.

Interviewer: Cowsheds, chicken coops?

Soldier: Yes, yes.

Interviewer: Every building and every structure?

Soldier: Every building and every structure. Everything.

Interviewer: What does the area look like after?

Soldier: Hiroshima. That's what I'm saying, Hiroshima.

The genocidal ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people from Gaza is a towering crime—a crime that everyone around the world, and especially the U.S.—is responsible for exposing, and mobilizing to stop.