As the United Nations General Assembly met last week, Israel’s U.S.-backed genocide continued to escalate in Gaza in truly horrific, barbaric ways. 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump both addressed the gathering. 

Israel’s atrocities in Gaza and the West Bank were repeatedly condemned by the heads of various countries throughout the week. On Friday, as Netan-Nazi took the podium, well over two-thirds of the delegates stood up and walked out in protest. Some, including the President of Colombia,¹ called for the creation of an armed, UN intervention force to stop the genocide in Gaza. As Netanyahu was speaking, thousands protested Israel’s Gaza genocide outside UN headquarters.

Netanyahu delivered a bloodthirsty tirade to a largely empty hall, doubling down on his lies and towering crimes in Gaza. He belligerently bragged about terrorizing the region, celebrating Israel's war crimes against Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Iran. He repeated the big lie that Israel was waging “war” against Hamas in Gaza: “Lay down your arms. Free all [the] hostages now… If you do, you will live. If you don’t, Israel will hunt you down.” 

But this is not a "war against Hamas," this is a full-blown genocide of the Palestinian people. Israel, with full U.S. backing, has killed at least 65,549 people and injured 167,518. The actual number of people murdered is much, much higher—but bodies remain buried and uncounted in the rubble. In addition, the entire infrastructure in Gaza has been systematically destroyed—hospitals bombed, schools and universities demolished, homes razed to the ground and hundreds of thousands starved and forced to evacuate again and again.

Netanyahu arranged for loudspeakers to blare his speech into Gaza. He even said that Israel had hacked into the cell phones of people in Gaza to livestream his speech, but whether his terrorist rant was actually heard in Gaza is not clear.

Trump spoke at the UN earlier in the week. He blamed Hamas for the ongoing slaughter committed by Israel and claimed that he had a new "peace proposal." But the key decisions about Gaza’s future seem likely to be made on Monday, September 29 at the White House, where Trump has invited Netanyahu for a meeting. 

In his speech, Netan-Nazi warned that Israel must “finish the job in Gaza as fast as possible.” But "the job" he is talking about is the job of genocide, of making Gaza fully unlivable for over two million Palestinians. As he spoke, the Palestinian poet and Pulitzer prize winning author Mosab Abu Toha posted a video on X: “Even while he speaks, he is committing war crimes. This is a few minutes in al-Shati Camp where i was born, where Israel yesterday slaughtered a second cousin of mine along with his wife and their four very young children.”

The following are further dimensions of the “job” Netanyahu is threatening to finish in Gaza, again, with Trump's full financial, political and military support.

Gaza City: Focal Point of Ethnic Cleansing and Genocide

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have been forcibly displaced from Gaza City, but as many as 500,000 may still remain, desperately trying to shelter and stay alive. They face an unrelenting Israeli assault, by tanks, troops, planes, drones, and robot tanks. Israeli forces are driving deeper and deeper into the city to force these hundreds of thousands to southern Gaza. But Israel is still bombing and shooting people as they head south. And if people do somehow make it out alive, there aren't even places to pitch tents in overcrowded areas that are themselves unlivable.

Israel hit some 170 targets in Gaza City on September 25 alone. They are escalating their attacks on family homes, warehouses, and other buildings where people are sheltering. One strike on a family home killed at least 11 people. Yet another on a warehouse where people were sheltering killed 22, including nine children.

“Bring me Noor,” one mother cried after her five-year-old daughter was buried by an airstrike. “Bring me Noor. In seven years, I’ve only had her. I do not have any children except her. Noor is under the rubble. Where is Noor?” Noor died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.

People are being forced into a constant state of uncertainty, trauma, fear, and displacement, trying desperately to find a safe place to shelter, to avoid attacks, to figure out where they should go next. 

“I have already left my home in the Tal al-Hawa neighborhood and took only a few of my belongings with me,” one woman said. “I couldn’t carry more, and it was the harshest situation anyone could go through because you have to choose between what you need to survive and what you want to keep as a memory with you.”

Satellite images show that as the Israeli military sweeps through Gaza City, it is razing block after block, destroying everything standing. By weeks end, hundreds had been killed and thousands more wounded. 

“These robots are the nightmare of this war.” Israel has packed explosives into converted armored personnel carriers and turned them into “mega-bombs” that are flooding Gaza City. “These robots are the nightmare of this war. They have the capacity to destroy entire neighborhoods at once, and the shrapnel has reached us multiple times, even though we are relatively far from the explosions. This is a policy of leave or be killed,” one Palestinian said.

Injuries Most Often Seen in War Zones. A new study has found that some types of war wounds—like burns or injuries to legs—were more common in Gaza’s civilians than among U.S. troops who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. “Injured civilians in Gaza are experiencing a pattern of wounds that you would expect in intense combat with military professionals,” one researcher said. The scale of these traumatic injuries reflects “the impact of indiscriminate aerial and heavy explosive bombardment in civilian areas,” the study said. Another study found that as many as 15 of every 16 Palestinians Israel has killed since March 2025 have been civilians.

As Need for Medical Care Surges, Doctors Without Borders Is Forced to Leave. As Israel’s military relentlessly kills and wounds, it also targets the very medical facilities needed to treat the injured and wounded. This week the international aid group Doctors Without Borders announced: “We have been left with no choice but to stop our activities, as our clinics are encircled by Israeli forces... This is the last thing we wanted…. We have been forced to suspend our activities and leave Gaza City.”

The remaining hospitals in Gaza City have been so damaged and starved of supplies that doctors were forced to ask parents of one wounded child “to go find a pharmacy and buy the stitching thread, iodine, and gauze, because the hospital did not have these most basic of medical supplies.”

Meanwhile, in central and southern Gaza, the few hospitals and clinics remaining are being inundated by a “tsunami” of injured and sick patients fleeing the Israeli offensive in Gaza City.

One in Three Children Have Nothing to Eat for 24 Hours. Child hunger and injuries are rising sharply in Gaza. The International Rescue Committee (IRC) recently found that one in three children under three hadn’t eaten in the last 24 hours. 

Women—Forced to Give Birth on the Streets. The United Nations has reported that "Israel's offensive in Gaza is forcing women to give birth in the streets, without hospitals, doctors or clean water.” Because of this and the collapse of healthcare, “23,000 women are going without care, and about 15 babies are being born each week with no medical help." As if this weren’t terrible enough, the situation on the ground "is worsening by the hour," according to the UN.

Ask yourself: what other motivation than ethnic cleansing and genocide could Israel have for flattening Gaza and leaving people no homes to go back to and nowhere to live, nothing to eat with relentless death and torment surrounding them at every turn?!

It is a product of the huge international protests and outcry that so many world leaders of capitalist and imperialist governments have spoken out against Israel's genocidal war crimes. But as the U.S.-Israeli genocide continues, it is not enough.

Now is the time for even more courage and defiance…

In light of the ongoing atrocities in Gaza, and Trump’s fascist rampage in the U.S., we urge readers to study and share our post last week: An invitation and a challenge to those who burn with rage at the U.S.-backed Israeli genocide being brought down on Gaza.

As we wrote there:

Now is the time for even more courage and defiance, for more determination to demand an END to the siege on Gaza and an end to the U.S./Israeli genocide. AND now is the time to bring this struggle into the fight to drive the Trump fascist regime from power.