In many ways, the past 10 days in Gaza have been some of the most horrific since Israel’s genocidal bloodlust began after October 7. 

Over nine months, Israel—with full U.S. backing—has killed at least 38,983 people in Gaza, not counting at least 10,000 buried in rubble.

Israel’s “Safe Zones” Are Killing Fields

On July 12, Israel bombed the “safe zone” it declared in the al-Mawasi area along the Mediterranean Sea, slaughtering 90 people who had been driven into this packed area of side-to-side tents. Days later, on July 17, Israel struck al-Mawasi again, slaughtering 17 people. 

Israel claimed in each instance that it was targeting one Hamas operative and is “investigating” whether there were civilian deaths. In fact, there were 107 civilian deaths. Over and over and over again these kinds of cruel, transparent lies cover up massacres of civilians. And that sends a message. 

The message is that everyone in Gaza is a “dead man walking.” This is the phrase used to describe people on death row. Everyone in Gaza is living in constant terror that the ever-present hum of drones or the earth-shaking thunder of bombs is a death sentence to be carried out. There is nowhere—not on the floor of a classroom of a UN school, not in a hospital, not in a tent in an Israel-announced “safe zone”—where anyone can lay their head at night and expect to be alive, or find their loved ones alive, in the morning.

And each week that this continues, and expands, and escalates, the impact accumulates, wearing down the bodies, mental health, and ability of the Palestinian people in Gaza to survive. 

On July 18, an Al Jazeera correspondent in Gaza wrote:

There’s an overwhelming sense of desperation and depression across the Gaza Strip after nine months of relentless attacks. Entire families have been obliterated. People are trapped under piles of rubble. 

This morning a whole family of three generations – grandparents, parents, and their children – were all killed. This is the pattern of systematic mass killing that we’ve witnessed over and over. 

The intense Israeli bombing campaign has been mainly concentrated in central Gaza. Five hundred people have been killed in the past 10 days, and that’s likely a conservative number. When you consider all those missing, it’s probably far higher than this. [emphasis added]

Serial School Bombers, Armed, Enabled by the USA

In the 10 days leading up to July 18, Israel attacked at least six UN-run schools serving as shelters for displaced Palestinians. UNRWA (the UN relief agency in Gaza) says 120 of their educational institutions have been hit in air attacks since Israel began its war on Gaza. Hundreds of Palestinians sheltering in UN schools have been killed by American bombs and missiles. 

Louise Wateridge, a UN official on the ground in Gaza, said, “People choose these schools because they believe sheltering under the UN flag, as international law states, should provide safety.” 

For those hoping against hope that bombing schools is a “red line” that would cause the U.S. to impose meaningful penalties on Israel, the cold reality is that to date, there is no red line that Israel has crossed that has caused the U.S. to impose any meaningful punishment on Israel. 

Assault on Healthcare Escalates

Israel’s bombing of the al-Mawasi “safe zone” flooded the Nasser Medical Complex [also known as the Nasser Hospital] with people desperately seeking treatment for injuries. That hospital was already devastated by Israeli bans on bringing medical supplies into Gaza, and by Israel forcing the closure of the European Gaza Hospital, the only other functioning hospital in that part of Gaza (see Israel forces evacuation of European Gaza Hospital: Interview with Dr. Majed Jaber + update). 

On July 14, the Deputy Humanitarian Coordinator and Director of UNRWA Affairs in Gaza, Scott Anderson, described the scene in Nasser Hospital where “many patients were treated on the ground without disinfectants.” 

Israel’s War on Women and Babies

Each new Israeli massacre that floods hospital emergency rooms with injured people makes it more impossible for the overwhelmed medical system to provide care for pregnant women and babies. When Israel forced the closure of the European Gaza Hospital, babies in intensive care had to be evacuated to Nasser Hospital under dangerous and desperate conditions.

On July 10, ReliefWeb reported that pregnant women in Gaza find it “increasingly challenging to access the life-saving care they need due to repeated displacement, insecurity and attacks on healthcare facilities...”

The UN Office for Humanitarian Affairs reports women in Gaza are giving birth with no medical assistance in tents. Right now, thousands of pregnant women face acute levels of hunger and even deadly famine. This is leading to a rapid rise in the number of babies with a dangerously low birth weight as a result of severe malnourishment compounded by stress, fear and exhaustion. In an interview from Gaza for The RNL—Revolution, Nothing Less!—Show, Dr. Majed Jaber described seeing babies so emaciated (because their mothers were so starved they could not produce milk) that they could not be revived without special formula that Israel does not allow into Gaza.

Let’s call this what it is: Israel and the U.S. are genocidal baby killers. (See A Projected Death Toll of 186,000 Human Beings! Letter to The Lancet Exposes Scope, Depth of U.S.-Backed Israeli Genocide.)

Imposed Disease = Germ Warfare

Since October 7, Israel has systematically destroyed Gaza’s waste and sewage systems. And as such, Israel is essentially waging germ warfare on the people of Gaza, weaponizing disease as part of a genocide.

Skin rashes are spreading. Hepatitis A is spreading. And now, polio is showing up  in the raw sewage that flows everywhere in Gaza.  

Polio is an infectious disease that can lead to the permanent paralysis of body parts and ultimately cause death by immobilizing a person’s ability to breathe. It primarily affects children. Polio is preventable by vaccine, and it was nearly absent from Gaza before October 7. Unlike the situation in other parts of the world where polio remains a threat, in Gaza aid agencies have the capacity to bring in sufficient vaccine to protect people.

But Israel is preventing that. 

The danger to aid workers, the inability to bring in medical supplies, the constant forced evacuations are all the direct result of Israel’s choking off aid and scorched-earth bombing. And the U.S. has actively enabled this. Genocide Joe Biden, and later the U.S. Congress, defunded UNRWA, the UN agency with the capacity to provide and distribute water, safe waste disposal, vaccines, and medicines. And Biden’s administration consistently whitewashed, lied about, and covered up—and in doing so enabled—Israel’s attacks on aid workers. 

Confronting the Situation Demands Intensified Protest NOW

What you just read is further proof what we have been documenting for nine months at revcom.us:

Israel seized on the October 7th attack to attempt to impose a final solution. That’s the term that Hitler and the Nazis used to refer to the final solution of the Jews in Europe, by which they meant the physical extermination of the Jewish people in Europe. That is, Israel’s intent is to make it impossible for the Palestinian people to survive as a people in the historic homeland of Palestine, whether through mass murder, exile, imprisonment, even more brutal oppression, or all of the above.

Every day that Israel’s genocide in Gaza continues, the impact of death, destruction, trauma and terror is amplified and multiplied.

This must be a wake-up call to people in this country of the need for a whole other level of determined, creative, massive protest to STOP THE GENOCIDE NOW. 

Be at the protest in Washington, DC on July 24 when Netan-Nazi speaks at a joint session in Congress. March with THE REVCOM CORPS For The Emancipation Of Humanity to demand:

STOP the U.S./Israeli Genocide of the Palestinian People NOW!

And with that, be part of breaking open serious debate over what will it take to get rid of this whole system of capitalism-imperialism that can only exist based on this kind of horror. Dig seriously into the analysis from the revolutionary leader Bob Avakian on what is driving this genocide, and what it will take to get to a society where this—and horrors like this—never happen again.