While Prime Minister Netan-Nazi, aka Benjamin Netanyahu, was being applauded repeatedly by a bipartisan session of Congress, the U.S.-backed and -funded Israeli genocide—which Netan-nazi was here to uphold and defend—intensified.

This is not genocide through neglect or by accident, but active, conscious, murderous policy of the Israeli government. Again, fully armed, financed and backed by the U.S. government. 

Here is just some of the nightmare being brought down on the people of Gaza.

ONE: Massacres and Mass Evacuations

Last winter and spring, the Israeli army intensively bombed the whole of the Gaza strip, from Gaza City in the north to Khan Younis in the south. Over 40,000 people have been killed (likely many more, buried under the rubble), and more than 90,000 wounded. Israel has turned most of the population into refugees, forced to leave their homes and desperately seek a safe place to sleep and a chance to get some food, water, medical aid—which are all increasingly unavailable. Many camped in the rubble of bombed-out buildings; others jammed into schools, hospitals and UN refugee camps that they hoped would be safe from Israeli attack. 

But nowhere is safe in Gaza. The bombing and the massacres have not stopped. This week, Israel launched a new wave of military offensives against these half-ruined cities, forcing hundreds of thousands to flee for the third, fourth or eighth time. 

Khan Younis and Al-Mawasi

On Monday, July 22, Israel ordered the evacuation of a large part of Khan Younis and about 15 percent of a “humanitarian zone,” Al-Mawasi. Al-Mawasi is an 8.6-mile-long stretch of desolate beach with no sanitation or medical facilities and little access to food and other aid, which 1.8 million people were forced to crowd into. Despite its classification as a “humanitarian zone,” Al-Mawasi has been repeatedly attacked—with tents set on fire, and people, including children, slaughtered.

Israel claimed that “small groups” of Hamas fighters had regrouped there, and forced about 180,000 people to flee—some into what remained of that “humanitarian zone,” others to cities further north, amping up their suffering to the limits of endurance.

But the Israeli army gave almost no advance notice. Munadil Abu Younes, who has been displaced eight times, reported to The Guardian: “Israeli forces told us about the evacuation order as they entered the area,” he said. “We barely had time to collect our things, most people fled without taking anything. During previous evacuation orders they gave us a day or two, but this time we didn’t even have half an hour.” 

Within just hours, as thousands were fleeing to who-knows-where, Israel launched an all-out attack on Khan Younis, trapping hundreds of civilians in the war zone. Israeli planes and tanks struck more than 30 sites. 

Younes described the scene: “We found people running, racing to escape like judgment day had come. Bullets were falling around us like rain, and many people got hit...”

Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor called this “all part of Israel's media disinformation campaign and psychological warfare tactics, since military assaults on forcibly displaced people and their tents have occurred continually in this area for several weeks now, resulting in hundreds of deaths and injuries.” 

They went on that, “After carrying out a premeditated mass murder this morning, the Israeli army launched dozens of raids, fire belts, and artillery shelling on homes, streets, and gatherings of displaced people. Thousands of these people fled into the streets in a panic, looking for a safe place that did not exist... In addition to aerial bombardment and shooting from quadcopter aircraft, the Israeli army employs direct and indiscriminate artillery shelling against civilians.”

By Friday, at least 129 people were killed, many at the hands of Israeli snipers who were, according to an Al Jazeera journalist in Khan Younis, “shooting anyone who was moving.” 

“Mass Casualty Events” Overwhelm Al-Nasser Hospital

On the first day of the assault (July 22) seventy dead Palestinians and over 200 wounded were brought to the embattled Al-Nasser Hospital. Two-hundred injured pouring into any hospital is a crisis but Nasser was already desperately overcrowded and short of supplies, no syringes, no mattresses, no disinfectant. The following is a description of a similar “mass casualty event” at Al-Nasser on July 13, which gives us a sense of what is likely happening there now. (This report is from Dr. Javid Abdelmoneim, from Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières.)

Dr. Abdelmoneim writes, “[T]here was blood everywhere on the floor and I had to kneel to see the patients on the floor. Patients were sprawled everywhere, because there were no beds left.” He describes the stream of patients. First there was a three-year-old girl with her worried parents: 

She was breathing, so she must be okay, I thought. But as I took her bandage off, I realized her entire left thigh was peeled down to the bone. I turned to the next patient: a woman covered in dust. As I approached her, she looked up at me and I tried to smile and engage with her. She was breathing normally—her eyes were open, I couldn’t see blood anywhere. But as I took down the bandage, a large piece of her bowel came out.

And it went on and on like this, for over four hours.

Meanwhile, Israel claimed this tsunami of suffering was justified because (they claim) they “eliminated several terrorists.”

Deir al-Balah

On July 27, in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, Israeli planes attacked a girls’ school where thousands of refugees were sheltering. Israel claimed (with zero evidence, as always) that the school was a “Hamas command center.” At least 30 people were killed and over 100 injured, overwhelmingly women and children. CNN reported on the scene at nearby Al-Aqsa Hospital: bodies on the floor of the morgue, patients being treated on the floor of the overwhelmed emergency room, a dead child with the word “unidentified” written on his stomach.

There were also attacks reported in Gaza City in the north. Israel is making it clear that their offensive is far from over. So, the same cycle of military assaults on civilian targets and hundreds of thousands again forced to flee is being imposed on a people already sick, starved and exhausted to the edge of human limits.

TWO: Israel Is Waging a War on Children

Dr. Mark Perlmutter is an American surgeon who volunteered to work at European Hospital in southern Gaza this past May.¹ Perlmutter told CBS’s Sunday Morning that he treated many children shot by Israeli snipers: “… shot so perfectly in the chest, I couldn't put my stethoscope over their heart more accurately, and directly on the side of the head, in the same child.” 

Perlmutter adds: “No toddler gets shot twice by mistake by the 'world's best sniper.'” (Emphasis added)

The CBS team went on to interview more than 20 other doctors who had served in Gaza. They backed up Dr. Perlmutter’s report.

Yet this is only a small part of a horrifying picture.

In December, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) declared that Gaza was “the most dangerous place in the world to be a child.” UNICEF pointed to the 14,000 or more children killed, to the lack of clean water, basic sanitation, even toilet paper. It pointed out that hundreds of thousands of Gaza’s children are seriously injured or ill.

Since then, things have gotten even worse. 

According to Sunday Morning, “hundreds of thousands of children need medical care” which is unavailable because “Israel has destroyed most of Gaza’s hospitals.” Organizations seeking to evacuate injured or ill children to other countries are blocked at every turn by Israel. Tareq Hailat of the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund says his group has only gotten 200 children out. Thousands are on waiting lists, but since Israel seized and closed the Rafah crossing to Egypt, medical evacuations are “almost impossible.” 

Asked what happens to the ill children who do not receive care, Hailat responded: "Sadly, the real answer is they're dying. A broken leg here in the United States is not the same as a broken leg in Gaza. A broken leg in Gaza means that most likely you're going to have that leg amputated, which means that most likely you're gonna get an infection post that amputation, which most likely means that you're going to die.”

Ask yourself, what could be the intention behind obstructing evacuations of sick children from a war zone? What is the intention behind subjecting hundreds of thousands of children to the physical dangers of war, illness and starvation, and also the profound, soul-destroying trauma of seeing friends, family, parents slaughtered, blown apart by bombs, shredded by automatic weapons, buried in collapsed buildings?

Again, this is not neglect, but conscious genocidal slaughter.

THREE: Gaza Is a Death Camp

For decades since it came under illegal Israeli occupation, Gaza was known as “the world’s largest outdoor prison,” because neither people nor goods were allowed to enter or leave without Israeli permission.

Now with the Israeli invasion, Gaza has become the world’s largest concentration camp² where deliberately imposed conditions of daily life drive large numbers to the edge of death, or beyond.

According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, eighty-three percent of Gaza is now either under evacuation orders (subject to military assault) or is considered a “no-go zone” for Palestinians (meaning they can be shot on sight for being there.) That means that most of the roughly two million people in Gaza are forced into less than one-fifth of its territory.

The conditions in these “safer” areas, like those in the Nazi concentration camps, amount to people facing a slow death, from starvation, untreated illness, contaminated water, exhaustion and terror. 

And these deadly conditions continue to worsen. The UN reports that Gaza’s water production is one-fourth of pre-invasion levels, due to Israeli destruction of water pumping and treatment facilities. And the World Health Organization is “extremely worried” about a possible outbreak of the highly infectious polio virus which has been found in the raw sewage that runs through many refugee camps and towns.³ 

The Rulers of This Country Are Monstrous Criminals

All this is what the American rulers—Democrats and Republicans—were applauding in the halls of Congress. 

And if you do not act to stop this, it is what you are complicit with.