The Genocide Drags On by Vijay Prashad

 It has become background noise. We know it is happening, but we can almost forget that it continues at a barbaric rate. The United Nations deputy special coordinator for Palestine, Muhannad Hadi, released a statement on December 13, 2024, that simply makes no sense: “I am very concerned about the rapidly deteriorating security and humanitarian situation in Gaza.” How can anything deteriorate in Gaza? Isn’t the situation as bad as it could get, the genocidal war of the Israelis grinding on?

If you are paying attention, you will find that every day there are more and more reports of bombing in northern Gaza. These bombings pulverize entire buildings and massacre entire families. On December 17, the commissioner-general of the UN Palestinian Agency (UNRWA) Philippe Lazzarini put the situation clearest: “We are getting out of words to describe the situation in Gaza…. My colleagues when they come back, they basically describe a post-apocalyptic environment, and people are just living among [garbage], sewage water, in the rubble, and struggling because they are confronted on a daily basis with death, hunger, and disease.”

Dead Bodies

The day before Hadi made his statement, an Israeli airstrike hit a housing development in the Nuseirat refugee camp and killed large numbers of the al-Sheikh Ali family. It has become part of counting the death toll to track the elimination of entire families by Israeli bombs. A Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor report from October 2024 showed that 3,500 Palestinian families in Gaza “have suffered multiple losses since October 2023. Of these, 365 families have lost more than 10 members, while over 2,750 families have lost at least three.” These numbers will need to be updated. The Euro-Med report is called De-Gaza: A Year of Israel’s Genocide and the Collapse of World Order.

On December 11, 2024, before this round of bombardments and killings, a startling press briefing was given by Mounir al-Bursh (director general of the Palestinian Ministry of Health) and Mahmoud Basal (spokesman for the Palestinian Civil Defense Agency). Al-Bursh said that the Israeli troops fired on ambulances and prevented rescue workers from getting to the buildings to recover the injured and the dead. As a result, he said, “bodies are left in the streets and are eaten by dogs.” Basal, meanwhile, said that many of the injured were dying under the rubble because the rescue teams no longer had regular access to the bombed buildings and did not have the equipment to save people. This means that the Israelis are not only bombing residential areas and killing unarmed civilians, but they are also preventing the injured from being rescued and the dead from an honorable burial. Journalist Hossam Shabat, reporting from northern Gaza, wrote, “Due to the rising Israeli bombings and killings in northern Gaza, we have run out of body bags to bury the dead, and now we resort to using any piece of clothing or a blanket for their burial.”

Reports

Over the past few months, two reports have been published whose honesty enables the reader to feel the atrocities being committed against the Palestinians in Gaza.

First, in October 2024, the remarkable UN special rapporteur on Palestine, Francesca Albanese, published her 32-page report for the UN General Assembly. Her finding is clear: “The current genocide is part of a century-long project of eliminatory settler colonialism in Palestine, a stain on the international system and humanity, which must be ended, investigated, and prosecuted.” The legal case for the end not only of genocide but its basis, the occupation, is made very strongly. Anyone who reads Albanese’s report with an open mind will come to that conclusion.

Second, in December, Amnesty International released a 296-page documentcalled You Feel Like You Are Subhuman: Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza. The most painful section to read is the evidence presented clinically by Amnesty of the genocidal words of Israeli officials that are then enacted by their soldiers. It is worth reading a few sentences from the Amnesty report:

Amnesty International analyzed 102 statements made by Israeli government officials, high-ranking military officers, and members of the Knesset made between [October 7, 2023, and June 30, 2024] which dehumanized Palestinians, or called for, or justified genocidal acts or other crimes under international law against them. Of these, it identified 22 statements that were specifically made by members of Israel’s war and security cabinets, who included Prime Minister Netanyahu, then Minister of Defense Gallant and other government ministers, by [high-ranking] military officers and by Israel’s president between [October 7, 2023, and June 30, 2024]. These statements appeared to call for, or justify, genocidal acts.

Also, the language used by Israeli officials was frequently repeated, including by soldiers in Gaza, apparently explaining the rationale for their [behavior]. This is evidenced by Amnesty International’s analysis of 62 videos, audio recordings, and photographs posted online showing Israeli soldiers in which they made calls for the destruction of Gaza or the denial of essential services to people in Gaza, or celebrated the destruction of Palestinian homes, mosques, schools, and universities.

For example, before the Israeli offensive on Rafah, Israeli minister of finance Bezalel Smotrich said at a public event, “There are no jobs half done. Rafah, Deir al-Balah, Nuseirat, destruction! Blot out the memory of [the people of] Amalek from under heaven.” This genocidal language was then replicated on the ground. Amnesty’s report affirms strongly that there is no other way to understand the Israeli campaign against the Palestinians in Gaza than as a genocide.

Rascal Children

The Ministry of Health in Gaza says that since the genocide began, the Israelis have killed at least 45,059 Palestinians. Of them, at least 17,000 are children. Israel and its Western allies have spent considerable funds to deny these numbers. The right-wing Henry Jackson Society (based in the United Kingdom) has published a 40-page report that belongs in a juvenile debate. To complain about this or that individual case and not to see the extent of the bombardment and destruction, as revealed by reputed human rights organizations, is disingenuous. They would like to justify the killing of children by their dispute over statistics.

In 2014, during a previous terrible bombing of Gaza by the Israelis, the Palestinian poet Khaled Juma wrote about the children being killed then. Then, the Israelis killed 551 children, as recorded by the official UN inquiry. This time the number is 30 times as high and climbing. No debate about the exact numbers will change that.

Oh, rascal children of Gaza,
You who constantly disturbed me with your screams under my window,
You who filled every morning with rush and chaos,
You who broke my vase and stole the lonely flower on my balcony,
Come back—
And scream as you want,
And break all the vases,
Steal all the flowers,
Come back,
Just come back…