This is the most lethal war for the media in recent times. A generation of journalists is being wiped out
Sun 31 Aug 2025 18.30 CEST
Day by day, the death toll rises, the war crimes mount, and the outrage grows. Last Wednesday, the pope demanded that Israel stop its “collective punishment” of Gaza’s population. A day later, António Guterres, the United Nations secretary general, warned that “the levels of death and destruction … are without parallel in recent times”. More than 500 UN staff have pressed the human rights chief, Volker Türk, to call it genocide. Half of registered voters in the US have already concluded that that is what Israel is doing in Gaza.
The agony is deepening. On Friday, the Israeli military declared famine-hit Gaza City to be a combat zone, intensifying its assault and ending “tactical pauses” that allowed limited – if utterly inadequate – food delivery. Many inhabitants are physically incapable of fleeing again, and fear that they would be no safer elsewhere. Israel has attacked parts of areas that it has labelled as “humanitarian zones”.
Israel could end the international condemnation by stopping its campaign of annihilation. Instead, it tries to stop us learning about it, by silencing those who bear witness. It is determined to control the narrative of the war – though even its own figures at times offer a bleak view of conditions – and will go to shocking lengths. This has become the most lethal war for the media in recent history. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), at least 189 Palestinian journalists are dead in Gaza; others put the toll still higher. Five were killed in a single strike last week.
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and Avaaz, a non-profit organisation promoting global activism, are calling on Israel to abide by its international obligations to protect journalists as civilians, and open Gaza’s borders so that international journalists can report freely.
The Guardian is printing the names of all of those whom the CPJ has listed as killed: women and men such as Fatma Hassona, Hamza al-Dahdouh and Anas al-Sharif, admired for their work and, of course, dearly loved as daughters, fathers, sisters and friends. These are deeply personal losses. But they also represent a generation of journalists that is being wiped out and cannot be replaced.
“At the rate journalists are being killed in Gaza by the Israeli army, there will soon be no one left to keep you informed,” warned Thibaut Bruttin, RSF’s director general.
The civilian death toll in Gaza is staggering, and journalists are put at particular risk when they run to danger to report as others try to escape. But the killing of so many who have been clearly identified as members of the media, in some cases after they were threatened over their work or smeared, leaves no doubt that they have been targeted. This is “the deadliest and most deliberate effort to kill and silence journalists that CPJ has ever documented”, the organisation has said. “Palestinian journalists are being threatened, directly targeted and murdered by Israeli forces, and are arbitrarily detained and tortured in retaliation for their work.”
Journalists in Gaza work in unbearable conditions – hungry and exhausted, breaking off reporting to find food for their families, help carry bodies from rubble or assist wounded relatives in finding shelter. Many are separated from those they love; many have buried loved ones. All know that in bearing witness, they increase the danger that they face. They carry on to defend the truth against Israel’s attempts to extinguish it. They must be defended themselves.
Genoa’s dockworkers, engaged in collecting and shipping aid for Gaza, vow to block Europe if the Sumud Flotilla faces attacks or intimidation.
The Port of Genoa has turned into a symbol of resistance and international solidarity.
Italian media reported that for weeks, Genoese dockworkers have been collecting aid for the people of Gaza, and on Saturday evening they renewed their clear and determined message: if the Global Sumud Flotilla, which set sail today loaded with food supplies, were to find itself in danger, an unprecedented response will follow.
“If we lose contact with our boats even for just 20 minutes, we will block all of Europe. From the Port of Genoa nothing will leave anymore,” declared representatives of the Autonomous Collective of Dockworkers (Calp).
Their words, spoken before 40,000 people, expressed the unbreakable bond between the Ligurian city and the international mission to break Israel’s siege on Gaza.
The collective’s spokesperson explained that the most delicate stage will begin “around mid-September, when these boats will arrive near the coast of Gaza, in the critical zone.”
He then added: “If we lose contact with our boats, with our comrades, even for just 20 minutes, we will block all of Europe. Together with our Usb union, together with all dockworkers, together with the entire city of Genoa.”
During the torchlight vigil, the dockworkers reaffirmed their commitment: “Our girls and boys must return without a scratch, and all our goods, which belong to the people, down to the very last box, must reach their destination.”
They also reminded that every year 13-14,000 containers leave the Genoa port for Israel, issuing a stern warning: “We will not let a single nail leave anymore. We will launch an international strike, we will block the roads. We will block everything.”
Words were matched with actions. Over 280 tons of foodstuffs have been collected and shipped thanks to the joint efforts of the dockworkers and the association Music for Peace.
“We want to show that the Port of Genoa is a civilian port and not a port of war. We want to send the signal that not only do we block weapons, but we also physically deliver aid to the Palestinian population,” explained the dockworkers.
The historic “Sala della Compagnia Unica” has been transformed into a warehouse of resistance, where teams of volunteer dockworkers organized, packed, and loaded the aid. Not only their labor, but also their vehicles and resources, were put at the service of a cause they consider not abstract solidarity but a duty of class and humanity.
The Sumud Flotilla therefore sets out from Genoa not only as a humanitarian mission, but as a direct challenge to an inhuman siege.
And the dockworkers, long at the forefront of struggles for dignity and justice, have made it clear they will not stand by: if anyone tries to stop the boats, “we will block all of Europe.”
by Akram Belkaïd, Le Monde diplomatique, September 2025
The Arab states will not come to Gaza’s aid. None of them has launched any significant diplomatic initiative to prevent the reoccupation of the enclave or to end the Israeli bombardment it has endured for nearly two years. Despite the dreadful human toll — 70,000 dead, 70% of them women and children, according to some estimates — and a famine reminiscent of the worst medieval sieges, not a single capital across the Arab world is demanding sanctions against Tel Aviv or threatening its Western partners with retaliation for their unwavering support of Binyamin Netanyahu and his government (1).
Unlike in the October 1973 Arab-Israeli war, the Organisation of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) is not trying to persuade other oil producers to restrict deliveries so that Washington will put pressure on Israel. As an example of how things have changed, in May, as American weapons continued to flow into Israel and Congress approved credit after credit for Tel Aviv, the USS Forrest Sherman, a US Navy destroyer, made a routine port call at Algiers (2).
The communist activist Georges Ibrahim Abdallah, recently released after 41 years in a French prison, was just as critical of ordinary Arab people as of their leaders, if not more so: ‘Palestinian children are dying of hunger,’ he said when he arrived in Beirut. ‘It’s a source of shame for history. A source of shame for the Arab people, more than for their governments. The regimes, we know. [But] how many martyrs have died in demonstrations or attempting to cross Gaza’s borders? None. No one has fallen. Everything depends on the Egyptian people, more than on anyone else.’
Egypt’s leaders disagree. Far from breaking off diplomatic relations, they are strengthening their economic cooperation with Tel Aviv, even as dozens of Gazans die every day. True, 40,000 Egyptian soldiers are deployed in northern Sinai, but their mission is not to open a corridor for humanitarian aid, it’s to prevent an influx of refugees. Reasons aren’t hard to find…
In early August the Israeli company NewMed announced the signing of a ‘historic’ €35bn contract to supply Egypt with natural gas from the offshore Leviathan field starting in 2026. The deal — for 135 billion cubic metres over 15 years — will supply 20% of Egypt’s annual needs. Since 2019, when it concluded a first contract for 60 billion cubic metres, Cairo has accepted that it’s dependent on Israel for its energy security. This may explain why its security services prevented participants in the World March to Gaza from converging on Sinai in June, often by force.
The United Arab Emirates (UAE), for its part, normalised relations with Israel in 2020 under the Abraham accords. In January, Edge Group, a leading Emirati defence contractor, announced a $10m deal that will give it a 30% stake in the Israeli company Thirdeye Systems, which specialises in drone detection using AI. In Egypt, the UAE and Morocco — another signatory of the Abraham accords — normalisation with Israel goes hand in hand with business opportunities. It’s enough to inspire Syria and Saudi Arabia, which are stepping up their contacts with Israel too.
Akram Belkaïd is deputy director of Le Monde diplomatique.
A U.N. Security Council vote to grant Palestine permanent U.N. membership would end Israel’s zealous delusions of permanent control over Palestine, write Jeffrey Sachs and Sybil Fares. But the U.S. stands in the way.
U.S. President Donald Trump at the White House, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu looking on, February 2025 (The White House, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
President Donald Trump wants a Nobel Peace Prize, and his efforts toward peace in Ukraine, if successful, could possibly help him earn one—but only if he also ends U.S. complicity in the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
Under Trump, as under former President Joe Biden, the U.S. has served as Israel’s partner in mass murder, annexation, starvation, and the escalating torment of millions of Palestinians. The genocide can, and will, stop if Trump wills it. So far he has not.
Israel is committing genocide—everyone knows it, even its staunchest defenders. The Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem has recently made a poignant acknowledgment of “Our Genocide.” In Foreign Affairs, former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew recently admitted that extremist parties in Netanyahu’s government openly aim to starve Palestinians in Gaza.
Lew frames his piece as praise for the former Biden administration (and for himself) for their supposedly valiant efforts to prevent mass starvation by pressuring Israel to allow minimal food entry, while blaming Trump for easing that pressure.
Yet the actual importance of the piece is that an ardent Zionist insider certifies the genocidal agenda sustaining Netanyahu’s rule. Lew recounts that in the aftermath of Oct. 7, Israelis frequently pledged that “not a drop of water, not a drop of milk, and not a drop of fuel will go from Israel to Gaza,” a stance that still shapes Israel’s cabinet policy. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) can use Lew’s article as confirmation of Israel’s genocidal intent.
“The U.S. aids and protects Israel every day in these horrific crimes against the Palestinian people.”
The genocide in Gaza, coupled with the annexation in the West Bank, aims to fulfill the Likud vision of a Greater Israel that exercises territorial control between the Sea and Jordan. This will destroy any possibility of a Palestinian state, and any possibility of peace.
Indeed, Bezalel Smotrich, the extremist minister of finance and minister in the ministry of defense, recently vowed to “permanently bury the idea of a Palestinian state” while the Knesset has recently called for annexation of the occupied West Bank.
Bezalel Smotrich celebrating election victory in March 2021. (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)
The U.S. aids and protects Israel every day in these horrific crimes against the Palestinian people. The U.S. provides billions of dollars in military support, goes to war alongside Israel, and offers diplomatic cover for Israel’s crimes against humanity. The vacuous mantra that “Israel has the right to defend itself” is the U.S. pat excuse for Israel’s mass murder and starvation of innocent civilians.
Generations of historians, psychologists, sociologists, philosophers, and inquiring minds will ask how the descendants and coreligionists of the Jews murdered by Hitler’s genocidal regime came to become genocidaires. Two factors, deeply intertwined, come to the fore.
First, the Nazi Holocaust lent credence among Jews to the Zionist claim that only a state with overwhelming military power and ready to use it can protect the Jewish people. For these militarists, every Arab country opposed to Israel’s ongoing occupation of Palestine became a dire foe to be crushed by war.
This is Netanyahu’s doctrine of violence, which was first unveiled in the Clean Break strategy, and which has produced nonstop Israeli mobilization and war, and a society now gripped by implacable hatred even of innocent women and children in Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria. Netanyahu has dragged the U.S. into countless devastating and futile wars out of Netanyahu’s blindness to the reality that only diplomacy, not war, can achieve Israel’s security.
Second, this non-stop resort to violence reignited a dormant strain of Biblical Judaism, notably based on the Book of Joshua, which presents God’s covenant with Abraham as justification for genocides committed in conquering the Promised Land. Ancient zealotry of this kind, and the belief that God would redeem his chosen people through violence, fueled suicidal revolts against the Roman Empire between 66 and 135 AD. Whether the genocides in the Book of Joshua ever occurred (probably not) is beside the point. For today’s zealots, the license to commit genocide is vivid, immediate, and biblically ordained.
Netanyahu has dragged the U.S. into countless devastating and futile wars out of Netanyahu’s blindness to the reality that only diplomacy, not war, can achieve Israel’s security.
Aware of the danger of self-destructive zealotry, the rabbis who shaped the Babylonian Talmud proscribed Jews from attempting to return en masse to the promised land (Ketubot 111a). They taught that Jews should live in their own communities and fulfill God’s commandments where they are, rather than seeking to recapture a land from which they had been exiled following decades of suicidal revolt.
“Netanyahu has dragged the U.S. into countless devastating and futile wars out of Netanyahu’s blindness to the reality that only diplomacy, not war, can achieve Israel’s security.”
Whatever the fundamental reasons for Israel’s murderous turn, Israel’s survival among nations is at risk today as it has become a pariah state. For the first time in history, Israel’s Western allies have repudiated Israel’s violent ways.
France, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada have each pledged to formally recognize the State of Palestine at the upcoming U.N. General Assembly in September. These countries will finally join the will of the overwhelming global majority in recognizing that the two-state solution, enshrined in international law, is the true guarantor of peace.
The majority of the American people are rightly revulsed by Israel’s brutality and are also turning their support massively to the Palestinian cause. In a Reuters poll released Aug. 20, 58 percent of Americans now believe that the U.N. should recognize the State of Palestine, against just 32 percent who oppose that.
American politicians will surely note the change, at Israel’s peril, unless the two-state solution is rapidly implemented. (Logical arguments can also be given for a peaceful one-state, bi-national solution, but this alternative has essentially no backing among U.N. member states and no basis in the international law regarding the Israel-Palestine conflict that has developed over more than seven decades.)
This Israeli government will not change course on its own. Only the Trump administration can end the genocide through a comprehensive settlement agreed by the world’s nations at the U.N. Security Council and U.N. General Assembly. The solution is to stop the genocide, make peace, and salvage Israel’s standing in the world by creating a Palestinian state alongside Israel on the June 4, 1967 borders.
Trump must force Israel to see reality: that Israel cannot continue to rule over the Palestinian people, murder them, starve them, and ethnically cleanse them.
United Nations General Assembly emergency special session meeting on the situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, June 2025 (UN Photo/Evan Schneider)
For decades, the entire Arab and Islamic world has supported the two-state solution and advocated to normalize relations with Israel and guarantee security for the entire region. This solution is in full accordance with international law, and was again espoused clearly by the U.N. General Assembly in the New York Declaration last month at the conclusion of the United Nations High-Level International Conference on the Peaceful Settlement of the Question of Palestine and the Implementation of the Two-State Solution (July 29, 2025).
Trump has come to understand that to save Ukraine, he must force it to see reality: that NATO cannot expand to Ukraine as that would directly threaten Russia’s own security. In the same way, Trump must force Israel to see reality: that Israel cannot continue to rule over the Palestinian people, murder them, starve them, and ethnically cleanse them. The two-state solution thereby saves both Palestine and Israel.
An immediate U.N. Security Council vote to grant Palestine permanent membership in the U.N. next month would put an end to Israel’s zealous delusions of permanent control over Palestine, as well as its reckless territorial ambitions in Lebanon and Syria.
The focus of the crisis would then shift to immediate and practical issues: how to disarm non-state actors within the framework of the new state and regional peace, how to enable mutual security for Israel and Palestine, how to empower the Palestinians to govern effectively, how to finance the reconstruction, and how to provide urgent humanitarian assistance to a starving population.
Trump can make this happen at the U.N. in September. The U.S., and only the U.S., has vetoed the permanent membership of Palestine in the UN. The other members of the U.N. Security Council have already signaled their support.
Peace in the Middle East is possible now — and there is no time to lose.
Jeffrey D. Sachs is a university professor and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he directed The Earth Institute from 2002 until 2016. He is also president of the U.N. Sustainable Development Solutions Network and a commissioner of the U.N. Broadband Commission for Development.
Sybil Fares is a specialist and adviser in Middle East policy and sustainable development at SDSN.
Gaza’s Health Ministry said in a statement on Tuesday that Israeli forces killed 75 Palestinians and wounded 370 over the previous 24-hour period as relentless US-backed Israeli attacks continue across the Strip.
On top of the violent deaths, the Health Ministry also recorded three starvation-related deaths due to the Israeli siege. “This brings the total number of victims of famine and malnutrition to 303, including 117 children,” the ministry wrote on Telegram.
Israeli strikes on Tuesday included the bombing of a tent in southern Gaza near the city of Khan Younis that killed six members of the same family, including three children, according to the Palestinian news agency WAFA.
Palestinians mourn by the shrouded bodies of loved ones killed in Israeli strikes on Khan Yunis, ahead of their funeral at Nasser hospital in Khan Younis on August 26, 2025 (IMAGO/APAimages via Reuters Connect)
The IDF has continued its heavy attacks on Gaza City as it prepares to take over the city, plans that involve cleansing the city of its Palestinian population and then completely destroying it. Gaza City residents told Reuters that Israeli tank and aerial attacks pounded the city’s eastern neighborhoods throughout the night.
“Earthquakes, we call it, they want to scare people to leave their homes,” said Ismail, a 40-year-old Gaza City resident. Health officials told Reuters that at least 18 people were killed in and around Gaza City overnight.
Last week, the UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) confirmed that famine is occurring in the Gaza Governorate, which encompasses Gaza City and its surrounding towns. The IPC is calling for an immediate ceasefire to address the humanitarian catastrophe.
Israeli forces also continued to kill Palestinians attempting to reach aid, with the Health Ministry recording the death of 17 aid seekers and the injury of 122. Since the end of May, the ministry has recorded the killing of 2,140 aid seekers, and more than 15,737 have been injured.
The Health Ministry said that since October 7, 2023, its violent death toll has reached 62,819, and the number of wounded has climbed to 158,629. Studies have found that the ministry’s numbers are likely a significant undercount.
The Trump administration has provided backing for the settlement expansion plan
by Dave Decamp, Antiwar. com, August 20, 2025
An Israeli committee on Wednesday gave final approval for the construction of about 3,400 housing units for the expansion of an illegal settlement in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, a step that Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said “erases” a Palestinian state.
The housing units will be constructed as part of the controversial E1 settlement project, which has been frozen for decades due to international opposition, since it will essentially split the West Bank in two. Smotrich, who also holds a position in the Defense Ministry that gives authority to expand settlements, first announced the plan last week.
The Israeli settlement watchdog group Peace Now said that the vote by the Higher Planning Committee of the Civil Administration, a Defense Ministry department, for final approval of the construction came at “record speed” as scheduling usually takes much longer. The settlement expansion is seen as the Israeli government’s response to several Western countries, including the UK, France, Canada, and Australia, announcing plans to recognize a Palestinian state.
Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and a woman hold a map that shows the long-frozen E1 settlement scheme, that would split East Jerusalem from the occupied West Bank, on the day of a press conference near the Israeli settlement of Maale Adumim, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, August 14, 2025. REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun
“This is a significant step that practically erases the two-state delusion and consolidates the Jewish people’s hold on the heart of the Land of Israel,” Smotrich said after the settlements were approved.
“The Palestinian state is being erased from the table not by slogans but by deeds. Every settlement, every neighborhood, every housing unit is another nail in the coffin of this dangerous idea,” he added.
Peace Now slammed the approval, saying that Smotrich and “his minority of messianic friends are establishing a delusional settlement that we will have to evacuate in any agreement.” The group added that the “entire purpose of the settlement in E1 is to sabotage a political solution and rush towards a binational apartheid state.”
The Palestinian Authority said that the plan “fragments… geographic and demographic unity, entrenching the division of the occupied West Bank into isolated areas and cantons that are disconnected from one another, turning them into something akin to real prisons.”
While historically, the US has tried to distance itself from Israeli settlement expansion since it is illegal under international law, both Trump administrations have been openly supportive of the land grabs. US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee claimed that the E1 expansion was not a violation of international law and said that the US wouldn’t oppose it.
Huckabee also claimed that the Palestinian territory was part of Israel. “It’s also, I think, incumbent on all of us to recognise that Israelis have a right to live in Israel,” he said.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited a Jewish settlement in the Israeli-occupied West Bank on Sunday and said that he had fulfilled a promise to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state that he made to the settlers 25 years ago.
According to The Times of Israel, the Israeli leader recalled his visit to the Ofra settlement in the year 2000 and saying that “we would do everything to ensure our continued hold on the Land of Israel, to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, to thwart the attempts that existed then — and unfortunately still exist — to try to uproot us from here. Thank God, what I promised — we kept.”
Netanyahu said he prevented a Palestinian state despite significant external pressure. “Pressures from home, pressures from abroad, a series of American presidents who wanted to uproot us and to establish a Palestinian state here. We stood firm together. We upheld the promise of the generations,” he said.
The Ofra settlement was started in 1975 and, like all other Israeli settlements in the West Bank, is illegal under international law. Netanyahu was visiting the settlement on Sunday for an event marking its 50th anniversary.
The visit came after Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich announced a major settlement expansion that he said would “bury the idea of a Palestinian state.” The plan is seen as Smotrich’s reaction to the UK, France, Canada, and Australia declaring their intent to recognize a Palestinian state.
The Trump administration has also expressed significant opposition to its allies’ plans to recognize a Palestinian state, and President Trump has even suggested a trade deal with Canada could be scrapped over Ottawa’s plans.
Israel’s current genocide in Gaza and recently announced plans to occupy Gaza City are both part of a long and tortured history of Israeli military occupations of the tiny strip.
A convoy of Israeli military vehicles drives down a road on the border with the Gaza Strip on October 15, 2023. (Menahem Kahana / AFP via Getty Images)
Whenever we imagine that Israel’s genocide has reached its nadir, the country plumbs new depths of evil. Israel’s genocidal energy in Gaza seems bottomless.
On Thursday, nearly two years into the genocide, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced on Fox News that Israel intends to take military control of the entire Gaza Strip. On Friday, Israel’s security cabinet approved a plan to occupy Gaza City, which will involve the mass displacement of “all Palestinian civilians from Gaza City.”
If implemented, the planned reoccupation, which comes exactly twenty years after Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in August 2005, will unleash Israel’s third military occupation of Gaza, culminating a decades-long history marked by brutal violence, mass slaughter and ethnic cleansing, and endless displacements. Not that Israel is not already an occupying force in Gaza. According to the United Nations, Israel is still occupying Gaza, because it continues to control the territory by land, air, and sea. Freely touting its ethnic cleansing schemes there, now Israel wants Gaza without its people. It’s a settler-colonial campaign branded as military occupation.
Gaza is not a state in conflict with Israel. It’s the largest refugee camp on earth. Squeezed in a tiny sliver of land (1.3 percent of Palestine), the majority of its two million people live in cramped refugee camps, most of which have been in existence for over seven decades.
It started during the Nakba, the mass displacement of Palestinians at Israel’s founding in 1948 when over 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly expelled from their land and homes in Israel and made lifetime refugees. Nearly 250,000 of those uprooted flooded into Gaza, the last surviving Palestinian city along the Mediterranean coast, tripling its population overnight and rendering it a colossal refugee camp squashed between desert and sea. Providing shelter to the displaced inhabitants of over 250 razed Palestinian towns and villages, Gaza became a Noah’s ark for Palestine after the Nakba.
The tragedy was so profound that the United Nations set up that year a special agency to provide aid to Palestinian refugees, the United Nations Relief for Palestinian Refugees, which was shortly succeeded by the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), and soon moved its headquarters to Gaza City.Gaza is not a state in conflict with Israel. It’s the largest refugee camp on earth.
Most of the refugees who flooded into Gaza came from towns and villages in central and southern Palestine and from northern parts as far as Galilee. But those from villages around Gaza had to endure the tragedy of being displaced within sight of their lost lands and homes. As Israeli military leader Moshe Dayan later confessed,
Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahlal arose in the place of Mahlul; Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Huneifis; and Kefar Yehushu’a in the place of Tal al-Shuman. There is not one single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.
Those settlements, built on the ruins of uprooted Palestinians, served as a constant reminder of the Nakba. To cite the late Lebanese writer Elias Khoury, voice of the Palestinian refugees: “Nahal Oz was a military settlement founded by the Nahal units of the Israeli army to harass Palestinian farmers who had been driven out of their villages and had become refugees in Gaza.”
Over the next seven decades, Gaza’s bleak refugee reality would set into motion a long and tortured history of Israeli military occupations of the tiny strip.
Israel’s Brutal Invasions
In November 1956, embarking on its first occupation of Gaza, Israeli forces invaded the territory by launching military raids on its impoverished refugee camps. The occupation took place during Tripartite Aggression against Egypt, which was then controlling Gaza. It started with a series of horrific massacres. Israeli soldiers entered Khan Yunis and collected all adult males from their homes and shot them at their doorsteps and in the streets, killing at least 520 people.
Even Rafah in the south was not safe from Israeli invasions and mass slaughter. On November 12, Israeli forces invaded the refugee camps in Rafah, rounded up male residents, and killed and wounded hundreds of people in cold blood. The bodies of the victims were dumped in the district of Tell Zurab, west of Rafah, where families had to risk curfews to pick up the bodies of loved ones and bury them, though most of the burials were carried out without identification. The bloodshed, known as the Rafah massacre, sent waves of horror through the camps.
And so Gaza got a first taste of what an Israeli occupation was like: thousands of civilians were killed and wounded throughout the whole Gaza Strip, and hundreds of prisoners summarily executed. The carnage was described by the Red Cross as “scenes of terror.” It was so appalling that E. L. M. Burns, the head of the UN observer mission in Gaza, warned that Israel’s atrocities there intended to wipe out Gaza’s refugee population, which according to international law, amounted to an act of genocide.
Because Gaza was essentially a massive refugee camp of displaced Palestinians who were expelled from their homes inside Israel during the Nakba, Israel became the first occupying power in history that uprooted a native population, chased it into exile, and occupied it. (Isarel’s invasion of Lebanon in the early 1980s would mete out the same fate to Palestinian refugees there, culminating in the horrific Sabra and Shatila massacre, which was also condemned by the UN as “an act of genocide.”)
Even Israeli military leaders like Dayan were forced to admit that grim reality. As he confessed that year: “What can we say against their terrible hatred of us? For eight years, they have sat in the refugee camps of Gaza and have watched how, before their very eyes, we have turned their lands and villages, where they and their forefathers dwelled, into our home.”
But the Nakba was only the beginning. Unsatisfied with uprooting Palestinians, Israel would routinely invade Gaza, wreak horror, and carry out a series of massacres. Frequently after 1948, Israeli forces would raid Gaza’s refugee camps, slaughtering and displacing thousands of refugees, and demolishing their homes and camps. In January 1949, with the bloody memory of the Nakba still fresh in Gaza, Israeli forces bombed food distribution centers in Deir al-Balah and Khan Yunis at peak hours, killing hundreds of Palestinians. Those refugees who attempted to return to their homes, labeled by Israel as “infiltrators,” were routinely shot on sight by Israeli soldiers.
In August 1953, an Israeli military unit, led by Ariel Sharon, the future prime minister of Israel, invaded the Bureij refugee camp and killed some fifty people in their beds. According to UN officials, Israeli forces threw bombs through the windows of huts where Palestinian refugees were sleeping and shot at those who tried to flee. The massacre was described by a UN commission as an “appalling case of deliberate mass murder.”
Those repeated massacres were part of a wider Israeli campaign to ethnically cleanse Gaza’s refugee population. Following the Nakba, Israel’s founders, including David Ben-Gurion, foresaw the risk of concentrating hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees in a coastal strip straddled between the Negev and Sinai deserts with no real way out and no hope for escape or dispersion. Haunted by Gaza’s refugee population and the prospect of Palestinian right of return, and fearing the spectacle of “waves of refugees marching on Israel from Gaza,” Israel attempted to solve the crisis by wiping it out.
When that failed, Israel moved to reoccupy Gaza.
Massacre Upon Massacre
In 1967, war again broke out and Israel invaded Gaza for the second time. It was no easy feat: it took Israel six days to win the war but four years to take control of Gaza. The resistance spurred a second exodus, as tens of thousands of refugees, still traumatized by the memory of the first occupation, were forced to flee the coastal strip to Jordan and Egypt — never to return. Israel’s second and decades-long occupation of Gaza was underway.
The refugee population of Gaza continued to haunt Israeli leaders after 1967. Transfer plans abounded. During Israel’s prolonged occupation of Gaza — which placed refugees under the control of the very forces that had uprooted them two decades earlier — Israeli leaders, notably Levi Eshkol and Dayan, contemplated transferring Gaza refugees to the West Bank, or Sinai in Egypt, or Iraq, or an Arab country in North Africa (the “Libyan Operation”). They even hatched a secret plan, the “Moshe Dayan plan,” to transfer Gazan refugees to Latin America by air, though luckily for the people of Gaza, the plan was deemed costly and unfeasible.
Unsatisfied with military occupation, Israeli forces moved quickly to uproot Palestinians in Gaza, demolish their homes and seize their land, and build Jewish settlements on the ruins of displaced refugees. The settlements prospered while Palestinians suffered under occupation.
Even peace proved costly for Gaza’s refugees. The 1979 Camp David Accords closed off Gaza’s border with Egypt, dividing families by barbed wires, causing further population displacements and house demolitions along the newly demarcated border, depriving Gaza’s fishermen of their traditional access to Egyptian territorial waters. The destruction of Israeli settlements in Sinai was further compensated by an upsurge in settlement activity in Gaza.For nearly two decades, Israel has imposed a total blockade on Gaza, while routinely assaulting and raiding its population.
During the second intifada, after nearly four decades of protracted occupation, Israel seemingly withdrew from Gaza, leaving behind over one million camped refugees. When its forces left the coastal strip, Israeli leaders were confident they had finally swept Gaza’s refugee crisis under the rug of “disengagement.”
Meanwhile, Israel continued to control Gaza’s frontier posts, airspace, and territorial waters. Declaring the impoverished enclave a “hostile territory” and viewing its refugee population as a security threat of “existential” proportions that required disproportionate force, Israel routinely subjected Gaza to collective punishment. It continued to subject its population to military operations and invasions. Israel’s pullout was branded to the outside world as a concession, the end of occupation, and the fulfillment of Israel’s obligations toward Gaza and its refugees.
In reality, the withdrawal made the refugee population an easy target for its military incursions and conquests, with entire sections of the camps declared no-go areas for the Israeli patrols. Meanwhile, Israel moved its settlers to new settlements in the West Bank and around Gaza, and before long, Gaza was placed under total siege.
For nearly two decades, Israel has imposed a total blockade on Gaza, while routinely assaulting and raiding its population — a brutal chapter that would culminate in the ongoing genocide. All that time, the refugees of Gaza had to suffer the horrifying fate of living under the yoke of the very forces that had ethnically cleansed them decades earlier. Bombarded, under siege, penned in a slaughterhouse, and trapped in an iron cage fashioned by Israel, the refugees of Gaza have come to fathom the depth of their tragedy: there is one thing worse than being displaced, and that is not being able to leave. Many still fear that leaving would amount to a second Nakba, which Israeli leaders have been so determined to carry out.
Every year or so after the Nakba, Israeli forces would invade Gaza. For decades, Israel would subject Gaza to a brutal series of military invasions and occupations, raids and offenses, military incursions and administrations, bombing campaigns and air strikes, repeated massacres and mass displacements, a yearslong blockade that is still in place, and an ongoing genocide with no end in sight.
Israel’s brutality in Gaza has often spawned resistance. Owing to its refugee history, Gaza was the birthplace of the first intifada, known as the stone uprising, which broke out in Jabalya refugee camp (nicknamed “Vietnam Camp”), and was led by unarmed young Palestinians who were born refugees and grew up under Israeli occupation. Gaza then became the symbolic battlefield of the second intifada when, at a crossroads near Bureij refugee camp, twelve-year-old Muhammad al-Durrah was shot dead in his father’s arms, the iconic image of the uprising.
According to French historian Jean-Pierre Filiu, Israel has waged at least fifteen wars on Gaza since the Nakba, which has resulted in the near annihilation of Gaza’s 4,000-year-old civilization. In the five wars it has waged on Gaza since the blockade, Israel has killed hundreds of thousands Palestinians while displacing over two million others. In summer 2014, during Operation Protective Edge, Israeli forces slaughtered over two thousand Palestinians in Gaza. Two Palestinian popular uprisings, or intifadas, were brutally suppressed by Israel. Even when seven years ago Palestinians staged a symbolic March of Return within the sealed walls of Gaza, to commemorate the Nakba, they were mercilessly slaughtered by Israel in the hundreds, including children flying kites. Today nearly two years into the Gaza genocide, those past massacres have become a daily spectacle in Gaza.
The tragic irony is that the refugees in Gaza now being slaughtered and displaced were created in the heat of war by Israel itself more than seventy-seven years ago. Except this time, the refugees have nowhere left to go.
Yet Israel’s obsession with Gaza’s refugees is not completely misplaced and will certainly be met with Palestinian steadfastness. As Khoury put it: “For seventy years the refugees have not stopped knocking on the gates of Gaza, which are locked with hatred and death, and they will continue to knock on them until the locks are broken, and Palestine will reach out its hands to its people who return to it invaded by the water and mud of the earth, and build from their death a gate to life.”
Israel has murdered Anas Al-Sharif, 28, a steadfast, well-known Al Jazeera correspondent called “the voice of Gaza to the world,” in a targeted strike in Gaza City that also killed four other journalists. Long threatened by Israel for his relentless coverage of Israeli atrocities, Al-Sharif vowed to continue “every day and every hour to report what is happening – this is our cause.” In a last message, Al-Sharif wrote, “I lived pain in all its details and I tasted loss and grief time and again…Do not forget Gaza.”
Al-Sharif was among five Al Jazeera journalists killed in a clearly targeted strike on a tent housing them outside the main gate of al-Shifa Hospital late Sunday. The other victims were Al Jazeera correspondent Mohammed Qreiqeh and camera operators Ibrahim Zaher, Mohammed Noufal and Moamen Aliwa. In his last post before his death, al-Sharif said Israel had launched intense bombing, called “fire belts,” on Gaza City; his final video showed the sky lit by orange flashes as loud booms sounded.
Calling Al-Sharif “one of Gaza’s bravest journalists” – and one of the most prominent with over half a million followers online – Al Jazeera said he and his colleagues were among the last remaining voices in Gaza “conveying its tragic reality to the world.” It accused Israel of waging a “campaign of incitement” against its journalists by repeatedly fabricating evidence seeking to link them to Hamas; in the last 22 months, the Israeli military has killed over 230 journalists, including multiple ones from Al Jazeera.
A U.N. rapporteur had earlier cited Israel’s “repeated threats and accusations” against Al-Sharif, arguing, “Fears for (his) safety are well-founded.” Last month, Israel claimed it had “unequivocal proof” he was a member of Hamas, and on Sunday they admitted to a deliberate strike against Al-Sharif, “the head of a terrorist cell.” Colleagues dismissed the claim as propaganda, with “zero evidence” to support it. Said a colleague of Al-Sharif’s: “His entire daily routine was standing in front of a camera from morning to evening.”
Other journalists also charge Israel is waging “a deliberate war on journalists” purely for their willingness to risk their lives to document Israel’s genocidal crimes, from mass bombardment to mass starvation. “Israel’s strategy is clear: Silence the truth by murdering those who report it,” said The Palestine Chronicle‘s Ramzi Baroud, who mourned having to lose so many journalists solely for their “commitment to the truth.” Still, he insisted, “Their deaths will not bury the Palestinian story.”
Al-Sharif had earlier written that, “despite all (the) difficulties and tragic circumstances” he and his colleagues had faced over the last brutal year and a half, he held to his belief that “it is the duty of the world to see and witness what we are documenting…This drives us to continue in our coverage to our last breath.” Still, he knew death likely awaited. “This is my will and final message,” he wrote in April. “If these words reach you, know that Israel has succeeded in killing me and silencing my voice.”
“First, peace and God’s mercy and blessings be upon you,” he wrote in the translated post published by his family. “God knows I have given all my effort and strength to be a support and a voice for my people since I opened my eyes to life in the alleys and streets of Jabalia Refugee Camp. My hope was that God would grant me life so I could return with my family and loved ones to our original town of Ashkelon (Al-Majdal), now occupied. But God’s will was swifter, and His judgment is inevitable.”
Berating “those who remained silent, who accepted our killing,” he goes on to entrust those reading “with Palestine, the jewel of the Muslim crown and the heartbeat of every free person in this world…with its people and its innocent children who were not granted a lifetime to dream or live in safety and peace,” and with his wife and two children he did not live to see grow. “I die steadfast in my principles,” he writes. “Forgive me if I have fallen short, and pray for mercy for me, for I have kept my promise…Do not forget Gaza.”
“I lost my voice screaming, ‘Massacre, massacre,’ hoping that the world takes action. But it is an unjust world.” – Anas Jamal Al-Sharif.
US President Donald Trump and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu talk in the midst of a joint news conference in the White House in Washington, U.S., January 28, 2020. — Reuters
Twenty-one months into the protracted conflict, the Gaza massacre is marked by an ever-increasing number of innocent civilian casualties, with the death toll having surpassed 60,000, according to Reuters.
Calling it “genocide”, the former Israeli prime minister wrote a piece in Haaretz, a leftist Israeli mainstream newspaper, outlining the war crimes Israel is committing in Gaza. Now, a highly plausible threat of famine looms over innocent Gazans, with a large number being children. As the situation worsens manifold, people, both in the US and around the globe, are perplexed at the unstinted US support for Israel even when the genocide of the 21st century plays out on their TV screens.
Recently, the Trump administration announced that, in case of a natural disaster, the federal government would not assist US cities and states that boycott Israeli companies. This has led the core base of the Republican Party to question the veracity of Trump’s ‘America First’ slogan.
It is certainly difficult for Mr Trump to balance the factions within his party surrounding the issue; on the one hand, hawkish members of the administration, such as Senator Ted Cruz, routinely advocate for US involvement. On the other hand, some conservative voices in the Republican Party strongly oppose direct US interference in yet another conflict. For instance, Republican lawmaker and an influential voice in the party, Marjorie Taylor Greene, is among the very few who openly oppose Israel’s heinous actions.
It is, however, important to note that multiple US presidents, regardless of the party, have done Israel’s bidding. For instance, under the Biden administration, according to The Guardian, the US vetoed five UNSC resolutions calling for a ceasefire in Gaza since the beginning of the conflict in October 2023, thus effectively allowing Israel to carry out genocidal actions without any ramifications and international accountability.
It is, therefore, a worthy question to ask: Why is the US blind to Israel’s genocidal policies that threaten regional peace and stability? Well, the answer to such a question is rather intricate and multifaceted: there are cultural, economic and political factors behind the US’s unconditional and sustained support for Israel.
First, elite Christian Zionism is one of the driving factors. Christian Zionism is the ancient belief among Christians, especially evangelical Protestants, that the modern state of Israel fulfilled biblical prophecy and that standing up for the state of Israel is a religious duty. It refers to the historical return of the Jewish people to the holy land.
Some of the key tenets of the ideology include: the establishment of the Temple in Jerusalem, which is a prerequisite to the arrival of Jesus; Israeli sovereignty over all of historic Palestine, including the West Bank.
With roots entrenched in ancient biblical narrative, evangelical Zionism has an overarching influence on American foreign policy, especially in the Middle East: it is mainly promulgated by conservative think tanks and right-wing political figures.
According to Dr Noam Chomsky, the extremist Zionism of the vast evangelical movement has now become “a substantial part of the Republican Party’s base”.
For instance, in a recent podcast with Tucker Carlson, a conservative media figure and former Fox News host, Ted Cruz, a Republican Senator from Texas and a former presidential candidate, stated: “Growing up in Sunday school, I was taught, from the bible, that those who bless Israel will be blessed and those who curse Israel will be cursed, and from my perspective, I want to be on the blessing side of things”.
Consequently, evangelical Zionists have become a major political force in the American political landscape, playing a pivotal role behind the US’s unwavering support for Israel. Through effective lobbying, they have influenced significant US policy decisions: the relocation of the embassy to Jerusalem – a region of profound cultural and religious significance claimed by both Israel and Palestine.
This religious fervour of evangelical Zionists has helped lay the foundation, but it is lobbying groups that turn this sentiment into legislative action. Chief among them is the American–Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which has been instrumental in shaping both Republicans’ and Democrats’ positions on Israel.
Established in 1951, AIPAC began as a small advocacy group. However, since then, it has evolved into one of the most well-funded and powerful lobbies in Washington DC. While it claims to be bipartisan and focused on strengthening the US-Israel relationship, its influence often skews US foreign policy in favour of Israel – regardless of human rights or the concerns surrounding the violations of international law.
AIPAC lobbies Congress aggressively to ensure continued military aid, fiercely opposes any legislation critical of Israeli actions and promotes policies that shield Israel from accountability. For instance, it plays a key role in ensuring that Israel receives $3.8 billion in military aid. It also opposed the No Way to Treat a Child Act, which aimed to restrict US funding from being used to detain or abuse Palestinian children. Also, AIPAC supported legislation that penalised individuals and companies that boycott and condemn Israel.
In election cycles, AIPAC has funnelled millions of dollars through its affiliated Super PACs like United Democracy Project, targeting lawmakers critical of Israeli policies. In 2022, it spent heavily to defeat progressive candidates such as Rep Donna Edwards and Rep Andy Levin, both of whom supported conditioning aid to Israel. Meanwhile, it has helped elect more compliant figures by boosting their campaigns financially.
By exerting pressure through substantial campaign contributions, high-profile conferences, and mobilisation of pro-Israel political networks, AIPAC has ensured that challenging Israel’s policies comes at a heavy cost that few are willing to pay. AIPAC’s pervasive influence has led to dire consequences for the Jewish community as well. When Israel’s war crimes are justified as ‘Jewish self-defence’ – as AIPAC routinely does – it inevitably ties Judaism to the bombing of children.
The US’s unconditional support of Israel has fueled anti-American sentiment all around the world. Ignoring Israel’s ongoing atrocities in Gaza, turning a blind eye to the expansion of the Jewish settlements in the West Bank, and the US’s perpetual opposition to peace calls by the international community undermines the very principles the US has advocated for.
While Washington lectures Russia and China on human rights, its blanket defence of Israel’s atrocities exposes a moral bankruptcy that undermines US credibility worldwide.
If the US seeks to restore its global credibility and allow the true voice of its people to shape foreign policy, it must begin by curbing the disproportionate influence of lobbies that act in the interests of foreign governments – often at the expense of justice, democracy, and the public will.
The writer lives in New York and aspires to be a legal scholar. He can be reached at: alibilal4471@gmail.com
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