Six months on, the Israeli genocidal war machine carries on its daily slaughter of innocent Palestinian men, women and children, relentlessly and remorselessly, Nearly 34,000 Palestinians have been murdered in cold blood; another 5,000 are missing, probably buried in the rubble to which Gaza has been reduced through indiscriminate bombing by the Israeli air force; a further 6,500 excess deaths are expected as a result of injuries and disease – bringing the total thus far (the middle of April 2024) to 45,500 done to death in this continuing genocide being perpetrated by the ethno-racist Zionist regime, driven by the racist, anti-Semitic and reactionary Zionist ideology which serves as the principal reactionary tool of Anglo-American imperialism in the Middle East. The majority of the dead are women and children.
• 75,000 people have been wounded, under conditions of totally inadequate medical provision to cater for their injuries;
• The IDF has destroyed or badly damaged all 36 of Gaza’s hospitals as well as 100 clinics and health centres. Children are the biggest sufferers as they fall victim to infectious diseases at a rate 23 times higher than normal; 90% of children under the age of 5 in Gaza suffer from one or more infectious diseases.
• 1.1 million people in Gaza are experiencing catastrophic food insecurity; a third of children under 5 are actually malnourished in the north of Gaza. Hunger and malnutrition in Gaza are “unprecedented in modern history” according to US humanitarian experts.
Even Samantha Power, former US representatives to the United Nations and presently the administrator of USAID – the top US humanitarian official – has publicly stated for the first time that famine is likely already to be underway in parts of Gaza. Her statement was made during a hearing of the House of Representatives in reply to a question by Representative Julian Castro (D – Texas) about news reports that some USAID officials had sent a cable to the National Security Council (NSC) warning that a famine was likely already to be occurring in parts of Gaza and that death due to hunger would in all likelihood “accelerate in the weeks ahead” (Akbar Shahid Ahmed, Huffington Post, 2 April 2024).
This contrasts with the lying assertions of the NSC spokesperson John Kirby made on Tuesday 5 April that the State Department has “found no evidence of Israel violating humanitarian law”. John Kirby, just like Matt Miller, spokesperson for the State Department, are so lacking in common decency, let alone humanity, that they can hardly be considered human beings. They are well and truly animals in human form.
With the aim of ethnic cleansing, Israel is denying food, electricity, water and medical supplies to Gaza in violation of the decision of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) which ordered Israel not to impede these supplies and to prevent genocide.
Under Section 62 of the US Foreign Assistance Act, the US is prohibited from supplying military assistance to states impeding delivery of humanitarian assistance. To bypass this provision, the Biden administration, from Genocide Joe Biden all the way down to the lowest minion, are busy lying through their teeth and denying that Israel is violating international humanitarian law or that it is engaged in committing genocide, when it is clear even to the blind that is precisely what Israel is doing, and doing so intentionally in order to destroy as many Palestinian lives as it can.
To find a. parallel to Israel’s continuing genocide in Gaza, one has to go back to the genocides perpetrated by the Hitlerites in the 1940s against Jews, Russians and several other peoples. With an ideology similar to that of the Nazis, the Zionist rulers of Israel are the true successors of the Nazi regime in trying to implement genocide as the ‘final solution’ to the Palestinian problem. But they will be no more successful in their monstrous design than were the Hitlerites.
• Israel has so far killed 224 aid workers, the purpose being to starve Palestinians, including the 90 children in Gaza who die every day;
• Israel slaughters some 20 journalists each month – the purpose being to prevent the spread of information about its murderous activity. By way of contrast, one journalist a year is killed in Ukraine.
What has suddenly woken up the imperialist political and journalist establishment to Israeli mass slaughter of Palestinians through bombing and impeding humanitarian assistance was the drone strike by the IDF which targeted a 3-car convoy belonging to the World Central Kitchen, killing seven aid workers. The aid vehicles had agreed their route with the IDF and were marked prominently with the charity’s logo which was clearly visible.
The IDF has called the drone strike a grave mistake and has suspended a colonel and a major in the unit involved in the attack on the WCK convoy. Israeli president Herzog has apologised for the incident.
The reason for this sudden volte face is simply this: founded by celebrity chef José Andrés, the WCK has very close connections with the White House administration. In addition, of the victims of this atrocity, all but one held Western passports and, to put it in blunt terms, were white. One of the victims was an American, one Australian, three British, one Polish and one, the driver, was Palestinian. These seven victims have achieved greater attention than the 34,000 Palestinians bombed into obliteration by the Nazi-style blitzkrieg of the Zionist air force.
The Australian prime minister, whose conscience had not been troubled by the slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians, made all of a sudden, in an effort to show his grief at the murder of an Australian, a 20-minute telephone call to Israeli prime minister Netanyahu to express his anger. His Foreign Minister, Penny Wong, characterised the IDF attack on the WCK aid convoy as “outrageous and unacceptable”. Only with this latest atrocity have the IDF actions become outrageous and unacceptable in the eyes of imperialist politicians. This reveals their hypocrisy and disregard for truth, to say nothing of their lack of honesty and human decency as well as their racism.
Refusing to be mollified by this sudden surge in feigned concern for the WCK victims, José Andrés has characterised the Israeli actions as “war against humanity” through starvation and emaciation. WCK, notwithstanding its connection with the White House, as well as the silence it had maintained concerning the Gaza genocide, was seen by the fascist rulers of Israel as an obstacle to its war aim of starving the people of Gaza and to ethnically cleanse it of its people. This is what forced Andrés to state that “Israel attacked systematically car by car”. Since this murderous attack, WCK has suspended its operations, as has another aid organisation.
UNWRA has already been banned by the Israeli government from entering northern Gaza, and has been defunded by the US, all to facilitate the fascist genocide in Gaza. Israel is targeting all and every Palestinian on the flimsiest of pretexts. On Wednesday 11 April the IDF murdered three sons and three grandsons of Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas. Just as guilty are Israel’s imperialist backers, especially the US, who facilitate this genocide by the supply to Israel of vast amounts of of military and financial aid, while providing diplomatic cover for its actions in Gaza and the wider Middle East. As per the 2024 US spending bill, the US disburses over $20m a day to or because of Israel – the combined total for the year comes to $7.5bn.
While paying lip service to the two-state solution, the US continues to block Palestine’s application to be accepted as a member state of the United Nations; although recognised by 140 countries Palestine continues to have merely observer status. The US has exercised its veto in the UN Security Council to prevent the admission of the Palestinian state as a UN member.
On top of destruction through bombing, Israel is now prioritising the wholesale eliminaton of Palestinians through starvation, famine and disease.
Attacks on Gaza’s education system designed to destroy it is one of Israel’s aims. Gaza’s education system was already under stress before October 2023, with schools operating double shifts so as to meet demand, with overcrowded classrooms and school hours curtailed. The horrors of frequent Israeli attacks had already taken a toll on children’s mental wellbeing, with four out of every five afflicted with depression, grief and fear before 7 October.
The war has put an end to education in Gaza’s 813 schools which, because of double shifts and shared 563 school buildings and the physical damage (76%), hundreds of schools are now housing displaced people. The fate of UNWRA, the biggest UN agency working in Gaza, which ran 183 schools and served 300,000 students, has made the dire situation far worse. Following bogus Israeli allegations, UNWRA’s funding was frozen by the US, the UK and some other imperialist countries.
Five out of six of Gaza’s universities have been completely or partially destroyed, including the Islamic University of Gaza, one of the largest in Gaza, serving some 20,000 students. Its president Sofyan Taya, a scientist and prolific scholar in the field of optics, was murdered in Israeli air strikes alongside his wife and five children.
Israa University was reduced to rubble on 17 January – blown up by Israeli soldiers who had used it as a base for 70 days.
95 academics and researchers, including 77 PhD holders, and three heads of universities have been murdered by Israeli air strikes. Israa, a non-profit institution founded in 2014, taught medicine, engineering, finance, law and humanities to some 4,000 students but has now been destroyed.
“The systematic nature of attacks, the number of persons killed and schools damaged, demonstrate clear intent”, says Neve Gordon, an Israeli professor who teaches international law at Queen Mary University in London. Destruction of houses and electricity have disrupted online education as well.
The murder of cultural figures, teachers and university professors is an incalculable loss – the destruction of Gaza’s educational and cultural elite. Palestine has long boasted the highest literacy rate (98%) in the Arab world in spite of decades of occupation and a 17-year blockade. The literacy rates and educational standards are comparable to those of wealthy Gulf states, according to a September 2023 report of the Palestinian Bureau of Statistics.
Education is highly prized in Palestinian society. Many manage to complete masters’ degrees and doctorates in the West and come back to work or teach. A young doctor with an M.Sc. from King’s College, Misrays Alrayyes, was murdered in an Israeli air strike on 6 November along with his parents and other relatives. Tariq Phabet, along with a dozen members of his family, was wiped out on 29 October. He had been a specialist in economic development. 14-year old Lubna Algaan, a talented violinist was murdered with dozens of family members on 21 November. She attended the Edward Said Conservatory of Music in Gaza and had lessons with global musicians such as Tom Suarez, a former member of the Baltimore and American Symphony Orchestras.
“I just want to stay with you so we can die together when we are bombed,” says to her mother a girl of 6 who has lost her previous love of learning.
Israel is trying to denude the Palestinian people of its educated and intellectual assets, for it views knowledge and science as obstacles to its programme of wiping out the educated base of Palestinian society. It is far worse than the Nazi book burning,
In its desperate attempt to wipe out the flower of Palestinian youth and intellectual cream, the Zionists will only end up radicalising a new generation. Those who have survived after their entire families have been killed will never forget or forgive, says al-Azhar’s Abusala.
Israel has already lost the war in Gaza; it has lost the war against Hezbollah next to northern Israel; it has lost the war against Iran, as the incidents of the recent weeks have demonstrated; it has lost its deterrence advantage, as was clearly revealed by the successful assault mounted by the resistance on 7 October against southern Israel and, most spectacularly, by Iran’s assault on Israel using drones and missiles, which penetrated the most protected place on the planet – the Nevatim defence base and its intelligence centre on the Golan Heights; its economy is in tatters; the morale of Israeli soldiers and civilians has received a battering. To cap it all, it has lost the battle in the court of world public opinion, and is now clearly seen everywhere, including increasingly in the imperialist countries, for what it has always been, i.e., a genocidal, racist and ethno-supremacist colonial settler regime, surviving only thanks to the support of Anglo-American imperialism, whose attack dog in the Middle East it has always been. And last, but not least, large numbers of Jews in the US and Europe are refusing to support this genocidal regime, which employs artificial intelligence to target tens of thousands of Palestinians and their families. It is hurtling at an accelerated pace towards self-destruction, and its strength is draining away, no matter how great its bravado and hyperbolic rhetoric. At every turn it is lifting a rock only to drop it on its own feet. All in all, to paraphrase Chairman Mao’s words, there is chaos under heaven, the situation is wonderful. Out of the carnage and chaos created by the Zionist entity and neo-Nazi Nato from Ukraine to the Middle East, a beautiful world is emerging, bringing with it joy to the popular masses of the world. Our slogan is: Seize the day! Seize the hour!
VICTORY TO THE RESISTANCE!
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