Gaza City Neighborhood of Shuja’iyya destroyed by Israel during Operation Protective Edge (2014). Photo by Gary Fields.
It is now imperative to acknowledge what people of conscience the world over know to be true: The State of Israel is operating a Death Camp for the Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip. By forcibly confining the Palestinians of Gaza within impassable bounds, while at the same time slaughtering and starving them within this confined space, the State of Israel has made a mockery of the slogan, “Never Again.”
In broad outline, Gaza is similar to the camps of the Shoah where Jews were mercilessly confined and murdered. In the case of Gaza, however, Palestinians have replaced Jews as victims of slaughter, starvation and eradication, and the State of Israel, in turn, has evolved into the keeper of the Camp.
What also differentiates the death camp that is Gaza from the camps of the Holocaust, is that during the latter, camps were decentralized with six primary camps utilized for the horrendous mass killing of Jews, the most famous being Treblinka, Sobibor, and Auschwitz. Gaza, by contrast, is a single confined space and killing field.
Finally, the other difference of note is that during the Shoah Jews were killed in the camps primarily with poison gas, while the Palestinians of the Gaza camp are being liquidated by unceasing bombing and shelling along with the deliberate starvation of the population and the destruction and withholding of all necessities for bare life.
The record of this murderous conduct by Israel has been visible to the entire world as Israel’s leaders and public figures have publicized their aims openly.
From the time of Israeli President, Issac Herzog saying on October 14, 2023: “It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible. This rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved, it’s not true;” to the present-day acknowledgment of Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, that “Gaza will be totally destroyed,” there exist countless admissions of this exterminationist discourse coming from Israel leaders and the public posted on social media.
At the same time, Israeli soldiers on the front lines of the killing have posted their exploits openly for the entire world to witness on TikTok, Instagram, and other platforms in such broad numbers that even the Israeli military has warned them not to continue this practice.
The record of Israel in this murderous mayhem is indeed grim. The Israeli military has bombed and shelled Gaza daily and unceasingly for the last 19 months, save for brief moments of ceasefire, and has killed, by official statistics over 54,000 Gazans, although reputable estimates such as that of the Lancet put the total killed closer to 200,000. In this onslaught, it has killed close to 20,000 children, a number unmatched by any conflict in this century. By contrast, the war in Ukraine to date has witnessed the deaths of 682 children. If children are the future, Israel is clearly seeking to eliminate that future.
Alongside this killing spree, Israel has obliterated all infrastructure enabling Palestinians of Gaza simply to exist. It has bombed and destroyed 92% of Gaza’s housing stock. It has targeted Gaza’s entire health sector destroying or incapacitating all 36 of Gaza’s hospitals. Israel has bombed every single bakery in the territory and has obliterated the one desalination plant providing the only internal source of drinking water within the Camp to the people of Gaza. For 90 days since March, Israel did not allow a single truckload of food, water or basic necessities including medicines to enter the territory. Only in the last 4-5 days has Israel allowed a controversial but pathetically inadequate number of trucks with food and water into Gaza for the 2.2 million people there. In effect, the State of Israel with its military campaign, has created conditions in Gaza for mass extermination.
Israel insists that what it has inflicted on the Palestinians of Gaza is due to Hamas and that Palestinian fatalities are the collateral damage resulting from Hamas hiding among civilians. “Our war is with Hamas,” is the mantra repeated over and over by Israel’s political and military establishment. In truth, the war waged by Israel seeks to eradicate the Palestinians of Gaza, and Hamas, it appears, is the collateral damage.
In its 84-page submission before the International Court of Justice charging Israel with Genocide in Gaza, South Africa used nine of those pages to document statements of genocidal intent made by Israeli politicians, military figures and media personalities in just four months since October, 2023. Since that time, candidly open genocidal incitement by key figures in Israel society has only intensified.
Even former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who for most of the last eighteen months denied that Israel was engaged in acts of genocide, recently described Israel’s onslaught in Gaza as a war of annihilation: “What we are doing in Gaza is a war of extermination,” he admitted, “indiscriminate, unrestrained, brutal and criminal killing of civilians.”+++
In a well-known book about the protest movement against the Vietnam War, Todd Gitlin reprised a famous slogan from the anti-war movement in titling his classic, The Whole World is Watching. Today, in the 19th month of Israel’s genocidal onslaught against the people of Gaza, the entire world knows exactly what it is witnessing.