Israel has killed at least 8,796 Palestinians since it started bombarding the Gaza Strip on October 7, Gaza’s Ministry of Health said on Wednesday, November 1. 2,290 women and 3,648 children are among those killed. Another 2,030, including over 1,000 children, are still buried under the rubble of bombed-out buildings.
Over 450 children have been killed only since Sunday, after Save the Children said that the “number of children reported killed in Gaza in just three weeks” had already “surpassed the annual number of children killed across the world’s conflict zones since 2019.”
The number of injured has crossed 22,000. Short of medicines, antiseptics, and anesthesia, chances of successful treatment of those with grievous wounds and preventing infections are increasingly slim as the healthcare system has all but collapsed.
“Some 58 hospitals and 32 primary care centers have been forced out of service due to the Israeli assault and fuel shortage,” Ministry of Health spokesperson Ashraf al-Qudra said, adding that Israeli attacks have killed 132 medics and destroyed 25 ambulances.
‘Colonial West is liable to charges of crimes against humanity and genocide’
In an apparent attempt to justify the atrocity by claiming divine sanction, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu equated Palestinians with Israel’s Biblical enemy in his speech on Saturday, insisting, “You must remember what Amalek has done to you.”
The Old Testament from which he quoted these words also adds: “Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.”
“There’s no way to understand this except as a declaration of intent to wholly annihilate — aka genocide — Palestinians in Gaza,” observed Lara Friedman, President of the Foundation for Middle East Peace.
“The European, ethno-nationalist, settler colonial project in Palestine has entered its final phase, toward the expedited destruction of the last remnants of Indigenous Palestinian life in Palestine,” Craig Mokhiber, Director in the New York Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), wrote in his resignation letter. The governments of the US, UK, and much of Europe “are wholly complicit,” he added, describing Israeli atrocities as “a text-book case of genocide.”
Netanyahu has also bragged that Israel is not alone. “Since the start of the war, we have succeeded in securing broad international support” of “leaders from the US and Europe, led by President Biden, together with the French President, the British Prime Minister, the Italian Prime Minister, the German Chancellor,” among others. “They came to us in wartime and brought one clear message: We not only support you – we hope for your victory. We welcome this.”
“The colonial West is involved in the genocide Apartheid Israel is committing,” and its leaders are “liable to charges of Crimes against Humanity and Genocide,” Haider Eid, Professor of Cultural Studies at the Al-Aqsa University in Gaza, told Peoples Dispatch. He is the author of ‘Decolonising the Palestinian Mind’, to be published by LeftWord Books this month.
Eid and his family have been displaced twice since the bombardment started, and are now staying with relatives in southern Gaza, sharing a single house with multiple families. Israeli strikes have hit his residential tower in Rimal. This relatively affluent district with Gaza’s administrative buildings has been “flattened down,” he said.
‘I don’t know how Gaza can be rebuilt any time in the near future’
Thousands rendered homeless in the previous Israeli bombardments in 2009, 2014 and 2021 had still not been rehabilitated as the earlier initiatives to rebuild their houses were yet to be completed when Israel started bombarding on October 7 again.
The destruction unleashed this time is on such a vast scale that “I don’t know how Gaza can be rebuilt any time in the near future,” even if the Israeli bombardment stopped right now, Eid said. And Netanyahu has made it clear that Gaza’s destruction will not stop anytime soon, but will rather intensify with expanding ground operations by Israeli troops.
“The war inside the Gaza Strip” — which he has fashioned as a Biblical war that “has continued for over 3,000 years” — “will be long and difficult,” Netanyahu said, adding, “and we are ready for it.”
“This will be a victory… of light over darkness,” he declared, illuminating with bombs the darkness he has imposed on Gaza by blockading power and fuel supply.
With the last liters of stocked fuel used to power generators nearing exhaustion, most bakeries have shut down. “We have no bread whatsoever. We were trying to bake at home, but have run out of flour now,” Eid said.
Thousands of desperate people, mostly displaced refugees, broke into the warehouses of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) on Saturday, “taking wheat flour and other basic survival items like hygiene supplies,” the UN agency said.
Warning that this is “a worrying sign that civil order is starting to break down,” Thomas White, director of UNRWA Affairs in the Gaza Strip, said “Supplies on the market are running out while the humanitarian aid coming into the Gaza Strip on trucks from Egypt is insufficient. The needs of the communities are immense, if only for basic survival, while the aid we receive is meager and inconsistent.”
From “incremental genocide” to a “full-fledged genocide”
Even before October 7, shortages of water, food, electricity, medicine etc were common in the 365 sq. km Gaza Strip where Israel has held 2.3 million Palestinians under a “deadly medieval siege” for 17 years, Eid said. Israeli historian Ilan Pape has described this siege as an “incremental genocide.“
The besieged Palestinians were dependent for their survival on an average of 500 aid trucks that used to enter Gaza daily. After Israel unleashed what Eid calls a “full-fledged genocide” on October 7, the quantity of aid required by the population has more than doubled. However, after imposing a total blockade till October 21, Israel had permitted only 117 aid trucks to enter as of October 29, at an average of only 13 a day.
These “crumbs,” as UNRWA spokesperson Juliette Touma described the aid’s quantity, do not include fuel, without which people are unable to power the desalination plants and pump water, whose piped supply has also been stopped by Israel. Water production has reduced to 5% of the usual output, according to UNICEF.
“Since Oct 7, we have managed to wash our bodies only twice. We had to borrow water from mosques,” Eid said. Vulnerable populations, including 52,000 pregnant women and over 30,000 babies, have been resorting to drinking brackish or contaminated water, according to an internal document of the US State Department.
Nevertheless, “We do not support a ceasefire at this time,” reiterated US National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby at a press briefing on October 30. “We believe that a ceasefire right now benefits Hamas… as Israel continues to… prosecute their operations against Hamas leadership,” he explained.
Jordan’s original draft of the Resolution placed before the UN General Assembly for voting on October 27 had called for an immediate ceasefire. However, in order to gain more support and minimize opposition, it was watered down to call “for an immediate, durable and sustained humanitarian truce leading to a cessation of hostilities.”
Even this diluted resolution was deemed “outrageous” by ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, US envoy to the UN. The amendment proposed by Canada and co-sponsored by the US, calling for a condemnation of Hamas, was not passed by the Assembly.
The resolution tabled by Jordan, and co-sponsored by 40 other countries in Africa, Latin America, and Asia’s West, South, and Southeast, was adopted with 120 votes in favor. Only 14 countries — including the US, Australia and other tiny states whose foreign policies are known to be controlled by Washington — voted against the resolution. 45 countries, including the US allies in Europe supporting Israel, abstained.
With the exception of India which also abstained, all the major countries in the Global South voted in favor of the resolution, which prefixes all references to “Palestinian Territory” with the term “Occupied,” and refers to Israel as “the occupying Power.”
“While most countries outside the West condemn the atrocities in Gaza, they continue maintaining their diplomatic and economic relations with Apartheid Israel,” complained Eid. Among the exceptions are the left-wing governments of Bolivia, which severed diplomatic ties on October 31, and Chile and Colombia which recalled their ambassadors to Israel.
‘Do not forget us. Do not leave us alone. Or, you will not hear our voice tomorrow’
However, mass protests condemning their governments’ normalization of diplomatic ties with Israel have been raging across the Arabic-speaking world in the countries of West Asia and North Africa. Under the pressure of people’s movements, the ruling African National Congress (ANC) itself has picketed the Israeli embassy in South Africa, calling for the expulsion of its ambassador. Left parties in India are leading protests in various parts of the country, condemning their far-right government’s refusal to back Palestine.
Mass protests also oppose the US government, which has been propping up the Israeli occupation and apartheid with an annual military aid of nearly $3.8 billion — the largest amount of aid it gives to any country. The amount does not include the extra arms and ammunition it has supplied since October 7. An additional aid of $14 billion is being deliberated by its parliament to help Israel prosecute this war.
Police arrested 400 protesters on October 30 from the Grand Central Station which was shut down by “one of New York’s largest acts of civil disobedience in 20 years,” organized by the Jewish Voice for Peace against the US-funded “genocide” Israel is committing in the name of their religion.
Despite major European countries banning pro-Palestinian rallies and slogans and the UK criminalizing the Palestinian flag itself, their governments are unable to stop the mass rallies in solidarity with Palestine which only continue to grow in size.
“We have reached the conclusion that we can only rely on people’s movements across the world. Their solidarity is all we have right now,” Eid said.
“Do not forget us. Do not leave us alone. Or, you will not hear our voice tomorrow. It is only your support that is keeping us alive,” he added in a message to all protesters taking to the streets across the world in solidarity with Palestine despite the risks of facing arrests and charges.
“In this time of tremendous suffering, the Palestinians in Gaza are banking on the freedom-loving people across the world to pressurize their governments to boycott Apartheid Israel and put an end to this ongoing genocide,” he said.
He went on to reassure the global Palestine solidarity movement, “We remain steadfast on the ground here in Gaza and will continue our popular resistance. With your support, we will get rid of Apartheid and throw it in the dustbin of history.”
