A year of horror in Gaza, the graveyard of civilisation
The upcoming first anniversary of the total war in Gaza exposes how the international system is not working and how we have come to live in a time of eternal warfare, argues Boštjan Videmšek.
On 16 September 2024, the Gazan Ministry of Health published a 649-page document listing most of the deaths caused by the Israeli collective punishment of Gaza for the Hamas massacre on 7 October 2023.
The list includes more than 34,000 of the 41,000 Gazans who died directly in air strikes. The remainder of the casualties have yet to be identified. The list does not include the over 10,000 people trapped under the rubble nor all the indirect casualties of the Israeli aggression, such as those who died due to malnutrition or the breakdown of the territory’s healthcare system.
The timeframe covered by the list extends up to 31 August 2024. Since then, at least a thousand more Gazans have been killed.
Next to the victims’ names, their gender, personal document number and age are also listed. For the first 14 pages of the document, the number in the ‘Age’ column reads 0.
Zero.
This signifies that those listed on the first 14 pages had been killed before their first birthday.
On 9 September 2024, a new school year should have started in Gaza. After a year of unspeakable horror, some 640,000 children should have been returning to the classrooms. Some 45,000 of them would have entered first grade.
This, of course, did not happen.
As 700 UN teams were mass-vaccinating the Palestinian children against polio, whose reemergence in Gaza marks a form of societal regression, the Israeli bombs and rockets kept raining down.
On the day school should have started, the Israeli army raided the school at the Nuseirat refugee camp, which is operated by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine (UNRWA). Some 12,000 people driven from their homes had found refuge there. Of these, 25 were killed during the raid, including six UN employees. In a little under a year, 250 humanitarian workers and at least 116 journalists were murdered in the Palestinian enclave – making it the deadliest conflict for journalists since at least the early 1990s.
This one raid on what was supposed to have been a safe zone cost one Palestinian mother all six of her children.
Around 40% of the victims of the Israeli mass slaughter in Gaza have been children. An additional 20,000 children were orphaned or separated from their parents. A year of indescribable havoc is bound to cast a long shadow over generations to come.
Nowhere in Gaza is safe. According to UN data, 93% of the inhabitants have been internally displaced over the past year – most of them several times, some of them as many as 10 times. More than 80% of Gaza has been laid to waste. The Palestinian enclave has been all but levelled, and thus rendered uninhabitable for years.
Over a million people – a little less than half of the population of one of the world’s most densely populated areas – are trying to survive in the brutal conditions at the al-Mawasi camp by the Mediterranean shore. Most of them fled there after the Israeli army launched a ground offensive on Rafah, where 1.3 million people sought refuge after the first months of the Israeli invasion.
At al-Mawasi, the exhausted, ill and profoundly traumatised refugees have almost no water, food and medicine at their disposal. The conditions at the other temporary shelters amid the post-apocalyptic ruins are much the same. Only a few hospitals in Gaza have managed to keep functioning. Countless medical facilities have been ransacked; hundreds of medical workers murdered. For weeks on end, the Israeli forces laid siege to several hospitals, including the largest one, al-Shifa.
The situation of the Gaza residents was further exacerbated in May, during the ground offensive on Rafah, when the Israeli army took control of the Palestinian side of the Egyptian border crossing – and soon after that also of the so-called Philadelphi Corridor.
This caused humanitarian aid, which had already been severely hampered by the Israeli blockade, to grind to an almost complete halt. It is now clear that Israel opted to enlist mass hunger, yet another weapon in its arsenal. Right now, more than 70% of the people of Gaza are experiencing famine conditions. The population is entirely dependent on foreign aid that almost never comes. This is especially true of the cut-off north of Gaza, which has been turned into a starvation ghetto where the Israeli forces attacked humanitarian convoys on a number of occasions.
As far back as two months ago, the renowned British medical journal The Lancet estimated the total number of direct and indirect deaths due to the Israeli aggression at 186,000. This constitutes 8% of Gaza’s entire population.
Forever wars
One may well ask: how can all this be?
The international system is not functioning – it cannot be put much milder than that. The United Nations has long been reduced to a living fossil presiding over an ever-mounting toll of genocides (Rwanda, Srebrenica, Darfur, Gaza, and more). The overall dominance of the Security Council’s permanent members, in combination with their veto rights, pose the ultimate hindrance to any sort of competent intervention. Especially now, in the times of a global disorder, whose cold wars are now merging into a rather hot one.
The rulings of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the Hague have long lost almost all relevance. The same goes for international humanitarian law, key international conventions and the very concept of human rights, which now all seem mere echoes of a bygone age that perhaps never really existed. The times grow more dystopian by the hour – and more divided, racist and stratified. All the long-existing social contracts are crumbling before our eyes. It is much the same all over the world, and certainly in the now almost impossibly narcissistic West.
This is part of the reason why we have come to live in a time of eternal war.
Not a single war that started following the 11 September 2001 attacks has really ended. In Afghanistan, August 2021 saw the return of the Taliban to power after 20 years of US occupation. Yes, much of the fighting may have simmered down, but the war against the Afghan population is far from over. The ‘Coalition of the Willing” invasion of Iraq in March 2003 – followed by an occupation and a savage civil war – sent shockwaves over the entire region. The echoes of the war in Iraq had a dire impact on the never-ended war in Syria and on the ongoing horrors in Yemen, which the so-called international community had long been sweeping under the rug.
The war that broke out in Sudan last April is one of the most horrific wars of our time. According to UN data, it also brought on the greatest humanitarian crisis in history … And there is no end in sight. The same goes for the conflicts in Libya and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The latter conflict has been raging since 1997. Its first six years had cost six million lives.
And then there is the war in Ukraine, bearing all the hallmarks of yet another forever war. Next to the daily massacres in Gaza, it best testifies to the utter fecklessness of the international community, which is increasingly being led by psychopaths and even mass murderers.
A few days after the Hamas atrocities in southern Israel, the UN Secretary-General António Guterres commented that the Hamas attacks “did not happen in a vacuum”. It was the mildest possible description of 75 years of systematic racism, land theft, forceful relocations, apartheid, collective humiliation and stupendous violence perpetrated by Israel.
The morning of 7 October 2023 brought the realisation that the status quo was gone forever. And that a savage Israeli response was inevitable. It was also certain that the international community will fail to come up with an answer. To paraphrase the Secretary-General: what happened after the Hamas attacks also did not happen in a vacuum.
All the above was perfectly understood by the Hamas leaders, who opted to cave to their own political impotence and the thoroughly depraved state of Palestinian internal politics and push their own nation to the brink of utter ruin. After its violent takeover of power in the summer of 2007, Hamas ruled the Palestinian enclave with an iron fist. And also, hand in hand with its co-progenitors, the Israeli political elite.
It was the perfect recipe for total and unrelenting disaster.
During the year of mass slaughter in Gaza, the Israeli far-right authorities led by the eternal prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu failed to achieve a single one of their official aims. Some 100 Israeli hostages still remain in Gaza, though it’s unclear how many are still alive, and how many have been killed by their captors or by Israeli bombs and rockets.
This is the key reason behind the mass protests taking place on the streets of Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities every weekend. On 14 September 2024, for instance, more than a million Israelis came out to protest and demand the immediate freeing of the hostages – not by military force, which has already proved far too ineffective, but through negotiating a ceasefire with Hamas.
After a year of unchecked savagery, the Israeli army has failed to defeat Hamas either in the military or in the political arena. Despite taking tremendous casualties, Hamas’ position in the region has been significantly strengthened. Most of all on the streets of the Arab world, where there is still a modicum of solidarity for the Palestinians … unlike with the spectacularly corrupt Arab political elites, who were happy enough to betray Gaza for what seems to be one final time.
Given the facts that Hamas is indisputably a terrorist organisation and that the Palestinian Authority (PA) are mere sub-contractors of the Israeli occupation, the Palestinians have no one to represent them.
Israel as a threat to Itself
Despite all the butchery, Israel is still flooded with enormous quantities of weapons.
According to the latest data by The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the vast majority of Israel’s imported weapons between 2019 and 2023 came from the United States (65.6%). Germany supplied 29.7%, while 4.7% came from Italy. Two months ago, Washington authorised an additional sale of weapons to Israel amounting to $20 billion.
According to SIPRI data, the combined European arms sales to Israel last year totalled €326.5 million – 10 times more than in 2022. On the other hand, Israel’s Ministry of Defense freely admits that Israel exported $13 billion of arms in 2023. Its most lucrative arms deal was with Germany, who paid Israel $3.5 billion for its Arrow 3 Anti-Ballistic Missile Interceptor system.
In the Middle East, just like everywhere else, getting rich on war is usually a two-way street.
A year of rampaging in Gaza and increasingly in the occupied West Bank have also significantly weakened Israel itself. Its security, social, economic and political prospects have been greatly diminished. Many international investments have been withdrawn. In all the 76 years of its history, Israel has never been this internally divided and globally reviled.
It bears stating that Netanyahu and his far-right, messianic, Taliban-like coalition partners began steering the Jewish state onto its current path towards totalitarianism even before the 7 October atrocities. The prime minister’s thirst for power was never more evident than when he tried to pass a judicial reform measure that would bring the supreme court – the traditionally most independent and progressive among Israeli institutions – entirely under his control.
Mind you, Netanyahu’s motivation was more personally than politically driven. There is still an ongoing trial against him for his alleged corrupt practices.
Over the past few years, the Netanyahu-led ruling extremists pulled off a sort of (anti-)cultural revolution in Israel. Yet despite that, and the fact that the Israeli authorities were fully to blame for the security fiasco of 7 October, the prime minister’s grip on power seems firmer than it was a year ago, even though none of his stated political objectives for the war have been achieved. Moreover, by spreading the conflict to Lebanon, Syria, Iran and Yemen, the prime minister exposed the Jewish state to a severe existential risk.
On 13 September 2024, the Israeli newspaper Maariv published a poll, according to which Netanyahu and his Likudparty would still win the largest number of Knesset seats. The same poll also testified to the prime minister’s personal popularity having increased since the beginning of the war. The Israeli public seems to perceive him as the most appropriate man for the job.
Once more: how can all this be?
All genuine political opposition in the country has been extinguished. What remains is led by shameless opportunists like Beni Gantz, whom the White House has long favoured as Netanyahu’s successor.
What passes for opposition these days is thus complicit in the ongoing orgy of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Similar words could be used to describe a large portion of the current anti-government protestors. The appalling suffering of the Palestinians is not something they feel called to bother with, given that their protests are mostly fuelled by ethnocentristic concerns.
Last April, the historian Amos Goldberg, an associate professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, published a very significant article in the Israeli magazine Sicha Mekommit. Titled, ‘Yes, this is genocide‘, the article loudly and clearly classified the Israeli actions in Gaza as genocide – and then went on to meticulously justify the claim.
Such writing, of course, demands enormous courage in today’s Israel. The risks are far from negligible.
“A radical atmosphere of dehumanisation of the Palestinians prevails in Israeli society to an extent that I can’t remember in my 58 years of living here,” Goldberg recently stated in an interview with Jacobin.
Goldberg also related that he was at first highly hesitant to use the word genocide, and tried to do all he could think of to convince himself otherwise. “No one wants to see themselves as part of a genocidal society. But there was explicit intent, a systematic pattern, and a genocidal outcome — so, I came to the conclusion that this is exactly what genocide looks like,” says Goldberg.
“And once you come to this conclusion, you cannot remain silent,” the Israeli historian was clear.
So it comes to brave local historians to keep telling the truth. But who will provide the data for future brave historians? Foreign journalists are still barred from entering Gaza and the domestic ones are being purposefully killed by the Israeli army.
After days of heavy bombardment, On 1 October 2024 Israel started the ground offensive in Lebanon.
Did somebody mention Gaza?
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Image at top of article: Bashar Taleb, Wafa news agency
