Photography by Nathaniel St. Clair

It became background noise. We know this is happening, but we can almost forget that it continues at a barbaric pace. The United Nations Deputy Special Coordinator for Palestine, Muhannad Hadi, issued a statement on December 13, 2024, this simply makes no sense: “I am very concerned about the rapid deterioration of the security and humanitarian situation in Gaza. » How can things get worse in Gaza? Is the situation not as bad as it could be with the genocidal Israeli war continuing?

If you pay attention, you will see that every day there are more and more reports of bombings in northern Gaza. These bombings pulverize entire buildings and massacre entire families. On December 17, the Commissioner General of the Palestinian United Nations Agency (UNRWA) Philippe Lazzarini put the situation is the clearest: “We lack words to describe the situation in Gaza…. My colleagues, when they come back, basically describe a post-apocalyptic environment, and people are living among (waste), sewage, in rubble, and struggling because they are faced daily with death, hunger and to illness. .”

Corpses

The day before Hadi’s statement, an Israeli airstrike hit a housing estate in the Nuseirat refugee camp and killed a large number of members of the al-Sheikh Ali family. It is now part of the death count to track the elimination of entire families by Israeli bombs. A Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor report from October 2024 showed that 3,500 Palestinian families in Gaza “have suffered multiple losses since October 2023. Among them, 365 families have lost more than 10 members, while more than 2,750 families have lost at least three.” These figures will need to be updated. The Euro-Med report is entitled De-Gaza: a year of Israeli genocide and collapse of the world order.

December 11, 2024, before this series of bombings and murders, a surprising event press briefing was given by Mounir al-Bursh (director general of the Palestinian Ministry of Health) and Mahmoud Basal (spokesperson for the Palestinian Civil Defense Agency). Al-Bursh said Israeli troops fired on ambulances and prevented rescue workers from accessing buildings to retrieve the injured and dead. As a result, he said, “bodies are left in the streets and are eaten by dogs.” Basal, meanwhile, said many injured people were dying under the rubble because rescue teams no longer had regular access to bombed buildings and did not have the equipment needed to save people. This means that the Israelis are not only bombing residential areas and killing unarmed civilians, but also preventing the wounded from being rescued and the dead from being honorably buried. Journalist Hossam Shabat, reporting from northern Gaza, wrote“Due to increased Israeli bombings and killings in northern Gaza, we are running out of body bags to bury the dead, and now we are resorting to any clothing or blanket for their burial. »

Reports

In recent months, two reports have been published whose honesty allows the reader to feel the atrocities committed against Palestinians in Gaza.

First, in October 2024, the remarkable UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine, Francesca Albanese, released her 32-page document report for the United Nations General Assembly. His conclusion is clear: “The current genocide is part of a century-long project to eliminate settler colonialism in Palestine, a stain on the international system and humanity, which must be ended, investigated and prosecuted. in court. » The legal arguments in favor of ending not only the genocide but also its basis, the occupation, are very strong. Anyone who reads Albanese’s report with an open mind will come to this conclusion.

Second, in December, Amnesty International published a 296-page document documentcalled You feel subhuman: the Israeli genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza. The most painful section to read is the clinical evidence presented by Amnesty of the genocidal words of Israeli officials which are then put into practice by their soldiers. It is worth reading a few sentences from the Amnesty report:

Amnesty International analyzed 102 statements made by Israeli government officials, high-ranking military officers and members of the Knesset between October 7, 2023 and June 30, 2024, that dehumanized Palestinians, or called for or justified acts of genocide or other acts. crimes under international law against them. Among these, he identified 22 statements specifically made by members of Israel’s war and security cabinets, including Prime Minister Netanyahu, then Defense Minister Gallant and other government ministers, by military officers (high-ranking) and by the Israeli president between (October 7, 2023 and June 30, 2024). These statements appeared to call for or justify acts of genocide.

Furthermore, the language used by Israeli officials was frequently repeated, including by soldiers in Gaza, apparently explaining the reason for their (behavior). This is evidenced by Amnesty International’s analysis of 62 videos, audio recordings and photographs published online showing Israeli soldiers in which they called for the destruction of Gaza or the denial of essential services to the Gaza population, or celebrated the destruction of homes. Palestinians. mosques, schools and universities.

For example, before the Israeli offensive on Rafah, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said at a public event: “There is no job half done. Rafah, Deir al-Balah, Nuseirat, destruction! Erase from under the sky the memory of (the people of) Amalek. This genocidal language was then reproduced on the ground. The Amnesty report forcefully states that there is no other way to understand the Israeli campaign against Palestinians in Gaza than as genocide.

Naughty children

The Ministry of Health in Gaza said that since the start of the genocide, Israelis have killed at least 45,059 Palestinians. Among them, at least 17,000 are children. Israel and its Western allies have spent considerable sums to deny these figures. The right-wing Henry Jackson Society (UK based) published a 40-page article report this belongs to a juvenile debate. Complaining about this or that individual case and not seeing the scale of the bombings and destruction, revealed by reputable human rights organizations, is fallacious. They would like to justify the murder of children by their argument over statistics.

In 2014, during a previous terrible Israeli bombing of Gaza, Palestinian poet Khaled Juma wrote about the children who were killed then. Then the Israelis killed 551 children, like recorded by the official UN investigation. This time the number is 30 times higher and continues to climb. No amount of debate about the exact numbers will change anything.

Oh, naughty children of Gaza,
You who constantly bothered me with your cries under my window,
You who fill every morning with precipitation and chaos,
You who broke my vase and stole the solitary flower from my balcony,
To come back-
And scream as you want,
And break all the vessels,
Steal all the flowers,
To come back,
Just come back…