2.4 million people, half of them under 18, packed into an area the size of the Isle of Wight, now face further expulsion from their bomb-decimated homes.
The Nakba catastrophe which saw 750,000 Palestinians forcibly removed from their land has been a continuous process of ethnic cleansing. And now millions more are facing the march of dispossession.
80% of Gaza’s people are already refugees, forced from their homes in settler-taken towns like Sderot and Ashkelon across Israel’s ‘security’ fence.
That’s why the people of Gaza rallied in their thousands during the Great March of Return in 2018, and were murdered en masse for their heroic efforts.
As Aaron Mate charts, the extent of Palestinian resentment over their initial displacement was ‘recognised’ even by one of Israel’s most infamous generals, Moshe Dayan:
“Let us not cast the blame on the murderers today. Why should we deplore their burning hatred for us? For eight years they have been sitting in the refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we have been transforming the lands and villages, where they and their fathers dwelt, into our estate.”
Now they are being displaced once again in another act of brutal collective punishment, an order deemed illegal under international law, a breach of the Geneva Convention, condemned by the UN and rejected by every humanitarian agency in the world.
As UNRWA's director of communications, Juliette Touma warns:
“This is the worst we've ever seen. This is hitting rock bottom. This is Gaza being pushed into an abyss, there is tragedy unfolding as the world is watching. This is Gaza.”
UN Special Rapporteur to the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, states:
“Mass forced displacement of Palestinians has occurred in 1947/49 and 1967, and continued ever since, in less visible but not less painful forms. This time it risks to be as cruel as ever, under our watch, with some member states even risking to enable it.”
Deprived of food, water and electricity, bombed and broken people now face the further traumatic prospect of never again seeing their territory, as the new horror of an invading Zionist army come again to kill, expel and annex.
Israel's Defence Minister Yoav Gallant declared in his scorched-earth warning: “Gaza won’t return to what it was before. We will eliminate everything.”
We’re now seeing Israel’s long-gestating plan of banishing Gaza’s entire population to the Sinai Desert. “They need to move south, out to the Sinai Peninsula”, Israel’s army head Amir Avivi declares.
In another chilling interview, ex-Israeli Deputy Foreign minister and senior diplomat Danny Avalon has revealed Israel’s pre-planned goal of expulsion to the Sinai, sealing the border and confiscating the land.
As Mustafa Barghouthi clarifies: “Israel is fighting, not Hamas. Israel is fighting all the Palestinian people.”
Egypt’s own complicit part in this historic illegal transfer is also now emerging.
And as the enforcement commences, Israel has rained down death and destruction on the south-heading evacuees.
It's also important to remember that, contrary to media references, Israel’s fence around Gaza is not a border. It has no legal status. It is a physical construct built by Israel to keep Palestinians locked in, controlled by air, land and sea. Israel thus remains the occupying power over Gaza.
While desperate Gazans reach out to the world for basic aid, the West looks on in callous disregard. The US, Israel’s senior patron, flew in Antony Blinken, pledging to stand resolute with Netanyahu and his supremacist cohorts. EU head Ursula von der Leyen, still fuelling the military madness in Ukraine, has also promised unstinting support for the regime. And the UK - ever-cruel Britannia - is sending not relief ships to deliver vital aid, but warships off the coast of Gaza to mount surveillance on starving and fleeing Palestinians.
The inhumanity of this war-diseased empire is truly breathtaking. How such a barbaric state still commands unequivocal US/UK/EU support tells us all we need to know about the 'moral standing' of Western ‘democracies’.
This backing also now comes in the wake of an emergent far-right fascist government that’s been green-lighting pogroms and terror upon Palestinians across the West Bank.
It continues despite Amnesty now joining other major human rights organisations in declaring Israel an apartheid state.
And it intensifies now as Israel breaks every international law in the book in slaughtering and expelling the people of Gaza, clear acts of genocide, as specified by the UN.
As Jonathan Cook cogently writes, “the blood of Gaza is on the West’s hands as much as Israel’s.”
Shamefully, Labour leader Keir Starmer, a lawyer and former DPP, has refused to oppose Israel’s blocking of food, water and electricity to Gaza, a flagrant violation of international law.
He has also ordered party officials not to attend any of the mass protest rallies in support of Palestine.
Is it possible for this shameless and alarming figure to sink any lower?
Meanwhile, media platforms are awash with drum-beating Western ‘war analysts’, from state-funded ‘think tanks’ to retired generals, offering cold scenarios for Israel’s bombing and invasion.
There’s no seeming alternative, they intone, other than ground forces to erase Hamas. Alas, they lament, the mass civilian casualties to follow will always be an 'inevitable consequence of war', and no more so than here in the prosecution of Israel's 'rightful retaliatory' war.
Of course, there’s no such admission that deaths from the al-Qassam Brigade's own incursion into Israel could ever be linked to the decades of invasion inflicted on Gaza, or that those civilian losses could ever be viewed as a ‘sad and inevitable’ consequence of decades-long war being waged upon Palestinians.
Nowhere from the mainstream political and media class is there the remotest call for Israel and its sponsors to seek an actual political solution, rather than pursue further catastrophic warfare.
Nor will you ever read anything from Western service media on the actual complexities of Hamas’ own political and military development.
There's no discussion of it being cultivated by Israel from the late-1970s, and its particular promotion by Netanyahu from 1987, as a bulwark to Fatah.
We hear nothing of the preemptive Hamas action against a US-backed coup following its democratic election in 2006, leading to the subsequent punishment siege from 2007.
There’s no mention of the key political shift from its fundamentalist 1988 Charter to its more moderated one of 2017, notably its acceptance of two states.
There’s no explanation of the long-term hudna (ceasefire/truce) efforts pushed by Hamas in an effort to lift the siege.
There's no mention of the West's quiet back-channel to Hamas, via Qatar.
After so many failed Hamas initiatives and obstructions by Israel, there's no thought given to why its military wing took a more decisive shift to armed resistance.
All of which leaves no serious background context to the current Hamas operations.
This should all be the stuff of studious political analysis and public interest reporting. Instead, the BBC choose to repeat ad nauseam the simplified Western framing of Hamas as a banned terrorist enemy. It's a carefully calibrated presentation, serving not just to demonise Hamas and dumb the public, but to brand Palestinians and anyone supporting the Palestinian cause as implicit supporters of it.
Palestinians, and those speaking up for them, are also being harangued by news anchors and interviewers demanding their immediate condemnation of Hamas.
It’s the primary media opening: “do you condemn?” As though actual suffering Palestinians and their backers are expected to assume blame and express contrition; as if Palestinians and their followers have no such regard for human life.
It further serves to normalise the lie that Israel is intent on only wiping out Hamas, rather than erasing all Palestinians. It's also, as Palestinian Ambassador/Head of Mission to the UK Husam Zomlot encountered, used as a crude media trope to portray the problem as one of internal Palestinian political divisions and their ‘refusal’ to acknowledge such.
This is all bad faith interrogation, not rational explorative journalism. The first thing to be said in any such exchange should be, “I reject the premise of your question and the duplicitous motive behind it.”
One might also ask of such inquisitors: “have you ever thought of condemning your own state-serving media in turning a blind-eye to the West’s horrific crimes, including its long-time harbouring of Israel’s terror state?”
From its priority headlines to its tributing of Israel’s flag on public buildings, BBC reports are overwhelmingly loaded in favour of Israel. Israeli victims have highlighted names, extended stories, media empathy. Palestinians are numbers, ‘collateral’ losses, anonymous victims, their stories attenuated, their terrors reduced to 'anxieties'.
Public empathy for Palestinians is further undermined by loaded media language such as “Hamas-run” hospitals and other facilities.
BBC reporters will talk of Hamas massacres. But they will never speak about the bombing of Gaza apartments and the deliberate mass killing of civilians as Israeli massacres. The taking of civilians as hostages by Hamas is elevated as a crisis issue. In contrast, thousands of Palestinians, including hundreds of children, have been effectively abducted by Israel under Administrative Detention and locked away for years, with barely a murmur of media concern.
Whatever images of bombed and suffering Gazans being aired - and how could the barbaric extent of it ever be truly hidden - the ‘predominant concerns’ still prevail: Israel’s own ‘fears’, ‘security’, fate of hostages, and ‘right to protect itself’.
It’s a narrative laden with qualified sympathy for Palestinians: ‘yes, we see your suffering, but you must see the ‘greater imperative’of Israel’s ‘sole right to retaliate’ and act in its own ‘higher interests’.
Armchair warriors and siren tabloid voices insist that, whatever the cost in human life, Gaza must be invaded, the need for Israeli revenge sated. To suggest otherwise is simply unthinkable.
So how do Palestinians protect themselves? Where should they flee? Into the sea? Into the wilderness of Sinai? To these questions, there are no answers, practical or moral. All that matters is military execution of Israel's ‘superior’ aims.
This is the Western hierarchy of suffering. And it’s coupled with the implicit requirement that Palestinian victims must condemn themselves in order to see the ‘problem’ of their ‘own making’.
It’s all redolent of an ingrained colonial-imperialist mindset, speaking down to a ‘lesser’ people, the ‘other’, those who have dared to break out of their prison cage.
If only the late, great Edward Said were still here to witness this chapter of the Palestinian catastrophe and deconstruct the media/cultural racism underlying it.
How easy to condemn. How false to use it as harassment, entrapment and smear, as Palestinians like Zomlot, and Palestinian supporters like Jeremy Corbyn have had to endure.
This is the default line of warmongering Western leaders, posturing liberals and a public assaulted by the same moralising media propaganda.
Real, honest and constructive condemnation is always underwritten by two further essential elements: the need to see and understand the core causes of why such violence and suffering occurs; and a sincere moral effort to use that understanding in an effort to help prevent further war, violence and suffering.
In a textbook illustration of such, the honourable Israeli journalist Gideon Levy reminds us that it is Israel’s own relentless crimes against Palestinians and the brutal subjugation of Gaza that has brought about this desperate breakout, boiling point reaction, and, conveniently, the regime’s biggest ever pretext for wiping out Gaza.
With the mass, indiscriminate bombing of every civilian and all infrastructure, Israel’s demonic Dahiya Doctrine is now being played out to full and hellish effect.
As Israel readies to completely level Gaza and expel its entire population, all this criminal calamity is being excused by Western capitals and its amplifier media in the name of ‘righteous vengeance’. And as the violence-ridden post-9/11 world has shown, that only leads to more war, terror and death.
While Palestinians resist in whatever ways they can, we can at least serve their cause by helping to expose this pernicious narrative: in calling-out the loaded, virtue-signalling politics of condemnation; in taking, without fear of further specious condemnation, the unequivocal side of the oppressed, not the oppressor; and in saying clearly that Palestinians who are responding with arms aren’t just doing so for the sake of it.
Nothing happens in isolation. All the horrors we’re now witnessing are the direct consequence of Palestinian displacement, imprisonment, occupation and siege, the continuous Nakba.
Tragically, there will be no end to the killing until true efforts are made to establish a system of equal political and civil rights under one state for all.
As this vital video of the Palestinian catastrophe and ongoing persecution shows, all serious condemnation should be informed by a need to understand the fundamental roots of the crisis, as the basis of any eventual and just resolution.
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Further reading:
For those trying to comprehend the extent of UK and Western complicity, please see Jonathan Cook’s excellent analysis: Lawless on Gaza: why Britain and the West back Israel’s crimes.
Yanis Varoufakis has also compiled a specific list of internationally-defined war crimes committed by Israel since 7 October.
