Israel-Palestine is not "complicated"
Do we stand with the kids throwing stones at tanks and yearning for freedom? Or do we stand with the heavily armed forces imprisoning and sniping those kids in the head?
The International Criminal Court, Human Rights Watch, the World Health Organization, Doctors Without Borders, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Save the Children, and countless other human rights organizations and institutions around the world all agree that Israel—with ironclad support from the United States—is committing a genocide primarily of tens of thousands of children in Palestine.
Most recently, Amnesty International released a 296-page report titled “‘You Feel Like You Are Subhuman’: Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza.”
In a press release about the report, Amnesty International stated:
“The world has witnessed the government of Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in occupied Gaza. Month after month, the government of Israel has treated Palestinians in Gaza as a subhuman group unworthy of human rights and dignity, demonstrating its specific intent to physically destroy them. Israel's government and state officials responsible for the crime of genocide must be held accountable. We are calling on all states to use every legal avenue to bring suspected perpetrators to justice. No one should be allowed to commit genocide and remain unpunished.”
The report states:
“The evidence presented clearly shows that the destruction of Palestinians in Gaza, as such, was Israel’s intent, either in addition to, or as a means to achieve, its military aims. There is only one reasonable inference that can be drawn from the evidence presented: genocidal intent has been part and parcel of Israel’s conduct in Gaza since 7 October 2023, including its military campaign… Our damning findings must serve as a wake-up call to the international community: this is genocide. It must stop now. States that continue to transfer arms to Israel at this time must know they are violating their obligation to prevent genocide and are at risk of becoming complicit in genocide. All states with influence over Israel, particularly key arms suppliers like the USA and Germany, but also other EU member states, the UK and others, must act now to bring Israel’s atrocities against Palestinians in Gaza to an immediate end.”
Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, recently referred to the Gaza genocide as “the monstrosity of our time.”
“Israel is erasing Palestinians from Palestine—starving, torturing to death, pulverizing homes, schools, churches, trees, human bodies, burning them in tents—and we call it ‘self-defense,’” Albanese said. “Israel’s ‘self-defense’ is the defense of genocide.”
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has said, “The catastrophe in Gaza is nothing short of a complete breakdown of our common humanity. The nightmare must stop. We cannot continue to look away.”
More than 1,400 families have been totally eradicated from Gaza’s civil registry since the increase in Israeli aggression in Gaza last year. Due to the complete destruction of Gaza’s civil services and the current lack of ability to keep track of these numbers, we know that the reality is far worse.
Gaza’s Civil Defense Spokesperson Mahmoud Bassal said recently that, “Entire families are being obliterated in northern Gaza and we do not know anything about them. There are many who survive attacks under the rubble and there are no civil defense workers there to help.”
Bassal said more than 10,000 people have been wounded in northern Gaza just in the last fifty days.
Per the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, the age group most killed by US-backed Israeli forces in Gaza is 5-9 year-old children. Second is 10-14 year-olds. Third is 0-4 year-olds.
Since October 2023, Israel has killed one Palestinian child every thirty minutes. More than 17,000 children have lost one or both of their parents as a result of the attacks.
Due to US-Israeli forced starvation policies, more than two million people in Palestine, mostly children, now are at great risk of starving to death should they be so fortunate as to survive the constant bombardment and targeted drone assassinations. According to UNRWA, the average wait time at Israeli-controlled crossing points for humanitarian aid trucks to enter Gaza is 74 days.
According to reports, Gaza requires roughly 600 humanitarian aid trucks per day to avoid famine. The Biden Administration asked Israel to allow in only 350 per day. The actual number Israel has allowed in is closer to 50 per day.
In October this year, the Biden Administration threatened to withhold military aid if Israel within 30 days did not fulfill a list of demands including increased flow of humanitarian aid to Gaza. Despite Israel failing to meet a single demand of the Biden Administration, no change in policy has been implemented.
Earlier this year, American doctor Irfan Galaria wrote an op-ed titled “I’m an American doctor who went to Gaza. What I saw wasn’t war—it was annihilation.”
Galaria wrote:
“I stopped keeping track of how many new orphans I had operated on. After surgery they would be filed somewhere in the hospital, I’m unsure of who will take care of them or how they will survive. On one occasion, a handful of children, all about ages 5 to 8, were carried to the emergency room by their parents. All had single sniper shots to the head. These families were returning to their homes in Khan Yunis, about 2.5 miles away from the hospital, after Israeli tanks had withdrawn. But the snipers apparently stayed behind. None of these children survived… I feel incredibly guilty that I was able to leave while millions are forced to endure the nightmare in Gaza. As an American, I think of our tax dollars paying for the weapons that likely injured my patients there. Already driven from their homes, these people have nowhere else to turn.”
US surgeon Mark Perlmutter, who volunteered at the European hospital of Khan Younis in Gaza, said Israeli snipers were deliberately targeting Palestinian children.
“I’ve seen more incinerated children [in Gaza] than I’ve ever seen in my entire life combined. I've seen more shredded children [in Gaza] in just the first week than I've ever seen in my entire life combined. All the disaster zones combined don’t equal the level of carnage I saw in Gaza,” Perlmutter said. “I’ve seen children shot twice by snipers. No toddler gets shot twice by mistake by the world’s best sniper… The Western world is paying for the bombs that are burning children to death. They're paying for the bullets that shredded those children. We are complicit in this."
British surgeon Nizam Mamode, who worked at Nasser Hospital in Gaza, testified to the UK Parliament that Israeli quad-copters were purposely ‘picking off civilians’ after bombings.
“The drones would come down and pick off civilians—children,” Momode said. “We had description after description. This was not an occasional thing. This was day after day, operating on children who would say, ‘I was lying on the ground after a bomb had dropped, and this quad-copter came down and hovered over me and shot me.’ And that was clearly a deliberate act, a persistent targeting of children day after day. We had one or two mass casualty incidents every day.”
Dr. Tanya Hassan, who volunteered for Medical Aid for Palestinians in Gaza, broke down crying while speaking to the UN, stating:
“The precedent set in Gaza is going to spread everywhere… It signals the demise of the rule of law. When I was in Gaza, I felt like it was the prelude to the end of humanity.”
As recently noted by Jehad Abusalim, executive director of the Institute for Palestine Studies, US-Israeli destruction of life in Palestine is made exponentially worse by the repeated, direct targeting of humanitarian aid workers and health care professionals.
Abusalim wrote:
“There’s a photo circulating of the Zionist army rounding up doctors, nurses, and patients from a hospital in northern Gaza. The detainees are blindfolded, stripped of their clothes, their hands zip-tied. One of them leans on crutches. Western media and Israel's allies want you to believe these soldiers are both victims and heroes, while the Palestinian doctors and nurses—who remained in their hospitals for over a year, healing the wounded, treating the sick, and saving lives—are cast as villains. For many in the West, the lives of these Palestinians are neither celebrated in life nor mourned in death. Their deaths are not condemned, their suffering barely deemed newsworthy.
These are people who were born as refugees, lived under curfews, endured entire lifetimes under blockade, moving from one war to another, cut off from the outside world. They have lived without rights, without privileges, and without access to even the most basic freedoms. Yet, despite this crushing reality, they pursued education, built families and careers, and dedicated their lives to helping others. And yet, we are conditioned to disregard their deaths, their torture, their humiliation—to overlook their suffering and ignore their plight.
This is the brutal dynamic that has been normalized for more than a century: that one people’s lives, narratives, and aspirations are deemed inherently more valuable than another’s. There will be no peace, no quiet, no justice in our region until that dynamic is dismantled. Period.”
Even more recently, Israeli forces murdered Mahmoud Almadhoun, a chef and founder of the Gaza Soup Kitchen, which helps each day to provide food to more than 3,000 starving people in northern Gaza. Mahmoud is the most recent of at least 338 humanitarian aid workers murdered by Israel since October last year.
Even now, as I switch between open tabs on my laptop doing research for this article, I find countless stories of the most unthinkably terrible atrocities committed by Israel—from yesterday, from last week, from last year even—and I am utterly disgusted to know that my tax dollars and my government helped to cause this.
Per UNICEF, last week, a 3-week-old baby, born prematurely, died of pneumonia in Gaza, due to Israeli attacks on hospitals leading to an inability to provide necessary neonatal intensive care. His mother, Hala, had not yet named the child from fear of losing him.
Nour Morsi, a two-year-old Palestinian girl recently was shot through the heart by an Israeli sniper.
This is Eline Qasem. She lost all family members including her parents. She suffers from broken skull and legs, as well as bruises and burns all over her body, caused by constant US-Israeli bombardments.
Last week, Israel killed dozens of civilians and injured countless others in an airstrike targeting the home of the Al-Nadi family in Nuseirat, central Gaza Strip.
Because of the constant bombardments, Gaza now is home to the largest number in history of children with amputated limbs. Because Israel blocks all importations into Gaza of anesthetics, dozens of children are amputated daily without anesthesia. Many are left to suffer with no help at all due to the complete destruction of nearly all medical facilities in Gaza. CNN recently reported that the items most frequently rejected by the Israelis are anesthetics, anesthesia machines, oxygen cylinders, ventilators and water filtration systems.
Wheelchair-bound 16 year-old child Mahmoud Abu Al-Aish was killed by the Israelis while he was being taken by staff to the radiology department. A doctor from the hospital told Dropsite News that such attacks have become a tragic “daily occurrence.”
Palestinian children and babies were severely injured last week when Israel bombed a residential block in Al-Nafaq Street in Gaza City.
The Israelis murdered a displaced 10 year-old Palestinian girl by shooting her in the chest while she was trying to cross a checkpoint.
Perhaps most infamously, in January, US-backed Israeli forces fired from a tank 335 bullets at the car in which 6-year-old Palestinian child Hind Rajab was hiding alone, eventually murdering her as she pleaded for help from rescuers. Before murdering Hind, Israeli forces murdered her family as she watched, and later murdered the medics who were sent to save her.
A whole year ago, a group of children in the Gaza Strip—speaking in English—stood in front of Al-Shifa Hospital warning the world of Israel’s evident attempts to “exterminate the people of Gaza, their dreams and their future.”
“Since the 7th of October, we have faced extermination, killing, bombing falling over our heads—all of this in front of the world,” one of the children said. “They lie to the world that they kill the fighters, but they kill the people of Gaza, their dreams and their future. Kids of Gaza run out of their hopes and wants… The occupation is starving us. We don’t find water [and] food. We drink from the unusable water. We come now to shout and invite you to protect us. We want to live. We want peace. We want to judge the killers of children. We want medicine, food and education. We want to live as the other children live.”
Since that day, Israel has gone on to murder tens of thousands more children in Palestine.
In February, Al-Jazeera published a video scrolling through the names of all the Palestinian children killed in US-Israeli attacks in Gaza up to that point. The video is more than seven minutes long. The first thirty seconds display only the names of children who were murdered by the US and Israel before their first birthday.
https://twitter.com/AJEnglish/status/1753401017469633010
Israel’s slaughtering of children in Gaza has become so thoroughly normalized that some children, fearing seemingly inescapable death, have written their own wills. This one, found beneath rubble, was written by a 10-year-old child named Rasha. It says: “Please don’t cry for me, as it would make me sad. I hope my clothes can go to those in need, and my accessories to Rahaf, Lana, and Batool. The bead boxes should go to Batool. As for my monthly allowance of 50 shekels, I want half to go to Rahaf and the other half to Ahmad. I’d like Batool to have my toys. Lastly, please don’t shout at my brother Ahmad. Please follow these wishes.”
Both Rasha and her 8-year-old brother Ahmad were murdered by Israel.
Al Jazeera Investigations recently reported that “Israeli quad-copters equipped with loudspeakers were emitting baby sounds, playing sounds of screaming women” to lure Palestinians out of their homes to murder them, a blatant crime against humanity.
More than 20 years ago, American journalist and war correspondent Chris Hedges wrote: "Children have been shot in other conflicts I have covered, but I have never before watched soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport,” which is precisely what he saw while reporting from Palestine.
Norman Finkelstein, the American son of two Jewish Holocaust survivors and an expert on the Nazi Holocaust, recently remarked, “If you are at war with Gaza, why are you shooting children in the skull and in the chest? Why are you killing journalists, medics, UN workers? Does that sound like a war or does that sound like a genocide?”
The Oxford Union recently voted by an overwhelming majority of 278 to 59 that "Israel is an apartheid state responsible for genocide" in Palestine. Palestinian American writer and human rights activist Susan Abulhawa spoke in support of the motion, stating:
“When I was in Gaza, I saw a little boy no more than 9 years whose hands and part of his face had been blown off from a booby trapped can of food that soldiers had left behind for Gaza’s starving children. I later learned that they had also left poisoned food for people in Shujaiyya, and in the 1980s and 90s, Israeli soldiers had left booby trapped toys in southern Lebanon that exploded when excited children picked them up.
The harm they do is diabolical, and yet, they expect you to believe they are the victims. Invoking Europe’s holocaust and screaming antisemitism, they expect you to suspend fundamental human reason to believe that the daily sniping of children with so called ‘kill shots’ and the bombing of entire neighborhoods that bury families alive and wipe out whole bloodlines is self-defense.”
Gabor Maté, a Hungarian-Canadian physician, author, speaker, expert on trauma and addiction, and a Jewish survivor of the Nazi Holocaust, recently described his experience learning of the US and Israel’s actions in Palestine as being “like watching Auschwitz on TikTok.”
In a Haaretz article published Wednesday, Israeli journalist Chaim Har-Zahav, who served an 86-day reserve mission in Gaza, detailed what he witnessed during that time, including army commanders instructing troops to open fire on Palestinians regardless of whether they posed a threat.
"The lives of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip depend first and foremost on the private and personal scale of values of the commanders in the Strip," Har-Zahav wrote, adding that any senior officer who orders the killing of Palestinians simply because of their identity will not face consequences.
"A human life in the Gaza Strip is worth less than the lives of the thousands of stray dogs that roam the area looking for food,” he wrote. “While there is a clear order prohibiting shooting dogs unless a soldier is in real danger when the dog's jaws are locked on him, humans are permitted to be shot without any real restrictions."
In the piece, Har-Zahav described an incident involving a senior commander ordering the shooting of an unarmed man waving a white flag. When told the man did not pose a threat and was clearly without weapons, the commander responded by saying, "I don't know what a white flag is. Shoot him. It's an order."
Rohan Talbot, director of advocacy and campaigns for Medical Aid for Palestinians, said that “what Israel is doing in northern Gaza is unspeakable: the purest, most despicable terrorism.”
Israeli historian Lee Mordechai recently published what Haaretz called “the most methodical and detailed documentation in Hebrew… of the war crimes that Israel is perpetrating in Gaza.”
The English translation of the 124-page report, titled “Bearing Witness to the Israel-Gaza War,” references thousands of documents including photos, videos, eyewitness accounts, investigative reports and other sources.
“My role as a historian is to give voice to those who cannot sound their own voices, whether they were eunuchs in the 11th century or children in Gaza,” Mordechai writes, concluding bluntly that “Israel is ethnically cleansing North Gaza.”
In a recent Dropsite News article titled “Death march from Beit Lahia,” Palestinian journalist Hossam Shabat reports:
“Witnesses describe tear-streaked children covered in dust running panicked in the streets as warplanes and drones roared overhead. Some pleaded for water but Israeli soldiers refused to give them anything and instead poured water on the ground in front of them to taunt them, according to witnesses. At the checkpoint, Israeli troops separated the men and detained them as their families screamed in desperation. Witnesses described children clinging to Israeli tanks in a desperate attempt to stay with their fathers.
After the checkpoint, families were forced to walk for hours more, through the day, making their way a harrowing 10 kilometers south to Gaza City. Some of the wounded fell on the road with no hope of getting treatment. ‘I was walking with my sister in the street,’ said Rahaf, 16. She and her sister were the sole survivors in their family of an earlier airstrike that killed 70 people. ‘Suddenly my sister fell due to the bombing. I saw blood pouring from her, but I couldn't do anything. I left her in the street, and no one pulled her out. I was screaming, but no one heard me.’”
Shabat wrote in a recent social media post:
“The situation in northern Gaza is beyond catastrophic. Israeli occupation forces have destroyed about 90% of the buildings, leaving displaced families to seek shelter in schools. But over the past few months, these schools have also been targeted and destroyed. Now, thousands of people are sleeping on the streets without any shelter, with women and children forced to sleep on the ground. The end goal is to make northern Gaza uninhabitable in order to ethnically cleanse the remaining population to build settlements… After 426 days, you are either against genocide or pro-genocide; nothing in between. It’s not complicated. The Israeli government is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza loud and clear.”
These are the brutal, barbaric realities of US imperialism, deliberately hidden from us by our corrupt corporate media. And I could go on. These real-life nightmares are endless. We must do everything in our power to make them stop. How long will we allow this to continue?
In his book The Myth of American Idealism, American professor Noam Chomsky discusses why we, as Americans, have a unique responsibility—at the very least—to make our voices heard in opposition to this genocide being funded by our tax dollars and supported with the full force of our own government.
Chomsky writes:
“American support for Israel means that Israel’s actions should rightly be understood as ‘US-Israeli’ actions. When we talk about ‘Israeli crimes,’ the framing is misleading, because they are US-Israeli crimes. Whatever Israel does is either implicitly or explicitly authorized by the US, which provides economic, diplomatic, military, and ideological support, and US presidents can alter Israeli policy and restrain Israel’s violence when they choose to do so. When we talk about Israel, we should remember that in an important sense we are talking about ourselves. Because the US arms and protects Israel, we bear responsibility for what it does.”
Chomsky also pushes back on the common misconception that the genocide is somehow too “complicated” to have a realistic solution:
“The Israel-Palestine conflict is often portrayed as complicated. In fact, it is relatively simple. The conflict is centered in territories that have been under harsh military occupation for fifty years. The conqueror is a major military power, acting with massive military, economic, and diplomatic support from the global superpower. Its subjects are alone and defenseless, many barely surviving in miserable camps, who have suffered brutal terror of a kind familiar in colonial wars and have in turn committed terrible atrocities. The United States has long had a choice: will it insist that Israel operate in accordance with basic democratic values and international norms, or will it fund and encourage the immoral, illegal, and self-destructive project of building a permanent apartheid state? Only through domestic public pressure in the US can the pattern of this country’s policies be disrupted.”
A recent report from Brown University’s Costs of War project reveals that the US contributed at least $22.76 billion from 7 October 2023 to 30 September 2024 to support Israel’s genocide of Palestinians. And that figure does not include details of hundreds of arms deals obscured by US officials to keep them below the threshold that would legally require Congressional approval.
Retired Israeli General Yirzhak Brik once stated bluntly: “All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs—it’s all from the US. The minute they turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting. You have no capability… Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.”
The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. Despite international obligations to arrest these men over war crimes and crimes against humanity, the US allows them to visit freely, totally rejecting the orders of the ICC. Gallant even visited the White House on Human Rights Day for a meeting with Biden’s Middle East coordinator.
The US has repeatedly vetoed UN Security Council resolutions calling for a ceasefire and humanitarian pause to the genocide in Palestine. In some cases, the US stood alone as the only country on the council to vote against the resolution.
Last month, the US and Israel were two of just six countries to vote against a UN resolution affirming “the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination.”
Further, while Zionist supporters of Israel attempt to justify their genocide by pointing to the Hamas attacks on October 7 last year, the Palestinian people have the right under international law to engage in armed struggle to resist their occupiers. United Nations General Assembly resolution 37/43, adopted in 1982, is unambiguous:
Even before last year, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International already had declared that Israel—with total support from the US—was operating as an illegal apartheid state.
“In April 2021, after years of research, detailed case studies and a careful review of Israeli government planning documents, statements by officials and other sources, Human Rights Watch found that Israeli authorities were and are committing the crime of apartheid against Palestinians, based on the Israeli government policy to maintain domination over Palestinians and grave abuses against Palestinians in the occupied territory.”
“Israeli authorities must be held accountable for committing the crime of apartheid against Palestinians, Amnesty International stated in a damning report. The investigation details how Israel enforces a system of oppression and domination against the Palestinian people wherever it has control over their rights. This includes Palestinians living in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), as well as displaced refugees in other countries.
The comprehensive report, ‘Israel’s Apartheid against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime against Humanity,’ sets out how massive seizures of Palestinian land and property, unlawful killings, forcible transfer, drastic movement restrictions, and the denial of nationality and citizenship to Palestinians are all components of a system which amounts to apartheid under international law. This system is maintained by violations which Amnesty International found to constitute apartheid as a crime against humanity, as defined in the Rome Statute and Apartheid Convention.”
Israel is one of few nations remaining in the world which still regularly imprisons children. For decades, according to Defense for Children International, each year approximately 500-700 Palestinian children, some as young as 12 years old, have been detained and prosecuted in the Israeli military court system. The most common charge is stone throwing.
An estimated 10,000 Palestinian children have been held in military detention over the past 20 years, with Save the Children noting that they are “the only children in the world who are systematically prosecuted in military courts.”
It is long past time for honest people to stop pretending this genocide is in any way complicated. The question we are faced with is utterly simple: Do we stand with the kids throwing stones at tanks and yearning for freedom? Or do we stand with the heavily armed forces imprisoning and sniping those kids in the head?
Finally, if for some inexplicable reason you cannot find the courage to stand up and fight for the human rights of the men, women and children being slaughtered with our own weapons—paid for by our own tax dollars and supported by our own government—perhaps you can, at the very least, find somewhere within you the courage to fight for yourself.
“You are in grave danger and you don’t even realize it,” American human rights lawyer Craig Mokhiber wrote recently. “The moral bubbles we all live in are going to destroy us all. Think. Do you really believe that the dehumanization, wholesale murder, systematic torture, mass imprisonment, imposed starvation and disease and media erasure of victims will stop at the borders of Palestine? Is it credible to believe that impunity for a live-streamed genocide will not lead to more horror? If Israel, the US and other perpetrators get away with this, don’t doubt that the same dark power may knock on your door next. You leave the people of Gaza alone at your own peril.”
Or, as online journalist Tiberius put it:
“There is an implicit admission within the West’s acceptance and defense of Israel’s crimes—like mass rape, torturing hostages to death, and gleefully massacring children—that shows human life and human suffering do not matter to those in charge. This is a threat to us all. You simply can’t take a bunch of psychopaths and give them absolute power and control over society and then expect anything except a society that stumbles from crisis to crisis with massive human suffering before eventually collapsing in on itself. This is what ‘None of us are free until all of us are free’ points to. It’s what Dr. King meant when he said ‘Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.’ It’s what Baldwin got at when he said ‘Every bombed village is my home town.’ We are all intimately connected. Either we fight to create a world within which justice is applied universally, rights are protected universally, and liberation for *all* is the bedrock of our efforts, or it is merely a matter of time before we or our children sit at the wrong end of the injustice we foster.”
After all, the true struggle to liberate oppressed people anywhere is the same struggle to liberate oppressed people everywhere. Join the struggle, my brothers and sisters. We need y’all. The children need y’all. We all need each other.
