What’s Happening in Gaza is the Shame of the Century
"It's just wasteland for miles and miles and miles... There’s nothing left to bomb there... But amidst that despair, people are trying to rebuild their lives."
From United Nations Humanitarian Chief Tom Fletcher:
- Have you ever seen anything like what you saw in Gaza?
“No. Never. And you try to prepare yourself for a visit like that. You talk to people who’ve been. But nothing can prepare you for that. I feared the worst, and it was much worse than I had anticipated. You know, I’ve been to southern Israel. I’ve bene to Nir Oz, one of the kibbutz that was attacked on October the 7th. A quarter of people there were taken hostage or killed. And then I drove across the border from southern Israel into northern Gaza through the Erez checkpoint. And it’s just wasteland for miles and miles and miles. You know, people are talking about the resumption of the conflict. There’s nothing left to bomb there. My staff who stayed all the way through this conflict had to use GPS to find where their homes were because there were no landmarks to navigate by. You see people pulling bodies from the rubble. You see animals going through the rubble looking for corpses. It’s a horror show. It’s a complete horror show. As you get into the south of Gaza, you see life coming back a bit more. But certainly the north of Gaza is utter, utter devastation. And yet, everyone I met said, ‘We are determined to stay. Give us a tent, give us some fuel, and we’ll rebuild our lives.’”
- President Trump of course has his plan, where he says he wants to remove the people of Gaza. The UN has been very clear that it does not agree with that. What’s your view on that? Can people stay in place while Gaza is rebuilt?
“Well, I mean, the conditions are absolutely devastating. And, you know, it’s hard to imagine how people are managing to survive there. But I think we should ask the Palestinians, as I did, and the people of Gaza are finding ways to survive. They’ve survived months and months of this devastating, devastating conflict, and now they’re surviving in the conditions they’re in. And what they’re saying to us is give us the tents. And they’re going back to the rubble of their houses and they’re clearing away the unexploded ordnance. They’re clearing out the corpses. And they’re putting the tents back on the ruins of their houses and trying to live there. So, President Trump is right that the conditions are horrific, horrific for human life. But amid that, amidst that despair, people are trying to rebuild their lives.”
From Professor John Mearsheimer:
“This is an ethnic cleansing exercise. And what the Israelis thought they could do is murder large numbers of Palestinians and drive them out of Gaza. And they thought they could starve them to death and use that as an instrument for driving them out of Gaza as well. If you look at the damage they have inflicted on Gaza, it goes well, well beyond the claim that they were interested in going after Hamas and that this is just collateral damage. They’ve destroyed virtually every university or college in Gaza. They’ve been tearing up cemeteries. They’ve been destroying libraries and mosques. They’ve been shooting up hospitals. There are hardly any functioning hospitals left in Gaza.
…
You’re going to have the continuation of an apartheid state. Israel is going to remain an apartheid state. And the question you have to ask yourself is: What are the oppressed people in that apartheid state going to do? And the fact is that they are going to continue to resist. The thing you need to remember is that the number of Palestinians inside Greater Israel is roughly the same number as the number of Israeli Jews. By my count, you have about 7.3 million Israeli Jews and 7.3 million Palestinians inside of Greater Israel. The question is, given those numbers, and given that you have an apartheid state, where does all this lead?”
- Well, it’s a demographical time bomb for Israelis…
“That’s right. And that’s why they’re trying to ethnically cleanse Gaza. That’s why they’re murdering all those people. The Israelis understand that they live in an apartheid state. Israelis understand what happened to South Africa. They understand that an apartheid state is not sustainable over the long term and that they have to fix the problem. And the only way they see to fix the problem is to drive the Palestinians out of Gaza and out of the West Bank—and if they can’t do that, then they’ll murder them all.”
From United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese:
“What’s happening in Gaza is the shame of the century…
This genocide would not have been possible without the shocking cover-up by the media…
The role of Western media in defending the acts of a genocidal state is unprecedented.”
