Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza has changed in tempo, but its lethal intent has not

The sombre reality on the ground speaks for itself.

It is now plain as day that the much-touted ceasefire in Gaza is a misnomer. A sorry excuse for a truce that has created the dangerous illusion that life for the population in the devastated enclave has returned to normal.

An illusion it is, for Israeli forces "are still committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza by continuing to deliberately inflict conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction," Amnesty International asserted in a report released last month. 

This included, the report added, the calculated impediments placed on the delivery of humanitarian aid and the lethal bombing of civilian targets, both prohibited by the ceasefire agreement.

In short, Israel's genocidal war has not ended. It has simply changed in tempo. The gratuitous killing of civilians has not stopped, nor has the use of starvation as a weapon of war. 

The nightmarish horrors we have grown accustomed to watching daily over the last two years in this little, tormented strip of land show no sign of abatement. 

One would only raise serious doubts about the professional skills of one's optometrist to argue otherwise.

A mirage called peace

Just over two months since this ceasefire was signed on October 10, more than 400 Palestinians have been slaughtered, including dozens of children. An additional 100 or more children died of malnutrition and hypothermia. 

In one day alone, on October 19, Israel's military carried out several airstrikes across different parts of the enclave, killing 53 Palestinian men and 12 children. 

The airstrikes came in response to what the Israeli military claimed was an “attack” on soldiers by an armed man in Rafah.

We need to say that again. They killed twelve children! 

Pilots sat in air-conditioned cockpits of their jet fighter planes and dropped bombs on civilian targets that deliberately killed these children – and then returned home that day to hug their own children, eat dinner and perhaps then relax by listening to Moonlight Sonata, all the while indifferent to the human havoc they had wrought earlier that day.

Ricardo Pires, a UNICEF spokesperson, confirmed to reporters on November 24 that "yesterday morning, a baby girl was killed in Khan Younis by an airstrike, while the day before seven children were killed in Gaza City and the south." 

He added that "ongoing airstrikes and attacks attributed to Israeli forces in Gaza continue to kill and maim people of all ages in the shattered enclave, despite an agreed ceasefire," and that since October 11, the first day of that ceasefire, Palestinian children in Gaza have been killed at a "rate of two a day."

Several days after he spoke, two Gaza brothers, aged 11 and 8,  were killed by an Israeli drone on November 29 while they were out gathering firewood close to a school sheltering displaced people in the town of Beit Suheila. 

And so it goes. It will be recalled how immediately after news of the ceasefire broke, Palestinians in Gaza were seen dancing with joy. 

Now, they hoped, the suffocating siege that their enclave had been subjected to for what seemed like eternity, a blockade that one imagines must have felt as if a python had them in its grip, would be lifted, and what they had been deprived of for two long, agonising years – food, medicine, clean water, healthcare and perhaps winter clothing for their kids – would flood in.

More than two months on and they are still hoping, for what little is allowed by Israel to pass through border crossings does not – not by a stretch – meet the minimal needs of the population.

According to the UN, Israel has rejected well over 100 requests by humanitarian aid organisations to deliver aid. 

As far back as November 6, Deputy UN Spokesperson, Farhan Haq, told journalists in New York, "Our partners report that since the ceasefire, the Israeli authorities have rejected 107 requests for the entry of relief materials," adding that the requests came from more than 30 different local and international NGOs.

The restrictions remain in place as we speak.

One would have to agree with those who may want to call all this a new form of Genocide. A slow-motion genocide or perhaps genocide by attrition.

Yet we wonder. How to explain this calculated, pitiless infliction of cruelty by Israel – cruelty that appears to be, according to various polls, applauded by the majority of its population, while the rest simply stand mute — against Palestinians in Gaza, as indeed against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank as well? 

Banality of evil

What is there, in the pursuit of this cruelty, for Israel? These are occupied territories, now we know that the Zionist state has used these last six decades like a petri dish wherein it experimented with ways to pioneer new forms of torment, with ways to cultivate new methods of persecution, with ways to malevolently seek new agonies for its occupied victims.

One need only be a reasonably literate individual familiar with an accessible discipline like psychology to feel confident in telling you that the infliction of that cruelty is used as a means of domination, intended to strip the victims of their agency, their dignity, and their sense of selfhood as a people. 

This ideally will lead, in Israel's calculation, to a desired breakdown in these victims' community, as well as to an erasure of their social structures, which in turn will enable Israel, in this case, to exercise continuous, absolute control over their lives.

This kind of diabolical behaviour may be linked, as it is, to one form of psychopathy or another, but it also happens to be, in international law, a crime against humanity.

Meanwhile, as Israeli troops dig in inside the so-called Yellow line, the 53 percent of Gaza's territory which is now virtually all ethnically cleansed of Palestinian inhabitants and which includes most of Gaza's agricultural land and its only border crossing with Egypt, their intent, it appears, is to dig in for permanent tenure. 

In a recent speech to troops, Israel's Army Chief of Staff, Eyal Zamir, was quoted as saying, according to an English transcript of his remarks released by a military spokesperson, that the Yellow Line henceforth "will be Israel's new border" and its "forward defence line" that Israel will not withdraw from, comments that clearly contradict President Trump's 20-point peace plan, which specifies that "Israel will not occupy or annex Gaza".

Anyone who believes that the Zionist state will give two-pence – or has ever given two-pence since it grafted itself on Palestine not quite eight decades ago – about peace plans and how many points are in them is gifted with self-deception or doesn't understand the Zionist mind.

Folks, we're in it for the long haul.

Still, before we slide into complacency, despair or apathy, behold this image from Gaza. 

In the midst of their exposure to the murderousness and caprice of Israel's brutalities as well as to nature's fury in the form of a deadly storms that brought torrential rain, high winds and flash flooding, killing dozens of people and reportedly sweeping away tents sheltering displaced families, students were seen attending classes in makeshift schools inside half-demolished buildings or inside tents that were left standing.

The ecology of the image spoke volumes both about the unvanquished spirit of the Palestinian people of Gaza and about the cross that the cumulative weight of history has placed on their collective back. 

Being Palestinian today is every Palestinian's pride and burden.