In the last 12 months, Israel has dropped more than 70,000 tons of bombs on Gaza, the narrow coastal strip that is one of the most densely populated places on Earth. The unprecedented scale of destruction has turned Gaza into a lunar landscape, one in which the signs of human habitation have been systematically erased. The goal, it seems, is to make the entire enclave — home to more than two million people — uninhabitable.
Since Israel began its genocidal war on Gaza, 1,000 families have been erased from the civil registry. Close to 1,500 families have been eliminated except for a single member, and there are 10,000 extended families now reduced to just two people. More than 100,000 Palestinian civilians have been wounded, many sustaining injuries that will require lifelong care. Close to 42,000 Palestinians have been killed, the majority women and children, and no one knows how many bodies have yet to be excavated from the debris which the UN estimates will take 15 years to clear. Relief and medical workers who spoke to Al-Ahram Weekly in recent weeks estimate that the number of unrecovered bodies could double the known casualty figure.
Israel launched its war on Gaza in response to the 7 October operation by Hamas in which 1,200 Israelis were killed and 251 taken captive. The Israeli response has displaced close to two million people, often multiple times: they have repeatedly been forced into unprotected shelters which then come under Israeli attack. And all the while ceasefire talks have continued, a series of ultimately futile negotiations held as Israel was denying entry of desperately needed humanitarian aid, including medical supplies for a health sector brought to its knees as Israel continued to target hospitals and other health facilities.
Medical sources who spoke with the Weekly as the Israeli war was dragging into its sixth month reported that doctors were unable to conduct basic surgical operations that would save lives or spare patients from a lifetime of disability.
Speaking to the Weekly in February this year, Mads Gilbert, a doctor working in Gaza with the Norwegian Aid Committee (NORWAC), described the trauma of having to watch people being rushed into hospital where there was no space to put them but the floor and little that could be done to help them because medical supplies had been exhausted. Israel, he said, had made it impossible for medical teams to help the injured.
“Cancer patients in Gaza have no access to radiotherapy, unless they get out of Gaza. If they cannot, they cannot receive therapy, at a time when cancer drugs have been more and more difficult to access due to the Israeli blockade.”
By May this year, as Israeli tanks were invading Rafah, the southernmost point of Gaza which Israel had earlier announced was a safe space in which more than a million Palestinians had sought refuge, world leaders and heads of international organisations described Gaza as the worst place in the world for children to live.
This week, UNRWA Commissioner-General Phillippe Lazzarini characterised Israel’s 12-month war on Gaza as a “free fall descent into barbarism”. In recent months, Lazzarini has openly complained about Israel’s attempts to “destroy” the work UNRWA has undertaken for over seven decades to provide basic services, assistance, and protection to Palestinian refugees “pending a just and lasting solution”.
Throughout the year, Egyptian and Cairo-based foreign diplomats have expressed concerns over Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s real goals for a war that started as retribution for a militant attack that caught Benjamin Netanyahu and his extremist government off guard. Netanyahu, many of them argue, is using the war not just to eliminate Gaza-based Islamic militant resistance movements but to bury the Palestinian cause once and for all. This, they say, is why he is so determined to destroy UNRWA, an organisation that reminds the world of the unending plight of Palestinians.
Massive demonstrations in the world’s capital cities calling to end the genocide in Gaza, and Israeli demonstrations demanding a ceasefire to allow the remaining hostages to be freed, have done nothing to shift the position of Netanyahu and his right-wing allies.
“He never had any intention of allowing a ceasefire, and he still doesn’t,” said an informed Egyptian source close to ceasefire negotiations mediated by Cairo, Doha, and the US.
With the exception of a week-long truce in November, during which some hostages were released in exchange for Palestinians held in Israeli jails, Gazans have faced a relentless Israeli onslaught which the International Court of Justice has characterised as including acts of genocide.
On 28 September, addressing the press on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, European Union Foreign Policy Chief Josep Borrell said: “What we do is apply diplomatic pressure for a ceasefire but nobody seems to be able to stop Netanyahu in Gaza or in the West Bank.”
In August, Israel launched one of its deadliest attacks on the West Bank, the seat of the weakened Palestinian Authority, since the end of the Second Intifada. Attacks there have killed close to 1,000 Palestinians in the last year.
In an interview to be published by Ahram Online this week, Gilbert Achcar, Lebanese writer and professor of political science at SOAS, said that Netanyahu is waging a war of reoccupation in Gaza, and possibly in parts of the West Bank.
“We have to remember that when [former Israeli prime minister Ariel] Sharon carried out his withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, Netanyahu, then a member of the Israeli government, resigned in protest.”
Today, says Achcar, one way or another, Netanyahu is set to stay in Gaza which “at best” will become like the West Bank, divided into tiny Bantustan townships.
Emboldened by the failure of the international community to put a stop to his war on Gaza, and by the not-so-secret sympathy for the war felt in a number of capitals, Netanyahu expanded the assault on Hamas and Hizbullah to include assassinations of the groups’ leaders — Fuad Shukr, a leading Hizbullah figure in Beirut, and Ismail Haniyeh, the chief of the Hamas Political Bureau while he was in Tehran — culminating in the 27 September elimination of Hizbullah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah alongside many of Hizbullah’s most senior figures.
In the less than two weeks since Israel began its bombardment of South Lebanon and Al-Dahiya (south Beirut), the attacks — which Israel claims are in retribution for Hizbullah rockets fired at northern Israel since 8 October 2023 — have killed over 2,000 and displaced 1.5 million, including Syrian refugees who had escaped war in their own country, and Palestinian refugees who have been in Lebanon since the 1948 and 1967 wars.
In Gaza and in Beirut images of civilians — including women, children, and the elderly — with nowhere to go have been plastered across the media. And according to Egyptian sources, it has become impossible to exaggerate the fear of what may lie ahead given the direct confrontation — the strikes and counterstrikes — that has started to unfold between Iran and Israel.
As the Weekly went to press, the Middle East was braced for an Israeli strike against Iranian targets in retaliation for last week’s Iranian attack against Israel.
Netanyahu has shrugged off appeals for a ceasefire in Gaza, including from US President Joe Biden, and this week attacked French President Emmanuel Macron for calling for an end to the war. The symbolic limitations placed by Washington, London and most recently Paris on arms exports to Israel, have had no effect. And he is refusing to provide Washington with details of the Iranian targets Israel might attack.
The world is on edge, seemingly powerless to do anything to halt the expanding war that Netanyahu insists will disable Islamic resistance movements and allow for a new chapter in the Middle East — one dominated by Israeli military and intelligence supremacy and Arab-Israeli normalisation.
But Netanyahu’s assumptions, says Achcar, seem more wishful thinking than analysis based in fact. There are no solid grounds to conclude that the Middle East will change in the way Netanyahu wants, that resistance to Israeli occupation will be forever defeated, or that normalisation with Israel will continue irrespective of what happens to the Palestinians.
What Achcar hopes will emerge from the wreckage of Israel’s “genocidal war” is a new form of political resistance to the Israeli occupation, one that battles not as dictated by the enemy but on its own political terms.
And in shaping the future of the region, Arab nations’ perceptions about the role of resistance movements and their share in military and political decision-making will play at least as important a role as the progress of Israel’s wars or the direction of normalisation.
Over the past week, Arab officials have been openly saying that the time has come for resistance movements to move beneath the umbrella of their nation states. While this might be possible in the case of Lebanon, it remains unclear how it could happen with the Palestinian factions given the deep-seated grievances between Hamas in Gaza and the PA in Ramallah.
Nor does it look like Israel’s rampage will end any time soon. Just last month, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said letting two million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip die of hunger might be “justified and moral.”
* A version of this article appears in print in the 10 October, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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