The death toll continues to rise in Gaza as Israel imposes collective punishment on the 2.4 million Palestinians trapped in the occupied enclave, which has been described as the world’s largest open-air prison. Palestinians in Gaza have lived under a complete Israeli military blockade since 2007, following the victory of the Hamas organisation in the Palestinian legislative elections. Since then, Israel decides how much food, fuel and water enter Gaza, and controls the movement of Palestinians in and out of Gaza entirely, in a system of control that Human Rights Watch and many other organisations have described as apartheid.
Since Hamas’s brutal surprise attack on southern Israel on 7 October, which killed more than 1,300 Israelis, mostly civilians and including many children, Israel has intensified its siege and unleashed a relentless bombardment of the narrow Gaza Strip. As we go to press, more than 3,800 Palestinians have been killed and more than 12,000 injured. These figures are certain to rise as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has promised a “long and difficult war”.
Much of the mainstream Western media on Wednesday focused on determining who was responsible for the horrific explosion that occurred at the Al-Ahli hospital in northern Gaza, which claimed the lives of around 500 people. However, they placed less emphasis on providing information about the bloodshed at the hospital. Because of the apparent magnitude of the blast, it was initially widely believed that Israel, which has a vast arsenal that includes numerous types of bombs, missiles and other munitions, was responsible for the attack. But US President Joe Biden, who was on his way to Israel at the time, and major Western news channels almost immediately embraced the explanation provided by the Israeli military, which claimed that the explosion was caused by a failed rocket launch by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad group.
The media forgot the thousands of Palestinians who have already perished in the more than ten days of Israeli bombardment and the still uncertain number of those lying, dead or alive, under the rubble.
Mustafa Barghouti, a Palestinian doctor and secretary-general of the Palestinian National Initiative political party, told Democracy Now! Palestinians, not only in Gaza but also in the West Bank, are being subjected to terrible war crimes and ethnic cleansing. Acts of collective punishment are being committed against the people of Gaza. Many civilians are dying because they have no water, no electricity, no food and no medicine. It is an ongoing genocide. Every five minutes, a Palestinian dies in Gaza. Every 15 minutes, a Palestinian child dies in Gaza. And it doesn’t stop.
Across the Arab world, as well as in the United States and Europe, protests are on the rise. Demonstrations have been registered in places as far apart as Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, Amman in Jordan, Baghdad in Iraq and the US Capitol in Washington, DC. At the latter, a Jewish-led protest, called by the organisations If Not Now and Jewish Voice for Peace, brought together thousands of people demanding a ceasefire in Gaza. Some 300 protesters were arrested in the rotunda of the Cannon House building.
Among the participants in the mobilisation in Washington D.C. was Amira Hass, a renowned Israeli Jewish journalist and correspondent for the newspaper Haaretz, who has lived for decades in the occupied Palestinian territories and is the daughter of Holocaust survivors. Speaking to Democracy Now!, Hass said she was there not as a journalist, but as a Jew, and stressed: “This onslaught on Gaza must stop immediately.
Another protest came from an unexpected quarter: from within the US State Department. Josh Paul served for eleven years as director of public and parliamentary affairs in the US State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs. This is the government office most directly involved in arms deliveries to foreign governments. On Wednesday, Paul drafted a two-page letter of resignation from his post, which he shared publicly on the internet and which deserves to be quoted in detail:
“We cannot be for and against the occupation. We cannot be for and against freedom. And we cannot be for a better world and at the same time contribute to one that is significantly worse. I believe in the depths of my soul that the answer Israel is giving and the US support for that answer and the ‘status quo’ of occupation will only lead to greater and deeper suffering for both the Israeli people and the Palestinian people, and will not be in the long-term interests of the United States. This government’s answer is extremely disappointing, but not at all surprising. Decades of this same approach have shown that the policy of ‘security for peace’ leads neither to security nor to peace. Everywhere in the world we can find beauty, which deserves to be protected and to have the right to flourish. That is what I want most for both Israelis and Palestinians. The murder of civilians is the enemy of that desire, whether committed by terrorists against people dancing at a party or by terrorists against people harvesting their olive groves. The abduction of children is the enemy of that desire, whether they are taken at gunpoint from their kibbutz or at gunpoint from their village. And collective punishment, whether it involves the demolition of one house or thousands of them, is the enemy of that desire, just as ethnic cleansing, occupation and apartheid are the enemy of that desire.
