As the clock ticks down to the end of 2024, a moment to try and contemplate the continuing catastrophe this past year in Gaza.
In plain sight, a crime so huge, so heinous, so horrific, yet so hidden, mitigated and normalised by our criminal political class and service media, it’s as though it has never happened.
How has this regime managed to get away with so much killing and destruction based on the most blatantly deceitful claims? Largely, because its Western backers and our craven media have blatantly indulged that deceit.
If, as Israel insists, the people of Gaza are being controlled and manipulated against their will by Hamas, if it’s ‘all the fault of Hamas’, why kill all Palestinians? Why blow up their homes, hospitals, schools, universities, mosques and churches? Why bomb tented refugee centres? Why murder infants in the streets?
Of course, it’s all a complete pretext. There is no selective targeting of Hamas. No ‘precision strikes’. This isn’t even a ‘war on Hamas’, or even a war at all. It’s a genocide against all Palestinians.
There has to be the nominal statement to the world: ‘we are targeting terrorists’. But behind that brazen fiction lies the real message: we want to, we can, and we will, kill every Palestinian we are able to. We will eliminate everyone and everything before us.
It’s a message the regime wants not just Palestinians to know, but it’s ‘international community’ of enablers, too. And with it comes the unstated subtext message: dare to stop us.
Lamentably, as it marauds across the region, few have, or will. It’s a game of bluff. No Western state has the real resolve to take on this depraved entity; certainly not the depraved US and UK, given the vast crimes these imperialist regimes have committed. And without any action to sanction and isolate their colonialist progeny, the horror show continues.
The instruction coming directly from the political and military top is now abundantly clear: kill everyone; destroy everything. Spare no one; all must be wiped out.
“The soldiers describe shooting dead anyone who moves inside undeclared so-called “kill zones”, even children, and then claiming them to be “terrorists”. The dead are left to be eaten by packs of dogs. The only words one Israeli reservist found to describe Israel’s repeated and intentional killing of children in Gaza was “pure evil”.”
What kind of ‘moral army’ would fire direct to the heads of children? It’s an act beyond our comprehension. Yet it’s a command handed down with calculating efficiency from army leaders: “these kids need to be killed from the day they are born”.
“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.”
At this year’s end, the regime and its enablers have abandoned the people of Gaza to another winter of suffering and death.
Imagine the political and media outcry if this was happening in Ukraine rather than Palestine.
In an act of supreme courage, dedication and defence of human rights, the hospital’s director, Hussam Abu Safia, still unaccounted for, was last seen walking in front of Israeli tanks, defying the regime’s wickedness.
“Dr Hussam Abu Saffiya strides in his white lab coat through the wreckage of the Kamal Adwan hospital he ran – the last functioning one in northern Gaza – towards two tanks, their gun-barrels aimed at him. It tells the story of the final stages of Israel’s genocide in Gaza better than any words. Is that why the corporate media has shown so little interest in publicising this image?”
One can only wonder at the bravery and resilience of such people, and the shameful silence of others in still failing to tell the full story of this unmitigated horror.
As we enter this next perilous year for Gaza and the wider people of Palestine, it’s imperative that every continuing effort, every show of solidarity, every creative action, be deployed to help end the genocide and bring about the removal of this evil entity.
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