Gaza, Saudi, Iran, Venezuela and More

Ramzy Baroud

January 4, 2024

It would have been outlandish to suggest that a small region like Gaza, seemingly bereft of significant natural resources, political will of its own, and let alone sovereignty, would become the world’s most significant geopolitical spot on earth.

 

The ongoing Israeli war on Gaza and the legendary resistance of the Palestinian people, however, have changed our calculation – or perhaps miscalculation – regarding what a besieged nation can achieve, in terms of collective resistance, in fact changing the rules of the game altogether.

However, it is still early to fully fathom the surely significant possible outcomes of the current upheaval resulting from the Gaza war and Resistance.

While Israel and the United States are desperate to return to the status quo model, which existed in the Middle East prior to October 7, the newly emerging Palestinian leadership is keen on introducing a new era of international relations, namely new geopolitical players, who could, in turn, rope in new allies, with their own political ambitions and economic interests.

That said, 2023 was also rife with other major geopolitical shifts that will impact our world in the coming year; in fact, for many years to come.

These are some of the most significant geopolitical events, with the potential of having a long-lasting impact on international relations.

Saudi-Iran Deal

One, is the Saudi-Iran deal. The Riyadh-Tehran political reconciliation on April 6, took the region and the world by surprise, as the two Muslim neighbors have had major differences that resulted in a breakdown of relations seven years ago.

The rift between two significant Middle Eastern, Muslim and oil-producing countries has impacted the geopolitical stability of the Middle East, invited greater foreign meddling and has, directly or indirectly contributed to existing conflicts.

The identity of the mediator of the peace treaty, China, was equally significant, as this opportunity allowed, for the first time in the modern history of the region, Beijing to play the role of the peacemaker, in an area long-dominated by US-Western influence.

The Saudi-Iran deal has proved durable, despite the ongoing conflicts and struggles that continue to define the region.

Expansion of BRICS

Two, is the expansion of BRICS.

The BRICS countries – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – have taken their economic alliance to new heights in 2023.

The group has agreed, on August 24, to allow for a significant expansion to its membership, and will, as of January 1, 2024, include Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

Additionally, the BRICS New Development Bank is itself expanding, both in terms of membership and its overall financial capital.

According to data from the UK-based research firm, Acorn Macro Consulting, BRICS members have surpassed the Group of Seven (G7) in terms of gross domestic product (GDP)  calculated on purchasing power parity (PPP).

Why is this significant?

The importance of BRICS has become more apparent following the Russia-Ukraine war in February 2022, as it allowed Russia significant margins to operate economically beyond the confines of Western-led sanctions.

With China, too, facing a US-led trade war, BRICS has created new platforms for new major markets, concentrated mostly in the Global South.

With the growing polarization between the West and the East, and the Global North and the Global South, it was only natural that BRICS began to take on a greater political role with a more defined political discourse. This shall become even more apparent in the coming year.

The geopolitical importance of BRICS lies mostly in its ability to create a powerful new model for alternative economic, financial and, eventually, political platforms that will directly challenge Western hegemony around the world.

Rise and Fall

Three, is the rise and fall of international political actors.

Shortly before the start of the Russia-Ukraine war, Germany has served as the economic engine of Europe.

Despite the setbacks and challenges that faced various Western European economies, Europe seemed on its way to a complete recovery from the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. True, some analysts warned of over-optimism and structural fault lines, but Europe persisted in its recovery efforts.

Then, the Ukraine war started, exposing Europe’s vulnerable economic spots – mainly its energy dependency – along with its geopolitical limitations, namely the balancing act between its political and military reliance on the US, energy reliance on Russia and economic reliance on China.

Europe’s dream of recovery has turned into a seemingly never-ending nightmare. According to a study conducted by the Swiss National Bank and published last September, “the war in Ukraine has reduced European economic growth and ‘considerably’ pushed up inflation across the continent,” Reuters reported.

While Europe continues to struggle with this unenviable position, other countries that have, for many years, been marginalized due to their outright political conflicts with Western countries, are finding themselves in a much stronger position.

The changing global and military dynamics have, indeed, allowed countries like Mali, Niger, Chad, Burkina Faso and others – mostly in West Africa and its Sahel region – to confront their former colonizers, in this case France, and to redefine the concept of post-colonial sovereignty.

Venezuela, on the other hand, which was heavily sanctioned by Washington, is finally able to sell its oil on the international market, thus pivoting away from a grinding economic crisis, unprecedented in decades. This only became possible because of the global energy crisis resulting from the war in Ukraine.

All of these geopolitical shifts are likely to stay with us in 2024, leading to yet other significant changes to the world’s political map and, unfortunately, yet more conflicts, as well. Time will tell.

 

After US Rebuke, Top Israeli Ministers Double Down on Ethnic Cleansing Push

Jake Johnson

Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel's national security minister, declared in response to the U.S. State Department that Israel is "not another star on the American flag."

Two leading Israeli government ministers have brushed aside criticism from the U.S. State Department and doubled down on their push for the ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip, publicly demanding what they have cynically described as the "voluntary migration" of Palestinians out of the besieged enclave and the return of Jewish settlements that were removed nearly two decades ago.

Bezalel Smotrich, Israel's finance minister, claimed Wednesday that the mass expulsion of Gazans would be a "humanitarian solution" and declared that "a small country like ours cannot afford a reality where, four minutes away from our settlements, there is a hotbed of hatred and terror, where there are two million people who wake up every morning with the desire to destroy the state of Israel."

Smotrich's comments came a day after U.S. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller issued a statement rebuking the finance minister and Israel's national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, for "advocating for the resettlement of Palestinians outside of Gaza."

Miller called the high-ranking officials' comments "irresponsible" and claimed they don't align with what the Biden administration has "been told repeatedly and consistently by the government of Israel, including by the prime minister."

Ben-Gvir quickly hit back, writing in a social media post on Tuesday that Israel is "not another star on the American flag."

"The United States is our best friend, but first of all we will do what is best for the state of Israel: The migration of hundreds of thousands from Gaza will allow the residents of the enclave to return home and live in security and protect the IDF soldiers," the Israeli minister wrote.

Asked during a Wednesday press briefing about Ben-Gvir's response, Miller said that "Israel is a sovereign country that does make its own decisions."

"I'm not surprised that he continues to double down and make those statements," Miller added, "but they are not only in contradiction with United States policy and what we think is in the best interests of the Israeli people, the Palestinian people, the broader region, and ultimately stability in the world, but they are in direct contradiction of his own government's policy."

Miller's insistence that Smotrich and Ben-Gvir's position is not aligned with official Israeli policy toward Gaza is belied by repeated public and private comments from Israeli lawmakers, key government ministries, and top officials—including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has reportedly sought out countries willing to "absorb" displaced Gazans.

On Wednesday, The Times of Israelreported that "Israeli officials have held clandestine talks with the African nation of Congo and several others for the potential acceptance of Gaza emigrants."

Expert observers have argued that Israel's U.S.-backed military, which has relentlessly bombed Gaza for nearly three months straight, is clearly acting as if its objective is to permanently expel Palestinians from the enclave, where 90% of the population has been internally displaced. If allowed to return, many Gazans won't have a home to go back to, as 70% of the territory's housing units have been damaged or destroyed by Israeli airstrikes.

"As evacuation orders and military operations continue to expand and civilians are subjected to relentless attacks on a daily basis, the only logical conclusion is that Israel's military operation in Gaza aims to deport the majority of the civilian population en masse," United Nations' special rapporteur on the human rights of internally displaced persons said last month.

Forcible transfer is a war crime under international humanitarian law.

South Africa is currently leading a case at the International Court of Justice accusing the Israeli government of genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza.

In an editorial on Wednesday, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz called South Africa's charges "a wake-up call for Israel" and accused government officials—including Smotrich and Ben-Gvir—of inciting war crimes.

"Israelis do not hear themselves," the editorial reads. "Since the war began, lawmakers and cabinet members have repeatedly made statements that could be seen as indicating an intention to carry out crimes against humanity."

The editorial points to a Knesset meeting on Wednesday during which one lawmaker suggested that Israel should "raze all the buildings" in northern Gaza and "build neighborhoods" for Israeli settlers.

Haaretz's editorial board argued that "the most effective way" for Israel to push back on South Africa's genocide case is to "remove from the government those who incite war crimes."

"This is the only way to persuade the world that the deranged ideas they are spreading do not reflect reality," the editorial states.

 

How Long can Israel Defy the World?

Yakov M. Rabkin

Palestinians in Gaza are being decimated. Over 20 000 have been killed, mostly women and children. Three times more have been wounded. Some experts qualify it as genocide, others as massacre. Two million people have been displaced, many more than during the entire history of displacement of the Palestinians since the start of the Zionist settlement at the turn of the 20th century. As Israel takes out hospitals and civilian infrastructure, infectious diseases and famine threaten to kill many more people. Several Israeli soldiers have been reported infected during the ground operations, one has died. General Giora Eiland suggests relying on the weapon of imminent epidemics in lieu of endangering the lives of Israeli soldiers in real warfare. Gaza is violently demodernized, bombed into stone age: hospitals, schools, power stations are bombed to rubble. What is happening appears unprecedented.

The number of victims is, indeed, unprecedented. Yet the unfolding tragedy follows the old script of the Zionist project, which is European in more than one sense. It is rooted in ethnic nationalisms of Eastern and Central Europe. Nations must live in their “natural” environment where those not of the titular nationality would be at best tolerated. According to an Iraqi journalist writing in 1945, the Zionists’ goal was “to expel the British and the Arabs from Palestine so that it will be a pure Zionist state. … Terrorism [was] the only means that can bring the Zionist aspirations to fruition.” Significantly, the journalist did not consider the future state Jewish but Zionist. He must have known that Jews from countries other than those of Europe and European colonization constituted a miniscule part of the Zionist movement.

Zionism is also European because it is a settler colonial project, the most recent of all. The Palestine Jewish Colonization Association was among several agencies devoted to turning the multi-ethnic and multi-confessional Palestine into “the Jewish homeland”. The Jewish Colonial Trust, the predecessor of Bank Leumi, today Israel’s largest bank, financed the segregated economic development of the Zionist settlement in Palestine. In the usual colonial manner, the early Zionist settlers were eager to establish a separate colony rather than integrate in the existing Palestinian society.

Zionism is not only the most recent case of settler colonialism. Israel is unique in that, unlike Algeria or Kenya, it is not populated by migrants from the colonial metropolis. But this distinction matters little to the indigenous Palestinians who, just like in many other such situations, are being displaced, dispossessed, and massacred by the settlers. Displacement is enacted not only in Gaza, where it is massive and indiscriminate, but also in the West Bank where it is more focused.

To attain its objectives Zionism has had to rely on major powers, the British Empire, the Soviet Union, France and, nowadays, the United States. The Zionists, committed to the success of their project, have been pragmatic and ideologically promiscuous. They would enjoy the support of the Socialist International during most of of the 20th century and then switch to become the darlings of White supremacists and the extreme-right.

Zionism is a nationalist response to anti-Jewish discrimination and violence in Europe. It deems antisemitism endemic and ineradicable, explicitly rejecting long-term viability of Jewish life anywhere except in “the Jewish state” in Palestine. The Nazi genocide in Europe reinforced this conviction and offered legitimacy to the fledgling colonial project while such projects were crumbling elsewhere in the world. The Zionist project, ignoring the opposition of the Palestinians and other Arabs, simply exported Europe’s “Jewish question” to Palestine.

Palestinians gradually understood that the Zionist project would deprive them of their land and resisted it. This is why the early Zionist settlers, most of them from the Russian Empire, formed militias to fight local population. They perfected their terrorist experience gained during the Russian revolution of 1905 with colonial counterinsurgency measures learned from the vast experience of the British. Established against the will of the entire Arab world, including the local Palestinians, the state of Israel has had to live by the sword. The army and the police have worked hard to keep the Palestinians down (the British used to call it “pacification of the natives”). Their task has been to conquer as much land as possible with as few Palestinians remaining on it as possible.

Many Palestinians now in Gaza had been expelled from the very area in what is now Israel that experienced the Hamas attack in October. They are mostly refugees or descendants of refugees. The high density of the population in an enclosed area (some called it “the largest open-air prison) makes them particularly vulnerable. When Israel did not like the election of Hamas in 2006, it laid siege to Gaza, limiting access to food, medicines, work etc. Israeli officials were openly admitting they were putting the Gazans “on a diet” while having to “mow the lawn” from time to time, subjecting the Gazans to violent “pacification”.

The 16 years of siege intensified anger, frustration and despair leading to the Hamas attack. In response, Israeli used drones, missiles, and aircraft to continue what used to be done with rifles and machine-guns. The death rate has increased, but the goal of terrorizing Palestinians into submission has remained the same. The name of the current onslaught on Gaza is “Iron Swords”, aptly reflects the Zionists’ century-old choice to live by the sword rather than coexist with the Palestinians on equal terms. Ein berera, “we have no choice”, the common Israeli excuse for unleashing violence, is therefore misleading.

Impunity and impotence

Israel has enjoyed a large degree of impunity, with dozens of UN resolutions simply ignored. Only once, in the wake of the 1956 Suez War, was Israel forced to give up territorial conquest. This happened under a threat coming from both the United States and the Soviet Union. Since then, Israel has relied on firm U.S. diplomatic and military support, which has become more brazen with the advent of America’s unipolar moment after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. This support is now embodied in the supply of American munitions for the war on Gaza, in the presence of U.S. Navy vessels protecting Israel from third parties and in the U.S. vetoes at the Security Council. Israel and the United States are joined at the hip. Europe, while being more critical of Israel rhetorically, closely follows the U.S. line just as it does in the Ukraine conflict. In both conflicts, European chanceries appear to have abdicated independence and, possibly, ability of action.

Israel’s impunity also reflects impotence of the rest of the world. While Muslim and Arab governments decry and protest Israel’s assault on Gaza, none has imposed or even proposed economic, let alone military, sanctions. Fewer than a dozen of countries has suspended diplomatic relations or withdrawn diplomatic personnel from Israel. None has broken relations. Russia and China, along with most of the Global South, express their dismay at civilian casualties in Gaza but they too stop short of going beyond words.

The double standard of the Western reactions is obvious. Drastic economic sanctions imposed on Russia contrast with the generous supply of arms and at best verbal pleas for moderation in response to the Israeli actions in Gaza. In just a few months, the IDF surpassed Russia’s almost two-year record in the Ukraine with respect to the volume of explosives dropped, the number of people killed and wounded, and the civilian/military ratio among the casualties. Western sermons about inclusion and democracy are unlikely to carry much weight in the rest of the world. Palestinian lives do not really matter to Western governments.

This lackadaisical reaction to the massacres in Gaza contrasts with the indignation they provoke in the population in much of the world. Massive demonstrations call on governments to stop the violence. In response, most Western governments have strengthened measures to restrict freedom of speech. Opposition to Zionism has been declared antisemitic, the most recent such measure is the equivalence between anti-Zionism and antisemitism decided by the U.S. Congress in December 2023. Accusations of antisemitism are leveled at students, often Jewish, who organize pro-Palestinian demonstrations. Televised debates as to what constitutes “genocidal antisemitism” on elite university campuses divert attention from what looks like a real genocide in Gaza. Antisemitism serves as Israel’s Wunderwaffe, its ultimate weapon of mass distraction.

Pro-Palestinian demonstrations have been banned in several European capitals where commercial or cultural boycott of Israel has been made illegal. This pressure from the ruling class, including courts, police, corporate media, employers, and university administrations, creates a powerful sense of frustration among the rank-and-file. Shortly after attacking Gaza in 2009, and over sharp criticism of its treatment of the Palestinians, Israel was unanimously accepted into the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), made up of some 30 countries that boast democratic structures of governance. Former Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper, while still in office, placed solidarity with Israel above Canada’s interests to the point of claiming that his government would support Israel “whatever the cost.”

Support for Israel, tending to increase with income, has become a class issue. It serves as another reminder of the growing estrangement between the rulers and the ruled, the proverbial One Per Cent and the rest. It remains to be seen if popular frustration with the hypocrisy of governments in their support for the war on Gaza may one day result in political change that would begin to dent Israel’s impunity.

Israel is a state without borders. Geographically, it has expanded with military conquest or colonization. The Zionist movement and successive Israeli governments have taken great pains never to define the borders they envisage for their state. Israeli secret services and the army pay no heed to borders, striking targets in its neighboring countries at will. This borderless character is also embodied in Israel’s claim that it belongs to the world’s Jews rather than to its citizens. This leads to the overt transformation of Jewish organizations around the world into Israeli agents. This is particularly the case in the United States. Israeli agents, such AIPAC, ensure Israel’s interests in elections on all levels, from school boards to the White House. Israel has even played the legislative against the executive branch in Washington. Yet this unabashed political interference attracts a lot less criticism in mainstream media that the alleged meddling of China or Russia. Israel also intervenes in the political process of other countries.

Conflict between Jewish and Zionist values.

Zionism has provoked controversy among Jews from its very inception. The first Zionist congress in 1897 had to be moved from Germany to Switzerland because German Jewish organizations objected to holding a Zionist event in their country. The Zionist argument that the homeland of the Jews is not the country, where they have lived for centuries and for which many have spilled their blood in wars, but in a land in Western Asia. For many Jews, this message bears disconcerting resemblance to that of the antisemites who resent their social integration.

Initially irreligious, Zionism transforms spiritual terms into political ones. Thus, ‘am Israel, “the people of Israel”, defined by their relationship to the Torah, becomes ethnicity or nationality in the Zionist vocabulary. This prompted the prominent European rabbi Jechiel Weinberg (1884-1966) to emphasize that “Jewish nationality is different from that of all nations in the sense that it is uniquely spiritual, and that its spirituality is nothing but the Torah. […] In this respect we are different from all other nations, and whoever does not recognize it, denies the fundamental principle of Judaism.”

Another reason for Jewish opposition to Zionism has been moral and religious. While prayers for the return to the Holy Land is part of the daily Judaic ritual, it is not a political, let alone a military objective. Moreover, the Talmud spells out specific prohibitions of a mass move to Palestine before Messianic times, even “with the accord of the nations”. This is why the Zionist project with its addiction to armed violence continues to repel many Jews causing them embarrassment and even revulsion.

True, the Pentateuch and several of the books of the Prophets, such as Joshua and Judges, teem with violent images. But far from glorifying war, Jewish tradition identifies allegiance to God, and not military prowess, as the principal reason for the victories mentioned in the Bible. Jewish tradition abhors violence and reinterprets war episodes, plentiful in the Hebrew Bible, in a pacifist mode. Tradition clearly privileges compromise and accommodation. Albert Einstein was among the Jewish humanists who denounced Beitar, the paramilitary Zionist youth movement, today affiliated with the ruling Likud. He deemed it to be“ as much of a danger to our youth as Hitlerism is to German youth”.

Zionism vigorously rejects this “exilic” tradition, which it deems “consolation of the weak”. Generations of Israelis have been brought up on the values of martial courage, proud of serving in the military. Zionists regularly refer to their state as a continuation of biblical history. The idea of the Greater Israel is rooted in the literal reading of the Pentateuch. Zionism demands total commitment and brooks little opposition or criticism. The passion of the Zionist commitment has led to assassination of opponents, pitched fathers against sons, splitting Jewish families and communities. The historian Eli Barnavi, former Israeli ambassador in Paris, warns that “the dream of a ‘Third Kingdom of Israel’ could only lead to totalitarianism”. Indeed, many Jewish community leaders, undisturbed by the specter of “dual loyalty”, insist that allegiance to the state of Israel must prevail over all others, including allegiance toward their own country.

The Zionists, whether in Israel or elsewhere, have long claimed to be “the vanguard of the Jewish people” with Zionism replacing Judaism for quite a few Jews. Their identity, initially religious, has become political: they are supporters and patriots of Israel, “my country right or wrong” rather than adherents of Judaism.

Generationally, Israel appears an exception among the wealthy countries. With every generation Israelis become more combative and anti-Arab. While in other countries young Jews are usually less conservative than their parents and embrace ideas of social and political justice, young Israeli Jews defy this trend. Israeli education inculcates martial values and the belief that, had the state of Israel existed before World War II, the Nazi genocide would never have taken place. What sustains the fragile unity of the non-Arab majority is fear: a siege mentality that most frequently takes the self-image of a virtuous victim determined to prevent a repetition of the Nazi genocide. The memory of that European tragedy has become a tool of mobilizing Jews to the Zionist cause. Its political utility is still far from exhausted.

Use of the genocide to foster Israeli patriotism has been unflagging since the early 1960s. After an air show in Poland in 2008, three Israeli F-15 fighter jets bearing the Star of David and piloted by descendants of genocide survivors overflew the former Nazi extermination camp while two hundred Israeli soldiers observed the flyover from the Birkenau death camp adjacent to Auschwitz. The remarks of one of the Israeli pilots stressed confidence in the armed forces: “This is triumph for us. Sixty years ago, we had nothing. No country, no army, nothing.”

State schools promote the model of a fighter against “the Arabs” (the word “Palestinian” is usually avoided), glorifies military service turning it into an aspiration and a rite of passage to adulthood. No wonder that Hamas and, by extension, all the Gazans, are often referred to as Nazis. Dozens of Israeli officials and public figures have openly incited genocide of Palestinians: dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza, flattening it into a parking lot, etc. Israeli political scientists have pointed out that civic religion provides no answers to questions of ultimate meaning, while at the same time it obliges its practitioners to accept the ultimate sacrifice. Civic space in Israel has become associated above all with “death for the fatherland.”

Elsewhere in the world, the Hamas attack has galvanized the Zionist commitment under the slogan “We stand with Israel!”. Massive and organized efforts are made to fight the information war. Israeli officials rely on a network of powerful supporters, including executives of high-tech companies, who make sure that the internet amplifies pro-Israel voices and muffles or cancels pro-Palestinian discourse. Censorship leads to self-censorship because pro-Palestinian involvement impedes job prospects and threatens careers.

However, unlike Israelis, diaspora Jews become less and less committed to Jewish nationalism with every generation. Growing numbers of young Jews refuse to be associated with Israel and choose to support the Palestinians. The systematic AI assisted massacre of Palestinians in Gaza has swollen their ranks, particularly in North America. Most spectacular protests against Israel’s ferocity have been organized by Jewish organizations, such as Not in My Name and Jewish Voice for Peace in the United States, Independent Jewish Voices in Canada, and Union juive française pour la paix in France. Prominent Jewish intellectuals denounce Israel and are found among the most consistent opponents of Zionism.

Albeit incongruently, these Jews are accused of antisemitism. Even more incongruently, the same accusation is hurled at ultra-Orthodox anti-Zionists. While Israel’s claim to be the state of all Jews exposes them to disgrace and danger, many Jews who support the Palestinians rehabilitate Judaism in the eyes of the world.

The Samson Option

Since its beginning, critics of Zionism have insisted that the Zionist state would become a death trap for both the colonizers and the colonized. In the wake of the ongoing tragedy triggered by the Hamas attack, these words of an ultra-Orthodox activist spoken decades ago sound prescient:

    “Only blind dogmatism could present Israel as something positive for the Jewish people. Established as a so-called refuge, it has, unfailingly been the most dangerous place on the face of the earth for a Jew. It has been the cause of tens of thousands of Jewish deaths … it has left in its wake a trail of mourning widows, orphans and friends…. And let us not forget that to this account of the physical suffering of the Jews, must be added those of the Palestinian people, a nation condemned to indigence, persecution, to life without shelter, to overwhelming despair, and all too often to premature death.”

The fate of the colonized is, of course, incomparably more tragic than that of the colonizer. Palestinian citizens of Israel face systemic discrimination while their kin in the West Bank are subject to repression from both the Israeli military and their subcontractors in the Palestinian Authority. Arbitrary detention without trial, dispossession, checkpoints, segregated roads, house searches without warrant and more and more frequent death at the hands of soldiers and settler vigilantes have become routine on the West Bank. Palestinians in Gaza, even prior to the operation Iron Swords, lived isolated on a small territory, with their access to food and medicine strictly rationed by Israel. Even peaceful protest would be met by lethal fire from Israeli soldiers sitting on the other side of the barrier. There was little work and no prospects for the future. The pressure cooker was ready to explode as it did on October 7.

Since then, thousands of Gazans have been killed and wounded by one of the most sophisticated war machines in the world. This provokes more anger and hatred among the Palestinians both in Gaza and the West Bank. Israelis find themselves in a vicious circle: chronic insecurity inevitable in a settler colony reinforces the Zionist postulate that a Jew must rely on force to survive, which in turn provokes hostility and creates insecurity.

Over two decades ago David Grossman, one of the best-known Israeli authors, addressed the then prime minister Ariel Sharon known for his bellicosity:

    “We start to wonder whether, for the sake of your goals, you have made a strategic decision to move the battlefield not into enemy territory, as is normally done, but into a completely different dimension of reality — into the realm of utter absurdity, into the realm of utter self-obliteration, in which we will get nothing, and neither will they. A big fat zero….”

Critical voices within and particularly outside Israel call on the Israelis to recognize that “the Zionist experiment was a tragic error. The sooner it is put to rest, the better it will be for all mankind.” In practice this would mean ensuring equality for all the inhabitants between the Jordan and the Mediterranean and a transformation of the existing ethnocracy into a state of all its citizens. However, Israeli society is conditioned to see in such calls an existential threat and a rejection of “Israel’s right to exist”.

The settler colonial logic radicalizes society in the direction of ethnic cleansing and even genocide. No Israeli government would be capable of evacuating hundreds of thousands of settlers to free space for a separate Palestinian state; the chances of giving up Zionist supremacy in the entire land are even lower. Only strong-armed international pressure may make Israel consider such a reform.

More probably, however, Israel will resist such pressure and threat to resort to the Samson Option, i.e., a nuclear attack on the countries endangering “Israel’s right to exist”. In this worst-case scenario, Israel would be annihilated, but those who put pressure on it would also suffer enormous casualties. Obviously, no country in the world will run the risk of a nuclear attack to free the Palestinians.

Pressure is more likely to come from the public but largely misdirected at local Jewish communities, almost all of them associated in the public mind with Israel. While these Jews, even the most Zionist, have never influenced Israel’s policies towards the Arabs, they have become easy scapegoats for Israel’s misdeeds.

American politicians seem to agree. President Trump referred to Israel as “your state” when addressing a Jewish audience in the United States. President Biden said that “without Israel, no Jew anywhere is safe.” Israeli leaders appreciate such conflations between Judaism and Zionism, between Jews and Israelis. These conflations boost Zionism, feed antisemitism and push Jews to migrate to Israel. This is a welcome prospect for the country, which these new Israelis will strengthen with their intellectual, entrepreneurial, and financial resources as well as supply more soldiers for the IDF.

Despite the opprobrium and public denunciations, Israel appears immune to pressure from the rest of the world. Israeli disdain for international law, the United Nations and, a fortiori, to moral arguments is proverbial. “What matters is what the Jews do, not what the gentiles say”, was Ben-Gurion’s favorite quip. His successors, a lot more radical than Israel’s founding father, will make sure that the tragedy of Gaza does not lead to any compromise with the Palestinians. The Israeli mainstream mocks or simply ignores well-intentioned pleas of liberal Zionists, an endangered species, to “save Israel from itself”. However counterintuitive today, only changes within Israeli society may shake the usual hubris. In the meantime, Israel will continue to defy the world.

 

Netanyahu suffers defeat on curbing judiciary, but Supreme Court and opposition parties back Gaza genocide and planned war on Iran

Chris Marsden

Israel’s Supreme Court has narrowly overturned the “reasonableness” amendment passed last July 14 by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government.

This was nominally a political victory for last summer’s mass protest movement against Netanyahu’s efforts to remove minimal checks on his government by ending the Supreme Court’s power to strike down decisions of elected officials by citing their “unreasonableness”—though the retirement of two “liberal” members of the court, Esther Hayut and Anat Baron, means the conservatives are set to have a 7-6 majority.

The amendment, one of a package of planned curbs of the judiciary, met unprecedented opposition because it would enable Netanyahu and his fascist and ultra-religious coalition partners, Jewish Power and Religious Zionism, to assume virtually dictatorial powers to mount an assault on social and democratic rights in Israel and press ahead with plans to annex large swathes of the West Bank through the expansion of illegal settlements, while denying the Palestinians citizenship rights.

The amendment, if successful, would also have paved the way for legislation enabling Netanyahu to evade conviction on charges of corruption. One of the issues that brought Likud into conflict with the Supreme Court was its January 2023 ruling that it was “unreasonable in the extreme” for Aryeh Deri, chair of the Shas party, to be appointed as a cabinet minister due to his past criminal convictions.

Israel has no constitution and its pretensions to be “a Jewish and democratic state” rest on just 12 Basic Laws passed since 1958, portrayed as the basis for a “future constitution” of the State of Israel.

The majority of one in the 8-7 ruling against the Netanyahu-backed law pitted previous Basic Laws against Netanyahu’s amendment, also a Basic Law passed as an amendment, which was judged to be incompatible with its predecessors.

Moreover, in a separate vote of far greater significance, 12 of 15 Supreme Court judges ruled for the first time that the court had the authority to exercise judicial review of Israel’s Basic Laws, in exceptional and extreme cases where the Knesset had exceeded its legislative powers and authority, and to prevent “unprecedented and severe harm to the democratic values of the state.”

During the mass protests, preserving the authority of the Supreme Court was proclaimed by their Zionist leaders as the central aim of an oppositional wave that included more than 10,000 army reservists refusing to serve in the Isarel Defense Forces. But there was never any real concern for democratic rights represented by the Supreme Court and its political advocates, who prevented the development of a genuine oppositional movement through their insistence on loyalty to the Zionist state.

As the World Socialist Web Site explained, the sole concern of Netanyahu’s opponents—former ministers, generals and security and intelligence chiefs—was that he was destabilising Israel and risked discrediting it politically, “under conditions where Israel is a social and political powder keg and the entire Middle East has been destabilised by the deepening global economic crisis, the pandemic, climate change and US-led plans to escalate the war against Russia in Ukraine and its regional allies, Iran and Syria, with Tel Aviv as its chief attack dog.”

The democratic bona-fides of the Supreme Court never withstood scrutiny. As was noted by Amnesty, “Israel’s judiciary has regularly upheld laws, policies and practices which help to maintain and enforce Israel’s system of apartheid against Palestinians—the Supreme Court has signed off on many of the violations that underpin the apartheid system.”

This has included signing off on the demolition of thousands of Palestinian homes and even entire villages, and upholding administrative detention orders imprisoning Palestinians without trial or charge. Above all, the Supreme Court upheld the 2018 “nation state law”, defining Israel as the exclusive “nation state of the Jewish people” and endorsing settlement expansion as a “national value.”

In addition, in a January 1 op-ed complaining, “If only the ‘reasonableness law,’ nixed by Israel’s top court, had never been initiated”, Times of Israel editor David Horovitz writes of how “The fiercely independent and world-renowned top court, it should be noted, has been vital to Israel’s capacity to push away efforts by international courts and tribunals over the years to prosecute the IDF [Israel Defense Forces], its commanders, soldiers and political overseers for war crimes and other alleged offenses.” He fears that without a credible judiciary that is ostensibly capable of examining human rights abuses and war crimes, Israel will be open to investigation and prosecution by the international courts.

If further proof of the reactionary character of Israel’s Supreme Court were needed, then its response to Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza provides it.

Time and again it has cited the “compelling reason” of the October 7 incursion by the Palestinians and Israel’s one-sided war as providing “compelling” national security considerations justifying the abrogation of democratic rights that have included not providing information on Palestinian detainees to civil rights groups, and allowing the government to ban pro-Palestinian speech and the police to ban demonstrations calling for a ceasefire.

At the same time, Israel’s senior law enforcement officials and the courts have taken no action against the plethora of genocidal statements loudly proclaimed by senior Israeli officials.

Israel’s genocide in Gaza refutes forever all claims that democratic rights can be defended in Israel other than through a movement centred on opposition to the systematic and bloody dispossession and repression of the Palestinians, and rejecting any support for the Zionist state and all its political representatives.

Almost every commentary on the Supreme Court verdict, when speculating on its impact on Netanyahu’s future, acknowledges that it is likely that the preservation of wartime “unity” will for now keep him in power.

More grotesque even than the Supreme Court’s role is the rush by Netanyahu’s putative opponents to back the mass murder and ethnic cleansing in Gaza and advanced plans for a wider military conflict led by the US and targeting Iran and its allies in Lebanon, Syria and Yemen.

National Unity Party leader Benny Gantz joined Netanyahu’s war cabinet on October 12, less than a week after hostilities began. The former defence minister, in calling for the Supreme Court ruling to be respected, declared on X, “We are brothers, we all have a common destiny. These are not days for political arguments, there are no winners and losers today. Today we have only one common goal—to win the war, together.”

The other main opposition leader and former prime minister, Yair Lapid of the Yesh Atid Party, warned that if the government did not abandon its struggle against the Supreme Court, then “They have not learned anything from October 7th. They have learned nothing from 87 days of war to defend the homeland.”

It should be added that the other declared “hero” of the protest movement was none other than Netanyahu’s Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant, who opposed the amendment and was temporarily fired, but who now once again leads the IDF.

Given the unswerving loyalty of Gantz, Lapid and their ilk, the major concern expressed over the impact of the Supreme Court verdict is that Netanyahu does not jeopardise this by trying to appease his Minister of Justice Yariv Levin and the fascist Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir of Jewish Power who has stridently denounced the Supreme Court for weakening “the morale of the fighters in Gaza” and undermining “the war effort.”

Recognising his weakened position, Netanyahu has not yet commented on the verdict while his Likud party has complained that the Supreme Court has gone against a national desire “for unity” by bringing “a ruling at the heart of the social dispute in Israel precisely when IDF soldiers on the right and the left are fighting and risking their lives in the campaign.”

Horowitz declares in the Times of Israel, “For now, the war comes first.” And as far as the Zionist bourgeoisie is concerned, war always comes first. Any professed commitment to democracy, even for Jews, is a sham.

Netanyahu’s position is increasingly precarious, so that even a war he has actively sought may not save him in the end. Already deeply unpopular, he faces a mounting crisis over revelations that the security services and the military under his command knew about the planned October 7 incursion and allowed it to take place to serve as a pretext for a long-planned assault on Gaza.

On January 1, a group of survivors injured at Israel’s Supernova music festival initiated legal action seeking $56 million in damages from the Shin Bet security service, the Israel Defense Forces, Israel Police and the Defence Ministry for failing to make even a “single phone call” calling for “the party to disperse” immediately, that “would have saved lives and prevented the physical and mental injuries of hundreds of partygoers, including the plaintiffs.”

However, should Netanyahu fall on this basis alone he or his entire government would only be replaced by political forces equally committed to the war against the Palestinians, most likely led by Gantz, who commanded the IDF in the 2014 Gaza War. Launching his 2019 election campaign, Gantz bragged about “sending parts of Gaza back to the Stone Age”—a policy he is now implementing in toto as a member of Netanyahu’s war cabinet.

It is urgently necessary for the most farsighted workers and young people in Israel to follow the lead taken by many Jews internationally and take a determined stand against the war in Gaza. Without this, their future, as “citizens” of one of the most hated states in the world, one built on repression and slaughter, is bleak. They face the imminent prospect of being used by Israel’s paymaster in Washington as cannon fodder in a conflict pursuing US imperialist domination that could set the Middle East and the entire world alight.

Sanders: “No More US Funding” for Israel as It Wages “Illegal” Assault on Gaza

Sharon Zhang

The senator is calling on Congress to reject a bill to send $10 billion in military funding to Israel.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) has issued a stern call for lawmakers to reject a proposal to send Israel additional military assistance to bolster its assault on Gaza as the Palestinian death toll surpasses 22,000.

On Tuesday, Sanders released a statement calling for “no more U.S. funding for [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s illegal and immoral war against the Palestinian people,” saying that Congress should reject the proposed funding bill that would send $10.1 billion in military funding to Israel on top of the billions in military assistance that the U.S. already sends each year.

“The issue we face with Israel-Gaza is not complicated,” Sanders said.

Noting that he believes Hamas’s October 7 attack was the beginning of the current conflict — perhaps overlooking the decades of Israeli apartheid and occupation in Palestine leading up to the attack — Sanders continued, “we must also recognize that Israel’s military response has been grossly disproportionate, immoral, and in violation of international law. And, most importantly for Americans, we must understand that Israel’s war against the Palestinian people has been significantly waged with U.S. bombs, artillery shells, and other forms of weaponry.”

Indeed, U.S. intelligence reports have found that a whopping 22,000 of the bombs that Israeli forces dropped on Gaza in the first month and a half of Israel’s current assault were U.S.-made. These bombs could have been drawn from many sources: the over 70,000 weapons that the U.S. has sent to Israel over the past decades, the normally highly guarded U.S. weapons stockpile that officials are allowing Israeli forces to access, or the thousands of bombs and weapons that Biden administration officials are currently secretively funneling to Israeli forces.

The administration has been so determined to send more weapons to Israel, in fact, that it has now twice circumvented Congress in order to approve arms sales. President Joe Biden was behind the request for $10.1 billion in military assistance to Israel, which is awaiting approval from Congress.

Sanders highlighted the brutality of Israel’s assault in his statement, noting that 85 percent of people in Gaza have been forcibly displaced, 70 percent of homes in Gaza have been destroyed and the entire population of Gaza is going hungry.

“Today, not only are the vast majority of people in Gaza homeless, they lack food, water, medical supplies, and fuel,” the senator said. “The chief economist at the World Food Program said the humanitarian disaster in Gaza is among the worst he has ever seen. This cannot be allowed to continue.”

“Congress is working to pass a supplemental funding bill that includes $10 billion of unconditional military aid for the right-wing Netanyahu government to continue its brutal war against the Palestinian people,” Sanders continued. “Enough is enough. Congress must reject that funding. The taxpayers of the United States must no longer be complicit in destroying the lives of innocent men, women, and children in Gaza.”

Sanders has continually spoken out against the supplemental aid bill. Last month, he sent a letter to Biden asking the president to reject the funding bill, urging him to back a “humanitarian ceasefire,” and reverse the U.S.’s stance on vetoing UN legislation calling for a ceasefire and the release of all hostages. However, Sanders has refused to call for a permanent ceasefire, making him the target of ire of Palestinian rights advocates who maintain that a ceasefire is the only way to begin ushering lasting peace for Palestinians.

 

In Gaza ‘safe zone,’ Palestinians are living out their nightmares

Ruwaida Kamal Amer

Israel ordered thousands to evacuate to the area of Al-Mawasi, where they are struggling to find food, water, and shelter amid the war and winter cold.

Al-Mawasi is a narrow strip of coastal land in Gaza, one kilometer wide and fourteen kilometers long, stretching from the city of Khan Younis to the southernmost city of Rafah. Before the war, the area was home to over 6,000 residents, mostly Palestinian Bedouin families, who primarily relied on farming and fishing along the seaside; but otherwise, the land was largely empty and unutilized.

Now, however, Al-Mawasi has been transformed into a densely populated area, filled with hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fleeing Israel’s raging war on the besieged Strip, stranded in the winter cold and lacking the most basic necessities of life.

Since early December, Israel has called on Palestinians to evacuate approximately 20 percent of the land area of Khan Younis, which before the war was inhabited by more than 620,000 people, according to the UN. This was in addition to Israeli orders, issued in mid-October, for over 1 million people in the north of the Strip to evacuate south of Wadi Gaza (Gaza Valley), leading to mass displacement from places like Gaza City and Jabalia refugee camp.

But the residents displaced to Al-Mawasi, which was designated by Israel as a humanitarian zone, did not find any shelter or infrastructure there. Instead, they were left to find an empty area where they could pitch a tent, waiting out the fighting and staving off the increasingly cold weather. All the while, the masses of people arriving in this small area are growing.

It was not possible to confirm the exact number of people who have moved to Al-Mawasi in recent weeks, but the figure is estimated at around 300,000. Nearly 85 percent of the Gaza Strip’s population — about 1.9 million people — have been displaced from their homes since October 7.

Muhammad Sadiq, 36, lived in the city center of Khan Younis before the war, but recently fled to Al-Mawasi. “We thought that our area [in Khan Younis] was safe,” he said. “We did not leave our house during past wars. But we were shocked by the Israeli army’s order to evacuate from there. I expected that the evacuation would be for the eastern parts of the city only, but the occupation asked the residents in the center to evacuate as well.

“We had no place to go,” Sadiq continued. “All of our relatives and friends live in the same area, so the only option was to go to Al-Mawasi. It is a barren land with only sand.”

Sadiq emphasized Al-Mawasi’s unsuitable living conditions for families, let alone for the sudden influx of thousands to the area. “We left the house crying for the safety and warmth that we had left behind, and went to an empty land next to the sea,” he lamented. “We took the bedding we needed, but when we arrived, it was like we were in an empty desert, with no water, no bathrooms, nothing.” Sadiq and his family set up their two tents, one made of nylon and the other of cloth, and made a simple bathroom inside the tent for them to use.

“I can’t believe that we left our homes and are sleeping here, in an open place, and in the extreme cold,” he said. “We all fell ill, and we cannot be treated due to the inability to move around. The Israeli navy also fires bombs here. There is no safe place in Gaza. If we go out, it is to try to save our children [with food and water], not ourselves.”

‘My children are going to sleep hungry’

Among many of the area’s new inhabitants are Palestinians who have fled the north of the Strip. Reem Al-Atrash, a 40-year-old mother from Beit Hanoun, described a similar situation to Sadiq. At the start of the war, she and her family of six fled south to Khan Younis, sheltering in an UNRWA school. But shortly after their arrival, the Israeli army ordered their area to evacuate as well, forcing them to flee yet again, this time to Al-Mawasi.

“I don’t know what happened to my house, but I cannot live in this desert,” she said. “There is no water and no food. My children are going to sleep hungry, and I don’t know what to do for them. They wake up at night in pain from the cold. I tell them that tomorrow we will return home. Be patient. I do not know if I am being honest. But I do hope to return home. No one is comfortable here.”

Because of Al-Mawasi’s relative remoteness, those currently living in the area are struggling to access basic resources — a challenge compounded by Israel’s total blockade on goods entering Gaza, save for mere trickles of humanitarian aid.

“I make bread with the women, but because there is not a lot of wood here, the men work together to collect what they can,” said Al-Atrash. “Sometimes the bread is not enough, and my children sleep hungry, but I can’t do anything for them. The distance [to the city] is very far, and I need water for washing and drinking. We are trying to search for a source of water here, and we sometimes find some, but with great difficulty.

“We hope the war will stop soon,” she added. “Enough suffering and injustice.”

Like Al-Atrash, Aya Awad, a 27-year-old mother of two from Khan Younis, was displaced twice over the past three months. “I did not cry the second time,” she said. “Instead, I was silent in the face of the horror of this war, its madness, its oppression, and the frightening scenes of displacement.”

Awad similarly described the constant search for the most basic needs. “Everyone stands in lines carrying yellow gallons [for water]. They search for firewood but cannot find it. They are forced to uproot old trees, palm fronds, and lighting poles that are no longer needed because of the power outage. They’ll even collect scattered papers and nylon bags. The women wear prayer clothes and cook; the men light the fire and the boys fan it to keep the flames going. All family members have a role to survive.”

The suffering, meanwhile, is taking a severe emotional toll on the families. “People walk around unconsciously,” she said. “No one knows their way. These streets are alien to us — empty streets with no buildings. Most of them are agricultural lands and former settlements [those of Gush Katif, an Israeli settlement bloc dismantled in 2005].

“The displaced people carry their tents, bedding, clothes, and sorrows, and walk toward the unknown, weighed down by all the fears running through their minds, the feeling of insecurity, and the desire to disappear from all this scene,” Al-Atrash lamented. “How did we get here? Here we are just passers-by, living out our nightmares before we even dream them.”

 

80 percent of global famine is currently in Gaza, UN expert warns

Sharon Zhang

“In my life, I’ve never seen anything like this in terms of severity, in terms of scale, and then in terms of speed.”

Israel’s starvation campaign in Gaza is so severe that the vast majority of people across the world who are experiencing famine are located in Gaza, a UN food expert pointed out this week.

There are currently roughly 706,000 people in total across the world who are in populations experiencing “catastrophic” or “famine” levels of hunger, global food researchers have found. Of those people, about 577,000 are Palestinians in Gaza, according to a recent report by the UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC).

This means Palestinians in Gaza make up 80 percent of the global population that is currently experiencing famine, as chief economist for the UN World Food Program Arif Husain said in an interview with The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner published Wednesday. Some of the other countries facing some level of famine are Sudan, South Sudan and Somalia, according to the IPC.

Husain emphasized that the hunger crisis in Gaza, which IPC researchers have determined is acute across the entire region, is unprecedented in its severity.

“I’ve been doing this for the past two decades, and I’ve been to all kinds of conflicts and all kinds of crises. And, for me, this is unprecedented because of, one, the magnitude, the scale, the entire population of a particular place; second, the severity; and, third, the speed at which this is happening, at which this has unfolded, is unprecedented,” Husain said. “In my life, I’ve never seen anything like this in terms of severity, in terms of scale, and then in terms of speed.”

Husain also pointed out that the IPC report determined that the entire population of Gaza, or about 2.2 million people, will be under “full-fledged famine” within the next six months if Israel continues its blockade of food and other basic needs. The economist said that the escalating crisis is largely the result of Israel barring food from entering and being distributed in the region, adding that its relentless bombing campaign has endangered humanitarian workers and made it nearly impossible to distribute resources.

Famine is the worst level of hunger under IPC’s classification system, characterized by three main criteria, as Husain explained. First, more than 20 percent of a region’s population must be starving. The second is that 30 percent of children in the region must be malnourished or extremely thin, known as being “wasted.” Then, the mortality rate must be double the average rate.

Currently, Gaza is not classified as a full famine because its population only meets the first criteria, he said, but the population is on the way there. Roughly a quarter of the population has already reached the “famine” classification, while 50 percent are in the next highest classification of a food insecurity “emergency” and the rest are in an acute “crisis” of hunger, the IPC found.

“The bottom line is that, in Gaza, pretty much everybody is hungry at the moment,” Husain said.

“[Y]ou hope not to say, ‘O.K., let’s act because there is a famine,’” he added. “You need to act to avoid a famine, right? Because if you say, ‘O.K., let’s act when there is a famine,’ that means you’re saying people have already died, children are already wasted, people are already starving. That’s not the point. The point is that we should never let a population reach that state.”

 

‘Israel is killing us without mercy’: As the fighting in Gaza continues, civilians are starting to lose hope

Elizabeth Blade

Amid a humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Palestine that no international organization can cope with, locals tell their stories of survival.

Since October 7, 2023, an estimated 22,000 Palestinians have lost their lives amid Israel's shelling of Gaza. Most were civilians. As the conflict nears the end of its third month, the humanitarian situation in the enclave is deteriorating. The vast majority of residents lack food, water and basic medications.

Last October 7, mobs of Palestinian militants stormed Israel's southern communities, massacring an estimated 1,200 and leaving over 5,000 wounded. In response, Israel opened a war on Gaza aimed at crushing Hamas, the Islamic group responsible for the deadly attack. But in the process of doing so, more than 21,000 lives have been taken. According to estimates, only 8,000 of these were militants.

Samira Hamad, a 33-year-old Palestinian woman from Gaza City, says she would like to forget the last year.

"Even before the war, my family, like most of Palestinians, were living in poverty and deprivation," says Hamad. "But back then, we at least had some sort of security. My husband was working inside Israel, there was food on the table and there was a hope that things would change for the better. The events of October 7 turned all our lives upside down."

For 41 days, Hamad, her husband and their four children, lived under heavy Israeli bombardment focused primarily on Gaza City. Hamad says she had lost three of her brothers and their families amid the Israeli shelling. When the bombing intensified, the family decided to relocate to Khan Yunis, in the center of Gaza. There, they found refuge with relatives but ten days later, death knocked on their door.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF), which had been striking military targets belonging to Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, dropped a bomb on a six-story building in the center of Khan Yunis, killing her husband and dozens of other civilians. After Hamad buried him, she had no other choice but to move south, to the city of Rafah, where she currently resides in tents, together with her four children.

But conditions there are terrible, she says. "When my husband was alive, he was providing us with all our necessities. Now we rely on the donations of UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees) and other agencies but their aid is far from being enough.

Food is not the only commodity Hamad and most of Gaza's 2.2 million population are lacking. Basic hygiene products and medications are also out of reach; medical services are almost non-existent, primarily because many of Gaza's hospitals have either stopped functioning or are about to shut down.

"My kids are often sick due to the poor weather conditions. To get any medical assistance, I need to walk for two hours to reach one of the nearby hospitals, as I simply don't have money for transportation, even if it is a donkey cart."

Hisham Mhanna, communications officer with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), who is currently in Gaza, says he and his organization "understand and feel the distress, helplessness and anger the people in Gaza feel and endure."

According to him, hundreds of thousands of people are trying to find refuge in Gaza shelters, hospitals and schools. Many are staying with their relatives or sleep in their cars or out in the open air, since their homes and neighborhoods have been turned into rubble.

"The vast majority of the Gazan population is now displaced in parts of the Middle area and Rafah governates. These large-scale displacements add immense pressure on the already fragile service systems – water, sanitation and electricity.

No bakeries have been working, due to the lack of fuel, water, and wheat flour, as well as extensive damage caused by hostilities. Most water plants in Gaza have ceased operating. Water can no longer be pumped or desalinated, leaving families with no access to clean drinking water," he explained.

Since the beginning of the hostilities on October 7, the ICRC, with over 100 staff comprising medical, surgical and weapons contamination experts, has helped to support hospitals and deliver life-saving medication. The staff have also distributed essential household items and conducted multiple surgeries. But, Mhanna admits, the international agency's operations have been rather limited.

One of the reasons for this is the absence of "basic safety conditions," primarily caused by the heavy Israeli shelling. Another is Israel's reluctance to allow large quantities of humanitarian aid in to the area. The assistance that does enter doesn't meet the growing needs of the population.

This, Mhanna says, is why the assistance the ICRC is able to provide can hardly be called "meaningful."

"It's beyond any humanitarian organization's capacity to respond to the situation in Gaza. In the absence of sufficient aid, absence of security guarantees to move safely and freely and non-stop hostilities, no one can satisfy those who lost their homes, livelihood, family members and future prospects," the communications officer acknowledged.

These words, however, do not comfort Hamad, who vents anger not only at the lack of assistance from the international bodies but also at Israel, Hamas, Palestinian factions and the world community.

"Israel kills us without mercy, the US –which supports it– doesn't care about us, the innocent people. Palestinian factions are keeping silence, Arab presidents and the world community ignore our suffering.

According to official UN data, more than 1.7 out of 2.2 million Gazans, have been displaced by the conflict. Over one in four households in the coastal enclave face extreme hunger. 26% have completely exhausted their food supplies. The vast majority suffers from the lack of clean drinking water.

Hamad says she doesn't have any hope for a better future, as the bloody conflict that has claimed up to 22,000 Palestinian lives is about to enter its fourth month. And Mhanna is certain that if the situation continues to deteriorate, Gazans' living conditions will become even more unbearable.

"We exist in Israel and the Occupied Territories since 1967. But we have never witnessed this level of human suffering and deteriorating humanitarian situation before, and if it continues to get worse, we will see more loss of civilian lives, including women and children. More families will be separated and the living conditions for millions of people will worsen".