Over the past year, almost the entire population of Gaza has been repeatedly force-marched into so-called “safe zones.” These are death camps. There are no resources there for them to survive. People struggle to exist in flimsy plastic tents in the cold, wet Gaza winter.

Palestinian people in Gaza are subjected to constant psychological torture, tracked and targeted by ever-present drones. At any moment, a U.S.-supplied Israeli missile, bullet or bomb might strike. The situation for the 75,000 Palestinians trapped in northern Gaza is much worse. Israel has turned the north of Gaza into a free-fire zone.

Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the West Bank region of Palestine is accelerating ferociously, carried out by rabidly racist Jewish supremacist “settlers,” along with the Israeli military. 

Starvation, Disease, Torture as Weapons of Genocide

Amidst devastation imposed by Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s farms, fisheries, and bakeries, Israel has now choked off food aid entering Gaza to an all-time low since shortly after October 7, 2023. People are eating grass and animal feed, and drinking sea water (which is poisonous) in an attempt to put something in their stomach.

Israel has systematically destroyed the healthcare system in Gaza. All that remains are a handful of badly damaged hospitals without reliable power, supplies, or personnel to function in any meaningful way. And pop-up medical tents are utterly overwhelmed by an injured, sick, starving population. 

Even in a capitalist profit-driven world, providing modern medical technology, medicine, and technique is doable in Gaza with the resources available to aid agencies. But Israel uses bombs, tanks, missiles, and assassinations of aid workers to prevent that. As a result, emergency amputations are carried out in germ-filled environments without anesthesia. Women give birth without any aid in crowded school classrooms. Medical professionals try to live with the horrible reality that all their training means nothing when Israel is destroying their facilities and denies them medicine and tools to heal people. 

The only effective channel for distributing food aid, the UN’s relief agency UNRWA, has been outlawed in Israel, making it extremely difficult to stage shipments of food into Gaza. Within Gaza, the Israeli military systematically targets civilian authorities who attempt to manage and preserve order at food distribution locations, ensuring that whatever aid makes its way into Gaza falls into the hands of gangs that sell the food at extortionary prices on the black market.  

Death Camps in the South, Free-Fire Zone in the North

Almost the entire population of Gaza has been repeatedly force-marched into so-called “safe zones.” They are starved, shot, and subjected to disease carried through sewage where children play. The drones that track their every move, and carry out assassinations, fill the air with sounds described as amplified lawnmowers. In any group of Palestinians, someone has lost a child, a parent, a neighbor.

Northern Gaza is a free-fire zone. Israeli bombings and earth-moving machinery are continuing to level north Gaza and shoot anything that moves. Israel has cut off even the sadistically meager amount of aid it allows into the south. The hyper-militarized “Netzarim corridor” has walled off the northern section of tiny Gaza. This “corridor” is a two-and-a-half-mile-wide militarized staging area that runs the entire four-mile width of the Gaza Strip. That is one-seventh of all the land in Gaza! Hundreds of nearby buildings, including a hospital and a university, were bulldozed to clear space for it. 

A retired Israeli military official told the New York Times that many of Israel’s military leaders now believe Gaza will be occupied by Jewish settlers and annexed into Israel. Pointing to the Netzarim corridor, he said, “That’s why they’re building all of this.” 

Destroying Education and Culture to Destroy a People

Israel has methodically destroyed Gaza’s schools, blowing up the buildings, massacring students, and killing people seeking safe refuge in these schools administered by the UN. Nearly 700,000 school-age children in Gaza are being deprived of elementary and secondary education, a chance to learn, to play, to socialize, to get a meal.

Israel has destroyed every single college and trade school in Gaza.¹  Historian Rasheed Khalidi told NBC News, “When you destroy those kinds of institutions, you're not fighting Hamas, you're fighting the existence of the Palestinians. You’re fighting their capability to have memory and to have records and to be educated.” 

The Israeli army has assassinated dozens of academic, scientific, and intellectual figures in Gaza. I knew one of them. I hosted an event at Revolution Books in New York City in 2014 with educator, author, and editor Refaat Alareer. It was part of a U.S. book tour that Refaat led, with several young contributors to his anthology Gaza Writes Back. He and his students explored the shelves and displays in Revolution Books with eager curiosity. In his collection of essays, Refaat took particular efforts to give voice to young women writers in Gaza, up against many layers of oppression. When I read that Israel bombed his home, with bombs supplied by the United States, murdering him and his family, I was shaking in tears and rage.

Intensifying Ethnic Cleansing in the West Bank

For decades, the West Bank region of Palestine has been under siege by armed, rabidly Zionist illegal settlers, and the Israeli military. Since October 7, Palestinians in the West Bank have been subjected to ferocious, constant, escalating terrorist ethnic cleansing.

Today there are more than 140 official Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. They are illegal under international law, but officially recognized by Israel. There are also more than 200 “unofficial” settlements armed by the Israeli government. Violence against Palestinians in the West Bank has grown steadily, including Israeli Air Force bombing missions.

Crimes Enabled by the USA

Every one of the horrific crimes you just read about, and countless more, have been armed, funded, whitewashed, and justified by the Biden-Harris administration.

Since October 7, 2023, the U.S. has pumped almost $18 billion in military “aid” to Israel. That includes artillery shells, tanks, and 2,000-pound “bunker buster” bombs used to obliterate whole residential high-rises and the surrounding area. In addition, the U.S. military itself has deployed billions of dollars in operations to directly facilitate Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Over and over and over, when Israel destroys a hospital, assassinates aid workers, gets exposed for running a series of massive torture chambers for Palestinians without any pretense of due process, shuts off aid, kills reporters… the U.S. State Department issues the same template: We are working with our Israeli partners to investigate this and await their report. 

The U.S. has repeatedly blocked ceasefire resolutions at the United Nations, blocked prosecution of Israeli leaders for war crimes, and opposed findings of genocide by world bodies.

The Time to STOP THE GENOCIDE Is NOW

The powerful, inspiring upsurge against the U.S.-backed Israeli genocide on a hundred campuses across the U.S. (and beyond) struck a raw nerve for the rulers of this country. It challenged the legitimacy of the U.S.’s political, financial, military, and diplomatic support for Israel's genocide of the Palestinian people. And many people were driven to seek out and learn the truth about the state of Israel: that it was and is above all a neocolonial settler state, which today serves the interests of U.S. imperialist domination of the region. 

The empire struck back, with arrests, suspensions, blacklisting, doxing, and firings. And the rulers of this country unleashed a coordinated attempt to paint any and all protests against Zionism as being the same as anti-Semitism. This lie conflates political opposition to a state based on Jewish supremacy with hatred of the Jewish people as a people.

The incoming fascist Trump/MAGA regime threatens “hell on earth” in Gaza when he takes power. In whatever form “hell on earth” might take, that threat must be taken seriously. And people here in the belly of the beast must respond. The time for decent people everywhere to demand an END to U.S. backing for Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the West Bank is NOW.