Gaza death camp: How Palestinians resist with art when words fail
A Palestinian girl, wounded in an Israeli strike, is hugged by a relative at Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City on 19 June 2025
Ammiel Alcalay writes in Middle East Eye on 25 June 2025:
As Israel assassinated Iranian scientists and bombed hospitals and television stations across Iran, the logic of escalation – and the outright cowardice displayed by the so-called “most moral army” in the Middle East’s “only democracy” – continues methodically and relentlessly.
This extends to the targeted assassination of Mohamed Nasrallah, a beloved beekeeper in Hula, a Lebanese village south of the Litani River. Nasrallah – or perhaps his bees – must have posed a mortal threat to Israeli settlers near the border.
The constant mix of random and calculated attacks makes singular loss – and the ability to grieve – almost impossible to register. The momentary shock felt when it became clear, after only a few days of operation, that the new Mossad-affiliated, US-supported “humanitarian aid stations” were in fact kill zones, designed to pulverise Palestinian solidarity through starvation and the criminal control of food, has worn off.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s open admission that military and intelligence forces were working with criminal gangs to seize control of food distribution has gone hand in hand with Israel’s continued elimination – through targeted assassinations or outright destruction – of every tier of Palestinian civil and communal life.
In most concentration camps and gulags, the result of slave labour, meagre rations, and lack of medicine was typhus. Death followed.
But in Gaza – surely the largest concentration camp ever created – Palestinians are eliminated mathematically, in categories, through differing forms of cruelty. Like the US sanctions regime in Iraq, the structure through which Israel carries out these murders is far harder to document than its physical consequences
The form of slave labour imposed on Palestinians takes perversity to new levels. Enacted upon the self, it consists of doing everything necessary to stay alive – following the “hunger games” of evacuation orders, running between bullets, bombs and missiles, whether fired by snipers, tanks, drones, jets or ships.
In the so-called “humanitarian corridors”, hundreds of Palestinians seeking the bare minimum to feed their starving families continue to be murdered daily – in cold blood, and at random, as examples. Many more are shot or stabbed – often critically – by criminals who steal the coveted food to sell on the black market.
In the Israeli playbook, the unthinkable becomes routine. In Khan Younis on 17 June, an estimated 80 or more people waiting for the crumbs presented so magnanimously by White House spokesperson Tammy Bruce as humanitarian aid were torn apart by Israeli bombers paid for by US taxpayers. Some 300 more were wounded.
As Israel assassinates more Palestinian journalists, fewer eyewitness reports emerge from Gaza. But, like the US sanctions regime in Iraq – a bureaucratic and technocratic killing machine that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives – the structure through which these murders occur is far harder to document than its consequences on the ground.
Engineered chaos
On 9 June, Dr Ezzideen Shehab, a prominent Palestinian physician, posted on X: “The World Health Organization was informed calmly and formally that the Israeli army has suspended medical coordination for all Palestinian males over the age of twelve. Twelve.”