Minimizing harm to civilians? The genocide continues
A woman near a house destroyed by Israeli bombing, July 2026
Ilana Hammerman writes in Haaretz on 27 July 2026:
“Today, the ‘war’ ended. This isn’t an Aggression any more; it’s a Genocide. There isn’t another word that can describe the scale of violence I see in front of me,” Plestia Alaqad, then a 22-year-old Gaza woman, wrote already on October 18, 2023. The impressive diary, in which she documented, in English, the first three weeks of the Gaza Strip’s destruction, was published last year as a memoir (“The Eyes of Gaza: A Diary of Resilience,” published by Little, Brown and Company in the United States and Pan Macmillan in the United Kingdom.).
In the meantime, these three weeks have grown to nearly three years, and the death from the air, land and sea continues to this day, nonstop. There is no cease-fire. The genocide continues.
Day after day, men and women, young and old are killed and wounded. Nearly 2 million remain displaced, crammed into tents in a small area of about one-fifth of Gaza’s total territory, sentenced to suffer in seven circles of hell, between life and death. The Israeli military controls close to 70 percent of the Strip, where Palestinian villages and neighborhoods once stood. They were razed to the ground, their residents forcibly evicted and barred from returning.
On July 7, Dr. Said Muhammad Al-Kahlout (name spellings vary), a Gazan mental health expert and writer, wrote on Facebook: “The skies are filled with eyes that follow what the planes are recording, and the planes are close and can count the dentures in the mouth of an old displaced man – what harm would have been done to the world had he remained alive for one more day. … But the plane wants him to die now. How many shrapnel pieces are enough for your emaciated body, grandpa? Half a piece, maybe less. But the plane bombs him with a thousand fragments until he turns into little pieces. In the morning, the man will be only a number, devoid of humanity, that will crawl by effortlessly on the news ticker on the bottom of the screen.”
On July 17, the Rafah-based poet Nima Hasan wrote on Facebook: “A few minutes ago, I watched a video of a 15-year-old boy who had fallen into one of the many sewage ditches scattered around our tents. He was already dead when he was brought to the hospital. Before that, a different boy played with a suspicious object that exploded and killed him. And then another boy walked past the yellow [concrete blocks marking the Israeli-occupied part of the Strip], and occupation soldiers shot him. And a bullet came into a tent where a girl was and killed her. And children fell from a trailer and were crushed under the wheels. And children died of malnutrition, and others were not treated. And there are children who were not taken for treatment and died while waiting. … Death stalks our children from all sides, even from the bowels of the earth in Gaza. Does anyone hear? Does anyone see?” (The two posts above were uploaded by Tamar Goldschmidt and Aya Kaniuk as part of a unique documentation project, on Facebook, that is entirely given over, on a daily basis, to a selection of posts by Gaza residents.)
On Friday, Nir Hasson reported in Haaretz: “The Israel Air Force continues to kill children in the Gaza Strip. Since the cease-fire went into effect there last October, 282 children and teens under the age of 18 have been killed – an average of one child every day.”
But the last word in news reports and features of this kind is, for some reason, always reserved for the army spokesman, who reiterates in his response: “The Israel Defense Forces strongly rejects and condemns the claim that there is a policy or pattern of deliberately harming children. … The IDF invests efforts to reduce and minimize harm to civilian lives and civilian infrastructure in accordance with the laws of war, and takes precautionary measures before carrying out attacks.”
Minimizing harm to civilian lives and infrastructure? From the start, the attack on Gaza was a systematic war of annihilation, a disproportionate, frenzied response to Hamas’s barbaric attack on October 7. A war that from day one did not distinguish between fighters and civilians and between Hamas’ military infrastructure and Gaza’s civilian infrastructure. That fact is that in heavy shelling and bombing of densely populated residential areas, which did not allow for any distinction, tens of thousands of women, children and older people were killed, injured and permanently disabled, and hospitals, educational institutions, roads, water and electricity systems were destroyed, as was agriculture.
And the work of destruction continues today, not only through the bombing by planes and drones, but by consigning the vast majority of the population to abysmal living conditions.
More than 80 percent of Gazan’s residents have been forced from their communities and their homes destroyed. They live in crowded tents that are scorching hot in the summer and flooded with rainwater in the winter, with sewage flowing between them and collecting in puddles. They are exposed to a plague of mice, rats and fleas, and to infectious diseases that, in the absence of adequate medical care, become a death sentence, especially for children and old people.
So, it is genocide. The State of Israel inflicted and continues to inflicting a holocaust on the Gaza Strip. There is no other word to describe it today, when the dimensions of the killing and the devastation are clear to all. And yet, in the media and public discourse among Israeli Jews, and now in the election campaign, a black hole has opened up into which this crime, this terrible human tragedy, which will be with us for generations, has been swallowed up, as if it never happened.
How evident this is in the election campaign of the Democrats Party, whose English-language website declares: “We are the values-based, ideological, diplomatic-security, and Zionist backbone of the democratic-liberal bloc in Israel. We are the forefront of the fight for Israel’s character and future, under the leadership of Major General (Res.) Yair Golan, a hero of the October 7 [sic]. We will continue to fight with determination and courage for a strong, secure, and just Israel … without fear, without bowing to the poison machine, and without compromising on our values.”
It is a declaration that ignores the greatest value of all, that must be fought for today in the racist, ultranationalist and militaristic State of Israel, namely humanism.
This article is reproduced in its entirety