It has been 207 days since the beginning of the Gaza genocide. Over 34,200 civilians have been killed, including 14,500 children and 10,000 women. Over 10,000 people are still buried under the rubble. Mass graves have been uncovered at hospitals in the north and the south of Gaza. At the time of writing, hundreds of dead bodies have just been discovered in a huge mass grave at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis. Mothers are still trying to identify the bodies of their sons and daughters. Two thousand people are still missing.
Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor has documented 140 mass and unmarked graves so far in Gaza. The barbarity by Israel is unprecedented. Among the deceased in the mass graves at al-Shifa and Nasser hospitals, some people had been stripped of their clothes and buried with their hands tied. According to World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, a child is killed every 10 minutes in Gaza on average. Ghebreyesus paints a gloomy picture: “Nowhere and no one is safe.”
Almost all Gazans have been displaced, waiting for the day when they will return home as a first step towards their return to the towns and villages from which they and their parents were ethnically cleansed in 1948. Now, nothing is left. The beautiful coastal strip is no longer recognizable. Two-thirds of its houses have been destroyed; roads, hospitals, schools, universities, factories, shops, cemeteries, libraries, mosques, churches, restaurants, stadiums, farms, water wells, electricity generators…all have been erased.
Yet that does not seem to be enough for genocidal Israel, the United States of America, and the colonial West! They have decided to starve the people of Gaza by closing all the crossings and banning all kinds of food, clean water, and medicines. Even UNRWA has been defunded — despite an independent UN commission saying that Israel had failed to offer evidence for its smears against the aid agency — and for one reason only: to kill more Gazans.
The decision taken by major colonial powers to defund UNRWA has led the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention to sound the alarm and state:“[This] represents a shift by several countries from potential complicity in genocide to direct involvement in engineered famine.”