The next stage of the Gaza genocide has begun
A woman holding the hand of a young boy looks towards destroyed buildings at the Nuseirat camp for Palestinian refugees in central Gaza on 31 January 2026
Ghada Ageel writes in Al Jazeera on 2 February 2026:
Jamal’s nine-year-old body is paralysed. He experiences constant, uncontrollable, violent spasms. He cannot sleep through them, nor can his mother. To keep the spasms under control, a drug called baclofen is required. It relaxes the muscles and stops the shaking. Suddenly halting the use of baclofen can have serious health consequences.
Jamal’s mother, my cousin Shaima, wrote to me from the family’s tent in the al-Mawasi displacement camp in Gaza a week ago. It was her son’s seventh day without the medicine. The violent, neurological spasms that seize Jamal’s limbs leave him screaming out in pain.
Baclofen is unavailable anywhere in Gaza: not in hospitals, not in clinics, not in Ministry of Health warehouses, and not even through the Red Cross. Shaima has searched all of them. It is one of the many medicines blocked by Israel, along with painkillers and antibiotics. Jamal now endures dozens of spasms each day. There is no alternative medication or substitute. There is no relief, only pain.
Jamal’s story is not to be told if the likes of former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are to have their way. Speaking at the United States-based, Israel-focused MirYam Institute last month, Pompeo said, “We need to make sure that the story is told properly, so that when the history books write this, they don’t write about the victims of Gaza”. At this line, the audience applauded.
Pompeo went on to say that every war has civilian casualties, but the true victims in this case are the Israeli people. His concern is that October 7 and the war in Gaza would be remembered “incorrectly”.
It seems Pompeo wants to argue that the people of Gaza are just “collateral damage” in Israel’s war. They are to remain nameless, faceless, forgotten. He wants their stories erased from the pages of human history.
His remarks reflect the next phase of Israel’s genocide. Dissatisfied with its progress in eliminating Gaza’s people, their mosques, their schools and universities, their cultural institutions, economy and land, Israel and its Christian-Zionist allies like Pompeo have now embarked on the erasure of memory and martyrdom.
The campaign is evident both inside and beyond Gaza. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) – an institution that has long preserved the status of the Palestinian refugee population and safeguarded their right of return under international law – is being systematically undermined and dismantled. TikTok – one of the few social media platforms where Palestinian voices have had a bit more freedom to speak – is now shadow-banning and restricting pro-Palestinian accounts, after being taken over by an Israel-friendly conglomerate.
In the US, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere, local laws are weaponised to come after pro-Palestinian youth, with scores being detained for using what should be their protected right to free speech. Laws are even passed at the state level in the US to shape what can be taught at schools about Israel and Palestine.
But what Pompeo – and those like him who misread biblical verses to justify their support for Israel and its genocide – do not understand is that Palestinians have faced erasure before and have overcome it. We will do so again.