Israel ended its ceasefire in Gaza—which it had never fully observed—not with words but with the slaughter of over 400 Palestinians on March 18, including 150 children. For those who resist the term genocide consider the following:

GENOCIDE BEFORE THE EYES OF THE WORLD

1. Since Hamas’ deadly Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack against civilians and soldiers in Israel, massacring more than 1,200 and taking 251 as hostages—including women and children—the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have “officially” slaughtered some 48,000 Gazans, the majority of whom were civilians, women and children.

A Palestinian family outside their home in Jabaliya, Gaza Strip, destroyed by the Israeli army. Photo: FMT, CC BY 4.0

In addition, an estimated 10,000 or more are buried under the rubble of what used to be Gaza, including destroyed hospitals, schools, and mosques—all in the name of destroying Hamas, but top officials had called for making Gaza “unlivable.”

2. Israeli soldiers arrested thousands of civilians with no connection to Hamas, jailing them in Israel and subjecting them to intense interrogation and at times torture.
3. For some 18 months, with only a brief pause for an exchange of captives, Israel stopped the flow of food, water and medical supplies to Gaza. The result is famine and death of even more civilians—especially children.
4. A report has just been issued by the UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Including East Jerusalem, showing that Israel’s systemic attacks on women’s healthcare in Gaza amount to “genocidal acts,” and Israeli security forces used sexual violence as a weapon of war to “dominate and destroy the Palestinian people.” The report details attacks on maternity wards and other healthcare facilities for women, the destruction of an IVF clinic and controls on the entry of food and medical supplies into Gaza that taken together “destroyed in part the reproductive capacity of Palestinians in Gaza as a group.”
5. Netanyahu and his cohorts adore Donald Trump’s ethnic cleansing plan to forcibly remove Gaza’s Palestinians (and the West Bank’s as well). The plan demanded that Egypt and Jordan accept the Palestinians, but Egypt and Jordan refused. Not to be deterred, the U.S. and Israel have contacted Sudan (the country with the world’s worst humanitarian crisis!), Somalia, and Somaliland.
6. Negotiations to implement stage two of the ceasefire, ending in a return of all the hostages and a withdrawal of Israel from Gaza, were supposed to start immediately, but Israel refused. Instead, it again has cut off medical supplies, food, and now electricity used to run a critical desalination plant providing drinkable water for Palestinians. Hamas, for its part, cares little for the actual people of Gaza.
7. Since the war started in October 2023, Israel has cracked down on the three million Palestinians living in the West Bank. Right-wing Israeli settlers, religious zealots and extreme nationalists, were given a free hand, and encouraged by the Israeli government to burn Palestinian villages and kill people, forcing Palestinians to flee. The IDF has conducted military raids in West Bank refugee camps and cities. Hundreds have been killed. New roadblocks have been built making travel even more difficult.

WHITHER THE ISRAELI PEACE MOVEMENT?

Can a significant segment of Israelis, who, in the years since occupation began in 1967, made up an important peace movement in solidarity with Palestinians, make a difference today? Unfortunately, that peace movement, while it has not totally disappeared, has diminished as Israeli society has moved further to the right. A significant segment of Israeli society is opposed to Netanyahu over his refusal to put aside his war aims and personal ambitions in order to secure the release of the hostages held in Gaza.

But, as Israeli researcher Yonatan Mandel notes: “Many in Jewish Israeli society do not grasp, and do not want to grasp, that there is a connection between the eruption of violence on October 7 and the fact that the conflict’s core issues—occupation, settlements, borders, security, water, Jerusalem, refugees, sovereignty, freedom of movement, the existence of a Palestinian state—have never been settled” (New York Review of Books, Jan. 23, 2025).

What cannot be thwarted forever is the Palestinians’ desire for self-determination. After President Trump’s racist ethnic cleansing proposal for Gaza, Arab countries quickly arranged a summit to reject that plan and to propose their own. But these are the countries that, over the decades, 1. at most paid lip service to the Palestinians’ quest for freedom; 2. often ignored the Palestinians’ struggle as they sought deals with the U.S. and others; 3. don’t allow self-determination for their own people (for example, Egypt’s el-Sisi’s dictatorship and Saudi Arabia’s absolute monarchy). As for Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, surveys show that both are deeply unpopular in Palestine.

The genocide and struggle for freedom calls for our deepest solidarity with Palestinian masses’ efforts at self-activity, without which self-determination is out of reach.