Alex Rutherford
Benjamin Netanyahu has announced his war against the Palestinians will soon enter a ‘new phase’. This will not end the slaughter in Gaza, but does threaten more violence in the West Bank and southern Lebanon.
Israel’s genocide against the people of Gaza is heading towards its anniversary, having been ongoing for 10 months. The devastation can be seen regularly on the TV news and online. As we go to press, news of another 90 Palestinians murdered and 289 wounded in al-Mawasi refugee camp, west of Khan Younis in an Israeli airstrike has just hit our screens.
Despite platonic appeals from US President Joe Biden, Israel has not for one minute refrained from such atrocities. On 9 July 2024, Israeli airstrikes targeted a school sheltering displaced people, killing at least 29 and wounding many more. A video of the attack has circulated on social media. In it school kids can be seen playing football, moments before the bombs hit.
This is only one of four schools which have been targeted in July. Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor has said the targeting of schools being used as shelters demonstrated ‘a deliberate policy intended to prevent security across the entire Gaza Strip and deny displaced Palestinians stability or shelter, even if that shelter is only temporary’. Israel has also continued to issue evacuation orders in zones sheltering people who have already been displaced many times over, thwarting efforts to deliver aid.
True scale of genocide
A report published by the medical journal, The Lancet, has stated that although the confirmed death toll is currently just below 40,000 people (itself a staggering number), this does not reflect the true scale of the horror being inflicted. For one thing, that figure doesn’t take account of the more than 10,000 people buried below the rubble of destroyed homes and buildings.
The figure is further increased, the report says, when account is taken of indirect deaths caused by Israel’s war crimes, given ‘the intensity of the conflict; destroyed healthcare infrastructure; severe shortages of food, water and shelter; the population’s inability to flee to safe places; and the loss of funding to UNRWA, one of the very few humanitarian organisations still active in the Gaza Strip’.
It goes on to explain that in recent conflicts, the indirect deaths are generally between three and fifteen times the number of direct deaths. Even applying a conservative figure of four indirect deaths for every direct death, the report estimates a total death toll of more than 186,000, or 7.9% of the population of Gaza. So even with an immediate ceasefire, this would rank as one of the worst crimes against humanity ever committed.
West Bank
Israeli brutality, however, is not confined to Gaza. The entire Palestinian population is under threat. While attention has been focused on the Strip, Israel has been ramping up its dispossession and land seizures in the West Bank. According to Israeli watchdog group Peace Now, Israel has formally annexed 23.7km2 of land in the West Bank so far this year, an ‘unprecedented’ rate.
On 4 July, the Israeli government approved 5,295 homes in illegal settlements. These actions further undermine the basis of any kind of ‘two-state’ solution. In fact the latest land grab would link up several existing settlements and form a barrier, blocking Palestinians’ access to Jordan. In short it is designed to turn the West Bank into another ‘open air prison’ just like Gaza.
There has also been a marked uptick in violent atrocities in the West Bank. The BBC reported on 30 June that three Palestinian men were tied to the bonnets of an Israeli army jeep and driven at speed along village roads. This is just one example of the torture being meted out to the civilian Palestinian population. Vigilante violence by settlers has also increased. Meanwhile, nearly 10,000 Palestinians have been detained in the West Bank since 8 October.
American impotence
It has been nearly two months since Biden unveiled the supposed ‘Israeli proposal’ for a three-stage peace negotiation resulting in a ceasefire. Since that time, progress has been glacial because Israel has utterly refused to consider any ceasefire which does not allow them to ‘achieve all their war aims’, including the total destruction of Hamas. Clearly, this would be no true ceasefire.
The lack of progress reflects Israel’s revenge-fueled desire to inflict maximum suffering on the civilian population of Gaza. However, to complete a war of extermination does not fit with the desires of Israel’s imperialist overlords. Occupied with supplying weapons to Ukraine and facing domestic pressure over falling living standards, the western imperialists’ appetite for a protracted war is small. The genocide is also causing significant unrest and even appears to have impacted the results of the recent elections in Britain and France.
Israel too faces economic and military pressures. Despite its vast superiority over Hamas in these fields, much of the tunnel network in Gaza remains operational. Israel’s goal of eradicating the resistance group remains a distant one. Meanwhile, the recent escalation of fighting against Hezbollah on Israel’s northern border with Lebanon has raised the spectre of a regional conflagration.
Aping US General Curtis Le May during the Vietnam War, Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant told reporters in Washington DC on 22 June that Israel was capable of taking‘Lebanon ‘back to the stone age’. It can hardly be doubted that the Zionist state is capable of this and that the present cabinet would have little compunction in authorising it
Clearly this would upset all Biden’s (and Trump’s) calculations for the ‘normalisation’ of Israel’s relations with the reactionary Arab states Egypt and Saudi Arabia. It is this that has obliged Binyamin Netanyahu to send Shin Bet envoys to negotiations in Cairo and Qatar.
But his repeated vetoes of Hamas proposals, plus the fascist settler ministers in his cabinet, have made it clear that there will be neither a total nor a permanent ceasefire, let alone the withdrawal of the IDF or any opening of the borders of Gaza to aid and reconstruction. Even though Genocide Joe continues to prop up the withered corpse of the two state solution, nobody believes it for a minute.
Indeed any agreement reached under the cosh of Netanyahu and Ben Gvir’s New Nakba and the services of US imperialism would mean simply continuing the torment of the Palestinians and the denial of their democratic rights and national sovereignty. We must do all in our power to aid the Palestinians in defeating their oppressors until their homeland is free— ‘from the river to the sea’.
In particular that means demanding from the new Labour government that it stops arming Israel, that it calls for an unconditional ceasefire and withdrawal of the IDF from Gaza and the West Bank, and that it breaks with the Zionist state by supporting the Palestinians’ national rights. We should do so, not in any short-term hope that this will succeed, but in order to force the unions to confront Labour’s complicity with genocide and mobilise their members to fight Starmer and David Lammy.