On 18 March 2025, Israel unilaterally broke the ceasefire agreement and bombed several sites in Gaza. It is estimated that at least 400 Palestinians, mostly civilians, died by Israeli bombs. Journalists in Gaza report that of those dead, 174 are children. Once more, entire families have been wiped out. The head of the United Nations organisation for Palestine (UNRWA), Philippe Lazzarini, said that the Israelis have fuelled ‘hell on earth’. Amnesty International’s Secretary General Agnès Callamard described the situation as ‘the hellish nightmare of intense bombardment’. The word ‘hell’ is on everyone’s lips. It defines the situation in Gaza at present.

Israel’s Attack

Why did the Israelis break the ceasefire? There is no good reason. There was nothing done on the ground by the Palestinians that provoked this return to deadly violence. The prisoner exchange went as smoothly as possible and the process of verification of the ceasefire was intact. There are, however, three points of interest that could have drawn the Israelis back to the violence.

First, the Palestinians embarrassed the Israeli government on at least two issues: by marching northwards in the hundreds of thousands to reclaim northern Gaza on 27 January, and by allowing the Israeli prisoners to show empathy with their captors when they were released (to the point of Israeli soldiers kissing Hamas gunmen who had held them hostage).

Second, the Israeli government broke the ceasefire and then Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu welcomed back to his cabinet three members of the far-right wing Otzma Yehudit (Itamar Ben-Gvir, Amichai Eliyahu, and Yitzhak Vassirulov) who had resigned because of the ceasefire. Their return cements Netanyahu’s government. It is within the character of Netanyahu to murder Palestinians to maintain his own political power.

Finally, US President Donald Trump’s authorisation to attack Yemen’s government in retaliation for its defence of the Palestinians shined a green light to Israel for a resumption of hostilities. Yemen’s Ansar Allah was the only remaining group that continued to attack Israel because of its genocide (Lebanon’s Hezbollah and the Syrian factions have been largely silenced).

Pregnant Palestinians

According to the United Nations Population Fund (UNPFA), there are 50,000 pregnant Palestinian women in Gaza, with 4,000 ready to give birth next month (more than 130 per day). Currently, these women have no adequate medical care. The Israeli government has blocked for two weeks the delivery of fifty-four ultrasound machines and nine portable incubators (essential for premature babies). The cuts in electricity and water on top of the destroyed medical centres and hospitals have placed an inordinate burden on medical workers and therefore on the pregnant women.

Dr. Yacoub (name changed), a doctor at Kuwait Hospital in Gaza recounted two stories of importance as the bombs fell once more. A thirty-year-old woman who was twenty-two weeks pregnant came to the hospital from al-Mawasi in Khan Younis with a head injury caused by an Israeli airstrike. She died in the hospital. When the doctor examined her, he found that her baby was also dead. A second woman, in her twelfth week of pregnancy, suffered a miscarriage. She was in terrible pain when she arrived. Her mother told the doctor: ‘We barely managed to get to this hospital. We barely found transportation. The situation is unstable, with shelling and fear. We came here scared’. One of the two women died. Both of their babies are dead. ‘In times of war’, Dr. Yacoub said, ‘the devastation extends beyond the battlefield, affecting innocent lives, including those of expectant mothers and their unborn children’.

Reopening Gaza

Against all odds, the Palestinian Red Crescent Society reopened the al-Quds Hospital in Gaza City’s Tal al-Hawa neighbourhood. The hospital had been bombed by the Israelis and closed since November 2023. The North Gaza Emergency Committee, set up by civilians three years ago, met to decide on the absolute necessity of trying to provide some medical care despite the dire context. They have been able to reestablish two operating rooms, an emergency department, and outpatient clinics.

It is important to remind readers that during this genocide, Israel targeted the Palestinians who had been leaders of the Emergency Committees and who had been involved in the entry of humanitarian aid. For instance, in March 2024, Israeli aircraft targeted and killed Amjad Hathat, a popular leader of an Emergency Committee in western Gaza, and Brigadier General Fayeq al-Mabhouh, the policeman who coordinated the entry of humanitarian aid through the UN Palestinian agency (UNRWA). The murder of people such as Hathat and al-Mabhouh has left the Palestinians in northern Gaza without those with the expertise to bring aid into Gaza and then distribute it amongst the Palestinians. Despite their loss, others have stepped into the breach, including the beleaguered UNRWA officials.

During the ceasefire, UNRWA opened 130 temporary learning spaces across Gaza to enrol a remarkable 270,000 boys and girls. As UNRWA head, Lazzarini, wrote, ‘Education for children restores some hope. It helps them help and slowly reconnect with their childhood’. But he wrote this on 15 March. Israel began its bombardment again three days later.

The rubble will grow. The despair will increase. The genocide continues.

This article was produced by Globetrotter and No Cold War.

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Photograph Source: Raul Jusinto – CC BY-SA 2.0

Donald Trump spoke to reporters for over three hours on Air Force One on his way to see the Super Bowl in New Orleans on 9 February 2025. It was not clear to the reporters who broadcast his comments whether Trump was speaking as the President of the United States, a member of the United Nations, or as a real estate magnate. Gaza, he said, is a “demolition site” that needed to be “leveled out” and “fixed up”. Since Gaza is on the Mediterranean Sea, Trump said, it could be developed into a new French Riviera. According to him, it is not the crime scene of a genocide but “a big real estate site”. The United States, he said with his presidential smile on, “will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it too”.

Palestinians from Gaza listening to this commentary could have imagined that the United States would be funding the reconstruction of Gaza, which has been estimated by the United Nations to be – at a minimum – $53 billion (the cost after the 2014 pulverization of Gaza by Israel was $2.4 billion). In 2023, total US Overseas Development Aid was $66 billion, and, with the cuts proclaimed by President Trump, it is unlikely that the US can muster anything near the bill for the reconstruction of Gaza. There was nothing humanitarian in Trump’s comments about the making of the Gaza Riviera (or since this appears to be a gift to Israel, it is more likely that Trump imagines it to be the Azzah Riviera, using the Zionist name for Gaza, meaning “strong city”). The Israeli establishment has, from the start of this genocidal campaign, said that it wants to annex Gaza, which seems to be aligned with the Trump vision to make Gaza American or to develop Gaza as a beachside resort for U.S. tourists and Israeli settlers. Knowing Trump, he will likely want to reserve a section of the beachfront for himself and to build a Trump International Hotel and Tower that has a casino attached to it for good measure.

Zionist Gentrification

None of this is a surprise and nor are these ideas original to Trump. The entire Zionist project imagines an Eretz Israel that stretches from the borders with Egypt to that of Iran. The real estate deed for this is a line in the Bible, “To your descendants, I have given this land, from the river of Egypt as far as the great river the Euphrates” (Genesis 15:18). It is not clear which river in Egypt this line refers to, whether the Nile or Wadi el-Arish (in the Sinai Peninsula). But if the Euphrates is taken as its border, then the land that Zionists claim includes the entire West Bank and Jerusalem, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and the western half of Iraq. There are maps of this kind that can be seen in the offices of far-right Israeli politicians (on 19 March, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich spoke in Paris from a podium that displayed an Israeli map that included Jordan). This is utterly normal in the world of the illegal settlements in the West Bank (part of the UN-mandated Occupied Palestine Territory), which the settlers call Judea and Samaria. Their geography has been different since at least when their spiritual guide Ze’ev Jabotinsky wrote in The Iron Wall(1923) that Zionists must build Eretz Israel behind an “iron wall, which is to say a strong power in Palestine that is not amenable to any Arab pressure”.

Trump is not much of a reader. He probably has never heard of Jabotinsky or of Theodor Herzl. He probably cannot define Zionism. But he knows a real estate opportunity when he sees one, and that is how he has understood his solution to the problems facing Israel. In his first term, Trump made the “deal of the century”, the Abraham Accords, which brought a series of states to normalize relations with Israel: Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates (September 2020), Sudan (October 2020), and Morocco (December 2020). With Egypt (1979) and Jordan (1994) having already made peace deals with Israel, the map had begun to shift away from the Palestinians and toward the Israelis. The new governments in Lebanon and Syria are not far from making their own separate agreements, and Saudi Arabia has already said that it would normalize with Tel Aviv. Trump is a “bazaari” (marketplace) politician, one who tosses outlandish agreements in the air (for Morocco, the acceptance of its illegal occupation of Western Sahara) in utter disregard for international law. He is now doing the same with Gaza.

“I think that it’s a big mistake to allow people – the Palestinians, or the people living in Gaza – to go back yet another time”, he said on Air Force One. “We don’t want Hamas going back”, Trump said. “The United States is going to own it”. It did not take long for all the UN Special Rapporteurs to sign a strong letter condemning Trump’s comments. They made the correct argument that his idea, if implemented, is a war crime. Trump does not understand international law. He thinks like a gentrifier. This is what he has been doing across the United States: evicting ordinary people and building hideous buildings as a monument to the fabulous wealth of the few. Trump, like the illegal settlers, conducts Zionist gentrification.

Silence

Marwan Bardawil is an engineer with the Palestinian Water Authority. At a little-noticed press conference in Ramallah, Palestine, Bardawil said that 85% of the water and sewage facilities in the Gaza Strip were destroyed by the Israeli genocide. It will cost $1 billion to repair and replace the water and sewage facilities in Gaza. Polio, which was eradicated in Gaza a quarter of a century ago, has returned because of the collapse of the water system.

The Palestinians are being silenced as the debate around Gaza unfolds. If they want a Trump International Hotel and Tower, that is up to them, not up to Trump or Netanyahu. But they are not clamouring for a golden tower. What they want are their homes. And their universities. And their hospitals. And the photographs of their family members who are now all dead.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

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Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain

For the past quarter century, ever since 2001, presidents of the United States inaugurate their terms not with bottles of champagne but with drone and missile strikes. Donald Trump followed the rhythm. Not long after he ascended to the chair in the Oval Office, he sent off missiles against ISIS fighters “hiding in caves” – as he put it on social media – in the Golis mountains in northeast Somalia. No civilians were killed, said Trump. They always say that.

Trump’s first missile strike of this presidency reminded me of Barack Obama’s first missile strike, only three days after the Nobel Peace Prize winner was sworn in as the president of the United States in 2009. In the morning of January 23, CIA director Michael Hayden told Obama that they were ready to strike high-level al-Qaeda and Taliban commanders in northern Pakistan. Obama did not object. At 830pm, local time, a drone flew over Karez Kot in Ziraki village, Waziristan. The people on the ground heard it. They called the drones bhungana, that which sounds like a buzzing bee. Three Hellfire missiles were fired remotely, and they smashed into some homes. Fifteen people died in that attack.

One of the missiles went through the wall of a home and exploded in the drawing room of the house. Inside that room sat a group of family members who were celebrating before one of the young men – Aizazur Rehman Qureshi (age 21) – was to leave for the United Arab Emirates. The drone strike killed him. It also killed two men, Mohammed Khalil and Mansoor Rehman, leaving their fourteen children without a father. Their nephew, Faheem Qureshi (age 7), felt his face on fire, and ran out of the room (he lost an eye). Not one of the men and boys in the room had a connection to either al-Qaeda or to the Taliban. They were hard working people, one of the men had been a worker in the UAE and on his return, his nephew was preparing to go and help the family by working in the Gulf. Now, a hasty decision by the CIA left the family distraught. The US government never apologised for the attack and did not compensate the family.

In 2012, Newsweek’s Daniel Klaidman published Kill or Capture: The War on Terror and the Soul of the Obama Presidency. If I were Obama, I would like this book. It is sympathetic to him. After that drone strike, Klaidman points out, “Obama was understandably disturbed.” The next day, a person who was there in the Situation Room told Klaidman, Obama walked in but “you could tell from his body language that he was not a happy man.” Apparently, this was the spur for Obama to learn about the CIA’s “signature strikes” (when the US government felt it could kill anyone who looked like a terrorist) and “crowd killing” (when it was acceptable to kill civilians in a crowd if a “high value target” was also there). Obama said that he did not like this that he was unhappy that there might be women and children in the crowd. But, as Klaidman writes, “Obama relented – for the time being.” In fact, the “time being” seems to have extended through the two terms of his presidency. What differentiated Obama from Bush before him and Trump afterwards was merely his hesitancy. His actions were the same.

In 2010, Obama’s team developed the Disposition Matrix or the “kill list” and the procedures to activate the use of strikes to kill or capture “high value targets.” The chain of decision making for this kill list did not include any sense that the men on the list could have been accidentally placed there or that they would get a chance to defend themselves from the CIA’s accusations in a court of law. In other words, there was no judicial review. In 2011, this should have raised eyebrows when these procedures led to the assassination of several US citizens in Yemen (first Anwar al-Awlaki, born in New Mexico, and then – in a separate drone strike – his sixteen-year-old son Abdulrahman al-Awlaki); in 2017, the US government killed al-Awlaki’s eight-year-old daughter, Nawar al-Awlaki. All three were US citizens, who should have been afforded some US constitutional protections even if the US disregards international law. None was available to them.

In 2012, the film Ghaddar (Traitor) has a popular song sung by Rahim Shah called Shaba Tabhi Oka (Come on Destroy Everything). The film is in Pashto, the language of northern Pakistan and large parts of Afghanistan. It is also the language of those who died in Obama’s 2009 drone strike. In the song sequence, two lovers, played by the popular actors Arbaaz Khan and Sobia Khan, dance and sing with the culture of drones and bombs now associated with love. “Look at me, bomb my heart,” says Sobia Khan, while the refrain runs, “come on, destroy everything.”

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Photograph Source: rajatonvimma /// VJ Group Random Doctors – CC BY 2.0

From early December 2024 to early January 2025, the body temperature of eight babies fell below any acceptable amount and they froze to death. This condition is known as hypothermia. The most recent of these children to die, Yousef, was sleeping beside his mother because, as she told Al Jazeera, of the very cold weather. Temperatures in Gaza have fallen to just above freezing, which in the context of a lack of housing, blankets, and warm bedclothes is deadly. Body heat is the only protection, which is minimal for an infant. Yousef’s mother said, “He slept next to me and in the morning I found him frozen and dead. I don’t know what to say. No one can feel my misery. No one in the world can understand our catastrophic situation.”

Each of these stories is incomprehensible. The al-Batran family in Deir al-Balah are living in a tent made of blue plastic. Their bedding is only acceptable to them because their entire household has been destroyed, and they have not received any relief. Twin brothers Ali and Jumaa were born during this ugly genocidal bombardment in November 2024, but then one after the other succumbed to hypothermia. When the father felt Jumma’s head, it was as “cold as ice.”

By early January 2025, studies by the United Nations and the Palestinian government showed that at least 92 percent of housing units in Gaza had been destroyed. Most Palestinians who remain in northern Gaza have no homes in which to shelter. They are living in makeshift tents, not even having access to the United Nations tents that are sparsely available. Because there are now no hospitals open in northern Gaza, children are being born in these tents, and they are not receiving any medical care. “The health sector is being systematically dismantled,” Dr. Rik Peeperkorn of the World Health Organization told the United Nations Security Council on January 3. In the so-called “safe zone” of al-Mawasi, near Khan Younis, three babies died of hypothermia, mocking the idea that this is indeed a safe zone. Mahmoud al-Faseeh, the father of Sila Mahmoud al-Faseeh (who died in her third week), told Al Jazeera, “We sleep on the sand and we don’t have enough blankets and we feel the cold inside our tent.” The story is the same up and down Gaza’s length: the cold has come at night, ceaseless rain has made everything damp, the tents are inadequate, the blankets are thread worn, and the infants—the most vulnerable—have begun to die.

The map of such suffering is not restricted to Gaza or to the Palestinians. Such stories of a parent walking to find their child beside them in an inadequate tent, with no blankets because of the lack of relief in a war zone, are sadly not unique. The children frozen in the Kabul slum of Chaman-e-Babrak in 2012 had names that are utterly forgotten outside their families. These were victims of a war that trudged on and threw these rural Afghans into cities where they lived in glorified plastic bags. Similarly, there is little memory of the precious infants who froze to death in the unnamed camps north of Idlib, Syria, along the Turkish border. The parents of these children went from tent to tent over a decade, trying desperately to find a stable life. Some of their children froze to death; other families perished as their dangerous heaters in these plastic tents set their entire families on fire.

Wars on Civilians

War zones are no longer places where combatants fight each other. They have become charnel houses for civilians, and entire populations taken hostage and brutalized. In May 2024, before the full toll of the Israeli genocide had been measured, the UN Secretary-General provided a report to the Security Council on civilian deaths. The data is stunning:

The United Nations recorded at least 33,443 civilian deaths in armed conflicts in 2023, a 72 percent increase as compared with 2022. The proportion of women and children killed doubled and tripled, respectively, as compared with 2022. In 2023, 4 out of every 10 civilians killed in conflicts were women, and 3 out of 10 were children. Seven out of 10 recorded deaths occurred in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel, making it the deadliest conflict for civilians in 2023.

The number regarding the Occupied Palestine Territory includes the Israeli violence from October to December 2023, but not the violence that intensified across the entirety of 2024. Those numbers will come later this year.

A look backward at the post-9/11 Western wars on Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen shows the bleakness of the general attitude toward civilians in these parts of the world. The direct deaths from the bombs and the gunfire have been calculated to be nearly one million, an enormous underestimation but still a very large number. Adding in excess deaths, including from starvation and hypothermia, the toll is calculated to be nearing five million, also an underestimation but at least indicative of the impact on these parts of the world.

On August 29, 2021, two U.S. MQ-9 Reapers hovered over a white Toyota Corolla that had pulled into a parking area of a multi-family home in Kabul’s working-class Khwaja Burgha neighborhood. The U.S. drone operators, who had tracked the car for the past eight hours, watched as a man left the car, as a group of people came to greet him, and as one person took out a black bag from the rear seat of the car. At that point, the U.S. decided to fire a hellfire missile at the man and the people around him. They were all killed. It turned out that the man, Zemari Ahmadi, was not a member of the enemy group ISIS-K, but was an employee of a California-based non-governmental organization called Nutrition and Education International (NEI). The people who came to greet him from inside the house were his children, grandchildren, and their cousins. The black bag, which the U.S. claimed might have had explosives, carried a laptop from NEI, and another bag carried water bottles. The secondary explosion that the operators saw on their video feed was not from a bomb but from a propane tank in the carport.

The list of people killed by the United States on that day should give one pause because of the youth of so many of them: Zemari Ahmadi (age 43), Naser Haidari (age 30), Zamir (age 20), Faisal (age 16), Farzad (age 10), Arwin (age 7), Benyamen (age 6), Malika (age 6), Ayat (age 2), and Sumaya (age 2). This is the last U.S. drone strike before the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. Not one U.S. soldier was charged with the murder, let alone found guilty. Not one Israeli soldier will be charged or found guilty of the deaths of the Palestinian children in Gaza. This is the impunity that defines the assault on civilians, including those little Palestinian babies freezing to death in their blue tents, lying beside desperate parents.

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Photo by Bernd Dittrich

In November, Álvaro Noboa, the father of Ecuador’s president Daniel Noboa, had a heart attack. He was hastily taken to a clinic in Guayaquil, his hometown, and then after he was stabilized, flown to a hospital in New York. Álvaro Noboa unsuccessfully ran for president five times (1998, 2002, 2006, 2009, and 2013), but it was his son who prevailed in 2023 at the age of 35. What defines the Noboa family is not political office, but the wealth of the Noboa Corporation. Grupo Noboa was formed out of Bananera Noboa S.A. set up in 1947 by Luis Noboa Naranjo, the grandfather of the current president. Bananera Noboa expanded, thanks to Álvaro, into the Exportadora Bananera Noboa, which is the heart of the Group’s billion-dollar empire in Ecuador (population 18 million, a third of whom live below an abysmally low poverty line). The name of the expanded firm has two words in it that describe the hold of the Noboa family on the Ecuadorian economy and on its political life: the export (exportadora) of bananas (bananera).

Banana Trade

Countries other than Ecuador produce a very large share of the world’s banana product. India produces more than a quarter of bananas, while China produces a tenth. But these are not banana-exporting countries because they have enormous domestic markets for bananas. More than 90 percent of the world’s exported bananas come from Central and South America as well as the Philippines. Ecuador, which only produces a little over 5 percent of the world’s banana produce, exports 95 percent of its production, making up 36 percent of the world’s exported bananas (Costa Rica is next at 15 percent). Grupo Noboa is Ecuador’s largest banana firm, and therefore one of the most important companies in the export of bananas globally. The largest importers of bananas are the European Union (5.1 million tons), the United States (4.1 million tons), and China (1.8 million tons). Europe and the United States have established suppliers in Central and South America (Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, and the Dominican Republic), and neither experience major supply shortages.

China has faced problems from its major suppliers Cambodia and the Philippines (from which it procured 50 percent of its imported bananas). For instance, Cambodia has been wracked by El Niño, resulting in less precipitation, greater depletion of soil moisture, and an increase in pesticide resistance pests. Such a climate change phenomenon has damaged banana production in both Cambodia and the Philippines. This is the reason why Chinese importers have invested in expanding banana plantations in India and Vietnam, two emerging suppliers for the Chinese market. But there is no substitute for Ecuadorian bananas.

Chinese Market

Between 2022 and 2023, Ecuador’s exports of bananas to China increased by 33 percent. However, the problem with Ecuadorian bananas is that the journey from South America to China has increasedthe average import unit value to $690 per ton. This means that for the Chinese market bananas from Ecuador are 41 times more expensive than bananas from Vietnam. Over the past five years, the banana merchants of both China and Ecuador, and their governments, have tried to reduce the cost of the bananas for export to China.

First, the two countries signed a free trade agreement in May 2023 that ensured that 90 percent of the goods traded between the countries would be tariff-free and that any tariffs on bananas would be eliminated over the next decade. China is already Ecuador’s largest trading partner. It is expected that the Chinese firms will invest in processing and in the industrial production capacity within Ecuador so as to make products from the bananas before the fruit sets sail.

Second, the Chinese have been eager to cut the shipping time between South America and China, which means to ensure upgrades at ports at both ends. The Chinese government has upgraded both the Dalian Port in Liaoning Province and the Tianjin Port in Tianjin. Both of these ports are capable of running container ocean liners from dock to dock over twenty-five days, which is a week faster than other routes. The new Peruvian port in Chancay, built with Chinese investment, will enable goods from Bolivia, Brazil, and Peru to travel very fast to and from China, while the upgraded Ecuadorian ports of Puerto Guayaquil and Puerto Bolívar already ensure rapid transit of goods from Ecuador. Meanwhile, the Colombian government and the Chinese government are considering the expansion of the port of Buenaventura and the building of a “dry canal” to link the Pacific (Buenaventura) and Atlantic (Cartagena) ports by a rail link; this would be a direct challenge to the Panama Canal, which is perhaps why Donald Trump made his speech about bringing that canal under direct U.S. control.

Third, the banana merchants on both sides of the Pacific have been working to upgrade their ports so that they are both storage facilities for cold chain products (such as fruits and vegetables) and light manufacturing so that value can be added to them through processing. With warehouses for refrigerated containers, there is less waste and greater haste in getting the goods ready for the long journey.

With European supermarkets enforcing a cut in banana prices, Central and South American exporters are keen to send their bananas to China. But this is not just about bananas.

Cold Banana War

The United States government has taken it as a personal affront that Chinese businesses and the Chinese state have been involved in economic activities in Latin America. In 2020, the United States blocked a Chinese firm from developing La Unión port on the Pacific Ocean in El Salvador. But this year, it was impossible to prevent Peru from participating in the $3.6 billion upgrade to the port of Chancay, also on the Pacific. In comparison, in May 2023, the United States pledged $150 million as a credit to upgrade the Turkish-run Yilport Terminal Operations at the Puerto Bolívar port in Ecuador. The arrival of expensive Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) projects in South America is now a fact.

The U.S. government has only now begun to invest in its own ports (to the tune of $580 million promised in November 2024, a pittance compared to what is needed). In November 2023, the United States launched the Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity, whose intention is to contest China’s BRI in Latin America. However, the Partnership only has $5 million as an accelerator, which is an embarrassingly small amount of money. Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru—all three involved in the BRI projects—are members of the Partnership, but the gains they get from it are minimal.

The story seems to end where it always ends. Unable to compete on commercial grounds, the United States brings its cavalry to bear. President Noboa gave the U. S. permission to use the environmentally fragile Galapagos Islands as a military base to conduct surveillance in the area.

The Noboa family knows a thing or two about using force instead of conducting an honest negotiation. When workers from their plantations organized a union to fight for an end to child labor (documentedby Human Rights Watch) and to ensure that the Ecuadorian Constitution was honored, the Noboa corporation refused to engage with them. Twelve thousand workers at Los Álamos plantation struck on May 6, 2002. Ten days later, armed men went into the workers’ houses, detained the organizers, and tortured them (one was killed). They threatened the workers that if they did not stop the strike, they would put about 60 of them in a container and dump it into a nearby river. They shot at the workers, wounding many of them. Mauro Romero, whose leg had to be amputated, received nothing from his employers; it was the union that paid his bills. This was under the watch of President Noboa’s father and his minister of agriculture (Eduardo Izaguirre). But despite where the story appears to end, these men understand the current realities: they will trade with China, but give up part of their territory to the United States for a military base.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

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Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, military leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. Screengrab from CNN interview.

As the rebel forces led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (Syria Liberation Committee) seized Damascus, Syria’s capital, on December 7, 2024, the president of Syria, Bashar al-Assad boarded a flight to Moscow, Russia. It was the end of the rule of the Assad family that began when Hafez al-Assad (1930-2000) became president in 1971, and continued through his son Bashar from 2000—a 53-year period of rule. Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which seized Damascus, was formed out of the remnants of the al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria, Jabhat al-Nusra (Front for the Conquest of Syria) in 2017, and led by its emir Abu Jaber Shaykh and its military commander Abu Mohammed al-Jolani.

For the past seven years, HTS has been restrained in the city of Idlib, in Syria’s north. In 2014, a group of al-Qaeda veterans created the Khorasan network (led by Sami al-Uraydi, the religious leader), whose intent was to control the city and the Islamist movements. Over the next year, al-Nusra tried to form alliances with other Islamist forces, such as Ahrar al-Sham, particularly for the governance of the city. The Russian military intervention in 2015 damaged the ability of these groups to advance out of Idlib, which led to the formal break of many of the Islamists from al-Qaeda in 2016 and the creation of HTS in January 2017. Those who remained linked to al-Qaeda formed Hurras al-Din (or Guardians of the Religious Organization). By the end of the year, HTS had seized the initiative and become the major force inside Idlib, took over the local councils across the city and declared that it was the home of the Syrian Salvation Government. When the Syrian Arab Army, the government’s military force, moved toward Idlib in early 2020, Turkey invaded Syria’s north to defend the Islamists. This invasion resulted in the Russian-Turkish ceasefire in March 2020 that allowed the HTS and others to remain in Idlib unscathed. HTS rebuilt its ranks through alliances with Turkish-backed armed forces and with fighters from across Central Asia (including many Uyghur fighters from the Turkistan Islamic Party).

Operation Deterrence of Aggression, launched by HTS in November 2024 with Turkish and Israeli support, whipped down highway M5 from Aleppo to Damascus in about fourteen days. The Syrian Arab Army dissolved before them and the gates of Damascus opened without enormous bloodshed.

The Jihadi Blitzkrieg

The surprise victory of HTS had been predicted in November by Iranian officials, who informed Assad about the weakness of the state’s defenses because of the sustained Israeli attacks on Syrian army positions, of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and of the war in Ukraine. When Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi met with Assad in Damascus after Aleppo fell to the rebels, Assad told Araghchi that this was not a defeat but a “tactical retreat.” That was clearly illusionary. Araghchi, knowing this, told Assad that Iran simply did not have the capacity to send new troops to defend Damascus. It had also been made clear to the Assad government that the Russians did not have the surplus capacity to defend the government, not even the Russian naval base in Tartus. During the HTS drive against the Syrian army, the Russian presidential envoy for Syria Alexander Lavrentyev said that he had been in touch with the incoming Trump administration to discuss a deal between “all parties” over the Syrian conflict. Neither Russia nor Iran believed that the Assad government would be able to unilaterally defeat the various rebels and remove the United States from its occupation of the eastern oil fields. A deal was the only way out, which meant that neither Iran nor Russia was willing to commit more troops to defend the Assad government.

Since 2011, Israel’s air force has struck several Syrian military bases, including bases that hosted Iranian troops. These strikes degraded Syrian military capacity by destroying ordinance and materiel. Since October 2023, Israel has increased its strikes within Syria, including hitting Iranian forces, Syrian air defenses, and Syrian arms production facilities. On December 4, the heads of the militaries of Iran (Chief of Staff Major General Mohammad Bagheri), Iraq (Major General Yahya Rasool), Russia (Defense Minister Andrey Belousov), and Syria (General Abdul Karim Mahmoud Ibrahim) met to assess the situation in Syria. They discussed the movement of HTS down from Aleppo and agreed that with the fragile ceasefire in Lebanon and the Syrian government’s weakened forces, this was a “dangerous scenario.” While they said that they would support the government in Damascus, there were no concrete steps taken by them. The Israeli attacks inside Syria meanwhile increased the demoralization within the Syrian army, which has not been properly reorganized after the stalemate began with the rebels in Idlib in 2017.

When Russia entered the conflict in Syria in 2015, the Russian military command insisted that the Syrian government no longer permit pro-government militia groups (such as the Kataeb al-Ba’ath and the Shabbiha) to operate independently. Instead, these groups were integrated into the Fourth and Fifth Corps under Russian command. Meanwhile, the Iranian officers organized their own battalions of Syrian soldiers. The soldiers’ declining economic standards combined with the foreign command accelerated the demoralization. Even the Republican Guard, tasked with defending Damascus and in particular the presidential palace, had lost much of its historical power.

At no point after 2011 was the Syrian government in control of the territory of the country. Already, since 1973, Israel had seized the Golan Heights. Then, during 2011, Turkey had eaten into the borderlands of northern Syria, while the Kurdish resistance forces (YPG and PKK) had formed a zone alongside the Syria-Turkey border. Northwestern Syria had been taken by the rebels, who included not only HTS but also a range of Turkish-backed militia groups. Northeastern Syria was occupied by the United States, which had taken charge of the oil fields. In this region, the US forces contested the Islamic State, which had been pushed out of both northern Iraq and northeastern Syria, but which continued to appear in spurts. Meanwhile, in southern Syria, the government had made a series of hasty agreements with the rebels to provide an appearance of peace. In cities such as Busra al-Sham, Daraa, Houran, and Tafas, the government could not send any of its officials; these, like Idlib, had come under rebel control. When HTS moved on Damascus, the rebels in the south rose up as did the rebels in the country’s eastern edge along the border with Iraq. The reality of Assad’s weakness became apparent.

Israel’s Advantage

As if in a coordinated fashion, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu went to the occupied Golan Heights, which Israel seized from Syria in 1973, and announced, “This is a historic day in the history of the Middle East.” He then said that his government had ordered the Israeli army to invade the UN buffer zone between the Israeli occupation of Golan and the Syrian army posts that had been established during the armistice of 1974. Israeli tanks moved into the countryside of Quneitra Governorate and took over the main town. The border between Israel and Syria has now been shaped by this invasion, since Israel has now moved several kilometers into Syria to seize almost the entire length of the border.

During the final days of the HTS advance to Damascus, the Israeli air force provided the rebels with air support. They bombed military bases and the headquarters of Syrian intelligence in the center of Damascus. With the excuse that they wanted to destroy weapons depots before the rebels seized them, the Israelis struck bases that housed Syrian troops and stockpiles of weapons that the Syrian army might have used to defend Damascus (this included the Mezzah Air Base). Israeli officials have said that they will continue these air strikes, but have not indicated whom they plan to target.

The Israeli assault on Syria deepened during the protest movement in 2011. As fighting between the rebels and the Syrian government spread across southern Syria, near the Israeli border, Israel began to fire across the border at Syrian forces. In March 2013, for instance, the Israelis fired missiles at Syrian military posts, weakening them and strengthening the rebels. At the end of 2013, Israel created Division 210, a special military command, to begin engagements along the Israel-Syrian armistice line. Importantly, when the HTS predecessor and al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra began to make gains along the Israeli line of control, Israel did not strike them. Instead, Israel hit the Syrian government through shooting down Syrian air force jets and assassinating senior Syrian allies (such as General Mohammad Ali Allahdadi, an Iranian general, in January 2015, and Samir Kuntar, a Fatah leader, in late 2015). A former press officer in Damascus told me that the Israelis effectively provided air support for the HTS assault on the capital.

Syria’s Future

Assad left Syria without making any announcement. It is said by former government officials in Damascus that some senior leaders left with him or left for the Iraqi border before the fall of Damascus. The silence from Assad has bewildered many Syrians who had believed fundamentally that the state would protect them from the onslaught of groups such as HTS. It is a sign of the collapse of the Assad government that his Republican Guard did not try to defend the city and that he left without any words of encouragement to his people.

The country is polarized regarding the new government. Sections of the population that had seen their way of life degraded by the war and sanctions welcome the opening, and they have been on the streets celebrating the new situation. The larger context for the Middle East is not their immediate concern, although depending on Israel’s actions, this might change. A considerable section is concerned about the behavior of the Islamists, who use terms of disparagement against non-Sunni Muslims such as nusayriyya (for Alawites, the community of the al-Assad family) and rawafid (such as the large Shia population in Syria). Calling non-Sunni Muslims ahl al-batil or the “lost ones” and using strong Salafi language about apostasy and its punishment sets in motion fear amongst those who might be targets of attacks. Whether the new government will be able to control its forces motivated by this sectarian ideology remains to be seen.

Such sectarianism is only the opening of the contradictions that will emerge almost immediately. How will the new government deal with the Israeli, Turkish, and US incursions into Syrian territory? Will it seek to win back that land? What will be the relationship between the Syrian government and its neighbors, particularly Lebanon? Will the millions of Syrian refugees return to their home now that the basis for their migration has been removed, and if they return, what will be awaiting them inside Syria? And centrally, what will all this mean for the ongoing genocide of the Palestinians by the Israelis?

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Image Source: hstoops – Public Domain

On November 14, 2023, a month into Israel’s genocidal attack on the Palestinians in Gaza, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, one of the leaders of Ansar Allah and of the government of Yemen, delivered a speech that was broadcast on Al-Masirah television. “Our eyes are open to constant monitoring and searching for any Israeli ship,” he said. “The enemy relies on camouflage in its movement in the Red Sea, especially in Bab al-Mandab, and [does] not dare to raise Israeli flags on its ships.” The Bab al-Mandab, the Gate of Grief, is the 14-nautical-mile wide waterway between Djibouti and Yemen. What is interesting is that, by United Nations treaty, a country claims 12 nautical miles as its territorial limit; this means a large part of the waters are within Yemen’s jurisdiction.

Five days later, Yemeni commandos flew in a helicopter over Galaxy Leader, a cargo ship that is registered in the Bahamas and is operated by the Japanese NYK shipping line but that is partially owned by Abraham Ungar (one of Israel’s richest men). The ship continues to be held within Yemen’s territorial waters in the port of Saleef, with its 25 crew members as hostages in Al-Hudaydah governorate. This assault on Galaxy Leader, and then on several other Israeli-owned vessels, halted the traffic of goods to the Port of Eliat, which sits at the end of the Gulf of Aqaba. Squeezed between Egypt and Jordan, this port, which is the only non-Mediterranean Sea access for Israel, no longer has the level of cargo ships that it had before October 2023 and the private operator of the port has said it is almost bankrupt. Over the course of the past year, the port has been hit by drone and missile strikes emanating from Bahrain, Iraq, and Yemen.

U.S. Strikes Are Not Working

Yemen’s government said that it would desist from any attack if Israel stopped its genocidal war against the Palestinians. Since the Israeli attack continues, Yemen’s attacks have also continued. These Yemeni attacks have provoked massive assaults on Yemen’s already fragile infrastructure—including an Israeli attack on Yemen’s port city of Hodeidah in July and punctual missile attacks by the United States. When U. S. President Joe Biden was asked if the U. S. airstrikes and missile strikes on Yemen were working, he answered bluntly: “When you say ‘working,’ are they stopping the Houthis? No. Are they going to continue? Yes.” In other words, Yemen’s government—erroneously called the Houthis after the Zaydi tradition of Islam followed by a quarter of the Yemeni population—is not going to cease its attacks on Israel just because the U.S. and the Israelis have been hitting their country. Yemeni opposition to the Israeli genocide exceeds the Zaydi community, the Ansar Allah movement, and the Yemeni government. Even Tawakkol Karman, who received the Nobel Prize for Peace in 2011 and is a critic of the Yemeni government, has been vocal in her criticism of Israel.

Biden’s admission that the U.S. missile strikes will not stop Yemen from its attacks has been accurate. Yemen faced a murderous bombardment from Saudi Arabia from 2015 to 2023, with the Saudis destroying large parts of the infrastructure in Yemen. And yet, the Yemenis have maintained the ability to strike Israeli targets. In October 2024, the United States military deployed B-2 Spirit bombers to hit what the Pentagon called, “five underground targets.” It was not clear if these weapons depots were destroyed, but it does show the increasing desperation of the U.S. and Israel to stop the Yemeni attacks. The names of the U.S. missions (Operation Prosperity Guardian and Operation Poseidon Archer) sound impressive. They are backed by a roster of carrier strike groups to protect Israel and to hit Yemen as well as groups that attempt to deter Israel’s genocide. There are at least 40,000 U.S. troops in the Middle East and at any given time at least one carrier strike group with aircraft carriers and destroyers. According to the U.S. Navy, there are two destroyers in the Mediterranean Sea (USS Bulkeley and USS Arleigh Burke) and two in the Red Sea (USS Cole and USS Jason Dunham), with Carrier Strike Group 8, anchored by the aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman, en route to the Mediterranean as USS Abraham Lincoln goes off to the Pacific Ocean. There is a considerable amount of U.S. firepower in the area around Israel.

A Political Solution

Biden has not been the only person to say that the U.S. attacks on Yemen have failed. U. S. Vice Admiral George Wikoff, who leads Operation Prosperity Guardian, addressed an audience in Washington, D.C. from his headquarters in Bahrain in August. Wikoff said that the United States cannot “find a centralized center of gravity” for the Yemenis, which means that it cannot apply “a classic deterrence policy.” If the United States cannot strike fear into the leadership of the Yemeni government, then it cannot halt the Yemeni attacks on Israeli shipping or infrastructure. “We have certainly degraded their capability,” Wikoff said referring to the drones and missiles shot down by the U.S. weapons. Wikoff did not mention that each of the Yemeni missiles and drones cost about $2,000, while the U.S. missiles used to shoot them down cost $2 million. In the end, the Yemenis might be the ones degrading the U.S. military (the Wall Street Journal reported in October that the U.S. is running low on air-defense missiles, and the same paper reportedin June that the U.S. had spent $1 billion on its war on Yemen since October 2023). Like Biden, Wikoff reflected: “Have we stopped them? No.” In an interesting aside, Wikoff said, “The solution is not going to come at the end of a weapon system.”

As far as the Yemeni government is concerned, the only solution will come when Israel ceases its genocide. But even a ceasefire might not be sufficient. In early November, the United Nations official Louise Wateridge posted a video on X of the desolation in northern Gaza, and then wrote, “An entire society now a graveyard.” The ability of the Yemeni government to cease shipping to Israel and to pin down the United States off its coast might embolden it to continue with this if Israel continues its illegal policies of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid. Both Wikoff and Biden agree that the U.S. policy has not worked, and Wikoff even said that the solution is not going to be through military force. It will have to be political.

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Indigenous leader Lidia Thorpe confronts King Charles III during his visit to Australia. (Screengrab from X.)

If you go to the bluff at Kings Park in Perth, Australia, you can overlook the Swan River and enjoy a remarkable view. Across the bay, there is a phalanx of steel and glass buildings that rise to the skies. Each of these buildings carries a sign that glistens in the sharp sun: BHP, Rio Tinto, Chevron, Deloitte, and others. Kings Park no longer survives merely with the patronage of the British King, who continues to claim sovereignty over Australia. Part of it is now named Rio Tinto Kings Park, needing the corporate profits from this enormous mining company to sustain its charms. Down one of the avenues of the park there are trees set apart by a few meters, and at the base of these trees are small markers for dead soldiers from past wars; these are not graves but remembrances that are crowned by Australian flags. The park brings together the three crucial pieces of Western Australia, this province of which Perth is the capital which is the size of Western Europe: the British monarchy, the mining companies and its affiliates, and the role of the military.

Of Kings

A few days before I arrived in Canberra, an aboriginal senator, Lidia Thorpe, interrupted the celebration of King Charles III to say, “You are not my king. This is not your land.” It was a powerful demonstration against the treatment of Australia ever since the arrival of English ships to the country’s east in January 1788. In fact, the British crown does claim title to the entirety of the Australian landmass. King Charles III is head of the 56-country Commonwealth and the total land area of the Commonwealth takes up 21 percent of the world’s total land. It is quite remarkable to realize that King Charles III is nominally in charge of merely 22 percent less than Queen Victoria (1819-1901).

The day after Senator Thorpe’s statement, a group of aboriginal leaders met with King Charles III to discuss the theme of “sovereignty.” In Sydney, Elder Allan Murray of the Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council welcomed the King to Gadigal land and said, “We’ve got stories to tell, and I think you witnessed that story yesterday in Canberra. But the story is unwavering, and we’ve got a long way to achieve what we want to achieve and that’s our own sovereignty.” When Captain James Cook (1770) and Captain Arthur Phillip (1788) arrived on this Gadigal land, they were met by people who had lived in the area for tens of thousands of years. In 1789, a smallpox epidemic brought by the British killed 53 percent of the Gadigal, and eventually—through violence—they reduced the population to three in 1791. It is accurate, then, for Elder Murray to have said to the press after King Charles III left that “The Union Jack was put on our land without our consent. We’ve been ignored.” What remained were barrangal dyara (skin and bones, as the Gadigal would have said). Given the value of the land in Sydney, the Gadigal clan would today be one of the richest groups in the world. But apart from a few descendants who do not have title to the land, the ghosts of the ancestors walk these streets.

Of Minerals

Australia is one of the widest countries in the world, with a large desert in its middle section. Underneath its soil, which has been walked on by a range of Aboriginal communities for tens of thousands of years, is wealth that is estimated to be $19.9 trillion. This estimate includes the country’s holdings of coal, copper, iron ore, gold, uranium, and rare earth elements. In 2022, Australia’s mining companies—which are also some of the largest in the world—extracted at least 27 minerals from the subsoil, including lithium (Australia is the world’s largest producer of lithium, annually providing 52 percent of the global market’s lithium).

On May 24, 2020, Rio Tinto’s engineers and workers blew up a cave in the Pilbara area of Western Australia to expand their Brockman 4 iron ore mine. The cave in the Juukan Gorge had been used by the Puutu Kunti Kurrama people for 46,000 years and had been kept by them as a community treasure. In 2013, Rio Tinto approached the Western Australian government to seek an exemption to destroy the cave and to extend the mine. They received this exemption based on a law called the Aboriginal Heritage Act of 1972, which had been drafted to favor mining companies. Rio Tinto, with substantial operations in Western Australia and around the world, has a market capitalization of $105.7 billion, making it—after BHP (market cap of $135.5)—the second largest minerals company in the world (both Rio Tinto and BHP are headquartered in Melbourne). Hastily, BHP began to reconsider its permission to destroy 40 cultural sites for its South Flank iron mine extension in the Pilbara region (and after its investigation and conversation with the Banjima community) decided to save 10 sites.

Craig and Monique Oobagooma live in the northernmost homestead in Australia near the Robinson River. They are part of the Wanjina Wunggurr, whose lands are now used for the extraction of uranium and other metals and minerals. The uranium mines in the north are owned and operated by Paladin Energy, another Perth-based mining company that also owns mines in Malawi and Namibia. There is also a large military base in nearby Yampi. Craig told me that when he walks his land, he can dig beneath the soil and find pink diamonds. But, he says, he puts them back. “They are sacred stones,” he says. Some parts of the land can be used for the betterment of his family, but not all of it. Not the sacred stones. And not the ancestral sites, of which there are only a few that remain.

Of Militaries

In 2023, the governments of Australia and the United Kingdom signed an agreement to preserve “critical minerals” for their own development and security. Such an agreement is part of the New Cold War against China, to ensure that it does not directly own the “critical minerals.” Between 2022 and 2023, Chinese investment in mining decreased from AU$1809 million to AU$34 million. Meanwhile, Australian investment in building military infrastructure for the United States has increased dramatically, with the Australian government expanding the Tindal air base in Darwin (Northern Territory) to hold U.S. B-1 and B-52 nuclear bombers, expanding the submarine docking stations along the coastline of Western Australia, and expanding the Exmouth submarine and deep space communications facility. All of this is part of Australia’s historically high defense budget of $37 billion.

In Sydney, near the Central Train station, I met Euranga, who lived in a tunnel which he had painted with the history of the Aboriginal peoples of Eora (Sydney). He had been part of the Stolen Generation, one in three Aboriginal children stolen from their families and raised in boarding schools. The school hurt his spirit, he told me. “This is our land, but it is also not our land,” he said. Beneath the land is wealth, but it is being drained away by private mining companies and for the purposes of military force. The old train station nearby looks forlorn. There is no high-speed rail in vast Australia. Such a better way to spend its precious resources, as Euranga indicated in his paintings: embrace the worlds of the Aboriginal communities who have been so harshly displaced and build infrastructure for people rather than for wars.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

After news broke that Han Kang—the South Korean author—had won the Nobel Prize for Literature, her father—the novelist Han Seung-won—asked her where she wanted to hold a press conference to talk about the award. She published her fiction with Changbi and her poetry with Munhakdongne, both of which hoped to host her. Initially, Han Kang, the 53-year-old author of the 2016 Booker Prize-winning The Vegetarian, thought that she would talk to the press. But then, after reflection, she told her father that he should make a statement in her place. “With the war intensifying and people being carried out dead every day,” she told the press through her father, “How can we have a celebration or a press conference?”

The Nobel Committee awarded the Peace Prize this year to the organization Nihon Hidankyo “for its efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons and for demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again.” The group was formed in 1956 by survivors of the U.S. nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Its mission from the first has been to ban nuclear and other horrendous weapons. Part of its impact had been to hold Hiroshima Day events on August 6 to publicize the dangers of such weapons (these events have sadly become less impactful, but perhaps the Nobel Prize will raise their status). At its press conference, one of the co-heads of Nihon Hidankyo Toshiyuki Mimaki (who had been struck by atomic radiation in Hiroshima at the age of three), said, “I thought the prize would go to those working hard in Gaza… In Gaza, bleeding children are being held [by their parents]. It’s like Japan 80 years ago.”

It is like Japan in its effects: the “bleeding children” that Mimaki referred to have been a constant sight for the past year. But it is not like Japan in its execution. Only a small number of people knew the deadly potential of the atomic bomb when the U.S. military dropped it on Hiroshima and then three days later Nagasaki. After the bombs fell, first Japan and then the United States prevented journalists from reporting on their impact. One hundred and fourteen employees of Chugoku Shimbun, the main newspaper of Hiroshima, died in the attack. Those who remained created Verbal Reporting Corps or kudentai to go about and provide information in person about relief opportunities. Yoshito Matsushige from the paper took some of the most evocative photographs of the devastation. Two foreign reporters—Leslie Nakashima (Asian American) and Wilfred Burchett (Australian)—broke through the barricades to report from Hiroshima. “What had been a city of 300,000 population had vanished,” Nakashima wrote for United Press International on August 31, 1945.

The Bombs Continue to Drop

In fact, the city had not vanished. Despite the overwhelming Israeli bombardment (far greater firepower used in Gaza than on Hiroshima and Nagasaki), the Palestinians remain across Gaza in their homes and in shelters. They refuse to leave, as many of them tell me, because they remember the stories of their grandparents and parents from 1948; when the Israelis chased them off from their villages then, they never allowed them to return. That feeling of defiance combined with the fact that there really is nowhere to go has kept the Palestinians amid rubble.

And the Israelis have not stopped their bombing. There is not one atom bomb, but thousands of lethal bombs that continue to rain down from Israeli jets. In December 2023, the Israeli authorities designated al-Mawasi, just west of Khan Younis, as a humanitarian or safe zone. Despite that, Israel has continued to attack settlements and shelter within this safe zone, reducing what was already measly to a fraction of what had been designated for the people. The density of population per square kilometer in this zone is roughly 35,000, far greater than the densest place on earth (Macau, a small city, with a population density of 21,000), and—for comparison—the density of population in the United States is 35 people per square kilometer.

In one week this month, the Israelis struck three schools that have become shelters in Deir al-Balah, 15 kilometers north of al-Mawasi, as reported by Abubaker Abed: Ahmed al-Kurd school (October 5), al-Ayesha School (October 3), and Rufaida al-Aslamia Secondary School for Girls (October 10). The Israeli attacks on Rufaida school just before 11:30 a.m. killed 28 Palestinians, many of them children and the elderly, and among them two staff of the United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF). The bombs landed, as Imad Zakout reported, when the coordinators of the shelter were handing out milk formula to the children and their parents.

The bombs dropped by Israel—the GBU-39—are manufactured by Boeing and are designed to scatter shrapnel and cause great physical harm even to those who survive the blast. No one in the shelter takes Israel’s contention that it struck Hamas operatives. The people have been identified, and everyone knows them and knows that they are not part of any Hamas structure. The youngest person killed was Mila Alaa al-Sultan (age six) and the oldest was Sumaya Younis al-Kafarna (age 87). Among the dead are a much-loved policeman named Salem Ruwaishid al-Waqadi (age 26) and the administrator of the school named Ahmed Adel Hamouda (age 58).

Humans Are Scary

Those who have read Han Kang’s Human Acts (2016) will not be surprised by her reaction to the Nobel Prize and the genocide in Gaza. When she was 10 years old, in 1980, the South Korean military dictatorship of Chun Doo-hwan unleashed terrible force against the Gwangju Uprising for democracy. This violence, in Han Kang’s hometown, led to the deaths and injuries of thousands of people. When she was 13, her father showed her an album of photographs of the violence. “If I had been older,” Han Kang reflected in 2016, “I would have experienced a social awakening out of anger toward the new military regime. But I was too young. My first thought was that humans are scary.”

Human Acts tells the story of several characters from May 1980 to the present: Jeong-dae dies in the uprising, Eun-sook and Kang Dong-ho gather the dead, Kim Jin-su goes to prison and commits suicide ten years later, while Seon-ju is tortured by the military. These are powerful stories of human courage and dignity in the face of terrible violence. That is what Han Kang and others see in the Palestinian predicament: the Israeli violence is ugly, but the remarkable resilience of the Palestinians demands that humans commit acts that refuse the feeling that “humans are scary.”

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On September 18, 2024, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) passed a resolution that demanded that Israel immediately withdraw from the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) of East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank. The resolution used strong language, saying that “Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is unlawful” and that it is “under an obligation” to end its “unlawful presence” in the OPT “as rapidly as possible.” The resolution was submitted by the State of Palestine, which was recognized as a bona fide part of the United Nations only in June of 2024 as part of the global disgust with Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The result was predictable: while 43 countries abstained, 124 voted for the resolution and only 14 voted against it (with the United States and Israel at their head). It is now perfectly legal to say that Israel’s occupation of the OPT is illegal and that this occupation must end immediately.

The UNGA resolution follows the ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in July 2024. This ICJ ruling argued that Israel’s continued seizure of the OPT is illegal and that it must be ended immediately. The language of the ICJ is very strong: “The sustained abuse by Israel of its position as an occupying Power, through annexation and an assertion of permanent control over the Occupied Palestinian Territory and continued frustration of the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination, violates fundamental principles of international law and renders Israel’s presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory unlawful.” There is no ambiguity about this statement, and none in the UNGA resolution that followed.

Rains of Heaven

Going from one village to another in Palestine’s West Bank, I was shown broken water cistern after broken water cistern. Each time the story was the same. Palestinians, starved of water by the illegal Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestine Territory (OPT) and by the Israeli military, try their best to harvest rainwater in cisterns. But each time the Israelis find out about this ancient human practice, the Israeli military shows up and destroys the cisterns. It has become part of the ritual of the Israeli occupation. After the 1967 war, the Israeli government issued Military Order 158 (November 1967) and Military Order 498 (November 1974) which forced Palestinians to seek permits from the Israeli military before they could build any water installation.

During one of these visits, an elderly Palestinian man asked me if I had read either the Torah or the Bible. I told him that I had read bits and pieces of the Bible, but not systematically. He then proceeded to tell me a story from Deuteronomy about the exodus of the Jews from Egypt, where they had been enslaved. Egypt, they are told, was a land of milk and honey, while the land before them—Palestine—is a land that suffers from a lack of water. The Jews would have to rely upon the “rains of heaven” and not the rivers that irrigated Egypt. These rains of heaven, said the elderly Palestinian man, “are denied to us.”

Israelis who live in the illegal settlements in the West Bank consume on average 247 liters of water per person per day, while the Palestinians can access at most 89 liters per person per day (the World Health Organization or WHO minimum amount is 100 liters per person per day). It bears repeating to say that the Israelis live in illegal settlements. This illegality is not made in moral terms but in terms of international law. Several United Nations Security Council resolutions have said that Israel is in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention as it extends its settlements in the West Bank: Resolution 446(March 1979), Resolution 478 (August 1980), and Resolution 2334(December 2016). The 2024 ICJ ruling and the new UNGA resolution underlie the illegality. We did not need more laws to clarify the situation, but it does help that the new statements are unequivocal.

Water in Gaza

A decade ago, the only time I was in Gaza, I was horrified by the lack of basic water supplies. Wadi Gaza, which runs through the Gaza Strip, is the culmination of rivers that stretch into the West Bank (Wadi al-Khalil) and rivers that run into the al-Naqab desert (Wadi Besor). It would be an act of foolishness to drink from Wadi Gaza or from the coastal aquifer, most of which was polluted by insufficient sewage services in Gaza long before this genocidal war. Most people in Gaza, even in 2014, bought water from expensive private tankers. There was no other choice.

If the situation in Gaza was objectionable a decade ago, it is now beyond belief. The average Palestinian in Gaza, who has been forcibly ejected from their homes (most of them bombed), now survives on an average of 4.74 liters of water per person per day (that is 95.53 liters less than the WHO-mandated minimum for a person to survive). Since October 2023, the daily use of water amongst the Palestinians of Gaza has declined by 94 percent. The scale of the destruction of Gaza’s infrastructure is overwhelming (as shown by the UN Satellite Centre). In April 2024, only 6 percent of Rafah’s water and sanitation infrastructure showed signs of damage, but by June, the Israelis had destroyed 67.6 percent of all the infrastructure. It has been clearly demonstrated that the Israelis are targeting the basic elements of life, such as water, to ensure the annihilation of the Palestinians in the OPT.

And so, this is precisely why the UNGA voted overwhelmingly for Israel to exit from the OPT and cease its annexationist policies. The Israeli government responded with defiance, saying that the resolution “tells a one-sided, fictional story” in which there is no violence against Israel. However, what the Israeli government ignores is the occupation, which frames the entire conflict. A people who are occupied have the right to resist their occupation, which makes the violence against Israel important to register but not central to the argument. The ICJ and the UNGA say that Israel’s occupation must end. That point is not addressed by the Israeli government, which pretends that there is no occupation and that they have the right to annex as much land as possible even if this means ethnic cleansing. Cutting access to water, for example, is one of the instruments of that ceaseless, genocidal violence.

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Photograph Source: Saleh Najm and Anas Sharif – CC BY 4.0

It is almost as if the Israeli army is trying to gather as many Palestinians as possible in one place and then kill them all. Ahmed Abed and his family fled the Dalal al-Maghribi school in early August after an Israeli airstrike displaced them. That airstrike killed 15 Palestinians who had taken refuge there after Israel had bombed their homes in the Ash Shujaiyeh neighborhood of Gaza City. The family arrived at the al-Taba’een school, a private school with an attached mosque, that sheltered 2,500 people. Since the Israelis began their most recent bombardment of Gaza in October 2023, Palestinians have taken refuge in private schools and in schools run by the United Nations (UN). The UN reports that in the Gaza Strip, the Israeli attacks have damaged 190 of their facilities, most of them schools. There are few sanctuaries left in Gaza. These schools—whether private or UN—are the only places that were seen as relatively safe.

At 4:30 a.m. on August 10, Israeli jet fighters flew over Gaza City and dropped U.S.-made GBU-39 250-pound bombs on the al-Taba’een school and mosque. During that time, a large number of the inhabitants had lined up at the mosque to go for the Fajr or dawn prayer. The bombs hit the people near the mosque, killing at least 100 Palestinians. It is a grotesque massacre that took place just when the United States decided to rearm Israel with these kinds of weapons. Sarah Leah Whitson, former Middle East and North Africa division director for Human Rights Watch, wrote that the arms sales to Israel by the United States on the day of this bombardment demonstrated a “Pavlovian conditioning for a feral army.”

The United States, despite occasional statements about withholding weapons, has consistently armed Israel during this genocidal war. Since 1948, the United States has provided $130 billion worth of weapons to Israel. Between 2018 and 2022, 79 percent of all weapons sold to Israel came from the United States (the next was Germany, which supplied 20 percent of Israel’s arms imports). The U.S. arms sales have come in deliberately small bunches of under $25 million per sale so that they do not require the scrutiny of the U.S. Congress, and therefore public debate. From October 2023 through March, the U.S. approved 100 of these small sales, which amount to over $1 billion in weapons sales, including the GBU-39. It is important to know that the bomb, created in the United States, was likely loaded onto an Israeli fighter jet by a U.S. technician seconded to the Israeli bases.

A Pattern of Targeting Schools

Mahmoud Basal, the spokesperson for Gaza’s civil defense unit, said that the medics who got to the scene at the al-Taba’een school, many of them already veterans of this kind of violence, were confounded by what they found. “The school area is strewn with dead bodies and body parts,” he said. “It is very difficult for paramedics to identify a whole dead body. There’s an arm here, a leg there. Bodies are ripped to pieces. Medical teams stand helpless before this horrific scene.” At least 40,000 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli bombings since last October, and 2 million Palestinians have been displaced from their homes.

In the lead-up to the attack on al-Taba’een school, the Israeli forces have been escalating their bombings of schools in Gaza that serve as shelters. In July, the Israeli military struck 17 schools in Gaza, killing at least 163 Palestinians. In the week before August 10, Israel hit the Khadija and Ahmad al-Kurd schools in Deir al-Balah killing 30 Palestinians (July 27), the Dalal Moghrabi school in Ash Shujaiyeh killing 15 Palestinians (August 1), the Hamama and Huda schools in Sheikh Radwan killing sixteen Palestinians (August 3), the Hassan Salame and Nasser schools in al-Nassr killing 25 Palestinians (August 4), and the al-Zahraa and Abdul Fattah Hamouda schools killing 17 Palestinians (August 8).

This sequence of attacks on schools came before the August 10 bombing, which shows that there is a pattern of targeting civilians who are seeking shelter in schools. The massacre at al-Taba’een is the 21st attack by Israel against a school that has been serving as a shelter since July 4. Ahmed Abed lost his brother-in-law Abdullah al-Arair in the massacre at al-Taba’een. “There is nowhere else to go,” he said. “Every place in Gaza is a target.”

Israeli Denials

Israel accepted that it had bombed these schools but denied that it had killed civilians. In fact, Israel no longer names these places such as al-Taba’een and Dalal Moghrabi as schools; it calls them “military facilities.” The Israeli military said that it had killed at least 20 “terror operatives” since it is reported to have claimed to have hit an “‘active’ Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad command room embedded within a mosque.” The Israeli authorities released the names of at least 19 people who they claimed were senior operatives of Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

The EuroMed Human Rights Monitor, an independent organization based in Switzerland, studied the claims made by Israel’s military and found them to be factually wanting. The Monitor’s staff went to the school, did a survey of the survivors, and reviewed the Israeli-controlled civil registry for the names. The team’s “preliminary investigation found that the Israeli army used names of Palestinians killed in Israeli raids—some of whom were killed in earlier raids—in its list.” The three people killed earlier, but whose names appeared in the Israeli lists, include Ahmed Ihab al-Jaabari (killed on December 5, 2023), Youssef al-Wadiyya (killed on August 8, 2024), and Montaser Daher (killed on August 9, 2024). The Israeli list also had three elderly civilians who have no connection to any militant group, including Abdul Aziz Misbah al-Kafarna (a school principal) and Yousef Kahlout (an Arabic language teacher and deputy mayor of Beit Hanoun). The list also includes six civilians, “some of whom were even Hamas opponents.”

It is remarkable that even in their own statements the Israeli officials seem unsure about their claims. Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari of the Israeli military said that “various intelligence indications” show that there was a “high probability” that Ashraf Juda, a commander of the Islamic Jihad’s Central Camps Brigade, was in al-Taba’een school. But the Israelis could not confirm it. So, the Israelis killed 100 civilians even though they were not certain if their target was in the facility at that time.

The Israeli army has set up a pattern for its genocidal campaign. It first bombs civilian neighborhoods, sending terrified people into shelters such as schools and hospitals. Then, it announces blanket evacuation orders from an entire area, forcing people in these shelters to live in fear since many of them do not have the wherewithal to leave them for other places (indeed, “There is nowhere else to go,” said Ahmed Abed). Having made these evacuation orders, Israel then bombs the protected shelters, including hospitals and schools, with the argument that these are military targets. This formula was enacted in Gaza City and in other parts of Gaza.

Now, Israel has announced forced evacuation orders for people in Khan Younis, a city in central Gaza. Alongside these orders, Israeli forces have begun aerial and artillery attacks at the eastern edge of Khan Younis. We will now see these kinds of attacks on schools and hospitals that are shelters for desperate people in the center of Gaza, with every building seen by the Israelis as a legitimate target.

 This article was produced by Globetrotter.

The post Every Place in Gaza—Including Schools—Is a Target appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.