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By Franklin Frederick

This year’s Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Maria Corina Machado, a choice that once again demonstrates the European ruling class’s profound contempt for democracy. It is important to remember that the prestigious Sakharov Prize for 2024 had already been awarded to Venezuela’s far right. This prize is awarded by the European Parliament, according to its website:

The Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought

“Each year Parliament awards the Sakharov Prize, including a monetary award of €50,000, to honour and support exceptional individuals and organisations defending human rights, democracy and fundamental freedoms.

The prize, launched in 1988, is named after Andrei Sakharov, a Soviet nuclear physicist and a strong defender of democracy and human rights. He won the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to raise awareness to the dangers of the nuclear arms race.”

“The European Parliament awarded the 2024 Sakharov Prize for the Freedom of Thought to María Corina Machado as the leader of the democratic forces in Venezuela and President-elect Edmundo González Urrutia, representing all Venezuelans inside and outside the country fighting for the re-institution of freedom and democracy.

“This award is not just a recognition but also a reminder that the fight for freedom is never in vain. The future of Venezuela belongs to its people and the European Parliament stands proudly with them,” said Roberta Metsola, President of the European Parliament.”

The committee responsible for the Nobel Peace Prize justified its choice of Maria Corina Machado “for her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.”

The committee also reports:

“Ms. Machado has been a key, unifying figure in a political opposition that was once deeply divided – an opposition that found common ground in the demand for free elections and representative government. This is precisely what lies at the heart of democracy: our shared willingness to defend the principles of popular rule, even though we disagree. “ (…)

Venezuela’s authoritarian regime makes political work extremely difficult. As a founder of Súmate, an organisation devoted to democratic development, Ms. Machado stood up for free and fair elections more than 20 years ago. As she said: “It was a choice of ballots over bullets.” In political office and in her service to organisations since then, Ms. Machado has spoken out for judicial independence, human rights and popular representation. She has spent years working for the freedom of the Venezuelan people.

Ahead of the election of 2024, Ms. Machado was the opposition’s presidential candidate, but the regime blocked her candidacy. She then backed the representative of a different party, Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia, in the election. Hundreds of thousands of volunteers mobilised across political divides.»

What both the European Parliament and the Nobel Peace Prize committee are trying to do is legitimize the Venezuelan far right as a “democratic” force and consequently reinforce the narrative of President Maduro’s “dictatorial” government. They act as instruments of the European ruling class and its interests. Information about Maria Corina Machado really is widely available, if the European Parliament and the Nobel Peace Prize Committee were truly interested in defending democracy.

Regarding the 2024 election, a public opinion poll conducted in Venezuela reports the following:

“María Corina Machado’s role as leader of the far-right opposition has been rejected by 64.6% of Venezuelans, according to a study conducted by polling company Datanálisis.

With these disapproval ratings, María Corina Machado is 10 points below her previous overall popularity rating, reflecting a decline in public perception of her leadership, which has been characterized by adherence to the US political agenda and refusal to participate in the dialogue process promoted by the Venezuelan government.” (1)

And among many other articles published in various countries, I also cite this one published in Argentina:

“The violence of the right wing, which shows its true colors, generates widespread revulsion among the population, and this revulsion has certainly been the most important reason why the Venezuelan people did not elect them in times of scarcity, miserable wages, power cuts, gas shortages, preventable deaths due to lack of medicine, international blockades and sanctions, but also due to government mistakes. It was the racist and classist violence of the right wing that motivated that phrase so often heard in Venezuela over the last 10 years: We are suffering, but we do not want those who governed us before to return. María Corina Machado is the most genuine representative of this violence, as she is a white leader from an oligarchic family and has been linked to all the conspiracies, acts of vandalism, and guarimbas that have killed hundreds of Venezuelans. She represents the sector of the opposition that never wanted to run in elections and tried to violently remove Maduro from office. (2)

An important chronology of the violence perpetrated by the Venezuelan far right and published in Venezuela, ends with the following information:

“July 28 to August 3, 2024. Reelection of President Maduro. María Corina Machado and Edmundo González Urrutia again alleged electoral fraud and called for protests that resulted in an escalation of violence and destructive chaos, in a context of insurrection with criminal elements and coup tendencies. With a toll of 25 dead and 131 injured, most of the events were concentrated in the Capital District and the state of Aragua; 76.2% of the incidents occurred in the context of violent demonstrations, which were planned and organized, both the events themselves and their unfortunate consequences. Public and private property was destroyed, including educational and health facilities.” (3)

Recently, renowned Latin American political expert Dr. Francisco Dominguez wrote:

“In late 2024, Prince, a professional mercenary, alongside Venezuela’s far right, promoted a plan to deploy a private army to Venezuela. He suggested that if the US raised the bounty on Maduro’s head to $100 million, targeting not only the president but also Diosdado Cabello and the entire government, they could “just sit back and wait for the magic to happen.” Prince and Venezuela’s far right even launched a crowdfunding campaign, Ya Casi Venezuela (“Almost There, Venezuela”), to collect the $100 million. (…)

 On January 12 2025, Prince sent a message of support to opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, urging her to “stay resolute.”

Prince had pushed for the bounty to be raised to $100m, but when the Biden administration ignored him, he secured backing from Senators Marco Rubio and Rick Scott, who share his objectives. On September 20 2024, Scott and Rubio introduced the Securing Timely Opportunities for Payment and Maximising Awards for Detaining Unlawful Regime Officials Act of 2024 (the STOP Maduro Act), allocating $100m — taken from seized Venezuelan assets — to fund Prince’s efforts to depose Maduro.”

Long before all this, in 2014, a group of researchers, parliamentarians, and scholars, including Jeremy Corbyn, Dr. Francisco Dominguez, Ken Loach, and John Pilger, among others, signed a letter published by The Guardian newspaper in which they stated:

“We deplore the wave of violence from minority and extremist sections of Venezuela’s opposition, that left three dead, 60 injured and saw physical assaults on government institutions, including shots and Molotov cocktails attacks on the state TV channel and a state governor’s residency. This followed a recently launched campaign by Venezuela’s extreme right for La Salida (the ousting) of the government of President Maduro before his constitutional mandate ends in 2019. La Salida is led by extremist politicians Leopoldo López and María Corina Machado, who were both implicated in the 2002 coup in Venezuela. This is not the first time that the sections of the opposition have sought to oust the elected government by unconstitutional means, having lost at the ballot box.”(4)

Even more serious is this information, published on May 28, 2024 (5):

“Today, opposition member María Corina Machado, better known as La Sayona, who is traveling around the country asking Venezuelans to vote for the opposition candidate, Edmundo González, is the same person who in 2018 sent a letter to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then-Argentine President Mauricio Macri calling for an attack on Venezuela under the banner of ‘regime change.’ “

“On her social media account, the opposition justifies the use of force against Venezuela based on false arguments related to drug trafficking and terrorism, which supposedly represented a ‘real threat to other countries, including, and especially, Israel.’”

I am convinced that the international community, in accordance with the doctrine of responsibility to protect, is called upon to give Venezuelans the support they need to promote urgent regime change, with a view to restoring national and international security. For this reason, I recently sent letters to several world leaders with the aim of promoting, before the United Nations Security Council, the adoption of effective measures to protect Venezuela through the promotion of regime change, a measure that necessarily implies a strengthening of international security. Today, I want to ask Israel and Argentina to contribute their experience and influence to move toward a precise and urgent decision-making process in the Security Council,” was La Sayona’s request for foreign troops to mine Venezuelan territory.

“For this reason, this sector of the Venezuelan opposition remained complicitly silent when plans were revealed that the Argentine army had contemplated in 2019 against Venezuela during Macri’s term, which would be carried out under the justification of humanitarian reasons.”

“That is why, even today, sectors of the Venezuelan far right do not condemn the massacre that Israel is perpetrating against the Palestinian people, as they are the same people who called for an invasion of Venezuela a few years ago, solely because of their ambitions to come to power and promote ‘regime change’.”

The European Parliament and the Nobel Peace Prize committee can hardly ignore all this information. Nor should they have ignored this interesting meeting that took place this year in Europe and was widely publicized:

“Convening under the banner of “Patriots for Europe”, two months ago the European extreme right met in Madrid, bringing political leaders of the Trumpist current together like some budget, fascist Avengers. Marching under the flags of ultra-nationalism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, antisemitism, and neo-fascism, representatives from France, Italy, Portugal, the Czech Republic, Austria, Estonia, Greece, and Poland were hosted by Santiago Abascal of Spain’s Vox on February 8.

“In addition to the often-repeated “Make Europe Great Again,” the summit’s other prominent slogan was Reconquista, an ideologically charged term referencing the European military and cultural efforts to expel Islamic influence, culminating in the late 15th century. Viewed by its supporters as a victory for Christianity, the Reconquista involved the forced conversion of Muslims and the expulsion of Jews, while coinciding with the onset of Spanish colonisation in the Caribbean and the Americas.

And while it’s easy to see why the slogan is used by a European ultra-right obsessed with reclaiming its colonialist past and expelling the ‘infidels’ from Europe, the presence of right-wingers from Venezuela and Israel seems less natural. But Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado and the Israeli Likud party took part in it, and present themselves as frontline fighters of the same Western civilisational battle. “

But the Nobel Peace Prize committee is right when it says that democracy is under threat,  since both the committee itself and the European Parliament are joining forces to defend the international far right and defame the democratically elected government of Venezuela. And this at a time when genocide is taking place in Palestine, arrogantly ignored by the European champions of democracy.

When Alfred Nobel established the prize that bears his name, he decided that the Nobel Peace Prize would be awarded by a committee based in Norway, not Sweden, like all the others. He could not have foreseen some strange events involving peaceful and developed Norway:

“The Norwegian Oil Fund, officially known as the Government Pension Fund Global (GPFG), is the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world, holding assets worth more than $2 trillion.

Built on the windfalls from Norway’s decades-old oil and gas industry, its scale dwarfs that of equivalent funds such as Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, the UAE’s Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, or the Kuwait Investment Authority, each of which holds assets worth around $1 trillion.

Its current investments include more than £20bn ($26bn) in shares in 49 of the world’s top 100 arms companies, the majority of which are either directly or indirectly supplying Israel.” (8)

Could this have influenced the decision of the Norwegian Nobel Committee?

Coincidentally, Venezuela has one of the largest oil reserves in the world, and European and US oil companies are eager to get their hands on these resources, which the Venezuelan government—blasphemy! —uses for the benefit of the Venezuelan people! Thus, the European Parliament and the Nobel Committee join Israel in defending “democracy.”

We can no longer have any illusions. What the Nobel Committee and the European Parliament want for the Global South is a return to colonial status—that is the “democracy” they defend, the “democracy” of white supremacy and its brutality.

Meanwhile, US forces are preparing to invade Venezuela, a military invasion now sanctioned by the Nobel Prize. The European “democracies” and their allies have failed to seize Ukraine’s wealth, and they have equally failed in their attempt to seize Iran’s natural resources. Now it is Venezuela’s turn.

Throughout the Global South and in Palestine, however, resistance against white supremacy and the neocolonial order is rising. And it is not the pathetic and desperate European Parliament or the Nobel Prize committee with its ridiculous decisions that will change that. History is moving in another direction, and the future does not lie in Europe.

Franklin Frederick is a Brazilian writer and political activist

14 October 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Azmat Ali

Today, Palestine stands at a stark crossroads: devastation and dignity, loss and light. The ongoing genocide in Gaza continues, carried out by Israel, yet Palestinians across the world, in science and culture, continue to win global recognition. Their recognition by prestigious institutions marks their resilience and identity. This sends a strong message to those who seek to erase the identity of Palestine: the movement is alive, and righteousness prevails.

On 8 October 2025, Palestinian-American scientist Omar Yaghi, along with Susumu Kitagawa (Japan) and Richard Robson (Australia), was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on the development of metal–organic frameworks (MOFs). Born and raised in a Palestinian refugee camp in Amman, Jordan, Yaghi recalls his childhood memories:

“I grew up in a very humble home. There were dozens of us in one small room, sharing it with the cattle we used to raise. I was born into a family of refugees, and my parents could barely read or write. So it’s quite a journey—and science allows you to do it. Science is the greatest equalising force in the world. Smart people, talented people, and skilled people exist everywhere. That’s why we should really focus on unleashing their potential.”

His work symbolises the power of knowledge rising above ruin and destruction.

In August 2025, a different kind of spotlight shone on 27-year-old Palestinian model Nadeen Ayoub, who announced her participation in Miss Universe 2025. Her appearance was more than pageantry; it was a representation of Palestinian identity. In an interview with The New Arab, she spoke about Gaza’s suffering and the resilience of Palestinian women and children. “We don’t just want to survive—we need to thrive,” she said. She urged the world not to remain silent about Gaza’s suffering but to raise its voice against it. She further added: “And when I say beauty, I don’t just mean physical beauty—I mean the beauty of our nation and our culture.”

Another moment of triumph came when the Israeli–Palestinian documentary No Other Land won the Oscar for Best Documentary. It chronicled the ongoing expulsion of Palestinians from Masafer Yatta. Its directors—Hamdan Ballal, Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor—worked across occupation lines, risking censorship and violence to tell a story of land, loss and belonging. Their win transformed testimony into a global platform and added another chapter to Palestinian resilience in the face of Israel’s genocide.

Israel continues its bombardment of Gaza City in an attempt to erase the land and Palestinian identity. More than 67,000 Palestinians have been killed, 92 per cent of homes have been damaged or destroyed, and millions have been displaced since October 2023. The UN has declared a famine in Gaza, gripping nearly the entire population, with almost one-third facing catastrophic starvation. Schools, hospitals and cultural centres lie in ruins.

In September, the independent UN Human Rights Commission concluded that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza—a verdict echoing through global forums. Earlier, Amnesty International, Scholars on Genocide, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights–Israel reached similar conclusions. In response, diplomats from 142 UN member states have expressed support for the recognition of a sovereign Palestinian state, a permanent ceasefire and a peaceful Middle East. Meanwhile, the proposed “Trump 20-Point Peace Plan” for Gaza now circulates as a tentative blueprint for reconstruction—fragile yet potentially transformative.

Still, life pulses through Gaza’s ruins. Youth volunteers organise community aid; artists paint on shattered walls; children write poems on UN flour bags. “Even under the rubble,” one young painter said, “we paint our history.” From street murals to online galleries, creativity becomes survival. Each brushstroke resists erasure; each word rebuilds memory.

Here, the spirit of Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts finds a new meaning. Ibsen warned that silence breeds decay—that the sins we conceal will one day speak. Gaza’s generation refuses that silence. They inherit trauma but translate it into defiance. Their inheritance is not disease, as in Ibsen’s play, but endurance. From the Nobel Prize to pageant stages, from refugee camps to digital screens, Palestinians are turning their ghosts into resistance and resilience.

In a world that once spoke about them, they now speak for themselves. Their message is simple and unbroken: we exist, we create, we win.

Azmat Ali is a student at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

14 October 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Ellen Isaacs 

As Israeli forces withdrew back from central Gaza, while continuing to occupy 53% of the territory, they gleefully torched homes and the last remaining sanitation plant in Gaza City. There will now be no source of potable water for Gazans attempting to return to their destroyed homes. 1 Gazans will still have to live in tents as 90% of structures are leveled. The sick and injured will not be able to receive anything approaching adequate health care in the destroyed and unsupplied hospitals. Food, water and medicine will long be difficult to access. Indeed, nearly all surviving Gazans are debilitated, ill and/or psychologically devastated, and nothing approaching their need for rehabilitation is available.

Why is this respite even happening now? It’s hard to be sure, but it likely has to do with Netanyahu bombing Qatar, which is so dear to Trump. Not only did Qatar give him his big beautiful (old) new plane, but they just agreed to build a new Trump golf course there and to $243.5 billion in deals.2 Qatar is also the site of the headquarters of US Central Command, which directs military operations across 21 countries, and recently agreed to build a training facility in Idaho for their pilots.3 All this on top of the growing worldwide hatred of Israel, bringing antagonism to the US along with it, was enough for Trump to order Netanyahu to stop his atrocities. Not give up ruling Palestine, just cool it.

Even as Hamas returned all the living hostages and bodies of many of the deceased, Israel began to release only 2000 of the 11,000 prisoners it holds, most without charges. Most of those prisoners have been severely mistreated, and many can expect to be soon re-arrested, as during the previous releases. As Israelis wildly celebrate the return of their captives, Palestinians have been forbidden to celebrate at all or face arrest. This alone makes it clear that there is no liberation involved in this settlement.

What is definite is that the occupation and oppression of Palestinians will not end. The wall around the West Bank and Gaza will remain. The occupation by Israeli soldiers, the check points, the military court system, the surveillance will remain throughout Palestine. All that may be new is that imperialists like the US and their wealthy autocratic allies in the Middle East – Qatar, Egypt, the UAE, Saudi Arabia – will have more direct access to Gaza in order to exploit its land and location. The fact remains that near 80% of the world’s fossil fuel resources they value so much are in the Middle East and cannot be ceded. There is no indication that Israel has in any way changed its goal of taking over all of Palestine and getting rid of Palestinians by death or displacement (see https://multiracialunity.org/2023/12/07/ethnic-cleansing-was-always-the-zionist-plan/).

We do not know if Hamas plans to disarm as Israel demands, but we doubt it. Thus Israel may seize upon this or many other issues to restart its war of annihilation. Even if hostilities do not begin again, we do not know if the imperialist-run Board of Peace will allow any Palestinians, including the Palestinian Authority (PA), to play any role in Gaza. But neither the PA nor Hamas has anything to offer Palestinian workers in any case. They both have exploited and abused Palestinian workers to enrich themselves and ensconce themselves in power without regard to the wellbeing of their citizenry. We do not know if the capitalist powers of the world will continue to pay lip service to the idea of a Palestinian state, but we do know that such an entity is impossible in an occupied, disempowered, scattered and impoverished land. In fact, this mythological concept has simply served as pretense of righteousness for those very governments that continued to arm Israel and tolerate genocide.

There is no hope for the workers of Palestine – or for the workers of Sudan, Congo, El Salvador, even Israel and the US, all the world – unless a class conscious, anti-capitalist, anti-nationalist movement can be born out of the ashes. The world is moving closer to much larger and more devastating war between the competing capitalists of the US and China and their allies. The world is experiencing accelerating climate change that threatens all of our existence. Fascism is rapidly advancing even in the most liberal “democracies” like the US and Britain as capitalists’ profits and power fade. Revolutionary system change may not be on the near horizon, but it is critical. Let us start planning to get rid of capitalism and imperialism now, everywhere. Let us start envisioning a world run by and for workers.

1. https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/israel-idf-soldiers-set-fire-food-homes-sewage-treatment-plan-after-ceasefire-announced
2. https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/05/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-secures-historic-1-2-trillion-economic-commitment-in-qatar/
3. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hegseth-qatar-air-force-facility-us-base-idaho/

Ellen Isaacs is a physician, anti-racist and anti-capitalist activist and co-editor of multiracialunity.org. 

14 October 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark

Depending on which source you consult, the twenty-point peace plan of President Donald Trump for securing peace in Gaza shows much exultance and extravagant omission.  The exultance was initially focused on the return of the hostages.  It then shifted to the broader strategic goals of the various parties.  Commentary on this point, even as the living Israeli hostages convalescence after their exchange for Palestinian detainees, sidesteps the Palestinian people, those fly in the ointment irritants who never seem to exit the political scene. 

The peace plan, in effect, is being executed to eliminate Hamas and any semblance of a Palestinian militant movement in favour of an Israel-Arab-US axis of preferment and normalisation.  Doing so puts a firm lid on Palestinian sovereignty and statehood in favour of sounder relations between Israel and the Arab states. 

Consider, for instance, the views from the American Jewish Committee in their October 10 assessment. “President Trump’s unconventional approach created new diplomatic realities and forced Israel and key Arab states to align in new ways.”  The peace plan was “the most credible framework to date for advancing Israeli-Arab peace, creating new opportunities for regional engagement, and countering Hamas’ ideology through a united alliance of Israel and Arab nations committed to peace, security, and prosperity.”  Clearly, Palestinians are, if not footnotes, then invisible ink lines in such arrangements.

This attitude is also echoed in remarks made by the US Vice President, J.D. Vance.  Palestinian subservience is assumed in any new proposed arrangement which prioritises Israeli security and a collective of overseeing nation states that will guard against any mischief in the Strip.  “The President convinced the entire Muslim world really, both the Gulf Arab states, but as far as South-East Asia as Indonesia, to really step up and provide ground troops so that Gaza could be secured in safety.”

Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty gave some sense of what is expected.  “We are going to support and commit troops within specific parameters,” he told CBS.  A UN Security Council mandate would be required, along with clear specifications for what the mission of the troops on the ground would be, “which will be peacekeeping and providing training to Palestinian police.”

Trump’s near cinematic appearance on October 13 in the compact, claustrophobic Knesset after the handover of the hostages set the scene for Israeli grandstanding, staged mawkishness and denial.  Netanyahu was in typical form, accusing Israel’s friends of blood libel stupidity for recognising Palestine; in doing so, they had effectively committed acts of antisemitism, buying “into Hamas’s false propaganda.”  Massacring and starving those in the Gaza Strip warranted no mention, but disarming Hamas and demilitarising the enclave did. With praise for both himself and Trump, Netanyahu spoke of jointly forging “a path to bring the remaining hostages home and end the war. End a war in a way that ensures the disarming of Hamas, the demilitarisation of Gaza, and that Gaza would never again pose a threat to Israel.”

He also thanked Trump for “fully” backing the decision to make the last murderous assault into Gaza City.  This “military pressure” provided momentum that eventually saw Hamas capitulate.  The US President then “succeeded in doing something that no one believed was possible.  You brought most of the Arab world, you did, you brought most of the world behind your proposal to free the hostages and end the war.” 

Opposition leader Yair Lapid, for his part, explicitly denied any genocide or “intentional starvation” of the Palestinians, then proceeded to overlook them in calling on “all the nations of the Islamic world” to engage Israel.

Trump’s own speech was meandering, personal and free of complex turns.  He spoke about his envoy Steve Witkoff as a Henry Kissinger who did not leak, an emissary of singular genius.  An interruption by Hadash lawmakers Ayman Odeh and Ofer Cassif, both demanding that Palestine be recognised, did not faze him.  And then came mention of the Ukraine War, and Russian President Vladimir Putin and more adulatory remarks for the US delegates who have paid homage to the US God King.  They were all part of “central casting”. 

Not a sliver of reference to the Palestinian cause for sovereignty made an appearance, which continues to moan under the strategic expediency of it all, the residents of Gaza doomed to indefinite invigilation at the hands of Trump’s “Board of Peace”.  More to the point, he was happy to admit providing weapons at the request of “Bibi” at a moment’s notice.  The US made “the best weapons in the world, and we’ve given a lot to Israel, … and you used them well.”  But the slaughter could not continue, and the Israeli PM would be remembered “far more” for accepting the peace agreement.  “The timing for this is brilliant.  I said, ‘Bibi you’re going to be remembered for this far more than if you kept this thing going, going, going, kill, kill, kill.’”

The Palestinians, granted brief respite from military violence, will be desperately wary.  When Lapid mentioned that Trump had “saved far more than one life, and life is an entire world”, it can also be assumed that killing one life kills a world.  Some 68,000 Palestinian worlds (a conservative estimate) were extinguished by the munitions and weapons of Israel and its backers.  As humanitarian workers return to Gaza, they see the horrors of a lunarscape of devastation.  If only Trump had considered paying a visit to that particular part of earth.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. 

14 October 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr Gideon Polya

The Zionist Israeli-permitted Palestinian Breakout from the Gaza Concentration Camp led to the deaths of 1,200 Israelis, mostly past or present Israeli soldiers. After 2 years of US-backed Zionist killing, Gazan deaths from violence, 174,000, and from imposed deprivation, 698,000, total 872,000. I have carefully tabulated this Gaza Holocaust in terms of 50 numbers that can be used in the war crimes trials of all the Zionist Israeli, US and US Alliance perpetrators.

Gaza suffering from 7 October 2023 to about 7 October 2025 by 50 numbers:

(1). 42,000 with life-changing injuries [1].

UN OCHA: “Over the past two years, nearly 42,000 Palestinians have suffered life-changing injuries in Gaza, one in four are children and including more than 5,000 amputations, according to the World Health Organization” [1].

(2). 10,000 children with life-changing injuries [1].

UN OCHA: “Nearly 42,000 Palestinians have suffered life-changing injuries in Gaza, one in four are children” [1].

(3). >5,000 amputations [1].

UN OCHA: “More than 5,000 amputations” [1].

(4). >565 aid workers killed [1].

UN OCHA: “Four aid workers have been killed in the Gaza Strip on average every week so far in 2025 and at least 565 aid workers have been killed since 7 October 2023” [1].

(5). 4 aid workers killed per week (in 2025)[1].

UN OCHA: “Four aid workers have been killed in the Gaza Strip on average every week so far in 2025”[1].

(6). 2,400 medically evacuated out of Gaza (in 2025) [1].

UN OCHA: “About 2,400 patients have been medically evacuated from the Gaza Strip so far in 2025. This is an average of less than 10 patients evacuated per day” [1].

(7). <10 patients evacuated out of Gaza per day (in 2025) [1].

UN OCHA: “Less than 10 patients evacuated per day” [1].

(8). >1.4 million people in inadequate shelter [1, 2].

UN OCHA: “Most people in Gaza reside in inadequate shelters that fail to meet basic emergency standards, leaving them exposed to the winter conditions, the Shelter Cluster reports” [1]. Shelter Cluster: “Since mid-August, intensified bombardment on Gaza City has displaced thousands as military operations expand. Residents are pressured to move to the south and central areas of the Strip. The shelter situation is catastrophic and there are already 1.4 million people in need of basic emergency shelter based on Shelter Cluster estimations, and likely to increase with ongoing displacement… Site density has fallen below 30 m² per person, stripping families of dignity and safety” [2].

(9). >95% of housing destroyed or damaged [2].

Shelter Cluster: “More than 95 per cent of housing has been destroyed or damaged” [2].

(10). 3,500 trucks of tents, tarpaulins and basic household items needed [2].

Shelter Cluster: “Hundreds of thousands of families are displaced in Gaza, living in overcrowded and unsafe conditions. For the past five months, no shelter materials have entered the Gaza Strip. Meeting existing emergency relief needs alone requires an estimated 3,500 trucks of tents, tarpaulins and basic household items. International humanitarian law recognises shelter as essential to survival and obliges Israel, as an occupying power, to facilitate its provision” [2].

(11). 61 million tons of rubble [3-7].

USA Today: “According to a U.N. damage assessment released last month, any reconstruction would need to begin with clearing the more than 55 million tons of rubble that resulted from sustained Israeli bombardment, much of the rubble containing asbestos and human remains. Clearing rubble, which involves heavy equipment like bulldozers and cranes, could take 21 years and cost $1.2 billion” [3].The Palestinian Information Service: “Gaza’s Government Media Office… also warned that the ban on heavy machinery has left over 55 million tons of rubble uncleared, trapping more than 10,000 missing individuals beneath the debris and obstructing roads, creating a severe health and environmental crisis” [4]. UN: “The resulting debris amounts to nearly 50 million tonnes – an overwhelming quantity of rubble that would take decades to remove under current conditions” [5]. The Guardian: “Israel’s campaign of intense aerial bombing and deliberate tactic of razing territory its troops have seized has led to 78% of Gaza’s estimated 250,000 buildings being damaged or destroyed, generating 61m tonnes of debris, of which about 15% may be contaminated with asbestos, industrial waste or heavy metals” [6]. Zeteo: “55 million tonnes of rubble” [7].

(12). 518 schools damaged or destroyed [6- 8].

The Guardian: “518 schools damaged or destroyed (90% of schools)”. [6]. Zeteo: “518 million schools damaged or destroyed” [7]. UNICEF: “95 per cent of schools damaged or destroyed” [8].

(13). 90-95% of schools damaged or destroyed [6-8].

The Guardian: “518 schools damaged or destroyed (90% of schools)” [6]. Zeteo: “518 million schools damaged or destroyed” [7]. UNICEF: “95 per cent of schools damaged or destroyed” [8].

(14). 658.000 children without school for 2 years [6].

The Guardian: “Children and university-age students out of formal education…Since October 2023, 745,000 students in Gaza have been out of school for more than two academic years, including 88,000 higher education students who have been forced to put their studies on hold” [6]. UNICEF: “With 95 per cent of schools damaged or destroyed, 658,000 children have been out of school for nearly two years, marking one of the most severe education crises” [8].

(15). 745,000 young out of formal education for 2 years [8].

The Guardian: “Children and university-age students out of formal education…Since October 2023, 745,000 students in Gaza have been out of school for more than two academic years, including 88,000 higher education students who have been forced to put their studies on hold” [8].

(16). 90% of educational infrastructure destroyed [8].

The Guardian : “Gaza’s educational infrastructure has been more or less destroyed: more than 90% of school buildings, 79% of higher education campuses and 60% of vocational training centres have been damaged or destroyed”[8].

(17). 1.9 million displaced (many repeatedly) [7, 9].

UNRWA: “According to the UN, at least 1.9 million people – or about 90 per cent of the population – across the Gaza Strip have been displaced during the war. Many have been displaced repeatedly, some 10 times or more”[9].

(18). 99% of households food insecure [7, 10].

World Food Program: “According to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) snapshot released today, 470,000 people in Gaza are facing catastrophic hunger (IPC Phase 5), and the entire population is experiencing acute food insecurity. The report also projects an alarming 71,000 children and more than 17,000 mothers will need urgent treatment for acute malnutrition. At the beginning of 2025, agencies estimated 60,000 children would need treatment” [10]. Zeteo: “99% of households food insecure” [7].

(19). <6 litres water /day (1 million), <9 litres water/day (0.5 million) [6].

The Guardian: “Currently, 1 million people cannot access six litres of drinking water a day, while 500,000 people exist on less than nine litres, just over a tenth of what was available before the war” [6]. Target 150: “Target 150 is a voluntary program that encourages every Melburnian to save water and keep us below 150 litres of water per person, per day [total use]” [11]. Mayo Clinic: “The U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine determined that an adequate daily fluid intake is: About 15.5 cups (3.7 liters) of fluids a day for men. About 11.5 cups (2.7 liters) of fluids a day for women” [12]. UN Action UK: “ In order to survive, humans need 20 to 50 litres of clean water free from harmful contaminants every day to ensure their basic needs for drinking, cooking and cleaning. Each person in the UK uses 150 litres of water a day, with the average family using 500 litres a day. This takes into account cooking, cleaning, washing and flushing” [13]. UNRWA: “According to a recent assessment by water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) partners, 1 million people are accessing less than the emergency minimum of six litres of drinking water per day” [14].

(20). 1,581 health workers killed in Gaza [15].

Francesca Albanese (Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories): “1,581, this is the number of health workers killed in Gaza” [15].

(21). 790 attacks on doctors and health care facilities [7, 16].

Zeteo: “790 attacks on doctors and health care facilities” [7]. UNWRA: “Over 790 attacks on health workers, patients, and hospitals” [16]. WHO: WHO has recorded 28 attacks on health care in Gaza during this [1week] period and 697 attacks since October 2023” [17].

(22). 346 UN staff killed [15].

Francesca Albanese: “346 is the number of UN staff killed in Gaza” [15].

(23). 270 journalists killed ([7, 18]; see also [15, 19-33]).

X: “Al Jazeera and other sources report up to 270 journalists and media workers killed” [18]. Francesca Albanese: “252 is the number of the journalists, your colleagues, killed in Gaza” [15].

(24). 10,000 Palestinian hostages detained [15].

Francesca Albanese: “10,000 Palestinians have been detained, mostly arbitrarily, by an unlawful occupation, which has been starving, torturing, and even raping inmates, including doctors and patients” [15].

(25). 75 detainee deaths in Zionist Israeli custody [15]..

Francesca Albanese: “Seventy-five is the numbers of detainees who have been reported killed in Israeli custody just in the last 710 days” [15].

(26). 6 US vetoes of United Nations Security Council Resolutions during the Gaza Genocide [34].

Reuters: “The United States vetoed on Thursday a draft United Nations Security Council resolution that would have demanded an immediate, unconditional and permanent ceasefire in Gaza and that Israel lift all restrictions on aid deliveries to the Palestinian enclave. The text, drafted by the elected 10 members of the 15-member council, would also have demanded the immediate, dignified and unconditional release of all hostages held by Hamas and other groups… It received 14 votes in favor. It was the sixth time the U.S. had cast a veto in the Security Council over the nearly two-year war between Israel and Palestinian militants Hamas” [34] UN: 6 US vetoes over “The situation in the Middle East, including the Palestinian question”: 18 September 2025, 04 June 2025 (under Terrorist Trump) , 20 November 2024, 20 February 2024, 8 December 2023, 18 October 2023 (under Butcher Biden) [35]. Al Jazeera: “A history of the US blocking UN resolutions against Israel. Over the past five decades, the United States has vetoed at least 53 UN Security Council resolutions critical of Israel” [36].

(27). 92 US vetoes of UNSC Resolutions, 50 for Apartheid Israel and 42 for Apartheid in Africa and against victims of US aggression) [34-36].

Al Jazeera: “A history of the US blocking UN resolutions against Israel. Over the past five decades, the United States has vetoed at least 53 UN Security Council resolutions critical of Israel” [36]. UN Security Council veto list 1946-2025: 50 vetoes in support of Apartheid Israel and 42 vetoes for Apartheid in Southern Africa and against victims of US aggression [35].

(28). $34 billion in US arms sales to Apartheid Israel since 7 October 2023 [7, 37].

William Hartung: “According to a companion report by Linda J. Bilmes, the U.S. has spent an additional $9.65 – $12.07 billion on military operations in Yemen and the wider region sparked by or in support of Israeli military operations since October 7, 2023, for a total of $31.35 – $33.77 billion and counting in U.S. spending on two years of war” [37]. Zeteo: “$40 billion in U.S. arms sales to Israel since October 7” [7].

[29]. 872,000 Gaza “deaths from violence, 174,000, and deprivation, 698,000, by 7 October 2025 versus Mainstream reported “67, 173” [38].

Reuters: “The latest detailed breakdown released by the Palestinian Ministry of Health on October 7[2025] showed 67,173 killed, including 20,179 children, accounting for 30% of the total… The numbers do not necessarily reflect all victims, as the + estimates several thousand bodies are under rubble and it does not count the 460 malnutrition-related deaths it has recorded amid a famine in North Gaza. Official Palestinian tallies of direct deaths likely undercounted the number of casualties by around 40% in the first nine months of the war as Gaza’s healthcare infrastructure disintegrated, according to a peer-reviewed study published in The Lancet journal in January. The U.N. human rights office also says the Palestinian authorities’ figure is probably an undercount” [38]. This is a 13-fold under-count that ignores (a) upwardly revised estimates of violent deaths to 174,625 after 2 years ([39] see also [40-42]) and (b) “Indirect deaths (non-violent deaths from deprivation) that are “conservatively” estimated as 4 times greater than Direct deaths (violent deaths) [43, 44].

An international team of expert epidemiologists published in The Lancet found that 64,260 Gazans had been killed violently by 30 June 2024 (Day 269 of the Gaza Genocide) [39]. Assuming the same rate of killing, this translates to 174,625 Direct (violent) deaths by 7 October 2025 (Day 731 i.e. after 2 years) [39-41]. However other expert epidemiologists published in The Lancet and elsewhere have “conservatively” estimated that deaths from deprivation (Indirect deaths) are 4 times the Direct deaths [43, 44], this implying 174,625 x 4 = 698,500 Indirect deaths and a total of 873,125 “deaths from violence and deprivation” (Google this phrase) by 7 October 2025 [40-42]. Euro-Med Monitor: “ The Israeli army killed 42,510 Palestinians over the course of the 200-day attack, 38,621 of whom were civilians, including 10,091 women and 15,780 children” [44]. Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor has thus estimated that of deaths reported by the Gaza Ministry of Health the breakdown was 37.1% (children), 23.7% (women) and 39.1% (men) [45] (see also [46]) . Conservatively assuming that these proportions apply to the total of 873,000 Gaza deaths (and in particular ignoring the extreme vulnerability of infants [47]) indicates deaths of 324,000 children, 207,000 women and 341,000 men after 2 years of the Gaza Genocide [39-41] (for related articles see [48-81]).

(30). 324,000 children killed after 2 years, ignoring the extreme vulnerability of under-5 year old children (see #29).

(31). 207,000 women killed after 2 years (see #29).

(32). 341,000 men killed after 2 years (see #29).

(33). 100,000 tonnes of bombs dropped on Gaza [82].

Anadolu Agency: “Israel has dropped 100,000 tons of explosives on the Gaza Strip since launching its genocide 19 months ago” [82].

(34). 828 mosques completely destroyed and 167 partially destroyed [82].

Anadolu Agency: “The destruction extended to religious and humanitarian infrastructure, with Israeli forces demolishing 828 mosques completely and 167 partially, targeting three churches, and destroying 19 of 60 cemeteries either fully or partially” [82].

(35). 500,000 people trapped in man-made famine [83].

WHO: “More than half a million people in Gaza are trapped in famine, marked by widespread starvation, destitution and preventable deaths, according to a new Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) analysis released today. Famine conditions are projected to spread from Gaza Governorate to Deir Al Balah and Khan Younis Governorates in the coming weeks… By the end of September, more than 640 000 people will face Catastrophic levels of food insecurity – classified as IPC Phase 5 – across the Gaza Strip. An additional 1.14 million people in the territory will be in Emergency (IPC Phase 4) and a further 396 000 people in Crisis (IPC Phase 3) conditions. Conditions in North Gaza are estimated to be as severe – or worse – than in Gaza City. However, limited data prevented an IPC classification, highlighting the urgent need for access to assess and assist. Rafah was not analyzed given indications that it is largely depopulated” [83].

[36]. 97.5% of Israelis killed on 7 October were adults and hence mostly former or present Occupier soldiers [84].

Gideon Polya: “Analysis of the Israel dead from detailed photographic and statistical data provided by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz yields the following breakdown of Israelis killed: Of the 1,200 Israelis killed 84.2% (1,010) were 18-39 years old (i.e. were current Israeli military, conscripts or reservists), 13.3% (160) were 40 and older (with most being former or existing military), and 2.5% (30) were aged under 18 (children) i.e. about 97% of those killed were legitimate military targets as past or serving Occupying forces”[84].

[37]. 50% or more of Israelis killed on 7 October were killed by the IDF [84, 85].

Gideon Polya: “The firepower of the IDF (shells and missiles) vastly exceeded the firepower of the lightly-armed Palestinians. If deaths in the fire zone are proportional to firepower then most of the Israeli deaths on or about 7 October were due to the IDF” [84]. Tlozek et al.: “Israeli forces accused of killing their own citizens under the ‘Hannibal Directive’ during October 7 chaos” [85].

[38]. 40.6 year average life expectancy versus 75.5 years pre-Gaza Massacre [86].

The Lancet: “In the central variant, life expectancy in the Gaza Strip decreased by 34·9 years during the first 12 months of the war, about half (–46·3%) the prewar level of 75·5 years. Life expectancy losses were larger for males (–38·0 years [–51·6%]) than for females, but nonetheless, females also suffered large losses (–29·9 years [–38·6%])” [86].

(39). About 100% of under-5 infants killed? [47, 87].

Children represented 47.3% of the pre-war Gaza population of 2.4 million i.e. 1,135,000 people [87]. Under-5 children represented 15.25% of the population i.e. 366,000 out of the pre-war 2.4 million Gaza population [87]. Under-5 year old children are highly vulnerable (just remember holding a baby in your arms) and for impoverished countries under-5 year old infants account for 70% of avoidable deaths from deprivation [47] . However 70% of the 698,0000 Gaza deaths from deprivation is 488,600 which is similar to the estimated total population of 366,000 under-5 infants. Given all the assumptions made in the calculations, this close approximation is surprising. Is it possible that the Zionist Israelis have killed nearly all of the highly vulnerable under-5 year old infants? Only after the genocidal Zionazi Occupation is ended and forensic teams enter Gaza will we discover the exact extent of this unforgivable genocide and holocaust atrocity.

(40). Zero (0) of 6 key Zionazi impositions have been removed, notwithstanding the present hope for a permanent end to the killing of Gazans [88].

In 2024 I published a huge book entitled “Free Palestine. End Apartheid Israel, Human Rights Denial, Gaza Massacre, Child Killing, Occupation and Palestinian Genocide” [88]. The subtitle lists 6 key things that must happen for Palestine to be free. Notwithstanding the much-vaunted Trump Peace Deal, zero (0) of these impositions have been removed. Zero (0) has special significance for Gaza as explained by William Dalrymple in “The Golden Road” that explores the huge Indian contribution to civilization from East, South and South East Asia to Europe. The Indians discovered zero (0) and communicated this to the brilliant mediaeval Arabic culture. According to William Dalrymple, Indian-Arabic mathematics was communicated to the Crusaders occupying Gaza and thence to Western Europe [89].

(41). Occupied Palestinians are excluded from 100% of the Human Rights set out in the 30 Articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights [90, 91].

(42). 15 Major International Laws and Conventions violated by the Zionazi Occupier Apartheid Israel [90].

The 15 Major International Laws and Conventions violated by the Zionazi Occupier Apartheid Israel include (a). the UN Charter, (b). the UN Conventionon the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (UN Genocide Convention) (c). the Rights of the Child Convention (United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child ), (d). the UN Refugee Convention ( UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees), (e). the Geneva Conventions (f). the International Criminal Court, (g). the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, (h). the “International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid”, (i). the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), (j). International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, (k). UNGA and UNSC Resolutions, (l) the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, (m). the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, (n). the 1926 Slavery Convention or the Convention to Suppress the Slave Trade and Slavery, and (o). the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement [90].

(43). 4,000 years of Palestinian civilization all but physically erased in the Gaza Urbicide [92, 93].

The Palestinian civilization dates back 4,000 years [92] but its physical presence in the ancient and culturally super-important city of Gaza has been erased in a war criminal Gaza Urbicide [93] by the barbaric and genocidal Zionazi state of Apartheid Israel that is a mere 77 years old [90]. Palestine was part of the Fertile Crescent that brought the world the alphabet, writing, recording, mathematics, astronomy, plant breeding, animal breeding, and philosophy when the much-exalted British were running around near-naked and painted blue. Jump 3,000 years and the Al Aqsa compound including the Dome of the Rock is the third holiest shrine in Islam and was constructed on geometric principles that underlie 1,500 years of brilliant Islamic architecture. (A personal note: my much loved Great Uncle George Polya was a famous Jewish Hungarian mathematician who among many other things proved that there were only 17 basic plane symmetry groups (wall paper patterns), this work inspiring famed lithographer M.C. Escher [94-100]. However Islamic architects and artists had empirically discovered this 1,500 years before, beginning with the Dome of the Rock in Al Quds (Jerusalem) and thence the glories of Islamic architecture from Isfahan in Iran to the Alhambra in Spain [94-100]). In 2025 Palestinian scientist Omar Yaghi (UC Berkeley) shared the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Richard Robson ( University of Melbourne) and Susumu Kitagawa (Kyoto University) for discoveries about synthetic organo-metallic lattices [101].

(44). 5,000 more abusively imprisoned Palestinian hostages were added during the Gaza Genocide [102] (see #24).

Mainstream media have been saturated for 2 years over the 250 Israeli hostages held by Hamas in Gaza, but there has been scant concern over the 10,000 hostages abusively imprisoned by Apartheid Israel [102]. Al Jazeera: “For every Palestinian Israel freed in the ceasefire deal, it apprehended 15 more. The number of political prisoners in its jails has doubled since the war began”[102].

(45). 5.6 million Occupied Palestinians held hostage under Zionazi guns over 58 years [90].

Before the Gaza Massacre 5.6 million Occupied Palestinians were held hostage under Zionazi guns and without human rights in the illegal and war criminal Zionist Occupation [90].

(46). 58 years of illegal and war criminal Occupation [90, 103].

The illegal Zionist-imposed Occupation started in 1967 and has endured for 58 years due to 50 vetoes of UN Security Council resolutions by Zionist-perverted America [34-36, 103]. The Office of the UN Human Rights Commissioner on the ICJ’s Gaza effective Peace Plan of 19 July 2024: “Israel and other UN Member States must immediately comply with the authoritative determination by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on Israel’s presence in the occupied Palestinian territory, independent human rights experts said today. The landmark ruling of 19 July 2024 declared that Israel’s occupation of the Gaza strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, is unlawful, along with the associated settlement regime, annexation and use of natural resources. The Court added that Israel’s legislation and measures violate the international prohibition on racial segregation and apartheid. The ICJ mandated Israel to end its occupation, dismantle its settlements, provide full reparations to Palestinian victims and facilitate the return of displaced people” [104] (see also [105]). .

(47). 18 countries attacked by Apartheid Israel , 7 in 2025 alone [106].

Gideon Polya: “Post-WW2 and apart from significant border spats, India and China have not invaded any other country, and Russia has invaded 4 countries. However with its recent unprovoked attack on Qatar, a nuclear terrorist, state terrorist, Nazi Germany-style, exceptionalist, genocidal and uncontrolled Apartheid Israel has now militarily attacked 18 countries, a record similar to that of Nazi Germany in WW2. The World must stop Israeli war crimes NOW with draconian Sanctions” [106].

(48). $7.2 trillion in reparations to be paid by Israel, the US and other countries complicit in the Gaza Genocide and Gaza Holocaust [104, 105, 107, 108].

The International Court of Justice has ordered Israel to end its occupation, dismantle its settlements, provide full reparations to Palestinian victims and facilitate the return of displaced people [104, 105]. It is estimated that reparations to be paid by Apartheid Israel, America and other complicit countries total $7.2 trillion [107, 108]. My own country, Australia, is second only to the US as a fervent supporter of Apartheid Israel, is complicit in the Gaza Genocide in 20 ways [109], and lies for Apartheid Israel in 35 ways [110, 111].

(49). 24 million people died avoidably from deprivation since 1950 in countries variously occupied by Apartheid Israel [47].

Countries threatened by invasion by genocidally racist rogue states such as US-backed Apartheid Israel and Zionist-perverted America have to divert huge resources to arms and away from peaceful social uses including life-preserving uses. 24 million people died avoidably from deprivation since 1950 in countries variously occupied by Apartheid Israel [47]. By way of comparison, Nazi Germany caused over 30 million “deaths from violence and deprivation” in WW2 [47].

(50). 3.1 million Palestinians killed by violence, 0.3 million, and deprivation, 2.8 million, in the century-long Palestinian Genocide [see #29].

Before the Gaza Genocide it was estimated that 2.2 million Palestinians had died from violence, 0.1 million, and deprivation , 2.1 million [112]. However the Gaza Holocaust has been associate with a further 0.2 million violent deaths and 0.7 million deaths from imposed deprivation. The century-long Palestinian Genocide and Palestinian Holocaust is presently associated with 3.1 million Palestinians killed by violence, 0.3 million, and deprivation, 2.8 million, in the century-long Palestinian Genocide. By way of comparison, the WW2 Jewish Holocaust that wiped my family from the face of Europe was associated with 5-6 million deaths from violence and deprivation [113-115].

JUSTICE!

References.

[1]. UN OCHA, “Humanitarian Situation Update #329 | Gaza Strip”, 9 October 2025: https://www.ochaopt.org/content/humanitarian-situation-update-329-gaza-strip .

[2]. Shelter Cluster, “Resumption of Shelter Supplies into Gaza during the Gaza City Operation – August 2025”, 20 August 2025: https://sheltercluster.org/palestine/documents/resumption-shelter-supplies-gaza-during-gaza-city-operation-august-2025 .

[3]. Stephen Beard and Shawn Sullivan, “Trump on Gaza: U.S. ownership, no Palestinian right of return. See updated damage maps”, USA Today, 10 February 2025: https://www.usatoday.com/story/graphics/2025/02/10/trump-gaza-strip-rebuild-palestine-return/78221706007/ .

[4]. The Palestinian Information Service, “Ramadan in Gaza: Israel wields the weapon of starvation again”, 9 March 2025: https://english.palinfo.com/reports/2025/03/09/335321/ .

[5]. UN, “Gaza: Destruction of vital lifting gear halts search for thousands buried under rubble”, 22 April 2025: https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/04/1162491 .

[6]. Jason Burke, “The ruin of Gaza: how Israel’s two-year assault has devastated the territory”, The Guardian, 7 October 2025: https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2025/oct/07/the-ruin-of-gaza-how-israel-two-year-assault-has-devastated-the-territory .

[7]. Zeteo, “These Horrific Numbers Show the Scale of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza Two Years On”, 9 October : https://zeteo.com/p/these-horrific-numbers-show-the-scale .

[8]. UNICEF, “Humanitarian situation report No. 40”, 1 January -30 June 2025: https://www.unicef.org/media/172691/file/State-of-Palestine-Humanitarian-SitRep-No-40,-30-June-2025.pdf.pdf .

[9]. UNWRA, “UNRWA Situation Report #184 on the Humanitarian Crisis in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem”, 15 August 2025: https://www.un.org/unispal/document/unrwa-sitrep-184-15aug25/ .

[10]. World Food Program, “Risk of famine across all of Gaza, new report says”, 12 May 2025: https://www.wfp.org/news/risk-famine-across-all-gaza-new-report-says .

[11]. Target 150, “We’re only a bucket of water away”: https://southeastwater.com.au/water-waste-and-environment/saving-water/target-150/ .

[12]. Mayo Clinic, “Nutrition and healthy eating”: https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-healthy-eating/in-depth/water/art-20044256#:~:text=About%2015.5%20cups%20(3.7%20liters,fluids%20a%20day%20for%20women .

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[14]. UNWRA, “UNRWA Situation Report #191 on the Humanitarian Crisis in the Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem”, 7 October 2025: https://www.unrwa.org/resources/reports/unrwa-situation-report-191-situation-gaza-strip-and-west-bank-including-east-jerusalem .

[15]. Francesca Albanese, “Gaza- the shame of our time”, UN, The Question of Palestine”, 15 September 2025: https://www.un.org/unispal/document/press-briefing-francesca-albanese-16sep25/ .

[16]. UNWRA, Facebook, October 2025: https://www.facebook.com/unrwa/posts/gazas-war-2-years-too-long-over-790-attacks-on-health-workers-patients-and-hospi/1286476273512702/ .

[17]. WHO, “Health system at breaking point as hostilities further intensify in Gaza, WHO warns”, 25 May 2025: https://www.who.int/news/item/22-05-2025-health-system-at-breaking-point-as-hostilities-further-intensify–who-warns .

[18]. “How many reporters have Israelis killed since 2023?”, X: https://x.com/i/grok/share/KxwWJb8u6cFTf7S9xRGtf4qKN .

[19]. Free Palestine Melbourne, “Statement on the Assassination of Al Jazeera Journalists in Gaza”, 11 August 2025: https://www.freepalestinevic.org/press-releases/statement-on-the-assassination-of-al-jazeera-journalists-in-gaza/ .

[20]. Jeremy Webb: “Where is the outrage? Israel’s systematic mass assassination of journalists”, Pearls & Irritations, 16 August 2025: https://johnmenadue.com/post/2025/08/where-is-the-outrage-israels-systematic-mass-assassination-of-journalists/ .

[21]. John D. Marks, “Killing the Witness: Gaza’s Journalists and the Global Blueprint of Disappearance”, Countercurrents, 13 August 2025: https://countercurrents.org/2025/08/killing-the-witness-gazas-journalists-and-the-global-blueprint-of-disappearance/ .

[22]. Robert Inlakesh. “Dehumanize and destroy: How western media helped target Gaza’s journalists”, The Cradle, 14 August 2025: https://thecradle.co/articles/dehumanize-and-destroy-how-western-media-helped-target-gazas-journalists .

[23]. Anas Al-Sharif, “Last testament”, Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ans.al.alshryf.2025/posts/742925041926114 .

[24]. Chantelle Al-Khouri and Lauren Day, “Journalists in Gaza are writing their own obituaries, after Israel brands them ‘terrorists’”, ABC, 12 August 2025: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08-12/palestinian-journalists-israeli-air-strikes-anas-al-sharif/105639346 .

[25]. International Federation of Journalists, “White Paper on global journalism”, IFJ, 2020: ”, https://www.ifj.org/fileadmin/user_upload/IFJ_white_book__part_1.pdf .

[26]. Gideon Polya, “Remember Shireen Abu Akleh: Apartheid Israel Leads The World For Killing Journalists”, Countercurrents, 6 June 2022: https://countercurrents.org/2022/06/remember-shireen-abu-akleh-apartheid-israel-leads-the-world-for-killing-journalists/ .

[27]. Brendan Ciaran Browne, “The killing of Shireen Abu Akleh a fatal sign of sign of Israel’s control ”, The Irish Times, 16 May 2022: https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/killing-of-shireen-abu-akleh-a-fatal-sign-of-israel-s-control-1.4878879 .

[28]. “Shireen Abu Akleh”, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shireen_Abu_Akleh .

[29]. WAFA News Agency, “Analysis website Countercurrents: Apartheid Israel leads the world for killing journalists”, 11 June 2022: https://english.wafa.ps/Pages/Details/129629 .

[30]. Amy Watson, “Most dangerous countries for journalists worldwide from 2016 to 2021, by deaths” , Statista, 18 January 2022: https://www.statista.com/statistics/267871/number-of-journalists-killed-by-region/ .

[31]. Gideon Polya, “Anas Al-Sharif Died Reporting Gaza Holocaust: Israel Leads World In Killing Journalists”, Countercurrents, 18 August 2025: https://countercurrents.org/2025/08/anas-al-sharif-died-reporting-gaza-holocaust-israel-leads-world-in-killing-journalists/ .

[32]. France 24, “UN says 242 journalists killed in Gaza as Al Jazeera mourns those killed in Israeli strike”, 12 August 2025: https://www.france24.com/en/middle-east/20250811-live-reporters-without-borders-slams-al-jazeera-journalist-s-murder-by-israeli-army .

[33]. Mohamed Solaimane, “Gaza – the deadliest war for journalists, but they keep reporting”, TRT Global, 11 August 2025: https://trt.global/world/article/50c0769bf3ab .

[34]. Michelle Nichols, “US casts 6th veto at United Nations over war in Gaza”, Reuters, 19 September 2025: https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/us-vetoes-un-demand-ceasefire-aid-access-gaza-2025-09-18/ .

[35]. UN, “Security Council – Veto List (in reverse chronological order)”: https://www.un.org/depts/dhl/resguide/scact_veto_table_en.htm .

[36]. Creede Newton, “A history of the US blocking UN resolutions against Israel”, Al Jazeera, 19 May 2021: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/5/19/a-history-of-the-us-blocking-un-resolutions-against-israel .

[37]. William D. Hartung, “U.S. Military Aid and Arms Transfers to Israel, October 2023 – September 2025”, Cost of War, Brown University, 7 October 2025: https://costsofwar.watson.brown.edu/sites/default/files/2025-10/U.S.-Military-Aid-to-Israel_Hartung_Costs-of-War-Quincy_Oct-7-2025.pdf .

[38]. Nidal Al-Mughrabi and Emma Farge, “Explainer: How many Palestinians has Israel’s Gaza offensive killed?”, Reuters, 8 October 2025: https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/how-many-palestinians-has-israels-gaza-offensive-killed-2025-10-07/ .

[39]. Zeina Jamaluddine, Hanan Abukmail, Sarah Aly, Oona M R Campbell, and Francesco Checchi, “Traumatic injury mortality in the Gaza Strip from Oct 7, 2023, to June 30, 2024: a capture–recapture analysis”, The Lancet, 9 January 2025: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)02678-3/fulltext .

[40]. Gideon Polya, “Gideon Polya Rally Speech Demanded Action On 680,000 Gaza Deaths By 25/4/25 – Now 872,000”, Countercurrents, 7 October 2025: https://countercurrents.org/2025/10/gideon-polya-rally-speech-demanded-action-on-680000-gaza-deaths-by-25-4-25-now-872000/ .

[41]. Gideon Polya, “Genocide denialists and apologists must remember the entreaty to ‘bear witness’”, Green Left, 8 October 2025: https://www.greenleft.org.au/2025/1440/analysis/genocide-denialists-and-apologists-must-remember-entreaty-bear-witness .

[42]. “Australian Mainstream media lying & censorship”: https://sites.google.com/site/mainstreammedialying/australian-mainstream-media-lying-censorshp .

[43]. Rasha Khatib, Martin McKee and Salim Yusuf, “Counting the dead in Gaza: difficult but essential”, The Lancet, Volume 404, Issue 10449, p237-238, 10 July, 2024: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)01169-3/fulltext .

[44]. Devi Sridhar, “Scientists are closing in on the true, horrifying scale of death and disease in Gaza”, The Guardian, 5 September 2024: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/sep/05/scientists-death-disease-gaza-polio-vaccinations-israel.

[45]. Euro-Med Monitor, “Israeli Army Poised to Demolish Beit Lahia, Gaza”, Mirage News, 24 April 2024: https://www.miragenews.com/israeli-army-poised-to-demolish-beit-lahia-gaza-1221354/ .

[46]. Euro-Med Human Rights Watch, “Of the 50,292 Palestinians killed—including those still buried under the debris—33 per cent were children, and 21 per cent were women [and hence 46% men]”, 6 October 2024: https://euromedmonitor.org/en/article/6494/New-report..-De-Gaza:-A-Year-of-Israel%E2%80%99s-Genocide-and-the-Collapse-of-World-Order .

[47]. Gideon Polya, “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950”, 2nd edition, Korsgaard Publishing, 2021.

[48]. Richard Hil and Gideon Polya, “Australian mainstream media continue to hugely understate Gazan death toll”, Countercurrents, 15 September 2025: https://countercurrents.org/2025/09/australian-mainstream-media-continue-to-hugely-understate-gazan-death-toll/ .

[49]. Gideon Polya, “Mass Starvation In Gaza: World Must End Occupation, Provide Aid & Boycott US, Israel & Germany”, Countercurrents, 25 July 2025: https://countercurrents.org/2025/07/mass-starvation-in-gaza-world-must-end-occupation-provide-aid-boycott-us-israel-germany/ .

[50]. Gideon Polya, “VJ Day 80th Anniversary: Racist West Ignores Australia-complicit WW2 Chinese, Bengali & Gaza Holocausts”, Countercurrents, 9 September 2025: https://countercurrents.org/2025/09/vj-day-80th-anniversary-racist-west-ignores-australia-complicit-ww2-chinese-bengali-gaza-holocausts/ .

[51]. Richard Hil and Gideon Polya, “Skewering History: The Odious Politics of Counting Gaza’s Dead”, Arena, 11 July 2025: https://arena.org.au/politics-of-counting-gazas-dead/ .

[52]. Richard Hil and Gideon Polya, “Gaza death toll far worse than reported in Western media” Independent Australia, 12 August 2025: https://independentaustralia.net/life/life-display/gaza-death-toll-far-worse-than-reported-in-western-media,20034 .

[53]. Kevin Maimann, “1.7 million” Palestinians in Gaza? Trump’s statement raises questions about death toll”, CBC, 13 February 2025: https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/trump-gaza-population-relocation-1.7457559 .

[54]. John Menadue, “The real death toll in Gaza”, Pearls & Irritations, 5 September 2025: https://johnmenadue.com/post/2025/09/the-real-death-toll-in-gaza/ .

[55]. Ralph Nader, “Open letter to journalists on the vast undercount of deaths and serious injuries in Gaza”, Pearls & Irritations, 20 August 2025: https://johnmenadue.com/post/2025/08/open-letter-to-journalists-on-the-vast-undercount-of-deaths-and-serious-injuries-in-gaza/ .

[56]. Gideon Polya, “10-fold MSM undercounting of 680,000 Gaza deaths”, Pearls & Irritations, 21 August 2025: https://johnmenadue.com/letters_to_editor/2025/08/10-fold-msm-undercounting-of-680000-gaza-deaths/ .

[57]. Gideon Polya, “Chinese, Bengali and Gaza holocausts”, Pearls & Irritations, 2 September 2025: https://johnmenadue.com/letters_to_editor/2025/09/chinese-bengali-and-gaza-holocausts/ .

[58]. Middle East Monitor, “680,000 dead”, 13 September 2025: https://x.com/MiddleEastMnt/status/1966532981058605192 .

[59]. Gideon Polya, “Gaza Genocide By Numbers: Apply BDS Over 0.7 Million Gaza Deaths From Violence And Imposed Deprivation”, 4 July 2025: https://countercurrents.org/2025/07/gaza-genocide-by-numbers-apply-bds-over-0-7-million-gaza-deaths-from-violence-and-imposed-deprivation/ .

[60]. Gideon Polya, “Estimated 273,000 Gazans Killed In the First Year Of Oxford Union-Perceived Gaza Genocide By Apartheid Israel”, Countercurrents, 6 December 2024: https://countercurrents.org/2024/12/estimated-273000-gazans-killed-in-the-first-year-of-oxford-union-perceived-gaza-genocide-by-apartheid-israel/ .

[61]. Gideon Polya, “Reckoning: 553,000 Gaza Deaths From Violence & Deprivation Demand Global Sanctions & Huge Reparations”, Countercurrents, 21 January 2025: https://countercurrents.org/2025/01/reckoning-553000-gaza-deaths-from-violence-deprivation-demand-global-sanctions-huge-reparations/ .

[62]. Gideon Polya, “Zionist-perverted, US Lackey Australia Ignores Palestinian Genocide On Anzac Day & Election Day”, Countercurrents, 23 April 2025: https://countercurrents.org/2025/04/zionist-perverted-us-lackey-australia-ignores-palestinian-genocide-on-anzac-day-election-day/ .

[63]. Gideon Polya, “The Lancet: 64,260 Gaza Violent Deaths Indicating 257,000 Indirect Deaths In 9 Months”, Countercurrents, 14 January 2025: https://countercurrents.org/2025/01/the-lancet-64260-gaza-violent-deaths-indicating-257000-indirect-deaths-in-9-months/

[64]. Gideon Polya, “Open Letter To Australian MPs: Mainstream Undercounting 0.6 Million Gaza Deaths”, Countercurrents, 5 April 2025: https://countercurrents.org/2025/04/open-letter-to-australian-mps-mainstream-undercounting-0-6-million-gaza-deaths/ .

[65]. Gideon Polya, “Australian Elections: Australian Voters Deceived By US- And Zionist-perverted Mainstream Media & Politicians”, Countercurrents, 10 May 2025: https://countercurrents.org/2025/05/australian-elections-australian-voters-deceived-by-us-and-zionist-perverted-mainstream-media-politicians/ .

[66]. Susan Abulhawa, “Math proves that Israel’s stated goals are an epic lie”, The Electronic Intifada, 27 June 2024: https://electronicintifada.net/content/math-proves-israels-stated-goals-are-epic-lie/47371 .

[67]. Gideon Polya, “Estimated 273,000 Gazans Killed In the First Year Of Oxford Union-Perceived Gaza Genocide By Apartheid Israel”, Countercurrents, 6 December 2024: https://countercurrents.org/2024/12/estimated-273000-gazans-killed-in-the-first-year-of-oxford-union-perceived-gaza-genocide-by-apartheid-israel/ .

[68]. Gideon Polya, “Holocaust Denial Exposed: US, Western & Australian Mainstream Media Lying By Omission Over Gaza Genocide”, 20 October 2024: https://countercurrents.org/2024/10/holocaust-denial-exposed-us-western-australian-mainstream-media-lying-by-omission-over-gaza-genocide/ .

[69]. Gideon Polya, “335,500 Gaza Dead Ignored By Western Mainstream Media: Input To Special Rapporteur Report To Human Rights Council”, 17 October 2024: https://countercurrents.org/2024/10/335500-gaza-dead-ignored-by-western-mainstream-media-input-to-special-rapporteur-report-to-human-rights-council/ .

[70]. Ralph Nader, “Exposing the Gaza Death Undercount. 40,000? It’s more like 300,000 – treachery on both sides”, Capitol Hill Citizen, August-September 2024: https://www.capitolhillcitizen.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/CHC10.August2024WEB2_01.pdf

[71]. “EXPOSING THE GAZA DEATH UNDERCOUNT, BY RALPH NADER; Congressional Record Vol. 170, No. 152: https://www.congress.gov/congressional-record/volume-170/issue-152/extensions-of-remarks-section/article/E1000-3 .

[72]. Gideon Polya, “Stop The Killing & Occupation: Comparisons Of Jewish Israeli-Imposed Gaza Genocide Deaths With Nazi Atrocities”, Countercurrents, 12 November 2024: https://countercurrents.org/2024/11/stop-the-killing-occupation-comparisons-of-jewish-israeli-imposed-gaza-genocide-deaths-with-nazi-atrocities/ .

[73]. Gideon Polya, “Why Cowardly & Racist Australian Labor Government Won’t Apply Sanctions To Genocidal Apartheid Israel”, Counteercurrents, 27 May 2025: https://countercurrents.org/2025/05/why-cowardly-racist-australian-labor-government-wont-apply-sanctions-to-genocidal-apartheid-israel/ .

[74]. Gideon Polya, “US Alliance-Backed Genocidal Apartheid Israel: The Last European Settler Colonialism Project”, Countercurrents, 26 June 2025: https://countercurrents.org/2025/06/us-alliance-backed-genocidal-apartheid-israel-the-last-european-settler-colonialism-project/ .

[75]. Gideon Polya, “LeMay, Albright & Trump: 3 US Officials Who Confessed To US Mass Murder Of Civilians”, Countercurrents,17 March 2025: https://countercurrents.org/2025/03/lemay-albright-trump-3-us-officials-who-confessed-to-us-mass-murder-of-civilians/ .

[76]. Kevin Maimann, “1.7 million’ Palestinians in Gaza? Trump’s statement raises questions about death toll”, CBC, 13 February 2025: https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/trump-gaza-population-relocation-1.7457559 .

[77]. Arwa Mahdawi, Trump’s Gaza remarks are no surprise: ethnic cleansing was always the plan”, The Guardian, 6 February 2025: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/feb/05/trump-gaza-ethnic-cleansing

[78]. Jonathan Cook, “Trump Gaza Plan ”, X, 5 February 2025: https://x.com/Jonathan_K_Cook/status/1887109208752918549 .

[79]. Gideon Polya, “Why Cowardly & Racist Australian Labor Government Won’t Apply Sanctions To Genocidal Apartheid Israel”, Countercurrents, 27 May 2025: https://countercurrents.org/2025/05/why-cowardly-racist-australian-labor-government-wont-apply-sanctions-to-genocidal-apartheid-israel/ .

[80]. Quds News Network, “377,000 Missing in Gaza, Half of Them Children, from Pre-Genocide Population of 2.2 Million”, Countercurrents, 25 June 2025: https://countercurrents.org/2025/06/377000-missing-in-gaza-half-of-them-children-from-pre-genocide-population-of-2-2-million/ .

[81]. Stuart Rees, “A century of deceit: Towards a new understanding of the colonisation of Palestine”, Pearls & Irritations, October 2025: https://johnmenadue.com/post/2025/10/a-century-of-deceit-the-colonisation-of-palestine-towards-a-new-understanding/ .

[82]. Mohammed Sio, “Israel dropped 100,000 tons of explosives over Gaza, wiped out 2,200 families: Media office”, Anadolu Agency, 8 May 2025: https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/israel-dropped-100-000-tons-of-explosives-over-gaza-wiped-out-2-200-families-media-office/3561614 .

[83]. WHO, “Famine confirmed for first time in Gaza”, 22 August 2025: https://www.who.int/news/item/22-08-2025-famine-confirmed-for-first-time-in-gaza .

[84]. Gideon Polya, “IDF Killed Israelis On 7 October Enabling 9/11-style Excuse For Gaza Genocide”, Countercurrents, 31 December 2023: https://countercurrents.org/2023/12/idf-killed-israelis-on-7-october-enabling-9-11-style-excuse-for-gaza-genocide/ .

[85]. Eric Tlozek, Orly Halpern and Allyson Horn, “Israeli forces accused of killing their own citizens under the ‘Hannibal Directive’ during October 7 chaos”, ABC News, 7 September 2024: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-09-07/israel-hannibal-directive-kidnap-hamas-gaza-hostages-idf/104224430 .

[86]. Michel Guiilot et al., “Life expectancy losses in the Gaza Strip during the period October, 2023, to September, 2024”, The Lancet, vol. 405, 8 February 2025: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)02810-1/abstract .

[87]. Linah Mohammad, “Children make up nearly half of Gaza’s population. Here’s what it means for the war”, 19 October 2023: https://www.npr.org/2023/10/19/1206479861/israel-gaza-hamas-children-population-war-palestinians .

[88]. Gideon Polya,“Free Palestine. End Apartheid Israel, Human Rights Denial, Gaza Massacre, Child Killing, Occupation and Palestinian Genocide”, Korsgaard Publishing, 2024.

[89].William Dalrymple, “The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed The World”, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024.

[90]. Gideon Polya, “Australia must stop Zionist subversion and join the World in comprehensive Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Apartheid Israel and all its supporters”, Subversion of Australia, 15 April 2021: https://sites.google.com/site/subversionofaustralia/2021-04-15 .

[91]. Gideon Polya, “Universal Declaration of Human Rights & Palestinians. Apartheid Israel violates ALL Palestinian Human Rights”, Palestine Genocide Essays, 24 January 2009: https://sites.google.com/site/palestinegenocideessays/universal-declaration-of-human-rights-palestinians .

[92]. Nur Masalha, “Palestine A Four Thousand Year History”, I.B. Tauris, 2021.

[93]. Gideon Polya, “Jewish Israeli Gaza Urbicide Erasing The Physical Record Of 4,000 Year Gaza History”, Countercurrents, 8 January 2025: https://countercurrents.org/2025/01/jewish-israeli-gaza-urbicide-erasing-the-physical-record-of-4000-year-gaza-history/ .

[94]. George Pólya, “How To Solve It. A New Aspect of Mathematical Method”, Princeton University Press, 2024 (first edition 1945).

[95]. Harold and Loretta Taylor, “George Pólya. Master of Discovery”, Dale Seymour Publications, 1993.

[96]. George Pólya, “Über die Analogie der Kristallsymmetrie in der Ebene”, Zeitschrift für Kristallographie, 1924.

[97] Gideon Polya, “Isfahan Matisse”: https://www.flickr.com/photos/gideonpolya/4290121654/ .

[98]. Gideon Polya, “Alhambra Pollock”: https://www.flickr.com/photos/gideonpolya/4288352915/in/photostream/ .

[99]. Istvan Hargittai, “Appeal of Symmetry”, IUCr, 33 (5), 2025: https://www.iucr.org/news/newsletter/volume-33/number-5/appeal-of-symmetry/_nocache .

[100]. Gideon Polya, “Art for Peace, Planet Mother and Child”: http://sites.google.com/site/artforpeaceplanetmotherchild/ .

[101]. Quds News Network, “Palestinian Scientist Omar Yaghi Wins 2025 Nobel in Chemistry”, Countercurrents, 9 October 2025: https://countercurrents.org/2025/10/palestinian-scientist-omar-yaghi-wins-2025-nobel-in-chemistry/ .

[102]. Mohamed A. Hussein and Mohammed Haddad, “A nation behind bars: Why has Israel imprisoned 10,000 Palestinians?”, Al Jazeera, 17 April 2025: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/4/17/a-nation-behind-bars-why-has-israel-imprisoned-10000-palestinians .

[103]. Gideon Polya, “ICJ Gaza Peace Plan Versus Racist Peace Plan Of Genocidal War Criminals Trump & Netanyahu”, Countercurrents, 4 October 2025: https://countercurrents.org/2025/10/icj-gaza-peace-plan-versus-racist-peace-plan-of-genocidal-war-criminals-trump-netanyahu/ .

[104].UN Human Rights, Office of the High Commissioner, “Experts hail ICJ declaration on illegality of Israel’s presence in the occupied Palestinian territory as “historic” for Palestinians and international law”, 30 July 2024: https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/07/experts-hail-icj-declaration-illegality-israels-presence-occupied .

[105]. International Court of Justice, “Summary of the Advisory Opinion of 19 July 2024”: https://www.icj-cij.org/node/204176 .

[106]. Gideon Polya, “Israeli State Terrorism & Qatar: US-backed Apartheid Israel Has Now Attacked 18 Countries”, Countercurrents, 22 September 2025: https://countercurrents.org/2025/09/israeli-state-terrorism-qatar-us-backed-apartheid-israel-has-now-attacked-18-countries/ .

[107]. Gideon Polya, “Reckoning: 553,000 Gaza Deaths From Violence & Deprivation Demand Global Sanctions & Huge Reparations”, Countercurrents, 21 January 2025: https://countercurrents.org/2025/01/reckoning-553000-gaza-deaths-from-violence-deprivation-demand-global-sanctions-huge-reparations/ .

[108]. Richard Hil and Gideon Polya, “A reckoning for Israel awaits”, Countercurrents, 2 May 2025: https://countercurrents.org/2025/05/a-reckoning-for-israel-awaits/ . [108]. Gideon Polya, “20 Ways Anti-Semitic Australian Labor Government Complicit In Jewish Israeli Gaza Genocide”, Countercurrents, 5 March 2024: https://countercurrents.org/2024/03/20-ways-anti-semitic-australian-labor-government-complicit-in-jewish-israeli-gaza-genocide/ .

[109]. Gideon Polya, “20 Ways Anti-Semitic Australian Labor Government Complicit In Jewish Israeli Gaza Genocide”, Countercurrents, 5 March 2024: https://countercurrents.org/2024/03/20-ways-anti-semitic-australian-labor-government-complicit-in-jewish-israeli-gaza-genocide/.

[110]. Gideon Polya, “35 Zionist Media Lies, the Killing of Children, Neo-Nazi Apartheid Israel”, Global Research, 24 November 2023: https://www.globalresearch.ca/35-zionist-lies-child-killing-neo-nazi-apartheid-israel/5841145 .

[111]. Gideon Polya, “Gaza Massacre: 35 Ways Zionist-perverted US, Australia & West Lie For Child-killing, Neo-Nazi Apartheid Israel”, Countercurrents, 23 November 2023: https://countercurrents.org/2023/11/gaza-massacre-35-ways-zionist-perverted-us-australia-west-lie-for-child-killing-neo-nazi-apartheid-israel/ . [108]. Richard Hil and Gideon Polya, “A reckoning for Israel awaits”, Countercurrents, 2 May 2025: https://countercurrents.org/2025/05/a-reckoning-for-israel-awaits/ .

[112]. Gideon Polya, “85 Ways Zionist Australian Labor Government Betrays Palestinian Human Rights & Humanity”, Countercurrents, 16 March 2023: https://countercurrents.org/2023/03/85-ways-zionist-australian-labor-government-betrays-palestinian-human-rights-humanity/ .

[113]. Gideon Polya, “UK Zionist Historian Sir Martin Gilbert (1936-2015) Variously Ignored Or Minimized WW2 Bengali Holocaust”, Countercurrents, 19 February 2015: https://countercurrents.org/polya190215.htm .

[114]. Martin Gilbert, “Jewish History Atlas”, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1969.

[115]. Martin Gilbert “Atlas of the Holocaust”, Michael Joseph, London, 1982.

Dr Gideon Polya taught science students at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia over 4 decades.

14 October 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Quds News Network

Gaza (QNN)- At least five Palestinians were killed and others injured on Tuesday by Israeli forces across the Gaza Strip, despite a ceasefire that took effect on Friday.

Local sources reported five people were killed after Israeli quadcopter drones opened fire on residents inspecting their homes in the Shujaiyya neighborhood, east of Gaza City.

In Khan Younis in southern Gaza, two Palestinians were wounded by Israeli fire, medical sources at Nasser Medical Complex said.

Hamas slammed Israel’s violation of the ceasefire. The Palestinian group spokesperson Hazem Qassem said, “The Israeli army’s killing of several residents of Gaza this morning through airstrikes and gunfire constitutes a violation of the ceasefire agreement.”

“Once again, we call on all parties to monitor Israel’s actions and ensure it does not evade its obligations to mediators regarding the end of the war on Gaza,” he added.

The ceasefire in Gaza took effect on Friday morning after Israel and Hamas agreed to the first phase of the 20-point plan brokered by Trump.

On Monday, Hamas concluded the release of 20 living Israeli captives. In exchange, 1,968 Palestinian detainees were freed, ending the first phase of the ceasefire deal.

More than 67,800 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli attacks since the start of the genocide in Gaza in October 2023.

14 October 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Rima Najjar

Author’s Note

Although abiding by the October 2025 Trump-brokered ceasefire — a deal that claims to stabilize but instead entrenches asymmetry — Palestinians are actively resisting this containment. Through legal filings, civil documentation, mutual aid, and discursive reframing, they refuse to let transitional committees and humanitarian optics overwrite the demand for sovereignty, return, and accountability.

This acceptance of a ceasefire is not a surrender of arms, nor a dissolution of resistance. The agreement pauses fire and enables prisoner exchanges and humanitarian access, but it explicitly defers Israel’s demand for disarmament. In practice, it underscores the distinction between tactical compliance under pressure and existential refusal of erasure.

In this essay, I trace the evolution of demands and counterdemands after Oct 7 and the evolution of armed resistance — from stone-throwing youth in the First Intifada to drone-led breaches in 2023 — alongside Israel’s escalating countermeasures: assassinations, sieges, surveillance, and legal erasure. Each phase reveals not only tactical shifts, but the persistence of asymmetry and the recalibration of refusal, shedding light on what is likely to come next.

Note: In this essay, references to “Hamas” should be understood as shorthand for Hamas and allied Palestinian resistance factions, including Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Popular Resistance Committees, and others operating within the Joint Operations Room.

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1. Reckoning Without Resolution

The Trump-brokered ceasefire that took effect on October 12, 2025 is structurally fragile. It rests on the premise that Israel can retain strategic control while outsourcing civil governance to vetted intermediaries. But can it? I would argue not. It assumes Palestinian resistance can be pacified through aid and administrative reshuffling. It won’t. And it assumes — despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary — that Israel can hold a ceasefire at all.

That premise collapses under scrutiny. Israel is currently rearresting freed Palestinian prisoners in the West Bank even as it negotiates exchange. It has done so before — during the Shalit exchange, the Oslo-era releases, and countless ceasefire arrangements. This tactic isn’t exceptional; it’s strategic. Israel uses rearrests as leverage, punishment, and disruption.

In the past year alone, Israel violated the November 2024 Lebanon ceasefire over 500 times, launched airstrikes within 24 hours of the October 2025 Gaza agreement, and sabotaged prisoner exchanges through preemptive arrests. For Israel, ceasefires function less as commitments than as diplomatic cover for continued operations.

The ceasefire also assumes that the destruction of Gaza and the slaughter of its population will serve as a deterrent. It won’t. Deterrence presumes survival is the goal. But Palestinian resistance is rooted not in fear, but in dispossession, memory, and refusal. The logic collapses when a besieged people have already endured decades of displacement and erasure — when atrocity becomes not a warning, but a reckoning. Resistance isn’t reducible to governance gaps. It endures because containment denies recognition, accountability, and return.

And beneath it all lies a final, unspoken assumption: that Israel can still project the image of invincibility. But that image has already fractured — on the battlefield, in the media, and in the moral imagination of a watching world. What remains is not deterrence, but desperation masquerading as dominance.

_______________________________________________________

So, where is this ceasefire heading?

• Toward asymmetrical governance: Gaza administered by international actors, but under Israeli military shadow — producing friction, fragmentation, and renewed resistance.
• Toward legal confrontation: ICC cases testing the limits of state impunity — either restoring credibility to international law or exposing its complicity.
• Toward discursive rupture: Resistance language breaking into the mainstream — Palestinian demands for dignity, return, and accountability reframed as legitimate claims.
• Toward regional recalibration: Egypt, Qatar, and Turkey asserting mediation, the U.S. clinging to centrality, Arab publics pressing harder, regional actors less deferential.
• Toward global mobilization: Activist networks surging across continents — boycotts, divestments, encampments, and mass demonstrations eroding Israel’s moral exceptionalism and accelerating its isolation.

_______________________________________________________

The ceasefire may hold temporarily, but the underlying asymmetries remain. What has changed is their visibility, the legal and discursive tools available to contest them, and the refusal — by Palestinians and global publics alike — to accept managed containment as peace.

Palestinian history teaches us that when Israel preserves its power through deferral and fragmentation, resistance recalibrates — as it has. From the First Intifada’s stones to the drone-led breaches of 2023, Palestinians have adapted their tactics in response to the evolving machinery of occupation. The brutal reality is that nonviolent appeals alone yield no structural change. International forums delay, humanitarian frameworks depoliticize, and ceasefires collapse under the weight of Israeli impunity.

The shift from mass marches to legal filings, from symbolic protest to infrastructural sabotage, reflects a refusal to be contained by frameworks that treat recognition as negotiable and justice as deferrable. It is also a response to the collapse of Israel’s deterrence doctrine. The myth of invincibility — once central to its strategic posture — has unraveled. What remains is not deterrence, but a cycle of escalation that exposes the limits of force and the futility of erasure.

What brings us to this moment is not just breach, but clarity: that resistance must be plural, strategic, and unrelenting. That ceasefire without justice is not peace — it is postponement. And that every recalibration is a reminder: the demand for return, dignity, and accountability will not be pacified. It will be rearticulated, reimagined, and reasserted — until the scaffolds of impunity collapse.

_______________________________________________________

2. From Stones to Drones

If the ceasefire reveals the fragility of Israel’s deterrence, the trajectory of Palestinian resistance reveals its persistence. Resistance has never been static; it has shifted forms in response to both repression and possibility, each phase marked by tactical recalibration and Israeli countermeasure. What endures is not a single method, but a continuum — stones, rockets, tunnels, drones — each iteration exposing the limits of domination and the futility of erasure.

During the First Intifada (1987–1993), grassroots organizers in Gaza and the West Bank — primarily under the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising — mobilized civilians to boycott Israeli goods, refuse tax payments, and stage mass demonstrations. Young Palestinians hurled stones at soldiers and tanks. These acts of defiance pressured Israeli authorities and drew global attention, culminating in the 1993 Oslo Accords. While Israel retained military control, Palestinians gained limited self-governance through the newly formed Palestinian Authority.

In the Second Intifada (2000–2005), armed factions such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Fatah’s al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades escalated resistance through suicide bombings, ambushes, and sniper attacks. Israel responded with Operation Defensive Shield, reoccupied major West Bank cities, and constructed the separation wall. It assassinated key Palestinian leaders, including Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi. Palestinians asserted their refusal to accept occupation, while Israel fortified borders and fragmented Palestinian political unity.

After Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from Gaza, Hamas consolidated control and shifted tactics toward rocket warfare. Hamas and Islamic Jihad launched thousands of rockets into southern Israel, prompting repeated Israeli military operations — Cast Lead (2008–09), Pillar of Defense (2012), and Protective Edge (2014). Israel deployed airstrikes, ground invasions, and naval blockades, killing thousands and destroying infrastructure. Palestinian factions built underground tunnels for smuggling and surprise attacks. Despite heavy losses, they maintained operational capacity and international visibility. Simultaneously, civil society groups organized nonviolent campaigns — like the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement and the Great March of Return (2018) — which Israel countered with sniper fire and legal restrictions.

On October 7, 2023, Hamas and allied Palestinian resistance factions launched a coordinated assault on southern Israel, targeting military bases, surveillance systems, and nearby settlements. Fighters used drones to disable towers, powered paragliders to breach airspace, and sent ground units to storm fortified positions. In the same area, the Nova music festival — held near Kibbutz Re’im, adjacent to several military installations — was caught both in the assault and in Israeli fire enacted under the Hannibal doctrine, a protocol invoked to prevent abductions even at the risk of killing Israeli civilians and soldiers. Israel responded with overwhelming force.

Approximately 1,200 people were killed inside Israel and more than 200 taken hostage by Hamas and allied factions. While the overall toll is widely cited, the precise breakdown remains unclear: independent tallies suggest roughly 815 civilians (including 36 children and 79 foreign nationals) and about 379 members of Israeli security forces, but attribution of responsibility for each death — whether caused by Palestinian fighters, Israeli crossfire under the Hannibal doctrine, or other circumstances — has not been independently verified.

For Palestinians, the breach shattered the illusion of Israeli invincibility and re-centered Gaza in global discourse. It demonstrated that even under siege, Palestinian factions could disrupt one of the most technologically fortified borders in the world. The operation forced international observers to confront the asymmetry of power and the persistence of Palestinian resistance.

Israel responded with overwhelming force. The Air Force bombed residential neighborhoods, refugee camps, and what it described as Hamas command centers — claims that were later discredited, as no such military infrastructure was found. The IDF invaded northern Gaza and imposed a full siege — cutting off electricity, fuel, food, and water. Cyber units disrupted communications, while Shin Bet and Mossad coordinated assassinations of Hamas leaders. These actions aimed to dismantle Hamas’s military capacity and restore deterrence.

Israel’s response deepened the humanitarian catastrophe and intensified global scrutiny of U.S.-backed impunity. Images of mass displacement and destroyed hospitals fueled international protests and legal challenges. While Israel achieved short-term tactical gains, it faced mounting reputational costs and renewed calls for accountability.

Meanwhile, Palestinian civil society responded with mass funerals, war crimes documentation, and digital campaigns that reframed the narrative. Artists, journalists, and legal advocates amplified testimonies and challenged the framing of the conflict as symmetrical. The October 7 breach marked not just a military rupture but a discursive one — where the limits of Israeli impunity and the resilience of Palestinian resistance collided on a global stage.

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3. Parallel Demands and Reversals (Oct 7, 2023–Oct 12, 2025)

If the evolution of Palestinian resistance — from stones to drones — signaled the collapse of Israel’s deterrence, then in the wake of October 7 the struggle shifted into negotiation rooms, where demands for recognition and return collided with Israeli preconditions and strategic reversals. Even the Palestinian negotiators themselves became targets of assassination attempts, exposing how perilous and fragile the process had become. Each phase unfolded as a duel of assertions: Palestinian calls for liberation met Israeli demands for submission, and every apparent concession dissolved under the weight of reversal.

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Phase 1: Shock and Assertion (Oct–Dec 2023)

Hamas demanded an immediate halt to Israeli military operations, the lifting of the Gaza blockade, and the release of thousands of Palestinian captives. Civil society amplified these demands through legal petitions, war-crimes dossiers, and mass testimony campaigns.

Israel responded with overwhelming force — bombing Gaza, invading northern sectors, and extending operations into Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen. Its counter-demand was categorical: the unconditional return of Israeli captives and Hamas’s total dismantlement.

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Phase 2: Strategic Entrenchment and Internationalization (Jan–Dec 2024)

Hamas recalibrated, advancing phased negotiation proposals centered on humanitarian corridors and prisoner exchanges. It entered indirect talks mediated by Egypt, Qatar, and Turkey.

Israel entrenched itself in maximalist positions — reoccupying strategic zones, violating ceasefire terms, and enacting laws that criminalized dissent. Cyber operations targeted Palestinian communications, extending the battlefield into the digital sphere.

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Phase 3: Exhaustion and Tactical Concessions (Jan–Oct 2025)

Hamas accepted a U.S.-brokered framework for phased disarmament, international aid oversight, and prisoner exchange. Civil society deepened its role, documenting violations and reframing Palestinian narratives in international forums.

Israel signed the ceasefire but immediately subverted it — rearresting released Palestinian prisoners, resuming airstrikes in Lebanon, and using tactical compliance as cover for strategic reversal.

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4. Legal Terrain: Cracks in the Shield

If the cycle of demands and reversals revealed the fragility of ceasefires, the legal terrain exposes the deeper fault line: enforcement. The Trump-brokered ceasefire was heralded as a stabilizing breakthrough, yet its credibility hinges on a question that shadows every Israeli-Palestinian truce: what does Israeli impunity mean for law itself?

Israel’s long record of violating international law under U.S. protection now faces unprecedented scrutiny. The ICC arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant mark a symbolic rupture, but symbolism alone cannot compel compliance. With no binding enforcement mechanisms, the ceasefire rests on fragile ground, and Israel’s history casts doubt on its intent to honor any terms.

Within 24 hours of the October 2025 ceasefire, Israel resumed airstrikes on Gaza, blocked UNRWA access, and withheld basic services. In the West Bank, Israel is rearresting previously freed Palestinian prisoners, violating the terms of the planned exchange.

These breaches are not anomalies — they are systemic. Israel’s military openly describes ceasefire-period strikes in Lebanon as “operational achievements,” boasting of degrading Hezbollah’s infrastructure during supposed calm. In Gaza, it refuses to commit in writing to non-resumption of hostilities, leaving every truce vulnerable to unilateral escalation.

The legal implications are mounting. Civil society groups, international legal bodies, and regional governments are documenting violations, filing complaints, and demanding accountability. The ICC’s jurisdictional reach is expanding, and calls for sanctions — once dismissed as fringe — are entering mainstream policy debates. The Trump administration’s silence on these violations further exposes the fragility of ceasefire enforcement when impunity is structurally embedded.

This is the terrain of reckoning. Israeli impunity is no longer absolute, and Palestinian resistance is no longer framed as disruption — it is increasingly recognized as demand. The Trump-brokered ceasefire may falter, but the architecture of accountability is being built — clause by clause, testimony by testimony, breach by breach.

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5. Closing: Not Resolution, But Refusal

The cracks in Israel’s legal shield are mirrored by fractures in its discursive one. Every filing, every warrant, every clause is shadowed by a larger contest: over memory, over narrative, over who defines legitimacy. Law alone cannot contain the struggle. What follows is not only a legal battle but a cultural and political rupture — where testimony becomes weapon, narrative becomes terrain, and refusal insists on being heard.

Palestinian refusal is infrastructural, legal, and through discourse — through discourse — in essays, poetry, slogans, oral histories, media, and everyday language that assert identity, memory, and resistance. It lives in the testimonies submitted to the ICC, in the rearrested prisoners whose names reappear on walls and in chants, and in the refusal of families to evacuate homes marked for demolition. It is the insistence that survival is not surrender, and that reconstruction without recognition is another form of erasure.

Hamas and allied factions’ acceptance of the ceasefire is an agreement to pause fire, exchange prisoners, and allow humanitarian access under international pressure. It is not an agreement to surrender arms, dissolve the resistance, or abandon the demand for sovereignty and return. Those issues were explicitly deferred, and Israel’s unmet insistence on disarmament underscores that what was accepted was tactical, while what was refused was existential.

The Trump plan, like Oslo before it, offers managed fragmentation: transitional committees, conditional aid, and strategic ambiguity. But the Palestinian response — across generations and geographies — has made clear that containment will not be mistaken for resolution. The ceasefire may pause the missiles, but it cannot pause memory, nor the demand for return, dignity, and accountability.

This moment carries the weight of accumulated refusal. It is not the end of war, nor the beginning of peace. It is the threshold where impunity is named, resistance is reframed, and the architecture of silence begins to crack. What comes next will not be decided in diplomatic chambers alone, but in the spaces where testimony, law, and memory converge — and where refusal becomes the grammar of justice.

Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem and whose mother’s side of the family is from Ijzim, south of Haifa.

13 October 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr. Ramzy Baroud

If we are to speak of a Palestinian victory in Gaza, it is a resounding triumph for the Palestinian people, their indomitable spirit, and their deeply rooted resistance that transcends faction, ideology, and politics.

For decades, the prevailing notion was that the ‘solution’ to the Israeli occupation of Palestine lay in a strictly negotiated process. “Only dialogue can achieve peace” has been the relentlessly peddled mantra in political circles, academic platforms, media forums, and the like.

A colossal industry burgeoned around that idea, expanding dramatically in the lead-up to, and for years after, the signing of the Oslo Accords between Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Israeli government.

The Unmaking of ‘Peace’

The problem was never with the fundamental principle of ‘dialogue,’ ‘peace,’ nor even with that of ‘painful compromises‘ — a notion tirelessly circulated during the ‘peace process’ period between 1993 and the early 2000s.

Instead, the conflict has largely been shaped by how these terms, and an entire scaffolding of similar terminology, were defined and implemented. ‘Peace’ for Israel and the US necessitated a subservient Palestinian leadership, ready to negotiate and operate within confined parameters, and entirely outside the binding parameters of international law.

Similarly, ‘dialogue’ was only permissible if the Palestinian leadership consented to renounce ‘terrorism’ — read: armed resistance — disarm, recognize Israel’s purported right to exist as a Jewish state, and adhere to the prescribed language dictated by Israel and the US.

In fact, only after officially renouncing ‘terrorism’ and accepting a restricted interpretation of specific UN resolutions on the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza did Washington agree to ‘dialogue’ with Arafat. Such low-level conversations took place in Tunisia and involved a junior US official — Robert Pelletreau, Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs.

Not once did Israel consent to ‘dialogue’ with Palestinians without a stringent set of preconditions, driving Arafat to a unilateral series of concessions at the expense of his people. Ultimately, Oslo yielded nothing of intrinsic value for Palestinians, apart from Israel’s mere recognition, not of Palestine or the Palestinian people, but of the Palestinian Authority (PA), which, over time, became a conduit for corruption. The PA’s continued existence is inextricably linked to that of the Israeli occupation itself.

Israel, conversely, operated unchecked, conducting raids on Palestinian towns, executing massacres at will, enforcing a debilitating siege on Gaza, assassinating activists, and imprisoning Palestinians en masse, including women and children. In fact, the post-‘dialogue,’ ‘peace,’ and ‘painful compromises’ era witnessed the largest expansion and effective annexation of Palestinian land since the 1967 Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza.

Gaza as the Anomaly

During this period, there was a widespread consensus that violence, meaning only Palestinian armed resistance in response to unconstrained Israeli violence, was intolerable. The PA’s Mahmoud Abbas dismissed it in 2008 as ‘useless,’ and subsequently, in coordination with the Israeli military, devoted much of the PA’s security apparatus to suppress any form of resistance to Israel, armed or otherwise.

Though Jenin, Tulkarm, Nablus, and other regions and refugee camps in the West Bank continued to forge spaces, however constrained, for armed resistance, the concerted efforts of Israel and the PA often crushed or at least substantially reduced these moments.

Gaza, however, consistently stood as the anomaly. The Strip’s armed uprisings have persisted since the early 1950s, with the emergence of the fedayeen movement, followed by a succession of socialist and Islamic resistance groups. The place has always remained unmanageable — by Israel, and later by the PA. When Abbas loyalists were defeated following brief but tragic violent clashes between Fatah and Hamas in Gaza in 2007, the small territory became an undisputed center of armed resistance.

This event occurred two years after the Israeli army’s redeployment out of Palestinian population centers in the Strip (2005), into the so-called military buffer zones, established on areas that were historically part of Gaza’s territory. It was the start of today’s hermetic siege on Gaza. 

In 2006, Hamas secured a majority of seats in the Palestinian Legislative Council, an unexpected turn of events that infuriated Washington, Tel Aviv, Ramallah, and other Western and Arab allies.

The fear was that without Israel’s PA allies maintaining control over the resistance inside Gaza and the West Bank, the occupied territories would inevitably result in a widespread anti-occupation revolt.

Consequently, Israel intensified its suffocating siege on the Strip, which refused to capitulate despite the horrific humanitarian crisis resulting from the blockade. Thus, starting in 2008, Israel adopted a new strategy: treating the Gaza resistance as an actual military force, thereby launching major wars that resulted in the killing and wounding of tens of thousands of people, predominantly civilians.

These major conflicts included the war of December 2008-January 2009, November 2012, July-August 2014, May 2021, and the latest genocidal war commencing in October 2023.

Despite the immense destruction and the relentless siege, let alone external international and Arab pressures and isolation, the Strip somehow endured and even regenerated itself. Destroyed residences were rebuilt from the salvaged rubble, and resistance weaponry was also replenished, often utilizing unexploded Israeli munitions.

The October 7 Rupture

The October 7 Hamas operation, known as Al-Aqsa Flood, constituted a significant break from the established pattern that had endured for years.

For Palestinians, it represented the ultimate evolution of their armed struggle, a culmination of a process that commenced in the early 1950s and involved diverse groups and political ideologies. It served as a stark notification to Israel that the rules of engagement have irrevocably shifted, and that the besieged Palestinians refuse to submit to their supposed historical role of perpetual victimhood.

For Israel, the event was earth-shattering. It exposed the country’s vaunted military and intelligence as deeply flawed, and revealed that the country’s leadership assessment of Palestinian capabilities was fundamentally erroneous.

This failure followed the brief surge of confidence during the normalization campaign initiated by the US and Israel with pliable Arab and Muslim countries during Trump’s first term in office. At that time, it appeared as though the Palestinians and their cause had been rendered irrelevant in the broader Middle Eastern political landscape. Between a co-opted Palestinian leadership in the West Bank and besieged resistance movements in Gaza, Palestine was no longer a decisive factor in Israel’s pursuit of regional hegemony.

The centerpiece of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s strategy, and his aspiration to conclude his long political career with the ultimate regional triumph, was suddenly obliterated. Enraged, disoriented, but also determined to restore all of Israel’s advantages since Oslo, Netanyahu embarked on a campaign of mass killing that, over the course of two years, culminated in one of the worst genocides in human history.

His methodical extermination of the Palestinians and overt desire to ethnically cleanse the survivors out of Gaza laid bare Israel and its Zionist ideology for their inherently violent character, thus allowing the world, especially Western societies, to fully perceive Israel for what it truly is, and what it has always been.

Resistance, Resilience, and Defeat

But the genuine fear that unified Israel, the US, and several Arab countries is the terrifying prospect that Resistance, particularly armed resistance, could re-emerge in Palestine, and by extension across the Middle East, as a viable force capable of threatening all autocratic and undemocratic regimes. This fear was dramatically amplified by the ascent of other non-state actors, such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and Ansarallah in Yemen, who collectively with the Gaza resistance managed to forge a formidable alliance that required direct US involvement in the conflict.

Even then, Israel failed to achieve any of its strategic objectives in Gaza, owing to the legendary resilience of the Palestinian people, but also the prowess of the resistance that managed to destroy over 2,000 Israeli military vehicles, including hundreds of the pride and joy of the Israeli military industry, the Merkava tank.

No Arab army has managed to exact this scale of military, political, and economic cost from Israel throughout the country’s violent existence of nearly eight decades. Though Israel and the US — and others, including some Arab countries and the PA — continue to demand the disarming of the resistance, such a demand is rationally nearly unattainable. Israel has dropped over 200,000 tons of explosives over Gaza over the course of two years to achieve that singular objective, and failed. There is no plausible reason to believe that it can achieve such a goal through political and economic pressures alone.

Not only did Israel fail in Gaza, or, more accurately in the words of many Israeli historians and retired army generals, was decisively defeated in Gaza, but Palestinians have managed to reassert Palestinian agency, including the legitimacy of all forms of resistance, as a winning strategy against Israeli colonialism and US-Western imperialism in the region. This explains the profound fear shared by all parties that Israel’s defeat in Gaza could fundamentally alter the entire regional power dynamics.

Though the US and its Western and Arab allies will persist in negotiating in an attempt to resurrect the almost 90-year-old Palestinian leader Abbas and his Oslo paradigm as the only viable alternatives for Palestinians, the medium and long-term consequences of the war are likely to present a starkly different reality, one where Oslo and its corrupted figures are definitively relegated to the past.

Finally, if we are to speak of a Palestinian victory in Gaza, it is a resounding triumph for the Palestinian people, their indomitable spirit, and their deeply rooted resistance that transcends faction, ideology, and politics.

All of this considered, it must also be clearly stated that the current ceasefire in Gaza cannot be misconstrued as a ‘peace plan’; it is a mere pause from the genocide, as there will certainly be a subsequent round of conflict, the nature of which depends heavily on what unfolds in the West Bank, indeed the entire region, in the coming months and years.

Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle.

13 October 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr Marwan Asmar 

As the winter months approach many people in Gaza continue to sleep outside as the cold freezing air starts to bite. They have been displaced countless times in this Israeli war and have nowhere to go as their homes have been bombed multiple times with the 2.2 million population turned into mass internal refugees.

One such family, without a husband, in south Gaza continues to sleep on the side of the road among the debris and moving cars and vehicles. Others, sleep in makeshift sheets and plastic, hastily hoisted to try and protect them and keep the freezing air out.

…On the roadside

“Don’t worry it will not fall down, now shut up and sleep”, a mother tells her little one who found a ramshackle place on the side of the road. “And the same goes for you,” she tells the other child.

But how can that be! “We are living on the pavement next to the road, among speeding cars, where people are moving, going up and down all the time,” she tells the Al Jazeera cameraman engulfed in the pitch dark surroundings. Only the passing cars offer a glimmer of light.

“In the night we are literally sleeping between the passing people, there is nothing to protect us. I try not to close my eyes because of the constant fear around us as men are constantly roaming up and down. This is not to say anything about the stray dogs and other animals who may come our way. I have to be alert to shoo them away.”

A car can be heard skidding nearby. “I stay awake as well because my child may suddenly get up and run to the road, and if a car hits him, it really wouldn’t be the fault of the driver. So I stay awake as I don’t want anyone to hurt my children,” she concludes.

But this is hard to believe in what has become a downtrodden chaotic world.

Living in Plastic

Next the scene changes with many tents huddled one against each other, trying to do with the latest modern living the war is now offering. The Gaza Strip has become proffused with tent cities, and with those labels, there are the underdogs – those who can’t offered the proper $1000 tents but have to sleep on the margins in derelict and tiny ‘holes” made of plastic sheets and/or light material that collapse at the sight of any wind.

“It’s like living outside, you can’t call this a place of living,” another one says referring to her small, plastic tent. Here there is no toilet, we have to ask other people’s living in proper tents to ‘do our business” and at times, forcing ourselves upon them but what can we do”, her voice can filter through the camera.

“At night we remain in fear because of the stray dogs who remain amongst us, howling between our tents. This is not to say anything about the creepy-crawlers and snakes. At night I beg my neighbors to let my two grown up daughters sleep in their tent while I remain with my other small children here, but it’s really a struggle.”

Her life has long become a complete misery. “At night my children freeze because there are no blankets, we barely have thin sheets to use as cover, there are no clothes here, we simply don’t have anything, they have to go bare foot, there are no shoes, not even sandals or flip-flops for them to wear.

There is neither food, nor drinks, we stay hungry all day except for the one-day meal the kids bring from the food charities the kids queue for. After that one meal, we wait for the following day hoping to be fed.”

Dry bread Sprinkled With Salt

“How can I describe the place, it’s bad,” says a haggard old man with a beard that keeps getting longer. “We have no tent to sleep in, winter is setting in and the rain is likely to lead to our death, first it was the scorching sun, God only knows how we survived then, now the winter is upon us, we just wait for the worse, the drenching rains, life is a constant challenge,” he says amidst the dirt-soil.

Even the water is hard to come, and this is for everyone, the rugs you see here were given to us by people whose situation is really no better than us. In terms of food, as God is my witness, the bread I have here from my feed, I collected, it’s dry and hard that has been sprinkled with salt. When I am hungry, I wet it with the available water and eat.  This is how we try to survive in Gaza today.”

These are a few of the voices from Gaza. For them, life has long become miserable. Here, they speak out of their dreary lives that have become a constant struggle for survival.

Dr Marwan Asmar is a journalist from Amman, Jordan

13 October 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr. Ghassan Shahrour

The tragedy unfolding in Gaza continues to challenge the moral conscience of our world. Entire families have vanished under the rubble, hospitals lie in ruins, and generations of children carry trauma that no ceasefire can erase. For those of us who serve in the health and humanitarian fields, Gaza is not a headline — it is a wound in humanity’s body, still bleeding despite the promises of diplomacy.

As health professionals and advocates for disarmament, peace, and human rights, we are bound by an ethical duty: to defend life, to protect dignity, and to refuse silence when politics crush compassion. Peace cannot be built on selective empathy or on temporary calm that ignores the roots of injustice.

U.S. President Donald Trump now claims credit for the Gaza agreement, yet his record and articles of the agreement tell another story — one that reveals the gulf between words and deeds:

• He backed Israel’s war machine with billions in weapons. According to Brown University’s Costs of War project (Sept 2025), U.S. aid to Israel between Oct 2023 and Sept 2025 reached $33.77 billion.(Biden/Trump). It encompasses both aid to Israel and broader U.S. military activities in the Middle East.
• He punished the International Criminal Court for issuing arrest warrants against Israel’s Prime Minister, shielding war crimes from accountability — the first such act in modern history.
• He sanctioned Palestinian human rights groups that cooperated with the ICC.
• He repeatedly vetoed UN Security Council ceasefire resolutions, even when all other members supported them.
• His “peace plan” omitted international law, victims’ rights, and any commitment to end occupation or annexation.
• It excluded Palestinian representation, sidelined the UN, and promoted privatized reconstruction under business elites.

This is not peacemaking — it is power disguised as diplomacy.

This is not reconstruction — it is control through commerce.

True peace requires more than deals between governments. It demands accountability, justice, dignity, international humanitarian laws and Palestinian self-determination — not a “Riviera of the Middle East” built on rubble and repression. Genuine peace grows from truth and equity, not from silence and spectacle.

To talk about peace while avoiding the question of justice is to perpetuate an illusion. Every demolished home, every denied permit, every child deprived of medical care and education is not only a personal tragedy but a violation of international law. The Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits collective punishment and attacks on civilians, yet such violations continue with impunity. When international law is applied selectively, it loses both its authority and its soul.

Peace that ignores accountability is fragile; peace without dignity is impossible. History has shown that oppression, when left unchallenged, reproduces itself under new names and flags. The lessons of South Africa, of Vietnam, of Bosnia — all remind us that reconciliation without justice merely postpones conflict.

As a medical doctor, I have seen how the human body mirrors the moral state of our societies. In Gaza’s hospitals, medical workers perform surgeries without anesthesia, parents search for missing children in the debris, and patients on dialysis die because fuel for generators has run out. These are not statistics — they are names, faces, and stories. They remind us that neutrality in the face of such suffering is not humanitarianism; it is complicity.

Disarmament, too, must be understood in moral terms. It is not only about reducing weapons stockpiles, but about dismantling the systems that arm injustice: unchecked power, economic greed, and the silence of those who know better. The architecture of impunity — built through vetoes, military aid, and political shielding — sustains the violence as much as the weapons themselves.

If humanity is to survive its own contradictions, it must reclaim moral clarity. The right to life, health, and safety cannot depend on geography or identity. The world cannot insist on accountability in one conflict while excusing atrocities in another. Selective outrage erodes the very foundation of universal human rights.

Peace is not a transaction; it is a transformation — of power into justice, of fear into dignity, of silence into truth and advocacy. It begins when we recognize that every life, Palestinian or otherwise, holds equal worth.

We must speak — for truth, for justice, for every person denied care, shelter, and recognition. The price of silence is far greater than the cost of courage.

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” — Martin Luther King Jr.

“It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies.” — Noam Chomsky

Last but not least, only when we embrace that responsibility — as citizens, professionals, and human beings — can the world hope to move from ceasefire to peace, and from peace to justice.

Dr. Ghassan Shahrour is a medical doctor, writer, and human rights advocate specializing in health, disability, and disarmament.

13 October 2025

Source: countercurrents.org