An Israeli soldier watches buildings in Gaza burn. Image via Twitter: @ytirawi
Israel’s government and army, with the broad approval of its society, have committed one of the most exhaustively documented genocides in modern history - a campaign of annihilation against the Palestinian people marked by war crimes and crimes against humanity.
For over two years, refugee camps and residential districts in Gaza have been subjected to relentless bombardment. Civilians - men, women, and children - have been systematically targeted by Israeli snipers and drones with lethal precision. Extrajudicial killings have become routine, executed from both air and ground. Across the decimated strip, mass graves continue to emerge, silent testaments to industrial-scale slaughter.
Behind the visible destruction lies another, hidden crime: thousands of Palestinians have vanished in a campaign of enforced disappearances. In warehouses, prisons, and detention centres, torture has been institutionalised; families left to search for loved ones who never return. Hunger has become a weapon, engineered by Israel’s siege to starve the population into submission. Thousands have been gunned down while seeking aid, killed by Israeli soldiers and American contractors from the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation in an orgy of state-sanctioned murder.
Much as the Nazis razed Warsaw, the Israeli army has systematically reduced Gaza’s cities, towns, and villages to rubble. Mosques have been levelled, churches struck by bombs and gunfire. Every hospital has been attacked, many obliterated entirely. Archaeological treasures have been looted, cultural heritage sites annihilated. Soldiers have filmed themselves plundering, torching, and celebrating amid the ruins. The erasure is total: Gaza’s universities, schools, and libraries have been wiped out; its farmland seized or scorched; its fishing fleets crippled beyond repair.
The human toll extends to those who sought only to save or to document. Aid workers, journalists, and doctors have been hunted as deliberately as fighters. Five hundred sixty-five aid workers, 223 journalists, and at least 1,400 healthcare professionals have been killed since October 2023 - the highest such tolls ever recorded.
By early 2024, Oxfam reported that Israeli forces were killing an average of 250 Palestinians every day, a rate unmatched in any conflict of the twenty-first century. Israeli army data confirmed that civilians constituted 83 percent of those killed - a figure that eviscerated the official claim that Israel was “targeting Hamas.” The Guardian observed that “this ratio of civilians to combatants among the dead is extremely high for modern warfare, even compared with conflicts notorious for indiscriminate killing, including the Syrian and Sudanese civil wars.”
The bloodletting has not been confined to Gaza. In the occupied West Bank, Netanyahu’s government accelerated annexation, expanding settlements and enabling the ultranationalist, messianic movement led by Smotrich and Ben-Gvir. Under their direction, ethnic cleansing has intensified, killing more than a thousand Palestinians since October 2023 and extinguishing the final vestiges of hope for a sovereign Palestinian state.
The death toll across the territories is far higher than the conservative figure of 67,000. By July 2024, The Lancet warned that “it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the war in Gaza.” The violence continued for more than a year after that estimate. In September 2025, former Israeli Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi admitted that “more than 200,000 [Palestinians]” were dead and wounded, acknowledging that the army had “taken the gloves off.” A UN official described the result as “the highest killing rate anywhere in the world since the Rwandan genocide of 1994.”
No statistic can truly convey the moral collapse such numbers represent. The genocide of the Palestinians, the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, and the devastation of Lebanon and Syria have transformed Israel from self-styled democracy into pariah. Its carefully constructed image of civility - already fraying long before October 7 - has dissolved entirely in blood and dust. No cascade of state propaganda or influencer-driven PR will restore it for generations, perhaps ever.
But this genocide is not Israel’s crime alone. The United States and major European powers - Germany, the United Kingdom, France - have for decades armed, funded, and shielded Israel’s war machine. Their complicity is shared by the network of lobbyists, media figures, and public-relations operatives who sought to obscure atrocity and shift blame, often onto the victims themselves. These people, irredeemable, will now feign ignorance as the ceasefire settles.
In Gaza, we glimpse the kind of world Israel’s leaders would reproduce elsewhere: one of walls, camps, and perpetual war. Figures such as Netanyahu, Trump, and Putin, and movements like Alternative für Deutschland, Le Pen’s National Rally, and Farage’s Reform Party, all channel similar impulses - illiberalism hardened by fear, authoritarianism wrapped in the language of security. Israel, now an ethnonationalist state corrupted by apartheid and zeal, stands as both warning and model for them. History will not.
Israel’s wars, from 1948 to today, have always ended the same way: military success masking political failure. The state has never resolved its founding contradiction - between those who seek more land and conquest, and those who wish to shed the burden of occupation that is devouring the country from within. The result is a society increasingly defined by zealotry, unable to distinguish survival from domination.
In this, Israel mirrors an older story. The Zealots of ancient Judea, born under Roman occupation, fused religious fervour with militant resistance. Their creed was absolute: redemption through struggle, even if it brought ruin upon their own people. They are remembered as both heroic and tragic - heroic in their defiance, tragic in their self-destruction.
Kahanism, the ideology ascendant in Israel today, is a perverse mirror of that ancient faith. Conceived by Rabbi Meir Kahane, it preaches a Jewish state purged of Palestinians, governed by theocratic nationalism, sustained by perpetual conflict. The Zealots fought foreign domination; the Kahanists enforce it. Yet both sanctify violence as a redemptive act and view compromise as betrayal. The difference is that Kahanism resides within a modern, nuclear-armed state - legitimised, financed, and armed by Washington.
As Gaza burns and starves, and Israel’s far right marches unimpeded through the corridors of power, the echoes of that zealotry grow louder. Israel’s dependence on permanent conflict - whether against Hamas, Hezbollah, or Iran - only postpones an inevitable reckoning with its internal decay: a collapsing social contract, the rise of settler messianism, and the erosion of even the thinnest democratic pretence.
That reckoning may come gradually, masked by cycles of violence and repression. But it will come. Like the Crusader kingdoms, Israel may endure for years through war and foreign patronage, yet its foundations - ethnocracy, apartheid, occupation - are unsustainable. Fortified walls and advanced weaponry can only delay the collapse. Much of the time remaining is borrowed.
In the end, it is the Palestinians - stateless, voiceless, and trapped between occupation and zealotry - who bear the heaviest price for a state that refuses self-examination. Few will mourn the eventual passing of this order. Those who enabled it, from the Knesset to Washington and London, will be condemned by history.
The destruction of Gaza evokes the Mongol sack of Baghdad in 1258 - not in precise historical terms, but in the magnitude of devastation and the symbolic annihilation of a people’s civic and cultural life. Gaza was more than a place; it was a living archive of memory, identity, and resistance. Its erasure will haunt the century.
Zionism and Kahanism - the ideologies driving Israel’s present course - will stand in history’s dock beside Hutu Power, Greater Serbia, Nazism, and other doctrines that fused supremacy with mass killing. All genocides are singular, but what may most haunt historians about the Palestinian genocide is not merely its scale, but the extent to which Western states and media surrendered their own moral agency to enable it. From London to Berlin, Washington to Paris, governments shredded international law and the rules of war to defend the indefensible.
Israel’s onslaught carries echoes of humanity’s darkest chapters, a shard of the Second World War re-emerging in our time. Yet to call its perpetrators Nazis misses the point - and plays into Israel’s own weaponisation of that language. The ideology driving Israel’s violence is its own distinct evil: a deformed Zionism fused with Kahanist messianism, an ethnonationalism that sacralises domination. It belongs to the same lineage of genocidal ideologies - but it is uniquely its own.
The Israeli regime’s survival strategy has always been permanent war. In waging it, Israel has decimated its enemies - from Lebanon to Gaza to Iran and Syria - but also hastened its own undoing. President Donald Trump’s ceasefire now offers only temporary reprieve. Beneath it lies a reckoning long deferred, and a truth impossible to bury: Israel’s destruction of Gaza marks not its triumph, but the beginning of its collapse.