Eileen Abu Zouz lies on the on the operating table. The toddler’s head is matted with blood and her pink cardigan has been ripped open by the medical team working on her. A piece of shrapnel from an Israeli shell which hit her home is lodged deep in her chest. Moaning in agony, obsodian eyes looking up to the ceiling, she emits cries of pain as she lies in critical condition. She is one of hundreds of children maimed or killed by murderous Israeli air raids on March 18th, attacks which brought an end to a ceasefire marked by intermittent bloodshed in a besieged Gaza and the West Bank.

The wave of bombardments have restarted the massacres in Gaza’s killing fields but for several weeks Benjamin Netanyhu’s government has already intensified its siege of the decimated strip by blocking all aid for three weeks. Israeli forces have killed nearly 1,000 Palestinian men, women and children since the abrupt end of ceasefire and targeted Gaza’s only specialised cancer hospital in the renewed assault.

The same patterns of collective punishment marked the war before the January ceasefire; using hunger as a weapon of war; systematically obliterating what remains of Gaza’s healthcare system; perpetrating massacres across the strip; and indiscrimnately targeting civilians have resumed. Between the reimpostion of a total siege of the strip and the systemic bombings, Israel appears to be pressing Hamas into releasing more hostages in exchange for prisoners, as well as to degrade Hamas’s control of Gaza. The attacks could be part of a haphazard plan to increase airstrikes and pressure, which could ultimately see a renewed ground invasion of Gaza, and potentially reoccupy the strip Israeli soldiers left in 2005.

As the army renews its murderous assualt on Gaza, cynical claims that the Israeli state is waging a war of defence or that Israel has “a right to defend itself” no longer hold weight. Where such claims held some credence in the immediate aftermath of the October 7 attacks - before the campaign almost immediately mutated into a campaign marked by indiscriminate, genocidal violence and widespread atrocities - the vicious campaign underway underscore that Netanyahu’s government does not want and never wanted peace.

This is a war of choice for the cabal of ethnonationalists, Jewish supremacists, Zionist extremists and the messianic settler movement that Netanyahu’s champions. Perpetual war is the end goal for Israel’s prime minister in a last ditch effort to cling to power, evade prison and avoid accountability for his failings that led to Israel’s catastrophic intelligence failure on October 7th.

The October 7th attacks by Hamas operatives which led to the death of 1,100 Israeli civilians and soldiers and the seizure of hundreds of hostages have served as a perfect pretext for the Israeli state and army to unleash genocidal slaughter over the past eighteen months. The campaign in Gaza, tempered by two ceasefires, has been brutal, killing an estimated 60,000 men, women and children, though it is likely the death toll is far higher with tens of thousands more missing, dying of hunger, wounds and preventable diseases.

Over 70% of those killed have been women and children, with several UN bodies describing Gaza as being the most dangerous place in the world to be a child. At least 112,000 people have been wounded and 90% of Gaza’s population has been displaced from their homes, some often multiple times by Israeli attacks.

Flagrant war crimes and crimes against humanity have been committed against the population by the Israeli army nearly two years. Israeli forces have manufactured famine in pockets of the strip and humanitarian aid has been blocked or targeted, denying the population access to food, water and medical supplies. Hospitals have been systematically obliterated up and down the enclave and doctors and healthcare workers have been murdered and disappered en-masse by the Israelis.

Aid workers trying to help, local and foreign, have been deliberately targeted and assassinated while UN workers and journalists have been killed in record numbers by Israeli forces. In detention centres, warehouses and de-facto concentration camps, evidence has mounted of Israeli police and soldiers torturing, raping, starving and abusing Palestinian prisoners. Thousands more have been disappeared by Israeli forces with families left in a hellish legal limbo and without information on the whereabouts of their loves ones.

Historical and archaeological treasures, mosques, churches, schools, homes, graveyards and shops have been targeted, ransacked or systematically looted and levelled, often with relish, by Israeli soldiers. Refugee camps and so-called ‘safe-zones’ have been repeated targets for massacre by Israeli air raids and mass-graves dot the landscape with thousands missing beneath the rubble. Almost every building in Gaza has been damaged or destroyed by Israeli forces, a product of one of the most devastating air bombing campaigns waged in human history.

In the West Bank, Israel wages war against the Palestinians on another front. Under the fog of war, the Israeli state is utilising the opportunity to expel more Palestinians, destroying refugee camps, annexing land and cementing apartheid rule in the second Palestinian enclave. What was once a slow-motion campaign of ethnic cleansing has been accelerated by Netanyahu’s government as the Israeli raids have reduced parts of the West Bank to ‘mini-Gazas’.

As the genocide continues unabated, and the outside world struggles to grapple with the magnitude of what is happeneing in Gaza, the Israeli state is doubling down on plans to unleash more ethnic cleansing and genocidal violence; acts actively championed by Netanyahu and his government. From the very beginning of the war, extremists across Israeli society have been baying for permanently uprooting Gaza’s population and replacing them with settlements.

Countries are being pitched as potential destination for Palestinians undergoing “voluntary emigration” from cleansed territories including African countries such as war-ravaged Sudan and Somalia and Somaliland. The plans bear chilling parallels to the Madagaskarplan proposed by the very nation that accelerated Israel’s creation; Nazi Germany’s government. One of multiple plans to solve the ‘Jewish Problem’ by ejecting them from Europe, the Nazi Party, fuelled by antisemtism and racism, believed that mass emigration to the island was the '“Final Solution” to ridding Europe of the “Jewish Problem”.

‘The island will be transferred [from France] to Germany under a mandate,’ the document read. ‘As Madagascar will only be a Mandate, the Jews living there will not acquire German citizenship…Jews deported to Madagascar will lose their citizenship of European countries from the date of deportation.’ The plan never came to fruition and was shelved but was worse was to come as Nazi Germany went on to wipe out vast swathes of Europe’s Jewish population and laid waste to the continent killing tens of millions of people.

As German supremacists and racists once obsessed about deporting European Jews, so too do Israeli supremacists and racists obsess about the mass explusions of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, what little remains of land that has been seized by Jewish settlers over the past century. Netanyahu has been actively lobbying Arab and African countries to accept refugees under “voluntary migration schemes” since the beginning of the war appearing in several meetings to say that a “scenario” of “deportation” of Gaza’s residents was being considered. “Our problem is countries that are ready to absorb them and we are working on it…It has strategic importance for the day after the war,” he stated at Likud’s party headquarters.

Ben-Gvir has repeatedly proposed “voluntary emigration” of Palestinians at conferences, on social media and rallies while Smotrich, more dangerous than Netanyahu and Ben-Gvir, has begun laying out proposals to form an ‘Emigration Directorate’ specifically tailored for Palestinian men, women and children in Gaza. Laid out at a conference called “The New Middle-East: The Plan for Voluntary Emigration from Gaza” in early March, Smotrich and several other Israeli politicians described it as a unique opportunity to end aspirations of Palestinian statehood and the conflict.

Others are proposing mass murder. “We should kill them, every last one of them,” one woman told Sky News bluntly. “If the government won’t do that then we should just kick them out. This is our land. We deserve it.” She was not an anomaly. Genocidal rhetoric flows unabated across Israeli airwaves and social media, carefully documented by human rights groups and open-source investigators. ‘This is the last phase of Zionism,’ Israeli journlaist Ilan Pappe stated in an interview with Al-Jazeera. ‘The old values of Zionism are now more extreme [and in] far more aggressive form than they were before,’ he said. ‘Whether colonials or empires, it’s usually the final chapter, the ruthless one, the most ambitious one. And then it’s too much and then they fall and collapse.’

From across the Atlantic, successive U.S. governments - for decades - have turned a blind eye to the draconian Israeli occupation and the daily brutalities heaped on the Palestinians large and small. It did little as Israeli soldiers ruthlessly put down Palestinian rebellions in the 1990s and early 2000s and has dutifully replenished Israeli stockpiles in its multiple wars in Gaza since the former Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, pulled out of the enclave in 2005.

But where the U.S. government once played enabler - bankrolling the Israeli occupation and paying lip-service to a peace process - they are now facilitating some of the worst war crimes and crimes against humanity of the 21st century so far under the Biden and second Trump administration. Where the Biden administration gave Netanyahu’s government a blank cheque on weapons and diplomatic cover to allow Israel’s rampage to continue unabated, the White House under Donald Trump now actively nourishes the dangerous fantasies and plans for the Palestinians tabled by Israel’s ethnonationalists even as push the country closer to naked authoritarianism and cement the apartheid regime.

With the ceasefire over and Israel mired in an intractable political crisis, the future is bleak for the Holy Land as extremists fill the void. Unless the international community acts, the Israeli state, the army and the settler movement will not stop until they have utterly eradicated or removed the Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank.