It has been five months since Hamas operatives launched an attack on the Israeli army and rampaged through towns and kibbutzes in southern Israel committing crimes against humanity. Since then, Gaza has slid into anarchy and biblical horror as the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) has razed the small sliver of land to the ground, driven millions from their homes, committed their own wave of atrocities and collectively punished the Palestinians. 

The statistics tell their own horrific story in the most violent phase in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict which has raged for a century. As of writing, more than 760 Israeli civilians have been killed, over ten thousand more have been wounded and hundreds of thousands have been displaced by Hamas’s assault and the small war between Israel and Hezbollah on the Israeli-Lebanon border. Hundreds of civilians and soldiers have been taken as hostages. Close to a thousand IDF soldiers have been killed in action (KIA) since October 7th with nearly 40% perishing on the first day of the war with thousands more wounded. For context, the Israeli army’s KIA in Gaza now exceeds the death toll that came with its 1982 invasion of Lebanon and its victorious campaign in the Six-Day War of 1967, illustrating the gruelling nature of the bloody counterinsurgency campaign it is currently waging in the tightly packed strip. 

In Gaza, the death toll is catastrophic. As of writing, more than 30,000 Palestinians are dead. These numbers do not reflect the true number, arguing it could be three times higher as it does not include the 7,000 people missing or the civilians already perishing from hunger, dehydration, and lack of medical access as Netanyahu’s government and IDF constricts aid going into Gaza and targets hospitals, both war crimes under international law. More than 70,000 Palestinian men, women, and children have been maimed and wounded by Israeli bombs and bullets while 1.5 million people have been displaced and driven from their homes. 4% of Gaza’s population has been killed, wounded or missing. According to the US Defence Secretary, Lloyd J. Austin, more than 25,000 women & children have been killed in five months. For context, it took Bashar Al-Assad’s regime eighteen months to reach that number in Syria’s ongoing civil war. 

But these are conservative numbers with the health system buckling under the weight of war and unable to keep an accurate toll of the casualties as the enclave slips into anarchy and with man-made famine all but inevitable, tens of thousands will follow as starvation slowly takes hold in pockets of the occupied territory. The IDF’s campaign has led to the deadliest period for journalists since the Committee to Protect Journalists began gathering data in 1992 and 152 UN aid workers have also been killed, the highest on record for the United Nations in a war zone and Israel and Egypt has obstructed foreign journalists from reporting from Gaza unless they accompany the IDF on organised tours of the battlefield to tell their versions of events. 

Beyond, the casualties, the IDF has obliterated the social and economic fabric of Gaza. Much as the Romans wiped Carthage off the face of the earth in 146 BC, Israeli soldiers have systematically pulverised Gaza. Satellite data analysis documented by BBC suggests between 144,000 and 175,000 buildings across the whole territory have been damaged or destroyed which equates to 50% and 61% of Gaza's buildings. The IDF has razed Palestinian learning and cultural centres including libraries, places of worship and at least twenty-two archaeological sites and places of ancient historical importance, and more than 1,000 of 1,200 mosques and 390 educational institutions, including schools and universities, have been destroyed or damaged. Even the dead have no rest, with Israeli tanks and soldiers destroying, damaging and vandalising Palestinian graveyards. 

The healthcare system has been systematically destroyed with more than 300 healthcare workers killed in the onslaught. Several hospitals and health care centres, large and small, including the Al-Shifa, Indonesia and Nasser hospitals, have been directly targeted by tanks, sniper fire and Israeli raids. In December 2023, it was estimated that 22% of Gaza’s agricultural land has been razed since the start of the conflict and 70% of Gaza’s fishing fleet has been reportedly sunk. Livestock are starving and unable to provide food or be a source of food for the starving population. Water and sanitation systems have collapsed and with 96% of water already undrinkable before the conflict escalated on October 7th, diseases such as acute respiratory infections, diarrhoea, lice, and scabies are spreading rapidly as rotting corpses, human excrement, bomb fragments, rubbish and destroyed buildings poison what remains of Gaza’s water supply and its soil. The grim numbers obscure the IDF’s dehumanisation of Palestinians and a pattern of grotesque conduct among Israeli soldiers and many civilians relishing in the killing and the impunity they enjoy under the protection of its key patron, the United States. Throughout the five-month war, IDF soldiers have documented themselves looting, burning and blowing up property, humiliating and torturing prisoners on social media channels and uploading graphic content of mutilated Palestinian corpses to Telegram channels. Calls for genocide, ethnic cleansing and hate speech fill Israeli airwaves and social media communities and have been actively filtered down from the very top of Netanyahu’s government and the army. 

As man-made famine created by the IDF takes hold, men, women, and children are beginning to resort to desperate measures to feed themselves. Some are resorting to eating grass, garbage, animal fodder, leaves and bird food while others are resorting to slaughtering horses and donkeys to eat. Many children have already starved to death. According to UNICEF, 10 children reportedly died of dehydration and malnutrition in Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza. On March 4, horrifying images and videos of the emaciated 10-year-old Palestinian child, Yazan Al-Kafarneh circulated on social media who died from severe malnourishment and insufficient healthcare. Even animals have been left unspared with Gaza’s zoo animals withering away and dying from hunger. “There is no instance since the Second World War in which an entire population has been reduced to extreme hunger and destitution with such speed,”  writes Alex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University and the author of ‘Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine’ in the Guardian. “It may be true, as Israel claims, that Hamas is using hospitals and residential neighbourhoods for its own war effort. But that doesn’t exonerate Israel. Palestinian children in Gaza will die, in the thousands, even if the barriers to aid are lifted today.” Melanie Ward, the director of Medical Aid for Palestinians, stated, “This is the fastest decline in a population's nutrition status ever recorded. That means children are being starved at the fastest rate the world has ever seen.”

This war, from beginning to end, has been an utter disaster for Israel. It has shredded its international reputation in a way not seen since Vladimir Putin launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and Hamas’s assault, while littered with atrocities, was a successful military operation that dealt a humiliating blow to the Middle East’s most powerful army and its intelligence services. The IDF has and will fail to ‘destroy’ both the ideology and power of Hamas as its cells and support stretch from Egypt to Lebanon to Syria to Turkey. “Total victory” remains as elusive as ever for the IDF and the war cabinet is coming apart at the seams.

In its military failure, illustrated by the growing death toll of IDF soldiers in Gaza, and continued fighting in north and south, it has burned Gaza for spite in a reactive blood frenzy driven by a thirst for revenge that is pulsing through Israeli society. The Netanyahu government has no strategic vision for Gaza, save a return to direct military occupation and satiating the insanity of the messianic settler movement to starve, exterminate and cleanse the bludgeoned territory of Palestinians as the remaining Israeli hostages being held are killed accidentally by IDF soldiers, by Israeli bombing raids and by the dreadful conditions in the war zone. In failing to achieve its war aims, steered by an incompetent government filled with extremists and headed by a weak prime minister desperate to hold onto power, the IDF is killing for the sake of killing. 

All these factors have enflamed Palestinian nationalism in the West Bank and Gaza and reawakened the question of Palestine across the world. At the same time, Netanyahu and his supporters, comprised of ethnonationalists, fanatical settlers, and religious supremacists have shown the world who they really are and what they stand for. The genocidal violence unleashed on the Palestinians in Gaza is the culmination of the aggressive rise of the far-right in Israel and its alliance with theocratic fundamentalists and Jewish supremacists. They are a threat to regional stability in the Middle East and whatever shred of integrity remains of international order and norms that has been ripped apart in Ukraine and Gaza. Equally important, and frequently forgotten by the international community in this terrible war, is that this aggressive movement in Israel, and the men and women who fill its ranks, are a grave danger to Israeli activists, dissidents, journalists, artists and ordinary civilians opposed to or criticising the war and above all those being held hostage in Gaza. 

The Western powers, particularly the United States, have failed the Israelis and Palestinians alike by allowing ethnic cleansing and genocidal violence to go unchecked in Gaza. For President Joe Biden, the Gaza war has been a profound foreign policy failure and for the United States and a consequence of three decades of Washington dragging its feet on the issue of the two-state solution and not being tougher on Israel’s unchecked expansion of settlements and its military occupation which is mutating into apartheid. It has fostered a sense of impunity that successive Israeli governments can do as they like and commit human rights violations without any consequences. When faced with criticism, Israel’s government and its supporters outside the country have frequently and cynically wielded the memory of the Holocaust to smear its critics as antisemites to shut down debate, muzzle dissent and hound activists, academics and journalists. 

In the context of the current war in Gaza, the IDF‘s campaign has moved well beyond claims of self-defence in the immediate aftermath of October 7th and descended into a blood frenzy. The mantra that “Israel has the right to defend itself” rings hollow today as IDF commanders and Netanyahu’s government manufacture a man-made famine in Gaza. Decades of reinforced impunity, propaganda, a perpetual military occupation that has reinforced tit-for-tat violence, a swing to the far-right in Israel and Hamas’s brutal assault have resulted in the perfect storm for the genocidal violence now unleashed in Gaza. 

But what is to be done? The US airforce has already begun airdropping aid to circumvent Israel and Egypt’s blockade of Gaza by land and sea. This is not enough to feed the population about to plunge into famine. The EU and UK should impose an arms embargo on Israel and recognise Palestine as a state while the United States must condition military aid to Israel on the condition of ending its blockade of the Gaza Strip, a ceasefire and lifting the siege. The settler movement in Israel, which continues pushing through the expansion of settlements, including Israeli officials such as Benzalal Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, and extremist Israeli settlers conducting price-tag attacks and ethnically cleansing Palestinians from the West Bank must have sanctions placed on them. Hamas must demilitarise and deradicalise its military wing and integrate into a power-sharing agreement with other Palestinian political groups and release all the remaining hostages and bodies of Israelis who have died in captivity.

Gaza is the most destroyed place on Earth and one of the greatest crimes of the 21st century is unfolding before our eyes with the Western powers turning a blind eye to Israeli atrocities in the face of overwhelming evidence of alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity. The only comfort one can take from these months of torment, anguish, anger, and feelings of powerlessness in the face of such grim barbarity, disinformation, impunity and denial is the judgment of history. Humanity has failed in Gaza and for Netanyahu’s ethnonationalist movement and Hamas, the butcher’s bill grows each day.

Hamas will be stained forever by its atrocities on October 7 and while it was carried out in the name of fighting an indisputably cruel occupation, the Qassam operatives’ cathartic killing spree has brought untold horror to the millions of Palestinians it rules in Gaza under the umbrella of the IDF. In massacring the largest number of Jews since the Second World War and provoking the wrath of the most extreme government in Israeli history, Yahya Sinwar and Hamas’ leadership provided them with a carte blanche to unleash extraordinary violence taking the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into its most dangerous waters yet. 

Those who have ensured weapons continued flowing to the IDF in Washington and the people inside and outside Israel who have acted as mouthpieces for Netanyahu’s propaganda machine across various governments and mainstream newspapers will be unable to scrub away their complicity in the atrocities committed in Gaza nor will the influencers who have gleefully streamed, selfied and photographed themselves across social media participating in and relishing in the slaughter of innocent Palestinians and Israelis be able to wash their hands of their participation in savagery.

For Israel’s increasingly powerful wing of ethnonationalists, settlers and religious extremists that have risen to the surface and been empowered in the wake of Hamas’s attack, history will be no less damning as they have driven and transformed Israel’s war into a campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide in the West Bank and Gaza. Netanyahu’s government, the ethnonationalist zealots the prime minister has enabled, and the commanders of the IDF that directed this war will sit alongside the Russian soldiers that butchered in Ukraine and Chechnya, Republika Srpska’s paramilitaries in Bosnia and the Janjaweed in Sudan who continue to starve, kill and displace in Darfur, all people that unleashed unspeakable horrors on others and plumbed the depths of inhumanity. As history holds the men and women who committed these atrocities in contempt, so too will historians condemn both Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas’s leadership for the destruction they brought to their people.