Unbridled cruelty is the warning to Humanity of both the ongoing Gaza Genocide and the WW2 Warsaw Ghetto.To say so is, for some, immediately contentious – some will insist that drawing any parallel between Gaza and the Warsaw Ghetto is antisemitic, an erasure of Jewish suffering, or a distortion of history. But the point is not to collapse distinct experiences or equate incomparable horrors; it is to recognise recurring patterns of dehumanisation, enclosure, starvation, and the systematic destruction of a people’s capacity to live. Gaza forces us to confront, in real time, the same underlying logic that once governed the Warsaw Ghetto: the belief that an entire population can be sealed off, punished collectively, and intentionally made to disappear.
It is in this light that the story of the Warsaw Ghetto must be revisited—not as a distant tragedy, but as a warning flaring again in our own time. It the reason too why what is happening in Gaza resonates in so many ways with the events in Poland, circa 1943. Gaza is a warming about the lengths to which rogue states – those who brazenly flout international law – will go to achieve their ends. It is a warning too about the future and what will occur when, in the midst of a deteriorating climate, states seek to supress dissent and maintain oligarchal power. Warsaw, like Gaza, reveals a cruelty unleashed not merely to erase a people – though that is unmistakably part of the design – but to impose a new order founded on raw racialized power and unrestrained impunity.
“In the ghetto we learned that to remain human was itself a form of resistance” – Janina Bauman, survivor of the Warsaw ghetto.
“We are not extraordinary people. We are people who refuse to disappear” – Mohammed El‑Kurd, Palestinian writer, poet, journalist.
“Gaza is a sacrifice zone. It is where the logic of settler colonialism is laid bare — a population rendered superfluous, contained, and punished” – journalist, Chris Hedges.
The Warsaw Ghetto
The final scenes of Roman Polanski’s Academy Award–winning film The Pianist (2002) are harrowing in the extreme. They depict a world once bustling with life, now obliterated – emptied of human presence, and consigned to history.
Based on the experiences of the Polish‑Jewish pianist Władysław Szpilman, who spent two and a half years in hiding, the film recounts the callous brutality of the Nazi occupation – the roundups, killings, starvation, humiliations, and ultimately the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto.
At its height, the ghetto held around 450,000 starved, beaten and traumatised people crammed into a 1.3‑square‑mile killing zone, enclosed by a 10‑foot wall topped with barbed wire. All contact with the outside world was severed. Jews were forbidden to leave on pain of death. Starvation and disease were rampant. Corpses lay in the streets. Lack of sanitation, food, water and medical supplies led to deadly epidemics, including typhus. In the first two years alone, over 100,000 ghetto residents died from hunger and disease.
In July 1942, the first major “resettlements” began—a Nazi euphemism for mass deportations to extermination camps. Between July and September, approximately 300,000 Jews were transported to Treblinka and murdered. Fewer than 60,000 remained in the ghetto.
On 19 April 1943, as the Nazis prepared the final liquidation, a few hundred remaining Jews—poorly armed but determined—rose in revolt. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising lasted 27 days, until 16 May 1943. The Germans labelled the fighters “criminals” and “bandits.” Many, including the 24‑year‑old resistance commander Mordechai Anielewicz and his partner, twenty-two-year-old Mira Fuchrer, chose suicide rather than surrender. Most survivors were killed on the spot or sent to Treblinka. A few managed to escape through sewers. On 16 May 1943, SS General Jürgen Stroop (later hanged for his crimes) reported triumphantly to his superiors: “The Jewish quarter of Warsaw is no more.” In material terms, he was right.
In early 1945, as German forces fled before the advancing Red Army, Szpilman emerged from hiding into the ruins of his former life, a ghost walking through the ashes of memory. Nothing was left. “Everything that had been familiar,” he later wrote, “had vanished. Whole districts had ceased to exist, as if they had been lifted away by a hurricane.” The vast majority of the people who once inhabited the Jewish quarter had been murdered. The Great Synagogue, the Judaic library, schools, universities, hospitals, apartment blocks, government buildings—every structure—had been levelled.
Gazing with incomprehension at the devastation, Szpilman shuffled through the dust and rubble, searching for anything that might make sense of nothingness. “I was,” he reflected, “alone in a world that had ceased to exist.” There was not a living soul. “Warsaw was dead. I walked through the ruins as if through the tomb of a giant city.”
Erasure and memory
Szpilman was not the first, nor indeed the last, to witness such deliberate devastation. To bear witness to the annihilation of everything familiar – to hold the unbearable present against the flickering embers of the past – is the story of countless brutalised and vanquished peoples who, over centuries, have been subjected to the vicissitudes of brute power and cruelty. Colonised Indigenous peoples and those prey to the whims of empires know intimately what attempted erasure looks like. It is not only buildings that must be destroyed, but the very fabric of everyday life, memory and culture.
Erasure and domination require the killing of intellectuals, artists, political opponents, trade unionists – anyone capable of reviving memory or resisting the will to power. The previous order must be overwritten with triumphalist narratives of exceptionalism and claims of cultural and even genetic superiority. Yet the problem for all settler‑colonial projects – any system intent on erasure -is that the erasure of memory is nearly impossible.
Inner stories, held in shared yet knowing silence, or acted out through coded rituals, become the reservoirs of resilience, resistance and survival, allowing for persistence and awaiting the moment when the struggle for justice can be ignited.
Physical places possess their own vocabularies of attachment, expressed through ancestral stories and shared experience. Environmental philosopher Val Plumwood reminds us that “shadow places” speak of an immovable presence that defies the overlay of the present. Reflecting on the destruction of European cities in the Second World War, W. G. Sebald observed: “The remnants speak more loudly than the whole ever did.” American novelist Toni Morrison, writing of the attempted erasure of place, notes that, “all that is left is the haunting” – the presence of past lives, of grievous suffering, and the unextinguished desire for justice.
Storytelling, testimonies and revisionist histories have each refused the triumphalist narratives and discursive neutralisations that seek to erase memory and moral culpability. The land itself, covered over by infrastructures of erasure – like the Spanish colonists’ edifices built on the ruins of Indigenous foundations, or the Nazi-planned “Neue deutsche Stadt Warschau” to replace old Warsaw – speaks of a presence that cannot be dislodged from history. As the Irish poet and playwright Seamus Heaney observes, “the ground remembers what the mind forgets”. Ultimately, it is the shared, storied memories, weighed with meaning and connection, that pull displaced peoples back to where they feel they belong. The ruins, as Canadian poet and novelist Anne Michaels observes, are simply “the map of our return” to places infused with inherited griefs and the histories that refuse to stay buried.
Shadowlands: The return
But what if this return is to places that have for decades been the sites of relentless violence, displacement and ruination; places of grievous loss and deprivation? What if the land is under constant occupation, overseen by powers that
claim it, desire it, for their own ends, irrespective of what that land means to its former inhabitants? Such places have long proliferated in the annals of colonial history: places of indescribable suffering, yet to which its inhabitants often yearn to return.
It is the historical relationship to that land, to its ancestral resonances that people wish to return, whatever the physical destruction, and despite all the suffering. Buildings can be replaced – miraculously so in the case of the reconstruction of Warsaw’s old town (stare miasto) – but the disappeared remain in the shadows of memory, sometimes acknowledged, sometimes not.
To venture today through the ghostly terrain of Warsaw’s former Jewish quarter – now a dense grid of tree-lined apartment blocks, along with schools, shops, the Museum of the History of Polish Jews and the Ghetto Heroes Monument – is to experience the inescapable, lingering tragedy of the past. General Stroop, who to the bitter end, showed no remorse for his murderous deeds, gloated in late 1943 at the spectacle of ghetto erasure, perhaps reflecting the vacuity of his own soul. To be sure, few of Warsaw’s Jews survived the Jewish Holocaust (between 10,000 -15,000), with only around 2,000-3,000 Jews currently residing in Poland’s capital.
On 19 October 2025, four days after the ceasefire announced on 15 October, The New York Times reported on the experiences of Palestinians permitted to return briefly to their homes in and around Gaza City. For thirty‑two‑year‑old Majdi Nassar, the return to his hometown of Jabaliya lasted less than 24 hours. Heading back south to Deir al‑Balah, Nassar said he would not return until clean drinking water had been restored. Shocked by the scale of the devastation, he said: “I could not find any trace of the building where I had an apartment, not even the rubble… Everything is gone.” For Abu Ghanem, the return to Gaza City was equally traumatic. Entire neighbourhoods no longer existed. Everything familiar – including the people – had vanished. “There was no one at all around,” she said. “There were no services, no water or electricity, and, of course, no markets to buy food.”
Twenty‑seven‑year‑old Fatima Abu Steita and her husband, Abdallah Abu, returned to Gaza City to search for their home in the Zeitoun neighbourhood, but it was “completely erased… Everything around that neighbourhood is flat ground… It’s a return to nothing. But it’s also saying: ‘We are still here.’” On 17 October, The Guardian reported another Gaza City resident saying: “I had hoped to return and find my home standing, but what I found was quite the opposite. I couldn’t even recognise the area. Everything was levelled to the ground.” Reaching the Sheikh Radwan district on the north side of Gaza City, fifty‑year‑old Suhair al‑Absi said: “I couldn’t identify the remains of my house because the rubble of everyone’s homes is all mixed together. The destruction here is beyond imagination, something the mind cannot grasp.”
A few days earlier, on 11 October, the BBC reported on residents attempting to return to their neighbourhoods, with one elderly man saying: “This is the last area we can reach. The Israeli army is still nearby. Look at the scale of destruction – they’ve destroyed everything.” The scale of destruction throughout Gaza – and the sustained, indiscriminate assault on its people – has been such that numerous academics, leading human rights advocates, and humanitarian organisations have accused Israel of genocide. The UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, noted in her 2025 report Gaza Genocide: A Collective Crime that: “The level of destruction in Gaza is so extensive and systematic that it reveals an intent to destroy the population’s ability to survive.”
Two years earlier, on 6 November 2023 – shortly after the start of Israel’s onslaught – UN Secretary‑General António Guterres warned: “Gaza is becoming a graveyard for children. Entire neighbourhoods have been flattened. The level of destruction is unprecedented.” Things only got worse – considerably worse.
After many months of sustained assault, on 16 September 2025, the UN Commission of Inquiry (COI) concluded that: “Israeli authorities and Israeli security forces committed four of the five genocidal acts defined by the 1948 Convention… including killing, causing serious bodily or mental harm, and deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of Palestinians in Gaza.”
The COI further found that: “The Israeli authorities intended to kill as many Palestinians as possible through its military operations in Gaza since 7 October 2023 and knew that the means and methods of warfare employed would cause mass deaths of Palestinians, including children.”
In addition to the systematic destruction of agricultural land, cultural sites, educational institutions and civic infrastructure, the report documented other egregious acts, including the destruction of maternity facilities and 4,000 embryos stored in Gaza’s largest fertility clinic.
Two years on from the start of Israel’s onslaught, The Guardian reported on 7 October 2025 that 92 percent of homes in Gaza had been destroyed or damaged, and 2.1 million people – 95 percent of the population – had been displaced. Medieval mosques, Ottoman‑period bazaars, churches, and ancient heritage sites had suffered damage or been wiped out. Ninety percent of schools had been damaged or destroyed, leaving 745,000 children and university‑age students without access to formal education. Around 80 percent of higher‑education campuses and 60 percent of vocational training centres had been damaged or destroyed. Repeated attacks on healthcare facilities had killed 1,700 health workers. Relentless bombing of hospitals and clinics created a critical shortage of medicines and medical equipment, crippling Gaza’s ability to provide even basic care.
The health of the Palestinian population deteriorated sharply as food aid was cut off and agricultural land systematically destroyed. Since 2023, Gaza has lost 97 percent of its tree crops, 95 percent of its shrubland, and 82 percent of its annual crops, rendering large‑scale food production impossible. Today, only 1.5 percent of cropland remains accessible and suitable for cultivation.
The Palestinian economy, already on its knees after decades of occupation and oppression, has been plunged into further crisis as a result of the ongoing carnage. Thousands, of professionals have been killed since 7 October. They include healthcare workers, senior physicians, journalists and media workers, teachers and education workers, humanitarian and aid workers (the largest loss of humanitarian workers ever recorded in a single conflict), civil defence and emergency responders, engineers, technicians, municipal workers, academics and university staff, and legal professionals. Thousands of others across a wide range of vital industries have also lost their lives or been severely injured.
The full spectrum impacts of the Israeli assault on Gaza and the West Bank is beyond the scope of this article. Suffice to say that every aspect of Palestinian life – and the environment that sustains it – has been spectacularly altered since 7 October 2023. Killing has taken many forms: urbicide (the destruction of towns, villages and cities), ecocide (the destruction of ecosystems), sociocide (the destruction of social institutions), and genocide (the destruction of a people).
Yet despite all this – and notwithstanding the continuation of mass killing and destruction since the so‑called “ceasefire” announced on 15 October 2025 – the Palestinian people have shown remarkable resilience and courage in the face of continued bombardment, restrictions, lack of healthcare, chronically poor living conditions, and perilous winter weather.
As Francesca Albanese has observed: “Despite unthinkable devastation, Palestinians continue to show a steadfastness that the world must finally honour instead of exploit.” Similarly, Jan Egeland, Secretary‑General of the Norwegian Refugee Council, noted: “What I see in Gaza is a people who refuse to give up on life, even when everything around them is being taken away.” This remarkable tenacity and enduring commitment to people and place has also been recognised by former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson, who remarked: “The resilience of Palestinians in the face of such profound injustice is a testament to the human spirit’s refusal to be broken.”
The greater Israel project
This refusal has come at an enormous cost for the Palestinian people whose suffering did not begin on 7 October 2023. Far from it. Forced displacements and killings have been ongoing since 1948, as have sieges and blockade: all part of the world’s longest military occupation. Since 2005, just over twenty years ago, the IDF has mounted numerous devastating, mostly “mowing the grass” operations designed variously to weaken Palestinian armed groups and instil fear and impose control over the population. This has been done in addition to countless more targeted operations (like assassinations, sniper deployments, and “free fire” killing zones, etc.) that have resulted in large scale death and destruction. Operation Summer Rains (2006) was Israel’s first major post‑disengagement ground and air campaign in Gaza. This was followed by Operation Hot Winter (2008) a large assault on northern Gaza, Operation Cast Lead (2008–2009), a three‑week war; one of the deadliest assaults on Gaza, Operation Pillar of Défense (2012) an eight‑day air campaign targeting Hamas leadership and infrastructure, Operation Protective Edge (2014) involving a massive 50‑day war with ground invasion, widespread destruction, and very high civilian casualties, Operation Guardian of the Walls (2021), an eleven‑day air war, Operation Breaking Dawn (2022), a three‑day assault targeting Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and most recently, the ongoing “Iron Swords” triggered by the events of 7 October 2023; the largest and deadliest assault on Gaza in history. Such operations were and are part of a general plan to eradicate the “terrorist threat”, lower the morale of the Gazan population and deplete its collective energies, weaken its infrastructure, and thereby create the conditions that render life on the Strip unbearable. This is a choreographed strategy, the aim of which is to create a “greater Israel” largely free of an Arab presence.
The desire for territorial expansion has long been an integral part of Israel’s stated regional ambitions. The founder of political Zionism, Theodor Herzl, remarked in 1895: “We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it employment in our country. The property owners will come over to our side. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.”
In the 1930s, the Irgun paramilitary organisation – whose ideological lineage runs directly into today’s Israeli far‑right – envisioned a “Greater Israel” encompassing all of Palestine and Jordan. By 1977, this expansionist vision had become mainstream political doctrine. In that year’s election campaign, Prime Minister Menachem Begin declared that Gaza and the West Bank were integral to Israel’s future, insisting: “The Land of Israel will be restored to the people of Israel. All of it. And forever.”
In 1989, Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir was equally blunt in rejecting any territorial compromise, asserting his desire for permanent control over all occupied territories: “The Arabs are the same Arabs and the sea is the same sea.” The implication was clear: nothing fundamental had changed, and Israel must therefore retain all conquered land.
Some years later, addressing Israeli settlers, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon openly encouraged the seizure of Palestinian land through settlement expansion: “Everybody has to move, run and grab as many hilltops as they can… everything we take now will stay ours.”
Today, the most extreme elements within the Israeli government cite biblical claims to demand territory “from the Nile to the Euphrates,” encompassing parts of Egypt, Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq. Israel’s current Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich – one of the most explicit contemporary advocates of radical Zionism and the annexation of the West Bank – has stated unequivocally: “There is no such thing as a Palestinian people.” Itamar Ben‑Gvir, Israel’s National Security Minister, has called for the “voluntary migration” of Palestinians (a euphemism for forced expulsion), asserting: “The land of Israel belongs only to the Jewish people.”
As far back as 1989, current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu argued that Israel should have used moments of global distraction to carry out mass expulsions, saying: “Israel should have exploited the repression of the demonstrations in China, when world attention focused on that country, to carry out mass expulsions among the Arabs of the territories.” More recently, in a 2025 interview with Israel’s i24 News, Netanyahu made no attempt to hide his support for a Greater Israel, saying he agreed “absolutely” with this goal, adding that: “I am on a historic and spiritual mission… very attached to the vision of the Promised Land and Greater Israel.”
In 2024, Netanyahu presented a map to the UN General Assembly depicting Israel occupying all of historic Palestine as well as the Syrian Golan Heights, surrounded by states he implied were either compliant or hostile. Egypt, Sudan, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and India were shown as aligned with Israel, while Lebanon, Iraq, Turkey, Iran, Yemen and Pakistan were marked as adversarial – an unmistakable pitch for a regional order shaped by Israeli dominance and territorial maximalism.
To legitimate the removal of Indigenous people, the latter was homogenised in terms of its moral culpability for attacks on Israel. Thus, in 2023, Israeli President Isaac Herzog declared: “It’s an entire nation that is out there that’s responsible. It’s not true, this rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true. They could have risen up, they could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza in a coup d’état.” These remarks were later cited in the genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice.
The broader pattern
The desire among leading Israeli political figures – across decades – to expand territorial control over lands they regard as historically or religiously theirs has been consistent. Such views invariably include the rejection of Palestinian statehood and enthusiastic support for settlement expansion.
Given the broad support for the Greater Israel project among significant sections of the Israeli public, it is clear that Israel seeks possession of all of historic Palestine plus the Syrian Golan Heights. It currently occupies over half of Gaza, as well as East Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and parts of southern Lebanon and Syria. These Arab lands are coveted, but only on the condition that they are emptied of their Indigenous Arab populations.
Most countries recognise the State of Palestine and support a Western‑favoured “two‑state solution,” with the Palestinian state composed of the currently occupied Palestinian territories. Israel rejects this and seeks to rule all of the land it occupies, including territories it has formally annexed.
For the occupied population, this means the negation of basic human rights under foreign military rule and confinement in what are effectively concentration zones or ghettoes. In ways not dissimilar to the Bantustans of Apartheid South Africa, Palestinians in the occupied territories have, for over 56 years, been excluded from voting for the government that rules them and subjected to a wide range of legal, civic, economic and cultural deprivations and injustices.
In an Advisory Opinion issued on 19 July 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) unequivocally stated that the occupation of Palestinian lands is illegal and that Israel must withdraw, end apartheid practices, permit the return of refugees, and make reparations for nearly eighty years of displacement, mass killing, demolition, human rights violations, and denial of self‑determination. The Trump Peace Plan for Gaza directly contradicts the ICJ ruling and therefore violates international law. Devised without any inputfrom Palestinians, the plan proposes foreign control of Gaza and the exploitation of its resources, including the appropriation of land for luxury real‑estate development and offshore gas extraction.
With neighbouring states unwilling to absorb further Palestinian refugees, the US-Israeli “solution” for Gaza and the West Bank appears to involve continued killing, forced expulsions into neighbouring countries, and “voluntary migration” schemes -effectively coerced displacement – to third states such as Somalia or the self‑declared and US- and Israel-recognized Republic of Somaliland. For those who remain, the plan envisages, in addition to Israel’s existing carceral system, mass confinement in what are effectively detention complexes: Rafah‑style “screening sites,” “processing zones,” and “humanitarian islands” where Palestinians would be held, interrogated, and sorted.
Construction of these facilities began in 2024, involving the bulldozing of large tracts of land, the building of new perimeter roads and earthworks, and the establishment of Israeli military positions surrounding the zones. Mass civilian containment in such environments offers few safeguards for those interned, as evidenced by conditions in Israeli prisons where tensof thousands of detainees – many held under “preventative detention” – have reported physical, psychological, and sexual abuse. These accounts have been widely documented by Israeli, Palestinian, UN, and international human rights organisations, UN bodies and special rapporteurs, and investigative journalists.
The power asymmetry between the Israeli state and Palestinians is exhibited both in their respective armouries and loss of life. Between 2008 and 6 October 2023, 7,077 Palestinians and 340 Israelis were killed—a ratio of twenty‑one to one. Applying this ratio to the events after 7 October would have implied roughly 25,200 Palestinian deaths as reprisals. Yet estimates suggest that after two years of bombardment 875,000 Palestinians may have been killed by violence and imposed deprivation (see below), producing a death ratio of 729 to 1. This exceeds by a factor of 73 the death ratio of 10 to 1 ordered by Hitler and immediately carried out by Nazi forces in the 1944 Ardeatine massacre in Rome.
Such comparisons are often condemned as “antisemitic”, but as Jewish American scholar Professor Bertell Ollman of New York University has remarked: “For obvious reasons, the Zionists are very sensitive about being compared to the Nazis… Yet the facts on the ground, when not obscured by one or another rationalization, show thatthe Zionists are the worst anti‑Semites in the world today, oppressing a Semitic people as no nation has done since the Nazis.”
This understanding of antisemitism takes on added significance given that Palestinians are a Semitic people, while the predominantly Ashkenazi Jewish population leading the assault on Gaza is culturally Semitic but not ethnically Semitic, descending largely from non‑Semitic Khazar converts to Judaism in the ninth century CE. This observation radically alters how the continuation of well‑documented war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza and the West Bank is interpreted.
Counting the dead and injured
Numbers matter, and vitally so, when assessing the dead and injured during wars and occupations. To paraphrase philosopher and essayist George Santayana, history ignored becomes history repeated. Israel’s actions toward an Indigenous people follow well‑worn patterns of settler‑colonial practice: dispossession, domination, and the systematic erasure of responsibility. Denial, deflection, and the concealment of harm are the stock-in-trade of states that brutalise those they rule.
Counting the dead and injured, of course, is not a simple empirical exercise. It is fraught with methodological and political complications. Yet it is essential in terms of understanding the nature and magnitude of the trauma experienced by victims of genocide, as well as assessing the needs of impacted communities and for culpability of perpetrators and their associates.
Before the Gaza massacre commenced on 7 October 2023, there were approximately 15 million Indigenous Palestinians worldwide: around 7 million living in exile, 5.6 million in the occupied territories (including 2.4 million in Gaza), and 2.1 million residing within Israel. After two years of the IDF’s military onslaught – resulting in an estimated 875,000 Gazans killed by violence and deprivation – only about 1.5 million Gazans remain. How did we arrive at this number?Epidemiological studies published in respected medical journal, The Lancet, estimated that 64,260 Gazans had died violently by 30 June 2024 (day 269 of the assault), implying 136,000 violent deaths by 25 April 2025 (day 569). Using a broadly accepted wartime index, the ratio of indirect deaths from deprivation to direct violent fatalities in war ranges from 2:1 (in the Iraq War, 1990–2011) to 16:1 (in the Afghan War, 2001–2021). Epidemiologists have conservatively estimated four deprivation‑related deaths for every violent death in Gaza. This yields approximately 544,000 indirect deaths and a total of around 680,000 Gazans killed by 25 April 2025.
Since the so‑called “ceasefire” of mid‑October 2025, the killing of Palestinians has continued. By 7 October 2025, day 731 of the Israeli onslaught against Gaza, violent deaths totalled roughly 175,000. Applying the conservative 4:1 deprivation‑to‑violence ratio produces an additional 700,000 indirect deaths, resulting in a combined total of 875,000 Gazan deaths after two years of bombardment and deprivation.
Assuming, in the absence of more granular data, that the proportions of children, women, and men among indirect deaths mirror those reported by Gaza’s health authorities for violent deaths, the 875,000 total therefore would include approximately 325,000 children, 207,000 women, and 342,000 men. These figures, however, underestimate child mortality, as they do not account for the extreme vulnerability of children under five, who represent about 70 percent of avoidable deaths from deprivation in impoverished settings (Gideon Polya, “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950”).
The mid‑October 2025 “ceasefire” substantially reduced direct killing but did little to alleviate deprivation. Severe Israeli-imposed restrictions on aid delivery and proposed exclusion of 37 food and medical aid organisations from Gaza mean that Palestinians continue to die from hunger, disease, and lack of medical care.
After more than twenty‑seven months of assault, the people of Gaza – 47 percent of whom were children before the genocide – have endured bombing, shooting, the near‑total destruction of homes and infrastructure (including hospitals and clinics), and catastrophic shortages of water, food, shelter, fuel, electricity, medicine, and medical care. The deaths of hundreds of thousands of Gazans have been driven in part by a man‑made famine and deliberate mass starvation. The world has watched the catastrophe unfold through the work of Palestinian journalists, yet the suffering continues.
The humanitarian crisis facing Gaza’s children is unprecedented in the modern era. Gaza’s suffering is vast and deeply layered: during the height of the conflict more than ten children lost one or both legs every day, over a thousand have already undergone amputations, and explosive weapons left fifteen children a day with life‑altering injuries throughout 2024; more than 11,000 now live with permanent disabilities, while tens of thousands have lost parents, siblings, or entire families, creating a generation of orphans in a place where tens of thousands children have been killed and more than a million require urgent psychosocial support. The psychological toll is immense. In late December 2024, The Guardian reported on a survey of Gaza’s children, noting: “The sense of being doomed has become pervasive. Almost all the children (96 percent) felt their death was imminent, and 49 percent actually wished to die—a feeling much more prevalent among boys (72 percent) than girls (26 percent).”
Before the mass killing of Gazans beginning on 7 October 2023 – and despite a century‑long process of dispossession and violence that had resulted in over 2.2 million Palestinian deaths from military action and deprivation – the 15.1 million people under Israeli control (across Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, and annexed territories) included 7.7 million Indigenous Palestinians (51 percent), 7 million Jews (47 percent), and 0.4 million others (2.5 percent). After more than two years of the Gaza Genocide, the remaining 14.2 million people under Israeli rule include 6.8 million Indigenous Palestinians (48 percent), 7 million Jews (49 percent), and 0.4 million others (3 percent). This demographic inversion reflects a long‑running process of population reduction that has unfolded over the past century, resulting in more than 3 million Palestinian deaths from violence and imposed deprivation. By comparison, deaths from violence and deprivation in the Second World War Jewish Holocaust totalled between 5 and 6 million.
The scale of the killing in Gaza demands comparison with other atrocities. For instance: (1). the rate of killing of children in Gaza has been 325,000 over 2 years or 162,500 per year, as compared to the rate of killing Jewish children in Occupied Europe by the Nazis of 1,500,000 in 6 years or 250,000 per year. (2). The rate of killing of Gazans has been 875,000 over 2 years (437,500 per year) as compared to the rate killing of Jews in occupied Europe by the Nazis of 0.8 to 1.0 million per year. (3). Nearly 37 percent of the pre-conflict population of Gaza has been killed in 2 years as compared to the Nazi killing of 59 percent of the total pre-war Jewish population of occupied Europe, 87 percent of the pre-war Jewish population of Poland, and 28 percent of the pre-war Jewish population of Hungary. (4). Prisoners killed per day per million of captive population has been 600 in Gaza versus 23 for Australian prisoners of war of the Japanese in World War 2.
Other present-day comparisons can be made. Gaza journalists, for example, have been reporting the carnage but have clearly been targeted. Israel leads the world in the killing of journalists on an annual per capita basis: 50 for Gaza versus 0.007for the rest of the world. When it comes to children killed on an annual per capita basis in Gaza, Israel leads the world: 83,000 in Gaza or 11,000 times greater than for the world (7.6) and 1,100 times greater than for crime-wracked Honduras (75.7). The UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories since 1 May 2022, Francesca Albanese, who has been subject to severe US sanctions, noted of our finding published in Arena in 2025 that 680,000 Gazans had died from violence and deprivation by 25 April 2025: “In fact, we shall start the thinking of 680,000, because this is the number that some scholars and scientists claim being the real death toll in Gaza. And it would be hard to be able to prove or disprove this number, especially if investigators and others remained banned from entering the occupied Palestinian territory, and particularly the Gaza Strip.” While a ceasefire was established in mid-October 2025, the daily violent killing continues, albeit at a much lower rate. However, Israel still restricts life-saving aid and proposed banning 37 aid organizations from entering Gaza by March 2026, precisely the people required to both assess how many have died and to save the lives of innocents caught up in this ongoing conflict.
Complicity, collusion and abandonment
As detailed above, and based on data and methodology published by expert epidemiologists in The Lancet, total Gaza deaths amount to36.5 percent of the pre-7 October population.
Despite the obvious point that the figures provided by the Gazan Ministry of Health – although credible, and in fact used by the IDF – are necessarily limited, they represent only a fraction of the overall mortality. The Ministry’s methodology is careful and systematic, but it can only record confirmed bodies brought to hospitals or reported by families. It cannot account for the unknown numbers buried under millions of tonnes of rubble, nor can it empirically verify the far larger number of deaths caused by imposed deprivation (starvation, dehydration, untreated wounds, disease, exposure).
Despite this, Western journalists, politicians, and academics have overwhelmingly limited their reporting to the Ministry’s figures, which currently hover around 75,000 deaths. This undercounting is reminiscent of the vast under-reporting of Iraqi deaths following the 2003 US‑led invasion, when the press relied almost exclusively on figures from Iraq Body Count, a London‑based research organisation that recorded only those deaths that could be triangulated through media reports, documentation, and visual verification. As a result, the Iraq Body Count total remained around 100,000, even though peer‑reviewed epidemiological studies (e.g., The Lancet Iraq mortality surveys) estimated well over one million deaths from violence and deprivation combined.
A similar pattern is now unfolding in Gaza. The Gazan Health Ministry’s figures dominate mainstream media coverage, with almost no reference to the much larger numbers implied when bodies under rubble and deprivation‑related deaths are included.
The unwillingness of Western journalists to offer a fuller accounting of Israel’s actions has occurred alongside increasing efforts across several countries to curtail “pro‑Palestinian” demonstrations and, through the lobbying power of major Jewish organisations, to equate criticism of Israel with “antisemitism.” Avoiding the total number of deaths has enabled Israeli authorities to promote the manufactured narrative that they have exercised “restraint” and targeted only “terrorists” allegedly hiding among civilians. Whatever the limitations of the Ministry of Health figures, they pale in comparison to the far larger totals produced by alternative methodologies.
As Ralph Nader has argued, it is in the interests of Israel and its allies to present a lower figure for the dead and injured in Gaza – just as Hamas has an interest in doing the same, given the horrendous scale of Israeli retaliation after 7 October. The United States, through its multi‑billion‑dollar arms transfers, roughly $5 billion per year in military aid, and repeated vetoes at the UN Security Council, has enabled a genocide whose full consequences it continues to deny. It too has an interest in minimising death figures, just as it did in Iraq during the first and second Gulf Wars.
More broadly, the US‑led alliance – including the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, Australia, and several EU states – has been largely inactive in the face of the genocide. The strongest action taken by some has been symbolic recognition of the State of Palestine, something Israel rejects outright. Many countries, however, have taken a robust stand in relation to the ICJ’s ruling in the genocide case South Africa v. Israel (26 January 2024). As the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights summarised following the ICJ’s 19 July 2024 Advisory Opinion:
“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… The Court 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.”
Across the world, numerous states issued formal statements supporting the ICJ’s authority, welcoming the genocide ruling, or calling on Israel to comply with the provisional measures. In Europe, Ireland, Spain, Belgium, Norway, Portugal, Iceland, Slovenia, Luxembourg, and Malta condemned Israel’s actions. Multilateral bodies such as the African Union, Arab League, Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, CARICOM, and ASEAN parliamentarians also expressed support for the ICJ finding.
Other countries have played a less honourable role. Australia has failed to openly support the ICJ judgment while continuing to supply parts for Israel’s F‑35 fighter‑bombers. Its stance on Israel’s actions has been tepid and often contradictory. While Australia mildly protested the Israeli killing of Australian aid worker Zomi Frankcom, it remained silent about the killing of several Australians in Lebanon and the deaths and injuries of thousands of relatives of Palestinian‑Australians in Gaza. With the backing of the Coalition Opposition, the Australian Labor Government sought to obscure the genocide through a campaign of “terror” and “antisemitism” hysteria that intensified after the horrific Bondi Massacre (15 killed, all but one Jewish).
Australia’s contradictory stance on Gaza mirrors its broader approach to human rights. In its World Report 2026, Human Rights Watch (HRW) criticised Australia for its cruel asylum‑seeker policies (including offshore detention) and its failure to advance the wellbeing of Indigenous people. “Australia,” the report concluded, “is a democracy with a strong human rights record in many areas, but significant failings in others… Australia is the only Western democracy without a national human rights act or charter.”
Missing from the HRW report, however, are recent abuses condemned by anti‑racist Jewish and non‑Jewish human rights experts. These include Australia’s complicity in the Gaza genocide, its adoption of the Zionist “Antisemitism Report,” , adoption of the highly- flawed IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) definition of antisemitism (condemned by over 40 anti-racist Jewish organizations including the anti-racist Jewish Council of Australia), the imposition of McCarthy‑style restrictions on political expression, draconian “hate speech” laws enabling the banning of law-abiding organisations and the imprisonment of their leaders for up to 15 years, and the invitation of Israeli President Isaac Herzog to Australia despite his role in the ongoing atrocities in Gaza. The backward Australian state of Queensland recently legislated 2 years in prison for anyone causing fear by publicly uttering the phrases “from the river to the sea” and “globalize the intifada” (common chants at weekly rallies for Gaza and Palestinian human rights in Melbourne) – Gideon Polya, the author of “Free Palestine. End Apartheid Israel, Human Rights Denial, Gaza Massacre, Child Killing, Occupation and Palestinian Genocide” was advised by a lawyer “Don’t go to Queensland”.
Resisting annihilation
Despite all the horrors that have befallen the Palestinian people before and after 7 October 2023, they nonetheless cling tenaciously to their homelands and to the promise of peace with justice. The attempted erasure of the Palestinian people has not succeeded. As Palestinian scholar Edward Said wrote in 1998: “Palestine and its people have simply not disappeared. No matter the sustained and unbroken hostility of the Israeli establishment to anything that Palestine represents, the sheer fact of our existence has foiled, where it has not defeated, the Israeli effort to be rid of us completely.”
The same can be said today as Palestinians return to their bombed‑out neighbourhoods and struggle to hold on to their homes and land in the face of intensified settler violence. The bludgeoning, violence and oppression cannot eradicate the idea of Palestine or the Palestinian people. As Said further remarked: “As an idea, a memory, and as an often buried or invisible reality, Palestine has simply not disappeared.”
But the assault on Gaza is more than a settler‑colonial project. It is a warning. It reveals the extent to which a determined state, backed by the world’s largest military power, can go to achieve its ends. It exposes the weakness of international institutions in restraining a rogue state, the trampling of international law, and the impunity which, as Italian human rights lawyer and UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese insists, “won’t last forever.”
Chris Hedges, in Genocide Foretold, argues that the warning extends beyond Gaza. It foreshadows the anticipated breakdown of international borders and nation‑states as the climate catastrophe accelerates, leading to the collapse of entire societies, massive population movements, and the rise of fortress states. The impunity shown in Gaza—the disregard for the “rules‑based order” and for international law—will be replicated in different forms as increasingly authoritarian governments impose their will on their own citizens and on those seeking refuge.
Israel has long tested the limits of international tolerance and the capacity of global governance institutions, and those institutions have been found wanting. The illegal military actions in Venezuela by the US, the resurgence of “gunboat diplomacy” in the Caribbean, and the near‑daily threats against nations that refuse to fall into line are all worrying signs of imperial impunity and authoritarian creep. Just as we have witnessed the incarceration of the Gazan population, so too do the expanding carceral systems in the United States and El Salvador offer a glimpse of what the future may hold. Gaza symbolises what brute power destroys.
“We are,” writes Naomi Klein, “living through a moral crisis,” and Gaza is the “moral X‑ray” of the world. “What is happening in Gaza,” she observes, “is not separate from the rise of authoritarianism globally — it is part of the same story.” The tragedy, of course, is that the Gaza Genocide and Gaza Holocaust is unfolding under the watch of the entire world. As Indian writer Arundhati Roy states: “The crisis is not that we are silenced. The crisis is that the world is listening and still does nothing.”
In a world governed by decency, compassion, and a commitment to human rights and international law, Israel would be required to immediately withdraw from the Occupied Palestinian Territories (as demanded by the International Court of Justice), immediately provide life‑sustaining food and medical services to Gaza (as required of any occupying power “to the fullest extent of the means available to it” under Articles 55 and 56 of the Fourth Geneva Convention), and immediately face rigorous Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS). Reparations and war‑crimes trials would be a moral priority. None of this is underway. The Trump Peace Plan only serves to further violate international law, which demands the withdrawal of foreign forces from occupied Palestinian territory.
Conclusion
At the heart of the genocide, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid regime is the insistence on establishing and maintaining a Jewish state in the ancient homeland of another people: the Palestinians. Israel’s version of “democracy”, in the form of a “Jewish State,” has meant democracy through expulsion, genocide, and the exclusion of Occupied Palestinians from voting for the government that rules them. In effect, the state of Israel rejects the principle of “all human rights for all,” a principle accepted by the rest of humanity.
Western countries – burdened by historical guilt and often fused with racist indifference to the suffering of Muslims – turn a blind eye to the Palestinian catastrophe, insisting that the “only democracy in the Middle East” has a “right to self‑defence,” even when that defence takes the form of occupation, genocide, and ethnic cleansing. The Gaza genocide is a stain on humanity. If the principle of universal human rights is to mean anything, and if Israel continues to flout international law, then it must face sanctions as severe as those once applied globally to apartheid South Africa.
In the absence of a free Palestine, the world must apply comprehensive Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) to the apartheid regime and to all individuals, political parties, corporations, and states that support it.
Without such urgent actions, a rogue state which, with the full backing of the US and other allies, continually flouts international law and scoffs at the prospect of peace with justice, will remain emboldened. In an era of climate catastrophe, the impunity displayed by Israel and its imperial enabler, the US, may indeed become the harbinger of equally repressive regimes to come. Gaza, like Lebanon and Iran, is a warning. It is a warming of “sacrifice zones” in which expendable unpeoples are abandoned in favour of self-aggrandising, expansionist agendas. Gaza is the laboratory, the testing ground for what happens when people try to hold power to account.