The quiet part out loud: Israel announces Gaza takeover
Babies should be chubby. They should be content and well fed. They should be happy and protected. Gaza’s children are none of these things. They are thin, sometimes to the point of total emaciation. Their bones can be seen through their skin. They are often silent with haunted eyes.
The UN’s child rights agency (UNICEF) recently reported that around 9,000 children have been admitted for treatment for acute malnutrition since the start of the year. Al Jazeera recently reported on a five-year-old boy who weighed only nine kilograms. This is the result of human decision-making. It is the conscious policy of the Israeli state, which has blocked all food, fuel and medicines from reaching Palestinians in Gaza since 2 March.
Much has been made of Israel’s “advanced” and “precise” weapons. It is part of what has made it one of the most profitable weapons manufacturing countries in the world. These weapons have, since January, “precisely” targeted families sheltering in makeshift tents in “humanitarian zones”.
They have also targeted bulldozers and other equipment intended to allow Gazans to rebuild their homes. It is precision barbarism. At least 2,300 Palestinians have been killed over the past six weeks alone—more than 50 people killed every day on average. More than 740 of the dead are children, according to the director of the Information Unit at the Ministry of Health in Gaza, Zaher Al-Wahidi.
At Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahiya, in northern Gaza, Dr Ahmed Abu Nasir said the situation has become “worse than ever”. It is hard to imagine the situation in Gaza getting worse. Worse than whole neighbourhoods, whole cities flattened. Worse than tens of thousands of human bodies ripped apart by bombs, by bullets, by shrapnel. Worse than forced displacement over and over and over again.
It’s hard to imagine, but true. Since the end of the ceasefire, the Israeli war machine has ramped up its genocidal efforts. Indeed, since 18 March, Israel has launched what can only be described as a scorched earth campaign. “The massacres do not stop. We are being slaughtered from vein to vein”, Al Jazeera correspondent Anas al-Sharif said in a social media post.
Now Israel is calling up reservists and has indicated a further escalation with Operation Gideon’s Chariots. The Israeli security cabinet has approved a plan for “conquering” the Gaza Strip. On X, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu posted a video declaring that the “population will be moved, for its own protection”.
Fascist Israeli politician Bezalel Smotrich has finally been let off the leash and is saying what other Israeli politicians have been thinking all along: “We are finally going to occupy the Gaza Strip. We will stop being afraid of the word ‘occupation’”. The last eighteen months have been leading to this point. The acting head of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Jonathan Whittall, said in a statement:
“Land is being annexed from the north, from the east, from the south of the strip as forces advance ... Gaza is being starved, it’s being bombed, it’s being strangled. This looks like the deliberate dismantling of Palestinian life.”
For over a year, Israeli politicians and their supporters across the West have claimed that the Israeli decimation of Gaza has had something to do with “tackling terror” and “defending democracy”. Red Flag and activists in the Palestine solidarity movement have argued that Israel has had a very different agenda.
We said that Israel would use the pretext of 7 October to murder, punish and humiliate Palestinians. We said that, if they could get away with it, the Israelis would try to conquer the Gaza strip. This has now come to pass. Even Netanyahu is saying the quiet part out loud.
US President Trump will visit the Middle East over the next few weeks and will no doubt give his blessing to this explicit effort at 21st-century ethnic cleansing. At the same time, Israel is waging an increasingly violent war on Palestinians living in the West Bank. If it can achieve total victory in Gaza, it will no doubt turn its sights to the total defeat of the Palestinians.
The Australian media have largely remained silent about these realities. Australia’s federal election campaign only further sidelined the issue of Palestine.
Over the last eighteen months, the ALP has been steadfast in its determination to maintain political, economic and military ties with Israel, despite the depths of the barbarism we have all witnessed. Labor politicians have been deeply complicit in what is happening. Now that they have been re-elected with a majority, they will feel like they can ignore the genocide. We cannot let this happen.
In a campaign meeting recently in Perth, an activist with family in Gaza reported that, while generations of Palestinians have remained steadfast—have held out hope for their own liberation—they are increasingly exhausted. They feel abandoned by the world.
It is our responsibility to call out what is happening. We need to maintain pressure on our own government and continue to show solidarity with a population suffering from the most extreme, conscious form of imperial barbarity in the 21st century.
