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The official death toll from the Israeli assault on Gaza has continued to climb at about the same rate it was climbing before the ceasefire went into effect, despite the ceasefire more or less holding. This is because the pause in the slaughter has given Palestinians the opportunity to dig up the remains of those who’ve been buried under the rubble all this time, allowing some to be added to the Gaza Health Ministry’s count.
Even if the ceasefire continues to hold, we can expect the death toll from violent trauma to keep climbing for a very long time. The footage we are seeing from places like Rafah and Jabalia are completely apocalyptic, with hardly any visible structures remaining even partially vertical in some areas. Many of the dead have been lying there for over a year. Many would have died slow, agonizing deaths over hours or days trapped beneath the wreckage without the possibility of rescue.
“Contrary to western propaganda, Gaza health authorities took a conservative approach to casualty figures, listing only recovered identified bodies,” journalist Craig Murray wrote on Twitter. “Now hundreds of unaccounted bodies are being dug from the rubble daily. Mothers are digging for the skeletons of their children.”
I remember back in the early days of the Gaza holocaust you’d get mobbed by Israel apologists on social media if you described what you were seeing as carpet bombing. They’d show photos of Dresden or Hamburg and say “THIS is what REAL carpet bombing looks like!”, and those photos looked exactly like the footage we are seeing of the wreckage of Gaza today.
This was a deliberate and methodical demolition of a civilization. An entirely intentional operation to turn a densely populated area into an uninhabitable wasteland, with the goal of eliminating and displacing a population who were deemed undesirable because of their ethnicity.
And it’s very possible that operation will resume in a few weeks’ time. President Trump is now on record saying he is “not confident” that the ceasefire will continue through all three phases, dishonestly claiming “It’s not our war. It is their war.”
To whatever extent you can call the methodical carpet bombing of a defenseless population a “war”, the US government has been equally as responsible for waging it as Israel. Insiders from the Israeli military and government have stated over and over and over again that the assault on Gaza would not have been possible without US assistance, which the US could at any point have chosen to withhold this entire time. Israel depends on the US about as much as any foreign US military base does, so the White House has always had more than enough leverage to force it to stop its ethnic cleansing campaign.
And this is to say nothing of the assault on the West Bank being waged by Israeli forces and extremist settlers, with no apparent pushback from the Trump administration. This comes as Israel’s Shin Bet agency declares that its “multi-front war” is now focused on the West Bank. Trump has appointed virulent Zionists to his cabinet like Mike Huckabee and Elise Stefanik, who are highly supportive of Israel annexing the West Bank in its entirety.
The most horrific thing about the Gaza holocaust is knowing that it’s going to happen again. Even if this ceasefire somehow manages to hold, some other nightmare will be unleashed by the US-centralized empire somewhere else in the world in the coming years.
We can be absolutely certain that it will happen again because nothing has been done to ensure that it doesn’t. No major policy changes have been put in place. Nobody has been punished — not the government officials responsible, nor the media who ran cover for their criminality this entire time. They torched the place and then walked away scot-free, just like they did with Iraq.
The reason nothing has been done to prevent other Gazas from happening again is because they want other Gazas to happen again. The US empire depends on nonstop violence and abuse to maintain its planetary domination; it’s not going to intentionally hamstring itself from using those tools wherever it needs to.
The US empire will continue terrorizing and abusing the world until it is brought to an end, as surely as an object will continue falling until it hits something.
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Featured image is a screen grab from footage shared on X by UNRWA.
