Gaza: one year of hell on Earth

One year since the 7 October attack by Hamas on southern Israel, the ensuing war has produced an unprecedented humanitarian disaster for the Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip. Now Lebanon is facing a similar scenario. Netanyahu warned Hezbollah that Israel could “turn Beirut and southern Lebanon... into Gaza”.

What does it mean to turn southern Lebanon into a Gaza? After one year of relentless bombing, Netanyahu’s genocidal war on Gaza has led to unprecedented levels of death and destruction for the Palestinian people. Nearly 42,000 have been killed in direct hits since October last year, while a further 100,000 have been injured, a quarter of whom, it is estimated, will remain permanently disabled.

These figures, however, do not tell the whole story of what has happened. The bombings have not only killed people in the direct hits, but the massive destruction of Gaza’s infrastructure has led to many more deaths that are not counted in the official figures. Water and power supplies have been destroyed, as well as much of the healthcare services, clinics and hospitals, together with housing and schools. According to UNRWA only one third of the hospitals in Gaza are functioning in any way.

Housing stock massively destroyed

In the first four months of the bombing, the value of infrastructure destroyed in Gaza was calculated as $18.5 billion, or 97 percent of the overall annual GDP of Gaza and the West Bank combined. More than 30 million tonnes of debris have been produced by the bombing, and it is calculated that this will take years to clear. As of June of this year, 75,000 tons of bombs had been dropped on Gaza. That is far more than was dropped on Dresden, Hamburg and London combined during the Second World War.

More than 30 million tonnes of debris have been produced by the bombing / Image: WAFA, Wikimedia Commons

An article published by AP News, The unprecedented destruction of housing in Gaza hasn’t been seen since World War II, the UN says (2 May 2024) outlined the level of devastation inflicted on Gaza’s housing stock in the first seven months of the war. It pointed out that, “At least 370,000 housing units in Gaza have been damaged, including 79,000 destroyed completely.”

More recent updates indicate that more than 80 percent of Gaza’s buildings have been destroyed. This was revealed by Assistant Secretary-General of the UN, Dr Abdallah Al-Dardari in an interview with Al Qahera News.

According to the United Nations Development Program (UNDP): “…almost $50 billion in investments in Gaza are estimated to have been wiped out in the conflict, and 1.8 million Palestinians have fallen into poverty.” The total population before the war was 2.3 million. 

It has been calculated that it would take until 2040 to rebuild the destroyed properties, and the overall cost would come to something like $40-50 billion.

Destruction of the education system

School buildings have been heavily damaged. This summer, “at least 354 people were killed in Israeli airstrikes on school buildings that housed displaced people between 1 June and 1 September”. A stream of videos and photos of children covered in blood as they flee bombed out schools, leaving behind the corpses of those killed, has come out of Gaza over the past year.

More than 600,000 school students in Gaza have had their education interrupted by the war. An ABC article reports that, “at least 70 percent of all schools in Gaza – 399 school buildings – have been damaged or destroyed since 7 October.”

There are a total of 567 school buildings in Gaza. ABC News gathered satellite images, and videos and photos, taken both by the IDF and Hamas, and came to the conclusion that “212 schools are either partially or completely destroyed, and a further 187 show signs of damage.” The UN, however, estimates that, “as many as 84 percent of schools – 477 buildings – will need to be repaired or rebuilt.”

Rachael Cummins, a Save the Children director in Gaza, commented that, “Children haven't been able to access formal education, so they've missed a whole year of learning. But, you know, outside of that, what they're seeing and what they’re living through and the consequences of that in terms of their mental health, really, really cannot be underestimated. A whole generation, a whole population, actually, of children and their parents and their caregivers, in terms of the impact of the war on their mental health is absolutely extraordinary.”

More than 600,000 school students in Gaza have had their education interrupted by the war / Image: WAFA, Wikimedia Commons

In these conditions children’s psychological development has been severely affected. Many suffer anxiety attacks, and are unable to focus. On top of the death and devastation all around them, these children also suffer illnesses, as a consequence of the collapse of the healthcare system, and malnutrition.

It is not just the schools that have been all but destroyed. Universities have also been affected. Gaza’s almost 90,000-strong university student population have had their studies interrupted. The Islamic University of Gaza was completely destroyed in a bombing raid in October of last year. The Al-Azhar University was completely razed to the ground. Israa University, the University of Palestine, Gaza University, Al-Quds Open University, Al-Aqsa University, and many more have all been severely damaged.

According to a report published by BRICUP (British Committee for the Universities of Palestine), “all of Gaza’s 19 universities have sustained severe damage or lie in utter ruins, with over 80 percent of university buildings destroyed.”

Over 100 Palestinian academics and over 600 university students have been killed in Gaza since the start of Israel’s war, according to figures provided by the Palestinian Education Ministry. Close to 9,000 school students have been killed, as well as 400 teachers.

The effects of all this are going to be long-lasting, and it will take many years to rebuild what has been destroyed.

Real number of deaths due to war

A report by Doctors Without Borders on 29 May 2024 notes that,

“In the last seven months the healthcare system in Gaza has been systematically dismantled. According to OCHA, 24 hospitals in Gaza are now out of service, while 493 health workers have been killed. Each medical centre or humanitarian delivery system has been or is being destroyed, to be replaced by less effective, improvised options. There is no telling what the indirect human cost in deaths and long-term injuries will be as a result of assistance and treatment having been denied.”

The healthcare services are in a state of collapse precisely when they are most needed. Just a few examples will serve to highlight this. The number of under-5s treated for diarrhoea has risen by a factor of 25 since 2022. In June of this year, 8,000 under-5s were treated for malnutrition. There are around 50,000 pregnant women, who are at much greater risk in cases of complications due to the lack of hospital services. Dialysis patients are staring death in the face. For example, the Al-Shifa Hospital is presently treating about 40 patients with kidney failure while prior to the war it was treating 450 patients.

As the above quoted report shows, around 500 healthcare workers have been killed. According to the World Health Organization, this is out of a total of about 20,000. As The New York Times has stated:

“That equates to an average of two health care workers killed every day, with one in every 40 health care workers, or 2.5 percent of Gaza’s health care workforce, now dead.”

According to a study published back in July in The Lancet, a prestigious British medical journal, this situation means there are far more deaths caused by the present war than those killed in direct bombing hits. Some have referred to these as ‘silent killings’. 

There are far more deaths caused by the present war than those killed in direct bombing hits / Image: WAFA, Wikimedia Commons

The Lancet report bases itself on previous war scenarios that show that the number of such deaths can be anywhere between three and fifteen times the number of people killed in direct deaths. Therefore, it states that “it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable” to the ongoing war.

A further 10,000 or so are classed as missing, still buried under the rubble. A more recent article in The Guardian, Scientists are closing in on the true, horrifying scale of death and disease in Gaza, estimates that the number of such deaths could be far higher than even The Lancet estimated.

It states that, “The discovery of polio in Gaza reminds us that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to assess the true cost of the war. We don’t have a sense of how widespread disease and starvation are – so called “indirect deaths” – and we are in the dark in terms of total number of deaths.”

And it explains that if the deaths continue at the rate calculated by The Lancet of around 23,000 per month, “there would be an additional 149,500 deaths by the end of the year, some six and half months from the initial mid-June estimate. Using the method, the total deaths since the conflict began would be estimated at about 335,500 in total.”

If these figures are confirmed, this would represent well over 10 percent of Gaza’s population. To bring this closer to home, it would be the equivalent of around 6-7 million people being killed in Britain, or over 30 million in the United States. This is by far the highest number of people killed in the long list of conflicts between Israel and the Palestinian people. 

In the Old Testament, Deuteronomy 19:21, we read that the God of the ancient Jews decreed that punishment for crimes should be a “life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth…” Its meaning was that the punishment for an injury incurred should match the crime.

Today’s Zionists, however, go far beyond what their own God ordained. If we take the numbers killed during the 7 October attack in southern Israel, and we work them out as a proportion of the numbers that may have died in Gaza according to The Guardian’s estimate, we get the figure of 250 to one. But this should surprise no one with a minimum of knowledge of the history of the conflict. Between 2008 and 2020 we see similar figures, with 5,590 Palestinians killed against 251 Israelis, a proportion of 22 to 1. And this was long before the 7 October Hamas attack last year. Zionists justify the butchery of this past year by constantly referring to that attack. The question has to be asked: what justified all the previous bombing campaigns and killings carried out by the Israeli military?

Adding insult to injury: the expansion of the settlements

What has to be remembered here is that the injured party historically are the Palestinians. It is they who suffered the historical crime of the Nakba, in which more than 700,000 Palestinians were violently expelled from their homeland back in 1948, with large numbers killed in the process. That crime saw a whole people robbed of their homeland.

The Zionists have always seen war as an opportunity to remove more Palestinians from their homeland, and to send in settlers. We saw this on a grand scale in the West Bank when a further 400,000 were expelled after the Six-Day War in 1967.

According to the Foundation for Middle East Peace, in 1972 there were 10,608 Jewish settlers in the territories occupied by Israel in 1967, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. By 2005, this figure had grown to almost half a million; and today they have become over 700,000, and the far-right Zionists are looking at bringing that figure to one million, and even two million. 

This is ethnic substitution on a grand scale. The official mainstream media, such as the BBC in the UK, attempt to play down the Nakba, and even when they acknowledge it, they insist that it was a long time ago and that now we must concentrate on the present and the future. This is a convenient way of ignoring the fact that the stealing of Palestinian land continues as I write these words.

Since 7 October 2023, the Israeli government has accelerated the settlement expansion, approving 5,295 new housing units back in July in the existing settlements, as well as approving five new settlements. The far-right finance minister Smotrich has also granted public funding for 70 outposts – formally illegal even according to Israeli law – providing them with water, electricity and roads. Outposts receive defence from the IDF, and eventually become settlements. 

And while all this has been going on, around 1,000 Palestinians have been removed from their land in 18 communities across the West Bank. The way this is achieved is worth spending a few words on. An outpost is established and then its members systematically harass the local Palestinians. They threaten them physically, they stop them from working their land, they cut off their water and electricity, making it impossible for them to stay. 

Once all this has been achieved, the land becomes uncultivated and can be classed as abandoned. The next step is to designate it as state land, coming under the direct control of Israel. After that it can be handed over to the settlers. It is blatant stealing of land, barely covered with a fig leaf of Israeli legality.

All this has been stepped up over this past year, and yet it doesn’t make the headlines in the mainstream media. The reason for this is that all western governments are backing Israel even as it continues the illegal expropriation of Palestinian land. They call on Hezbollah to abide by UN resolutions, but ignore the fact that Israel has systematically ignored UN resolutions applied to itself.

Prior to 2005, the Gaza Strip had 21 Israeli settlements with about 9,000 Jewish settlers. As part of the Oslo Accords, which saw the setting up of the Palestinian Authority, an agreement was reached whereby all Jewish settlements would be withdrawn from Gaza in 2005. Most left when ordered to, while some resisted and the IDF had to forcibly remove them.

The Zionists have always seen war as an opportunity to remove more Palestinians from their homeland, and to send in settlers / Image: public domain

Now the Zionists are talking of going back to their old plan of colonising the Gaza Strip. Again, war is the means by which this can be achieved. An article in The Guardian, Benjamin Netanyahu considering mass clearance of northern Gaza (23 September 2024), outlines the plans the Netanyahu government has to remove the civilian population from Northern Gaza. The idea is to force out all the civilians and then to declare that anyone remaining is a Hamas militant, and can therefore be shot on sight.

The Likud MP Avichai Boaron is quoted as saying that the plan was ‘‘currently being evaluated by the government”. Apparently, Netanyahu thinks the plan “makes sense”. The reason for this is that in spite of all the bombing, in spite of all the death and destruction, the IDF has failed to eliminate Hamas. So now they are looking at this desperate plan. It would involve declaring the area “military territory”, which would mean no supplies would be allowed in, thus forcibly removing the 300,000 to 500,000 Palestinians still in the north.

Back in December, stories began appearing about the settlers removed from Gaza in 2005 returning to the Strip. One example is an article, Former Israeli settlers yearn to return to Gaza after war, published in Al Monitor, which quotes Hannah Picard, a French-Israeli who lived for 16 years in the Gaza Strip, as saying “it’s obvious that we are going to go back”. The plan to clear the northern part of Gaza of civilians would facilitate this return.

In fact, among the Zionists there is much talk of the need to recommence the settlement programme in Gaza. In June of this year, two far-right MKs (Members of the Knesset) announced they were forming a “Knesset Caucus for the Renewal of Settlement in the Gaza Strip.” They were quoted as saying that, “Only by a dense presence of Jewish settlements throughout Gaza will it be possible to prevent the continuation of terrorist threats and deter the enemy.”

For this to work, however, the new settlements would have to be heavily armed and backed up by the IDF. They would in effect become prison guards in what is often referred to as ‘the world’s largest open-air prison’. This, however, is far easier said than done. They may go ahead with this plan, but it will become a source of enormous resentment among a new generation of Palestinians who have had to suffer the nightmares already outlined in this article, and who will be seeking a way of getting back their stolen lands.

Fight all the warmongers

The mainstream media – i.e. the media that belongs to wealthy capitalists whose job it is to defend the interests of the ruling class – ignoring history, keeps pumping out the mantra that ‘Israel has the right to defend itself’. How can anyone in their right mind claim that what has been outlined above is ‘self-defence’? No. It is part of a decades-long plan of the Zionists to take the whole of what was once Palestine. It is clear that in the thinking of the Zionists, last year’s 7 October attack by Hamas came as a convenient excuse to ramp up further the pressure on the Palestinian people.

When political leaders like Biden, Starmer, Macron and Scholz, together with all the other criminal warmongers – sitting in the comfort of their government buildings, living in their luxurious residences, making lots of money as they serve the interests of the rich and powerful capitalist class – make speeches about the ‘right of Israel to defend itself’, remember what has been outlined above.

What they are really saying is that the Zionist ruling class of Israel has the right to kill tens of thousands of Palestinians, to kill their women and children, to destroy their houses, schools and hospitals, and to threaten the whole region with war. That is what we have one year since 7 October. That is what all the western leaders are supporting.

The irony of all this is that, one year on, far from guaranteeing the safety of the people living in Israel – it was supposed to become a safe haven for the Jews – the Zionists have made Israel a much more dangerous place to live, in fact the most dangerous place on the planet for Jews. They have now pushed the whole region to the brink of a regional war, creating a situation where many more lives could be lost on both sides.

Why is all this happening? It is because the Zionists have systematically blocked all attempts to move in the direction of granting the Palestinians a state of their own – and they will continue to do so. Everything Netanyahu has done has been in this direction. Not only do they refuse to grant the Palestinians statehood, but they work relentlessly to squeeze them into smaller and smaller enclaves, to take more of their land and to increase the settler population.

On this road there can be no peace. So long as the Zionist ruling class of Israel remains in power, with its heavily armed state, backed by the most powerful imperialist country in the world, the United States, there will be no move towards granting full rights to the Palestinians.

The Zionist ruling class must be overthrown, as well as all the despotic bourgeois regimes across the region, from Saudi Arabia, to Jordan and Egypt, and all the others. And in the advanced capitalist countries we must organise and fight our own imperialist governments, those same governments who have supported the nightmare unleashed on the Palestinian people.