Isreal Genocide against palestine

The genocide did not begin on October 7, 2023. It began in 1948 and never ended.

In the spring of 1948, Zionist militias — Haganah, Irgun, Lehi — moved village by village across Palestine. Deir Yassin, April 9: 112 men, women, and children shot, bayoneted, or blown up with barrel bombs. The bodies were thrown into wells. The massacre was broadcast on loudspeakers to terrorize neighboring villages into fleeing. By the time Israel declared itself a state on May 14, 1948, more than 300 Palestinian villages had already been erased. Over 750,000 people — three-quarters of the Arab population in what became Israel — were driven out or fled under direct fire. This was the Nakba: the Catastrophe. Israel calls it the War of Independence. Palestinians call it the beginning of their attempted extermination.

Seventy-seven years later, the same logic is playing out in Gaza and the West Bank, only now with 2,000-pound bombs, artificial intelligence targeting systems, and starvation used as a calculated weapon of war.

The Israeli state was built on the principle that Palestine must be emptied of Palestinians. David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, wrote in his diary in 1937: “We must expel Arabs and take their places.” He repeated it publicly for decades. Transfer — code for ethnic cleansing — was not a fringe idea; it was the founding consensus. Plan Dalet, the Haganah’s military blueprint for 1948, explicitly ordered the “destruction of villages” and “expulsion of the population” in strategic areas. The orders were carried out with precision.

After 1948, Israel passed the Absentees’ Property Law, confiscating the homes, farms, and bank accounts of refugees who had been forced to flee. Entire cities — Jaffa, Haifa, Acre — were repopulated with Jewish immigrants while the original inhabitants were locked behind barbed wire in Gaza or scattered across Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. Israel never allowed a single family to return. That policy continues today: any Palestinian who leaves Gaza, even for medical treatment, is permanently banned from returning.

In 1967 Israel seized the rest of historic Palestine — the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza — plus the Syrian Golan and Egypt’s Sinai. Rather than withdraw, Israel began the largest settlement project in modern history. Today over 750,000 Jewish settlers live on stolen land in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, protected by a military that answers only to them. The International Court of Justice ruled in 2004 and again in 2024 that every settlement is illegal. Israel responded by accelerating construction.

Gaza became the world’s largest open-air prison. After Hamas won the 2006 elections — elections the United States demanded and then rejected — Israel imposed a total siege. Land, air, sea: nothing and no one entered or left without Israeli permission. Calories were counted by the occupation authorities to keep the population just above starvation level. An Israeli official in 2008 openly described the policy: “Put them on a diet.” Fishing was restricted to three nautical miles, rendering Gaza’s historic fishing industry dead. Farmers were shot if they approached within 300 meters of the border fence. Drones buzzed overhead 24 hours a day. Children grew up never knowing silence.

By 2023 Gaza had one of the youngest populations on earth — half under eighteen — and one of the highest unemployment rates: 70 percent among youth. The UN had already warned repeatedly that Gaza would be “unlivable” by 2020. Israel made sure it became a death trap.

The blockade was not security. It was collective punishment, a war crime under Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. It was the slow phase of genocide — the phase designed to make resistance inevitable so that the fast phase could be justified.

Every few years Israel launched a new “mowing the lawn” operation: 2008–2009, 2012, 2014, 2021. Each time the same pattern: Palestinian rockets (crude, often homemade), Israeli airstrikes that killed hundreds of civilians in days, then a ceasefire. In 2014 alone, Operation Protective Edge murdered 2,251 Palestinians, including 551 children. Sixty-seven Israelis died. The ratio was never a mistake. It was the point.

Israeli leaders never hid their intentions. In 2018, during the Great March of Return, Israeli snipers shot 6,000 unarmed demonstrators in the legs, deliberately maiming an entire generation. One soldier bragged on camera: “I have 52 confirmed knee hits.” Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman praised the snipers: “There are no innocent people in Gaza.” The message was clear: Palestinians have no right to exist, even when unarmed.

By 2023 the stage was set. Gaza was a cage filled with desperate people, surrounded by one of the most sophisticated militaries on earth. Hamas’s attack on October 7 gave Israel the pretext it had been waiting for — not to defeat Hamas, but to finish what began in 1948.

The Israeli cabinet met on October 8. Ministers spoke openly of “Nakba 2023.” Yoav Gallant, Defense Minister, announced a “complete siege”: “No electricity, no food, no fuel, no water. We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.” President Isaac Herzog declared: “There are no innocent civilians in Gaza.” National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir called for “total victory” and the resettlement of Gaza with Jewish colonies.

These were not slips of the tongue. They were declarations of genocidal intent, broadcast live.

Within days the bombs began falling. Not precision strikes — carpet bombing. Entire neighborhoods flattened. Hospitals, schools, universities, mosques, churches, bakeries, water plants — nothing was spared. Israel ordered 1.1 million people in northern Gaza to move south “for their safety,” then bombed the evacuation routes. The same orders were repeated again and again, pushing people into smaller and smaller corners of the Strip until there was nowhere left to go.

By November 2025, 70,525 Palestinians in Gaza were officially dead, 72,500 according to UN counts, and the true toll is far higher. Over 100,000 are wounded, many with life-changing injuries. More than 17,000 children are orphaned. Gaza’s Health Ministry collapsed months ago; bodies lie under rubble, eaten by dogs. The Lancet medical journal estimates the real death toll, including indirect deaths from starvation and disease, exceeds 186,000.

This is not collateral damage. This is the plan.

The West Bank, too, burns. Since October 2023, Israeli forces and settlers have killed over 1,010 Palestinians there — executions, home demolitions, nightly raids. Entire villages are being emptied to make way for new settlements. The Jordan Valley is being annexed piece by piece. Jerusalem’s Palestinian population is being strangled by residency revocations and wall-building.

The genocide is not only in Gaza. It is the entire project of eliminating Palestinians from the land between the river and the sea.

Israel controls every border, every calorie, every drop of water, every bullet. It has the power to end the slaughter in an afternoon. It chooses not to. Instead, it drops leaflets telling people to flee to “safe zones” and then bombs those zones. It tells hospitals to evacuate and then bombs the hospitals. It tells the world it is “defending itself” while it murders children by the thousands.

This is genocide by every definition in international law.

Article II of the 1948 Genocide Convention lists five acts, any one of which qualifies:

Killing members of the group

Causing serious bodily or mental harm

Deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction

Imposing measures to prevent births

Forcibly transferring children

Israel is committing all five in real time, on camera, with live-streamed evidence.

The intent is proven by the statements of Israel’s own leaders, by the pattern of destruction, by the starvation policy, by the bombing of every bakery and water desalination plant, by the use of rape as a weapon in detention camps, by the celebration of dead Palestinian children on Israeli television.

This book is not about “both sides.” There is no equivalence between occupier and occupied, between a nuclear-armed state and a people under siege for eight decades. This book is the record of a crime in progress — the crime of genocide — and the demand that it stop now.

The Palestinians are still here. After 77 years of massacres, expulsions, siege, and now industrial-scale extermination, they remain. Their sumud — their steadfastness — is unbreakable. The graves are full, but the people refuse to vanish.

Israel’s genocide will fail, just as every previous attempt failed. But the cost is measured in tens of thousands of lives, in entire families wiped from the civil registry, in a generation of children who will never see their parents again.

The world is watching. History is writing its verdict.

This chapter is only the beginning. The evidence is overwhelming. The dead demand we speak their names.