As Western politicians talk about recognising a Palestine state, here is a harsh dose of reality about the state of actually existing Palestine, where death and destruction is everywhere.
Dr Ghada Ageel is a visiting professor at the University of Alberta Political Science Department (Edmonton, Canada), an independent scholar, and active in the Faculty4Palestine-Alberta.
Cross-posted from Middle East Eye
Twenty-five members of the Hussari family lived in a five-storey home in al-Shati (Beach) camp, overlooking the destroyed harbour on the western edge of Gaza City.
Today, that house is a grave. Only three family members survived a massive Israeliattack last week, as drones and quadcopters strafed the area and shot those who attempted to rescue or recover bodies. Among those killed was Yara, a sixth-year medical student practising as a doctor.
Neighbours dug through the concrete and iron with their bare hands to pull out the bodies of two children. One relative recalled hearing faint cries beneath the rubble, until they fell silent – “as if the earth had swallowed them whole”.
Days later, 20 members of the Sultan family, in al-Tawam neighbourhood further to the north, were obliterated in a single strike; the whole family tree uprooted in a one brutal action.
This week, another 23 lives were erased as the Zaqout family was buried beneath the rubble of their home.
Haj Ibrahim Abdu, a displaced elderly Palestinian, collapsed at the Nabulsi roundabout in the heart of Gaza City while making his way south. He endured the hardships of the road, but his heart could not bear the agony of forced expulsion. It stopped, heavy with grief and sorrow over leaving his beloved Gaza City. With no transportation to the nearest cemetery in Sheikh Radwan, his family laid him to rest inside Al-Shifa Hospital.
This is only a glimpse of the genocidal violence unfolding at this very moment – even as you read these words.
Core military strategy
All of this forms a core part of Israel’s military strategy. On 8 September, Defence Minister Israel Katz declared: “A mighty hurricane will hit the skies of Gaza City today, and the roofs of the terror towers will shake.”
For the Hussari, Sultan and Zaqout families, those words were not metaphors. They were a death sentence. And the same death sentence hangs over Gaza City itself – a city more than 5,000 years old; a cradle of civilisation, history and culture.
Israeli attacks began in the areas of al-Zeitoun, al-Tuffah, al-Daraj and al-Shujaiya, the oldest parts of Gaza, where layers of memory and history were inscribed in its stones and streets, reducing that legacy to dust.
These working-class neighbourhoods were once home to Gaza’s oldest landmarks, such as al-Omari mosque, dating back to the year 634; the Hamam al-Sammara traditional bathhouse from 1320; and al-Saqqa Palace, built in 1661.
Today, Zeitoun is no more. In recent weeks, more than 1,500 of its homes were bombed and demolished.
From there, Israeli forces moved through al-Rimal, the beating heart of Gaza’s economic, administrative, cultural and social life. They destroyed what little remained of my alma mater, the Islamic University, claiming it was a military target, even though it sheltered hundreds of displaced families.
Now, the bombardment engulfs every neighbourhood across Gaza City – east, west, north and south – with such violence that it can be heard in Tel Aviv.
The streets are fast becoming graveyards for those who couldn’t make it out in time. A few days ago, in a Facebook post, Noor Abu Rukba, an Al Jazeera journalist who replaced her murdered colleague Anas al-Sharif, warned the world in words that should haunt humanity: “Gaza has become a human slaughterhouse right now – for whoever still cares. The streets and roads are overflowing with martyrs.”
‘A city exhaling its last breaths’
The drone-filled skies over Gaza City are pierced by the cries of children who have no painkillers to ease the agony of amputations.
Responding to Israel’s evacuation orders, meant to force families into flight, Samaher al-Khuzndar, a journalist based in Gaza, wrote: “Thank you for your warning … But I do not want to go to my death gasping! I stand in my place where I end up, take a deep breath, and imagine all the possible losses, with the utmost pain imaginable. I train myself so I will not panic while bleeding the last drops of my blood after seeing everyone I love die in the most horrific ways.
“From this point where I stand, in a city exhaling its last breaths, I see that the harshest possibilities are more merciful than running to death along paths chosen by those who burned our souls … This is neither endurance nor resistance; it is total submission to fate.”
This assessment has already proved correct. A family fleeing this week in a vehicle loaded with their belongings was struck by missiles near al-Katiba Square in western Gaza City, killing five.
The list of bombed towers and structures, and the ever-mounting Palestiniandeath toll, makes my heart sink. But even these long lists give only a small sense of the scale of the unfolding destruction, as Israel razes schools, tower blocks full of families and other vital social, historical, cultural and knowledge infrastructure.
From the heart of Tel al-Hawa, my relative Nour Khalil, a refugee from Beit Daras, a village that Israel destroyed and depopulated in 1948, pleaded in a recent Facebook post: “My beloved Gaza – I wish they would teach us how to hide you inside us; how to put you in the bag of displacement; and how to carry you on our backs as we leave. I wish they would teach us how to protect you from the rockets, from the pain, and from the blood.
“By God, it’s unbearable for us to see you dusty and full of blackness … How can a person live while feeling they have no place?”
Fighting for survival
Alongside Gaza’s families, Israel has been targeting the buildings of respected organisations, including al-Roya Tower, which housed the offices of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights – a group that was recently sanctioned by the US for its work to bring Israeli leaders to trial at The Hague.
All of this occurs with the approval of western states, including the US and UK, even as the United Nations this week concluded that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza, citing explicit genocidal calls by civilian and military authorities.
This is politically inconvenient news for western governments, who prefer to present these atrocities as an aberration caused by far-right ministers, rather than a long-standing and widely held viewpoint on Palestinians. The “gates of hell” that Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich described did not just open all of a sudden; they had long been ajar, creaking and burning, since the 1948 Nakba.
What distinguishes the current moment of genocide is its pace, scale and barbarity, as these horrors are lived and broadcast in real time.
As a consequence, in Gaza today, international humanitarian law is also fighting for its survival. Western states have a legal duty to prevent genocide by targeting the perpetrators.
Instead, the West is playing a double game – on the one hand, going through the charade of recognising a Palestinian state at the UN General Assembly, and on the other, continuing to supply arms to Israel, and thus eliminating any possibility of a Palestinian state for generations to come.
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