Israel and its partners continue waging genocide against Palestinian people. Those who, so far, have survived the hideous attacks since October 7, 2023, now face ongoing jeopardy. Hemmed in by yet another military border, over two million Palestinians in “East Gaza” live amid rubble, unexploded ordnance, decaying corpses, starvation conditions, and the uncertainties of inhabiting makeshift homes without sewage, sanitation, clean water, or protection against harsh winter weather.
A saddening certainty was hammered home on November 17, 2025, when not a single country stood up for them at the United Nations. The Security Council resolved to accept President Trump’s plan for Gaza’s future, a proposal which makes no effort to hold Israel and the US accountable, in the near term, for war crimes and relentless ethnic cleansing.
Anticipating what some call the “Gazafication” of the West Bank, human rights groups are calling on the Israeli military to cease their attacks on Palestinian neighborhoods and refugee camps. Most recently, the Israeli Defense Forces raided homes in the governorate of Tubas after expelling more than twenty families from the besieged Al Far’a refugee camp.
Throughout the world, nations continue trading with Israel, perpetuating a status quo that flaunts international law. While the US sanctions International Criminal Court judges for ruling against Israeli settlers who illegally occupy Palestinian land in the West Bank, the settlers have intensified their brutality, descending on Bedouin communities, villagers grazing their flocks, and Palestinians aiming to harvest olive tree crops.
Using jeeps, bulldozers, ATVs, rifles, and other equipment supplied by the Israeli government and military, settlers beat civilians with clubs, torch vehicles, steal livestock, and demolish homes.
In Gaza there is no peace: the brief quiet, punctuated as ever by Israeli gunfire and aerial attacks, is the quiet of a mass grave that cannot begin to be unearthed until Israel allows the land-moving equipment in.
This violence is not a fringe phenomenon. It is deliberate, escalatory. Shunning all international condemnation, it is ethnic cleansing aimed at involuntary population transfer and, unless disrupted, mass atrocities. The Israeli military throws up its hands at settler violence, but many of the settlers are Israeli military who commit vigilante actions, return to their homes, don Israeli military uniforms, and go back to the very places they have attacked to arrest the victims, blaming them for causing the unrest or for unrelated alleged violations of Israeli law. Fear of imprisonment and torture adds another layer of violence to entrap Palestinians refusing to leave their land.
Those Israeli outposts and settlements already constructed occupy vast stretches of land, akin to suburbs in the United States. They monopolize the best land and the readiest supplies of water for drinking or farming. They connect with segregated highways, designated for use only by Israelis. Settlers and their government leaders fully intend to expand further, accomplishing “Greater Israel.”
Amid the grotesque injustices in Israel, a Palestinian youngster can be sentenced to three years in prison for picking up a rock, while an Israeli youngster in trouble with his school or community or both can be sentenced to a settler outpost where extremist leaders will urge him to attack defenseless villagers, all in the name of racial supremacy and fulfillment of divine command. Israel gives itself a little quiet from youth delinquency by shipping troubled youth wholesale off to the West Bank. There, they can turn their rage upon Palestinians and international observers.
Excerpted: ‘Go Tell It on the Mountain: Genocide Is Wrong’. Courtesy: Commondreams.org
