Israel Unbound: October in Gaza, One Year Later

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A retaliatory military operation that many wizened pundits predicted would last no more than a month or so has now thundered on in ever-escalating episodes of violence and mass destruction for a year with no sign of relenting. What began as a war of vengeance has become a war of annihilation, not just of Hamas, but of Palestinian life and culture in Gaza and beyond.

While few took them seriously at the time, Israeli leaders spelled out in explicit terms the savage goals of their war and the unrestrained means they were going to use to prosecute it. This was going to be a campaign of collective punishment where every conceivable target–school, hospital, mosque–would be fair game. Here was Israel unbound. The old rules of war and international law were not only going to be ignored; they would be ridiculed and mocked by the Israeli leadership, which, in the days after the October 7 attacks, announced their intention to immiserate, starve, and displace more than 2 million Palestinians and kill anyone who stood in their way–man, woman or child.

For the last 17 years, the people of Gaza have been living a marginal existence, laboring under the cruel constrictions of a crushing Israeli embargo, where the daily allotments of food allowed into the Strip were measured out down to the calorie.  Now, the blockade was about to become total. On October 9, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant warned: “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, food, or fuel; everything is closed.” He wasn’t kidding.

These are the same Palestinians in Gaza who, for years, have functioned as Israel’s low-wage labor force. As one Palestinian laborer from Rafah told Amira Hass after an Israeli bombardment in 2004: “We Palestinians build your homes in Israel, now Israel comes and destroys ours.” After October 7, thousands of Palestinian workers in Israel were detained without warrants by Israeli forces and kept for weeks in torturous conditions. This time, Israel wouldn’t just destroy Palestinian houses; it was going to obliterate entire cities.

Israel didn’t hide its intentions to traduce 75 years of international law when its missiles, drones and quadcopters began blowing up apartment buildings, houses, markets, hospitals, schools, mosques, water treatment plants, pipelines, libraries, universities, UN buildings, media offices, aid convoys and tent cities. Israel’s own soldiers and commanding officers posted videos of these war crimes on social media platforms, including one funded by the press office of the IDF. The Netanyahu regime often gave a more unvarnished account of the horrors they were inflicting on Gaza than you’d find in the pages of the New York Times or broadcasts from the BBC.

For the past year, Israel has acted as if the disaster of October 7, when the Israeli government ignored repeated warnings that an attack was imminent, gave it impunity to commit atrocities on a much vaster scale, using remote-controlled weapons and AI targeting against an essentially defenseless civilian population, allowing it to blow up whatever targets it wanted at will with little fear of reprisals or legal consequences. Israel had good reason to indulge in this sadistic arrogance. Its principal weapons dealer has continued to rush shipment after shipment of bombs, missiles and artillery shells to Israel, ensuring that the stockpiles of its arsenal remain full, even though by March Israel had already dropped 70,000 tons of bombs on Gaza, more than the World War II bombings in Dresden, Hamburg, and London combined. The pace of the bombing (and the resupplies) has accelerated since then.

According to a damage assessment from UNOSAT in early September, Israeli airstrikes, bombs, artillery and bulldozers have damaged 163,778 buildings in the Gaza Strip, around 66% of structures in Gaza. Of these, 78% were completely destroyed or severely or moderately damaged. Among the damaged buildings are at least 227,591 housing units, leaving much of Gaza’s pre-war population of 2.3 million people seeking shelter in UN schools or tent camps. The ruins of these bombed structures have left behind more than 42 million tons of debris, some of it toxic, much of it covering human remains, that will take at least 14 years to clean up.

Satellite imagery collected by the UN on September 6 shows that at least 87 percent of school buildings in the Gaza Strip (493 out of 564) have been destroyed or damaged by Israeli airstrikes. Fifty-five percent of these schools (273) are government schools, a third (161) are UNRWA schools, and 12 percent (59) are private schools. Before the Israeli assault, these destroyed or damaged schools served about 541,227 students and employed more than 20,222 teachers.

Since October 7, 2023, the Israeli military has issued over 65 evacuation orders, including five since 1 October 2024. As a result, around 84 percent of the Gaza Strip remains under evacuation orders, more than a year after the war began. The new orders issued for October cover about 70 square kilometers, or 19 percent of the Strip, including areas where Palestinians had been ordered to evacuate multiple times.

According to a UN estimate, at least 75,000 people have been displaced over the past ten days, mainly within the north. The new orders applied to tens of critical service facilities, including 16 healthcare facilities, dozens of water, sanitation and hygiene facilities, 28 schools sheltering refugees, and one bakery.

Since October 7, Israel has made 516 attacks on healthcare sites across Gaza.  Israel has attacked UNRWA facilities, aid workers and aid convoys more than 464 times, killing 228 UN workers and damaging 190 UN facilities in Gaza. Only seven of UNRWA’s 17 medical clinics remain operational.

South Africa saw this for what it was: a genocide in the making. On December 29, it filed an 84-page petition with the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of committing genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza and requesting that the Court issue provisional measures of protection. Biden, who ordered his UN ambassador to veto several ceasefire resolutions passed by the Security Council, denounced South Africa’s petition as “meritless.” On January 26, the Court ruled that it had found  “that at least some of the rights claimed by South Africa and for which it is seeking protection are plausible” and ordered Israel “to take measures to prevent acts of genocide in the Gaza Strip; to prevent and punish incitement to genocide; to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza; and generally, to take more measures to protect Palestinian civilians.” Since the ICC ruling, Israel has killed at least another 16,000 Palestinians in Gaza, constricted the flow of humanitarian aid and food into the Strip and routinely bombed areas Israel itself had instructed Palestinians to relocate into.

The few rhetorical red lines the Biden-Harris administration drew, Israel almost immediately crossed with no lull in the flow of weapons. “Every time Israel escalates the war, Biden rushes in to protect Israel from the consequences of its own escalation,” says Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute. “That is not a strategy to prevent escalation; that is a strategy that fuels escalation.”

Biden not only protected Israel from the UN, but, more cravenly, he shielded Israel from damning findings made by his own administration. In April, the State Department’s Refugee Bureau and officials at the US Agency for International Development determined that Israel was deliberately blocking aid into Gaza, a finding that should have triggered the Leahy Act, which bans military assistance to countries that block American humanitarian aid. Yet Biden and Blinken buried the reports and falsely told Congress that Israel was not in violation of the law, allowing the weapons to continue streaming to Israel, even as it laid waste to Rafah in an operation Biden timorously told Netanyahu to scale down.

According to Brown University’s Cost of War project, since October 7, the Biden-Harris Administration has spent $22.76 billion to support Israel’s genocidal war on Palestinians in Gaza. This figure includes $17.9 billion in direct “security” aid to Israel (more than in any other year since the US began giving Israel military assistance in 1959) and $4.86 billion to support US military operations in the region.

The grotesque consequences in human terms have become almost numbingly familiar by now. After a year of unrelenting attacks on Gaza, the official death toll from the Palestinian Health Ministry stands at more than 42,065 Palestinians killed and 97,886 wounded. At least 32,280 of the dead have been identified, including 10,627 children, 5,956 women, and 2,770 elderly. At least another 10,000 Palestinians are estimated to be buried under the rubble. At least 3,100 Palestinian children under the age of five have been killed in Gaza,  700 of them were killed before their first birthday. The actual death toll, according to estimates from medical investigators at Lancet and elsewhere, probably exceeds 200,000 and is perhaps much higher. A study by Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins of Bard College found that as many as 67,000 Gazans may have already died of starvation since the start of the war. The Israelis have forced the children of Gaza to exist on only 245 calories per day, which is literally a starvation diet.

The leadership of Hamas has been decimated, including the apparent death of Sinwar. Two-thirds of the population of Gaza has been displaced. Polio and other infectious diseases are spreading through the surviving population. Palestinians have been without reliable supplies of clean water, power, fuel, medicine and food for a year. Children haven’t been to school since last October. And yet the killing, maiming and destruction goes on, almost unabated, under the risible rationale of “self-defense.” In recent weeks, the slaughter has even escalated, especially in North Gaza, where the Netanyahu regime appears intent on implementing the so-called “General’s Plan,” a genocidal scheme to drive as many as 400,000 weary, homeless and starving Palestinians southward so that Israel can permanently seize much of the northern reaches of the Strip.

Here’s a summary of what’s happened in Gaza in the days since the anniversary of the October 7 attacks.

+ Israel’s latest siege on the northern Gaza Strip and its new offensive on Jabalia began two weeks after Netanyahu announced to Israeli lawmakers that he was considering a plan put forward by several Israeli generals — known as the “Generals’ Plan” — aiming at emptying the north of the Gaza Strip of Palestinians by making the area uninhabitable. At least 350 Palestinians have already been killed in the area in the last ten days.

According to Muhannad Hadi, Humanitarian Coordinator for the Occupied Palestinian Territory: “In the past two weeks, over 50,000 people have been displaced from the Jabalya area, which is cut off, while others remain stranded in their homes amid increased bombardment and fighting. A military siege that deprives civilians of essential means of survival is unacceptable.”

+ As of mid-October, no humanitarian food assistance had entered northern Gaza in two weeks.  Israel had closed all the crossings, forcing kitchens, bakeries and food distribution points in the North Gaza governorate to shut down, in an area where at least three-quarters of the population rely on food aid to survive.

+ On October 13, five bakeries in Deir al Balah and Khan Younis were forced to close due to the shortage of flour. Already in September, about 1.4 million people ( nearly 70 percent of the total population) failed to receive their monthly food rations, which comprised pasta, rice, oil, and canned meats. If the flow of assistance does not immediately resume, almost two million people will lose this vital aid in October. According to the World Food Program, “People have run out of ways to cope, food systems have collapsed, and the risk of famine is real.”

+ During the first half of October, Israel killed another two journalists and wounded three others in Gaza. On  October 6, a Palestinian journalist and freelance photographer was killed by a missile fired from an Israeli drone and another journalist was killed and one injured when an Israeli drone fired at a TV crew covering Israeli forces operations in the Jabalya refugee camp. Between October 7, 2023, and October 10, 2024, 168 Palestinian journalists and media workers were killed in the Gaza Strip by Israeli forces or missiles, including 17 women. At least 360 have been injured and another 60 have been detained.

+ All three of the hospitals in North Gaza – Kamal Adwan, Al Awda and the Indonesian Hospital – are operating at minimum capacity and experiencing critical shortages of fuel, blood, trauma equipment, and medications. In total, 285 patients remain in these facilities, including eight children and five adults receiving mechanical ventilation in ICUs and 161 patients in emergency departments. Many patients urgently need advanced procedures, such as neurosurgery and vascular surgery, that can’t be conducted under current conditions.

+ The Kamal Adwan Hospital continues to be overwhelmed, receiving at least 50-70 newly injured patients daily. While emergency obstetric care continues to be provided at Kamal Adwan and Al Awda, “the lives of newborns in incubators and women with pregnancy complications are hanging by a thread,” according to the UN Population Fund (UNFPA). The UNFP report emphasizes that more than 9,000 pregnant women have been forced to move multiple times due to the latest evacuation orders. Meanwhile, none of the 25 primary healthcare centers in North Gaza are functional, and only five out of 15 medical clinics that had been operating in recent months continue to provide primary care.

+ On the anniversary of the October 7 attacks, after Israeli airstrikes hit a mosque and a school in Deir al Balah, Al Aqsa Hospital received 53 wounded patients and 22 dead bodies. According to doctors with Médecins Sans Frontières MSF, many patients suffered injuries to the head, thorax and abdomen, Several of the wounded had to be treated on the floor due to the shortage of beds.

+ Around three in the afternoon that same day, 13 Palestinians were killed and others injured when Israeli airstrikes targeted a group of people standing near a gas station in the Jabalya refugee camp in North Gaza.

+ Nine hours later, Israel bombed a house on Block 10 of Al Bureij refugee camp in Deir al Balah, killing 19 Palestinians, including nine women and five children.

+ On October 7, at about 3 PM, 10 Palestinians, including four women and three children, were killed when an Israeli missile struck a house in the Al Atatrah neighborhood in northeastern Rafah

+ In the early morning hours of October 9, nine Palestinians were killed and five others injured when Israel bombed a house in the Ash Shujai’yeh neighborhood in eastern Gaza City.

+ A few hours later, an Israeli airstrike targeted the Al Yaman As Saeed Hospital, where Palestinian refugees were sheltering. According to the UN Human Rights Office, the strike killed 17 people.

+ At 11:30 in the morning on October 10, Israel bombed the Rufaydah school west of Deir Al Balah, which was sheltering thousands of Palestinian refugees. At least 28 Palestinians, including women and children, were killed and more than 54 were injured, including five critically injured children.

+ Half an hour later that day, eight Palestinians were killed and a dozen others injured when they were shot in the back by Israeli quadcopters while trying to evacuate from the Jabalya refugee camp through the Abu Sharakh roundabout.

+ Shortly after 9 PM on October 11, 22 Palestinians, including several women and children, were killed and 90 others injured when Israeli airstrikes leveled several houses on a residential block in Jabalya Al Balad, in North Gaza.

+ At four in the afternoon on October 12, Israel targeted a house on Al Yafawi Street in the Jabalya refugee camp in North Gaza, killing nine Palestinians and injuring ten others.

+ Near 10:30 at night on October 12, Israel bombed a house in An Nuseirat refugee camp in Deir al Balah, killing eight Palestinians and wounding several others.

+ At 4:30 in the afternoon on October 13, five Palestinian children were killed and several others injured when an Israeli airstrike hit a group of Palestinian children while they were playing at a kindergarten in As Shati’ camp, west of Gaza City.

+ Seven hours later, 36 Palestinians, including 15 children, were killed and 80 others injured when Israeli artillery shelled the Al Mufti UNRWA school in An Nuseirat refugee camp, where over 6,200 displaced people were sheltering. According to UNRWA, the school was going to be used as a Polio vaccination site the following day.

+ At about 10 in the morning on October 14, ten Palestinians were killed, and 40 others were injured when an Israeli airstrike hit outside theUNRWA distribution center in Jabalya refugee camp. According to UNRWA, this happened while people waited to collect food and flour.

+ At 1:20 in the morning on 14 October, Israeli drones opened fire on the courtyard of Al Aqsa Hospital in Deir al Balah, where displaced Palestinians were sheltering. The attack ignited a fire that quickly engulfed dozens of tents, killing at least four Palestinians and burning several patients alive in their hospital beds as they writhed in pain, many of them still attached to IVs.  Several Palestinians tried to put out the fire. One of the survivors told a reporter with Al Jazeera: “We woke up to the sound of the strike, which blew away 40 tents. We spent the whole night transporting the injured. People were burned, and some were melted. People came here from everywhere, escaping death, but we came to a second death. Without tents or cover, what will people do now? Winter is coming. Where shall we go?”

+ At least four people were burned to death and more than 40 others were injured, including women and children. Médecins sans Frontières reported that Al Aqsa Hospital treated 40 patients, including ten children and eight women, many of whom had severe burns. Another 25 patients had to be referred to other health facilities due to the lack of capacity at Al Aqsa, which a few hours earlier had already received dozens of people injured in the strike on the Al Mufti school. According to an assessment by UN agencies, out of the hundreds of displaced families sheltering in the courtyard, some 40 families were affected, half of whom lost their shelter and other belongings in the fire. Referring to these incidents, Acting Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, Ms. Joyce Msuya, stated: “There seems to be no end to the horrors that Palestinians in Gaza are forced to endure… There really is no safe place in Gaza for people to go. Fighting is intensifying in the north and essential supplies for survival are running out… These atrocities must end. Civilians and civilian infrastructure must always be protected.”

+ In Jabalia in northern Gaza, where Israeli forces continued their latest ground offensive for the tenth day in a row, Israeli quadcopter drones opened fire on Palestinians who had gathered to receive food at a UNRWA aid distribution center, killing at least ten people and wounding more than 40 others.

+ On Wednesday, the Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahia issued an urgent call for medical supplies and generator fuel. The hospital, one of the last functioning hospitals in the strip, warned that the amount of fuel that could enter the area was only enough for ten more days.

+ On October 15, the family home of a Virginia man of Palestinian descent was destroyed in repeated airstrikes by Israeli forces in the Jabalyia refugee camp in northern Gaza. There were 15 people in the house when it was struck, including seven children and the man’s mother, a lawful permanent resident of the United States. The man’s mother and several relatives survived the initial attack but were trapped beneath the rubble of the house. In an effort to rescue the injured, the family called the Israeli authorities, gave them the address and GPS coordinates of the bombed house, and let them know that an ambulance had been dispatched to the scene. Instead of clearing the route for the rescuers, the IDF apparently used the information provided by the family to launch a second round of airstrikes, targeting both the ruins of the house and the ambulance coming to the aid of the wounded. The Israeli missile that hit the ambulance killed Dr. Ahmed Al-Najjar. The missile that struck the already bombed residence killed everyone except a seven-year-old boy. When Americans are attacked, Biden vowed, we will respond…with condolences and more 2,000-lb bombs.

+ As I was writing this column, word came of an Israeli airstrike on yet another UNRWA  school being used as a shelter in North Gaza. The bombing of the Abu Hussein School in Jabalia refugee camp on Thursday killed at least 28 Palestinians (and likely many more) and injured at least 160 people, including many women and children. Once again, the airstrikes ignited the tents where thousands of Palestinian families were sheltering. Al Jazeera journalist Hani Mahmoud reported that the victims were taken on carts and private cars to Al Awda and Kamal Adwan hospitals, already overflowing with patients and running low on fuel and supplies. “The scene is horrific, Mahmoud reported. “They can’t keep up with the large influx of casualties.”

+++

The war of revenge has become a war of dispossession, conquest and annexation, where war crime feeds on war crime. Not even the lives of the Israeli hostages will stand in the way; they will become Israeli martyrs in the cause of cleansing Gaza of Palestinians.

There can be little doubt now that this is the ultimate exterminationist goal. Smotrich and Ben Gvir have openly said as much and Netanyahu and Gallant have put their incendiary rhetoric into ruinous action. (This week, Netanyahu’s Likud government circulated invitations to an event called “Preparing to Settle Gaza.”) Even Benny Gantz, hailed as an enlightened alternative to Netanyahu by many in the West, proclaimed after learning of Sinwar’s death: “The circle is closed, but the mission is not over. The IDF will continue to operate in the Gaza Strip for years to come.”

It’s equally apparent that nothing Israel does, including killing American grandmothers, college students, and aid workers, will trigger the US government, whether it’s under the control of Biden, Harris, or Trump, to intervene to stop them or even pull the plug on the arms shipments that make this genocidal war possible. This week, Biden, while his secretaries of State and Defense publicly waged their fingers on Netanyahu for continuing to starve Palestinians, ordered US troops to Israel to operate the THAAD missile defense system he had just gifted them. Shortly after they arrived, Netanyahu took a gloating selfie with the fresh-faced US troops who had now officially placed their boots on the ground in Israel’s ever-widening war.

Sources

Linda Bilmes, William Hartung, Stephen Semler, United States Spending on Israel’s Military Operations and Related Operations in the Region, Costs of War Project, September 30, 2024.

Rasha Khatib, Martin McKee, Salim Yusuf, Counting the Dead in Gaza: Difficult But Essential, The Lancet, July 20, 2024.

Adam Taylor, Leo Sands, Kelly Kasulis Cho, and Adela Suliman, “What to Know About US Support for Israel After a Year of War,” Washington Post, Oct. 14, 2024.

Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, “2oo Days of Military Attacks on Gaza,” April 24, 2024.

UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Reported Impact Snapshot (Gaza), October 16, 2024.

UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Humanitarian Situation Update #229, Gaza Strip, October 15, 2024.

World Food Program, “New Gaza Food Security Assessment Sees Famine Risk Persisting Amid Ongoing Fighting and Restricted Aid Operations,” October 17, 2024.

The post Israel Unbound: October in Gaza, One Year Later appeared first on CounterPunch.org.