Let me preface this piece by saying I have had notes on this for almost a year now. Time and time again I’ve tried to put my thoughts into a coherent depiction of the sickening horror that is the slaughter of the innocent in Gaza. It’s not intended to be an exercise in good grammar or even journalism. It simply represents the emotional expression of a man who genuinely finds it difficult to sleep some nights, given the images and footage I’ve seen. If I wrote this story on paper you wouldn’t be able to read it, because my tears would have washed away my words.
As well as trying to articulate my thoughts, I’ve also been trying to visualise them and utterly failed. I can’t do it because I can’t face the images and the footage collected to tell the story and express exactly how I feel. I’m hoping this piece will give me the push I desperately need to get the job done, so I can share with you the true horror of a conflict that the Israeli government has waited decades for the excuse to prosecute.
Let me begin by stating, the heinous attack by Hamas on innocent Israeli citizens on October 7, was a WAR CRIME. Of that there is no doubt. I unequivocally condemn it today, as I did at the time. To the family and friends of EVERY innocent Israeli citizen murdered on that blood drenched day of terror, there are no words I could express that would likely offer any comfort for your loss. I can only hope the memories of times spent with those now gone, prior to that infamous day, will be memories you can embrace and treasure forever. May their memory and your love for them be a blessing.
To the families of those still held in captivity in Gaza, I can’t begin to understand the pain and suffering you are being forced to endure each and every day, not knowing if you will ever see your loved ones alive again. Once again, I condemn Hamas for this act of criminal psychological torture. I hope from deep within my heart, you will get a chance to embrace those currently missing from your life and welcome them home again.
I said at the time, I supported a proportional response by Israel to target those responsible for this heinous act of terrorism spearheaded by Hamas. This was a position echoed by leaders around the world. However, my fear from the outset, was that Benjamin Netanyahu would unleash the dogs of war with catastrophic consequences. And so it came to pass.
What was most egregious, was the methods Netanyahu used to emotionally blackmail the world, into creating a permissive environment in which to prosecute pure unbridled vengeance, with no regard for the innocent. Why did he deliberately manufacture stories of beheaded babies and other inconceivable horrors? It was a wicked act of deliberate deception with clear eyed motive. He wanted a world already repulsed, to be repulsed some more, for the sole purpose of justifying the most brutal genocidal act of revenge in modern history.
To provide some perspective of just how effective Israeli propaganda is, the claim was, and I quote, “40 babies/children were beheaded”. Israeli news channel i24 set the ball rolling and the IDF ran with it over and over again. It literally created a feeding frenzy in the global media. He even had the president of the United States repeat his propaganda lies, only for President Biden to have to walk them back.
Nobody should ever forget the horrors of the Holocaust and the murder of six million Jews in Europe between 1933 and 1945. It’s imperative that every year we celebrate Holocaust Memorial Day, to remember the victims whose only crime was to be Jewish. We must not forget, the sole purpose of Hitlers Final Solution, was to remove the Jews from the face of the earth. With an incredulous act of contempt for their memory, Netanyahu has persistently used the holocaust as the cornerstone for the justification to murder tens of thousands of innocent women and children. I simply can’t articulate how this makes me feel and I know it makes many members in the Jewish community feel equal contemptuous of his actions in this respect.
The Israeli government believed that if it banned international journalists from Gaza, they could do their ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in the dark. However, they never accounted for the citizen journalists who stepped up to film exactly what they were doing at great risk to their lives. As of this month, at least 170 journalists and media workers have been killed, along with 333 aid workers and over 1000 healthcare workers. To put this into context. Between 2001 and 2021, during the war in Afghanistan, around 93 journalists were killed, along with around 274 aid workers. In the eyes of the IDF, it seems EVERYTHING and EVERYONE is a legitimate target that can later be described as a terrorist. There are numerous well documented cases of the IDF deliberately targeting civilians, journalists and health workers.
Probably the most infamous example of this targeting being that of 5 year old Hind. She was travelling in a car with her uncle, his wife and their four children, fleeing fighting in northern Gaza, when they came under fire from the IDF. Hind was the sole survivor. She managed to call her mom, terrified. The Red Crescent despatched an ambulance to find her. However she was later found dead along with the two paramedics that had been sent to rescue her. Hers was just another story that came and went as the world was desensitised to the constant carnage. The murder of the innocent has now become like a ticking clock on a wall. After a while you simply don’t hear it anymore.
The Israeli government provided a constant supply of IDF spokespeople from their Operations Directorate. Men and women responsible for information policy and media relations. They lied, they lied and they lied again, to the point where , they became a laughing stock, as time and again their lies were called out. The downside for observers of the conflict, was that the sheer volume of all the lies DID have the desired effect, as slowly Gaza disappeared from the news. Now it rarely registers with news observers at all the ticking clock has fell silent.
The power of the Israeli state truly has shocked me. They have been so effective at shutting down criticism, not only in traditional media, but across the social media landscape too. They have literally waged war on dissent across the world. They’ve done it to the point where senior western politicians described lawful protests as hate marches in support of Hamas. The number of times Israeli spokespeople and politicians espouse anyone expressing criticism of Israeli actions is an antisemite, is truly frightening. History tells us, there is much to be learned from the words of our leaders, so what should we deduce from the words of former Prime Minister Golda Meir who said;
“We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children, but we can not forgive them for forcing us to kill their children!”
In the challenging times in which we live, it is easy to be confused by biblical references and single agenda rhetoric, but what’s clear is, the Palestinian people live under occupation. Their occupiers assert effective control over Gaza. As such, they have an obligation to provide humanitarian guarantees under international humanitarian law.
Israel has a duty to provide fundamental human rights (HR) under international human rights law
They argue, following the Israeli disengagement from the Gaza Strip in 2005, the Israeli government declared that it was no longer an occupant. This, despite deploying its forces throughout the Strip’s external border, with entry and exit points being wholly controlled by Israel’s Defence Forces. Clarification was sought from the International Court of Justice. They subsequently issued Advisory Opinion which declared, among others, that Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem have been under continuous belligerent occupation and that moreover, it was illegal. This opinion confirmed, despite Israeli statements to the contrary, it continues to be the occupying power of Gaza due to its effective control, notwithstanding it’s physical military presence. Interestingly, under Internation Law, this prevents them from using the justification of ‘self defence’
We can argue all day long about the why and wherefores, the fact remains, the Palestinians do not enjoy the right of free movement. They are effectively in a prison camp. I will refrain from using the term I would prefer to use, given the sensitivity of the issue. We know there’s a long an complex history involved that even a library full of books might fail to unravel, but what is clear, is that Palestinians live under apartheid rule. They are regarded much the same as black South Africans were under South African Apartheid. The difference being, the international community it seems dare not challenge Israel in the same way they challenged the South African regime.
Never in modern times have the lives of so many had so little value on the geopolitical stage. The United States and other western allies, however they try to justify Israel’s actions, are unquestionably complicit in Israel’s act of unbridled vengeance. There are those that say, Biden did his best to restrain Netanyahu with his token withholding of weapons, but frankly it was like putting lipstick on a pig and Netanyahu is a pig in every sense of the word. He has been playing American presidents like a fiddle for decades. Clinton reportedly once said of him,
“Who the f**k does he think he is? Who’s the f**king superpower here?”
With the help of AIPAC, Biden became powerless for fear of the electoral consequences. In the end, it didn’t matter and the hard right Israeli government was rewarded with Trump 2.0. There could not have been a better outcome for Israel.
Nobody, not even me was prepared for what was about to happen. I live in a country that is no stranger to war, but what happened next, shook me to my core. It was a prosecution of visceral hatred in plain site of the world. There was no adherence to the rules of war, the Geneva Convention or international law. It was a deliberate cynical and premeditated series of acts, which flew in the face of moral decency. They were carried out under the ludicrous and invalid excuse of ‘self defence’. The population was denied food, water, electricity and medical care as hospitals, schools and mosques were targeted. Under international law, these are textbook war crimes. There is much talk about Internet access, why was that not denied more often? Simple answer, the IDF needed it for targeting and drones.
The reaction by western leaders disgusts me to this day. They simply turned the other way ignoring millions of their own citizens out on the streets protesting against what they saw as genocide. Leaders simply made lame excuses for the indiscriminate carpet bombing of Gaza. This wasn’t just bombing, it was obliteration of infrastructure with no regard for innocent civilians. You might ask yourself why? Because to the IDF, they were ALL terrorists
I could write a whole book about what took place in real time, documented on social media by Gazans. As a filmmaker, I have waded through hours of footage and images that made me feel physically sick, but one image remains seared into my mind. That of a man racing down the street to a hospital entrance in a state of total shock. The type of shock experienced by soldiers on the beaches in Normandy who had witnessed their comrades blown up beside them. I had to even pause before I wrote this next sentence and you might want to, out of respect.
The man was carrying the pieces of his child in a carrier bag screaming for help. In his moment of shock and unspeakable trauma, he believed that the doctors could empty the contents of his blood stained bag and put his four year old son back together again. It haunts me to this day, every time I see a child in the street.
Fifty percent of the population is under 18, so it is hardly surprising that 70% of the now 50,000 deaths are women and children. Of course the Israeli government casts doubt on the numbers, but US intelligence considers them to be close to correct. This represents a catastrophic loss of life.
This is my opinion and should NOT be regarded as fact, but I would put it to you, the indiscriminate bombing is specifically designed to cull the young because these are the next generation threat. Israel also has a track record for targeting reproductive health clinics, not to mention the babies in incubators which were simply left to die after forced evacuations from hospitals. This is before we discuss historical charges of organ harvesting.
Netanyahu and the hard right members of his government, had been seeking an opportunity to drop the hammer on the Palestinians for years. What happened after October 7th, was the endgame in a decades old Apartheid system in which Palestinians had been subjected to evictions and forced removal from lands that had belonged to them for generations. Israel has played fast and loose with international law for decades. Defying numerous UN resolutions. They simply view themselves as above the law.
It was the clear intend from the outset of the assault on Gaza, to literally make it unfit for human habitation. There were so many objectives wrapped into one. The charade of targeting Hamas terrorists was a sham. From the very beginning, Netanyahu knew he had the tacit approval of western leaders to go after Hamas and he used that as cover to indiscriminately target ‘suspected’ terrorists. By the US’s own admission, the IDF parameters for collateral damage was in their words, ‘not as diligent as it should be’. This was evidenced when US aid workers from World Central Kitchen were targeted and killed. There was a simple admission it was a mistake, then it was back to business as usual. They even killed their own hostages, Yotam Haim (age 28), Alon Shamriz (age 26) and Samer Talalka (age 24)
Netanyahu knows you can’t bomb an ideology out of existence. You simply create more terrorists than you can kill, because each time you kill a farther, a mother a child, you create an enemy from those who survive to hate you. I would argue that Hamas is as strong today as it ever was. For every leader you eliminate. There are two waiting to take his place. This is of absolutely no interest to the Israeli government, the longer they can claim Hamas is still a threat, the more Palestinians they can kill.
Let’s not forget that Israel allowed suitcases holding millions of dollars in Qatari cash to enter Gaza through its crossings since 2018. This was to maintain its fragile ceasefire with the Hamas rulers of the Strip. But primarily, it was used to prevent Mahmoud Abbas, or anyone else in the Palestinian Authority’s West Bank government, from advancing toward the establishment of a Palestinian state.
This conflict is part of a much bigger picture. The subjugation of the Palestinians in the West Bank and occupied territories has been the default position for the Israeli government for decades. Putting Gaza aside for a moment, in 2023, 507 Palestinians were killed in the West Bank, including at least 81 children, making it the deadliest year for Palestinians since the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) began recording casualties in 2005.
OCHA recorded numerous incidents which resulted in the unlawful killing of 20 Palestinians, including seven children. Amnesty International’s research also found that Israeli forces obstructed medical assistance to people with life-threatening wounds and attacked those attempting to assist injured Palestinians, including paramedics. The IDF has for years, built a cottage industry around killing, injuring and assaulting Palestinians.
The key thing to understand is, the psychology employed in the relationship. In particular, between Israeli soldiers and the Palestinians they rule over. Numerous solders have spoken out against the deliberate dehumanisation that is the basis of their interactions with Palestinians. Michael Ofer-Ziv a former IDF Officer, was one of 130 IDF members who in October 2024, sent a letter to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Minister of Defence Yoav Gallant, refusing to serve unless the government worked to obtain a hostage and ceasefire deal.
As well as serving in the current conflict, he also served in the occupied West Bank. He said;
"It quickly became apparent that the goals of the Israeli government and the IDF were not solely to rescue the hostages and prevent another attack from happening. A discourse of retaliation, of revenge was already very apparent by 9 and 10 October”. He noted, “in the aftermath of the Hamas’ attack, prominent members of the Israeli government made comments about annihilating Gaza, destroying Gaza”, adding “that was very, very scary”.
Michael stated During his previous periods of service, there were always “rules of engagement” – a code of conduct by which soldiers were expected to operate. In his experience, this was NOT the case after October 7.
“There is no justification for killing civilians – Israelis or Palestinians”. He said, “We brought the situation in Gaza to a point where enough people felt, this was their only solution and they were willing to do this to dehumanise us, as they were.”. He went on, “Many Gazans hate us for obvious reasons, and people who are desperate are more likely to join a group like Hamas. If you have nothing to lose, you don’t mind dying fighting for your family.”
Michael is a man who was deeply affected by what happened on October 7 – he knew some of the people killed by Hamas. It is what drove him to reenlist. He noted,
“Many of those currently serving in the IDF were not soldiers on the seventh, they were concerned and afraid citizens sitting in their homes… and a lot of them lost people, dear ones, during the October attack. So how compromised is their own judgment when looking at Palestinians and Gazans? That is the reality that creates this carelessness or disregard of Palestinian lives.” He concludes “Regardless of what you call it, what is happening in Gaza is 100% something that is deeply immoral, deeply problematic, and should be stopped.”
After the killing by the IDF of the three Israeli hostages, He was horrified at what had happened,
“They were holding a white flag, screaming for help in Hebrew, and yet they were shot. this was the last straw, I knew I could no longer serve.”
Michael was given a routine break from service last December and never returned, despite being asked to go back in June. He and the 129 others who signed the aforementioned letter refusing to serve, were recently suspended from the IDF. They may be taken to court in the future. You can read the full account of Michael here
Any attempt by anyone to condemn Israel for what was evolving into mass murder, was accused of antisemitism by Netanyahu and his hard right cabinet members. These are members who had been waiting for an excuse to expel the Palestinians from Gaza for a long time. His is a government that has operated apartheid for decades in defiance of numerous UN resolutions.
The International Criminal Court who indicted Netanyahu and others for war crimes did so on the same evidence based investigation methods, used to issue a warrant for the arrest of Vladimir Putin, for the murder of innocent Ukrainian civilians. The selective acceptance of war crimes by the U.S. to the point of threatening sanctions against the ICC, does nothing for their credibility on the international stage. Add Trump to the mix and a tragedy becomes a dangerous geopolitical IED. We have reached the point where the world is living in fear of the words of a man that commits crimes against the English language and sentence structure on a daily basis.
We expect the alleged leader of the free world to behave like a leader, not a stumbling bumbling idiot staring at a red button on his desk saying ‘What happens if I press this?” In the context of US presidents he is unquestionably the runt of the litter.
When writing about his actions, it’s always worth waiting a little while before committing to making an assessment. And his proposed Gaza adventure is no exception. His verbal incontinence often leaves aids trailing behind with the messaging ‘pooper scooper’ attempting to clean up the mess he leaves in his wake. Every press conference delivers a new answer. We’ll send troops, we won’t have boots on the ground. Palestinians will be able to return, then Palestinians will not be returning.
Trump has simply given Netanyahu free reign to resume the slaughter of the innocent under the continued false guise of invalid self defence and the aim to eliminate Hamas. In fifteen months, despite unrelenting indiscriminate bombing, Netanyahu’s ‘most moral’ and well equipped army, has not eliminated Hamas because he’s ludicrously trying to eliminate an ideology by killing thousands of women and children. An act which simply serves as a Hamas recruiting aid.
In part two of this three part series, we will take a look at life for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. Then in Part three, we will get to the real heart of the matter and follow the money. There are much larger forces in play that the forced removal of the Palestinians to the Sinai Peninsula.
