Genocide by Design

Death Toll in Gaza (Oct 7, 2023 – Mar 25, 2025)

Introduction

On October 7, 2023, the Israeli regime intensified its ongoing settler-colonial project by unleashing a full-scale military extermination campaign against the Palestinian people in Gaza—a campaign inseparable from the broader colonial violence enacted across all of Occupied Palestine. Cloaked in the familiar language of “security” and “counterterrorism,” the assault revealed, from its first hours, a genocidal intent: not to contain resistance, but to annihilate life. Over the following 18 months, Gaza—already blockaded and fragmented by decades of siege—was transformed into a killing field. Entire neighborhoods were razed, water systems and hospitals deliberately destroyed, and entire families disappeared beneath rubble or into mass graves. The siege tightened into engineered famine. Disease spread in overcrowded displacement zones. Medical care collapsed. Children starved in tents as Israeli bombs cratered their shelters.

This report reconstructs the full, uncondensed accounting of that mass death. Grounded in survivor testimony, field documentation, and decolonial analysis, it details both the visible killings and the slow, systemic extermination carried out through deprivation. Using a corrected baseline of ~128,761 direct deaths as of March 25, 2025—far exceeding the occupation’s manipulated tallies—we also account for those who remain missing, unrecovered, or uncounted by collapsed infrastructure. With children comprising at least 44% of those killed, the genocide in Gaza must be understood as, in the words of UNRWA’s Philippe Lazzarini, “a war on children… on their childhood and their future.”

“People in Gaza are struggling to survive apocalyptic conditions, but nowhere is safe, no one is spared, and there is no exit from this shattered enclave,” said Dr. Christopher Lockyear of Médecins Sans Frontières. That reality—the violence of no escape—is the foundation of this analysis. We reject all euphemisms and false symmetry. This is not a “conflict.” It is not an aberration. It is a deliberate, protracted campaign of settler-colonial genocide. This report presents a detailed breakdown of direct and indirect death tolls, scenario projections, and survivor-informed narratives of life under siege. It situates the assault on Gaza within the ongoing genocidal fragmentation of the Palestinian people and calls for justice not through rhetoric, but through material accountability, political rupture, and global solidarity with the right of return, repair, and liberation.

Counting the Dead: Sources and Survivor Epistemologies

Tallying the dead in Gaza is both a forensic task and a sacred act of remembrance. It is not simply a question of numbers—it is an insistence on Palestinian existence in the face of systematic erasure. The primary source for documenting deaths has been Gaza’s Ministry of Health (MOH), which, despite relentless bombardment, electricity blackouts, and targeted attacks on medical infrastructure, has worked to track the names, ages, and causes of death of those it could reach. As of March 2025, the MOH’s official count exceeded 50,000 killed—a staggering number in any context—but this figure accounts only for those directly killed by airstrikes, artillery, and other forms of overt violence. It does not include those starved by blockade, infected by contaminated water, or denied medical care in the aftermath of deliberate infrastructural collapse.

In September 2024, the MOH published a list of 34,344 named victims—complete with birthdates and genders—as an act of defiance against the settler regime’s propaganda and the international media’s attempts to cast doubt on Palestinian loss. By that time, 44% of the confirmed fatalities were children, a number tragically consistent with Gaza’s demography (where roughly 40% of the population is under the age of 14), but even more reflective of the indiscriminate and child-targeted nature of the assault.

Still, the official death toll cannot capture the full scale of loss. Thousands remain missing beneath the rubble—unrecovered because bulldozers are forbidden from entering, because fuel is blocked, or because no one is left to search. As early as January 2024, the United Nations estimated that more than 10,000 bodies were likely buried under collapsed buildings. These dead may never be counted by the institutions, but they are mourned by name in Gaza’s homes, remembered in oral testimony, and carried in the grief of their communities.

Compounding this, Gaza’s healthcare system—already strangled by years of blockade—was deliberately collapsed: hospitals were bombed, ambulances targeted, doctors executed or abducted, and medical supplies withheld. Many wounded never reached care. Many deaths were never documented. Entire families have been killed in cutoff zones, known only through neighbor accounts, fragments on social media, or the haunting absence in a community’s daily rhythm.

In this vacuum of institutional documentation, survivor epistemologies have become a central method of truth-keeping. Families and volunteers have compiled death rolls, tracked missing relatives through social media, and created independent registries of the dead. Community networks have circulated names, recorded eyewitness accounts, and archived martyrdom announcements to preserve the humanity of those targeted for erasure. These acts of communal memory are not merely record-keeping—they are resistance. They refuse the colonial state’s attempt to render Palestinians into uncounted dust.

International experts have stepped in to confirm what Palestinians have already long known. A peer-reviewed analysis in The Lancet calculated 64,260 direct (violent) deaths in Gaza between October 7, 2023 and June 30, 2024—significantly higher than occupation-suppressed figures. The study projected over 70,000 direct deaths by October 2024, and noted that Gaza’s Ministry of Health had undercounted trauma-related deaths by at least 41%. Even more damning, the report stated that deaths from hunger, medical denial, and contamination were not included—despite the fact that these deaths are equally the result of Israel’s policies of extermination. In Gaza, people are not only killed by bombs. They are killed when dialysis machines shut off, when bread runs out, when a cesarean cannot be performed because the hospital has been leveled.

Taking these truths together—testimony, epidemiological projection, and the brutal reality of structural collapse—we adopt 128,761 as a corrected estimate of direct deaths as of March 25, 2025. This number includes those confirmed as killed by bombardment, as well as the likely tens of thousands more who were never recovered, never logged, or deliberately disappeared into the chaos of genocide. It is a grim calculation, but one that reflects the commitment to naming the dead in full. Behind every digit is a life. A child. A grandmother. A student. A midwife. A poet. A body buried not only by bombs but by the world’s silence. Naming them is the beginning of justice. Counting them is an act of refusal—refusal to forget, to normalize, or to accept annihilation as inevitable.

A War on Children

From the first moments of the Israeli regime’s genocidal campaign against Gaza, Palestinian children have been deliberately and disproportionately slaughtered. By November 2024, the UN Human Rights Office confirmed that 44% of those killed in Gaza were children—a staggering proportion even in one of the youngest populations on Earth. This is not incidental. It is not a byproduct of “urban warfare” or “dense terrain.” It is the direct result of systematic, indiscriminate, and often targeted state violence unleashed on families, homes, schools, and hospitals across a besieged enclave. UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini stated the obvious with rare candor: “This war is a war on children. It is a war on their childhood and their future.” In just a few months, more children were killed in Gaza than in all the world’s armed conflicts over the previous four years—combined.

By March 2025, over 60,000 Palestinian children—infants, toddlers, school-age children, and teens—have likely been killed. Some died in their beds, some while clinging to their parents, some vaporized in shelters the UN falsely labeled “safe.” Many were crushed beneath rubble. Others died slowly, starved by siege or denied medicine. The youngest known victim was a newborn, just hours old, killed when her incubator lost power after a fuel blockade. The deadliest day for children came when over 300 were killed in a single 24-hour period, as Israeli bombs leveled 72 residential homes. There is no battlefield that justifies this. There is no excuse that can make it moral. Gaza’s children were not “collateral damage”—they were made targets in a campaign of annihilation.

Those who survived are no less affected. For Gaza’s one million children, nowhere was safe—not hospitals, not UN shelters, not even the arms of their parents. Surveys conducted amid the genocide revealed that 96% of Gaza’s children live with constant fear of death, shaped by the relentless trauma of airstrikes, displacement, and starvation. Many have lost entire families. Thousands now live with amputations, burns, permanent disability. Gaza holds the highest number of amputee children per capita in the world—a devastating badge of Israeli military “precision.” UNICEF, Save the Children, and other humanitarian agencies have unequivocally declared Gaza the deadliest place on Earth to be a child.

By early 2024, over 3,100 children under five had already been killed. That toll has since multiplied, with famine and medical collapse claiming many more. These are not just numbers. Each child had a name, a favorite game, a laugh, a future stolen. One Palestinian father, cradling the memory of his children, said: “They didn’t just kill my kids. They killed every dream I ever had of watching them grow.”

This level of violence against children is not accidental—it is genocidal. The UN Genocide Convention includes, as a core criterion, the intent to destroy a people “in part” through the killing of its children. When 44% of the dead are children, and the siege deliberately ensures that even those who survive the bombs die from hunger, dehydration, or untreated illness, there can be no question of intent. It is impossible to overstate: an entire generation of Palestinian children is being erased—before our eyes, in real time, with international complicity.

What is unfolding in Gaza is not just a war on a people. It is a war on the possibility of Palestinian future. A war on memory, on inheritance, on hope. To bury this truth under euphemisms is to participate in the crime. To name it is the first step toward justice.

Direct vs. Indirect Deaths: Beyond the Bombs

The images of Gaza most often circulated by international media—bodies bloodied beneath rubble, buildings reduced to skeletons of concrete and rebar—focus the world’s gaze on the direct killings. But beneath the visible spectacle of carnage lies a slower, less photographable wave of death: the indirect killings, no less intentional, no less genocidal. These deaths are the result not of missiles but of deprivation. They come not from blasts but from blockade. In Gaza, death by siege has become as common—and in many cases more lethal—than death by airstrike.

Direct deaths refer to those immediately caused by military violence: aerial bombardments, artillery, sniper fire, collapsing buildings. They are brutal, fast, and undeniable. Indirect deaths, by contrast, emerge from the calculated destruction of the conditions that sustain life. A child dies of untreated diarrhea because water is contaminated and antibiotics are gone. A diabetic elder slips into a fatal coma because insulin shipments were blocked. A newborn suffocates in an unheated tent after her incubator fails when electricity is cut. These are not accidents. These are the deliberate outcomes of siege warfare, refined over decades of settler-colonial experimentation.

In most prolonged wars, indirect deaths eventually outnumber direct ones. In Gaza, that moment has already arrived. The blockade did not begin in 2023—it has persisted for nearly two decades—but the scale of infrastructural destruction since October 7, 2023 has shattered every remaining lifeline. Hospitals have been systematically bombed. Water desalination plants have been targeted. Food shipments have been deliberately obstructed. Humanitarian corridors have been turned into execution zones. According to Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), the number of “excess deaths”—fatalities from starvation, disease, and medical collapse—is already “likely much higher” than the number of people killed by direct violence. And that toll is growing daily.

Mortality Multipliers for Children and Adults

Children are especially vulnerable to indirect death. Their bodies dehydrate faster. They are more susceptible to infection, injury, and shock. They cannot seek food or clean water on their own. In warzones, child and infant mortality typically spikes 3–5× above pre-war levels due to indirect causes. But Gaza is not a typical warzone. Gaza is an open-air prison under total siege, with nowhere to flee and no relief allowed in. In this context, child mortality is amplified to catastrophic levels.

To estimate the true death toll in Gaza, we apply a multiplier of 9× for children and 6× for adults—figures grounded in war mortality data but escalated to match Gaza’s extraordinary level of destruction and deprivation. This means that for every child killed directly by Israeli bombs or bullets, approximately nine total children will die, including those lost to starvation, infection, and untreated illness. For every adult directly killed, approximately six will die in total, factoring in deaths caused by the collapse of medical care, the obliteration of infrastructure, and the slow violence of displacement. These multipliers do not represent hypothetical scenarios. They reflect the current trajectory of genocide under full siege.

Based on a corrected direct death estimate of ~128,761 by March 2025, with children comprising roughly 44–47% of the dead, we arrive at the following breakdown:

• Children (0–17 years):
  ~56,000 direct deaths × 9 = ≈504,000 total child deaths
  → Implies ~448,000 indirect child deaths

• Adults (18+ years):
  ~72,000 direct deaths × 6 = ≈432,000 total adult deaths
  → Implies ~360,000 indirect adult deaths

• Combined death toll:
  ≈504,000 children + ≈432,000 adults = ~936,000 Palestinians killed (direct + indirect)

Table: Projected Fatalities by March 2025

These figures are not speculative—they reflect the grim logic of total siege. Nearly one million Palestinians in Gaza, or 40% of the entire population, may already be dead or dying as a result of this genocide. Over half are children. This is not hyperbole. It is arithmetic backed by epidemiological modeling, humanitarian reports, and the lived reality on the ground.

Some may struggle to accept the scale of this toll. But Gaza has already provided ample evidence. By late 2024, Gaza’s own health officials were warning of “thousands of excess deaths” due to disease outbreaks and untreated conditions. International humanitarian workers described watching children die of dehydration and women die in childbirth with no medical help. In one field survey, over 60% of Palestinians reported losing at least one family member since the genocide began. In families of six to eight people, this means multiple losses in each household. The pain is collective, interwoven into the fabric of survival itself.

And still, many of these deaths go uncounted—not because they are invisible, but because the world has chosen to look away. The elderly man who dies because he cannot access dialysis. The infant who vomits blood from typhoid. The teenager with an infected wound that turns septic in a tent. The entire family who dies of hunger surrounded by fields of food they are not allowed to touch. These are not “indirect” deaths in the moral sense. They are central to the machinery of extermination. They are what make this genocide not just an event—but an ongoing system.

The magnitude of this loss is not always visible in news footage. But it is carved into Gaza’s epidemiological data. It is heard in the final voicemail of a doctor who could no longer treat his patients. It is felt in the testimonies of parents burying child after child. And it is codified in every policy decision that blocks aid, bombs hospitals, and calls starvation “necessary pressure.”

The indirect deaths may be harder to photograph—but they are no less real, no less intentional, and no less worthy of mourning and outrage. They are genocide by other means. They are the slow kill. And they must be counted.

Multi-Scenario Projections: Low, Mid, and High Estimates

Estimating the true scale of mass death during genocide is inherently fraught—especially under conditions of siege, media blackout, and ongoing annihilation. Bodies remain buried beneath rubble. Hospitals have no record-keeping systems left. Survivors die before they can speak. Colonial disinformation floods the global discourse. And yet, as with every atrocity, refusing to count the dead is another form of complicity.

To address this uncertainty without erasure, this report offers three mortality projections for Gaza from October 7, 2023 to March 25, 2025. These scenarios—Low, Mid, and High—are not thought experiments. They are grounded in real data, field reports, and genocide mortality modeling. Each reflects a different set of assumptions about how many Palestinians have died not just from Israeli bombs, but from the infrastructure of death built around them.

Low Scenario (Conservative Floor): Confirmed Direct Deaths Only

This scenario includes only those deaths formally documented by Gaza’s Ministry of Health and corroborated by UN agencies—currently around 50,000 confirmed Palestinians killed as of March 2025 (including approximately 48,000 in Gaza). This number excludes the dead still under the rubble, those who died from starvation, dehydration, infection, childbirth complications, or untreated injuries.

It is a baseline, not a realistic picture—a statistical floor, not a moral one. Even so, this “minimum” figure is staggering. It exceeds the total civilian deaths in many multi-year wars. It surpasses the immediate toll of Hiroshima. And unlike a single event, it unfolded as a sustained and deliberate military and policy campaign, under full global surveillance, with few consequences. If this were the full story, it would still constitute a historic massacre of civilians by any legal or moral standard.

Mid Scenario (Moderate Likely): Corrected Direct + Partial Indirect Deaths

This scenario builds on the corrected direct death toll of ~128,761, which accounts for underreporting, missing persons, and unrecovered bodies. It then applies a conservative multiplier for indirect deaths, drawn from conflict-zone precedents. For instance, if we estimate that for every person killed directly, one more dies indirectly, the total death toll doubles to approximately 257,500. If the multiplier rises modestly—say to 1.5× indirect deaths—the toll reaches ~322,000.

We settle this mid-range projection at ~300,000 total deaths, reflecting a scenario in which some humanitarian aid reached civilians, some hospitals functioned intermittently, and not all infrastructure was totally annihilated—conditions which, tragically, have only been met sporadically. This mid-range estimate implies that over 1 in 8 Palestinians in Gaza have died, a demographic density of death comparable to the Rwandan Genocide, where 1 in 7 were killed in 100 days.

This is still a genocide. And still, it assumes partial survival—not full collapse. It reflects a version of events in which the worst was mitigated—despite ample evidence that Israeli forces blocked aid, bombed convoys, and used starvation as a weapon.

High Scenario (Worst-Case Genocidal Projection): Full Direct + Indirect Deaths

This scenario extrapolates from the full mortality multipliers detailed in the previous section:

• 9× multiplier for child deaths, reflecting extreme vulnerability and Gaza’s youth-heavy population.

• 6× multiplier for adult deaths, reflecting siege-driven collapse of healthcare, food systems, and basic infrastructure.

Under these conditions, the total projected death toll reaches ~936,000 to 960,000 Palestinians—nearly 1 million human beings, the majority of them children. This would mean the genocide has already exterminated between 40% and 45% of Gaza’s entire population by March 2025. It is not a projection from fantasy. It is the logical outcome of a sustained, unmitigated campaign of destruction, starvation, disease spread, medical denial, and indiscriminate bombardment.

Signs of this scenario’s partial or full realization are already present:

• Gaza’s crude death rate has spiked beyond global crisis thresholds.

• Cemeteries are overflowing.

• Bodies lie unburied in the streets.

• Mass graves are being dug by children.

• People die waiting in line for flour.

• Children are shot while chasing humanitarian aid trucks.

• Israeli officials continue to speak of “erasing Gaza from the map” with no international deterrence.

If nothing changes, the high scenario is not just plausible—it is likely.

Scenario Summary Table

Full genocidal trajectory – 9×/6× multipliers applied for child/adult deaths.

Even the most conservative scenario—50,000 confirmed civilians killed—constitutes a crime against humanity on a historic scale. That figure rivals or exceeds the entire Bosnian War’s civilian toll over three years. It parallels the Bombing of Hiroshima, which killed ~70,000 people instantly. It far surpasses the death tolls of more widely recognized atrocities, and yet the world continues to rationalize Gaza’s destruction through the language of “security.”

The mid-range projection of 300,000 deaths would rank this genocide among the deadliest civilian mass killings since World War II, eclipsing the proportional death toll of Rwanda. In absolute numbers, it would place Israel’s campaign in the company of global genocides—yet it unfolds in real time, under livestreamed surveillance, with the complicity of world powers who fund, arm, and justify it.

The high-end scenario—approaching 1 million killed—is nearly unthinkable. And yet, it is not unimaginable. It is statistically and structurally consistent with the destruction Israel has already carried out, with the siege that remains in place, and with the public declarations by Israeli officials calling for the total annihilation of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure.

In short, all three scenarios—even the most “modest” among them—lead to the same conclusion:

Israel’s assault on Gaza is genocidal in both intent and effect.

Whether “only” 50,000 were killed or nearly a million, this is not the collateral fallout of war. This is the targeted eradication of a protected population through siege, bombing, starvation, infrastructure destruction, and mass psychological and physical trauma.

In the sections that follow, we detail how this mass death was not an accident of war, but a product of deliberate policy—how genocide was not an outcome, but the strategy itself.

Life (and Death) Under Siege: Famine, Thirst, and Disease

“They have been forcibly displaced time and time again to areas that are not safe or healthy. People cannot find even the most basic necessities like food, clean water, medicines, and soap amid a punishing siege and blockade.”
—Dr. Chris Lockyear, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF)

This is not a humanitarian crisis—it is a deliberate genocidal strategy. Following October 7, 2023, the Israeli regime intensified its assault on Gaza by enforcing a “complete siege”: an all-encompassing blockade that banned food, water, electricity, medicine, fuel, and humanitarian access. This was not hidden. It was publicly declared. Israeli leaders openly vowed to treat Palestinians as “human animals,” justifying starvation, dehydration, and medical collapse as tactical objectives. In doing so, they transformed the siege into a weaponized system of annihilation—a slow execution of an entire population through forced deprivation.

Over the following months, the blockade became more than collective punishment; it became a death sentence. Gaza’s infrastructure was not merely strained—it was shattered. Israel bombed bakeries, leveled farmland, targeted water networks, and cut off the flow of electricity and fuel. Aid trucks were bombed. Border crossings were sealed. Convoys were shelled in full daylight. The result was not chaos but calculated, systemic deprivation. And as the siege deepened, the indirect death toll exploded.

Famine as Policy, Not Tragedy

By early 2024, hunger turned to starvation in multiple regions. UNRWA warned that food supplies were running out and that widespread hunger had crossed into famine. Families reported going days without food. Some survived on leaves. Others ate animal feed or drank boiled weeds. Mothers diluted infant formula until even dirty water was gone. Gaza’s children, already malnourished after years of blockade, began to die of hunger in front of their families. This is not an “unintended consequence.” This is engineered famine, facilitated by the coordinated obstruction of aid and systematic bombing of agriculture.

Clean water became nearly impossible to find. Israel bombed Gaza’s desalination plants, water pipes, and wastewater systems. Without fuel, municipal wells couldn’t run. People began drinking sewage-contaminated water. Children succumbed to diarrheal diseases at record rates. In one of the most chilling testimonies, a Gaza health official stated:

“We are dying not just by bombs, but by water.”

These were not isolated cases. Gaza’s entire civilian infrastructure collapsed—intentionally.

The Medical System as a Battleground

Hospitals were not spared. They were targeted. By December 2024, fewer than half of Gaza’s 36 hospitals remained even partially functional. Many had been bombed directly. Fuel blockades rendered generators useless. Surgical theaters went dark. Doctors performed amputations without anesthesia, using cell phone flashlights in operating rooms soaked in blood. Dialysis, ventilators, and oxygen machines shut off. Cancer patients and diabetics died quietly. Newborns in NICUs gasped for air as incubators failed.

The World Health Organization documented over 100 attacks on hospitals and clinics, calling it one of the most sustained assaults on medical infrastructure in modern memory. MSF itself reported 41 attacks on its facilities and convoys in the first year. Ambulances were not safe—they were fired upon or blocked. Doctors were detained, tortured, or killed. Health care was not collateral damage—it was a primary target.

Inside these besieged hospitals, the conditions were apocalyptic. Supplies ran out. No gloves, no antiseptics, no IV fluids, no gauze. Emad Jibreel, a patient at Al-Shifa Hospital, described enduring eight days without having his infected wound treated:

“The doctors and nurses couldn’t care for us because they didn’t have gloves or gauze.”

Entire hospitals became prisons. Patients, displaced families, and medical staff were trapped during Israeli assaults. In Al-Shifa, Al-Quds, and Indonesian Hospital, survivors reported being denied evacuation for days. Wounded children bled out slowly because soldiers refused to let them leave. One boy, shot in the abdomen, was forced to wait “hours” before being released. By then, it was too late.

These are not passive deaths. Every life lost to blocked fuel, collapsed hospitals, or targeted airstrikes is a death-by-policy—a murder carried out by the mechanisms of siege.

Collapse of Public Health and the Spread of Disease

By early 2025, every indicator of human survival in Gaza had plummeted. Child malnutrition surged. MSF observed cases of stunted growth and irreversible cognitive damage due to famine. Pregnant women delivered stillborn babies from untreated complications and profound psychological stress. New outbreaks of measles, polio, and tuberculosis spread in overcrowded camps due to the collapse of vaccination programs. Displaced persons lived in makeshift encampments without shelter or sanitation. People froze to death in winter. Disabled Palestinians, unable to flee bombardments, were burned alive in their homes.

Mental health collapsed. Suicide attempts rose as despair took hold. Gaza’s population—90% of whom had been forcibly displaced—existed in conditions engineered for suffering. In the words of MSF:

“Water became another weapon of war.”

The siege was not merely an attack on infrastructure. It was an attack on the possibility of life. It ensured that even those who survived the initial wave of bombings were condemned to a slow, degrading death by attrition—by starvation, dehydration, exposure, infection, and untreated wounds.

Starvation as a War Crime, Siege as Genocide

This is not a theoretical violation of international law—it is an ongoing atrocity with clear and documented intent. Human Rights Watch stated unequivocally:

“The Israeli government is using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare in the Gaza Strip, which is a war crime.”

The impact is visible in the data. By June 2024, The Lancet reported that Gaza’s crude death rate had increased tenfold—primarily due to indirect causes tied directly to siege conditions. That surge cannot be dismissed as collateral—it is the measurable outcome of a strategy that weaponized every human necessity.

In legal terms, these conditions meet the definition of genocide under the UN Convention:

“Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”

What better evidence is needed? Gaza’s food is bombed. Its water is poisoned. Its hospitals are attacked. Its doctors are killed. Its aid is blocked. Its children are starving. Its sick are abandoned. Its wounded are executed through abandonment. Its dead are buried in mass graves because cemeteries are full.

This is not neglect. This is genocide through siege.

The world must understand: siege is not merely a tactic—it is a killing machine. It kills without explosion, without fire, but with absolute certainty. Gaza’s genocide is not only measured by the bombs that fall but by the food withheld, the medicine denied, and the breath that goes unfound.

These deaths may be labeled “indirect,” but they are direct in design, direct in intent, and direct in responsibility.

“Nowhere is Safe”: Targeting of Hospitals, Schools, and Refugee Camps

In tandem with siege-induced starvation, the Israeli regime has systematically attacked Gaza’s most vital sanctuaries—hospitals, schools, UN shelters, refugee camps. These sites, protected under international law, became deliberate killing zones, transformed from places of care and refuge into sites of carnage and mass death. The targeting was not incidental. It was calculated. And it constituted an assault not just on bodies, but on Gaza’s collective survival.

The pattern is unmistakable: obliterate what shelters, care, or educates the population. Bomb the very places families are told to flee toward. Deny the concept of refuge altogether. The genocidal strategy is not only physical erasure—it is psychological demolition, terrorizing the very idea of safety itself.

Hospitals: From Healing to Execution Sites

Gaza’s hospitals, overflowing with the sick, wounded, and displaced, were transformed into military targets. The most infamous example came in November 2023 and again in March 2024, when Al-Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s largest medical facility, was invaded by Israeli troops. Tanks surrounded the complex. Snipers took positions on rooftops. Entire wards were stormed. Stun grenades were thrown into corridors filled with civilians. Patients and medics were executed, arrested, or disappeared. Over 30 people were killed during the incursions, and hundreds more were abducted from the hospital grounds.

Al-Shifa was caring for premature infants, ICU patients, and thousands of displaced families sheltering from bombardment. By the time Israeli forces withdrew, the hospital was destroyed beyond repair. NPR interviewed survivors who watched as soldiers opened fire on hallways and dragged doctors away in handcuffs. One physician said simply: “We don’t understand the purpose behind this complete and utter destruction… behind the killing, torture, siege. We’re civilians. We have no one but God.”

But Al-Shifa was not an anomaly. It was one link in a broader chain of attacks:

• Al-Ahli Arab Hospital was hit by a massive explosion on October 17, 2023, killing an estimated 200–300 civilians sheltering there. Despite Israeli denials, global analysis traced the blast to Israeli munitions.

• Al-Quds Hospital was repeatedly shelled and given evacuation orders under fire.

• Indonesian Hospital was besieged, its staff operating in darkness by candlelight.

• In March 2025, Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis was struck, killing at least five people, prompting MSF to condemn the attack as “absolutely unacceptable.”

By the end of 2024, over 32 medical facilities had been bombed. Dozens of ambulances were destroyed. More than 120 health workers were killed—among them at least 25 doctors and over 50 nurses. The World Health Organization described Gaza as “a kill zone for healthcare.”

Every hospital reduced to rubble was a second blow: it killed those inside, and it denied care to countless others who might have survived. The aftershock of each bombing rippled through the entire population. A severed artery left to bleed. A fever untreated. A newborn suffocating in a dark room with no oxygen. These are intentional outcomes of a regime that has criminalized the act of saving Palestinian lives.

Schools and UN Shelters: The Death of the Safe Zone

Throughout the genocide, Palestinians were instructed—often by Israeli propaganda leaflets or international agencies—to evacuate to “designated safe zones.” These zones included UN schools and shelters, many of which had shared their exact GPS coordinates with Israeli forces. Despite this, they were repeatedly targeted.

By mid-2024, the United Nations had documented at least 50 attacks on its facilities. Among them:

• On October 31, 2023, an Israeli airstrike on Jabalia refugee camp struck a crowded UN school, killing at least 50 people.

• Al-Fakhura School in Jabalia, sheltering hundreds, was bombed—again—recalling its infamous shelling during Israel’s 2009 assault on Gaza.

• By March 2025, 178 UNRWA staff members—including teachers, engineers, and aid workers—had been killed while performing humanitarian work.

Palestinian families who fled to these “safe” shelters were later seen digging through the rubble of collapsed school buildings to recover their children’s bodies. The phrase “nowhere is safe” became not just a cry of despair—it became empirical truth, echoed across thousands of survivor testimonies.

Refugee Camps & Residential Areas: The Targeting of Civilian Density

Gaza’s refugee camps—among the most densely populated places on Earth—were struck with exceptional ferocity. In late 2024, multiple massive airstrikes cratered the heart of Jabalia Camp, collapsing entire apartment blocks. Extended families—30 or 40 members at once—were vaporized. Al-Shati (Beach) Camp and Maghazi Camp also endured devastating bombardment.

The official rationale was always the same: an alleged militant presence nearby. But the outcomes were consistent: civilian massacres, children’s bodies pulled from rubble, neighborhoods erased. A UN inquiry later found that 70% of those killed in these residential strikes were women and children—a clear reflection of the indiscriminate nature of the attacks and the systemic devaluation of Palestinian life.

Testimony as Evidence: What Survivors Saw and Lived

Nariman Qanita, a survivor living near Al-Shifa Hospital, recalled the horror of the raids:

“There were kids sleeping in their room – kids 12 and 13 years old. They cried out, ‘baba, baba.’ We saw one [child] bleeding out… He had a hole no smaller than 20 centimeters in him.”

The boy bled for hours, with no medical rescue permitted. After Israeli forces forcibly evacuated the building, Nariman returned to find her home turned to rubble.

“There are no suitable homes to live in. Where do we go, people?” she pleaded.
“While you’re preparing your Eid clothes and Eid cookies, we’re preparing shrouds and how to retrieve the dead from under our homes. It’s enough already.”

Her words are not exceptional. They are universal among Gaza’s survivors—those who lived through one round of attacks only to bury their families and sleep in the ruins.

Genocide by Design: No Sanctuary, No Survival

These attacks were not random, nor were they legitimate acts of war. They were attacks on the idea of refuge itself. Every destroyed hospital was a warning: healing is forbidden. Every bombed school screamed: your children are not safe. Every shelter turned into a mass grave testified to a singular logic: Palestinians must have no place to live, to rest, to dream, or to survive.

The aim was not self-defense. It was societal rupture—to break apart the community’s centers of resilience, obliterate its civil institutions, and terrorize the population into unlivability. These are the core tactics of ethnic cleansing and genocide. Destroy homes. Destroy clinics. Destroy schools. And leave survivors with nowhere to go but mass graves or permanent exile.

What remains when there are no hospitals, no schools, no safe houses, and no dreams left?

What remains is genocide—not by omission, but by design.

Every bomb dropped on a hospital, every strike on a classroom, every child killed while sheltering beneath a UN flag is not just an act of war—it is a war crime, a crime against humanity, and part of a calculated campaign of annihilation. The world must stop pretending otherwise.

Decolonial Analysis: Settler-Colonial Violence Unleashed

To understand the scale and structure of the Gaza genocide, it must be situated within the historical continuum of Zionist settler-colonial violence—not reduced to an isolated “conflict” or a reaction to October 7, 2023. The massacres that unfolded from 2023 and continuing into 2025 is not an aberration; it is the predictable climax of a decades-long colonial project designed to remove, subjugate, and fragment the Indigenous Palestinian population. Gaza is not merely a besieged strip—it is a refugee concentration zone, where the majority of inhabitants are survivors (or descendants of survivors) of the 1948 Nakba, forcibly expelled from their homes across historic Palestine.

For over 75 years, this population has been systematically ghettoized, surveilled, bombed, blockaded, and denied return. Gaza’s transformation into a carceral enclave—then into a death camp—did not begin in 2023. It was the long result of a settler state’s foundational ideology: that Palestinians are obstacles to be removed. What we witness now is not a deviation, but a continuation of Zionism’s core logic: colonial elimination.

Genocidal Rhetoric as Policy Blueprint

Israeli leaders have made their intent explicit. In the days following October 7, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant declared: “We are fighting human animals… We will act accordingly.”

President Isaac Herzog stated: “There are no innocents in Gaza,” effectively granting permission for indiscriminate mass killing.

A senior Israeli lawmaker spoke of “erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth,” and a military spokesperson described Gaza as “a city of tents” that would be reduced to rubble.

This language is not rhetoric—it is operational doctrine. It mirrors the genocidal incitement of other regimes: Tutsis called “cockroaches” in Rwanda, Jews called “vermin” by the Nazis, Indigenous peoples deemed “savages” by settler empires. This language prepares the ground for extermination. It enables soldiers, pilots, drone operators, and settlers to murder civilians en masse without remorse, because the population has already been marked as subhuman and expendable.

Beyond “Hamas”: Targeting the People

Mainstream narratives often frame the Israeli assault as a campaign to “destroy Hamas.” But a settler-colonial lens reveals the true target is the Palestinian people themselves—their bodies, homes, institutions, memory, and future. Gaza’s defiance—its refusal to surrender to apartheid, its demand for return, its capacity to resist—has long been perceived by the Israeli right as a “problem to be solved.” The response has been annihilation.

The chain of events after October 7—mass slaughter, forced displacement, total siege, infrastructure destruction, the bombing of shelters, hospitals, water sources, and schools—follows a familiar colonial playbook:

1. Terrorize the population into movement.

2. Render land uninhabitable.

3. Use displacement as demographic engineering.

4. Punish survival as resistance.

Israeli officials openly discussed pushing Palestinians into Egypt’s Sinai, evoking the logic of ethnic cleansing. This is the core function of settler-colonial genocide: not simply killing, but removing the native to claim the land. As Amnesty International’s Secretary-General Agnès Callamard stated:

“For months, Israel has persisted in committing genocidal acts, fully aware of the irreparable harm it was inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza.”

The legal definition of genocide—“the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”—is unmistakably met when we map these acts alongside the rhetoric and long-term objectives.

Global Complicity and Colonial Power

The genocide in Gaza has unfolded with near-total impunity, enabled by U.S. and European weapons, funding, and diplomatic cover. Billions in military aid, vetoes at the United Nations, and propaganda infrastructure have shielded Israel’s crimes from consequence. Gaza, meanwhile, remains an occupied, colonized, stateless territory—its people forcibly encaged, collectively punished, and denied basic recognition of their humanity.

The asymmetry is absolute. Israel is a nuclear-armed state with a full military-industrial complex and global media reach. Palestinians in Gaza are trapped civilians, overwhelmingly refugees, subjected to decades of de-development and sanctioned starvation. There is no “war between equals.” There is a colonizer and the colonized. A jailer and the jailed. A settler state and the Indigenous people it has long sought to erase.

B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization, made this clear early in the genocide:

“This is not ‘self-defense.’ This is settler-colonial violence par excellence – aimed at breaking the spirit of an occupied people and entrenching permanent apartheid.”

Gaza as a Pogrom of Unprecedented Scale

What we are witnessing is not simply a war crime. It is a pogrom of unimaginable scale, broadcast to the world in real-time, with the perpetrators celebrated by many of the same governments that claimed to stand against genocide in the past. Gaza has become the testing ground of global double standards—where death by siege, starvation, and airstrike is rationalized because the victims are Palestinian.

Palestinians are being punished not for “terrorism,” but for existing—for surviving 75 years of displacement, occupation, and exile. For refusing to surrender their identity, history, and right of return. For continuing to live. The term “collective punishment” no longer suffices. The wholesale erasure of a people’s life systems, language, heritage, and community under explicit military intent is genocide—rooted in the long settler-colonial fantasy of a Palestine without Palestinians.

This truth does not depend on anyone’s politics. It is visible in the bodies, in the numbers, in the statements of Israeli officials, and in the landscape of ruins across Gaza. It is written in the epidemiological data, in the starvation rates, in the craters where schools used to be, and in the mass graves where children lie.

Decolonization as the Only Path to Justice

This genocide will not end through ceasefires alone. It will not be stopped by symbolic gestures or humanitarian crumbs. It will only end through the dismantling of the settler-colonial system that produced it. True peace cannot be built on apartheid. Safety cannot coexist with siege. Freedom cannot emerge from permanent occupation.

Decolonial analysis insists that justice requires more than survival. It demands liberation—of land, of memory, of return. It demands that the Palestinian people, in Gaza and beyond, be recognized not as victims to be managed, but as a nation with inalienable rights: to exist, to return, to live free from foreign rule.

As in Darfur, Sarajevo, and Aleppo, genocide must be named. But naming it is only the beginning. Gaza’s future must be shaped not by the weapons of its occupiers, but by the will and resistance of its people—and the solidarity of those who refuse to look away.

Historical Parallels and War Mortality Comparisons

The genocidal campaign against Gaza from 2023 to 2025 stands out as one of the most devastating atrocities of the 21st century—not only for its scale, but for its brazenness, impunity, and targeted destruction of a besieged civilian population. While each genocide and war crime has its own context, comparing Gaza to prior mass atrocities allows us to understand its magnitude, structural intent, and unique cruelty. These comparisons are not offered to flatten histories, but to expose how Gaza fits within—and, in some ways, exceeds—the most extreme precedents of state-led mass killing.

Comparative Death Tolls: Gaza as a Modern-Day Killing Field

Even by the most conservative estimates (~50,000 dead as of early 2025), the Gaza genocide has far surpassed the tolls of past regional escalations:

• 2014 Gaza assault: ~2,251 killed

• 2006 Lebanon war: ~1,100 killed

• Bosnian War (1992–1995): ~38,000–40,000 civilians killed

The mid-range estimate (~250,000–300,000 deaths) situates Gaza among the deadliest campaigns since World War II—comparable in numbers to:

• The Rwandan Genocide (~800,000 killed in just 100 days)

• U.S. war in Iraq (2003–2011) with estimates ranging from 200,000–500,000 total violent and indirect deaths

The high-end estimate (~936,000–960,000 deaths) places Gaza alongside:

• Partition of India (1947): ~200,000–2 million killed in communal violence

• Holodomor (1932–1933): millions starved under Stalin’s policies

• Vietnam War (civilian toll ~2 million)—but over a decade, not 18 months

But Gaza is not a continent, a country, or even a large city. It is a 25-mile-long open-air prison, smaller than many metropolitan districts. If nearly one million people are dead or dying within that space, it would be one of the highest per capita death rates in modern recorded history. Gaza is not simply a warzone. It is a concentration zone under high-tech extermination.

Proportion of Population Killed: Gaza in Genocidal Territory

Raw death counts matter, but genocide is also measured by the percentage of a population annihilated. Here, Gaza’s suffering takes on even more terrifying dimensions:

• Conservative estimate (~50,000 deaths) = ~2% of Gaza’s population (2.3 million)

• Mid-range (~300,000 deaths) = ~13% of the population

• High-end (~900,000 deaths) = ~40% of the population—nearly half

By comparison:

• Rwanda (1994): ~11% of the population, ~75% of the Tutsi community

• Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge (1975–79): ~13–20%

• The Holocaust: ~67% of European Jews (1–2% of Europe’s overall population)

• Armenian Genocide: ~70–90% of Armenians in Ottoman territory

If 40% of Gaza’s population is killed, Gaza would rank among the most proportionally annihilated populations in modern history—and the most brutal targeting of children in a single sustained campaign.

The Death of a Generation: Gaza’s Child Victims

Most genocides disproportionately affect vulnerable populations. In Gaza, the targeting of children has reached staggering proportions. Whereas in many wars children make up 10–20% of casualties, in Gaza:

• Verified data (2024): 44% of the dead were children

• High-siege indirect mortality projections: over 50% of the dead are children

No modern war—even Rwanda, Syria, or Yemen—has seen such a systematic erasure of children on this scale in such a short period. In the Srebrenica massacre, the primary targets were men and teenage boys. In Gaza, infants, toddlers, schoolchildren, and teens of all genders are being exterminated en masse—in their homes, schools, and hospitals.

This is not collateral. It is structural. It is deliberate.

War Mortality Ratios: Civilian-to-Combatant Kill Ratios in Gaza

Historically, 20th-century conflicts have seen civilian casualties exceed military ones:

• World War II: Civilian deaths roughly double military deaths

• Vietnam: Civilian toll surpassed combatant deaths significantly

But Gaza represents an unprecedented inversion: a military assault where the overwhelming majority of those killed are unarmed civilians. Even if we accept Israel’s unverified claims that 5,000–10,000 Hamas fighters have been killed:

• At 50,000 total deaths → 80–90% civilians

• At 300,000+ deaths → 96–98% civilians

This means civilian-to-combatant kill ratios of 10:1 or higher—a ratio that dwarfs even the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where most of the dead were civilians but the strikes were single events. Gaza is a sustained campaign of indiscriminate, civilian-targeted bombardment. Legal scholars and human rights experts have described it as "massacre by policy".

It is worse than Guernica. Worse than Dresden. It is genocide unfolding in real time, under satellite surveillance, livestreamed to the world, and yet met with silence or approval from major powers.

Genocidal Tactics: Historical Patterns Repeating

The tactics used in Gaza echo the hallmarks of historic genocides:

• Forced population transfer: Israel ordered 1.1 million Palestinians to evacuate northern Gaza in October 2023—mirroring the forced marches of Armenians, the bussing of Bosnian Muslims, or the Trail of Tears.

• Weaponized starvation: The siege-induced famine echoes the Blockade of Leningrad, Soviet mass famines, and Aleppo/Eastern Ghouta in Syria—but on a scale of greater intensity and less international intervention.

• Bombing of hospitals and aid workers: Like Srebrenica or Sri Lanka’s 2009 massacre of Tamil civilians, Gaza saw UN shelters, ambulances, and hospitals turned into kill zones.

• Targeting of UN infrastructure: Even the most brutal regimes historically avoided directly attacking UN facilities. Israel has repeatedly struck UN schools, shelters, and convoys, reflecting a confidence in total impunity backed by Western powers.

• Psychological warfare and erasure: Displacement, starvation, targeted killings, and the erasure of civic life (archives, libraries, universities) mirror the Warsaw Ghetto siege—but here, it is a state with drones, AI targeting systems, and the world’s most advanced weaponry attacking a sealed-in civilian population.

Gaza as a Laboratory of Settler-Colonial Mass Death

The Gaza genocide is not only a case of mass death—it is a laboratory for settler-colonial violence refined by surveillance, tech, and propaganda. It is not just a massacre—it is a doctrine, tested and normalized. Gaza 2023–2025 may come to be known as:

• The Warsaw Ghetto of the 21st century—but with the roles inverted: here, the prison wall is digital, aerial, and geopolitical.

• The Stalingrad of children—but here, it is the besieging power using starvation, bombing, and dehumanization to break civilian life.

• The Guernica of our time—but it happens every day, for over a year, and still receives military aid.

Future historians will compare Gaza not only to Rwanda or Darfur, but to the genocides that were seen, documented, and allowed to continue. The comparison will be made not in hindsight, but in shame.

"Never Again" Must Mean Naming Gaza

The comparisons above are not rhetorical—they are empirical. They are backed by body counts, demographic studies, war mortality models, and eyewitness testimony. And they all lead to the same conclusion:

What is happening in Gaza is genocide.
It is unfolding in real time.
And the world is watching it happen.

If Gaza is not recognized as genocide, the phrase “Never Again” becomes nothing more than a slogan of selective grief. The obligation now is not to wait for retrospective tribunals. It is to name it, to document it, and to dismantle the system that allows it.

Gaza is not just a war zone. It is a cemetery of accountability. And unless the world acts, it will become a blueprint for future regimes seeking to erase a people behind the shield of geopolitics.

This moment demands clarity:
Not neutrality.
Not hand-wringing.
Recognition. Resistance. Reparation.

Conclusion: Dismantling Zionism, Delivering Justice — Nothing Less Will End the Genocide

The evidence is unambiguous. The numbers. The testimonies. The bombed hospitals. The starved children. The pulverized neighborhoods. Together they testify to a single truth:

Gaza has been subjected to genocide.

Not a “war.”
Not a “response.”
Not a “conflict.”

A systematic, state-orchestrated campaign to kill, starve, terrorize, displace, and erase an Indigenous people. A genocide, engineered in public, broadcast in real time, and enabled by the world’s most powerful governments.

As Amnesty International confirmed in its December 2024 report, Israel’s assault on Gaza meets the legal threshold for genocide. But legal definitions are not the highest standard. What matters most is the moral threshold Gaza has forced the world to confront.

Will we allow a settler-colonial regime to finish what it began in the 1880s and formalized in 1948?

Because genocide regimes don’t stop.
They are stopped.
They are dismantled.
They are held to account.

So too must Israel.

To honor the dead and protect the living, justice must go beyond rhetorical condemnation and move into material, political, and structural intervention.

1. Immediate Ceasefire and Protection for the Living

• An unconditional and immediate ceasefire is the absolute minimum.

• All parties must allow unrestricted humanitarian aid: food, water, fuel, medicine, building materials.

• The blockade must end permanently.

• International protection forces—or decolonial monitors under non-imperial auspices—may be necessary to secure the right of return, prevent mass expulsions, and shield Palestinians from future massacres.

As Médecins Sans Frontières demanded:
“The total destruction of Palestinian life in Gaza must stop.”
Not pause. Not slow down. Stop.

2. Full Accountability for War Crimes and Genocide

• The International Criminal Court must stop delaying and issue warrants for top Israeli officials—from the Prime Minister to field commanders and drone pilots.

• The evidence—civilian targeting, starvation sieges, medical obstruction, mass extermination—is overwhelming.

• Commanders, policy architects, surveillance engineers, and propagandists must be held accountable, as in Nuremberg, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and Yugoslavia.

• U.S. vetoes do not grant immunity. The world failed to stop the genocide. It must not fail to deliver justice.

3. Genocide Prevention Is a Legal and Moral Duty

• The Genocide Convention obligates every state to act—to prevent, to stop, and to punish.

• The U.S., UK, Germany, Canada, France, and Australia—those who funded, armed, and shielded the slaughter—are complicit unless they reverse course now.

• All arms transfers must be halted. All diplomatic cover withdrawn.

• Aid to genocide is genocide.

As MSF stated:
“Israel’s allies must act without delay to protect the lives of Palestinians and uphold the rules of war.”

If the West could mobilize for Ukraine, it can mobilize for Gaza. And if it won’t, it stands exposed.

4. Reparations and Full-Scale Reconstruction

• Gaza lies in ruins. Hospitals, homes, mosques, roads, schools—leveled. Tens of billions will be needed.

• But money alone will not heal.

Reconstruction must include:

• Permanent lifting of the siege

• Safe return of all displaced Palestinians

• Freedom of movement, the right of return, and refugee repatriation

• Long-term psychological and medical care, especially for Gaza’s orphaned, maimed, and traumatized children

Anything less is not justice.
It’s scaffolding for the next massacre.

5. Dismantling Israeli Apartheid, Ending the Zionist Project

• This genocide did not begin in 2023.
  It did not begin in 1948.

It began with the Zionist settler-colonial project in the 1880s—a project rooted in land theft, demographic engineering, and racial supremacy.

• Gaza is not an aberration. It is Zionism in action.

• As long as Israel exists as a settler-colonial, apartheid regime, genocide will remain not only possible—but inevitable.

Justice means more than stopping the bombs.
It means:

• Ending the occupation

• Dismantling apartheid

• Abolishing the Zionist state

• Restoring land, return, and sovereignty to Palestinians—across all of historic Palestine

This is not hyperbole.
This is survival.
This is the bare minimum.

6. Centering Survivors, Restoring Narrative Sovereignty

The survivors of Gaza—those who lost family, limbs, homes, futures—are the epistemic authorities of this genocide. Their stories define the record. Not Western media. Not imperial analysts. Not Zionist institutions laundering atrocity into legitimacy.

One Palestinian aid worker, after naming 36 murdered relatives, asked:
“How many more before you act?”

The world has yet to answer.
But this report does:

You should have acted long ago.
And now, you must act without delay.

7. Liberation, Not “Peace”: Toward a Free Palestine

No ceasefire can unbury Gaza’s dead.
No technocratic “two-state” lie will undo ethnic cleansing.

Only decolonial liberation will.

The world must:

• End all support for Zionism

• Support Palestinian-led resistance, return, and liberation

• Dismantle every political, legal, and ideological system that enabled this genocide

If Gaza’s dead mean anything, it is this:

“Never again” must not be selective.
It cannot apply only to white bodies, Western states, or NATO-vetted victims.

Never again must mean never again for Palestine.

Let Gaza Live. Let Palestine Be Free.

Behind every number in this report is a life:

• A mother cradling her baby in rubble

• A poet buried beneath a collapsed building

• A child digging their father’s body from ash

These are not abstractions.
They are stories erased with precision, with impunity, and with approval from those who called themselves “civilized.”

And yet—Gaza still breathes.
It resists. It remembers.

We do not mourn passively.
We rage. We organize.
And we vow: this genocide will not end in silence.

It will end in liberation.

Let Gaza live.
Let Palestine live.
And let the world understand: this only ends when Israel’s genocidal machinery is dismantled—root and stem.

Anything less is complicity.
Anything less is a death sentence for the next generation.

We choose life.
We choose justice.
We choose decolonization.

Now the world must choose, too.

This Is Not an Aberration — It Is the Blueprint

The data and testimonies make one truth irrevocably clear:

Gaza’s destruction is not an isolated horror.
It is the most visible phase of a long, continuous genocide waged against all Palestinians, from the river to the sea.

It did not begin in 2023.
It did not begin in 1947.

It began in the 1880s, when Zionist ideology first sought to remove, replace, and erase the Indigenous people of Palestine.

To speak only of Gaza—or only of this moment—is to fall into a trap:

“One of the most insidious Zionist propaganda tactics has been the artificial fragmentation of Palestine, treating Gaza, the West Bank, and the 1948 lands (present-day Israel) as separate issues rather than parts of a single colonized territory.”
— Story Ember leGaïe

We reject that fragmentation.

Gaza is not separate from the West Bank.
The West Bank is not separate from Jerusalem.
Jerusalem is not separate from Haifa, from Lydd, from Jaffa.

The wall.
The checkpoints.
The snipers.
The arrests.
The house demolitions.
The siege.
The settler mobs.
The bombs.
The water theft.
The starvation.
The surveillance.
The propaganda.

One system. One engine. One genocide.

This Is Not a War — It Is a Colonization Engine

Israel is not “defending itself.”
It is enacting a colonial program of Indigenous erasure.

• The bombs on Gaza are the same system as the evictions in Sheikh Jarrah.

• The missiles in Rafah are the same logic as the permits, prisons, and bulldozers in Masafer Yatta.

• The siege in Deir al-Balah is the same policy as the residency denial in Lydd, the water apartheid in Hebron, the snipers in Nablus.

It is all one war.
One regime.
One settler-colonial genocide.

And genocide regimes don’t reform.
They don’t apologize.
They don’t “pause.”

They are dismantled. They are ended.

Dismantling Zionism Is Not Optional — It Is the Only Path Forward

• Ceasefires are triage.

• Aid is insufficient.

• ICC trials are overdue.

But true justice means dismantling the system that made this genocide possible:
Zionism.

This requires:

• Ending the siege on Gaza

• Ending the military occupation of the West Bank

• Ending apartheid inside 1948 Palestine

• Ending land theft, forced removals, and criminalization of Palestinian life

• Ending the Zionist project altogether

You cannot liberate a people while preserving the structure built to eliminate them.

Palestine Is One — And Its Liberation Must Be Whole

“To understand this genocide, we must reject fragmented historical perspectives that artificially separate Gaza from the West Bank, or the West Bank from 1948 Palestine.”
— Story Ember leGaïe

Palestine is one.
Zionism has always treated it as one.
So must we.

Liberation is not just about halting airstrikes.

It is about:

• Return

• Land

• Memory

• Reparations

• Sovereignty

• The permanent dismantling of every system of settler domination

Let Gaza Live. Let All of Palestine Live. Dismantle Zionism Everywhere.

To the survivors:
We see you. We believe you. We mourn with you. We rise with you.

To the collaborators:
Silence will never wash the blood from your hands.

To the world:
This is your test.

There is no “neutrality” in the face of incinerated children, denied food, and mass extermination.

There is only this:

End the genocide.
Dismantle Zionism.
Free all of Palestine—from the river to the sea.

Anything less is betrayal.

---

Sources:

• Jamaluddine Z. et al. “Traumatic injury mortality in the Gaza Strip from Oct 7, 2023, to June 30, 2024: a capture–recapture analysis.” The Lancet, 405(10477):469-477, Feb 2025.

  theguardian.com

• Khatib R. et al. “Counting the dead in Gaza: difficult but essential.” The Lancet, 404(10449):237-238, July 2024.

• United Nations OHCHR. “Update on Gaza fatalities – Six-month report.” (Geneva, Nov 2024).

• Gaza Ministry of Health via Reuters and Al Jazeera reports (Oct 2023 – Mar 2025).

• Guardian News & Media. “Why researchers fear the Gaza death toll could reach 186,000.” (Mona Chalabi, Jul 12, 2024).

• Al Jazeera English. “Nearly 70 percent of deaths in Gaza are women and children: UN.” (Volker Türk statement, Nov 8, 2024).

• Reuters Graphics. “Gaza women, children are nearly 70% of war dead, UN finds.” (Emma Farge, Nov 8, 2024).

• Al Jazeera English. “Gaza’s 2024: A year of war and misery.” (Dec 31, 2024).

• Reuters. “Gaza war death toll could be 40% higher, says study.” (Maggie Fick, Jan 10, 2025).

• Reuters. “How many Palestinians has Israel’s Gaza offensive killed?” (Explainer, Mar 24, 2025).

• Watson Institute, Brown Univ. “The Human Toll: Indirect Deaths from War in Gaza.” (Stamatopoulou-Robbins S., Oct 7, 2024).

• World Health Organization (WHO) and UNRWA situation reports on Gaza humanitarian crisis.