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Rebranding Genocide
Chris Hedges
First, it was Israel’s right to defend itself. Then it was a war, even though, by Israel’s own military intelligence database, 83 percent of the casualties were civilians. The 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza, living under an Israeli air, land and sea blockade, have no army, air force, no mechanized units, no tanks, no navy, no missiles, no heavy artillery, no fleets of killer drones, no sophisticated tracking systems to map all movements, or an ally like the United States, which has given Israel at least $21.7 billion in military aid since Oct. 7, 2023.
Now, it is a “ceasefire.” Except of course, as usual, Israel only abided by the first of the 20 stipulations. It freed around 2,000 Palestinian captives held in Israeli prisons — 1700 of whom were detained after Oct. 7 — as well as around 300 bodies of Palestinians, in exchange for the return of the 20 remaining Israeli captives.
Israel has violated every other condition. It has tossed the agreement — brokered by the Trump administration without Palestinian participation — into the bonfire with all the other agreements and peace accords concerning Palestinians. Israel’s extensive and blatant flouting of international agreements and international law — Israel and its allies refuse to abide by three sets of legally binding orders by the International Cout of Justice (ICJ) and two ICJ advisory opinions, as well as the Genocide Convention and international humanitarian law — presage a world where the law is whatever the most militarily advanced countries say it is.
The sham peace plan — “President Donald J. Trump’s Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict” — in an act of stunning betrayal of the Palestinian people, was endorsed by most of the U.N. Security Council in November, with China and Russia abstaining. Member states washed their hands of Gaza and turned their backs on the genocide.
The adoption of resolution 2803 (2025), as the Middle East scholar Norman Finkelstein writes, “was simultaneously a revelation of moral insolvency and a declaration of war against Gaza. By proclaiming international law null and void, the Security Council proclaimed itself null and void. Vis-à-vis Gaza, the Council transmuted into a criminal conspiracy.”
The next phase is supposed to see Hamas surrender its weapons and Israel withdraw from Gaza. But these two steps will never happen. Hamas — along with other Palestinian factions — reject the Security Council resolution. They say they will disarm only when the occupation ends and a Palestinian state is created. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed that if Hamas does not disarm, it will be done “the hard way.”
The “Board of Peace,” headed by Trump, will ostensibly govern Gaza along with armed mercenaries from the Israel-allied International Stabilization Force, although no country seems anxious to commit their troops. Trump promises a Gaza Riviera that will function as a “special economic zone” — a territory operating outside of state law governed entirely by private investors, such as the Peter Thiel-backed charter city in Honduras. This will be achieved through the “voluntary” relocation of Palestinians — with those fortunate enough to own land offered digital tokens in exchange. Trump declares that the U.S. “will take over the Gaza Strip” and “own it.” It is a return to the rule of viceroys — though apparently not the odious Tony Blair. Palestinians, in one of the most laughable points in the plan, will be “deradicalized” by their new colonial masters.
But these fantasies will never come to fruition. Israel knows what it wants to do in Gaza and it knows no nation will intercede. Palestinians will struggle to survive in primitive and dehumanizing conditions. They will, as they have so many times in the past, be betrayed.
Israel has committed 738 violations of the ceasefire agreement between Oct. 10 and Dec. 12, including 358 land and air bombardments, the killing of at least 383 Palestinians and the injuring of 1,002 others, according to the Government Media Office in Gaza and the Palestinian Health Ministry. That’s an average of six Palestinians killed daily in Gaza — down from an average of 250 a day before the “ceasefire.” Israel said it killed a senior Hamas commander, Raed Saad, on Saturday, in a missile strike on a car on Gaza’s coastal road. Three others were also apparently killed in the strike.
The genocide is not over. Yes, the pace has slowed. But the intent remains unchanged. It is slow motion killing. The daily numbers of dead and wounded — with increasing numbers falling sick and dying from the cold and rain — are not in the hundreds but the dozens.
December saw an average of 140 aid trucks allowed into Gaza each day — instead of the promised 600 — to keep Palestinians on the edge of famine and ensure widespread malnutrition. In October, some 9,300 children in Gaza under five were diagnosed with severe acute malnutrition, according to UNICEF. Israel has opened the border crossing into Egypt at Rafah, but only for Palestinians leaving Gaza. It is not open for those who want to return to Gaza, as stipulated in the agreement. Israel has seized some 58 percent of Gaza and is steadily moving its demarcation line — known as “the yellow line” — to expand its occupation. Palestinians who cross this arbitrary line — which constantly shifts and is poorly marked when it is marked at all — are shot dead or blown up — even if they are children.
Palestinians are being crammed into a shrinking, fetid, overcrowded concentration camp until they can be deported. Ninety-two percent of Gaza’s residential buildings have been damaged or destroyed and around 81 percent of all structures are damaged, according to UN estimates. The Strip, only 25 miles long and seven-and-a-half miles wide, has been reduced to 61 million tons of rubble, including nine million tons of hazardous waste that includes asbestos, industrial waste, and heavy metals, in addition to unexploded ordnance and an estimated 10,000 decaying corpses. There is almost no clean water, electricity or sewage treatment. Israel blocks shipments of construction supplies, including cement and steel, shelter materials, water infrastructure and fuel, so nothing can be rebuilt.
Eighty-two percent of Israeli Jews support the ethnic cleansing of the entire population of Gaza and 47 percent support killing all civilians in cities captured by the Israeli military. Fifty-nine percent support doing the same to Palestinian citizens of Israel. Seventy-nine percent of Israeli Jews say they are “not so troubled” or “not troubled at all” by reports of famine and suffering among the population in Gaza, according to a survey conducted in July. The words “Erase Gaza” appeared more than 18,000 times in Hebrew-language Facebook posts in 2024 alone, according to a new report on hate speech and incitement against Palestinians.
The newest form of genocidal celebration in Israel — where social media and news channels routinely chortle over the suffering of Palestinians — is the sprouting of golden nooses on the lapels of members of the far-right political party Otzma Yehudit, Israel’s version of the Ku Klux Klan, including one worn by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.
They are pushing a bill through the Knesset which seeks to mandate the death penalty for Palestinians who “intentionally or indifferently causes the death of an Israeli citizen,” if they are said to be motivated by “racism or hostility toward a public,” and with the purpose of harming the Israeli state or “the rebirth of the Jewish people in its land,” the Israeli human rights group Adalah explains. More than 100 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli jails since Oct. 7. If the new bill becomes law — it has been cleared through its first reading — it will join the wave of more than 30 anti-Palestinian laws enactedsince October 7.
The message the genocide sends to the rest of the world, more than a billion of whom live on less than a dollar a day, is unequivocable: We have everything and if you try and take it away from us, we will kill you.
This is the new world order. It will look like Gaza. Concentration camps. Starvation. Obliteration of infrastructure and civil society. Mass killing. Wholesale surveillance. Executions. Torture, including the beatings, electrocutions, waterboarding, rape, public humiliation, deprivation of food and denial of medical care routinely used on Palestinians in Israeli prisons. Epidemics. Disease. Mass graves where corpses are bulldozed into unmarked pits and where bodies, as in Gaza, are dug up and torn apart by packs of ravenous wild dogs.
We are not destined for the Shangri-La sold to a gullible public by fatuous academics such as Stephen Pinker. We are destined for extinction. Not only individual extinction — which our consumer society furiously attempts to hide by peddling the fantasy of eternal youth — but wholesale extinction as temperatures rise to make the globe uninhabitable. If you think the human species will respond rationally to the ecocide, you are woefully out of touch with human nature. You need to study Gaza. And history.
If you live in the Global North, you will get to peer out at the horror, but slowly this horror, as the climate breaks down, will migrate home, turning most of us into Palestinians. Given our complicity in the genocide, it is what we deserve.
Empires, when they feel threatened, always embrace the instrument of genocide. Ask the victims of the Spanish conquistadors. Ask Native Americans. Ask the Herero and Nama. Ask the Armenians. Ask the survivors of Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Ask the Indians who survived the Bengal famine or the Kikuyu who rose against their British colonizers in Kenya. Climate refugees will get their turn.
This is not the end of the nightmare. It is the beginning.
[Chris Hedges worked for nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, National Public Radio and other news organizations in Latin America, the Middle East and the Balkans. He was part of the team of reporters at The New York Times who won a Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of global terrorism. Hedges is a fellow at the Nation Institute and the author of numerous books. His most recent are The Greatest Evil Is War and A Genocide Foretold: Reporting on Survival and Resistance in Occupied Palestine. Courtesy: Chris Hedges Report.]
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Rachel Corrie’s Parents, and 25,000 Hind Rajabs Await Justice in Gaza
Ghassan Shahrour
On November 19th, at Burning Coal Theatre in Raleigh, I attended a staged reading of My Name is Rachel Corrie, performed by Voices for Justice in Palestine. Twelve readers carried Rachel’s words across the stage, and it felt as though her voice—drawn from her diaries and emails—was speaking directly to us. Her passion, empathy, and outrage at injustice were alive in every line.
Rachel’s journey began in Olympia, Washington, a quiet town on the far western edge of the United States. At just 23, she left home and traveled nearly 6,000 miles to Gaza, driven by a profound need to connect her activism with the lived reality of people suffering under occupation. That immense distance is symbolic: it shows how far conscience can travel when humanity calls.
She arrived in Rafah, Gaza, in January 2003. Less than three months later, on March 16, she was killed by an Israeli bulldozer while trying to prevent the demolition of a Palestinian home. House demolitions—widely condemned by human rights organizations—have been criticized as violations of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits collective punishment and the destruction of civilian property under occupation. These demolitions, compounded by the long-standing blockade of Gaza, have destroyed thousands of buildings and helped create the humanitarian catastrophe that persists today.
Rachel’s brutal death devastated her parents, Cindy and Craig Corrie. Yet they chose not silence but advocacy, founding the Rachel Corrie Foundation for Peace and Justice. Through it, they have supported Palestinian youth, challenged the occupation, and nurtured the dream of a just peace. Their resilience magnifies the extraordinary role parents can play in transforming loss into collective struggle. Every speech they deliver, every project they undertake, is an act of love that keeps Rachel’s voice alive and reminds the world that grief can be turned into solidarity.
But Rachel’s story is not isolated. More than two decades later, Gaza continues to bury its children, often with the world watching in real time and doing far too little. Among the most searing examples is six-year-old Hind Rajab, whose terrified final phone call pleading for rescue during the 2024 assault on Gaza became one of the most haunting symbols of this war. Trapped in a car surrounded by the bodies of her family members, Hind cried, “Come pick me up. I’m scared.” No one reached her in time. Hind, like Rachel, became a symbol of innocence targeted and justice denied.
Her voice now echoes the staggering toll: approximately 25,000 children killed in Gaza since October 2023. To speak of “25,000 Hind Rajab” is to insist that these children are not statistics but human beings whose cries demand justice. Just as Rachel’s parents refused silence, the international community must refuse indifference. The scale of loss compels us to act, not only to remember.
As I sat in Raleigh, I felt the connection between Olympia, Gaza, and our theatre in North Carolina. Rachel’s words traveled across oceans and years, reminding us that solidarity is borderless. The voices of Rachel and Hind—separated by 22 years yet united by suffering—call on us to confront the impunity that allows such tragedies to repeat. And the steadfast advocacy of Cindy and Craig Corrie shows that even in the face of unimaginable loss, humanity can prevail.
This week, as the world approaches the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People on November 29, 2025, their stories carry renewed urgency. This day, adopted by the United Nations in 1977, is not only a symbolic commemoration but also a reminder of the international community’s responsibility to uphold justice and human rights for Palestinians. Gaza’s buildings may be destroyed, its people may endure unbearable suffering, but voices like Rachel’s and Hind’s—and the love of the families who refuse to let them be forgotten—continue to defend human rights and affirm human dignity.
Rachel once wrote, “We have got to understand that they dream our dreams and we dream theirs. We have got to understand that they are us. We are them.”
In Raleigh, in Gaza, in Olympia, and everywhere in between, their stories remind us that solidarity is not a distant ideal—it is a living responsibility.
[Dr. Ghassan Shahrour is a medical doctor, writer, and human rights advocate specializing in health, disability, and disarmament. He has contributed to global campaigns for peace, disarmament, and the rights of persons with disabilities. Courtesy: Countercurrents.org, an India-based news, views and analysis website, that describes itself as non-partisan and taking “the Side of the People!” It is edited by Binu Mathew.]
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Israeli Soldiers are Committing Suicide in Droves Because of Gaza
Dr Marwan Asmar
More Israeli soldiers are committing suicide than ever before. Today, the number of soldiers who have taken away their lives stands at 61 since the Israeli war on Gaza that began on 7 October, 2023.
These are official figures put out by the Israeli army with the figure likely to be much higher than that. As proof, the number of those soldiers who attempted suicide but failed is put at 279.
Israeli soldiers, long actively serving in the excecution of the Gaza genocide, have resorted to desperate and extreme measures. So far, 20 soldiers took their lives in 2025 because of the atrocities they seen and committed in Gaza.
The trend has been raising since October 2023 when at least seven soldiers committed suicide in the last three months of that year and with the total number standing at 17. In 2024, and at the heights of the Israeli war and when at least 43,000 Palestinians were killed, including 17,000 children, the suicide figure amongst Israeli soldiers stood to at least 21.
The trend has become increasingly disturbing for the Israeli authorities because in previous years the suicide rates were 14 in 2022, 11 in 2021, 9 in 2020, 12 in 2019, 9 in 2018 and 16 soldiers took their lives in 2017. These numbers were considered ‘normal’ in an Israel army that had a manpower force of around 170,000 but increased by 350,000 soon after the war started.
However, the disturbing suicidal trends become more glaring during the Israeli genocidal war on Gaza. The situation was becoming so bad that the Knesset Research and Information Committee (KRIC) produced a full report on 28 October, 2025. It focused on the period between January 2024 till July 2025 and found that one in seven of those who attempted suicide succeeded in killing themselves.
The KRIC, mainly a data collection committee, found that combat ground soldiers serving in the different areas of Gaza accounted for 78 percent of all suicides in 2024 and which is about 45 percent more of the suicidals from 2017 till 2022.
The committee also found that only 17 percent of those that committed suicide had met with a mental health officer in the previous two months. Because of the extent of violence, horror of the Israeli war, and probably the extent of the stiff resistance to the Israeli soldiers which resulted in their death and injuries, many had required psychiatric treatment.
Since October 2023 up till today 85,000 required psychological treatment in the rehabilitation unit of the Israeli Ministry of Defense. Today, over 10,000 soldiers are undergoing intensive medical health treatment that include mental health problems.
One of the major health mental problems suffered by Israeli soldiers in Gaza is Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) which includes flashbacks of reliving violent events, nightmares, feeling on edge, avoidance of places, constant fear, detachment, emotional numbness, memory problems and constant stress.
Most of these soldiers were in places in Gaza were mass bombs we’re being dropped, houses decimated, blood everywhere. As UN statistics show Gaza was being razed to the ground with more than 60 millions tons of debris and rubble and in many cases soldiers going through these with the constant fear of Palestinian fighters watching them, shooting at them or booby-trapping their tanks that was a major characteristic of this war.
Why Did They Commit Suicide?
Official figures estimate there are under 4000 who are diagnosed with PTSD and another 9000 who are yet to be diagnosed with the mental disease that is ripping Israeli society apart with soldiers taking their lives in different locations at military bases, in parks, near a beach, in their homes, and in one case, outside a Jewish settlement in Safad where a soldier, named Daniel Edri, sat in his car and set fire to it and burning himself alive.
His previous job was to carry the bodies of dead Israeli soldiers killed in Gaza. In a note to his mother, he wrote he continued to be haunted by the “smell and vision” of corpses he carried after being killed in combat with Palestinian resistance fighters.
And then in many cases there was the issue of deep guilt and which psychologists prefer to call “moral injury” carried by Israeli soldiers. There was the case of Eliran Mizrahi, a 40-year-old engineer who committed suicide on 7 June 2024, two days before he was called up to go back to Rafah, the southern-most city in the Gaza Strip. He was a D9 armored bulldozer operator and had previously spent 186 days in Gaza.
His co-operator Guy Zaken later told the Knesset committee that they were ordered on many occasions “to run over terrorists, dead or alive in the hundreds.” Zaken used a graphic description to describe what he was doing, saying ‘everything squirts out” in reference to the crushed bodies under his bulldozer.
He told the committee he can no longer eat meat because the sight and smell of it reminded him of what he did on the battlefield field of Gaza, scars which will likely haunt him for the rest of his life.
And then there was the case of Lithuanian Jew Tomas Adzgauskas who killed himself in a public park outside northern Gaza on 4 December, 2025. He was a reserve officer and a sniper in the Givati Brigade.
Although he was discharged from the Israeli army in April, 2024, the psycholgical stress eventually led him to suicide.
In a final note on Facebook, he wrote “…I am ruin and devastation…I did things that can’t be forgiven, and I can’t live with it anymore…there is a demon inside me that has been chasing me since 7.11…”
These were just two names among the many like Norwegian-born Dan Phillipson and Roi Wasserstein. The last took a gun to his head after 300 days of active duty in war-devastated Gaza while Ariel Meir Taman was found dead in his home in July 2025.
They died because of what they saw and did in Gaza, couldn’t believe their eyes and eventually decided to end their lives because of the scale of devastation and killing as 200,000 tons of explosives were dropped on the 364-kilometer Gaza Strip that is equivalent to 13 or 14 Hiroshima atomic bombs.
[Marwan Asmar is a writer from Amman. Courtesy: Countercurrents.org, an India-based news, views and analysis website, that describes itself as non-partisan and taking “the Side of the People!” It is edited by Binu Mathew.]
