I told them Ali is 6 years old. They gave me an 18 kilogram bag of body parts.
—A parent who survived the Gaza City massacre at al-Tabin school, Aug. 10
You Arabs, I don’t know what to say about you. Children are dying under the rubble. Their hands are severed, their legs are torn, their heads are crushed. To every Arab and foreigner who sees us: What blood runs in your veins? From what clay are you made?…I have one word to say: I will not forgive you in this life or the next.
—A child who witnessed the Al-Daraj massacre in Gaza City on Aug. 10, reported on Resistance News Network
Israel’s agenda—of leaving historic Palestine empty of Palestinians—has been advanced from an ultimate, distant goal to an urgent, immediate one.
—Jonathan Cook, writing in Middle East Eye on July 19
For nearly a year, the world has watched in horror and disbelief as Israel has bombed, executed and starved the besieged Palestinians in Gaza and demolished everything they have worked so hard to create—universities, hospitals, homes, neighborhoods, institutions, communities and neighborhoods. Much of that horror stems from incredulity that countries that might have stopped Israel’s genocidal rage have chosen to either passively do nothing or, like the United States and Germany, actively aid and abet the genocide by providing the ammunition and offering diplomatic protection to the killers. In such a sickening context, it is no surprise that the people around the world sympathize with the Palestinian people—how can they not, when citizens turned journalists are, at great personal risk, livestreaming their own genocide, sending videos and images out to the world in hope that they will arouse the world to act?
People around the world stand in solidarity with Palestinians at this moment of tremendous suffering. But solidarity that does not support the Palestinian resistance misses the meaning of this moment and is no solidarity at all.
Palestinians are doing more than enduring a savage, ongoing genocide, unprecedented in recent times. They are also waging an anti-colonial struggle. It is truly remarkable that from the Gaza Strip—a piece of land only 139-square-miles large, besieged and blockaded for 17 years and under repeated assault even before this genocide—fighters have emerged who are determined to ensure that their people take their place among the nations of the world. During the first month of the war, Israel dropped the equivalent of two nuclear bombs on Gaza. And now, one year later, the Palestinian resistance is still strong; no area of the Gaza Strip is safe for Israeli soldiers to roam. Not a single Israeli war aim has been achieved.
ISRAEL UNMASKS ITSELF AS A RUTHLESS KILLING MACHINE
An Electronic Intifada story published on July 15 tells of Muhannad al-Jamal, who was detained by Israeli soldiers, together with his mother, who was on a stretcher. Her stretcher was placed on the ground, and he watched as an Israeli tank ran over her. When he was able to escape, he returned to his mother and found that wild dogs were eating her flesh.
By December 2023, UNICEF estimated that at least 1,000 Palestinian children had lost a limb—a limb that was amputated without anesthesia, because Israel has denied medical supplies to Gaza’s hospitals. On average, 10 children a day undergo amputations in Gaza without anesthesia.
And in a concentration camp set up in Israeli territory just outside the Gaza Strip, Palestinian captives are tortured and starved and also undergoing amputations of limbs—by Israelis who are not surgeons, and who have access to anesthesia but prefer not to use it when operating on Palestinian bodies.
Israel has been brutal in the way it has dismembered the land of Palestine. It severed 78 percent of the territory when it created the state in 1948, and in 1967 it focused on the remaining 22 percent, severing Gaza from the rest of Palestine, making Jerusalem inaccessible to most Palestinians, and fragmenting the West Bank through a combination of control and land grab mechanisms: more than 200 Jewish-only colonies, more than 700 checkpoints and road barriers, and a Separation Wall that encloses communities and separates Palestinians from one another. All of these mechanisms make it easy for Israel to lay siege to Palestinian towns and villages as it is doing right now.
But if Israel has been brutal in its desecration of the land of Palestine (and the current war in Gaza rises to the level of ecocide), it has been positively savage in the ways it has dismembered and otherwise abused Palestinian bodies. It is hard to get reliable data about the number of Palestinians killed in Gaza because so many bodies are buried in the rubble.
The Palestinian Health Ministry gives an estimate of almost 40,000 dead as of Aug. 1. However, a June 19, 2024 article published in the Lancet argued that the true figure could be higher than 186,000, if one considers direct and indirect deaths (e.g., deaths caused by conditions that would not be fatal under normal circumstances). If that estimate is correct, and assuming a prewar population of 2.2 million, Israel killed a whopping 8 percent of the population of Gaza in 10 months of livestreamed genocide aided materially and enthusiastically by the United States and Germany, two unrepentant countries with several genocides under their belts.
Israel appears to be toying with more than 2 million residents in Gaza, ordering them around from one area of the Gaza Strip to another, claiming that one area is safe and then strafing it when it reaches capacity, declaring (to one another, but not to Palestinians) that some areas are no go zones and then killing Palestinians who wander into them. Wherever Israel goes, it burns and dismembers Palestinian bodies—in displacement camps, U.N. shelters, schools, hospitals, bakeries, mosques and churches.
A little girl, no older than 10, looks into the camera and tells how her father left the family to get flour one day: “He was gone for a long time. My cousin came to us and told us that the tower had been bombed and my father and uncle had been martyred. The next day their bodies were brought to us. My father’s eyes had been gouged, his tongue cut.”
—Quds Feed (Telegram channel), January 22, 2024
Children as young as five express a preference for death, the head of Doctors Without Borders told the U.N. Security Council in February. Many have seen their family members dismembered before their eyes. It is common to see adults carrying bags of body parts for burial.
HELPING THEMSELVES TO PALESTINIAN BODY PARTS
On Nov. 26, 2023, the Geneva-based Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor reported that Israel was stealing bodies from mass graves and then returning them. Medical professionals who examined the returned bodies found that some of them were missing organs—livers, kidneys, hearts and corneas.
In fact, reports of organ theft date at least to the First Intifada, when Palestinians were shot dead by the Israeli occupation army and then released to the family hours or days later, only after securing promises that the burial would be conducted quicky and at night. In her 2014 book Over Their Dead Bodies, Israeli doctor Meira Weiss disclosed that organs taken from dead Palestinians were used in medical research. The former head of Israel’s Abu Kabir Institute of Forensic Medicine, Yehuda Hess, reported that Israel helps itself to “human tissues, organs and skin” from Palestinians it kills. Back in 2008, CNN reported that Israel is a key player in the global (and illegal) trade in human organs. It is a safe bet that many of those organs are taken from Palestinians it kills—which demonstrates Israeli ingenuity in finding ways to turn its killing of Palestinians into a money-making venture.
DEMANDING THE RIGHT TO RAPE PALESTINIAN BODIES
There is no way to sugar coat this: Israelis openly assert the right to rape Palestinians.
In Sde Teiman, a torture center in Israel, Gazan men are tortured, often to death—not to extract information about the resistance (which they are unlikely to have anyway), but as an end in itself. Sometimes Israeli civilians are invited to film the torture on their phones.
In these black sites, Palestinians are beaten, urinated on, experimented on, operated on without anesthesia, starved and raped. Reports have surfaced, not only from released Palestinians but also from Israeli whistleblowers, that Palestinian men are raped with sharp objects. In one publicized case of a gang rape that was livestreamed, Israeli civilians and Knesset members rushed to free the alleged rapists from where they were being held for questioning, defending the rights of Israeli soldiers to do that and more.
Electronic Intifada reported in 2017 that the Chief Rabbi of Safad, Shmuel Eliyahu, had advocated in 2002 that Israeli soldiers be allowed to rape non-Jewish women during wartime, apparently as a way to keep their morale high. The same rabbi was equally tolerant of genocide. What differs today is that Israelis are willing to take to the streets and to discuss in the Knesset their right to rape, in yet another indication of the depraved Israeli national psyche. Israel is alone among nations where its army’s savagery is known to and fully endorsed by the majority of the population.
WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT THE PALESTINIAN RESISTANCE
The Palestinian militias resisting Israel’s killing machine in Gaza include several groups operating under a joint command: Hamas’ Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, by far the largest fighting force; the Islamic Jihad’s al-Quds Brigades; Fatah’s Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades; the Popular Resistance Committee’s Al-Nasser Salah al-Deen Brigades; the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine’s Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades; and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine’s National Resistance Brigades. In the West Bank, the Lions’ Den and Mujahideen Brigades are active as well.
Axios reported on May 14, 2024 that Hamas had 30,000 to 40,000 fighters at the beginning of the war and cites “Israeli intelligence assessments” that claim that 18 out of 24 fighting battalions have been dismantled. A June 6, 2024 article published on the Reuters site cited U.S. officials who claimed that the resistance relies on only 9,000 to 12,000 Palestinian fighters in Gaza. It is not clear what these assessments are based on; certainly the performance of the resistance does not suggest a diminished fighting force. In fact, a study by CNN in early August found evidence of a Hamas resurgence; using Israel’s estimate of 24 Hamas battalions, CNN analysts studied 16 of them in northern and central Gaza and found that only two had been “destroyed.”
The resistance claims that it cannot absorb all the volunteers wanting to fight since the war began. This sounds credible: since Israel targets civilians, one is equally likely to be killed in a displacement camp as in combat, so taking up arms to defend your community against the invaders does not expose you to additional risk. And then, there is the rage factor: Israel believes that killing civilians puts pressure on the resistance to accept unfavorable conditions for a ceasefire, when in fact the opposite is true. The fighters are local, not foreign imports (and according to some reports, 60 percent of them have been orphaned in previous Israeli assaults on Gaza); their families are being slaughtered, their children starved, their towns demolished, and everywhere the stench of decomposing bodies hovers. All of these conditions fuel rage and stiffen the backbone. If Israel unleashes such demonic savagery when it faces resistance, one can imagine what it is capable of doing if its power were not being challenged.
The resistance has been sustained for almost a year already, and there is no evidence of combat fatigue, as there is in the demoralized Israeli army. Israeli soldiers are effective demolition forces, dynamiting universities and hospitals, and they wantonly destroy homes and take selfies with blindfolded Palestinians, but they cannot find the Israeli prisoners of war and show no sign that they are even trying to.
The Palestinian resistance in Gaza is nothing short of epic. It uses weapons it makes locally, which bear the name of leaders who helped develop them or those it wishes to honor. In the operations videos released by the resistance, discussed in weekly Electronic Intifada podcasts by military analyst Jon Elmer, we see that fighters plan complex operations meticulously and are deliberate about their choice of weapon, displaying confidence. We see the fearlessness with which they place explosives on tanks, making it back to their base before the tank explodes. We see the skill with which they use the massive rubble created by Israel’s destruction of buildings to hide their advances. We see them hold their fire when medical evacuations take place, even though the enemy has made it a point to destroy hospitals, commandeer sections of them for variable lengths of time, and leave mass graves in its wake.
PALESTINIANS FIGHT FOR MORE THAN JUST AN END TO THE GENOCIDE
Some supporters of Palestinians who are appalled by the genocide in Gaza may be reluctant to vocally support the Palestinian resistance because it is led by Islamist parties. It is past time that such supporters get over their squeamishness. Palestinian society, by and large, is not a secular society, and so it is unlikely to produce a secular resistance that gains widespread traction, as the Islamists have managed to do. If one truly supports Palestinian rights and opposes colonialism, then one must support the fighters who put their lives on the line to defend those rights against the combined forces of Israel, the U.S., Germany, and other weapons suppliers and political allies.
The reasons for that reluctance need to be examined. Some people might have genuine differences with the political ideology of Islamists, but even that is not sufficient reason to withhold support from movements that are fighting a savage enemy against such overwhelming odds. Others, perhaps the majority, think of themselves as secular and thus as a matter of principle can’t support those with an ideology rooted in faith. Such people need to explore whether their “principled opposition” is really just another way of saying that they share their government’s disdain for Islam. Finding oneself on the side of the U.S. government on a foreign policy issue should give one pause: the U.S. government has never supported any people’s just rebellion against an oppressive regime. Even Israel’s killing of 234 unarmed Palestinian civilians during the 2018-19 Great March of Return in Gaza did not prompt the U.S. to rebuke Israel. No form of resistance by people in the Global South against Western hegemony, whether armed or unarmed, is acceptable to the U.S.
This is precisely the moment to break out of the parameters of discourse permitted in Western countries. People are rebelling against all structures and policies that keep them oppressed and that benefit only the ruling class, ranging from unending wars to income inequality, racialized policing, and environmental catastrophe. The attempt to hold up Hamas as a bogeyman to be defeated must be rejected out of hand, because the twin genocidaires promoting this propaganda line—Israel and the United States—cannot be trusted: they will always demand acquiescence to their power.
The Palestinian resistance fights for a cause—an end to foreign colonization, an end to Israeli impunity, which threatens every single non-Jew in historic Palestine. They fight to free the more than 9,000 Palestinians being tortured in Israeli prisons and to relieve the torment of their families. They fight to live freely on their land and to watch their loved ones thrive. Israelis on the other hand fight to maintain the principle of Jewish supremacy in Palestine—a principle that never made sense in the Arab world and cannot be defended in the 21st century.
Palestinians are tired of being at the mercy of a vicious and supremacist entity that kills, maims, rapes, starves and immobilizes them and desecrates the land. They are determined to end this foreign domination now. It is past time to bring such an unnatural regime to an end. Just as apartheid South Africa and Nazi Germany were stripped of the ideologies that made them so toxic, Palestinians fight for a country free of the toxicity of Zionism, from the river to the sea. It is a just goal, a noble goal, and it is within sight.
Ida Audeh is senior editor of the Washington Report. This article was first published onthe Washington Report on Middle East Affairs website on September 11, 2024.