Unfathomably, it’s been a year since a horrific Hamas assault set off a more horrific Israeli genocide in which an insatiable, unraveling Zionist project has slaughtered, burned, starved, maimed and broken hundreds of thousands, mostly women and children, in the ungodly name of vengeance. A year of blood, terror, protests, rulings, another self-immolation, ceaseless dead babies, doctors, teachers, poets. Yet still, “The word ‘ceasefire’ is a wish, a dream.” And in Gaza, “Every day, we live in hell.”
The official death toll in Gaza is now almost 42,000; doctors who have volunteered there say the true toll is at least 118,908, or almost triple that. There are over 97,000 wounded, and most of Gaza’s two million people are homeless. Given the ongoing violence, the tens of thousands missing, the unprecedented humanitarian crisis – famine looming, illness spreading, meager food, water, medical care – those obscene numbers will likely continue to soar. Meanwhile, Israel’s unhinged genocidal campaign has failed to achieve its mythical “total victory” over Hamas while successively obliterating one red line of “civilized” warfare after another – bombing schools, hospitals, mosques, shelters, using starvation as a weapon, killing hundreds of civilians to rescue four captives, targeting journalists and doctors, and so heedlessly, relentlessly bombing residential areas that entire families, babies to grandparents, have been wiped out. Still, complicit Western allies, mostly us, send killing weapons and look away.
The result: “A year of war against children that has made Palestine the most precarious place in the world to be a child.” Duly sacrificed on the altar of Israeli impunity are over 16,700 children killed, including newborns; at least 30,000 wounded, some as young as two with multiple limbs amputated; and many thousands of already disabled children seeing their fragile worlds implode: “They destroyed what was inside us.” In an angry letter to Biden urging, “End this madness now!,” ninety-nine U.S. doctors who worked in Gaza describe healthy newborns dying of malnutrition, the “first time I held a baby’s brain in my hand – the first of many,” children regularly shot in the head or chest despite international rules deeming them innocents, and, in their dreams, the cries and screams of maimed children and grieving mothers “our consciences will not let us forget. . . . Their mutilated bodies are a monument to cruelty.”
. . . And now Lebanon, where Israel burrows ever deeper into another quagmire without end or strategy, another place of dust, screams, sirens, rubble, bodies in pieces, nowhere to go. “We are all the same,” writes Mohammed Mhawish of “a solidarity beyond words.”
“For the people of Lebanon,” continues Mhawish, “Gaza is not a distant cause; it is a mirror of their own suffering, a continuation of the story we’ve been living for decades. We know the bombs killing their children are the same ones killing ours.”
On the mournful one-year marker, that sense of oneness prompted tens of thousands worldwide to protest, and fight to end, the ongoing genocide. In the U.S., the focus was rightly on our persistent, unconscionable, American-taxpayer-funded arming of Israel despite its routinely revealed war crimes, and irregardless of Biden Administration claims it’s been “working tirelessly” on a ceasefire. Critics: “That is not a thing.” The brutal, bottom-line truth: Without U.S. arms, funds and diplomatic cover, “This genocide would not have been possible.”
Anti-Genocide Presidential Candidate Jill Stein
Reflects on the First Anniversary of
Israel’s Genocide in Gaza
Related Off-site Links:
October 7th: The Unspeakable Tragedy of It All – Marianne Williamson (Transform, October 7, 2024).
One Year After October 7, Jewish Peace Group Says: “We Cannot Only Mourn” – Jake Johnson (Common Dreams, October 7, 2024).
Israel-Palestine History Didn’t Begin – or End – on October 7, 2023 – James Zogby (Common Dreams, October 7, 2024).
Palestinian Poet Mosab Abu Toha: One Year After October 7, U.S. Is Still Arming Israel’s Slaughter in Gaza – Democracy Now! (October 7, 2024).
“The Path Forward”: Palestinian and Israeli Activists Working Toward Peace Featured in New Film – Democracy Now! (October 7, 2024).
How Israel Has Made Trauma a Weapon of War – Naomi Klein (The Guardian, October 5, 2024).
“All the Talk About Ceasefire Means Nothing” as Long as Biden Keeps Sending Weapons to Israel – Phyllis Bennis (Institute for Policy Studies, October 1, 2024).
“Hell Is Breaking Loose in Lebanon”: Israel Rejects Ceasefire Proposal as U.N. Chief Calls for Peace – Democracy Now! (September 26, 2024).
To Stop Israel’s Expanding War, Biden Must Heed a New Demand: Arms Embargo – Brian Garvey (Common Dreams, September 26, 2024).
Netanyahu Has to Be Forced to Stop – Branko Marcetic (Jacobin, September 26, 2024).
Israeli Strikes Displace 140,000 Kids in Lebanon as Netanyahu Vows to Keep Bombing – Jake Johnson (Common Dreams, September 27, 2024).
Report from Beirut: Israel Is “Targeting Everyone” in Bombing Campaign, Killing 700+ in Just Days – Democracy Now! (September 27, 2024).
“Unfathomable”: Lancet Study Estimates Gaza Death Toll May Exceed 186,000 – Julia Conley (Common Dreams, July 8, 2024).
Drafter of Leahy Law Says It Was Never Applied to Israel – Connor Echols (Responsible Statecraft, May 7, 2024).
How U.S. Violates Its Own Leahy Law to Ensure Military Support for Israel – Ali Harb (Al Jazeera, May 2, 2024).
“Genocidal Actions” Persist in Gaza as Israel Blocks Aid and U.S. Weapons Flow – Julia Conley (Common Dreams, April 12, 2024).
Journalist Abby Martin Explains Why She Considers Israel’s Actions in Gaza to Constitute Genocide – Middle East Eye (April 3, 2024).
“A War Machine Out of Control”: Israel Keeps Attacking Aid Workers as Gaza Faces Famine – Democracy Now! (April 3, 2024).
How Do Leahy Laws Apply to U.S. Support for Israel? – An Interview with Charles Blaha, Former Director of the State Department’s Office of Security and Human Rights – Leila Fadel (NPR News, March 26, 2024).
Draft U.N, Report Finds Israel Has Met Threshold for Genocide – Brett Wilkins (Common Dreams, March 25, 2024).
UPDATES: “The Gaza Playbook”: Israel Brings Displacement, Death and Destruction to Lebanon – Democracy Now! (October 17, 2024).
“Should Shame the World”: Famine Takes Hold in Gaza as Israel Cuts Off Food Imports – Jake Johnson (Common Dreams, October 17, 2024).
Not Just Its Neighbors, Israel Makes War on the Entire World – Medea Benjamin and Nicholas J.S. Davies (Common Dreams, October 17, 2024).
See also the following chronologically-ordered Wild Reed posts:
• “Nothing About Today is ‘Unprovoked’”
• Phyllis Bennis: “If We Are Serious About Ending This Spiraling Violence, We Need to Look at Root Causes”
• In the Midst of the “Great Unraveling,” a Visit to the Prayer Tree
• Eric Levitz: Quote of the Day – October 11, 2023
• Something to Think About – October 12, 2023
• Prayer of the Week – October 16, 2023
• Voices of Reason and Compassion on the Crisis in Israel and Gaza
• More Voices of Reason and Compassion on the Crisis in Israel and Gaza
• Ta-Nehisi Coates: Quote of the Day – November 2, 2023
• Jehad Abusalim: Quote of the Day – December 8, 2023
• Christmas 2023 – Reflections, Activism, Art, and Celebrations
• Sabrina Salvati: Quote of the Day – January 2, 2024
• Michael Fakhri: Quote of the Day – February 27, 2024
• Phyllis Bennis: Quote of the Day – March 28, 2024
• Josh Paul: Quote of the Day – March 28, 2024
• “A Genocide Has Been Normalized”
• “This Is a Genocidal Project”
• Outrage and Despair
• Naomi Klein’s Powerful Words on Israel’s and the West’s Ongoing Gaza Genocide
• Judith Butler on the Ongoing Student Protests Against the Gaza Genocide
• Kyle Kulinski: Quote of the Day – May 23, 2024
• Something to Think About – June 28, 2024
• Nina Turner: Quote of the Day – July 24, 2024
• Phyllis Bennis: “We Can Never Give Up Hope”
• John Cusack: Quote of the Day – July 26, 2024
• Progressive Perspectives on the Presidential Nomination of Kamala Harris
• Breaking Down Kamala Harris’s DNC Speech on Gaza
• Yousef Munayyer: Quote of the Day – August 30, 2024
• “It’s a Systematic Slaughter That We’re Funding”
• Protesting Weapons Manufacturer and Genocide Enabler General Dynamics
• Something to Think About – September 26, 2024
See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• “The Mistreatment and Discrimination Against Palestinians Is Not Unprecedented. It’s Baked Into the Foundation of the Political System in Israel”
• Progressive Perspectives on the Ongoing Israeli-Palestinian “Nightmare” (2021)
• Something to Think About – July 29, 2018
• Noura Erakat: Quote of the Day – May 15, 2018
• For Some Jews, Israel’s Treatment of Palestinians is Yet Another Jewish Tragedy
• Remembering the Six-Day War and Its Ongoing Aftermath
• David Norris: Quote of the Day – August 12, 2014
Image: Gazans view the bodies of child victims of an Israeli air strike. (Photo: Eyad Baba / AFP via Getty Images).
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