Source: The Guardian (original headline: Israel's leaders committed genocide in Gaza and must pay for it. Their political and media allies must too)
Translation: Telegrafi.com
If those complicit in the Gaza genocide are not held accountable, the brutal consequences will be felt far beyond that devastated land. The ceasefire between Israel and Hamas offered some relief to traumatized survivors. But Donald Trump’s declaration that he is not sure if it will last has unleashed a new terror. From the new president’s decision to lift the moratorium on deliveries of one-ton bombs to Israel – which were repeatedly dropped on civilians in the so-called safe zones – to his choice of Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel who once said that “there really is no such thing as a Palestinian”, those hoping for a lasting peace have every right to worry that the carnage will soon resume.
The attack on Gaza is normalizing almost unlimited violence against civilians, facilitated and justified by many Western governments and media outlets. It is worth recalling the destruction of Guernica by Nazi and Italian forces during the Spanish Civil War, almost nine decades ago. Guernica experienced one of the first massive aerial bombings of a civilian community, and it shocked the world. The then US President, Franklin D Roosevelt, condemned the crime because “civilians, including large numbers of women and children, are being mercilessly killed from the air.” The journalist The Times, George Steer, wrote at the time: “In the form of execution and the scale of destruction it brought about, the attack on Guernica is unparalleled in military history.” Unfortunately, Guernica proved to be a test case for the aerial destruction of European cities a few years later: the Nazi military leader, Hermann Göring, said at the Nuremberg trials that Guernica enabled the Nazis to test their air power.
What about Gaza? Last week, Joe Biden claimed that – at the start of Israel’s military offensive in October 2023 – he had told Benjamin Netanyahu: “You can’t bomb these communities.” Apparently, the former president believed that telling the world he had said that would help his rehabilitation. But it seems more like an involuntary confession of criminal complicity. The US, after all, gave Israel nearly $18 billion in weapons the following year, when it knew, or should have known, that Netanyahu’s bombing campaign violated international law. In the first three weeks of the conflict, according to the NGO Airwars, at least 5,139 civilians were killed. The real number was probably higher. The bombs that killed them were mainly supplied by the US.
What was the military purpose of this? The US seems to have no answer. Former Secretary of State Antony Blinken said last week that Hamas had “recruited almost as many new militants as it has lost.” If this is true, it undermines the entire stated purpose of Israel’s brutality, which was to eliminate Hamas. Israel’s other alleged purpose was to return the hostages by military means. However, as a commentator in the Israeli newspaper recently put it Israel Hayom: “We can say, with certainty, that military pressure has killed more hostages than it has returned alive.” Most of the hostages have been released during ceasefires, not as a result of operations by Israeli forces. It is hard not to conclude that Israel’s actions are a massacre for the sake of fun.
Most Western media outlets have played a key role in normalizing these horrors. From October 2023 to January 2025, 1,091 infants were killed in Gaza, more than the total number of Israeli civilians killed on October 7. A total of 17,400 children have been killed – the equivalent of one every 30 minutes. A recent study in Lancet reported that the total number of deaths in Gaza was probably underestimated.
Gazeta The Times published a front-page story with unsubstantiated and unconfirmed allegations about Hamas, saying it had slit the throats of babies; two days later it followed up with another story about babies supposedly being “dismembered.” These unsubstantiated allegations were later revealed to be mere rumors. The more than 1,000 Palestinian babies killed are not rumors—they were actually killed by Israeli forces. As far as I know, there is no equivalent front-page story in The Times for this massacre.
The horror is not limited to the massacre of children. At the beginning of the conflict, the organization Human Rights Watch accused Israel of using starvation as a weapon of war. Two U.S. government agencies later concluded that the Israeli state was deliberately blocking the entry of essential supplies into Gaza. All 36 hospitals in Gaza have been repeatedly attacked; only 17 of them are still partially functional. Amputations and cesarean deliveries are being performed without anesthesia, and more than 1,000 health care workers have been killed. By the summer of 2024, nearly 10 Palestinians, including hundreds of children, were imprisoned. The United Nations has documented shocking reports of torture and sexual assault: men and women held in cages, bound in diapers and blindfolded, stripped naked, deprived of food, water, and sleep, and tortured with cigarette burns, water, electric shocks, and even rape and allegations of gang rape.
None of this should come as a surprise. Israeli General Ghassan Alian, in charge of civil affairs in the Israeli-occupied territories, described Gaza’s civilian population as “human beasts,” vowing to punish them with a total blockade and subject them to “hell.” An unnamed Israeli defense official declared that Gaza would “ultimately turn into a tent city. Not a single building will remain.”
Unlike Guernica, the atrocities committed in Gaza have been documented in real time. Israeli soldiers have proudly posted testimonies on social media, and survivors have used the internet to share footage of what they were experiencing. Many of these survivors, as Irish lawyer Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh describes it, were “streaming their devastation in real time, in the hope that the world would do something.”
Yet the British government has continued to supply Israel with arms, suspending only 30 of its 350 arms licenses – after considerable public and legal pressure. Meanwhile, much of the British media has either defended or embellished Israel’s crimes, failing to connect its criminal intent to its murderous actions. Faced with the prospect of a showdown over their complicity in this catastrophe, political leaders and the media have sought to portray opponents of Israel’s genocide as dangerous extremists. The former British Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, called anti-war protests “hate marches”; while the tabloid The Sun called them “hate demonstrations.” The attack on the London protests this weekend was the latest example of this trend.
The destruction of Guernica caused great shock, but it is worth remembering that after this attack, even more devastating aerial bombings became the new norm. In Guernica, some 1,650 people were killed; in Gaza the official figure of 47,283 Palestinians killed is likely a drastic underestimate, but despite this, this much greater crime has not provoked nearly the same outrage from political and media elites.
There must be justice. Those who continued to supply Israel with weapons must be brought to justice for their assistance in this massacre. Those who used their media platforms to justify this massacre must see their reputations destroyed. Without accountability, even more rampant violence will become normal, even acceptable.
This danger is especially great in an era when the far right is forming governments and when the climate crisis threatens even greater global chaos. Those who are collaborators know that the only way to protect themselves is by demonizing those who opposed the genocide and by turning the world upside down. But if they achieve this goal, then the world will catch fire. /Telegraph/
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