"1. In early 2008 – that is, 17 years ago – deputy defence minister Matan Vilnai, a former senior Israeli general, threatened that Gaza would face a "Shoah" – a word until then, strictly reserved for the Holocaust.
2. He did so shortly after Israel implemented what would become a near two-decade siege of Gaza. Israel had already surrounded the enclave with a heavily militarised fence, made its territorial waters off-limits, and bombed its only airport. From then on, food was tightly rationed, or what Israeli leaders called “ putting Gaza on a diet”, while swaths of the enclave were intermittently destroyed by Israeli bombing, or what Israeli leaders called “mowing the lawn”. Gaza was effectively turned into a
3. The siege was complemented by Israel's gradual destruction of Gaza's means of self-sufficiency: any fishing off its coast was stopped; Israel regularly sprayed herbicide on the enclave’s agricultural land; Israel eradicated Gaza's industrial sector by making exports almost impossible; and Israel regularly bombed Gaza's electricity and desalination plants, limiting the essentials of water and power.
4. The goal was clear: to make Gaza entirely dependent on Israel's goodwill, of which there was almost none, and at the same time utterly dependent on aid. In tandem, Israel started waging a deceitful campaign claiming UN aid organisations were linked to Hamas "terror" in the hope it could use this as a rationalisation for impeding aid, as it has done with great ferocity since 7 October 2023, and ultimately for taking over for itself all aid provision, as it has also managed to do in recent months with the creation of an Israeli-US front group, the “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation”.
5. With this as the background, the United Nations warned a decade ago that Gaza was likely to become uninhabitable by 2020. That was a major reason why Palestinians began mass protests at their concentration camp fence in 2018, which Israel responded to with lethal live fire.
In one article in the Israeli media at the time, IDF snipers boasted about shooting “ 42 knees in one day”. Hundreds were killed and many thousands crippled as a result. Those same snipers are currently shooting children in the head, abdomen and testicles, as British surgeon Nick Maynard, who is volunteering in Gaza, has warned Let us note too that Israel’s almost complete, and malevolent, control over Gaza – and the fact that the world had lost interest in the enclave’s desperate plight – was a major factor in Hamas and other groups launching their lethal break-out on 7 October 2023.
5. In parallel to all this, and starting in 2007, Israel persuaded the US to join it in a pressure campaign on Egypt: to open its single, short border with Gaza so that the enclave’s people would flood into Sinai – an act of ethnic cleansing and a blatant violation of international law. Egypt refused to submit before 7 October 2023, and has continued to do so since.
In fact, forcibly removing a group from their homes through violence and by making life impossible for them where they live itself meets the legal definition of genocide – all the more obviously so if those doing the forcible removal say that is what they are doing, as Israeli leaders have been stating from the start of their genocidal slaughter and starvation campaign in Gaza.
Israel is committing a genocide to force Egypt and the Arab world to take the people of Gaza as refugees. If they refuse, Israel will continue with the genocide by killing more of Gaza’s people. If they relent, Israel will continue the genocide by dispersing what’s left of the people of Gaza to the far corners of the world.
Either way, it is genocide. Either way, it must be stopped – now."
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