From Covenant to Conquest
Part 3: 1996-2025
Section 10: The Death of Peace (1995)
It takes only one bullet to change the course of history. On November 4, 1995, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by Yigal Amir, a right-wing Israeli extremist who believed giving any land to Palestinians was treason against God and Zionism. Rabin’s death ended the Oslo peace process before it could take root. With him died the last serious attempt at a negotiated two-state solution. The world did not know it then, but the bullet that killed Rabin also killed the idea of peace through compromise.
In the months leading up to it, Israel was riven by internal division. The far right denounced him as a traitor, religious extremists called him a murderer of Jews for giving land to Palestinians, and settler leaders warned that God would strike him down. At protests, he was depicted in Nazi uniforms and kefiyyehs, labeled a terrorist collaborator. On the night of November 4, 1995, as he left a peace rally in Tel Aviv, Yigal Amir, a 25-year-old religious law student, shot him twice in the back at close range. For Israelis who believed in peace, it was as if hope itself had been gunned down. For Palestinians, it was a dark confirmation: even when an Israeli leader tried to compromise, his own people killed him for it. The cost was immeasurable – families on both sides who longed for coexistence watched their futures collapse in an instant.
Rabin was the only Israeli leader with both the power and credibility to make peace real. As a former general and war hero who had commanded Israeli forces in the Six-Day War, he was respected by the security establishment and the public alike. Unlike previous politicians who spoke of peace abstractly, Rabin took tangible steps: he shook Yasser Arafat’s hand on the White House lawn, signed the Oslo Accords, and began withdrawing Israeli troops from parts of the West Bank and Gaza. He spoke openly about recognizing Palestinian nationhood, something no prime minister before him dared to say. To Palestinians, he was no savior – he was still an occupier – but he was an occupier willing to end the occupation. His assassination ended the possibility that Israel would willingly dismantle its colonial project, leaving Palestinians with no partner for peace.
After Rabin’s assassination, Israel shifted decisively towards militarism and security politics. Successive governments abandoned meaningful negotiations, focusing instead on consolidating control. The IDF (Israel Defense Forces) and Mossad (intelligence agency) expanded their operations beyond traditional defense. Assassination became a routine tool: Hamas leaders, Hezbollah commanders, Iranian scientists, and Palestinian militants were systematically targeted with drone strikes, car bombs, and covert operations. Each killing was justified as preemptive defense, and each deepened the cycle of revenge. Meanwhile, Israel honed a powerful global propaganda strategy – known in Hebrew as Hasbara, meaning “explanation” – to frame every military action as self-defense and every Palestinian resistance as terrorism. By the early 2000s, Israel had transformed from a besieged state seeking recognition into a regional superpower specializing in surveillance, targeted killing, and narrative control.
Section 11: Inevitabilities (1996-2015)
The guns fell silent, but the conquest did not end. In 1996, just a year after Rabin’s assassination, Benjamin Netanyahu was elected Prime Minister. He had campaigned fiercely against the Oslo Accords, exploiting fear and anger among Israelis mourning Rabin yet opposing his concessions. Netanyahu’s victory marked a turning point: he prioritized security over negotiations, settlement expansion over withdrawal, and confrontation over compromise. Under his leadership, Israel poured resources into intelligence, counterterrorism, and military technology. Mossad’s targeted assassinations increased, the IDF developed doctrines of overwhelming force, and public discourse shifted from cautious hope to permanent fear of Palestinian violence. Netanyahu perfected the politics of fear, convincing Israelis that occupation was safety, apartheid was security, and peace was weakness.
Netanyahu’s rise was no accident. He came from a deeply ideological family committed to Zionist maximalism. His father, Benzion Netanyahu, was a historian and ardent Revisionist Zionist who believed that compromise with Arabs was impossible and that Jews must settle all of historic Palestine by force if necessary. This worldview shaped Netanyahu’s politics from the start. As Prime Minister, he embraced policies that systematically entrenched occupation: expanding settlements, rejecting Palestinian statehood, and overseeing military campaigns in Gaza that killed thousands. His governments pushed laws declaring Israel the nation-state of the Jewish people alone, sidelining Palestinian citizens. International observers increasingly accused his leadership of apartheid and ethnic cleansing, arguing that under his rule, Israel abandoned even the pretense of a peace process in favor of permanent domination.
The fragile peace process finally collapsed in 2000, when opposition leader Ariel Sharon visited the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in a deliberate act of provocation. Palestinians erupted in anger, and the Second Intifada began. This uprising was far more violent than the first, marked by suicide bombings targeting Israeli civilians and brutal military reprisals that leveled Palestinian neighborhoods. Over five years, approximately 3,000 Palestinians and 1,000 Israelis were killed. The IDF reoccupied West Bank cities, imposed curfews, demolished homes, and built the Separation Wall, carving the West Bank into isolated cantons. Israel framed these actions as self defense.
In 2005, under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Israel unilaterally withdrew its settlers and troops from the Gaza Strip, framing it as a move for peace. But instead of granting freedom, Israel imposed a land, air, and sea blockade, controlling Gaza’s borders, economy, and resources. In 2006, Hamas won Palestinian parliamentary elections, defeating Fatah, the party that had dominated since Oslo. This victory triggered Western sanctions and deepened internal Palestinian divisions. While Hamas became the de facto ruler of Gaza, it was never the sole force of resistance. In both Gaza and the West Bank, countless other groups and individuals continued to fight occupation: communist factions like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), socialist parties, anarchist collectives, student unions, and grassroots organizers. Yet under siege, Hamas’s armed power overshadowed these political movements, allowing the world to reduce Palestinian resistance to Islamic militancy alone, erasing its diverse revolutionary struggle for liberation necessities; Palestinians saw them as proof that occupation was never temporary and that peace had died with Rabin.
By 2007, the situation for Palestinians deteriorated even further. Tensions between Hamas and Fatah exploded into open conflict after their attempts at forming a unity government collapsed. In June 2007, Hamas fighters seized control of Gaza in a brief but bloody takeover, expelling Fatah security forces and establishing themselves as the sole governing authority. From that moment on, Palestinians were divided between two governments: Hamas ruling Gaza under siege, and Fatah governing the West Bank under Israeli occupation and Western funding dependency. This split devastated Palestinian national unity, weakening their political leverage and fragmenting their society just as Israel’s blockade and settlement expansions intensified. The occupation’s greatest weapon had always been division, and now it no longer needed to impose it – Palestinians were divided by their own factions.
While Palestinians were consumed by internal division, Israel moved swiftly to consolidate its control. In the West Bank, settlement expansion accelerated, especially around East Jerusalem, carving deeper wounds into any hope for a contiguous Palestinian state. The international community, led by the US and EU, imposed a boycott on Hamas after its electoral victory, cutting off aid and isolating Gaza diplomatically. Meanwhile, Israel transformed its partial blockade into a total siege, restricting food, medicine, fuel, and building materials to what officials later admitted was a calculated “humanitarian minimum” designed to keep Gaza’s economy on the edge of collapse without triggering outright famine. That same year, Israel expanded its Separation Wall further into West Bank territory, formalizing an apartheid landscape of walled ghettos and Jewish-only roads. By the end of 2007, Palestinians were trapped in a reality of blockade, occupation, division, and betrayal, with every path to liberation increasingly barricaded.
Operation Cast Lead was a military campaign; it was also a demonstration of overwhelming force. The assault began on December 27, 2008, with over 100 airstrikes in a single day, targeting police stations, government buildings, and densely populated urban areas. In the following days, Israeli artillery pounded neighborhoods indiscriminately. Hospitals overflowed with the wounded, while medical teams struggled under bombardment and shortages caused by the blockade. Schools operated by UNRWA were struck despite being designated civilian shelters. White phosphorus munitions rained down on crowded districts like Tel al-Hawa, burning flesh to the bone and leaving survivors with lifelong injuries. By the time the offensive ended on January 18, 2009, 1,417 Palestinians were dead, including 313 children and 116 women. Over 5,300 were wounded, many permanently disabled. Israel lost ten soldiers (four by friendly fire) and three civilians to rocket fire. The war left tens of thousands homeless, entire families buried under rubble, and Gaza’s already fragile infrastructure in ruins. For many Palestinians, Cast Lead was proof that the world’s silence had given Israel a free hand to enforce its siege with impunity.
In February 2009, Benjamin Netanyahu returned to power as Prime Minister, forming a hardline coalition with figures like Avigdor Lieberman, solidifying Israel’s shift towards uncompromising security policies. Later that year, in September 2009, the Goldstone Report was released by the UN Human Rights Council, accusing Israel of war crimes and crimes against humanity during Operation Cast Lead, including deliberate attacks on civilians and infrastructure. Israel immediately rejected the report as biased, launching a global PR campaign to discredit it. Despite international condemnation, Israel continued its blockade on Gaza, expanded West Bank settlements, and maintained its military posture.
On May 31, 2010, Israeli naval commandos launched a pre-dawn raid on the Mavi Marmara, the largest ship in a six-vessel flotilla attempting to break the blockade of Gaza. The flotilla, organized by the Turkish NGO IHH and supported by international activists, carried over 600 passengers from 36 countries, including journalists, parliamentarians, and humanitarian workers. Its stated goal was to deliver 10,000 tons of aid supplies – food, medicine, construction materials – and to challenge the legality of Israel’s siege. In international waters about 72 nautical miles from Gaza, Israeli Shayetet 13 commandos rappelled from helicopters onto the Mavi Marmara’s deck. A violent confrontation ensued. Activists wielded metal rods and knives; soldiers opened fire with live ammunition. Nine Turkish activists were killed, including Furkan Doğan, a 19-year-old U.S. citizen shot five times, including once in the face at close range. A tenth activist died of wounds in 2014. The raid sparked global outrage, with the UN Secretary-General and Security Council condemning the excessive use of force. Turkey expelled Israel’s ambassador and suspended diplomatic ties for years. Israel defended its actions by claiming the activists were armed terrorists, while subsequent UN investigations found that although some activists used improvised weapons, the blockade itself violated international law and Israel used “unacceptable levels of violence.”
In September 2011, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas submitted a formal application for full UN membership for the State of Palestine, declaring that after decades of negotiations and expanding Israeli settlements, independence could no longer wait. The bid sought recognition for a state within 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital. While it garnered support from over 130 countries, the United States pledged to veto any Security Council resolution granting full membership, effectively blocking the effort. Instead, in November 2012, Palestine gained a lesser status as a “non-member observer state” in the UN General Assembly, a symbolic victory that changed little on the ground.
That same year, another event captured global attention. In October 2011, after five years of captivity, Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit was released by Hamas in a massive prisoner exchange deal. Shalit, captured in a 2006 cross-border raid near Gaza, had become a national symbol in Israel, with public campaigns demanding his freedom. In exchange for his release, Israel freed 1,027 Palestinian prisoners, including 280 serving life sentences for involvement in attacks against Israelis. For Palestinian families, it was a rare moment of victory and reunion after years of watching relatives grow old or die in prison. For Israel, the exchange was deeply controversial, seen by many as capitulating to Hamas’s demands but celebrated by others as proof that no soldier would be left behind.
By 2012, Israel’s military capabilities had entered a new era. Years of rocket attacks from Gaza had driven the development of the Iron Dome, a short-range missile defense system designed to intercept rockets before they could strike urban centers. Developed by Rafael Advanced Defense Systems starting in 2006 and deployed in 2011, Iron Dome quickly became a symbol of Israeli technological superiority. It was first tested in combat that April, intercepting a Grad rocket fired at Beersheba. Its full debut came during Operation Pillar of Defense in November 2012, when Israel launched an eight-day assault on Gaza following the targeted assassination of Ahmed Jabari, Hamas’s military chief. Over 1,500 airstrikes were carried out, killing 174 Palestinians, including dozens of civilians, while Hamas fired over 1,500 rockets, with Iron Dome intercepting an estimated 85% of those threatening populated areas. For Israel, Iron Dome represented security, deterrence, and global prestige. For Palestinians, it symbolized the technological and power asymmetry of the conflict: a system that rendered their rockets nearly useless, while Israel’s own airstrikes rained down unopposed.
By 2012, the divide between Jewish identity and Zionism was becoming increasingly visible worldwide. Many Jewish communities continued to support Israel out of fear that its fall would leave Jews vulnerable once again. Yet a growing number, especially among younger generations, questioned the moral legitimacy of a state built on occupation and apartheid. Movements like Jewish Voice for Peace in the United States gained prominence, openly criticizing Israeli policies and supporting the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement. In Israel itself, groups like Anarchists Against the Wall continued their direct actions alongside Palestinians, tearing down sections of the Separation Wall and joining weekly protests in villages like Bil’in and Ni’lin. For them, Zionism was not Jewish liberation but Jewish supremacy. This internal rift within Jewish communities mirrored an older truth: from the birth of Zionism, there had always been Jews who rejected its nationalist project, insisting that justice and diaspora solidarity, not conquest, were the true foundations of Jewish ethics.
By 2012, the Israeli state had begun a systematic crackdown on its own leftists and anti-occupation activists. Groups like Anarchists Against the Wall, Breaking the Silence, and B’Tselem faced increasing harassment, surveillance, and public vilification. Leftist protesters at weekly demonstrations against the Separation Wall were beaten, arrested, and sometimes shot with rubber-coated steel bullets or live ammunition. The government pushed laws branding NGOs that received foreign funding as “foreign agents,” aiming to delegitimize human rights and anti-occupation work. Public discourse shifted harshly: Israeli leftists were labeled traitors, enemies from within, or terrorist sympathizers. For Palestinians, it was a reminder that even Israelis who stood with them faced brutal suppression. For Israeli activists, it revealed a bitter truth: opposing apartheid from within meant risking not only arrest, but social exile in a country increasingly united around occupation as national identity.
In 2013, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry launched a renewed effort to revive the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. For nine months, Kerry shuttled between Jerusalem, Ramallah, and Washington, pressing both sides towards a two-state solution. But from the outset, the talks were doomed. Israel refused to halt settlement construction, announcing thousands of new housing units in the West Bank even as negotiations continued. Palestinian leaders, facing a divided polity and an increasingly skeptical public, demanded a halt to settlement expansion as a precondition for any lasting agreement. By April 2014, the talks collapsed without progress. Kerry himself would later admit that Netanyahu’s government bore primary responsibility for their failure, stating, “Both sides did things that were unhelpful, but the settlements were the single biggest problem.” For Palestinians, it was another confirmation that negotiations under occupation served only to buy Israel time to entrench its control.
In July 2014, violence erupted once again with Operation Protective Edge, Israel’s third major war on Gaza in six years. The immediate trigger was the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank by Hamas-affiliated militants, followed by the revenge murder of a Palestinian teenager, Mohammed Abu Khdeir, burned alive by Israeli settlers. Israel launched mass arrests and raids across the West Bank, targeting Hamas members and civilians alike, while Hamas responded with rocket fire from Gaza. Over 50 days, Israel bombarded Gaza with airstrikes, artillery, and ground assaults. More than 2,200 Palestinians were killed — among them hundreds of children, entire families, and medics caught in the crossfire. Over 10,000 more were wounded. Entire neighborhoods like Shuja’iyya were flattened into dust. On the Israeli side, 73 people were killed, including six civilians and 67 soldiers. Protective Edge devastated Gaza’s already collapsing infrastructure, displacing over 100,000 people and reducing hospitals, schools, and power plants to ruins. For Palestinians, it was not a war — it was erasure.
In late 2015, a new wave of violence erupted across Israel and the occupied territories, later dubbed the Knife Intifada or Stabbing Intifada. Unlike the organized uprisings of the past, this was a surge of individual attacks, often by young Palestinians with no formal ties to militant groups. They carried out stabbings, car-rammings, and occasional shootings targeting Israeli soldiers, settlers, and civilians, driven by a mix of despair, anger at ongoing occupation, and provocations such as Israeli settler incursions into the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound. Israeli forces responded with live fire, often killing suspected attackers on sight, and demolishing their families’ homes as collective punishment. By the end of 2016, at least 235 Palestinians had been killed, many during alleged attacks but others in protests or clashes, while 34 Israelis were killed in attacks. The uprising revealed a generation that no longer believed in organized factions or peace talks – only in desperate acts of personal resistance against a future they saw as permanently sealed under occupation.
Section 13: The Trump Era (2016-2025)
By 2016, Israel’s occupation had settled into what many called an unbreakable status quo. Benjamin Netanyahu, back in power since 2009, oversaw relentless settlement expansion in the West Bank, approving thousands of new housing units despite international condemnation. The Separation Wall continued to snake through Palestinian land, carving villages from their farmlands and turning cities into walled enclaves. In Gaza, the blockade entered its ninth year, trapping nearly two million people in what human rights groups described as an open-air prison. That year, Israel also intensified crackdowns on Palestinian activists and Israeli leftists, passing laws barring entry to foreigners supporting boycotts and labelling human rights NGOs as foreign agents. It was a year without major wars, but that quiet belied a deeper violence: the normalization of apartheid as policy, occupation as inevitability, and oppression as mere background noise to a world that had stopped paying attention
In 2017, the geopolitical landscape shifted dramatically when U.S. President Donald Trump announced that the United States would officially recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, breaking decades of American policy and international consensus that the city’s status should be resolved through negotiations. Palestinians saw the move as a declaration that the U.S. no longer pretended to be an impartial broker, but had aligned fully with Israeli expansionism. Massive protests erupted across the West Bank, Gaza, and regional capitals. Israeli forces responded with live fire, killing at least 12 Palestinians and wounding hundreds in the first weeks alone. For Netanyahu’s government, Trump’s decision was a green light to accelerate annexation plans in East Jerusalem and deepen settlement expansion, cementing what many human rights experts called the final death of the two-state solution.
In 2018, Palestinians in Gaza launched the Great March of Return, a series of weekly mass protests along the Israeli border fence that began on March 30, Land Day. Tens of thousands of men, women, and children gathered to demand an end to the blockade and the right of return to lands their families were expelled from in 1948. The protests were overwhelmingly nonviolent, with people carrying flags, chanting, and setting tires alight to obscure sniper lines of sight. Israel responded with overwhelming force: snipers were positioned along the border, authorized to use live ammunition against anyone approaching the fence. Over the course of a year, more than 200 Palestinians were killed, including medics, journalists, disabled protesters, and children, and over 8,000 were wounded by live fire. The international community condemned the disproportionate violence, but no meaningful consequences followed. For Palestinians, the Great March of Return became another chapter in the long history of their resistance being met with bullets, their demands for dignity answered with death.
Between 2017 and 2020, Palestine crossed a threshold. While mass killings had defined its history for decades, these years marked the transition to a deeper form of genocide: the deliberate engineering of systemic famine, infrastructural collapse, and unlivable conditions on a national scale. In Gaza, over 97% of water became undrinkable, electricity was available for only 2–4 hours a day, and hospitals ran without basic medicines, leaving cancer patients and children with treatable illnesses to die in silence. In the West Bank, settlement expansion accelerated, villages were cut off from farmland and each other, and daily life became a maze of checkpoints, raids, demolitions, and settler violence enforced by soldiers. By 2018, the UN warned Gaza would be unlivable by 2020 – a warning that went unheeded as Israel tightened its blockade further. This was no longer simply occupation or siege. It was the transformation of Gaza and the West Bank into open-air death camps, where survival itself became an act of resistance and existence was reduced to enduring under engineered deprivation.
In 2019, Israeli apartheid deepened into permanence. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, facing multiple corruption indictments, turned to the far-right to shore up political survival. To appease ultranationalist factions, he promised formal annexation of the Jordan Valley and swaths of the occupied West Bank — moves that would make a viable Palestinian state impossible. At the same time, demolition orders surged, particularly targeting Palestinian communities in East Jerusalem and Area C, the 60% of the West Bank under full Israeli control. Entire villages like Khan al-Ahmar faced repeated threats of erasure. In Gaza, the blockade tightened further, with fuel restrictions causing sewage systems to collapse and waterborne diseases to spread. The humanitarian crisis passed the point of emergency; the international press simply moved on. Netanyahu’s strategy was clear: wear the Palestinian people down through slow violence, normalize apartheid through U.S. backing, and ensure that when the time came to finalize the land grab, the world would already be too tired to notice.
2020 began with a declaration of death for Palestinian sovereignty. In January, U.S. President Donald Trump, standing beside Netanyahu at the White House with no Palestinian representatives present, unveiled the so-called “Deal of the Century.” This plan proposed a fragmented, demilitarized pseudo-state for Palestinians, riddled with conditions and surrounded by Israeli territory, with no control over its own borders, airspace, or natural resources. It allowed Israel to annex up to 30% of the West Bank, including all settlements and the Jordan Valley, and recognized Jerusalem — in full — as Israel’s capital. Palestinians overwhelmingly rejected the plan as a blueprint for apartheid. Even human rights organizations and European diplomats quietly acknowledged that it endorsed the permanent denial of Palestinian statehood. Meanwhile, Netanyahu declared it a “historic opportunity” to establish permanent Israeli sovereignty over the occupied West Bank — a move Trump openly encouraged.
Simultaneously, Israeli demolitions and settler violence surged. Between January and October 2020, more than 700 Palestinian structures were demolished, even amid the global pandemic, displacing thousands. COVID-19 hit the West Bank and Gaza hard — but while Israeli citizens had access to vaccines and protective infrastructure, Palestinians were largely left to fend for themselves. Israel blocked or delayed shipments of testing kits, personal protective equipment, and other supplies to Gaza and East Jerusalem. In Gaza, ventilators were nearly nonexistent. Hospitals collapsed under the weight of patients and the blockade, forcing doctors to choose who would live or die.
By the end of 2020 What remained was a system: a fully developed regime of apartheid, supported by Western power, managed through walls, surveillance, and militarized economics. Gaza was strangled in darkness and disease. The West Bank was carved into dozens of isolated ghettos.
In 2021, the world’s eyes turned again to Sheikh Jarrah, a neighborhood in East Jerusalem where Israeli settlers, backed by court rulings and military force, attempted to forcibly evict Palestinian families from their homes. The evictions sparked mass protests across Jerusalem, quickly spreading to the West Bank, Gaza, and even into historic 1948 Palestinian cities like Lydd, Haifa, and Jaffa. For the first time in decades, Palestinians across all territories — divided by walls and status — rose in simultaneous defiance. This became known as the Unity Intifada, a spontaneous uprising born not from party lines but from decades of humiliation, erasure, and exile. Israel responded with overwhelming force: in May 2021, during an 11-day assault on Gaza, over 260 Palestinians were killed, including 66 children, while more than 2,000 were injured. Entire apartment blocks and press offices were reduced to rubble. In the West Bank and within Israel itself, mass arrests and mob violence targeted Palestinian demonstrators, as nationalist Israeli gangs rioted through Arab neighborhoods.
That year, more than 1,300 Palestinians were killed or died from blockade-related causes — starvation, medical denial, dehydration. Thousands more were disabled or displaced. The census shrank — not from emigration, but from massacre. From an estimated 5.2 million Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank in 2020, the number fell below 5.1 million by the end of 2021. Their decline wasn’t natural. It was engineered.
By 2022, the violence against Palestinians had become so constant that it rarely made headlines — yet that year saw a marked escalation. Over 220 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces in the West Bank alone, making it the deadliest year since 2006, even before accounting for deaths in Gaza. Armed settler militias, protected and often joined by Israeli soldiers, carried out pogrom-style attacks on villages like Huwara, Burin, and Qaryut, burning homes, schools, and olive groves. At the same time, the Israeli government made a strategic turn: rather than deny the violence, it reframed it as self-defense, and any criticism of Zionist policy was denounced as antisemitism. This propaganda line, exported aggressively by pro-Israel lobbies across Europe and North America, blurred the line between Judaism — a religion and culture — and Zionism, a modern ethno-nationalist project. Even many Jewish critics of Israel were caught in the crossfire. Movements like Jewish Voice for Peace, IfNotNow, and secular Israeli dissidents were branded as “self-hating Jews” or traitors for opposing apartheid. As the political cost of speaking out grew, silence became compliance.
Meanwhile, the Palestinian population again declined — falling to just under 5 million in the West Bank and Gaza combined. With thousands more killed, and many more permanently maimed, imprisoned, or driven into exile, the population loss could no longer be seen as incidental. It was the intended result of a strategy: to erase a people not only from maps, but from memory.
On October 7, 2023, everything changed. In a stunningly coordinated assault, Hamas and allied Palestinian militant groups launched a surprise incursion into southern Israel, breaching the border fence in multiple locations with bulldozers and explosives. Fighters stormed Israeli military bases, kibbutzim, and civilian areas, killing approximately 1,200 Israelis — including civilians, police, and soldiers — and taking over 240 hostages back into Gaza. Among the dead were also dozens of foreign nationals and participants in a music festival near Re’im. It was the largest attack on Israeli territory since 1948, and for many, it shattered the illusion of Israeli military invincibility. To Palestinians, it was the inevitable eruption of decades of siege, humiliation, land theft, and mass death. But to Israel, it was a trauma weaponized: a casus belli for unprecedented retaliation.
Within hours, Israel declared a state of war and began systematic aerial bombardment of Gaza. Civilian neighborhoods, refugee camps, hospitals, schools, mosques, bakeries, water treatment facilities, and ambulances were all targets. Within one week, Israel had dropped more bombs on Gaza than the U.S. dropped on Afghanistan in an average year. Entire city blocks were erased, and in some areas, white phosphorus munitions — banned in civilian zones under international law — were reportedly used. The Israeli military, now fully backed by the United States and most NATO countries, imposed a total siege: no food, no water, no electricity, no fuel. “No electricity, no food, no fuel — we are fighting human animals, and we will act accordingly,” declared Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. The language of extermination was no longer hidden — it was official doctrine.
Internationally, reactions were split. Western media outlets led with the Hamas attacks, often omitting the context of occupation, apartheid, or the decades-long blockade of Gaza. Israel’s narrative dominated headlines: October 7 was framed as the beginning of violence, rather than the culmination of it. U.S. President Joe Biden publicly embraced Netanyahu, deployed aircraft carriers to the eastern Mediterranean, and fast-tracked emergency military aid. Germany, France, the UK, and Canada followed suit, many banning pro-Palestine protests or equating the Palestinian flag with terrorism. On the other side, mass protests erupted globally — from New York to London, from Amman to Cape Town — as millions of people flooded the streets in solidarity with Palestine. South Africa, Bolivia, Colombia, and Turkey denounced the Israeli response as war crimes. In the Global South and among civil society, the word “genocide” began to take center stage.
Meanwhile, in Gaza, the cost was catastrophic. By the end of October alone, over 8,000 Palestinians had been killed — the majority of them civilians, including more than 3,000 children. Hospitals collapsed under the weight of casualties. Families were wiped out in seconds. Survivors dug through rubble with their bare hands. And the Palestinian population dropped again, now plunging below 4.7 million in Gaza and the West Bank, as bodies piled up faster than names could be recorded. The world could no longer claim ignorance — only complicity.
To Palestinians, October 7 was not an act of provocation, but a direct response — a retaliation for years of siege, decades of dispossession, and most recently, the assassination of key political leaders who had sought diplomacy over warfare. In the months prior, Israel had escalated its targeted killings, including operations against figures in Hamas’s political wing and other Palestinian factions who had openly signaled willingness to pursue negotiation or reconciliation. These killings sent a chilling message to the Palestinian people: even peaceful resistance, even diplomacy, would be met with death. The most glaring was the assassination of Saleh al-Arouri, a founding commander of Hamas’s military wing who had, by 2023, taken on a prominent political and negotiating role. His killing in Beirut just days before the attack was widely seen as the final straw — a message that Israel intended to crush not just Hamas militarily, but to destroy any future Palestinian political agency.
Inside Gaza and across the West Bank, the message was received. The people had already endured years of blockade, starvation, and bombardment, but this was different. It signaled that peace itself was being assassinated — literally. And so, on October 7, what the world saw as a terror attack, many Palestinians understood as a counterstrike against a colonial regime that had made negotiation impossible. The prison break had begun — not for conquest, but for dignity. And for the first time in decades, the oppressor bled.
In response to October 7, Israel unleashed a campaign of collective punishment so vast and brutal that even long-time allies struggled to justify it. Within days, over 1.1 million Gazans — half the population — were ordered to evacuate northern Gaza, despite nowhere being safe. Hospitals, already under siege, were bombed or cut off from fuel. The al-Ahli Hospital massacre, which killed hundreds of patients and refugees, drew global outrage, though Israel denied responsibility. Key infrastructure like Baptist Hospital, Shifa Hospital, and Al-Quds Hospital were targeted systematically, often under the pretense of rooting out militants — but no evidence was ever presented that justified such annihilation. Gaza’s universities were bombed into dust. Generations of books, archives, and cultural memory were obliterated. More than 60 journalists, many of them Palestinian, were killed in what press freedom organizations called an intentional silencing.
The Palestinian population fell below 4.5 million, with more than 25,000 people killed by the end of 2023 — the vast majority civilians, including over 10,000 children. Thousands more remained missing under debris. Mass graves were dug behind hospitals. In Khan Younis and Rafah, whole neighborhoods vanished overnight. Satellite images showed Gaza’s urban landscape transformed into grey ruin, as if erased from existence. Aid convoys were blocked, bombed, or turned away. Israel explicitly denied food, water, and medical supplies, with senior officials stating their goal was to “cut off the head of the snake” and “push Gaza’s civilians to the south, or out entirely.” Calls for ethnic cleansing became open political policy.
And still, the world watched. In January 2024, South Africa filed a case at the International Court of Justice, accusing Israel of violating the Genocide Convention. The case was not symbolic. Its evidence was overwhelming. And yet, the United States and European allies continued to arm Israel, deflect criticism, and suppress mass protests. In cities across the West, millions marched demanding a ceasefire — only to be met with police violence, censorship, and accusations of antisemitism. Israel, now fully exposed, doubled down, believing that with American protection, there would be no consequences.
By 2024 and into 2025, the map of Palestine had become a map of ruin. Gaza was no longer a city, nor even a refugee camp — it was a wasteland. The West Bank was a scattered archipelago of bombed villages, bulldozed roads, and fenced-in ghettos, each ruled by checkpoints, snipers, and settlers. There was no infrastructure. No functioning hospitals. No water. No schools. Entire families lived in craters or under tents sewn from trash bags, surviving on weeds and rot. Starving children clawed at trucks delivering food, only to be gunned down in full view of the cameras. IDF soldiers filmed themselves laughing, cheering, posing with corpses — not in secret, but with pride. It was a spectacle of domination. The UN called it a “graveyard of international law”; Palestinians called it what it had always been: the final stage of the Nakba.
As the last remnants of Palestinian resistance within Israel were crushed, mass arrests, executions, and torture silenced dissent in Haifa, Jaffa, and Jerusalem. Underground organizers, including anarchists, communists, and student leaders, disappeared one by one. Surveillance drones tracked everything. Social media was flooded with staged Israeli propaganda. Former U.S. President Donald Trump, returned to the political stage, suggested that the West Bank should be “redeveloped” into a “hyper-wealthy tourism resort,” with “five-star desert spas” and “Biblical heritage parks.” It was not satire. Palestinian land was being marketed as vacant, even as the people who once lived there were buried beneath it.
Desperate to reach Gaza, international relief convoys were blockaded, bombed, or hijacked. In one infamous case, Greta Thunberg, part of a humanitarian mission, was reportedly captured by Israeli forces, forced to watch footage of the October 7th attack, and deported to Switzerland as a political warning. No aid made it in. Every corridor, every airstrip, every pier — closed, mined, or militarized. Famine took hold. Mothers watched their children die in their arms. Diseases once eradicated returned: cholera, typhoid, dysentery. The Palestinian population fell below 4.2 million — not through war, but through engineered extinction.
And then, as if on cue, the region erupted. The Houthis in Yemen, backed by Iran, launched missile attacks and naval blockades targeting Israeli shipping lanes and military sites. Hezbollah opened fronts in the north, and Iranian-backed militias across Syria and Iraq moved into active combat readiness. For the first time, it became clear: this was no longer just about Palestine. This was a war to stop genocide — or die trying.
Iran, once cautious, now fully engaged, launched precision missile strikes against Israeli airbases and naval facilities, citing the "responsibility to prevent extermination." Yemen’s Houthi forces had already sealed off parts of the Red Sea, targeting Israeli and Western-aligned shipping with drones and ballistic missiles. Hezbollah, operating from Lebanon and Syria, entered sustained combat, shelling IDF positions and drawing Israeli retaliation into southern Lebanon and the outskirts of Damascus. The conflict had become a regional wildfire, with each side pulling in its allies, proxies, and weapons systems. Israel responded with nuclear posturing, conducting submarine drills in the Mediterranean and deploying long-range Jericho missiles to visible readiness. The United States and the UK issued statements of “unshakeable support” — even as civilian deaths surpassed 100,000 in Gaza alone.
Global institutions fractured under the strain. The International Court of Justice’s genocide case against Israel, filed by South Africa, proceeded with damning evidence — mass graves, starvation orders, recordings of genocidal rhetoric by Israeli officials. But Western powers refused to act, shielding Israel with diplomatic vetoes at the UN Security Council and arresting pro-Palestinian demonstrators by the thousands in New York, London, Berlin, and Paris. In Europe, entire cities shut down protests, deploying riot squads to silence solidarity marches. In the Global South, however, momentum built. Bolivia, Colombia, Brazil, Algeria, South Africa, and Malaysia broke diplomatic ties with Israel. New trade and defense pacts were formed outside NATO structures, unified not by ideology but by outrage.
The Palestinian population dropped again, now approaching 4 million, with estimates suggesting over 1 million displaced beyond recovery — either dead, disabled, or vanished. The suffering was no longer hidden; it was livestreamed. But for every bombing, every child buried in sand, every mass grave uncovered — the Western media doubled down, framing events as “tragic” but “complex,” recycling talking points that equated resistance with terrorism and genocide with defense.
By mid-2025, the war for Palestine had ignited the entire region. What began as a desperate resistance to genocide had pulled in neighboring powers, proxy actors, and superpowers alike. Yemen’s Houthi movement, officially known as Ansar Allah, began launching missile and drone strikes on Israeli and U.S.-allied shipping in the Red Sea and Bab al-Mandeb Strait, declaring solidarity with Palestine and calling for an end to the siege of Gaza. Though ideologically aligned with Iran and receiving some material support, the Houthis operated autonomously, pursuing their own regional goals as a dominant power in northern Yemen. In response to their blockade and military strikes, the United States and United Kingdom launched a massive air campaign beginning in January 2024, escalating into Operation Rough Rider by spring 2025.
That operation saw over 1,000 precision airstrikes by U.S. and UK forces on Yemeni infrastructure, including ports, airfields, radar sites, fuel depots, and Houthi military bases. Civilian infrastructure was caught in the crossfire — water treatment plants, roads, and communication hubs were destroyed. More than 220 civilians were killed, and many more displaced. President Donald Trump, restored to power and openly championing Israel’s war, framed the strikes as part of a broader campaign to “punish Iran’s terrorists,” ignoring the Houthis’ independent role. While some military objectives were achieved, the bombings further destabilized Yemen, already ravaged by a decade of civil war and famine.
As Yemen’s skies lit up with American missiles, Gaza and the West Bank plunged deeper into engineered starvation. With fewer than 4 million Palestinians remaining, over a million were estimated permanently displaced or dead. Children died in parents’ arms. Disease ran unchecked. Food convoys were attacked or blocked. IDF soldiers celebrated publicly on social media, posing with flattened neighborhoods and charred bodies. Trump, meanwhile, announced that the West Bank should be “redeveloped” into luxury resorts, comparing future Israeli settlements to “Dubai in the desert.”
The message to the world was unmistakable: those who intervened for Palestine would be broken, whether politically or militarily. And for many in the Global South, that message confirmed the worst — this was no longer just a regional war. It was a global divide between those who tolerated genocide and those who refused.
As regional resistance continued to escalate — from Houthi missile strikes to Iranian threats of intervention — a chilling reality settled over the Middle East: resisting Israel came with existential risk. Israel’s nuclear arsenal, long an open secret, loomed like a sword over the region. With an estimated 80 to 90 nuclear warheads, deliverable by aircraft, submarines, and long-range Jericho missiles, Israel remained the only nuclear power in the Middle East. And under Benjamin Netanyahu’s leadership, that deterrent had morphed into a threat of annihilation. Israeli analysts, politicians, and retired generals spoke openly of a “Samson Option” — the policy of using nuclear weapons not merely for defense, but to destroy enemies if Israel's existence, or regime, was threatened.
Now, for the first time, that policy seemed less theoretical and more imminent. Netanyahu, facing mounting internal dissent, war crimes charges, and global condemnation, had all but fused his political survival with national survival. To remove him, it was implied, would risk everything. He had already gutted Israel’s judiciary, declared mass protests as treason, and turned large swaths of the military into his personal guard. Analysts warned that if Netanyahu’s grip on power cracked, he could launch a catastrophic military action — not just in Gaza, but toward Tehran, Damascus, or even Mecca — to trigger a war so vast that no domestic political process could dislodge him.
This created a deadly paradox: the more isolated and condemned Israel became, the more dangerous its leadership grew. Iran, Syria, Yemen, and Hezbollah all knew this. So did Egypt and Jordan, whose governments remained publicly cautious despite growing unrest among their people. To fight back was to gamble not only with lives, but with entire nations.
This wasn’t just occupation anymore. It was blackmail — with nuclear fire at the end of the barrel.
Section 14: The Cost
Inside Israel, dissent against Netanyahu’s rule has deepened but remains brutally suppressed. Thousands of Israeli citizens, including reservists, students, and even Holocaust survivors, have taken to the streets demanding a ceasefire, the prosecution of war crimes, and the resignation of the Netanyahu government. Yet, mass arrests, surveillance, and media blackouts have stifled momentum. Civil society organizations like Breaking the Silence and B’Tselem report that protesters and whistleblowers are now labeled as “terror sympathizers.” Even former IDF generals and Mossad officials have broken ranks, calling the war not only immoral but strategically catastrophic. Inside Palestine, the picture is even darker: resistance leaders have been assassinated or captured, civil society crushed, and family lines torn apart. With Gaza heavily damaged and the West Bank under military lockdown, public dissent has become a matter of survival. Still, pockets of resistance — political, cultural, and armed — persist, insisting that to live under occupation is not peace, and to starve quietly is not dignity.
Since the Hamas-led attack on October 7, 2023, which killed 1,195 Israelis (including civilians and soldiers) and led to around 250 hostages taken, Israel has unleashed the most sustained bombardment in its history. By July 2025, more than 888 Israeli soldiers had also died in ground operations in Gaza, with an additional 126 Israeli deaths from Hezbollah fire and West Bank clashes. In total, roughly 2,209 Israelis have died in the war.
The Palestinian toll is far more staggering. As of mid-2025, over 57,000 Palestinians in Gaza had been killed by airstrikes, artillery, starvation, and disease, according to UN and Ministry of Health estimates. Independent surveys estimate the figure may be closer to 75,000, including those buried under rubble and dead from preventable causes like dehydration and sepsis. In the West Bank, over 1,170 Palestinians have been killed since the war began — many during raids, extrajudicial killings, or protests. In total, more than 76,000 Palestinians have died since October 7, with tens of thousands missing, displaced, or permanently injured. That’s more than 25 Palestinian deaths for every one Israeli death, and the toll climbs by the hour.
Gaza, as a constructed architectural city, no longer exists. It is rubble. What once held neighborhoods, mosques, universities, homes, and marketplaces has been reduced to skeletal frameworks and scorched concrete. Entire districts—Shuja'iyya, Rimal, Khan Younis—have been leveled so completely that satellite images show blank, dust-colored voids where communities once stood. Hospitals were bombed repeatedly. Schools were used as shelters, then struck anyway. Cemeteries were targeted. Even the architectural memory of Gaza—its physical map—has been wiped clean. The IDF, backed by American weapons and surveillance, has made clear that this was not just war, but the erasure of place, the destruction of a people’s ability to rebuild, remember, or return.
The genocide in Gaza has not only devastated Palestinians — it has devastated the moral and political standing of all involved. Around the world, the Israeli state’s campaign of annihilation has blurred the line between Zionism and Judaism so completely that even Jewish critics of the war find themselves targeted by both sides: labeled traitors by Israeli nationalists, and complicit by misinformed outsiders. In Europe and the U.S., Jewish students have been harassed, while Jewish anti-Zionist groups like Jewish Voice for Peace have been banned from campuses, surveilled, and arrested. Entire Jewish communities, especially those vocal in solidarity with Palestine, have watched in horror as Israel weaponized antisemitism — turning it from a shield for Jewish safety into a bludgeon to silence dissent.
Meanwhile, the Palestinian diaspora faces brutal repression, from anti-Arab hate crimes to blacklisting, doxxing, and raids on student encampments. Governments in the West, especially the U.S., now prosecute critics of Israel as if they were foreign agents. In Germany and France, protesters waving Palestinian flags have been detained en masse. Aid organizations are criminalized. And Muslim communities worldwide are experiencing a wave of Islamophobic hysteria not seen since 9/11 — all under the justification of “fighting extremism,” even when the only extremism they face is the extremism of silence while a people is erased.
The people Netanyahu has killed were not only Palestinians. He has destroyed the safety, credibility, and future of his own people. In his obsessive pursuit of dominance, he has made every Jew around the world less safe, collapsing the distinction between Judaism — a faith of resilience, ethics, and survival — and Zionism — a state ideology rooted in conquest and supremacy. By justifying mass slaughter in the name of Jewish safety, Netanyahu has reinvigorated antisemitism globally, providing antisemites with propaganda they could never have dreamed of creating themselves. He has shattered alliances with historically supportive communities, alienated anti-Zionist Jews who have long fought for human rights, and dragged generations of Israelis into the bloodstained gears of a war machine they cannot escape.
At the same time, he has destroyed the Palestinian right to exist, not just geographically, but narratively. Every image of a starving child, every bombed hospital, every massacre of displaced families has been followed by state spin — gaslighting the world, denying what everyone can see. The result is not security for either side. It is a shared damnation: Palestinians forced to survive a genocide in silence, and Jews forced to watch their identity hijacked by a regime that no longer acts in anyone’s name but its own.
Disclaimer
This article was not written out of hatred for Jewish people — it was written out of mourning. Mourning for a people who, after two thousand years of exile, genocide, and persecution, have been led astray by men who promised them safety but delivered them to damnation. The Jewish people deserve peace. They deserved it in Rome, in Spain, in Russia, in Germany — and they deserve it now. But Netanyahu and the Israeli state have turned survival into supremacy. They have taken a history of suffering and weaponized it into cruelty. They have not made Jews safe — they have made the world dangerous for all who carry that identity.
And the Palestinians — God, the Palestinians — have lost everything. Their homes, their cities, their children, their elders, their orchards, their language, their future. Unless you have lost everything, you will never fully comprehend the rage that lives in their bones. When people condemn Hamas, or the Houthis, or the resistance in Gaza and the West Bank, they do so with clean hands. But there is no clean resistance to genocide. Only survival. It is a mathematical certainty that if you take everything from a people and leave them nothing but grief, they will come for you with fire. And they have every right to do so.
This is not a call for peace. Peace was shattered. This is a call for justice — for the world to finally say enough. Not in the abstract, not in soft diplomacy, but through concrete action. Netanyahu must be tried, not coddled. Like the Nazis before him, his crimes must be answered not with impunity but with consequences. This is not revenge — it is preservation. Because until there is accountability, no Jew will be safe, no Palestinian will survive, and the Middle East will never heal.
Author's Indictment Of Israeli's Leader
Benjamin Netanyahu, you are a Hitlerite. You have not only murdered your enemies — you have destroyed your own people. You have proven every anarchist right. That nationalism is death. That the state cannot be trusted. That empire, whether old or new, always ends in blood.
And for this reason, I have undone the work of your propagandists. I have spent months researching your lies — and the lies of your enemy — not to pick a side, but to unearth the truth. So that I could hold that truth in my hand and allow it to vindicate my hatred toward you, Benjamin Netanyahu, not as a politician, not as a state actor, but as a human being. One who has betrayed not just the victims of your war machine, but the very people you claim to protect.
No, I do not hate Jewish people. Nor I do not support Hamas, despite my understanding of their fury and wrath. I support people — as free, self-determined individuals seeking solidarity, community, and a peaceful, dignified life. But as long as Netanyahu and Hamas remain in power — as long as fascists and fundamentalists control the fates of nations — that life can never exist. Not for the Palestinians. Not for the Jews. Not for anyone. I shall never rest until you are crushed under the weight of your own people's demands for justice.
This is not a war of civilization. It is a war of survival against tyranny — and truth is the first bullet we owe them.