Israel no longer hides its genocidal aims in Gaza. Will the world keep looking away?

A Palestinian mother mourns over the body of her 15-year-old daughter Raghad Abu Amra at Al-Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, 3 April 2025

Since October 7, Israeli cabinet ministers, political figures, military officers and media pundits have openly and endlessly incited for the destruction of Gaza and its Palestinian inhabitants. Already by December 2023, South Africa had compiled an extensive record of these statements for its submission to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) alleging that Israel intended to perpetrate genocide in the Palestinian enclave.

Yet as the list of inflammatory statements grew, and the Israeli leadership refused to articulate a post-war vision that precluded this ghastly outcome, they also spoke to international audiences in terms that highlighted the narrower military aims of defeating Hamas and rescuing Israeli captives. This gave overseas supporters the cover to ignore the more extreme rhetoric.

Meanwhile, Israel continued to inflict levels of death, destruction and deprivation that could not possibly be justified by military necessity. Gaza, populated for millennia, has been reduced to rubble and ash. Residential neighborhoods, schools, universities, libraries, hospitals, businesses, and cultural and historical sites have been obliterated.

While no proper accounting is yet possible under siege conditions, at least 54,000 people are presumed dead — including 18,000 children — and hundreds of thousands wounded, with almost no medical care available. Satellite images today reveal a wasteland reminiscent of what the deputy speaker of Israel’s parliament MK Nissim Vaturi, said was the country’s “one common goal” after October 7: “erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth.”

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