Our Wednesday News Analysis | The Death Count Trap: Why Tallying Victims Won’t Stop Israel’s Genocide

The body of 9-year-old Ritaj Reyhan, who was killed in an Israeli attack on the northern Gaza Strip, is taken from the morgue of Al-Shifa Hospital for funeral prayers and burial in Gaza City, Palestine on April 9, 2026. (Photo by Anas Zeyad Fteha/Anadolu via Getty Images)

The words “killed,” “injured,” “maimed,” and the like often lose a great part of their meaning when they are repeated so relentlessly.

Take, for example, a headline like: “13 Palestinians Killed in Gaza, Others Wounded.” Though many of us can still feel deep sadness over such a tragedy, the news itself becomes less shocking over time.

According to figures produced by the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza, Israel has killed and wounded a total of over 250,000 Palestinians since the start of the genocide in 2023.

The tally is updated daily because the killing never stops.

The very least we can do is refuse to turn our backs or reduce the genocide before our eyes to numbers.

On July 23, six Palestinians were killed in Gaza. A day earlier, 13 were killed, and the day before that, nine others were killed, and so on.

It is this “and so on” that makes us lose our sense, over time, of what these tragedies actually entail. These are innocent people who are burned alive in their tents, bombed in their cars, or killed while attempting to enjoy a brief moment of respite from the scorching heat on the beach.

Among the nine killed on July 21, an entire family, including four young children, was wiped out in a single strike. As reports of Israel’s daily harvest of Palestinian lives in Gaza multiply, journalists too often neglect to humanize those killed.

A photo circulating on social media showed three of those children: a boy wearing a T-shirt that read “Santa Monica Beach”; his bespectacled sister in a pink shirt, proudly holding a certificate of achievement from her school; and their youngest sister, posing gently.

These three represent every single Palestinian child killed since the start of this genocide. According to United Nations and international estimates, over 21,000 children have been killed in Gaza, with tens of thousands more maimed or buried under the rubble.

Though the daily routine of killing makes the tragedy feel less shocking for those merely hearing the numbers, it becomes infinitely more tragic for those who must bear it directly. In Gaza, not a single family has been spared the loss of loved ones, making the grief compound day after day.

There are no words to describe the collective pain of Gaza...

Read more: The Death Count Trap: Why Tallying Victims Won’t Stop Israel’s Genocide

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TWO STATES IN ONE HOMELAND: RECYCLING A POLITICALLY DEFUNCT PARTITION PARADIGM

Source: Palestine Chronicle
https://www.palestinechronicle.com/two-states-in-one-homeland-recycling-a-politically-defunct-partition-paradigm/

By Awad Abdelfattah
Published August 3, 2026

Efforts to manage the conflict without dismantling the structures of settler colonialism have produced deeper occupation, expanding settlements, increasing fragmentation.

Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, US President Bill Clinton, and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat at the signing of the Oslo Accord. (Photo: Vince Musi, via Wikimedia Commons)

In recent years—before the genocidal war on Gaza—the collapse of the Oslo Accords and the fading illusion of the two-state solution led to the emergence of several alternative political proposals to resolve the colonial conflict in Palestine. Most prominent among these is the one democratic state vision, which primarily takes two forms: a unitary state or a binational state.

The most recent iteration is the seven-year-old One Democratic State Campaign (ODSC), which builds its program on the original liberation project endorsed by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1971. The ODSC, a Palestinian-led campaign, has updated this original program by drawing on the extensive literature produced by Palestinian intellectuals, academics, and politically educated activists since the late 1990s. While these two forms disagree on certain issues, they diverge from traditional models on one fundamental component: the necessity of dismantling the structures of colonial domination and creating a single state—either with three parliaments or with one parliament, one constitution, and one judiciary. The ODSC adopts the unitary state model as the fairest and most sustainable solution.

Recently, however, an Arab- Israeli Jewish initiative titled Two States in One Homeland has emerged, claiming to offer an alternative to the traditional two-state solution. In reality, it is merely a recycling of an already defunct paradigm—one effectively destroyed by the Israeli colonial and genocidal regime.

Following the emergence of the Two States in One Homeland initiative as a political proposal, questions have increasingly surfaced within Palestinian academic and political circles, as well as among international solidarity activists, regarding the fundamental differences between this model and the vision advanced by the (ODSC). At first glance, the two projects appear to share important features. Both acknowledge that the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea has become a single geopolitical and economic space, making the traditional territorial partition envisioned by the Oslo process increasingly impossible. Both also recognize that the classic two-state formula has reached a historic dead end.

This apparent convergence, however, conceals a far more profound divergence. Beneath the shared vocabulary lies a fundamentally different understanding of the nature of the conflict, the meaning of justice, and the political future of Palestine. While the Two States in One Homeland proposal seeks to preserve the basic logic of partition in a modified form, the One Democratic State Campaign argues that the political, legal, and moral assumptions underlying partition have themselves collapsed. The disagreement, therefore, is not merely institutional or constitutional; it concerns the very framework through which Palestine should be understood and decolonized.

The significance of this debate has grown as the Two States in One Homeland initiative has become increasingly institutionalized, attracting external funding and the participation of a few Palestinian academics and researchers, particularly from within “Israe. By contrast, the One Democratic State Campaign—which is a Palestinian-led organization—has remained a voluntary political campaign since its establishment. It brings together Palestinians from across all segments of the population—including citizens of Israel, Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, Jerusalemites, and the diaspora—alongside Israeli Jewish academics and activists committed to anti-colonial and anti-Zionist principles. This broad social and political composition has given the campaign a higher degree of legitimacy within significant sections of Palestinian political discourse, making it widely accepted among Palestinians. Furthermore, the ODSC project derives its inspiration from the Palestine Liberation Organization’s original vision, rather than being a framework presented or imposed by foreign powers. This originality makes it far more appealing and convincing...

Read more: Two States in One Homeland: Recycling a Politically Defunct Partition Paradigm

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THE WEST BANK ON THE BRINK: ISRAEL’S FAR RIGHT, U.S. SUPPORT, AND A REGION IN CRISIS

Source: Mideast Discourse
https://mideastdiscourse.com/2026/07/28/the-west-bank-on-the-brink-israels-far-right-u-s-support-and-a-region-in-crisis/

By Steven Sahiounie
Published August 3, 2026

While the world remains focused on the escalating confrontation between the United States and Iran, another crisis is deepening in the occupied Palestinian territories. Across the West Bank, Israeli military raids, mass arrests, settlement expansion, and attacks by extremist settlers are creating an increasingly volatile reality that threatens to push the region toward another major explosion.

The question is whether the escalation is simply a continuation of Israel’s decades-long settlement policy or whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government is deliberately exploiting the current regional turmoil to strengthen its political position and consolidate support among Israel’s most nationalist and ideological voters.

The answer may be a combination of both.

The settlement project did not begin with the current Israeli government. However, the rise of the far-right coalition led by Netanyahu has given figures such as National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich unprecedented political influence. Both have long supported the expansion of Israeli settlements and advocated policies that would strengthen Israeli control over the occupied West Bank.

Their influence has raised concerns that settlement expansion and settler violence are becoming increasingly intertwined with official government policy.

The timing is particularly significant. With Israel facing growing international criticism over its conduct in Gaza and the West Bank, and with the political future of Netanyahu’s coalition increasingly dependent on the support of the religious and nationalist right, the Palestinian issue has become both a security challenge and a domestic political battlefield.

For Israel’s far right, the West Bank is not merely a territory disputed over borders. It is viewed as an essential component of an ideological project rooted in the belief that

Jews have a historical and religious claim to the land.

Palestinian writer and political analyst Nael Barakat, speaking to me about the latest developments, argues that the roots of the settlement movement extend back more than a century...

Read more: The West Bank on the Brink: Israel’s Far Right, U.S. Support, and a Region in Crisis