[News] A Palestinian year in review: Genocide, resistance and unanswered questions

[Anti-Imperialist News]

 A Palestinian year in review: Genocide, resistance and unanswered questions
By Ramzy Baroud <https://english.palinfo.com/?p=250012>

Friday 27-December-2024 -
https://english.palinfo.com/opinion_articles/a-palestinian-year-in-review-genocide-resistance-and-unanswered-questions/

The story of the Israeli war on Gaza can be epitomized in the story of the
Israeli war on Beit Lahia, a small Palestinian town in the northern part of
the Strip.

When Israel launched its ground operations in Gaza, Beit Lahia was already
largely destroyed due to many days of relentless Israeli bombardment which
killed thousands.

Still, the border Gaza town resisted, leading to a hermetic Israeli siege,
which was never lifted, even when the Israeli military redeployed out of
much of northern Gaza in January 2024.

Beit Lahia is largely an isolated town, a short distance away from the
fence separating besieged Gaza from Israel. It is surrounded mostly by
agricultural areas that make it nearly impossible to defend.

Yet, a year of grisly Israeli war and genocide in Gaza did not end the
fighting there. To the contrary, 2024 has ended where it started, with
intense fighting on all fronts in Gaza, with Beit Lahia, a town that was
supposedly ‘conquered’ earlier, still leading the fight.

Beit Lahia is a microcosm of Israel’s failed war in the Strip, a bloody
grind that has led nowhere, despite the massive destruction, the repeated
ethnic cleansing of the population, the starvation and the genocide. Every
day of Israel’s terrible war on the Palestinians serves as a reminder that
there are no military solutions and that the Palestinian will cannot be
broken, no matter the cost or the sacrifice.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, however, remains unconvinced. He
entered the new year with more promises of ‘total victory’, and ended it as
a wanted criminal by the International Criminal Court (ICC).

The issuing of an arrest warrant for the Israeli leader was a reiteration
of a similar position taken by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) at
the start of 2024.

The ICJ’s position, however, was hardly as strong as many had hoped or
wanted to believe. The world’s highest court had, on 26 January, ordered
Israel “to take action to prevent acts of genocide”, but stopped short of
ordering Israel to halt its war.

The Israeli objectives of the war remained unclear, although Israeli
politicians provided clues as to what the war on Gaza was really all about.
Last January, several Israeli ministers, including 12 from Netanyahu’s
Likud party, took part in a conference calling for the resettlement of Gaza
and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. “Without settlements, there is no
security,” extremist Israeli minister of finance, Bezalel Smotrich, said.

For that to happen, the Palestinian people themselves, not merely those
fighting on the ground, had to be tamed, broken and defeated. Thus, the
‘flour massacres‘, a new Israeli war tactic that was centered around
killing as many Palestinians as possible while waiting for the few aid
trucks that were allowed to reach northern Gaza.

On 29 February, more than 100 Gazans were killed while queueing for aid.
They were mowed down by Israeli soldiers, as they desperately tried to lay
their hands on a loaf of bread, baby milk or a bottle of water. This scene
was repeated, again and again in the north, but also in other parts of the
Gaza Strip throughout the year.

The aim was to starve the Palestinians in the north so that they would be
forced to flee to other parts of the Strip. Famine actualized as early as
January, and many of those who tried to flee south were killed, anyway.

>From the early days of the war, Israel understood that to ethnically
cleanse Palestinians, they must target all aspects of life in the Strip.
This includes hospitals, bakeries, markets, electric grids, water stations,
and the like.

The Gaza hospitals, of course, received a large share of Israeli attacks.
In March, once more, Israel attacked the Al-Shifa Medical Complex in Gaza
City with greater ferocity than before. When it finally withdrew, on April
1, the Israeli army destroyed the entire compound, leaving behind mass
graves with hundreds of bodies, mostly medical staff, women and children.
They even executed several patients.

Aside from a few statements of concern by western leaders, little was done
to bring the genocide to an end. Only when seven international aid workers
with the charity, the World Central Kitchen, were killed by Israel, a
global outcry followed, leading to the first and only Israeli apology in
the entire war.

Desperate to distract from its failure in Gaza, but also Lebanon, and keen
on presenting the Israeli public with any kind of victory, the Israeli
military began escalating its war beyond Gaza. This included the strike on
the Iranian Embassy in Syria on 1 April. Despite repeated attempts, which
included the assassination in Iran of the head of Hamas’s Political Bureau,
Ismail Haniyeh, on 31 July, an all-out regional war has not yet come to
pass.

Another escalation was taking place, this time not by Netanyahu but by
millions of people around the world, demanding an end to the Israeli war. A
focal point of the protests were student movements that spread across US
campuses and, ultimately, worldwide. Instead of allowing free speech to
flourish, however, America’s largest academic institutions resorted to the
police, who violently shut down many of the protests, arresting hundreds of
students, many of whom were not allowed to return to their colleges.

Meanwhile, the US continued to block international efforts aimed at
producing a ceasefire resolution at the United Nations Security Council.
Ultimately, on 31 May, US President Joe Biden delivered a speech conveying
what he termed an “Israeli proposal” to end the war. After some delay,
Hamas accepted the proposal, but Israel rejected it. In his rejection,
Netanyahu referred to Biden’s speech as “incorrect” and “incomplete”.
Strangely, but also unsurprisingly, the White House blamed the Palestinians
for the failed initiative.

Losing faith in the American leadership, some European countries began
changing their foreign policy doctrines on Palestine, with Ireland, Norway
and Spain recognizing the State of Palestine on 28 May. The decisions were
largely symbolic but indicated that western unity around Israel was
faltering.

Israel remained unfazed and, despite international warnings, invaded the
Rafah area in southern Gaza on May 7, seizing control of the Philadelphi
Corridor – a buffer zone between Gaza and the Egyptian border that extends
for 14 kilometers.

Netanyahu’s government insisted that only war can bring their captives
back. There was very little success in that strategy, however. On June 8,
Israel, with logistical support from the US and other western countries
managed to rescue four of its captives held in the Nuseirat refugee camp in
central Gaza. To do so, Israel killed at least 276 Palestinians and wounded
800 more.

In August, another heart-wrenching massacre took place, this time in the
Al-Tabaeen school in Gaza City, where 93 people, mostly women and children,
were murdered in a single Israeli strike. According to the United Nations
High Commissioner for Human Rights, women and children were the main
victims of the Israeli genocide, accounting for 70 per cent by 8 November.

An earlier report by the Lancet Medical Journal said that if the war
stopped in July, “186,000 or even more” Palestinians would have been
killed. The war, however, went on. The rate of genocide in Gaza seemed to
maintain the same killing ratio, despite the major regional developments
including the mutual Iranian-Israeli tit-for-tat strikes and the major
Israeli ground operation in Lebanon.

In October, Israel returned to the policies of targeting or besieging
hospitals, killing doctors and other medical staff, and targeting aid and
civil defence workers. Still, Israel would not achieve any of its strategic
goals of the war. Even the killing of Hamas’ leader, Yahya Sinwar, in
battle on 16 October would not, in any way, alter the course of the war.

Israel’s frustration grew by leaps and bounds throughout the year. Its
desperate attempt to control the global narrative on the Gaza genocide
largely failed. On 19 July, and after listening to the testimonies of over
50 countries, the ICJ issued a landmark ruling that “Israel’s continued
presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is illegal.”

That ruling, which expressed international consensus on the matter, was
translated on 17 September to a UN General Assembly resolution “demanding
an end to Israel’s occupation of Palestine within the next twelve months”.

All of this effectively meant that Israel’s attempt at normalizing its
occupation of Palestine, and its quest to illegally annex the West Bank was
considered null and void by the international community. Israel, however,
doubled down, taking its rage against West Bank Palestinians, who, too,
were experiencing one of the worst Israeli pogroms in many years.

According to the Palestinian Health Ministry, by 21 November, at least 777
Palestinians have been killed since 7 October 2023, while thousands more
were wounded and over 11,700 arrested.

To make matters worse, Smotrich called, on November 11, for the full
annexation of the West Bank. The call was made soon after the election of
Donald Trump as the next US President, an event that initially inspired
optimism amongst Israeli leaders, but later concerns that Trump may not
serve the role of the savior for Israel after all.

On 21 November, the ICC issued its historic ruling to arrest Netanyahu and
his Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. The decision represented a measure of
hope, however faint, that the world is finally ready to hold Israel
accountable for its many crimes.

2025 could, indeed, represent that watershed moment. This remains to be
seen. However, as far as Palestinians are concerned, even with the failure
of the international community to stop the genocide and reign in Israel,
their steadfastness, sumoud, will remain strong until freedom is finally
attained.

*-Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of the Palestine Chronicle.
He is the author of five books. His latest is ‘These Chains Will Be Broken:
Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons’. Baroud is
a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global
Affairs (CIGA) and also at the Afro-Middle East Center (AMEC).*
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