“All the world is a stage,” Shakespeare wrote. But on this stage today, there seems to be no place for one part of the world – Gaza. Instead, the lights are shining brightly on Donald Trump for his victory in the US presidential election and the Democrats for their defeat.
As the world’s attention focuses on American politics, the world media has stopped reporting that people are being exterminated in Gaza. Looking at media headlines, one would think the genocide has stopped, but it hasn’t.
Palestinian journalists and the barely functioning medical authorities continue reporting: 54 people killed on November 5, 38 people killed on November 6, 52 people killed on November 7, 39 people killed on November 8, 44 people killed on November 9, 49 people killed on November 10.
And these are just the bodies that have been found. Countless victims lie in the streets or under the rubble in levelled neighbourhoods.
The Palestinians of Gaza are being exterminated at a steady pace by US-made Israeli fighter jets, tanks, drones, quadcopters, bulldozers and machineguns.
In recent weeks, the genocide has taken yet another wicked turn, with the Israeli army implementing what the Israeli media have called the “General’s Plan” – or the ethnic cleansing of northern Gaza.
As a result, entire communities are vanishing in a campaign that transcends military goals, targeting the very existence of the Palestinian people.
The towns of Beit Hanoon and Beit Lahiya were traditionally sleepy villages once cherished for their agricultural bounty and quiet lifestyle. They were renowned for the sweetness of their strawberries and oranges and their sandy dunes full of grazing sheep and goats.
Nearby stood the behemoth of Jabaliya, home to the largest and most densely populated refugee camp among Gaza’s eight camps, with more than 200,000 residents. It is where the first Intifada began in 1987 after an Israeli driver mowed down and killed four Palestinian labourers.
All areas of northern Gaza have been subject to repeated destruction since the second Intifada. But today, they face a level of violence and devastation that are as unimaginable as they are unprecedented, “a genocide within a genocide” as described by Majed Bamya, a senior Palestinian diplomat at the United Nations. The mass death, mass displacement and mass destruction are carried out with shocking ferocity, rendering the entire north a wasteland.
At the start of this latest campaign, about 400,000 Palestinians remained in the north, down from a population of one million. These people were given an ultimatum by Israel to leave but no guarantees of safe passage or an alternative place to shelter. Many decided to stay. Those who have tried to leave have often been targeted by Israeli forces and killed in the streets. Others who have made it have been tormented along the way.
In one harrowing scene related by a witness to journalist Motasem Dalloul, who posted it on social media, Israeli soldiers separated children from their mothers and pushed them into a pit. Then an Israeli tank circled around the pit, covering the children in sand and terrorising them. Eventually, the soldiers started taking children from the pit and throwing them over to the women.
According to the post: “Whoever caught a child was ordered to carry him and move away quickly, with no guarantee that the child would be their own. Many mothers carried children who were not their own, and were forced to leave with them, leaving their own children in the hands of other mothers. This marked the beginning of a new chapter of suffering, with mothers searching for their children in the arms of other women, trying to calm the children they held until they found their real mothers.”
For those Palestinians who decided to stay or are unable to leave, the horror continues. To force them out or just to eliminate them, Israel has deployed a deliberate policy of forced starvation. Its forces are systemically blocking humanitarian aid from reaching the north, including food, bottled water and medical supplies.
To accelerate mass death, the Israeli army is also preventing medical staff and rescue teams from reaching the wounded and others in need of medical help. Those who manage to get to a hospital often discover upon arrival that it can provide neither medical care nor safety. Many succumb to their injuries due to a critical lack of medical supplies and personnel.
The Israeli army has repeatedly attacked the barely functioning hospitals in the north. This led the UN special rapporteur on health, Dr Tlaleng Mofokeng, to label Israel’s actions as “medicide” on October 25. According to a recent UN report, Israel has engaged in a “concerted policy to destroy Gaza’s healthcare system”, including “deliberate attacks on medical personnel and facilities” – actions constituting war crimes.
During the most recent Israeli assault on Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahiya, its remaining medical equipment, supplies, oxygen cylinders, generators and medicines were destroyed. Thirty healthcare workers, including Dr Mohamed Obeid, head of orthopaedic surgery at al-Awda Hospital in Jabalia, were detained while providing care at Kamal Adwan. An unknown number of patients and displaced civilians sheltering nearby were also detained. The Israeli army dismantled tents, stripped men of their clothing and transported them to undisclosed locations.
The hospital’s director, Dr Hussam Abu Safiyeh, was interrogated and eventually released, only to discover that his teenage son had been executed. The haunting sound of his voice leading the Janazah prayer for his son pierces the soul and serves as a reminder of the brutal toll exacted by the occupation on Gaza’s medical professionals and their families.
With few hospitals and schools able to provide safety, the remaining Palestinians are crowding into residential buildings. As a result, the indiscriminate Israeli bombardment of residential areas is taking a staggering human toll, sometimes erasing entire extended families.
As I write this, the Abu Safi home in northern Gaza has been struck, killing at least 10 members of the family and injuring many others. Those wounded and trapped beneath the rubble are calling out for help, but rescue teams are prevented from reaching them.
On October 29, the Abu Nasr family’s multistorey home in Beit Lahiya, which had become a sanctuary for more than 100 displaced individuals from the same extended family along with the nearly 100 residents of the building, became the scene of a horrific massacre when Israel bombed it.
No ambulance or rescue crew was permitted to reach them, leaving neighbours — some wounded themselves — to dig through the rubble with their bare hands, clinging to the desperate hope of rescuing survivors. Of the more than 200 people sheltering there, only 15 survived, including 10 children, according to witnesses. More than 100 remain under the rubble.
The Abu Nasr family was known for their generosity, always opening their doors to anyone in need and sharing the limited resources they had. After the massacre, a neighbour shared how the family had been supporting displaced families who had settled nearby with nothing for their children. Despite the severe shortages in the north and the ongoing siege, the family’s grandmother offered them blankets, food and water, checking on them each day until that tragic day when they were targeted.
This mounting toll captures a genocide in real time in which lives are not merely lost but extinguished without a trace, each one irreplaceable in a web of relentless and interconnected loss.
While Israel is trying to erase Palestinian life in northern Gaza, it has not slowed down its genocidal assaults in the rest of the strip. Palestinians continue to face bombardment even in so-called safe zones.
My own family felt the anguish of this reality two weeks ago.
That day, just as I was preparing to leave for work, my son cried out, “Mom, mom, that’s Aunt Majdiya on the news!” I rushed to the TV room, where the screen showed Majdiya – an enduring survivor of the 1948 Nakba – sitting beside the body of her daughter Suzan, 47, and clutching the lifeless form of her five-month-old great-grandson, Tamer. Family members encircled them.
The report relayed that Suzan and Tamer had been killed in a strike on Nuseirat camp, an attack that took at least 18 lives. Later, we learned that another of Suzan’s grandchildren, four-year-old Nada, was also killed as she lay sleeping beside her.
Majdiya is now mourning the sixth loss in her family. The sight of Suzan’s still body and baby Tamer in Majdiya’s arms, her face etched with grief, her hands trembling while she describes her loss, breaks the heart.
The silent sorrow of Suzan’s children and siblings, gathered around the bodies, is unforgettable. The image of Bisan, Suzan’s daughter-in-law and the mother of Tamer and Nada, taking the last photographs by mobile of her children’s lifeless bodies is unbearably haunting. And then Suzan’s 17-year-old son, clinging to his mother’s body and pleading to be buried with her, a depth of sorrow that defies description.
Just a few months before her own death, Suzan had suffered the painful loss of her eldest son, Tamer, a 29-year-old taxi driver who helped displaced people move from place to place. Tamer’s son was born just a few days after his death and named after him. Baby Tamer lived for five months before being killed last week while sleeping next to his grandmother.
In search of safety, Suzan and her family had been forced to flee multiple times. First, they sought refuge with my brother-in-law in the Hay al-Amal neighbourhood of Khan Younis. When Hay al-Amal came under attack, they moved to al-Mawasi, but shelter was hard to find in the overcrowded area. Their next stop was Rafah and then back to Khan Younis when Rafah was destroyed.
Exhausted but resolute, Suzan declared, “If we are to die, then let it be in Nuseirat near our home. We will live there, or we will die there, but I will not die far from home.” So she and her family made the impossible journey from Khan Younis to Nuseirat camp, miraculously making it past Israeli forces blocking off the way between al-Zawaida and Nuseirat.
Perhaps Majdiya’s only consolation in her unimaginable grief was that she was able to offer Suzan and her two great-grandchildren a dignified burial, wrapping them in white shrouds.
So many families, especially in the north, have been denied even the basic means for honouring their dead. Some have been forced to wrap their dead loved ones in blankets, others in plastic garbage bags.
This inability to provide loved ones a respectful farewell makes the pain and grief much more unbearable. This, of course, is an intentional erosion of dignity. The Israeli army appears to be following the words of retired General Giora Eiland, the author of the “General’s Plan”, who said at a Knesset meeting: “What matters to [Hamas leader Yahya] Sinwar is land and dignity, and with this manoeuvre, you take away both land and dignity.”
This is the painful reality of Gaza – a reality hidden from global view, yet demanding urgent attention and action. While the world may be absorbed by the political drama in the US, Gaza faces systemic extermination, dehumanisation and brutality. To ignore this suffering is to be complicit in the erasure of a people and their history. Palestinian people will neither forget nor forgive.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
