Liquidation.
Annihilation.
Extermination.
Erasure.
Genocide.
Arising after World War II and the Nazi Holocaust in Europe, the United Nations established the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (the Genocide Convention), and as of 2022, it’s been ratified by 153 countries (including the US, although it took 40 years for the US to sign in 1988).
According to the Genocide Convention’s definition, genocide means any act “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group.”
I don’t repeat this definition here to try to convince anyone that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza and in the occupied Palestinian Territories, and in fact, that apartheid, at best, and ethnic cleansing and genocide have been the Zionist agenda from the beginning; if that isn’t clear now, then no amount of arguing will convince them.
I repeat the genocide definition now because, as long and difficult as it has been for human rights groups, international courts, nations, religious organizations, and Palestine solidarity organizations to enter “genocide” into the public discourse about what Israel’s doing, now that we hear and see “genocide” being used, for many it’s become so much Muzak, in one ear and out the other, that I’m not sure most people really understand the wanton depravity of those who are visiting this heinous act.
This is not an accident. This is a deliberate, calculated, strategic, intention to erase Palestine from human memory.
This is why it’s important that we keep using the word as well as its synonyms.
And to describe what genocide means in clear, real terms, the human cost, the intentional evil.
Israel … is committing … GENOCIDE … against the Palestinian people. Period. Full stop.
Genocide.
Liquidation.
Annihilation.
Extermination.
Erasure.
There are four reports prompting my outrage and the need to explain even more graphically what genocide looks like in real, human terms.
First, according to a recently released United Nations Report (June 23, 2026), the headline reads: “Israel continues to commit genocide and other atrocity crimes by deliberately targeting Palestinian children.”
CHILDREN!!!
Here are some of its findings:
a. Israel has killed 20,000 children and injured 44,000 more since 7 October 2023;
b. Severe physical and mental injuries, mass trauma, orphanhood, separation, disability, repeated displacements, starvation and the collapse of education and healthcare have erased childhood and will continue to affect children in Gaza throughout their lives;
c. Palestinian children have been arrested and subjected to torture and other severe forms of mistreatment in Israeli prisons and detention facilities, with no information on their whereabouts;
d. Israeli security forces have used sexual violence against children as part of the collective shaming and oppression, entrenched within a prolonged, ethnic, gendered and intergenerational pattern of occupation and hostilities;
e. Israel’s targeting of neonatal and maternity care centres in Gaza have directly harmed the survival of newborns and Palestinians’ reproductive future.
f. In addition, starvation imposed by Israel through blockade and siege have further caused the death of Palestinian children and severely impacted the health of many others. And according to another recent report, this one from the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC):
“Between April 16 and June 30, 2026, more than 1.2 million people — 59% of Gaza’s population — faced Crisis or worse conditions (IPC Phase 3 or above), including 212,000 in Emergency (IPC Phase 4). According to the organization, conditions are projected to deteriorate between July and December 2026, with more than 1.4 million people, or 67 percent of the population, expected to face Crisis or worse conditions. “In the absence of humanitarian food-security assistance, 1.9 million people, 90 percent of Gaza’s population, would face high levels of acute food insecurity through December 2026.”
g. Dismantling and destruction of orphanages and education facilities in Gaza and the West Bank have obstructed cognitive, social and emotional care and development and disrupted the foundations of Palestinian society.
The United Nations summarizes the Report: “The essence of childhood has been destroyed.” And at the press conference releasing the Report, Commissioner Christ Sidoti said, “There can be no doubt in anyone who reads today’s report that every international legal norm has been violated by the actions of the Israeli authorities towards Palestinian children and they need to be held accountable.”
Second, hundreds of bodies of women, men, and children have been buried in mass graves, some naked with hands tied behind their backs, evidence of executions, others mutilated showing signs of torture, others with medical tubes and other equipment attached to them, evidence of killing those hospitalized, as well as health care workers in their scrubs. And some were buried alive. And most egregious of all, many of the bodies in the mass graves were found with some of their organs removed.
And Healthcare Workers for Palestine reported, February 22, 2025:
“According to Euro Med “Concerns about organ theft from the corpses were brought up by Euro-Med Monitor, which cited reports from medical professionals in Gaza who quickly examined a few bodies after their release. These medical professionals found evidence of organ theft, including missing cochleas and corneas as well as other vital organs like livers, kidneys, and hearts. … For years, the Occupation’s war machine has laid claim to the bodies of Palestinian martyrs, not only holding them hostage, withholding their remains from their families, but also using them to perpetuate schemes of organ theft and trafficking. Israeli doctors, in direct violation of international law, have stolen Palestinian organs and Palestinian skin.”
The Healthcare workers conclude: “Zionist brutality reaches beyond death.”
Third, connected to this, just three weeks ago, August 4, 2026, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor reported that:
“Israel is clearing truckloads of rubble out of Gaza in a ‘deliberate’ move to erase evidence of genocide and war crimes.” They go on to say Israel has “removed, crushed, or moved more than 11 million U.S. tons of rubble from original sites within Gaza that Israel now occupies, amounting to about 66% of the Strip.” They documented close to 100 Israeli trucks daily – DAILY – carting away debris. This “debris” contains the physical evidence of genocide that would be necessary to hold Israel accountable to the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court, both of which rely on forensic documentation to investigate war crimes.
Since the genocide began, and increasing recently, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor also reports that Israel has destroyed more than 93% of Gaza’s cemeteries since October 2023, defiling the Palestinian dead. The report states:
“The systematic targeting of graves through demolition and bulldozing constitutes a grave violation of international humanitarian law and reflects a deliberate pattern of erasure. These actions violate the sanctity of the dead, erase physical traces, inflict severe psychological and spiritual harm on the living, and ultimately undermine collective memory, severing historical ties between the population, their ancestors, and their land.”
In other cases, Israeli Zionist forces deliberately bulldoze the defiled bodies from the desecrated cemeteries into mass graves, dismembering them in the process, thus covering up evidence of their genocide.
The Institute for Palestine Studies (already in August 2024) put it like this:
“The crucial point is that these practices are integral to Israel’s settler-colonial regime. Since the state’s creation, Israel has sought to displace and replace the indigenous Palestinian population. Thus, stripping Palestinian dead bodies from their dignity and denying them and their families their humanity feed into the processes of racialisation and dehumanisation as to intensify elimination. This involves desecrating Palestinian bodies, holding them hostage, depriving them of the right to a proper burial, and denying families the opportunity to mourn.
“All over historic Palestine, the bodies of Palestinians remain unprotected, subjected to ongoing colonial violence. In Gaza, Israel’s use of mass graves, the desecration of dead bodies, the destruction of burial sites, and the prevented access of forensic investigation teams are all calculated decisions to cover-up evidence which could be used to hold the perpetrators accountable, exposing Israel’s long history of erasure and dehumanisation that is inherent in its settler-colonial tactics.”
Finally, in March, the Israeli Knesset passed a law that imposes the death penalty on Palestinians living in the West Bank found guilty in Israeli military courts of acts that Israel deems acts of terrorism. Palestinians face a 99.7% conviction rate in Israeli military courts. Judge, jury, executioner.
Far-right fascist Israeli Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir announced nine days ago on August 18:
“I promised to pass a death penalty law for Palestinians and I did it, now I’m building a facility to execute them, I’ll put cameras in and it will be possible to watch them die live.” He calls it “a hanging facility.” The building to which Ben-Gvir refers is equipped with “observation booths” where people can come to watch Palestinians hang to death, like the ancient Romans watched Christians die for sport. Recently he offered that Israel should kill “30 or 40” people every night in Gaza.
The law does not apply to Israeli citizens, including settlers, because they are not subject to military law, they are subject to civil law.
So, this is the true face of Israel’s 78-year-long agenda, Zionism’s deliberate, planned, purposeful, and strategic intent to destroy a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group – Palestine,” to erase its traditions, its culture, its heritage, its history, the very word “Palestine” from human memory. For 78 years we have heard the same refrain from the Zionist regime, repeated most recently by Israel’s Chief Sephardic Rabbi David Yosef, who said that Israel has a right to all of occupied Palestine, declaring that “Gaza is ours,” “we will return there,” and that “there is no such thing as a Palestinian people” and “they do not have rights.”
I agree with the Indian human rights activist, Arundhati Roy, “What is under the rubble in Gaza is not just the bodies of Palestinians, but the carcass of Western liberal democracy.”
So I’ll just add, “How dare the US, how dare the West, how dare the Christian Church lecture Palestinians about non-violence, about human rights? How dare they? How dare we?”
I’m tired – I am O, so f#&@ing tired – of those on the Left who want to dialogue their way into and out of their lukewarm liberalism during this genocide. They sit comfortably in their homes, offices, in their churches soothing their offended consciences believing they would have been on the side of the underground in Nazi Germany and marched with Gandhi and King, while Palestinians are being mercilessly murdered by Israel every day, funded by, in criminal partnership with the US government and our tax dollars.
We know what we’ll get from the Religious and Political Right, captive to a macho, militarist, colonialist, supremacist ideology and theology. I expect more from progressives. So spare me, especially you liberals, your thoughts and prayers and your crocodile tears, your occasional word, your toothless resolutions by which you console yourselves but which cost you nothing.
While you’re knelt in prayer and wringing your hands, we’re standing arm-in-arm, hand-in-hand with our friends in Palestine; and why we stand foursquare in solidarity – a costly solidarity – with the Palestinian people at this time is not only because of the 73,000+ murdered in Gaza, 20,000 of whom are children, each a precious human being, the 175,000 wounded, and the 100s and 100s of thousands displaced; even more, we are standing against Israel’s deliberate, planned, systematic, and INTENTIONAL strategy and goal to erase Palestine from human memory.
Genocide.
Liquidation.
Annihilation.
Extermination.
Erasure.
When your children, your grandchildren ask someday where you were during this genocide, what will your answer be?
