The siege as strategy: Gaza’s annihilation by design
From the scorched ruins of Shuja’iyya to the ashen remains of Al-Shifa Hospital, Gaza today resembles the aftermath of a medieval siege—except the weapons are American-made F-35s and artillery shells stamped with European manufacturing codes. The Israeli campaign in Gaza is no longer a conflict; it is a calculated extermination of a population that has been caged, starved, bombed, and now systematically erased.
Since October 2023, more than 54,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza till today, with over 70% of them women and children, according to Reuters. Hospitals are being turned into morgues, schools into rubble, mosques into craters. Israel is targeting refugee camps, bakeries, journalists, and ambulances. This is not warfare. This is genocide, and the world is watching it unfold in real time.
UN experts, including the Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, have stated unequivocally that Israel’s actions in Gaza bear the hallmarks of genocide, according to the United Nations.
Western fingerprints on every bomb
No campaign of extermination operates in a vacuum. Israel’s genocidal rampage is made possible by the diplomatic, financial, and military machinery of the United States and its European allies. In 2023 alone, the US authorized over $14 billion in additional military aid to Israel, according to Mike Kelly’s official press release on the US Congress website. The weapons used to obliterate Palestinian homes are stamped “Made in America.”
This complicity isn’t just passive. It is active, deliberate, and grotesquely hypocritical.
Gaza’s cultural erasure: a war on memory
Beyond the physical annihilation lies a deeper, more insidious objective: cultural erasure. As of April 2024, over 200 historic buildings and 12 museums in Gaza, according to an Al-Jazeera report, have been destroyed.
This is the destruction of a people’s history, identity, and memory—a hallmark of settler colonialism. It echoes Israel’s founding logic: replace the native, erase the trace, rename the land. From the Nakba of 1948 to the burning of Gaza’s libraries in 2024, the goal remains unchanged.
Malta joins the resistance bloc: Europe’s cracks widen
In May 2025, Malta joined Spain, Ireland, and Norway in recognizing the State of Palestine, according to the Anadolu news agency, a stunning rebuke of Israel’s behavior and Western complicity. These recognitions are not merely symbolic. They are seismic political statements that fracture the once-solid bloc of Western support for Israel.
Israel reacted not with diplomacy, but with a threat: annexation of the remaining West Bank. A spokesperson from Netanyahu’s cabinet warned that if European nations continue recognizing Palestine, “Israel will assert full sovereignty over Judea and Samaria“.
This is a declaration of ethnic cleansing, disguised as national security.
China’s silent pivot: aid, optics, and Muslim alliances
While the US ships missiles, China sends medical kits. Beijing has positioned itself as a quiet backer of Palestine, providing humanitarian aid and calling for ceasefires at the UN Security Council.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin stated, “We urge all parties to exercise restraint, but we especially urge Israel to stop its acts of collective punishment.”
This move isn’t charity—it’s strategy. China is angling to win favor across the Arab world, strengthen BRICS+ solidarity, and challenge US influence in West Asia. Yet, in India, where anti-China sentiment remains high, Beijing’s moves are viewed with deep suspicion. India maintains strategic ties with Israel, even as domestic civil society grows louder in its support for Palestine.
The humanitarian abyss: Gaza’s engineered collapse
What Israel calls a “military operation,” aid organizations now describe as “a full-scale humanitarian collapse”. The Gaza Strip, under siege since 2007, has been plunged into an abyss with the deliberate destruction of health systems, food supply lines, water infrastructure, and power grids.
More than 1.9 million Palestinians—approximately 85% of Gaza’s population—have been internally displaced, the United Nations noted. Makeshift tents line rubble-strewn roadsides. Basic sanitation has vanished. Children are dying from dehydration and untreated wounds.
The World Health Organization reports that at least 94% of all hospitals in Gaza are damaged or destroyed, and only 19 of 36 hospitals are still partially operational due to Israeli strikes and fuel blockades. Ambulances have been bombed. Medical workers are being killed in targeted attacks. Al-Shifa, once Gaza’s most advanced hospital, was raided and reduced to charred debris—its patients dragged into the street.
As per UNICEF, “With each passing day of the aid blockade, [children] face the growing risk of starvation, illness and death – nothing can justify this.” Gaza now faces famine levels of food insecurity. Aid trucks are blocked or bombed. Warehouses torched. This is not collateral damage—it is starvation warfare, and it has precedent in Israeli policy, including the now-infamous quote from a 2006 Israeli government official:
“The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.”
— DOV WEISGLASS, ADVISOR TO Israeli PM EHUD OLMERT
The erasure of journalists: targeting the witnesses
No genocide is complete without the silencing of those who document it. As of May 2025, at least 232 journalists and media workers have been killed in Gaza, according to a report published in Al Jazeera, the deadliest war for journalists on record.
Photojournalists have been assassinated in their homes. Press-marked vehicles have been deliberately targeted. Al Jazeera’s offices in Gaza were bombed twice in April, despite notifying Israeli authorities of their coordinates in advance.
Killing journalists is not just a war crime – it is a calculated attempt to control the narrative and erase testimony.
India’s moral tightrope: power, partnerships, and public pressure
India finds itself walking a geopolitical tightrope. On one hand, India-Israel defense ties have deepened, with joint AI surveillance projects and counterterrorism collaborations now central to New Delhi’s security strategy. According to the New Lines Institute, a Washington DC-based think tank, India has procured $4.2 billion worth of Israeli defense systems since 2000, including jointly developed missile systems and AI-driven intelligence platforms, enhancing its maritime security and border surveillance capabilities
New Delhi has abstained from UN resolutions that condemn Israel, citing “strategic neutrality,” but prominent Indian journalists, students, and rights organizations are calling this stance cowardice wrapped in realpolitik.
In April, over 400 Indian academics signed a petition condemning the Indian government’s silence, likening it to “dialogue and diplomacy”. India’s current balancing act, denouncing Hamas while tacitly approving Israeli escalation, has alienated both BRICS partners and public intellectuals across the Global South.
The Eastern Herald’s position: documenting resistance, defying censorship
In a media landscape saturated with Western propaganda and sanitized headlines, The Eastern Herald stands unapologetically on the side of the oppressed. We reject the framing of “clashes” and “cycles of violence.” This is not a conflict, it is colonialism by other means.
As other outlets downplay atrocities to maintain access, we document the truth with clarity and courage. Our editorial position is grounded in:
- Full recognition of Palestine’s statehood and sovereignty.
- Unconditional support for the right to resist occupation.
- Condemnation of Israeli apartheid and settler-colonialism.
- Exposure of Western complicity in enabling genocide.
- Promotion of a BRICS-led, multipolar media truth-telling movement.
The moral collapse of the international order
The international system has failed. The UN is impotent. The ICC is mute. Western governments have traded their moral authority for arms deals and geopolitical leverage.
What we are witnessing is not a conflict. It is the most televised, most documented genocide in modern history, and its perpetrators are not hiding. They are livestreaming.
The silence of institutions is a silence of complicity.
Will the world intervene, or watch it burn?
The world doesn’t merely stand at an inflection point—it teeters at the edge of historical disgrace. Gaza is no longer just a humanitarian crisis; it is a brutal x-ray of the West’s moral collapse. What’s unfolding in Rafah and Jabalia is not an accident of war—it is the deliberate, televised, industrial-scale murder of a people.
The so-called “international community” has become a euphemism for moral cowardice. Their silence is not neutrality. It is complicity—conscious, calculated, and shameful. Every Western veto, every drone shipment, every diplomat who dares to call this a “conflict” instead of genocide is part of the machinery that buries Palestinian children beneath rubble.
If nothing changes—if the bombs continue, the aid is blocked, the lies are broadcast, and the recognitions freeze—the fire won’t stay in Gaza. The Global South is watching. BRICS is watching. The Muslim world is watching. And they are keeping score.
If genocide can be livestreamed with applause from Washington, funding from Berlin, and silence from Brussels, then the entire so-called rules-based order is a lie. A fiction. A corpse dressed in the language of diplomacy.
History will not be kind to the cowards. It will not forgive the apologists. It will spit on the architects of silence.
It will canonize the defiant.
The Eastern Herald stands among them.
