Israel’s genocide in Palestine: A verified report from Deir Yassin to Gaza 2025

This is genocide, not war

The ongoing assault on Palestine is not a war between equals. It is an unrelenting campaign of state-engineered extermination that aligns with the legal definition of genocide under the 1948 Genocide Convention. The victims are overwhelmingly civilians. They include families trapped in collapsing buildings, children struck while queuing for water, and medics buried under targeted rubble.

According to the Gaza Ministry of Health, more than 58,000 Palestinians have been killed between October 7, 2023, and June 18, 2025. Nearly 70 percent of the fatalities are women and children, according to the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR)

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) has documented direct Israeli airstrikes on schools, hospitals, bakeries, mosques, and civilian shelters. Fuel, food, and water have been cut off completely during several phases of the military campaign. Entire urban blocks in Rafah, Khan Younis, and Gaza City have been turned into concrete dust. The UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned of an imminent humanitarian collapse in Gaza.

Strikes on ambulances and evacuation corridors have become routine. In December 2023, Israel bombed Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza, killing over 500 civilians in what Palestinian officials described as a war crime. Despite global outcry, the US blocked any binding UN resolution calling for ceasefire.

What is unfolding is not accidental. These are not isolated misfires. The bombing patterns, the targeting of families, the deliberate collapse of civil infrastructure, and the systematic denial of humanitarian aid fit the international legal criteria of genocide. UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese warned in 2024 that there are grounds to believe the threshold of genocide has been crossed.

This is not a conflict. It is conquest without accountability. It is the methodical removal of a people under the guise of defense. And it is made possible by diplomatic shielding and military funding from the West.

A history soaked in blood

The current genocide in Gaza is not the beginning of Palestinian suffering. It is the latest chapter in a long, meticulously documented history of ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and massacre that stretches back to 1948.

The Nakba, or catastrophe, saw over 750,000 Palestinians forcibly expelled from their homes in cities and villages across what became Israel. One of the most brutal moments came in the Deir Yassin massacre. On April 9, 1948, members of the Zionist Irgun and Lehi terrorists stormed the Palestinian village and killed over 100 unarmed civilians, including women and children. Survivors were paraded through West Jerusalem. Many were executed.

In 1982, Israeli forces besieged the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon, allowing the Lebanese Christian Phalangist terrorists to enter the camps over a 72-hour period. Between 2,000 and 3,500 Palestinian civilians were butchered, many of them women and children. The United Nations General Assembly declared it an act of genocide in Resolution 37/123.

The pattern of massacres has continued unbroken. In 2002, Israeli forces bulldozed large portions of the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch reported war crimes, including extrajudicial killings, the use of civilians as human shields, and the obstruction of medical relief.

In 2014, during Operation Protective Edge, Israeli airstrikes killed 2,251 Palestinians, of whom 551 were children, according to the UN Human Rights Council. The Goldstone Report concluded that Israeli forces had intentionally targeted civilians and civilian infrastructure, including family homes, water tanks, and power lines.

This was not an accident. It was doctrine. The Dahiya Doctrine, formalized by Israeli military planners, encourages the use of disproportionate force and deliberate devastation of civilian areas to serve as a deterrent. This policy has been implemented in Gaza repeatedly and without legal consequences.

In each decade, the death toll rises, and the level of international complicity deepens. Yet the world fails to act. The Nakba was not a single event. It is a continuum of violence that stretches from 1948 to the present, from the razed villages of Haifa to the bombed-out camps of Rafah.

Settler terror in the West Bank

In the West Bank, violence is not incidental—it is an expanding network of terror, intimidation, and impunity sanctioned by the state. Israeli settlers, backed by heavily armed military escorts, have unleashed a wave of arson, assault, and property destruction against Palestinian communities.

Human Rights Watch reported in May 2025 that settler attacks on Palestinian civilians increased by 120 percent during the prior year. Homes have been firebombed. Olive groves that sustained families for generations have been uprooted and chained shut. Late 17 June evening, settlers attacked the village of Burqa, setting fire to cars and grazing lands even as children watched in terror.

Israeli soldiers frequently accompany these attacks or arrive too late to intervene. According to B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights centre, in dozens of documented cases, soldiers filmed or monitored settler actions without preventing them. This military protection emboldens settlers.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs recorded over 1800 severe settler attacks since October 7, 2022. Palestinian children have been shot while walking on the street or going to school. Community leaders have been beaten. Fields have been poisoned. Access to farmland has been blocked by new settler roads and checkpoints.

Israel’s legal system reinforces this terror. Out of 310 investigations opened by military police into settler violence in the West Bank over recent years, only about 2 percent led to indictments.

In this crucible of violence, Palestinians live in constant fear. Curfews are imposed arbitrarily. Palestinians are seized on the street. Checkpoints choke off communities. The settler movement emerges not as an irregular fringe but as an organised cohort enforcing colonial control through terror.

The West Bank is not a disputed territory. It is a front in Israel’s campaign of ethnic domination, maintained by forced displacement of ethnic Palestinians, violence, zionist terrorism, and diplomatic indifference.

Children are the first to die

Palestinian children have become the primary casualties of this state-directed extermination. According to UNICEF, more than 50,000 Palestinian children were killed or injured between October 2023 and June 2025. The vast majority were students, siblings, or infants – victims of actions that would demolish whole families at breakfast tables.

Doctors Without Borders reports that more than 2,523 medical staffers have perished, either in hospitals or in the course of civilian duties . These deaths include those of paramedics responding to emergency calls, only to be targeted while trying to save lives.

In a disturbing symbol of collective punishment, UNICEF reveals that over 660,000 children are now out of school, their classrooms reduced to rubble. The loss is not only physical. Mental health clinics report an epidemic of trauma among Gaza’s children. They are hallucinating explosions during daytime naps. They wake up screaming for parents lost under collapsed walls.

Watchdogs such as Human Rights Watch have documented repeated strikes on areas where children congregate, including playgrounds, mosques, and cake bakeries. One strike hit children queuing outside a UN school in Rafah, killing scores. Videos show maimed toddlers being pulled from twisted steel and concrete.

The destruction of family homes has led to mass displacement. Countless children now live in overcrowded shelters with no access to sanitation. The World Health Organization estimates that acute respiratory infections, malnutrition, and waterborne diseases have increased by more than 150 percent among children. Infants are dying in their mothers’ arms for lack of incubators, lack of medicine, lack of clean air.

There can be no justification for these deaths. They are not collateral damage. They are essential elements in a brutal strategy, whether by design or default, to dismantle Palestinian society, one child at a time. The world must register every shattering statistic, every lost childhood, and take responsibility.

The US bankrolls the killing

The United States is the principal architect of this genocide. Its financial and diplomatic backing for Israel is unwavering and unconditional. In 2023, Congress approved $3.8 billion in military aid to Israel, including precision-guided munitions, bunker-busting bombs, and advanced surveillance systems. This arsenal is deployed with lethal effect in Gaza.

Amazingly, this support continues while international observers document war crimes. In April 2025, the U.S. State Department acknowledged credible reports of Israeli forces intentionally striking civilian infrastructure. Yet the White House vetoes any congressional effort to condition aid or even call for an immediate ceasefire.

American diplomats consistently veto or dilute United Nations Security Council resolutions on Palestine. In March 2024, a proposed resolution calling for the protection of civilian infrastructure in Gaza was blocked by a U.S. veto. The message is clear: U.S. military aid continues even as bombs fall on civilian shelters.

This is not an error in policy. It is a conscious decision by Washington. Analysts at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace concluded in February 2025 that U.S. assistance enables Israel’s “indiscriminate bombardment of populated areas”.

Amr Hamzawy, the director of the Carnegie Middle East Program, wrote in his report that despite the deaths of “nearly 50,000 Palestinians and thousands of Lebanese,” the so-called international community has continued to “condone Israeli practices of indiscriminate violence against civilians.” In Gaza and Lebanon alike, entire populations have been targeted, erased, and displaced. Yet the UN Security Council, the very institution “entrusted with maintaining international peace and security,” has remained paralysed—offering no binding resolutions, no protection, and no deterrence. While charred bodies are pulled from rubble, the United States and Western governments flood Israel with “weapons, ammunition, and financial support,” reinforcing the machinery of annihilation rather than halting it.

In November 2024, the International Rescue Committee reported that U.S.-made bombs were used in several documented attacks on schools and hospitals.

At home, the American populace is fiercely divided. Popular protests calling for a halt to military funding are met with political opposition in Congress. Members of both parties block any shifts in policy toward accountability. The consequence is clear: U.S. sovereignty is used to insulate Israel from consequences, enabling impunity.

By underwriting the weaponry, vetoing humanitarian initiatives, and shielding Israel from geopolitical pressure, the United States is complicit in the mass killing of Palestinian civilians. The money flows, the bombs fall, the world watches.

Europe’s silence is complicity

European Union capitals speak in broad moral terms while supporting, funding, and normalizing the violence inflicted upon Palestinians. Their posture is not neutral or hopeful; it is complicit in outsourcing the dirty work of genocide.

In 2024, the EU Parliament condemned excessive civilian casualties in Gaza yet failed to tie its €146 million in annual funding to human rights conditions. Brussels continues to approve dual-use technology exports to Israel worth billions of euros each year. These devices enable air surveillance, military coordination, and drone targeting systems accused of bombing civilian sites.

Germany leads European arms sales to Israel. In January 2025, the German government approved the export of military drones and surveillance aircraft, transactions valued at €250 million, despite documented civilian casualties linked to those systems. Italian and Spanish firms are similarly engaged, selling military sensors and electronic gear.

European media frame Israeli operations as “self-defense.” Public debate is limited; parliamentary calls for the suspension of arms shipments rarely prevail. A 2024 Amnesty International report concluded that European governments are complicit in apartheid by fueling the machine that sustains it.

The continent’s position at the United Nations is just as damning. European UN representatives consistently vote against binding investigations or sanctions. In June 2024, Europe blocked a resolution demanding a ceasefire and civilian protection in Gaza. This passive facilitation is tantamount to endorsement of continued violence.

Europe might hold itself up as a bastion of human rights. On the ground, it is lending the tools, silence, and diplomatic cover that sustain mass extermination. Its complicity is strategic and intentional. Neutrality is violence.

The UN’s hands are tied

The United Nations is meant to be a bulwark against genocide. In this case, it is failing catastrophically. Its legal apparatus is stifled by vetoes, political bargaining, and procedural backsliding that neutralise accountability for Israel and punish appeal advocates.

In December 2023, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution demanding an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza. However, the UN Security Council declined to approve any enforceable measures because of threats of a U.S. veto. The Senate in Washington made it clear that unconditional U.S. military aid to Israel would not be jeopardised.

The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) has documented numerous alleged war crimes, including deliberate targeting of civilians, medical personnel, and shelters. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) has consistently called for safe passage corridors for children and pregnant women, only to be ignored.

Despite this, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has not launched a full inquiry. International Criminal Court (ICC) preliminary investigations remain stalled, blocked at political junctures even as mounting evidence is formally submitted by NGOs, field researchers, first responders, and medical examiners.

UN Special Rapporteurs have repeatedly warned of genocide-level activity. Francesca Albanese and Michael Lynk described the actions as “calculated” and “structural”. But their protests disappear into procedural limbo.

The UN is not neutral. It is incapacitated. Its humanitarian staff are risking their lives daily. Yet they are powerless to halt the carnage, to enforce evacuations, or to remedy the siege. Its organisational silence and political paralysis amount to the passive facilitation of the genocide of Palestinians. The very body founded to prevent such crimes has become a spectre unable to intervene.

The lies of the media machine

Global media outlets have constructed a linguistic façade that obscures the reality of genocide. Terms such as “both sides,” “clashes,” and “flare-up” suggest a symmetrical conflict. In reality, there is one genocidal state wreaking devastation on a civilian population trapped under siege.

Western media has served not as a watchdog, but as a shield for Israeli aggression. Phrases like “responding to threats” or “renewed escalation” flood headlines while entire Palestinian families are buried beneath concrete. A forensic analysis by The Intercept of over 1,000 articles from The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times during the 2023 Gaza assault revealed a systematic bias: Israeli voices and casualties dominated coverage, while Palestinians were depersonalized, criminalized, or rendered invisible. The study concluded that these newspapers “presented Israel’s perspective more frequently and more prominently than that of Palestinians”.

Media outlets consistently describe Israeli airstrikes as being conducted “in self‑defense,” rarely distinguishing between combatants and civilians, or highlighting documented strikes on schools and hospitals. Médecins Sans Frontières reported an airstrike so close to Al‑Awda hospital that undetonated munitions were left lodged in medical wards, and staff and patients were killed or wounded while seeking care. The International Rescue Committee documented a strike on December 15, 2024, against a UNRWA‑run school sheltering displaced families in Khan Younis, noting that “at least 20 people were killed” while the building was explicitly in a designated humanitarian zone.

The role of embedded journalists compounds the skew. Reporters embedded with Israeli forces routinely transmit military press releases verbatim, without critical examination. This results in dynamic visuals of missile launches being captioned as “Israel strikes militant stronghold,” while the visuals of civilian deaths are minimized as “possible unintended casualties.” Al Jazeera’s Institute of Modern Journalism observed that embedded journalists were often unable to speak with doctors or civilians at Al‑Shifa hospital, instead relying solely on controlled military narratives.

Investigative journalism that contradicts the dominant narrative is marginalized or labelled extremist. Reports documenting Israel’s use of white phosphorus in populated areas, confirmed by Human Rights Watch, received minimal coverage. Those that delve into births beneath destruction or children begging for water often become viral on social media, yet are not featured in nightly network news.

Visual journalism contributes to the bias. Satellite imagery of Gaza reduced to rubble circulates widely, but the accompanying text often emphasizes civilian deaths as collateral. Analysts are quoted emphasizing Israel’s military precision, reducing the experience of genocide to an inevitable cost of warfare.

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Global media machinery may claim impartiality, but in its semantic choices and framing, it reinforces the legitimacy of violence. It sanitizes slaughter. It normalizes genocide. It betrays its own professed role as chronicler of truth.

They kill, then justify

Israeli military doctrine follows a simple formula: strike first, validate later. Civilian neighborhoods are bombarded, and then the narrative is constructed to frame the devastation as necessary or justified.

After the May 2024 raid on Khan Younis that killed over 150 civilians, the Israeli Army claimed they targeted underground tunnels and weapons storage. Even after international investigators found no such infrastructure in that area, official statements persisted.

In November 2023, the bombing of a UN school sheltering displaced civilians killed 43 people. Israel described it as an accident due to “erroneous intelligence.” The United Nations Relief and Works Agency disputed that claim and demanded a transparent investigation, noting there was no evidence militants were present.

Following the July 2025 strike on a bakery in Rafah, which killed dozens of children waiting for bread, the Israeli military issued a statement blaming the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Video evidence showed no armed men in the vicinity. The military later conceded that the strike was conducted under misidentification but refused to release internal communications or transcripts.

This sequence repeats with every atrocity: bombs fall, families die, then intelligence is retrofitted. Investigations that contradict the military narrative are dismissed as flawed. Accountability is delayed. Apologies are rare. Damages are unpaid. And the international community accepts each explanation and refuses to pursue justice.

That is how genocide is normalised. By obfuscating initial intent, by declaring uncertainty fair game, by shifting blame onto victims. And by repeating the cycle until the evidence is buried under official records and media spin.

War crimes in high definition

Israel’s military strategy has evolved with technological capability, enabling war crimes with surgical precision. The Guardian has reported that Israel deployed artificial intelligence–assisted drones to identify individuals in Gaza. This technology surveillance also includes children and journalists. Facial recognition and algorithmic targeting have turned civilian zones into digital kill zones.

Precision-guided munitions, many supplied by the United States, are regularly used to strike alleged hostile sites. However, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have documented repeated failures to verify military targets in densely populated areas. Results include flattened apartment buildings, demolished hospitals, and burned schools. That means the very tools marketed as ‘precision’ are fabricating mass death.

I consulted the Forensic Architecture report titled “Israeli military conduct in Gaza during the 2025 ceasefire”, which documents extensive use of satellite imagery and on-the-ground verification. It confirms that entire residential units, including multi-generational families, were destroyed in single strikes, often collapsing from ground floors like kitchens all the way up through bedrooms. Analysts conclude that these patterns reflect not just reckless negligence but a “high degree of intent” to target civilian domestic spaces.

White phosphorus munitions have been used despite restrictions under international law. Human Rights Watch corroborated several shelling incidents of urban areas in Gaza City where the chemical device was deployed, inflicting indiscriminate incendiary harm.

Modern warfare is no longer fought with imprecise artillery. It is a digital, automated system of death that leverages software and hardware to transform civilians into targets. That architecture of violence amounts to war crimes; nothing less, nothing more.

No safe place in Palestine

In Gaza and the West Bank, every refuge is rendered unsafe. Whether a home, hospital, school, or mosque, no structure is preserved. According to UNRWA, more than 150 schools and shelters have been struck since October 2023. The Gaza Civil Defence reported over 75 confirmed attacks targeting declared safe zones in that time period.

Hospitals are repeatedly bombed and ambulances shot at despite being marked with recognized medical insignia. Over 200 health workers, including paramedics and emergency responders, were killed by the Israeli forces. In January 2025, Al-Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s largest, was rendered inoperative after sustained shelling destroyed its intensive care unit and maternity ward.

Religious sites have not been spared. Numerous mosques, including a centuries‑old complex in Khan Younis, have been bombed. Worshippers were trapped mid-prayer when metal ceilings collapsed on them. The religious sanctity of places of worship offers no immunity under the current Israeli campaign.

Even UN-designated facilities are struck with chilling regularity. For instance, in May 2025, a World Food Programme warehouse in Deir al-Balah came under fire, resulting in two confirmed deaths and multiple injuries. That such a clearly marked humanitarian facility can be hit suggests a pattern of disregard for protected zones. These incidents fit within a broader, systemic targeting of sanctuaries—not mere mistakes, but signs of a campaign that fails to shield civilian infrastructure.

The result is total exposure. Palestinians cannot flee. They cannot shelter. They cannot find sanctuary for a night or a day. Each brick and hall is vulnerable. Each sanctuary is a potential tomb. Palestinian life has been reduced to a precarious sequence of survival and death.

Israel is not a democracy

International observers and human rights advocates increasingly challenge the claim that Israel is a democracy. Rather, it functions as an apartheid state designed to enforce Jewish supremacy through legal and structural means.

Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and B’Tselem have all published findings in 2022 and 2023 asserting that Israeli policies on land allocation, freedom of movement, political representation, and civil rights systematically discriminate against Palestinians. Governing law differs sharply depending on ethnic identity: Palestinians in the occupied territories are bound by military orders, barred from voting for national representatives, and restricted by arbitrary permit systems for work, medical care, and religious pilgrimage.

Settlements expand every day. Palestinian land is expropriated. Natural resources are channeled to Israel. Curfews and checkpoints are omnipresent. This is not a conflict. It is engineered segregation.

Justice systems also reflect the divide. While Israeli Jews charged with violent crimes against Palestinians often benefit from leniency, the reverse is rarely true. A 2024 B’Tselem stats reveal that while Israeli settler offenders frequently go unprosecuted, Palestinians accused under military law face detention, interrogation without counsel, and conviction rates exceeding 95 percent.

In such a system, “democracy” is propaganda. Weapons aim at civilians. Laws aim at dispossession. Democracy is provided to one group and denied to another. That is not a state of law. It is a settler-colonial project with systemic discrimination as its law.

Western media whitewashes genocide

Mainstream Western news organisations routinely present the Palestinian catastrophe through a veil of neutrality that ends up protecting perpetrators. Headlines rebrand genocide as “escalation,” “flare-up,” or “tit-for-tat,” obscuring the power imbalance and scale of suffering.

A 2025 study by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) found that over 80 percent of opinion pieces in The New York Times and The Washington Post framed the violence as reciprocal, failing to highlight the legal asymmetry. In one high-profile report, a Times editorial described Gaza’s destruction as unfortunate “collateral damage”, without noting that such “damage” results from the deliberate bombing of civilian structures deemed critical by international law.

International television frequently airs survivor footage without translation or follow-up context. The spectacle of suffering remains unsubstantiated. Missing are the voices of journalists and legal scholars who connect the events to apartheid, genocide, and international law.

This form of editorial sleight of hand functions as an act of censorship by omission. It enables genocide by rendering it quiet, bureaucratic, and palatable for global consumption. Truth becomes a story without consequences.

The death toll tells nothing

Numbers fail to capture the full horror of Gaza’s destruction. Reporting more than 58,000 killed, according to UN’s OCHA, including over 18,000 children, offers a statistic, not a story. Each life lost carried a name, a future unfulfilled, a ripple of suffering that reverberates through families and communities.

Hospitals and morgues report systematic delays in releasing bodies. Many are buried in mass graves in Rafah, Khan Younis, and Gaza City. Parents do not wait for numbers. They wait for bodies. They search for birth certificates, for DNA test results, for a stretch of earth where they can place a marker.

Orphans now number in the tens of thousands. Community mental health teams describe whole cohorts of children who no longer speak, who clutch photographs of siblings or parents lost beneath the rubble.

Economies have collapsed. Markets lie in ruins. Families lack income or support. Documents show that nearly 70 percent of households in Gaza now live below the extreme poverty line. This is structural violence, made visible in economic graphs as well as body counts.

The death toll may be the easiest figure to provide. But it is only the smallest unit of suffering. Every number hides a story of erased dreams, ruptured homes, and shattered laughter. To reduce genocide to a spreadsheet is to collude in its erasure.

Voices from under the rubble

From makeshift tents to shattered crossroads, survivors in Gaza refuse anonymity. Their testimonies embody the resistance that refuses to be erased.

A Palestinian teacher in Khan Younis described losing her school and thirty students to one strike. She reopened classes under an olive tree, teaching arithmetic by candlelight: “They bombed our books, but not our minds.”

Refugees displaced multiple times now live in tents supplied by UNRWA, which are frequently hit in night raids. A young man who lost his leg in a missile strike stated, “They want to break our bodies so they can break our spirits. But we remain.”

These testimonies are not anomalies. They are a collective chorus of collective trauma and collective defiance. They emerge from a landscape of devastation but refuse silence. They demand recognition. They demand justice.

The resistance will not die

Amid rubble and ruins, Palestinian resistance takes shape beyond armed conflict. It thrives in solidarity networks, grassroots education, cultural revival, and legal action.

In the West Bank, organizations such as Al-Haq and Addameer file war crimes petitions in international tribunals. Their documentation of settler and military abuse has led to formal inquiries at the International Criminal Court. They pursue accountability as a form of resistance.

Across Europe and North America, cities are passing municipal bans on the purchase of Israeli arms, imposing divestment from companies profiting from the occupation. In 2025, Irish Parliament voted unanimously to cease military exports to Israel, a move echoed by growing council initiatives in Sweden and Canada.

Artists and intellectuals in Gaza operate underground theatres and poetry collectives, despite ongoing blackouts.

This resistance illuminates the future of Palestine. It asserts rights through justice, memory, art, legal challenge, and global solidarity. It makes clear that genocide may seek to erase a people, but cannot erase their spirit.

Conclusion

Palestine is more than rubble. It is memory. It is resistance. It is a future alive with defiance, theology, artistry, and legal struggle. The world must not reduce it to figures or images. It must recognize genocide, demand accountability, and stand with the people whose sovereignty and dignity are under assault.

At The Eastern Herald, we have never wavered in calling truth by its name. While much of the global media hesitates, dilutes, or hides behind euphemisms, we have upheld the uncompromising standard of saying what must be said—clearly, courageously, and without permission from power. We do not sanitize genocide, nor do we bow to narratives shaped in Washington, Brussels, or Tel Aviv. When Israel commits war crimes, we name them as such. When the West funds mass murder, we expose it. Our journalism is not driven by access or appeasement but by principle. In an age of moral cowardice and algorithmic censorship, The Eastern Herald remains a rare institution that speaks with conviction: right is right, wrong is wrong, and silence is complicity.