Katz’s Colonial Vision for Permanent Domination
Speaking before a gathering of settler leaders and far-right government officials including Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, Katz declared that Israel would establish military-civilian “Nahal” settlement groups in northern Gaza, explicitly referencing the settlements Israel evacuated in 2005. “With God’s help, when the time comes, also in northern Gaza, we will establish Nahal pioneer groups in place of the settlements that were evacuated,” Katz stated, his words echoing the eliminationist logic that has characterized Zionist settler-colonialism for over seven decades.
The Defence Minister’s pledge directly contradicts commitments made by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to President Donald Trump regarding a United States-backed peace plan. Yet Katz’s defiance reveals the true face of Israeli policy: agreements exist only as tactical delays, temporary concessions designed to pacify international criticism while the machinery of ethnic cleansing grinds forward unabated.
Though Katz hastily walked back his settlement remarks hours later under pressure from Netanyahu’s office, he doubled down on the core promise of permanent military occupation, stating unequivocally that “Israel will never fully leave Gaza for security reasons”. This calculated retreat fooled no one; the mask had slipped, exposing the annexationist endgame that Palestinian activists and human rights organizations have warned about since October 2023.
American Weapons, Israeli War Crimes
Katz’s declaration of permanent occupation cannot be divorced from the staggering military and financial support flowing from Washington to Tel Aviv. The United States approved a devastating $7.4 billion weapons sale to Israel in February 2025, including precision-guided munitions, armored bulldozers, and fighter jet components, the very instruments of destruction that have leveled entire neighborhoods in Gaza, reduced hospitals to rubble, and created what United Nations experts have characterized as genocide.
In late February, the Biden administration fast-tracked an additional $3 billion arms package featuring bunker-buster bombs and D9 military bulldozers, equipment explicitly designed for demolition operations that have erased Palestinian communities from existence. This American military largesse has enabled Israel to prosecute what a UN Commission of Inquiry definitively concluded in September 2025 constitutes Israel genocide against the Palestinian people.
The commission’s comprehensive The Guardian report documented systematic patterns of mass killing, deliberate destruction of healthcare infrastructure, intentional starvation tactics, and the forcible displacement of nearly two million Palestinians, all hallmarks of genocidal intent under international law. Yet rather than imposing sanctions or arms embargoes, Washington continues to function as Israel’s arsenal and diplomatic shield, vetoing UN Security Council resolutions and providing political cover for atrocities that shock the conscience of humanity.
The Erasure of Palestinian Christian Heritage
While Israeli tanks rumble through Gaza’s devastated streets, another dimension of Palestinian erasure unfolds in Bethlehem and across the occupied West Bank. Palestinian Christians, among the oldest continuous Christian communities on Earth, face an existential threat from relentless settlement expansion and systematic Israeli policies designed to fragment and eliminate Palestinian presence in the birthplace of Christianity itself.
For the second consecutive year, Bethlehem has foregone Christmas celebrations, its streets empty of the joy and festivities that once drew pilgrims from across the globe. The Church of the Nativity, normally packed with worshippers and tourists, stands eerily quiet. In place of the traditional Christmas tree in Manger Square, Bethlehem artists erected a haunting installation depicting the Holy Family’s flight to Egypt, a visual metaphor for the displacement and ethnic cleansing consuming Gaza.
Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, delivered a searing sermon in Gaza rejecting plans by the United States and other foreign powers to lead reconstruction efforts, recognizing such schemes as thinly veiled neocolonial projects designed to sanitize Israeli war crimes and permanently alter Gaza’s demographic character.
Palestinian Christian leaders describe their situation as one of deliberate erasure. Israeli settlement construction has accelerated dramatically, with the government approving 19 new settlement projects in December alone. These illegal colonies, recognized as war crimes under the Fourth Geneva Convention, physically sever Palestinian communities from their ancestral lands and holy sites, making worship increasingly impossible and daily life an exercise in navigating apartheid checkpoints and settler violence.
Hunger Strikers Sacrifice Bodies to Break Silence
As Israel tightens its grip on Palestinian territory with American weapons and diplomatic protection, six activists from the direct-action group Palestine Action entered their third week of hunger strike in British prisons, demanding freedom for themselves and accountability for the Western governments enabling genocide. The hunger strikers, imprisoned for targeting factories and facilities producing weapons components for Israel’s war machine, have now launched legal action against the UK government for what they characterize as political persecution designed to criminalize solidarity with Palestine.
Five of the hunger strikers were hospitalized as their physical conditions deteriorated, yet four vowed to continue their protest despite grave health risks. Their sacrifice illuminates a bitter truth: while Israel operates with impunity, demolishing hospitals and bombing refugee camps with Western-supplied weapons, those who take nonviolent action to disrupt the supply chain of genocide face imprisonment and potential death.
The hunger strikers’ legal challenge accuses the British government of applying double standards, prosecuting Palestine solidarity activists with unusual severity while treating far-right extremists and other criminal defendants with comparative leniency. This pattern extends beyond Britain; across Western nations, Palestinian rights activists face surveillance, arrest, and censorship while their governments sign billion-dollar weapons contracts with Israel and vilify calls for ceasefire as antisemitic.
Gaza’s Healthcare Apocalypse
The humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza has reached dimensions that defy comprehension. Munir al-Barsh, director-general of Gaza’s Ministry of Health, described the situation inside the territory’s hospitals as “tragic and horrific,” with thousands of patients facing death or permanent disability as Israeli authorities systematically block medical supplies from entering the enclave.
By late 2023, nearly half of Gaza’s hospitals had ceased functioning due to fuel shortages, power outages, and direct Israeli bombardment. The World Health Organization warned that deaths would “skyrocket” from preventable diseases and lack of healthcare access, a prediction that has materialized with devastating accuracy. Doctors have been forced to perform amputations and cesarean sections without anesthetic due to medicine shortages deliberately imposed by Israeli blockade policies.
Multiple premature babies died in neonatal intensive care units when hospitals lost power completely. The Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital faced a dialysis crisis with hundreds of patients sharing just 24 machines. Ambulances and medical facilities have been systematically targeted and destroyed, with the Red Cross declaring Gaza’s entire health system “on its knees”.
This calculated destruction of healthcare infrastructure constitutes a war crime under international humanitarian law and forms part of the broader pattern of genocidal conduct documented by UN investigators. Yet Israel continues these practices with complete impunity, secure in the knowledge that American diplomatic protection will shield it from accountability at the International Criminal Court and other international forums.
The International Community’s Moral Bankruptcy
Katz’s declaration of permanent occupation exposes the bankruptcy of the so-called peace process and the complicity of Western powers in Palestinian dispossession. For decades, the international community has demanded that Palestinians negotiate, compromise, and accept crumbs of sovereignty while Israeli settlements metastasize across occupied territory, devouring land and resources with each passing day.
The promise that good behavior and cooperation with Oslo Accords frameworks would yield Palestinian statehood has been revealed as a cruel deception. Israel never intended to relinquish control; the occupation was always designed as permanent, with periodic military operations serving to “mow the lawn,” Israeli military parlance for periodic massacres meant to suppress Palestinian resistance and thin the population.
Now, as Gaza lies in ruins with over 70,000 dead and counting, as Palestinian Christians face erasure from their homeland, and as Western activists sacrifice their health and freedom to disrupt the genocide, Israel’s Defence Minister openly declares the endgame: permanent military domination, settlement expansion, and the extinction of Palestinian national existence.
The international community’s response has been pathetically inadequate. Mild statements of “concern” and toothless calls for “restraint” mean nothing when accompanied by weapons shipments worth billions of dollars and diplomatic vetoes that shield Israel from consequences. South Africa’s genocide case at the International Court of Justice proceeds while the killing continues unabated, illustrating the impotence of international legal mechanisms in the face of great power complicity.
Palestinian resistance, both armed and unarmed, emerges not from hatred or fundamentalism but from the rational response of a people facing extermination. When every peaceful avenue has been exhausted, when international law proves meaningless, when the so-called rules-based international order reveals itself as a mechanism for protecting Western interests rather than universal human rights, resistance becomes not only justified but necessary for survival.
A Reckoning Deferred
Israel Katz’s promise of permanent occupation in Gaza represents more than policy, it constitutes a declaration of intent to complete the Nakba, the catastrophic ethnic cleansing of Palestinians that began in 1948 and continues today with American weapons and European silence. The 749 days of genocide in Gaza, the erasure of Palestinian Christian communities, and the imprisonment of solidarity activists form a continuum of settler-colonial violence that demands not condemnation but material consequences.
History will judge harshly those who enabled this genocide through action and inaction alike. The politicians who signed weapons contracts, the diplomats who provided cover at the United Nations, the journalists who both-sided systematic ethnic cleansing, and the publics who scrolled past atrocities with indifference, all bear responsibility for what unfolds in Gaza today.
Palestinians will endure because they have no choice. Their existence itself constitutes resistance against a colonial project that demands their disappearance. From the rubble of Gaza’s hospitals to the silenced streets of Bethlehem to the prison cells of Britain, Palestinians and their allies continue to resist, to document, to demand accountability.
The question facing the world is not whether Palestine will be free, colonialism always fails eventually, but how many more will die before that liberation arrives, and whether those who could have stopped the genocide will reckon with their complicity when the cameras finally turn away and the counting of the dead begins in earnest.
