ANALYSIS: By Chris Hedges

This is the last chapter of the genocide. It is the final, blood-soaked push to drive the Palestinians from Gaza. No food. No medicine. No shelter. No clean water. No electricity.

Israel is swiftly turning Gaza into a Dantesque cauldron of human misery where Palestinians are being killed in their hundreds and soon, again, in their thousands and tens of thousands, or they will be forced out never to return.

The final chapter marks the end of Israeli lies. The lie of the two-state solution. The lie that Israel respects the laws of war that protect civilians. The lie that Israel bombs hospitals and schools only because they are used as staging areas by Hamas.

• READ MORE: Other Chris Hedges Report articles

The lie that Hamas uses civilians as human shields, while Israel routinely forces captive Palestinians to enter potentially booby-trapped tunnels and buildings ahead of Israeli troops. The lie that Hamas or Palestine Islamic Jihad (PIJ) are responsible — the charge often being errant Palestinian rockets — for the destruction of hospitals, United Nations’ buildings or mass Palestinian casualties.

The lie that humanitarian aid to Gaza is blocked because Hamas is hijacking the trucks or smuggling in weapons and war material. The lie that Israeli babies are beheaded or Palestinians carried out mass rape of Israeli women. The lie that 75 percent of the tens of thousands killed in Gaza were Hamas “terrorists.”

The lie that Hamas, because it was allegedly rearming and recruiting new fighters, is responsible for the breakdown of the ceasefire agreement.

Israel’s naked genocidal visage is exposed. It has ordered the evacuation of northern Gaza where desperate Palestinians are camped out amid the rubble of their homes. What comes now is mass starvation — the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) said on March 21 it has six days of flour supplies left — deaths from diseases caused by contaminated water and food, scores of killed and wounded each day under the relentless assault of bombs, missiles, shells and bullets.

Nothing will function, bakeries, water treatment and sewage plants, hospitals — Israel blew up the damaged Turkish-Palestinian hospital on March 21 — schools, aid distribution centers or clinics. Less than half of the 53 emergency vehicles operated by the Palestine Red Crescent Society are functional due to fuel shortages. Soon there will be none.

Israel’s message is unequivocal: Gaza will be uninhabitable. Leave or die.

Since last Tuesday, when Israel broke the ceasefire with heavy bombing, over 700 Palestinians have been killed, including 200 children. In one 24 hour period 400 Palestinians were killed.

This is only the start. No Western power, including the United States, which provides the weapons for the genocide, intends to stop it. The images from Gaza during the nearly 16 months of incessant attacks were awful.

But what is coming now will be worse. It will rival the most atrocious war crimes of the 20th century, including the mass starvation, wholesale slaughter and leveling of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943 by the Nazis.

October 7 marked the dividing line between an Israeli policy that advocated the brutalisation and subjugation of the Palestinians and a policy that calls for their extermination and removal from historic Palestine. What we are witnessing is the historical equivalent of the moment triggered by the annihilation of some 200 soldiers led by George Armstrong Custer in June 1876 at the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

After that humiliating defeat, Native Americans were slated to be killed with the remnants forced into prisoner of war camps, later named reservations, where thousands died of disease, lived under the merciless gaze of their armed occupiers and fell into a life of immiseration and despair.

Expect the same for the Palestinians in Gaza, dumped, I suspect, in one of the world’s hellholes and forgotten.

“Gaza residents, this is your final warning,” Israeli Minister of Defense Israel Katz threatened:

“The first Sinwar destroyed Gaza and the second Sinwar will completely destroy it. The Air Force strikes against Hamas terrorists were just the first step. It will become much more difficult and you will pay the full price. The evacuation of the population from the combat zones will soon begin again…Return the hostages and remove Hamas and other options will open for you, including leaving for other places in the world for those who want to. The alternative is absolute destruction.”

The ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas was designed to be implemented in three phases. The first phase, lasting 42 days, would see an end to hostilities. Hamas would release 33 Israeli hostages who were captured on Oct. 7, 2023 — including women, those aged above 50, and those with illnesses — in exchange for upwards of 2,000 Palestinian men, women and children imprisoned by Israel (around 1,900 Palestinian captives have been released by Israel as of March 18).

Hamas has released a total of 147 hostages, of whom eight were dead. Israel says there are 59 Israelis still being held by Hamas, 35 of whom Israel believes are deceased.

The Israeli army would pull back from populated areas of Gaza on the first day of the ceasefire. On the seventh day, displaced Palestinians would be permitted to return to northern Gaza. Israel would allow 600 aid trucks with food and medical supplies to enter Gaza daily.

The second phase, which was expected to be negotiated on the 16th day of the ceasefire, would see the release of the remaining Israeli hostages. Israel would complete its withdrawal from Gaza maintaining a presence in some parts of the Philadelphi corridor, which stretches along the 13 km border between Gaza and Egypt.

It would surrender its control of the Rafah border crossing into Egypt.

The third phase would see negotiations for a permanent end of the war and the reconstruction of Gaza.

Israel habitually signs agreements, including the Camp David Accords and the Oslo Peace Agreement, with timetables and phases. It gets what it wants — in this case the release of the hostages — in the first phase and then violates subsequent phases. This pattern has never been broken.

Israel refused to honour the second phase of the deal. It blocked humanitarian aid into Gaza two weeks ago, violating the agreement. It also killed at least 137 Palestinians during the first phase of the ceasefire, including nine people, — three of them journalists — when Israeli drones attacked a relief team on March 15 in Beit Lahiya in northern Gaza

Israel’s heavy bombing and shelling of Gaza resumed March 18 while most Palestinians were asleep or preparing their suhoor, the meal eaten before dawn during the holy month of Ramadan. Israel will not stop its attacks now, even if the remaining hostages are freed — Israel’s supposed reason for the resumption of the bombing and siege of Gaza.

The Trump White House is cheering on the slaughter. They attack critics of the genocide as “antisemites” who should be silenced, criminalised or deported while funneling billions of dollars in weapons to Israel.

Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza is the inevitable denouement of its settler colonial project and apartheid state. The seizure of all of historic Palestine — with the West Bank soon, I expect, to be annexed by Israel — and displacement of all Palestinians has always been the Zionist goal.

Israel’s worst excesses occurred during the wars of 1948 and 1967 when huge parts of historic Palestine were seized, thousands of Palestinians killed and hundreds of thousands were ethnically cleansed. Between these wars, the slow-motion theft of land, murderous assaults and steady ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, continued.

That calibrated dance is over. This is the end. What we are witnessing dwarfs all the historical assaults on Palestinians. Israel’s demented genocidal dream — a Palestinian nightmare — is about to be achieved.

It will forever shatter the myth that we, or any Western nation, respect the rule of law or are the protectors of human rights, democracy and the so-called “virtues” of Western civilisation. Israel’s barbarity is our own. We may not understand this, but the rest of the globe does.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He is the host of show “The Chris Hedges Report”. This article is republished from his X account.

The Hamas attack on Israel yesterday has brought the usual round of systemic misreporting by New Zealand news outlets as they repost stories from the BBC, AP and Reuters which bend the truth in favour of Israeli narratives of “terrorism” and “victimhood”.

The worst comes from the BBC which is dutifully reposted by Radio New Zealand.

As we said in a commentary earlier this year the systemic anti-Palestinian in reporting from the Middle East includes:

• READ MORE: John Minto: Israeli attacks on Al Aqsa mosque – and the failings of media
• Al-Aqsa raid: How BBC coverage is enabling Israeli violence
• New Zealand politicians speak out over Israel-Hamas violence
• Al Jazeera coverage of the crisis
• Other Palestine reports

The BBC, AP and Reuters typically talk about the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem when they should be reported as the occupied West Bank, occupied Gaza and occupied East Jerusalem.

“Occupied” is the status these territories have under international law, United Nations resolutions and NZ government policy and should be consistently reported as such.

The BBC, AP and Reuters typically refer to Palestinians resisting Israel’s military occupation Palestinian “militants” or “terrorists” or similar derogatory and dismissive descriptions.

We would not call Ukrainians attacking Russian occupation forces as “militants” so why do our media think it’s OK to use this term to describe Palestinians attacking Israeli occupation forces?

Palestinian right to resist
Under international law, Palestinians have the right to resist Israel’s military occupation, including armed resistance and should not be abused for doing so by our media.

Palestinian resistance groups should be described as “resistance fighters” or “armed resistance organisations” while Israeli soldiers should be described as “Israeli occupation soldiers”.

The BBC, AP and Reuters typically give sympathetic coverage to Israelis killed by Palestinians but do not give similar sympathetic coverage to Palestinians killed, on a near daily basis, by the Israeli occupation (more than 240 killed so far this year, including dozens of children.

The vast majority of these killings are simply ignored.

Palestinians are the victims of Israeli apartheid policies, ethnic cleansing, land theft, house demolitions, military occupation and unbridled brutality and yet our media ends up giving the impression it’s the other way round.

Wide coverage is given to Israeli spokespeople in most stories with rudimentary reporting, if any, from Palestinian viewpoints.

For example, so far Radio New Zealand has reported on the views of New Zealand Jewish Council spokesperson Juliet Moses but has yet to interview any Palestinian New Zealanders who suffer great anxiety every time Palestinians are killed by Israel.

Support for self-determination
New Zealanders overwhelmingly support the Palestinian struggle for freedom and self-determination. They rightly reject Israel’s racist narratives and its apartheid policies towards Palestinians.

Yara Eid, a journalist from Gaza, expresses her reaction to the news that her friend and fellow journalist 21-year-old Ibrahim Lafi was murdered by Israeli missiles in Gaza. pic.twitter.com/4LqutaOgmP

— PALESTINE ONLINE (@OnlinePalEng) October 8, 2023

Our government policy needs to change.

We should not be calling for negotiations between the parties because Palestinians face both Israel and US at the negotiating table and this will never bring justice for Palestinians and will therefore never bring peace.

Instead, we need a timeline for Israel to abide by international law and United Nations resolutions. This would mean:

• Ending the Israeli military occupation of Palestine;
• Ending Israel’s apartheid policies against Palestinians, and Allowing Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and land in Palestine

John Minto is national chair of Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA).This article was first published by The Daily Blog and is republished with permission.

Contact with the journalist Nidal Al-Wahidi was lost yesterday during his coverage of events at the Beit Hanoun checkpoint, and there is no confirmed information about his death. https://t.co/2U9wAkrwaw

— PALESTINE ONLINE (@OnlinePalEng) October 8, 2023