Julian Kunnie
The extermination of 500 Gaza hospital babies on incubators depending on oxygen is just one indication of the intentional genocidal actions of the Israeli apartheid regime.
The destruction of 350 000 civilian dwellings, the intentional annihilation to date of 25 295 people, 70% of whom are women, children and adolescents, and the wounding of over 63 000, with another 7 000+ buried under the rubble, makes this a classic case of genocide with almost 100 000 people murdered, injured, and wounded over a 3-month-plus span. The evidence of genocide as the South African distinguished legal team presented is crystal clear and documented by PressTV.ir on January 15, making Israel’s feeble and anaemic response totally irrelevant and justifying genocide in 2023-2024, the first of its kind in this year and in many decades:
100 – the number of days of the latest genocidal war on Gaza.
24 000 – the total number of fatalities in Gaza since Oct 7
1 993 – the number of massacres committed by the regime since Oct 7
30 843 – the number of people killed or missing since Oct 7
23 843 – the number of people who were declared dead in hospitals.
10 400 – the number of children killed since Oct 7.
7 100 – the number of women killed since Oct 7.
337 – the number of doctors and paramedics killed since Oct 7.
45 – the number of civil defense personnel killed since Oct 7.
117 – the number of Palestinian journalists killed since Oct 7.
7 000 – the number of people missing, 70% of them children and women.
60 317 – the number of people injured since Oct 7.
6 200 – the number of injured people who need to travel for treatment.
10 000 – the number of cancer patients who face the risk of death.
99 – the number of health practitioners who have been arrested.
10 – the number of journalists arrested since Oct 7.
2 million – the number of displaced people in the Gaza Strip.
400 000 – the number of people with infectious diseases as a result of displacement.
134 – the number of government buildings destroyed since Oct 7.
95 – the number of schools and universities completely destroyed since Oct 7.
295 – the number of schools and universities partially destroyed by the occupation.
145 – the number of mosques completely destroyed since Oct 7.
243 – the number of mosques partially destroyed since Oct 7.
3 – the number of churches targeted and destroyed since Oct 7.
69 300 – the number of housing units completely destroyed since Oct 7.
290 000 – the number of housing units partially destroyed since Oct 7.
65 000 – tons of explosives dropped on Gaza since Oct. 7.
30 – The number of hospitals taken out of service since Oct 7
53 – the number of health centres that have become non-functional since Oct 7.
150 – the number of health institutions partially destroyed since Oct 7.
121 – the number of ambulances destroyed by the occupation army since Oct 7.
200 – the number of archaeological and heritage sites destroyed since Oct 7.
Israel has savagely dropped 65 000 tons of bombs, some 80 000 on Gaza over the past 103 days, a tiny sliver area of 360km2, one third the size of Los Angeles. On January 17, Israel detonated 300 landmines that pulverised and obliterated Israa University in Gaza. It has destroyed in entirety, libraries, the oldest Christian monastery on Earth, the Great Omari Mosque that has archival manuscripts of the region’s ancient history that documents Palestine’s early recorded history, 1 000 mosques, and even cemeteries. Even the dead aren’t spared in the ethnocidal onslaught. Israel is bent on destroying such evidence of Palestinian history and culture, just as the US did in its destruction of the Iraqi Museum during its bombing, invasion and occupation of Iraq in 1991 and in 2003.
The lingering questions are why: Why does Israel continue to engage in such hideous and flagrantly criminal actions that constitute both genocide and war crimes as many nations have charged both at the ICJ and the International Criminal Court? Further, why does the US continue to fund and support the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza though the majority of US residents (65%), including thousands of Jewish people, reject such support and millions collectively have engaged in consistent protests nationally demanding an end to the genocidal bombing and called for a permanent cease-fire?
Palestinians were certainly not responsible for the pogroms against Jewish people and have a multi-millennia history in Palestine as the indigenous people. Why should Palestinians pay such a deadly price of genocide for European racism against Jewish people and the accompanying Nazi holocaust?
Prior to the British colonisation of Palestine before 1948, Palestinian Christians, Muslims and Jews lived side-by-side with no violent conflict.
It was Theodor Herzl’s The Jewish State of 1896 that became the basis for the British occupation of Palestine through the Balfour Declaration of 1917, paving the way for the emergence of an exclusively Zionist political state as Herzl described, not a religious one.
No religion teaches exclusive rights for one particular people at the expense of another. Hence, Orthodox Jewry has always condemned the Israeli state as anathema to the Jewish faith and has thus been brutally attacked within Israel and elsewhere for its solidarity with Palestinian liberation.
Cape Times