Above: The ruins of Jabaliya Refugee Camp on 11 October 2023 (Photo: Yahya Hassouna/AFP)

In the 75 years of history of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict there are several, undeniable historical facts:

• Israel’s creation began with the ethnic cleansing of over 800,000 Palestinians and the razing of 418 Palestinian villages by Zionist terrorist groups. One particularly atrocious example of many—Israel built Yad Vashem, its Holocaust Museum, on top of the ruins of two of these Palestinian villages.
• The countless, brutal, and Orwellian realities of Israel’s 56-year-old military occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip were systematically suppressed by the Western media.
• Israel’s collective punishment of Gazans with its cruel blockade on the Gaza Strip for over 16 years. Even prior to that, freedom of movement was fraught.
• HAMAS didn’t even exist until 1987.

“Operation Swords of Iron”—Israel’s “response” to HAMAS’s attack—has involved 85 days of Israel directly indiscriminately bombing and otherwise targeting Palestinian civilians, leaving at the end of the year over 22,000 dead, over 61,000 wounded, and 1.9 million homeless. This is not including the 7,000 “missing” presumed dead under the rubble.

This is not the first large scale Israeli military assault on Gaza.

This is the thirteenth large scale Israeli military assault on Gaza in the last 20 years that has involved the destruction of entire apartment buildings, entire neighborhoods, and entire regions of Gaza.

Related Articles

• “Palestinians ‘attack’, Israel ‘retaliates’” by Nigel Parry (edited by Laurie King-Irani), The Electronic Intifada (25 May 2001)
• “The vocabulary of revenge” by Nigel Parry, Al-Ahram Weekly Online, Issue No. 529 (12-18 April 2001)
  

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