Gaza’s genocide is being normalized along with Israel’s West Bank crimes
“Accountability is essential,” wrote Yuli Novak, executive director of the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem in the Nov. 18th Guardian. “We must not look away. We must not move on. Those who wish to stand with us, all of us, the people of the land, must act to stop this violent, racist, increasingly fascist regime and hold its leaders to account. This is the only way to protect both Palestinian and Israeli lives.”
As the still ongoing genocide fades from the headlines, there is no sign that Novak’s appeal is being heeded. According to the Holocaust scholar Raz Segal, the Gaza genocide has become a model “of what awaits people who will dare to resist whatever measures [are] imposed on them by extremely violent states in a world shaped by brute force , now without even the pretense of Holocaust memory and international law.”
A newly released study by Max-Planck-Gesellschaft found that “by October 6, 2025, the number of conflict-related deaths in Gaza had likely surpassed 100,000 and life expectancy had “sharply decreased.” And now the occupation of Gaza by the ‘increasingly fascist regime’ of Israel is being reinforced by repackaged colonial rule under US command which has been given a stamp of approval by the US Security Council.
The Security Council “betrays the people it claims to protect”
This is the assessment of UN Security Council Resolution 2803 made by Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, who is herself under US sanctions for criticizing Israel. The resolution was unanimously endorsed on Nov. 17, with Russia and China abstaining. Rather than demanding Israel’s withdrawal from occupied territory and upholding the Palestinian right to self-determination, the US-drafted resolution, Albanese asserts, permits the perpetuation of “Israel’s ongoing unlawful siege, occupation, racial segregation, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing,” and assigns the US, ”which shares complicity in the genocide, as the new manager of the open-air prison that Israel has already established.”
An even more withering critique of the resolution was made by Craig Mokhiber, a human rights lawyer and former director of the New York office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. Calling its passage by the Security Council following weeks of US pressure a “day of shame for the UN,” he excoriates member states for openly flouting international la w and the UN Charter, denying Palestinians “participation in decisions on their own rights, governance, and lives” and handing over control of Gaza to the US, “a co-perpetrator of the genocide” and giving it a veto over Palestinian self-determination. The Board of Peace chaired by Trump for renewable two-year terms – a position he can continue to hold when he is no longer president of the US - and the ‘International Stabilization Force’ acting under Trump’s command and in cooperation with Israel have now been blessed by the UN although, as Israel insisted, they have no UN connection (see Nov. 17 Bi-Weekly Brief).
“The veto has repeatedly been used in the Council to deny Palestinian rights,” Mokhiber wrote. “In this case, when it could have been used to protect Palestinian rights, the veto was nowhere to be found. In one minute of voting, the Security Council has lost all legitimacy.”
Palestinians reject new form of colonial domination
Palestinian civil society has also been scathing about the UN endorsement of the resolution enshrining the Trump plan. In the words of the refugee rights organization Badil, under the resolution “Palestinians are reduced to recipients who merely manage the day-to-day services of the very system that dispossess them…Resolution 2803 is not a plan for Gaza’s recovery. It is a blueprint for managing Palestinians through foreign authority and colonial tutelage, trying to erase genocide from global memory, and entrenching the Israeli regime’s colonial apartheid under an international framework.”
The Palestinian policy network Al-Shabaka condemns the so-called peace plan as a “repackaged form of colonial domination presented as peacemaking.” It cites the “grave implications” of giving the Board of Peace control of humanitarian aid. “Aid has long been weaponized in Palestine, but the UN resolution grants an unprecedented degree of external control over who survives, who starves, and who gains access to basic services” — and who benefits from reconstruction.
Hamas and other Palestinian factions have strongly rejected the resolution. But the widely-unpopular Palestinian Authority (PA) strongly supported it. Although the PA is shunned by Israel, it is placing its hopes on the vague promise added as a sweetener to the resolution’s original draft over the opposition of Israel that after the ‘reform’ of the PA “the conditions may finally be in place for a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood.” Only hours before the resolution was passed National Security Minister Ben-Gvir demanded that Mahmoud Abbas be imprisoned and other PA officials killed if the UN paved the way to Palestinian statehood.
US silence on Israel’s ‘ceasefire’ violations an indication of the road ahead
Who is monitoring the conduct of the Gaza ‘ceasefire’ which has to date resulted in the slaughter of some 350 Palestinians – in seven weeks nearly tripling the number of 127 Lebanese killed by Israel during its year-long ‘ceasefire’ with Hezbollah? Supposedly this task is being carried out by the US from its Civil-Military Coordination Center (CMCC) in Kiryat Gat in southern Israel, but it has been entirely silent about Israel’s more than 500 ceasefire violations.
It may even have given Israel a green light to carry out such actions as the killing of 33 Palestinians, including 12 children, in air strikes on tented encampments and urban centers on Nov. 19, and the heavy tank fire and bombardments that killed 21 people on Nov. 23, including 11 members of the Abu Shawish family. On Nov. 29, the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, an Israeli drone murdered Fadi Abu Assis, aged 10, and his brother Juma, aged 8, when they were out gathering wood for their wheelchair-bound father on the outskirts of Khan Younis, bringing the Gaza Health Ministry’s count of those slain to 70,100. Israeli forces described the small children as two suspects who “conducted suspicious activities” by crossing the (mainly invisible) yellow line. Several hundred have been wounded at a time when those hospitals that still function lack essential supplies and Israel will holds in its prisons 80 doctors and other medical workers from Gaza who have not been charged with a crime.
Nor has the US publicly rebuked Israel for moving its tanks west of the ‘yellow line’ — the agreed ‘ceasefire’ line giving Israel control of 53 percent of the Gaza Strip -— to bombard Gaza City on Nov. 20. In a penetrating podcast the journalist Muhammad Shehada reports that the zone of total Israeli control is actually closer to 60 percent.
Disarming Hamas?
At the CMCC representatives of 21 countries (including 150 Israeli soldiers but “no formal Palestinian representation”) and the US-based high tech surveillance firms Palantir and Dataminr have been meeting with the US Central Command to figure out how to implement the Trump plan. According to the Israeli publication Ynet News they are being briefed by Israeli military intelligence officers about “how Hamas functions as a military organization,” in the expectation that the eventual ‘International Stabilization Force’ will take on the job of disarming the resistance forces. According to unnamed sources, “Hamas is not ready to disarm without a clear commitment to a complete Israeli withdrawal and a detailed plan for who would get the weapons it surrenders and who will be enforcing the process.”
Indications are that it may be difficult recruiting countries to fulfill this role given the lack of Palestinian involvement and the inability of Israel to decisively defeat Hamas even while it was being supplied with 120,000 tons of military equipment carried by a thousand flights from Western countries. A new report by Progressive International and the Palestinian Youth Movement has found that more than a thousand tons of military equipment each week were shipped to Israel in 2025 from a single Jersey City warehouse. Many of the arms transited through New York’s JFK Airport. The arms traffic with Israel is not one way only. Israel’s inability to force the surrender of a territory only a third the size of Cape Cod did not prevent the US from recently signing a multi-million dollar contract with the Israeli firm XTEND for attack drones “tested in Gaza.”
If Hamas refuses to turn over its weapons, Gaza can expect the treatment currently being given Lebanon, with Israel and the US reportedly now in sync on Israel’s near daily bombing of that country. Under the headline “’Imperial Israel’ in the New Middle East” Roger Cohen wrote in the Nov. 26 New York Times that “Israel is striking at will in Lebanon, killing enemies and innocents alike.” UNIFIL calculates there have been over 7,500 air violations by Israel and some 2,500 ground incursions during the year-long ‘ceasefire.’ According to Mondoweiss, “Israel is using existing ceasefire agreements to establish new realities on the ground, projecting itself as the regional hegemon by launching attacks on Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and the West Bank.”
Planning the future of Gaza
According to the UN, it will cost $70 billion to rebuild the devastated Gaza Strip. Plans appear to be moving ahead for vetted Palestinians to live in prefabricated ‘alternative safe communities’ in the Israeli-controlled part of Gaza, which the US calls the ‘green zone’ (another one!) They could be under perpetual AI-driven surveillance and permanently confined to the ‘green zone’ as a ‘security’ measure. According to Nov. 21 The Wall Street Journal, “One idea that has been floated is to use armed militias opposed to Hamas and backed by Israel to secure the communities…. Militias opposed to Hamas are already building clusters of communities inside the Gaza green zone, where hundreds to a few thousand civilians are already living.” Families and members of the Israeli-backed Abu Shabab militia — which Israel had reportedly protected as it looted aid trucks — are based in the part of Rafah that was not razed by Israel.
Since the main food growing area is in the ‘green zone’, and since it is likely that if Hamas refuses to surrender, the US and Israel will block the entry of many essential supplies into the ‘red zone’ where most Palestinians are currently crammed, ongoing starvation in the rubble may well be their fate.
Lethal lack of food and shelter
While Israel still controls what can enter Gaza, the CMCC is now supposed to be in charge of overseeing food delivery. Although more food is now getting into Gaza the situation is still dire. The World Food Program says a quarter of the families in Gaza are only eating one meal a day and most cannot afford the food brought in for sale in markets. The Nov. 24 Middle East Monitor reported that Israel was allowing in only 200 trucks a day, a third of what the ceasefire deal had called for.
Also on Nov. 24, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), which had maintained four food distribution hubs that cost over 2,600 Palestinians their lives and which had ceased its operations at the beginning of the truce, announced it was closing down. Drop Site reported that the mercenary outfit UG Solutions – which had provided the GHF with its deadly security forces – was recruiting more private military contractors for aid distribution.
Meanwhile, Palestinians are trying to deal not just with airstrikes and lack of sufficient food, fuel and clean water, but with widespread flooding and sewage spreading through encampments of tents that have collapsed from the winter rains. Even the few functioning hospitals are flooded.
Israel has blocked the entry of UNRWA-supplied tents and blankets for a million people that are stranded at Gaza’s crossings. It also has blocked the entry of tent poles, which are on its ‘dual-use’ list of items with military potential. As one displaced resident wrote on social media, “Gaza is drowning in blood and rainwater.”
Forced displacement in the West Bank
The heinous situation in the occupied West Bank - see this OCHA summary - is being given even less attention in the US media than Gaza. A report released on Nov. 20 by Human Rights Watch describes ‘Operation Iron Wall’ under which, beginning early in 2025, Palestinians were displaced from the Jenin, Tulkarem and Nur Shams refugee camps – “the largest displacement of Palestinians in one operation since the 1967 war.” Some 850 of their homes have been demolished and 32,000 Palestinians from the camps remain permanently displaced, with no food or shelter provided for them by the occupying forces.
Another major military operation targeting Tubas and four surrounding towns in the north of the West Bank got underway on Nov. 26. The army claimed its intention was “to prevent the reformation of armed resistance groups” in the area. But Mondoweiss reports that according to local sources the real reason behind the mobilization of three military brigades is “to lay the groundwork for confiscating large swathes of land for an upcoming settlement project.”
With annexation of at least 82 percent of the West Bank the goal of far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich (who also participates in the Defense Ministry and is in charge of the Civil Administration), Palestinians continue to be subjected to the unchecked terror of settlers, some using military-issued weapons, and casual killing by soldiers. There were more than 260 settler attacks in October alone, and any kind of Israeli investigation is rare.
Against a background of “severe economic contraction” the violent targeting of farmers as they tried to harvest their olives has been ruinous for many families. Palestinian herdsmen are being systematically driven out of the Jordan Valley. “Here, as elsewhere in the West Bank,” wrote Ha’aretz journalist Gideon Levy, “the population transfer is as quiet as it is methodical.” In an atmosphere of total impunity, arson attacks carried out by settlers on homes and mosques have proliferated around the West Bank, with at least five such attacks since late October, according to +972 Magazine. Soldiers have operated with a similar impunity, as shown in the execution in Jenin on Nov. 27 of two Palestinians who were on their knees with their hands in the air. A day after the murder National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir promoted the head of the soldiers’ Border Police unit.
Targeting children
No one is safe in the West Bank and the allegation of stone throwing can be a death sentence, as it was for 14-year-old Jadallah Jihad Jouma Jadallah, who was killed on Nov. 16 by soldiers in the Al-Far’a refugee camp. Two 15-year-olds were shot dead not far from an illegal settlement near Hebron which Israel said they were trying to infiltrate. The army confiscated all three bodies. According to Defense for Children International – Palestine, 50 children have been killed in the West Bank this year alone and many of their bodies have been withheld from their families.
Some 350 children aged 12-17 are currently in Israeli military detention. Until he was released on Nov. 27after a trial in military court where the conviction rate is nearly 100 percent, one of them was Mohammed Ibrahim, a Palestinian American whose family lives in both the West Bank and Florida. He was 15 in February 2025 when he was seized from his home at 4 AM, allegedly for throwing stones, and pressured into making a false confession. A hundred US organizations and 27 members of Congress had campaigned for his release. In prison he lost a quarter of his body weight, developed a severe case of scabies and was denied visits by his parents.
The torture and other forms of abusive treatment – including of children - have long been documented in Israel’s detention facilities. On Nov. 23, 2025 the US, Israel and Argentina were the only three countries to vote against a UN General Assembly resolution condemning torture, which was supported by 169 nations.
When torture – like genocide - becomes acceptable, hopes for accountability are dim.
Nancy Murray, Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine
