The Gaza Holocaust, Israel's authoritarian drift and the crisis of Western civilisation
A humanitarian catastrophe of unthinkable magnitude is unfolding in Palestine, threatening regional stability — and it continues with the full, unquestioning support of the US and EU
Guest post by Roberto Iannuzzi, originally published in Italian on his Substack.
What is happening in Gaza will not remain confined to Gaza. It is a symptom of a more general malaise that is eroding Western civilisation.
The breaking of the ceasefire in the Strip by Israel coincides with an unprecedented centralisation of power within the Jewish state, driven by the Netanyahu government.
That none of this is front-page news in Europe or the US is itself telling — an indication of a crisis that is not merely democratic, but civilisational, into which the entire West is plunging (seemingly unaware).
This numbness is due to the fact that these events are part of a broader global context in which the West itself is experiencing an illiberal drift and has progressively dismantled every aspect of the international law it once championed.
Today, for example, the United States openly talks about the possibility of annexing territories or sovereign states like Greenland and Canada.
And, paradoxically, European allies accuse Washington not of such grotesque claims, but of disloyalty for wanting to negotiate an end to the conflict in Ukraine, which has caused enormous damage to Europe and could cause even greater harm if it continues.
What is happening in Gaza
On the night of March 18, Israel broke the ceasefire with a ferocious bombing that killed over 400 Palestinians within a few hours. The death toll rose to over 700 the following day.
These figures, largely ignored by the Western press, sent an unequivocal message to the people of Gaza.
Even during the most violent days of the Israeli military operations that preceded the last ceasefire, the daily toll had not exceeded 250 deaths — itself a staggering figure by any measure.
According to the Palestinian Civil Defense, among the 400+ victims on the first day there were more than 170 children and over 80 women. In other words, the overwhelming majority were not only civilians, but women and children.
In short, the Israeli breach of the ceasefire has resulted in an indiscriminate and unprecedented massacre of defenceless victims — a hallmark of the entire Gaza “conflict” that is now assuming increasingly horrifying dimensions.
Since October 7, 2023, Israeli has killed at least 17,400 children, 15,600 of whom have been identified. Many others remain buried under rubble.
Even among the few Hamas-affiliated targets hit, Israel has mainly targeted people from Gaza’s civilian administration — i.e., non-combatants.
According to Israeli sources, the goal of such actions is to destroy the administrative structure that allows Hamas to govern Gaza.
Among others, Hamas has mourned the loss of Isam Da’alis (government coordinator), Mahmoud Hatteh (deputy justice minister), Ahmad Abu Watfeh (deputy interior minister) and Ismail Barhoum (finance chief), the last of whom was killed when Israel bombed the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, where he was hospitalised.
According to the Geneva Conventions, all parties in armed conflict must observe core principles like the distinction between military and civilian targets, and proportionality.
Despite all evidence, countries like the UK and US have concluded that it cannot be definitively stated that Israel has violated the principle of proportionality.
Last May, a State Department report requested by then-president Joe Biden to assess whether Israel was using US-supplied weapons “in accordance with international humanitarian law”, found that it could not reach a conclusion due to a lack of transparency from Israel about its decision-making processes.
Similarly, a letter by British Foreign Secretary David Lammy in January said an assessment was impossible because of “the opaque and contested information environment in Gaza”.
During the last phase of the ceasefire, Lammy appeared more critical of Tel Aviv, stating that Israel’s aid blockade to the Strip constituted a breach of international law.
However, he was promptly contradicted by a government spokesperson. The UK continues to maintain extremely close ties with Israel’s arms industry and military leadership.
Britain’s Akrotiri base in Cyprus has been widely used to dispatch US special forces and weapons to Israel during the conflict. And after Tel Aviv broke the ceasefire, British spy planes resumed daily flights over Gaza.
Deportation or extermination
The Netanyahu government broke the ceasefire by accusing Hamas of refusing to release the hostages. In reality, the truce agreement had been structured (in three phases) in such a way that it was clear from the outset it would likely fail.
Despite the accusations from Tel Aviv, it was the Israeli government that refused to implement — or even negotiate — the start of the second phase.
Instead, it aimed to prolong the first phase to secure the release of as many Israeli hostages as possible without committing to ending the conflict.
In the past, prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu had repeatedly declared that Israel would not end the war unless Hamas was destroyed.
Defence Minister Israel Katz unequivocally clarified the two options facing Gaza’s Palestinians. After the first day of heavy bombardments, he said it was just the “first step”.
Addressing a population devastated by hunger and destruction, Katz said that if the hostages are freed and Hamas is expelled, “other options” would be open to the Palestinians of Gaza, including “relocating to other places in the world to those who wish”.
“The alternative is utter destruction and devastation”, the minister concluded. In other words: deportation or extermination.
Just ten days earlier, during the ceasefire, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich — returning from Washington — had declared that Trump’s plan to remove the Palestinians from Gaza was “taking shape”.
According to the Washington Post, the Israeli army is preparing a new ground operation in the Strip that could last for months.
Tel Aviv’s forces have already regained control of the Netzarim Corridor in the central-northern part of the enclave and have attacked the city of Rafah in the south.
The newspaper reports that Israeli military leaders are planning even more aggressive tactics, including direct control of humanitarian aid, classifying Hamas’s civilian leadership as legitimate targets, and relocating the population into “humanitarian bubbles”.
Those who refuse to evacuate will be treated as combatants and eliminated — either militarily or through siege tactics like those already employed in northern Gaza before the truce.
This new and even more violent campaign would be enabled by Donald Trump’s return to the White House and a stronger alignment between the government and the new defence leadership. Minister Katz and the new army chief Eyal Zamir are both fully loyal to Netanyahu.
Their predecessors — Defence Minister Yoav Gallant and Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi — had opposed the idea of a full military occupation of Gaza, which would involve managing both the population and humanitarian aid.
Netanyahu’s power grab
Netanyahu’s decision to resume the military operations in Gaza also stems from specific domestic political needs.
By restarting the bombings, he secured renewed loyalty from minister Smotrich, who had threatened to leave the government if Israel moved forward with the second phase of the ceasefire.
The prime minister also managed to bring back into the cabinet the other far-right party, Otzma Yehudit, and its leader Itamar Ben-Gvir, who regained his position as Minister of National Security — despite the opposition of Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara.
The government now holds 68 out of 120 seats in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, which allowed it to pass the budget law before the March 31 deadline without fearing blackmail from ultra-Orthodox parties demanding exemption from military service.
The resumption of the military operations also offered Netanyahu a convenient distraction, enabling him to dismiss Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar without excessive resistance, following a prolonged and intense conflict between the two.
Shin Bet’s internal investigation into the October 7, 2023 attacks identified Qatari funding to Gaza — $30 million per month — as a key factor that enabled Hamas to prepare for the attack. That funding had been publicly backed by Netanyahu.
The Shin Bet is also reportedly investigating alleged ties between senior Netanyahu aides and Qatar, particularly efforts to boost the Gulf monarchy’s image ahead of the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Doha.
Moreover, the intelligence agency had begun probing the infiltration of Kahanist extremists into police ranks under Ben-Gvir’s supervision.
Naturally, Shin Bet and Ronen Bar themselves are blamed by much of the Israeli public for the October 7 failures. Yet many believe Netanyahu sacked Bar for personal reasons.
Attorney General Baharav-Miara has challenged the decision to dismiss Bar. An all-out battle is now unfolding between her and the prime minister, who is seeking to remove her from office as well.
Under the cover of war, the government has also completed the legislative process for the judicial reform that had already plunged Israel into an unprecedented political crisis — well before the Hamas attack of October 2023.
The reform law grants the political leadership — especially the government — significantly more power in selecting judges and Supreme Court members, at the expense of the judiciary and bar association.
Only slightly modified to appease the opposition, the reform was eventually approved by parliament despite a boycott by opposition parties.
Faced with the powerlessness of the opposition and dwindling street protests, Netanyahu’s only remaining obstacle to an unprecedented consolidation of personal power is the Attorney General.
Unconditional Western support
In his all-out battle for political survival, Netanyahu has repeatedly drawn self-serving parallels with US president Donald Trump.
Upon returning from his visit to the White House on February 11, Netanyahu gave a speech to his cabinet, which insiders dubbed the “loyalty speech”, during which he allegedly stated:
Look at Trump. He has done three things in America: he has surrounded himself with people who are loyal to him and only him; he has fired all the people who are not loyal to him; and he is eliminating the “deep state” methodically and thoroughly.
With this, Netanyahu is believed to have launched his own political purge.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has given its full green light to the resumption of military operations in Gaza, placing the blame for the ceasefire’s collapse squarely on Hamas.
The administration “fully supports” Israel, the IDF and the actions taken in recent days, declared White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt.
The European Union has offered more muted support, “deploring” the breakdown of the truce while simultaneously condemning Hamas’s “refusal” to release the hostages.
In practice, however, the EU has done nothing to rein in Israel’s actions, as evidenced by the visit to Israel by EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas on March 24.
During her visit, Kallas reiterated her “strong condemnation” of Hamas’s violence, while merely noting that “the breakdown of ceasefire has caused an appalling loss of life”.
Though she called for a resumption of negotiations, Kallas reaffirmed the EU’s solidarity with Israel and added: “We agree the immense threat Iran poses to the region and global stability”, noting further that “Iran is a threat also supporting Russia’s war in Ukraine”.
Likewise, neither Kallas nor other EU leaders have taken any concrete action regarding the brutal and unjustified military campaign launched by Israel in the West Bank at the end of January — just after the Gaza truce began.
Additional troubling signs are also coming from the White House.
Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth, who removed officials at the Pentagon responsible for assessing risks to civilians, has tasked military legal experts with relaxing the US Army’s rules of engagement.
Just before Israel broke the ceasefire in Gaza, US forces bombed Yemen’s Houthi rebels, responsible for a Red Sea blockade (which had paused during the Gaza truce), killing over 50 people — including numerous civilians.
The operation was accompanied by threats from Trump to the Yemeni group: “HELL WILL RAIN DOWN UPON YOU LIKE NOTHING YOU HAVE EVER SEEN BEFORE!”.
The West has thus signalled that, at least in the Middle East, it is comfortable with disproportionate use of force, even at the cost of countless civilian casualties — despite having only vague strategic goals.
Israel knows it has a free hand in Gaza, and likely in the West Bank as well. The outlook is a humanitarian catastrophe of unimaginable proportions, with renewed risks of regional destabilisation.
Neither the United States nor Europe seems willing to raise objections in the face of such a terrifying scenario.
In all likelihood, the rest of the world will draw its own conclusions from a Western attitude that is as violent, dangerous and erratic as it is weak, contradictory and ineffective in achieving meaningful outcomes.
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I am 60+ years old. I was born during the beginning of the Viet Nam war. Never in my lifetime has the west obeyed any “rule of law.” There isn’t a slide here… simply a continuation and escalation. The difference, so far as I can see, is that Western nations no longer bother to commit their crimes in secret or manufacture actual consent for their murderous policies; now, with a corporately owned media, they simply manufacture the illusion of consent. The lies we were once fed seemed plausible so long as we squinted a bit - now, the lies are simply laughable (or would be if they weren’t so gruesome) and those who can’t pretend to believe those lies are denounced as radicals, enemies, terrorists.
The entire COVID era taught our governments exactly what they could get away with in terms of controlling entire populations with propaganda, psychological terror, state repression, force, coercion, and censorship. (This is not an argument as to whether the pandemic was or was not real, only about how it was used to corral citizens and strip personal autonomous bodily rights from them.)
The Israel project and the Gaza holocaust are, and make no mistake about this, US hegemonic policy. This is the “New American Century” and the problem of “too much democracy” has been completely overcome.
We are living in very dark times, and I cannot foresee any light at the end of this tunnel.
"violent, dangerous and erratic" -- yes. But "weak, contradictory and ineffective in achieving meaningful outcomes" -- perhaps not. What if the desired outcome of the West+Israeli leadership is to establish a Greater Israel? Then it would seem to be moving in the right direction, especially if you consider the dismantling of Syria and nonexistence of a Lebanese resistance, not to mention the full cooperation and support of the Gulf petrolcrats... It would be better if you were right, because it would mean a higher likelihood of failure, but my worry is that there's more purpose and effectiveness going on than you give them credit for. Either way, appreciate your reporting and analysis as always!!!