This article is read by Eunice Wong, a Juilliard-trained actor, featured on Audible’s list of Best Women Narrators. Her work is on the annual Best Audiobooks lists of the New York Times, Audible, AudioFile, & Library Journal. www.eunicewong.actor
Text originally published December 15, 2025.
Full Text:
First, it was Israel’s right to defend itself. Then it was a war, even though, by Israel’s own military intelligence database, 83 percent of the casualties were civilians. The 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza, living under an Israeli air, land and sea blockade, have no army, air force, no mechanized units, no tanks, no navy, no missiles, no heavy artillery, no fleets of killer drones, no sophisticated tracking systems to map all movements, or an ally like the United States, which has given Israel at least $21.7 billion in military aid since Oct. 7, 2023.
Now, it is a “ceasefire.” Except of course, as usual, Israel only abided by the first of the 20 stipulations. It freed around 2,000 Palestinian captives held in Israeli prisons — 1700 of whom were detained after Oct. 7 — as well as around 300 bodies of Palestinians, in exchange for the return of the 20 remaining Israeli captives.
Israel has violated every other condition. It has tossed the agreement — brokered by the Trump administration without Palestinian participation — into the bonfire with all the other agreements and peace accords concerning Palestinians. Israel’s extensive and blatant flouting of international agreements and international law — Israel and its allies refuse to abide by three sets of legally binding orders by the International Cout of Justice (ICJ) and two ICJ advisory opinions, as well as the Genocide Convention and international humanitarian law — presage a world where the law is whatever the most militarily advanced countries say it is.
The sham peace plan — “President Donald J. Trump’s Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict” — in an act of stunning betrayal of the Palestinian people, was endorsed by most of the U.N. Security Council in November, with China and Russia abstaining. Member states washed their hands of Gaza and turned their backs on the genocide.
The adoption of resolution 2803 (2025), as the Middle East scholar Norman Finkelstein writes, “was simultaneously a revelation of moral insolvency and a declaration of war against Gaza. By proclaiming international law null and void, the Security Council proclaimed itself null and void. Vis-à-vis Gaza, the Council transmuted into a criminal conspiracy.”
The next phase is supposed to see Hamas surrender its weapons and Israel withdraw from Gaza. But these two steps will never happen. Hamas — along with other Palestinian factions — reject the Security Council resolution. They say they will disarm only when the occupation ends and a Palestinian state is created. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed that if Hamas does not disarm, it will be done “the hard way.”
The “Board of Peace,” headed by Trump, will ostensibly govern Gaza along with armed mercenaries from the Israel-allied International Stabilization Force, although no country seems anxious to commit their troops. Trump promises a Gaza Riviera that will function as a “special economic zone” — a territory operating outside of state law governed entirely by private investors, such as the Peter Thiel-backed charter city in Honduras. This will be achieved through the “voluntary” relocation of Palestinians — with those fortunate enough to own land offered digital tokens in exchange. Trump declares that the U.S. “will take over the Gaza Strip” and “own it.” It is a return to the rule of viceroys — though apparently not the odious Tony Blair. Palestinians, in one of the most laughable points in the plan, will be “deradicalized” by their new colonial masters.
But these fantasies will never come to fruition. Israel knows what it wants to do in Gaza and it knows no nation will intercede. Palestinians will struggle to survive in primitive and dehumanizing conditions. They will, as they have so many times in the past, be betrayed.
Israel has committed 738 violations of the ceasefire agreement between Oct. 10 and Dec. 12, including 358 land and air bombardments, the killing of at least 383 Palestinians and the injuring of 1,002 others, according to the Government Media Office in Gaza and the Palestinian Health Ministry. That’s an average of six Palestinians killed daily in Gaza — down from an average of 250 a day before the “ceasefire.” Israel said it killed a senior Hamas commander, Raed Saad, on Saturday, in a missile strike on a car on Gaza’s coastal road. Three others were also apparently killed in the strike.
December saw an average of 140 aid trucks allowed into Gaza each day — instead of the promised 600 — to keep Palestinians on the edge of famine and ensure widespread malnutrition. In October, some 9,300 children in Gaza under five were diagnosed with severe acute malnutrition, according to UNICEF. Israel has opened the border crossing into Egypt at Rafah, but only for Palestinians leaving Gaza. It is not open for those who want to return to Gaza, as stipulated in the agreement. Israel has seized some 58 percent of Gaza and is steadily moving its demarcation line — known as “the yellow line” — to expand its occupation. Palestinians who cross this arbitrary line — which constantly shifts and is poorly marked when it is marked at all — are shot dead or blown up — even if they are children.
Palestinians are being crammed into a shrinking, fetid, overcrowded concentration camp until they can be deported. Ninety-two percent of Gaza’s residential buildings have been damaged or destroyed and around 81 percent of all structures are damaged, according to UN estimates. The Strip, only 25 miles long and seven-and-a-half miles wide, has been reduced to 61 million tons of rubble, including nine million tons of hazardous waste that includes asbestos, industrial waste, and heavy metals, in addition to unexploded ordnance and an estimated 10,000 decaying corpses. There is almost no clean water, electricity or sewage treatment. Israel blocks shipments of construction supplies, including cement and steel, shelter materials, water infrastructure and fuel, so nothing can be rebuilt.
Eighty-two percent of Israeli Jews support the ethnic cleansing of the entire population of Gaza and 47 percent support killing all civilians in cities captured by the Israeli military. Fifty-nine percent support doing the same to Palestinian citizens of Israel. Seventy-nine percent of Israeli Jews say they are “not so troubled” or “not troubled at all” by reports of famine and suffering among the population in Gaza, according to a survey conducted in July. The words “Erase Gaza” appeared more than 18,000 times in Hebrew-language Facebook posts in 2024 alone, according to a new report on hate speech and incitement against Palestinians.
The newest form of genocidal celebration in Israel — where social media and news channels routinely chortle over the suffering of Palestinians — is the sprouting of golden nooses on the lapels of members of the far-right political party Otzma Yehudit, Israel’s version of the Ku Klux Klan, including one worn by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.
They are pushing a bill through the Knesset which seeks to mandate the death penalty for Palestinians who “intentionally or indifferently causes the death of an Israeli citizen,” if they are said to be motivated by “racism or hostility toward a public,” and with the purpose of harming the Israeli state or “the rebirth of the Jewish people in its land,” the Israeli human rights group Adalah explains. More than 100 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli jails since Oct. 7. If the new bill becomes law — it has been cleared through its first reading — it will join the wave of more than 30 anti-Palestinian laws enacted since October 7.
The message the genocide sends to the rest of the world, more than a billion of whom live on less than a dollar a day, is unequivocable: We have everything and if you try and take it away from us, we will kill you.
This is the new world order. It will look like Gaza. Concentration camps. Starvation. Obliteration of infrastructure and civil society. Mass killing. Wholesale surveillance. Executions. Torture, including the beatings, electrocutions, waterboarding, rape, public humiliation, deprivation of food and denial of medical care routinely used on Palestinians in Israeli prisons. Epidemics. Disease. Mass graves where corpses are bulldozed into unmarked pits and where bodies, as in Gaza, are dug up and torn apart by packs of ravenous wild dogs.
We are not destined for the Shangri-La sold to a gullible public by fatuous academics such as Stephen Pinker. We are destined for extinction. Not only individual extinction — which our consumer society furiously attempts to hide by peddling the fantasy of eternal youth — but wholesale extinction as temperatures rise to make the globe uninhabitable. If you think the human species will respond rationally to the ecocide, you are woefully out of touch with human nature. You need to study Gaza. And history.
If you live in the Global North, you will get to peer out at the horror, but slowly this horror, as the climate breaks down, will migrate home, turning most of us into Palestinians. Given our complicity in the genocide, it is what we deserve.
Empires, when they feel threatened, always embrace the instrument of genocide. Ask the victims of the Spanish conquistadors. Ask Native Americans. Ask the Herero and Nama. Ask the Armenians. Ask the survivors of Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Ask the Indians who survived the Bengal famine or the Kikuyu who rose against their British colonizers in Kenya. Climate refugees will get their turn.
This is not the end of the nightmare. It is the beginning.
Photos
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TOPSHOT – US special envoy Steve Witkoff (C) speaks as US businessman Jared Kushner (L) and his wife Ivanka Trump look on during a gathering at Hostages Square in Tel Aviv on October 11, 2025. (Photo by Jack GUEZ / AFP) (Photo by JACK GUEZ/AFP via Getty Images)
United Nations Security Council Meets To Consider Trump’s Gaza Peace Plan
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – NOVEMBER 17: Members of the UN Security Council raise their hands to vote in favor of a draft resolution to authorize an International Stabilization Force in Gaza, on November 17, 2025 at UN headquarters in New York City. The United Nations Security Council is voting on a draft resolution authored by the US that welcomes the establishment of a Board of Peace (BoP) as a “transitional governance administration” in Gaza and authorizes the BoP to establish a temporary International Stabilization Force (ISF) in the region. (Photo by Adam Gray/Getty Images)
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TOPSHOT – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attends a hearing in his trial on corruption charges at the district court in Tel Aviv on December 10, 2024. Netanyahu, the first sitting prime minister of Israel to face a criminal trial, testified for the first time when his corruption case resumed on December 10 on charges of bribery, fraud and breach of public trust in three separate cases. (Photo by Menahem Kahana / POOL / AFP) (Photo by MENAHEM KAHANA/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
“On Leadership” Reception With Tony Blair
WASHINGTON, DC – OCTOBER 24: The Right Honourable Tony Blair speaks onstage during the book launch for “On Leadership” and celebration of the work of The Tony Blair Institute For Global Change at St. Regis Hotel on October 24, 2024 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Paul Morigi/Getty Images for Washington Speakers Bureau)
Daily life in the shadow of destruction in Jabalia neighborhood of Gaza
JABALIA, GAZA – DECEMBER 17: Children try to warm themselves around the burning fires as Palestinians living in the Jabalia neighborhood in northern Gaza continue to carry on their daily lives under harsh conditions among the rubble left by Israeli attacks, as the sun sets over the area on December 17, 2025. Families deprived of basic necessities struggle to survive in makeshift tents set up near their destroyed homes or by sheltering inside damaged buildings, while also coping with cold weather conditions. (Photo by Khames Alrefi/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Funeral-for-Palestinians-Killed-in-Gaza-Airstrike
(EDITOR’S NOTE: Image depicts death) Mourners gather around the body of Raid Saad, a commander of the Al-Qassam Brigades, during his funeral in the Al-Shati refugee camp in Gaza City, Gaza on December 14, 2025. Saad was killed in an Israeli airstrike that targeted a car west of Gaza City, according to Hamas. The strike occurred amid a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. (Photo by Abood Abusalama / Middle East Images / AFP via Getty Images)
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TOPSHOT – Palestinians watch smoke billowing following an Israeli airstrike in Deir al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip on June 6, 2024, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas. (Photo by Bashar TALEB / AFP) (Photo by BASHAR TALEB/AFP via Getty Images)
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A Palestinian child sits in a tent as rain water runs past, at a makeshift camp housing displaced Palestinians in Deir al-Balah, in the central Gaza Strip on November 25, 2025, amid the continuing war between Israel and the militant Hamas group. After a long dry summer season, rain has finally reached the Levant coastline. (Photo by Bashar Taleb / AFP via Getty Images)
Palestinians flee after Israel’s violation of the cease-fire
GAZA CITY, GAZA – NOVEMBER 21: Palestinian families set out for areas they consider safer taking with them whatever belongings they could carry after the Israeli army expanded the so-called ‘Yellow Line’, where its forces are stationed, by placing new concrete blocks and carrying out attacks in the area in violation of the cease-fire in Gaza Strip on November 21, 2025. (Photo by Saeed M. M. T. Jaras/Anadolu via Getty Images)
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TOPSHOT – This picture taken from a position on the Israeli border with the Gaza Strip, shows the sun setting behind destroyed buildings in the Palestinian territory, on July 1, 2025. (Photo by Jack GUEZ / AFP via Getty Images)
TOPSHOT-PALESTINIAN-ISRAEL-CONFLICT-DAILY LIFE
TOPSHOT – Tents belonging to Palestinians are seen amid the rubble of destroyed buildings in Jabalia, in the northern Gaza Strip on February 18, 2025, as people return to northern parts of Gaza during a current ceasefire deal in the war between Israel and Hamas. (Photo by Omar AL-QATTAA / AFP) (Photo by OMAR AL-QATTAA/AFP via Getty Images)
Food distributed to Palestinians struggling with hunger in Gaza
GAZA CITY, GAZA – AUGUST 10: Starving Palestinians including women and children holding pots wait to receive food distributed by a charity organization as Israel continue to block humanitarian aid from reaching the Gaza Strip on August 10, 2025. (Photo by Khames Alrefi/Anadolu via Getty Images)
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TOPSHOT – Palestinian children line up to receive a hot meal at a food distribution point in Nuseirat on June 30, 2025. After more than 20 months of devastating conflict between Israel and the Hamas Islamist militant movement, rights groups say Gaza’s population of more than two million face famine-like conditions. (Photo by Eyad BABA / AFP) (Photo by EYAD BABA/AFP via Getty Images)
Portrait of Cambridge Professor Stephen Pinker
Cambridge Massachusetts Professor Stephen Pinker photographed at MIT. (Photo by Rick Friedman/Corbis via Getty Images)
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TOPSHOT – Flames from the wind-driven Eaton Fire engulf a house in Altadena, California, January 8, 2025. (Photo by Robyn BECK / AFP) (Photo by ROBYN BECK/AFP via Getty Images)
This post has been syndicated from The Chris Hedges Report, where it was published under this address.