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As Amal Nassar lay in pain on a bed at the Al-Awda Hospital in the Nuseirat refugee camp in northern Gaza, the echoes of explosions and artillery fire could be heard all around her. It was mid-January and she had made her way to the embattled hospital to give birth to a baby girl she would name Mira. While Amal should have been celebrating her infant\u2019s delivery, instead she was engulfed in fear, surrounded by the relentless nightmare of death and suffering that she and her family had experienced for months.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was muttering to myself, \u2018I hope I die<\/em>,\u2019\u201d she\u00a0recalled<\/a>.<\/p>\n Though gut-wrenching, Amal\u2019s story is not unlike those of so many other young mothers in Gaza today. The World Health Organization\u00a0estimates<\/a>\u00a0that more than 50,000 pregnant women are barely surviving there, while having babies at the rate of 180 births a day. Many of those women (especially in the north) are acutely malnourished and few received any medical attention before their labor pains began, often weeks ahead of schedule.<\/p>\n According to a bleak\u00a0report<\/a>\u00a0released in March by UNICEF, the thousands of infants born in Gaza over the previous two months (and ever since) are at great risk of dying. Many already have, although numbers are hard to come by.<\/p>\n \u201cThere are babies who died in their mothers\u2019 wombs and surgeries were performed to remove the dead fetuses,\u201d\u00a0said<\/a>\u00a0Dr. Muhammad Salha, acting director of Al-Awda Hospital, where the situation couldn\u2019t be more dire. \u201cMothers are not eating because of the conditions we are living in, and this affects the infants\u2026 There are [cases] of many children suffering from dehydration and malnutrition, leading to death.\u201d<\/p>\n Western healthcare providers who have returned from Gaza describe genuinely dreadful scenes. Dr. Nahreen Ahmed, a Philadelphia-based doctor and the medical director of the humanitarian aid group\u00a0MedGlobal<\/a>, left Gaza in late March, her second time on the frontlines since Israel launched its assault nearly<\/p>\n ht months ago. What she witnessed has changed her forever.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s not enough space for us to work closely with the mothers to help them start lactating again. We can\u2019t even access them. And to be able to do that, you have to have day-to-day activities with those women, and that is not something that\u2019s possible for us right now. Those children need to be breastfed. If they can\u2019t be breastfed, they need formula,\u201d Dr. Ahmed\u00a0told<\/a>\u00a0Democracy Now!\u00a0<\/em>host Amy Goodman. \u201cWhat we\u2019re talking about is women who are squeezing fruits, dates into handkerchiefs, into tissues, and feeding \u2014 drip-feeding their children with some sort of sugary substance to nourish them.\u201d<\/p>\n Being born amid the rubble, amid a horrifying offensive, will undoubtedly scar future generations \u2014 if, that is, they\u2019re lucky enough to survive the constant bombings and the denial of basic necessities like food, fuel, and medical aid. And as yet, despite mounting international pressure,\u00a0threats<\/a>\u00a0of war crimes charges, and\u00a0claims<\/a>\u00a0of genocide, Israel has shown no signs of relenting.<\/p>\n Onslaught of Revenge<\/strong><\/p>\n From early on, Israeli leaders have been remarkably clear about their intentions in the Palestinian enclave. Israeli Colonel Yogez BarSheshet,\u00a0speaking<\/a>\u00a0from Gaza in late 2023, put it bluntly: \u201cWhoever returns here\u2026 will find scorched earth. No houses, no agriculture, no nothing. They have no future.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s as if Israel\u2019s leaders knew that, while it was impossible to actually destroy Hamas, they could at least obliterate Gaza\u2019s infrastructure and murder civilians under the guise of hunting down terrorists. After seven long months of Israel\u2019s onslaught of revenge, it\u2019s clear that this has never been about freeing the hostages taken on October 7th. Along the way, Israel could easily have accepted multiple\u00a0proposals<\/a>\u00a0to do so, including a ceasefire\u00a0resolution<\/a>\u00a0brokered by Egypt, Qatar, and the U.S. in early May. Instead, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and crew shot down that plan, in which Hamas had agreed to release all living hostages taken in its October 7th assault on Israel in exchange for Palestinians held in Israeli prisons. The sticking point, however, had nothing to do with the release of those captives rotting in Gaza under who knows what kind of stressful conditions, but Israel\u2019s refusal to accept any resolution that includes a permanent ceasefire.<\/p>\n Immediately after nixing Hamas\u2019s offer to release the hostages, Israel began\u00a0bombing<\/a>\u00a0Rafah, home to more than a million refugees. Hundreds of thousands of them have since\u00a0fled<\/a>\u00a0the city, displaced yet again. And despite Netanyahu\u2019s now-discredited<\/a>\u00a0claim that he only had to destroy Hamas\u2019s last four \u201cbattalions\u201d in Rafah, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) soon found themselves\u00a0back<\/a>\u00a0at it in the north as well, attacking areas where Hamas was once again said to be operating.<\/p>\n In response to protests that spread quickly on college campuses in the U.S., President Biden paid lip service to the outrage and\u00a0paused<\/a>\u00a0shipments of U.S. military aid to Israel, only to reverse course a week later with a new\u00a0$1-billion arms deal<\/a>\u00a0for that country.<\/p>\n Depending on how Israel\u2019s post-October 7th blood-soaked incursion into Gaza is evaluated, the military operation has either been a complete disaster or a monumental success. If the destruction of Gaza and the slaughtering of Palestinians was the intent, then Israel has certainly succeeded. If the return of the hostages and the destruction of Hamas was the goal, then it failed miserably. Either way, Israel has quickly become a\u00a0pariah<\/a>\u00a0of its own making, something that never had to happen, and from which there may be no turning back.<\/p>\n The Damage Done<\/strong><\/p>\n The specter of death in Gaza is difficult, if not impossible, to grasp. At a distance, our understanding of the situation often relies on somber statistics, especially in the establishment media. The official count, consistently\u00a0cited<\/a>\u00a0by mainstream outlets,<\/em>\u00a0comes in at around 35,000 deaths.<\/p>\n In May, the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0and other outlets\u00a0jumped<\/a>\u00a0on a\u00a0report<\/a> from the United<\/p>\n Nations, which had apparently revised Gaza\u2019s death count. But the U.N. did not, in fact, halve its total of women and children who had died, as the\u00a0Jerusalem Post<\/em>\u00a0claimed<\/a>. It simply altered its classification system in terms of those estimated to have died and those it could\u00a0definitively confirm<\/a>\u00a0to be deceased. The totals, however, remained the same. Nonetheless, even those numbers, based on information provided by Gaza\u2019s Ministry of Health, end up blurring the cruel reality on the ground. U.N. officials also\u00a0fear that<\/a>\u00a0at least 10,000 more Gazans lie buried under the rubble in that 25-mile strip of land.<\/p>\n But death figures can also impart meaning, as the long-time consumer-rights activist Ralph Nader recently pointed out. He happens to\u00a0believe<\/a>\u00a0that Israel could have killed at least 200,000 Palestinians in Gaza, a mind-boggling figure, but worth examining. So, I called on him to elaborate.<\/p>\n \u201cThe undercount is staggering,\u201d said Nader, whose Lebanese parents emigrated to the United States before he was born. \u201cThe U.S. and Israel want a low number, so they look around. Instead of themselves estimating \u2014 which they don\u2019t want to do \u2014 they cling to Hamas\u2019s [figures], and Hamas doesn\u2019t want a realistic number because they don\u2019t want to be seen as unable to protect their own people. So, they developed these criteria: to be counted, the dead must first be certified by hospitals and morgues [which barely exist].\u201d<\/p>\n He has made it a habit to reach out to writers and editors. Like so many others, I have a bit of a phone affair with that 90-year-old thinker and activist. We discuss politics, baseball, and journalism\u2019s rapid, insidious decline. I\u2019ve certainly heard him animated in the past, but never more indignant than when he addresses the situation in Gaza. \u201cThe whole thing is one death camp now. It\u2019s easily 200,000 deaths in Gaza,\u201d he insisted, citing the number of bombs dropped, which have, by some estimates, exceeded\u00a0100,000<\/a>. We know that at least\u00a045,000<\/a>\u00a0missiles and bombs had been used in Gaza within three months of the beginning of Israel\u2019s military campaign. As a result, as many as\u00a0175,000 buildings<\/a>\u00a0have been damaged or destroyed by Israel. So, he seems to be on to something.<\/p>\n \u201cEventually [the real number of the dead] will come out,\u201d he adds. \u201cThey\u2019ll do a census, whoever takes over. The one thing the extended families in Gaza know is who\u2019s been killed in their families.\u201d<\/p>\n Of course, his assertion is circumstantial and he knows it, but he\u2019s making a point. With so much of the Gaza Strip facing imminent starvation, nearly all hospitals out of commission, just about no medicine left, and very little clean water or food, 35,000 deaths are likely, in the end, to prove a drastic undercount.<\/p>\n \u201cNot in Our Name\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n The Holocaust, in which Nazis murdered 11 million people,\u00a0six million<\/a>\u00a0of whom were Jews, was quite literally\u00a0the<\/em>\u00a0textbook genocide. Yet, as ghastly and systematic as it was, at least one other genocide may have claimed a larger death toll. In her latest book,\u00a0Doppelganger<\/em><\/a>, Naomi Klein\u00a0explains<\/a> that the largest genocide was inflicted on Indigenous peoples in the Americas at the hands of European settlers. Hitler\u2019s Holocaust, Klein writes, actually took a page from\u00a0 colonialists in the Americas and was deeply influenced by the Western frontier myth.<\/p>\n \u201cI think it is important to say that every genocide is different,\u201d was how Klein put it<\/a>\u00a0to Arielle Angel of the\u00a0Jewish Currents<\/em>\u00a0podcast\u00a0On the Nose<\/em><\/a>. \u201cThere are particularities to every holocaust, and there absolutely were particularities to the Nazi Holocaust. This was a Fordist Holocaust. It was quicker and on a much larger scale and more industrialized than had ever been seen before or since.\u201d<\/p>\n Klein is correct that the Nazi Holocaust was born out of Hitler\u2019s colonialist aspirations and ought to be framed as such. It\u2019s also worth noting that the 1948 Genocide Convention, which was a response to that atrocity, makes clear that classifying an event as a genocide is\u00a0dependent<\/a>\u00a0neither on the number of victims killed nor even on the percentage of a given population slaughtered. This means that the number of people killed in Gaza makes little difference in the court of international law; legally speaking, that is, Israel is\u00a0already committing genocide<\/a>.<\/p>\n In one of the saddest twists of modern history, in the wake of the October 7th Hamas assault, the trauma of the Holocaust is being used to exploit Jewish suffering and fear for safety and so to justify the slow evisceration of Palestinians. It\u2019s this tragic irony that\u2019s turned so many young American Jews against Israel\u2019s policies.<\/p>\n Amid a mounting\u00a0international backlash<\/a>, support for Israel among Jewish Americans has never faced such\u00a0intense division<\/a>. Many of the protests against the war in Gaza here have, in fact, been led by young Jews fed up with Israel\u2019s claim on their Judaism and cultural history. In response, the ranks of the Jewish-run\u00a0IfNotNow<\/a>\u00a0and the\u00a0Jewish Voice for Peace<\/a>\u00a0have swelled, helping to spawn a newly invigorated antiwar movement in this country.<\/p>\n The threat this poses to Zionism\u2019s future is unlike anything the movement has faced since the\u00a0Six-Day War<\/a>, according to the pro-Israel Anti-Defamation League (ADL). \u201cWe have a major, major, major generational problem,\u201d ADL director Jonathan Greenblatt\u00a0said<\/a>\u00a0in a panicked donor call last November. \u201cAll the polling I\u2019ve seen\u2026 suggests this is not a left\/right gap, folks. The issue of [the] United States\u2019 support for Israel is not left and right. It is young and old.\u201d<\/p>\n Greenblatt is correct. Gen Z and Millenials, Jewish or otherwise, are much less likely to accept Israel\u2019s rationale for the annihilation of Palestinians than the generations that came before them.\u00a0Poll<\/a>\u00a0after\u00a0poll<\/a>\u00a0shows that ever more young Jews in the United States are distancing themselves from the tenets of Zionism. Why wouldn\u2019t they? They\u2019ve seen the dead bodies on social media, the screams, the bloodshed, the flattened cities, and they want no part of it. Support for Israel among the young is now at a nadir.<\/p>\n And that, as\u00a0polls<\/a>\u00a0already suggest, could affect the coming election. \u201cBiden\u2019s going to lose the election just by people staying home,\u201d Ralph Nader predicted. \u201cHe thinks properly that Trump is worse on this issue and everything else, so he\u2019s got this attitude, so does the entire Democratic Party,\u00a0\u2018Hey you protestors, grow up, you\u2019ve got nowhere else to go.\u2019<\/em>\u00a0Yeah, they\u2019ve got somewhere to go. They can just stay home.\u201d<\/p>\n We\u2019re still months away from the November<\/p>\n election and things could change drastically, but you can\u2019t resurrect the dead or turn back the clock on genocide. Thanks, in part, to those American bombs and missiles, the damage is already done. Israel\u2019s collective punishment is now simply a fact of life and President Biden remains culpable<\/a>\u00a0for those deaths in Gaza, too, whether the human toll is now 35,000 or 200,000. The White House\u2019s continued\u00a0denial<\/a>\u00a0that Israel is committing genocide means very little when there\u2019s a mountain of\u00a0evidence<\/a>\u00a0to the contrary.<\/p>\n Back in the desperate and overcrowded Nuseirat refugee camp, Amal Nassar held her three-month-old as an April spring day arrived early in Gaza. She\u00a0wondered<\/a>\u00a0what the future would hold for her little baby girl.<\/p>\n