Eight months of war have reduced nine-year-old Yunis Jumaa to skin and bone.
Stretched out, semi-unconscious on a hospital bed in Khan Younis in southern Gaza, his twisted frame is hard to look at.
His arms and legs like matchsticks, his knee joints bulging, his chest heaves with the skin stretched tight over his rib cage.
“My son was in excellent health before, he was normal,” says his mother Ghanima Jumaa.
“But when he developed this malnutrition and dehydration, he became as you see him now.”
Have you seen what roof knocking is like?
Or that they stopped the roof knocking on Oct 9th 2023?
Or that the repeated evacuation orders, where somehow millions of people are supposed to evacuate in a mere 24 hours with no cell service, electricity, food, or water, is blatant ethnic cleansing
Or that Israel has repeatedly bombed evacuation routes, places outside the evacuation zones, and ‘safe’ zones?
Sorry, I mean ‘safer zones’ since a Safe Zone has an international definition that Israel fails to meet.
Or the deliberate targeting of civilian areas as Power Targets
Or the use of Lavender and Where’s Daddy which intentionally bomb whole families and civilians
After the founding of Israel, the Two-State Solutions were utilized to further annex the Palestinian Occupied Territories and enact military control over Palestinians while denying them human and civil rights. This is apartheid. Despite this, both Fatah and Hamas have accepted a Two-State Solution on the 1967 borders, with the two most important factors being the Right of Return of Palestinian refugees and an end to the permanent occupation. Israel has had no intention on peace, as evidence of the constant land grabbing, dividing the West Bank into hundreds of isolated enclaves.
The Israeli imposed closure on Gaza began in 1991, temporarily, becoming permanent in 1993. The barrier began around Gaza around 1972. After the ‘disengagement’ in 2007, this turned into a full blockade; where Israel has had control over the airspace, borders, and sea. Under the guise of ‘dual-use’ Israel has restricted food, allocating a minimum supply leading to over half of Gaza being food insecure; construction materials, medical supplies, and other basic necessities have also been restricted. This has been a deliberate tactic of De-development, part of the systemic violence of the Apartheid Regime.
The Gaza Strip: The Political Economy of De-Development - Third Edition by Sara M. Roy
Oslo Accord Sources: MEE, NYT, Haaretz, AJ
History of peace process - The Intercept
Israel has repeatedly refused any permanent ceasefire, here is a list that follows the ceasefire talks week by week
Hundreds of Genocide Scholars have described this ethnic cleansing campaign as genocide because of the deliberate targeting of children/civilians and expressed intent by Israeli officials.
“A Textbook Case of Genocide”: Israeli Holocaust Scholar Raz Segal Decries Israel’s Assault on Gaza
Law for Palestine Releases Database with 500+ Instances of Israeli Incitement to Genocide – Continuously Updated
AP News, Time, Reuters, Vox, CBC
Don’t paint me as a Hamas support either, I’ve been critical of them too. I don’t think they should rule and they should also be tried for their war crimes. But that doesn’t change the reality of the Apartheid. And no free fair election for Palestinians can happen under an Apartheid, that must end first.