Two Years of Genocide in Gaza: On the Struggle for Decolonization

Today marks two years of genocide in Gaza. Two years of the most violent episode in the modern history of Palestine.

Israel has killed over 67,000 Palestinians, including over 20,000 children. That number is a bare minimum. Thousands more are missing under the rubble. There have been countless massacres. Flour massacres, aid massacres, Red Crescent massacres. School massacres. The massacres of over a thousand families and bloodlines that have been wiped out forever.

We do not even know the number of deaths not caused by bombs or bullets or shells or drones—the number of preventable deaths caused by Israel’s assault. We do know that at least 460 Palestinians, including 154 children have starved to death and more are dying every day from Israel’s campaign of forced starvation and famine.

Entire cities have been reduced to dust and broken concrete. Homes, hospitals, schools, universities, mosques, churches, bakeries—everything that knits a community and society together has been destroyed. Even color seems to have been obliterated. Everything now covered now in gray dust.

92% of residential buildings have been damaged or destroyed. Over 500 schools and every university has been damaged or destroyed. Only 1.5% of cropland is still accessible and suitable for cultivation.

Nearly every Palestinian in Gaza —95% of the population—has been displaced, most of them multiple times. Hundreds of thousands now live in tent cities where they are still bombed and shelled and shot.

Health care has been devastated. Out of 38 hospitals in Gaza, 25 are completely shut down while the rest are barely functioning. The number of doctors and medical personal killed is over 1,700. Over 360 have been detained.

Journalists have been slaughtered. Israel has killed between 250 and 270 journalists and media workers over the past two years. An unprecedented number. There is so much that is unprecedented.

Israel’s massive colonial violence is by no means confined just to Gaza. Over the past two years, we’ve seen a huge escalation in daily attacks and dispossession in the occupied West Bank by Israeli settlers and soldiers. Tens of thousands of Palestinians have been driven from their homes in the largest wave of displacement in the West Bank since 1967. The number of Palestinians arrested in the West Bank and Jerusalem over the past two years has topped 20,000, including over 1,600 children. At least 77 political prisoners have died in custody.

And it is not just Palestine. Israel has bombed Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iran, Qatar.

All of this has been backed and supported and armed by the United States more than any other country. A new report by the Costs of War Project at Brown University found that the U.S. has provided Israel with at least 21 billion dollars in military aid over the past two years alone. It concludes with the obvious: Israel would not have been able to sustain its wars across the Middle East without massive US backing.

On today’s Drop Site livestream, Palestinian human rights lawyer and legal scholar Noura Erakat joins Drop Site’s Sharif Abdel Kouddous to discuss all of this and more. Erakat addressed the UN Security Council on Monday—only the second Palestinian woman to brief the Security Council since October 7, 2023 and the first to present the legal case that Israel’s war on Gaza is genocide.

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