Israel has ended its assault on the al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza, because there is nothing left to assault. The facility — the largest medical complex in Gaza where hundreds of civilians had been sheltering — is now an empty, unusable, burnt-out husk. Witnesses report hundreds of corpses in and around the complex, with video footage showing human body parts protruding from the earth and bodies with zip ties on their wrists. Israel is currently doing its usual song and dance where it claims the hospital was a Hamas headquarters and everyone it killed there was a “terrorist”, but at this point the only people buying that schtick are the ones who desperately need to. This was a massacre of profound savagery. It’s as plain as day to anyone who isn’t deeply invested in pretending otherwise. Israel, which at the beginning of the Gaza onslaught had adamantly denied that it would ever attack a hospital, has since launched hundreds of documented attacks on Gaza’s healthcare services and has destroyed most of its healthcare system. Just today the director-general of the World Health Organization announced that an Israeli airstrike on Gaza’s al-Aqsa Hospital compound killed four people and injured seventeen. Oxford University professor Nick Maynard, who spent time working at al-Aqsa Hospital earlier this year, recently accused the IDF of “systematically targeting healthcare facilities, healthcare personnel and really dismantling the whole healthcare system” in Gaza. “It’s not just about targeting the buildings, it’s about systematically destroying the infrastructure of the hospitals,” says Maynard. “Destroying the oxygen tanks at the al-Shifa hospital, deliberately destroying the CT scanners and making it much more difficult to rebuild that infrastructure. If it was just targeting Hamas militants, why are they deliberately destroying the infrastructure of these institutions?” Why indeed? If the objective is to target Hamas, why trash the hospital’s medical equipment? If the objective is to target Hamas, why destroy the whole complex and make it unusable as a healthcare facility? Logically we can only conclude that it isn’t about targeting Hamas at all. It’s about destroying Gaza’s healthcare infrastructure. Why would Israel want to destroy Gaza’s healthcare infrastructure? The answer to that question has been clear for months: to make the land uninhabitable for the Palestinians. The same reason they’re deliberately starving Gazans, destroying their homes, continually moving them from place to place and bombing every “safe zone” they create. This is naturally giving rise to a situation in which the inhabitants of Gaza will either die or flee to some other country — which just so happens to be exactly what Israel wants them to do. It’s so obvious what’s happening here. Painfully obvious. Poke-you-in-the-eyeballs obvious. But we’re still subjected to a western political-media class who keeps forcefully telling us that this blatant ethnic cleansing campaign is not what it looks like. Telling us that all this starvation and destruction and elimination of healthcare services and the way it directly places pressure on the Palestinians to leave their homeland is just a series of coincidences arising from Israel’s “war” of “defense”. That only by pure happenstance does it look exactly the same as the advancement of an agenda that Israelis have sought to advance for generations. Well I personally am through with having my intelligence insulted, and I hope you are too. The sky is blue, a spade’s a spade, the emperor has no clothes, and Israel is conducting a very obvious ethnic cleansing campaign in Gaza.

Don't talk to me about October 7. Don't talk to me about hostages. I don't care. I haven't cared for months. Many, many times more Gazans are dying and suffering than the number of Israelis who died and are suffering. That means the death and suffering of Palestinians is much more urgent and matters much more than the death and suffering of Israelis. The only way to disagree with this is to believe Israeli lives are worth much, much more than Palestinian lives. The longer the mass atrocity in Gaza goes on for the less tragic and worthy of sympathy October 7 becomes. It's already been diminished to a fraction of the significance it once had, and it's getting smaller and smaller as this nightmare stretches on. This is not the fault of people like me, it is the fault of the people conducting this genocide. You don't get to murder tens of thousands of people and then demand everyone weep over you losing a thousand. That's not a thing. It's SO fucking obnoxious how Israel supporters keep acting like actions a tiny fraction as impactful as what's been happening in Gaza are where all our sympathy and attention should still be going, nearly four months after the fact. Fuck all the way off with that idiotic bullshit. All of Israel's actions since October 7 have revealed why Hamas did what it did on October 7. This is the kind of murderousness and depravity Palestinians have been living under from the Nakba on. Israel is so murderous and depraved that one of the most common talking points of its apologists when responding to opposition to the atrocities in Gaza has been "Yeah, what did Hamas expect would happen? Fuck around and find out!" That's not a sane or acceptable way for human beings to talk about acts of genocide and the butchery of thousands of children, but Israel apologists think it's normal. Because that's what Israel is. In the eyes of the world, Israel has retroactively legitimized the acts of violence the Palestinian resistance has been inflicting upon it. It has legitimized those acts by showing the world its true face.