Two Years of Genocide in Gaza
Seventy-Seven Years of Denial

Following the revolt of the besieged against their jailors on October 7, 2023, the Zionist hasbara machine mobilized across the world to impose a false narrative. Its goal was clear: erase history, distort reality, and present Israel as the eternal victim. According to this framing, Israel was a peaceful entity blindsided by an unprovoked attack that supposedly emerged out of nowhere.

October 7 did not fall from the sky. It was the culmination of decades of dispossession, siege, and systematic dehumanization. Long before October 2023, Gaza was described by international observers as the world’s largest open-air prison. It was subjected to a starvation diet blockade for more than 16 years, or 5,800 days. Long before that, its 2.3 million inhabitants, of whom 1.3 million are refugees or their descendants, were driven from their homes and villages in 1948 during the Nakba, a catastrophe created by Zionist terror militias who ethnically cleansed the native Palestinians to create a state for Jews escaping European hatred.

To understand October 7, one must place it within the continuum of Palestinian suffering. That single day was not an aberration. It was one out of nearly 28,000 days since 1948 of Zionist hate and Israeli oppression. Each day carried the weight of exile, siege, humiliation, poverty, and hopelessness. Yet hasbara wants to delete those decades from recorded memories, 28,000 days of Palestinian statelessness, and reduce history to a single day divorced from context.

The “first October 7” was not in 2023; it was in 1948, when Zionist terrorist militias, transformed into today’s Israeli army, committed massacres, razed villages, and expelled Palestinians en masse. That foundational act of ethnic cleansing continues today. The daily bombardment, the starvation, the denial of basic human dignity to the people of Gaza are extensions of that original Zionist sin.

The hasbara’s greatest weapon is controlling the media, reframing narrative and selective memory. It seeks to decontextualize memory and conceal the structural violence that made October 7, inevitable. To remember the 28,000 days that preceded it is to expose the ongoing injustice at the heart of this so-called war: a colonized, besieged people struggling for survival against an occupying power that insists on their permanent subjugation.

Two years have passed since Israel unleashed its genocide plan. A strategy of systematic destruction, of homes, hospitals, schools, infrastructure and of life itself. Gaza today is not a war zone. It is a graveyard of a people suffocated before the eyes of a world that lost its humanity.

Two years, twenty-four months, seven hundred and thirty days more than that one October 7 day. However measured, life since October 2023 has been an eternity of suffering for the people of Gaza. A chronicle of genocide streamed live on TV. The most fundamental measure of this holocaust is the destruction and staggering loss of life. Gaza today stands as the most ruthlessly bombarded place in history: measured by explosives per square meter, Israel has dropped nearly seventy times more bombs on Gaza than the Allies did on Germany in World War II, and one hundred times more than the U.S. dropped on North Vietnam during Operation Rolling Thunder.

As of September 2025, more than 66,000 people have been murdered, among them at least 19,424 children. Thousands more are “missing,” buried anonymously under the rubble of their own homes. Young lives have been erased; thousands of stories have ended before they began. The total number of injured has surpassed 167,500, leaving an overwhelming number of survivors with life-changing injuries. Since Israel broke a ceasefire in March 2025 alone, 12,956 souls have been lost. Altogether, the injured and dead, represents more than 10 percent of Gaza’s population. These are not collateral casualties; they are the intended victims of a deliberate campaign of erasure of the Palestinian existence.

Beyond bombs and bullets, another insidious weapon is claiming lives: starvation. A Zionist-engineered famine, declared by the UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC). Over 500,000 people are living under Phase 5 conditions—the highest level, characterized by “starvation, destitution, and death.” At least 440 people have died from starvation, including 147 children, with hundreds of thousands more lacking food or clean water. The International Rescue Committee reports that one in three young children have gone at least 24 hours without food.

Every one of Gaza’s 625,000 students has been out of school for two years. More than 18,000 students and 972 teachers have been killed. Nearly 92% of schools are damaged or destroyed, all universities lie in complete ruins. The WHO reports over 2300 health and aid workers have been killed, and out of Gaza’s 36 hospitals, just 14 partially function.

To cover its crimes, Israel closed Gaza to the international media and targeted local journalists working inside Gaza. According to Brown University, Israel has killed more journalists in Gaza since October 2023, than in the US Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, Vietnam War, the wars in the former Yugoslavia and the post-9/11 war in Afghanistan – combined. Israel murdered 278 with little to no protest from the “free world” or the “free press.” By refusing to confront Israel’s censorship of reporting from Gaza, they betray the very principles of truth and freedom they claim to champion.

This is not war; it’s a premeditated genocide by the letter of the law. The 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines genocide as acts committed with “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” Article II lists five acts:

1. Killing members of the group: 66,000 and counting.

2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm: thousands of child amputees.

3. Deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction: blocking food aid, destroying farmland, 92% of homes destroyed.

4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births: targeting fertility clinics.

5. Forcibly transferring children.

Israel has committed at least the first four—indisputably, systematically, and publicly. The mass killings, the maiming of tens of thousands, and the starving of civilians fall squarely within the Convention’s threshold.

The International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) announced on 31 August 2025, that Israel’s actions in Gaza meet the definition of genocide under the UN Convention. Article III of the Convention extends responsibility not only to perpetrators but also the enablers of the genocide. That means Washington, London, Berlin, and Paris. Following the International Criminal Court indictment of Israeli leaders, any country that finances and arms indicted war criminals is responsible under Article III and could be brought before the ICC.

In its last phase of the holocaust in Gaza city, on October 1, the Zionist war minister, Israel Katz authorized, or koshered, the targeting of the remaining 250,000 civilians in the city when he classified them all as “terrorist.” Civilians who lacked the physical or financial means, or those who refused to leave their homes and not become refugee statistics in a new Israeli-made Nakba.

This genocide isn’t Israel’s alone; it’s the collective moral failure of the so-called Western civilization. By enabling indicted war criminals, providing them the genocide tools, and diplomatic protection, Western governments have exposed the selective value system they uphold. Their conspicuous silence, even as a war minister labels 250,000 civilians “terrorists,” reveals “Western values” as nothing but a cynical façade masking their hypocrisy and racial hierarchy.

Jamal Kanj is the author of Children of Catastrophe: Journey from a Palestinian Refugee Camp to America, and other books. He writes frequently on Arab world issues for various national and international commentaries.