Israel’s Genocidal Assault Is Deliberately Unravelling The Fabric Of Palestinian Society. Now Imagine It Is Living Under Crushing Psychological Pressure, For Nearly Two Years.
Since the beginning of this genocide, the Israeli military has targeted thousands of professors, doctors, journalists and public voices across all sectors – pursuing a calculated strategy to strip society of its intellectual and social leadership.
At the same time, the occupation devised a more insidious plan to crush those who remain. It encouraged the looting of the few food trucks allowed in under international pressure, while preventing regular deliveries to warehouses and distribution centres – a clear green light for thieves to attack the trucks, steal supplies and resell them at exorbitant prices to the desperate.
This policy has produced a new social class of looters, enriched by war and theft. And that is precisely the intended outcome: one of the mechanisms of extermination is to encourage the formation of criminal gangs, disconnected from community values or collective purpose, to dominate the new order.
Respected figures in the community – university professors, teachers, doctors, reformers – are not likely to loot trucks or chase after deadly American food drops. They therefore face starvation unless they can scavenge a few scraps to survive.
There is a particular cruelty in this humiliation. Those who once lived with social respect and professional esteem are now being forced down to the very bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy, laboring to secure a plate of poor-quality food for themselves and their children. They find themselves in a society sliding towards savagery, where human relations are increasingly defined by a brutal struggle for survival.
The children of Gaza have changed. Distortion of childhood is not the work of nature. It is the outcome of a deliberate policy sustained by the occupation.
When food used to enter in minimal but sufficient quantities, guarded and delivered to international agencies for orderly distribution, such scenes never existed.
Israel made the decision to attack those very institutions that organized aid distribution, with the explicit aim of drowning Gaza in chaos and tearing apart the foundations of social stability – destroying people’s humanity and pushing them into savagery in an attempt to strip them of moral legitimacy.
Political actors appear unwilling to take the decisive steps needed to halt Gaza’s comprehensive collapse. The devil whispered to Israel and its allied governments the idea of airdropping aid. It was a perfect scheme, delivering a spectacle for the cameras, while having little-to-no real impact in meeting the bare minimum of people’s needs.
Each day, a few planes release their cargo somewhere in Gaza. Children watch, clapping and cheering. Yet the load of a single plane is perhaps equivalent to half a truck. Gaza’s daily minimum requirement is about 500 truckloads. If around 1,000 airdrops are needed each day, what’s the point of 10 or 20?
They serve no purpose beyond media theatre. The children’s applause and excitement can only be explained by the novelty of the experience: for once, planes pass overhead without dropping bombs or missiles. That in itself is a new phenomenon for the people of Gaza.
Before this war, the skies were monopolised by Israeli aircraft of death – and so the children clap at the sight of planes that do not kill them. In this sense, the airdrops might be seen less as offering physical relief, and more as a type of fleeting psychological release; one small way to lighten the otherwise unbearable pressure.
Who could ever measure the damage this war has done to the souls of Gaza’s children?
Hidden History -- In The Making 