Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, and Medecins Sans Frontieres are all agreed. But the Gaza genocide is now just another routine news item, buried on the inside pages

Three separate reports published this month by leading international human rights and medical groups have detailed the same horrifying story: that Israel is well advanced in its genocide of the Palestinian population in Gaza.

Or, to be more accurate, they have confirmed what was already patently clear: that, for the past 14 months, Israel has been slaughtering tens of thousands of Palestinians with indiscriminate munitions, while at the same time gradually starving the survivors to death and denying them access to medical care.

Genocides can happen with gas chambers. Or with machetes. Or they can be carried out with 2,000lb bombs and aid blockades. Genocides rarely look the same. But they are all designed to arrive at the same endpoint: the elimination of a people.

Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) agree that Israel is striving for extermination. It has not hidden its intent, and that intent is confirmed by its actions on the ground.

Only the wilfully blind, which includes western politicians and their media, are still in denial. But worse than denial, they continue to actively collude in this, the ultimate crime against humanity, by supplying Israel with the weapons, intelligence and diplomatic cover it needs for the extermination.

Last week, MSF issued its report, titled Life in the Death Trap That is Gaza, concluding that Israel was intentionally “unravelling the fabric of society�.

The medical charity observed: “The violence unleashed by Israeli forces has caused physical and mental damage on a scale that would overwhelm any functioning health system, let alone one already decimated by a crushing offensive and a 17-year-long blockade [by Israel].�

MSF added: “Even if the offensive ended today, its long-term impact would be unprecedented, given the scale of the destruction.�

Rebuilding the society and dealing with the health consequences will “span generations�.

Intention proven

MSF’s findings followed hot on the heels of an 185-page report by Human Rights Watch, which concluded that Israel was committing “acts of genocide�.

The organisation limited its focus to one Israeli policy: its systematic effort to deprive the population of access to water – a clear measure of intentionality, the critical yardstick for judging whether mass killing has crossed into genocide.

At a news conference, Lama Fakih, HRW’s Middle East director, said their research had proved Israel was “intentionally killing Palestinians in Gaza by denying them the water that they need to survive�.

Israel had done so in four coordinated moves. It had blocked pipelines supplying water from outside Gaza. It had then cut off power to run the pumps that Gaza’s own supplies from wells and desalination plants depended on.

Next, it had destroyed the solar panels that were the backup to deal with such power cuts. And finally, it had killed crews trying to repair the supply system and aid agency staff trying to bring in water supplies.

“This is a comprehensive policy preventing people from getting any water,� HRW’s acting Israel and Palestine director, Bill Van Esveld, concluded. He added that the group had made “a very clear finding of extermination�.

‘Pattern of conduct’

HRW echoed a much wider-ranging report by Amnesty International, the world’s best-known international human rights organisation.

In a 296-page report published in early December, Amnesty concluded that Israel had been “brazenly, continuously� committing genocide in Gaza – or “unleashing hell� as the organisation phrased it more graphically.

The period of Amnesty’s research ended in July, five months ago. Since then, Israel has further intensified its destruction of northern Gaza to drive out the population.

Nonetheless, Amnesty described a “pattern of conduct� in which Israel had deliberately obstructed aid and power supplies, and detonated so much explosive power on the tiny enclave – equivalent to more than two nuclear bombs – that water, sanitation, food and healthcare systems had collapsed.

The scale of the attack, it noted, had caused death and destruction at a speed and level unmatched in any other 21st-century conflict.

Budour Hassan, Amnesty’s researcher for Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, said Israel’s actions went beyond the individual war crimes associated with conflicts: “This is something deeper.�

Agreeing with major Holocaust and genocide scholars, Amnesty concluded that the high bar needed to prove genocidal intent in law was crossed last May when Israel began destroying Rafah, the area in southern Gaza that it had herded Palestinian civilians into as a supposedly “safe zone�.

Israel had been warned not to attack Rafah by the world’s highest court, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), but went ahead anyway.

‘Mass denial’

For some time, leading Holocaust and genocide scholars – among them Israelis – have been speaking up to warn not only that a genocide is unfolding, but that it is nearing completion.

Last week, Omer Bartov even managed to get his message out on CNN. He told Christiane Amanpour that Israel was carrying out “a war of annihilation� on the Gaza Strip. “What the IDF [Israeli military] is doing there is destroying Gaza,� he said.

“It is actually a war of annihilation of the entire Gaza Strip.� In a sobering interview, historian @bartov_omer tells me of his recent visit to Israel, his reaction to the IDF saying they only target military targets, and why his view on the question of genocide has now changed. pic.twitter.com/1R9B8mihVJ

— Christiane Amanpour (@amanpour) December 19, 2024

Amos Goldberg, another Israeli Holocaust expert, noted that Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish-Polish scholar who coined the term “genocide�, described its two phases.

“The first is the destruction of the annihilated group and the second is what he called ‘imposition of the national pattern’ of the perpetrator. We are now witnessing the second phase as Israel prepares ethnically cleansed areas for Israeli settlements.�

Goldberg added: “Like in every other case of genocide in history, right now we have mass denial. Both here in Israel and around the world.�

Syria’s future under al-Qaeda spin-off HTS will come in two flavours only. Either submit and collude like the West Bank, or end up wrecked like Gaza

There has been a flurry of “What next for Syria?� articles in the wake of dictator Bashar al-Assad’s hurried exit from Syria and the takeover of much of the country by al-Qaeda’s rebranded local forces.

Western governments and media have been quick to celebrate the success of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), even though the group is designated a terrorist organisation in the United States, Britain and much of Europe.

Back in 2013, the US even placed a £10 million bounty on its leader, Abu Muhammad al-Julani, for his involvement with al-Qaeda and Islamic State (ISIS) and for carrying out a series of brutal attacks on civilians.

Once upon a time, he might have expected to end up in an orange jumpsuit in the notorious, off-the-grid detention and torture facility run by the Americans at Guantanamo Bay. Now he is positioning himself as Syria’s heir apparent, seemingly with Washington’s blessing.

Surprisingly, before either HTS or al-Julani can be tested in their new roles overseeing Syria, the West is hurrying to rehabilitate them. The US and UK are both moving to overturn HTS’s status as a proscribed organisation.

To put the extraordinary speed of this absolution in perspective, recall that Nelson Mandela, feted internationally for helping to liberate South Africa from apartheid rule, was removed from Washington’s terrorist watch list only in 2008 – 18 years after his release from prison.

Similarly, western media are helping al-Julani to rebrand himself as a statesman-in-the-making, airbrushing his past atrocities, by transitioning from using his nom de guerre to his birth name, Ahmed al-Sharaa.

Piling on pressure

Stories of prisoners being freed from Assad’s dungeons and of families pouring on to the streets in celebration have helped to drive an upbeat news agenda and obscure a more likely dismal future for newly “liberated� Syria – as the US, UK, Israel, Turkey and Gulf states jostle for a share of the pie.

Syria’s status looks sealed as a permanently failed state.

Israel’s bombing raids – destroying hundreds of critical infrastructure sites across Syria – are designed precisely towards that end.

Within days, the Israeli military was boasting it had destroyed 80 per cent of Syria’s military installations. More have gone since.

On Monday, Israel unleashed 16 strikes on Tartus, a strategically important port where Russia has a naval fleet. The blasts were so powerful, they registered 3.5 on the Richter scale.

During Assad’s rule, Israel chiefly rationalised its attacks on Syria – coordinating them with Russian forces supporting Damascus – as necessary to prevent the flow of weapons overland from Iran to its Lebanese ally, Hezbollah.

But that is not the goal currently. HTS’s Sunni fighters have vowed to keep Iran and Hezbollah – the Shiite “axis of resistance� against Israel – out of Syrian territory.

Israel has prioritised instead targeting Syria’s already beleaguered military – its planes, naval ships, radars, anti-aircraft batteries and missile stockpiles – to strip the country of any offensive or defensive capability. Any hope of Syria maintaining a semblance of sovereignty is crumbling before our eyes.

These latest strikes come on top of years of western efforts to undermine Syria’s integrity and economy. The US military controls Syria’s oil and wheat production areas, plundering these key resources with the help of a Kurdish minority. More generally, the West has imposed punitive sanctions on Syria’s economy.

It was precisely these pressures that hollowed out Assad’s government and led to its collapse. Now Israel is piling on more pressure to make sure any newcomer faces an even harder task.

Maps of post-Assad Syria, like those during the latter part of his beleaguered presidency, are a patchwork of different colours, with Turkey and its local allies seizing territory in the north, the Kurds clinging on to the east, US forces in the south, and the Israeli military encroaching from the west.

This is the proper context for answering the question of what comes next.

Two possible fates

Syria is now the plaything of a complex of vaguely aligned state interests. None have Syria’s interests as a strong, unified state high on their list.

In such circumstances, Israel’s priority will be to promote sectarian divisions and stop a central authority from emerging to replace Assad.

This has been Israel’s plan stretching back decades, and has shaped the thinking of the dominant foreign policy elite in Washington since the rise of the so-called neoconservatives under President George W Bush in the early 2000s. The aim has been to Balkanise any state in the Middle East that refuses to submit to Israeli and US hegemony.

Israel cares only that Syria is riven by internal feuding and power-plays. Beginning in 2013, Israel ran a covert programme to arm and fund at least 12 different rebel factions, according to a 2018 article in Foreign Policy magazine.

In this regard, Syria’s fate is being modelled on that of the Palestinians.

There may be a choice but it will come in no more than two flavours. Syria can become the West Bank, or it can become Gaza.

So far, the indications are that Israel is gunning for the Gaza option. Washington and Europe appear to prefer the West Bank route, which is why they have been focusing on the rehabilitation of HTS.

In the Gaza scenario, Israel keeps pounding Syria, depriving the rebranded al-Qaeda faction or any other group of the ability to run the country’s affairs. Instability and chaos reign.

With Assad’s legacy of secular rule destroyed, bitter sectarian rivalries dominate, cementing Syria into separate regions. Feuding warlords, militias and crime families battle it out for local dominance.

Their attention is directed inwards, towards strengthening their rule against rivals, not outwards towards Israel.

‘Back to the Stone Age’

There would be nothing new about this outcome for Syria in the worldview shared by Israel and the neocons. It draws on lessons Israel believes it learnt in both Gaza and Lebanon.

Israeli generals spoke of returning Gaza “to the Stone Age� long before they were in a position to realise that goal with the current genocide there. Those same generals first tested their ideas on a more limited scale in Lebanon, pummelling the country’s infrastructure under the so-called “Dahiya� doctrine.

Israel believed such indiscriminate wrecking sprees offered a double benefit. Overwhelming destruction forced the local population to concentrate on basic survival rather than organise resistance. And longer term, the targeted population would understand that, given the severity of the punishment, any future resistance to Israel should be avoided at all costs.

When westerners see ‘enemy’ governments fall, or civil wars erupt, they are led to think they are the geopolitical equivalent of a natural event. Nothing could be further from the truth

The long-harboured aspirations of the US, Turkey and Israel to topple the Syrian government, mainly through their rebranded al-Qaeda allies, succeeded at lightning speed.

Damascus fell days after Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) forces under Abu Mohammad al-Jolani surprised observers by breaking out of their small north-western enclave in Syria and seizing the country’s second city, Aleppo.

Bashar al-Assad’s government and his army, it turned out, were paper tigers. Or they were, once their chief allies – Russia, Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon – had been forced onto the back foot. Preoccupied with troubles closer to home, they could no longer offer the military support Assad depended on.

Israel’s rampage across Lebanon and its military intimidation of Iran – as well as Nato’s increasing efforts to pin Russia down in Ukraine – unfroze the main battle lines in Syria, arrived at several years ago between Assad’s army, al-Qaeda’s franchise in Syria and Kurdish forces in the north-east.

Backed by Turkey, a member of Nato – and more covertly by the CIA and MI6 – HTS and the so-called Syrian National Army (SNA) were able to drive south unhindered.

HTS is proscribed as a terrorist group by both the US and Britain. The CIA has placed a $10m bounty on Jolani’s head.

Strangely, amid the excitement, the BBC and the rest of the western media forgot to mention HTS’s status as a proscribed organisation – as they do in kneejerk fashion every time the Palestinian resistance group Hamas is referred to.

Notably, the very western politicians and media now celebrating the “liberation� of Syria by HTS are the same ones insisting that the eradication of the “terrorists� of Hamas in Gaza is so important it justifies the bombing and starvation of the enclave’s two million-plus Palestinian population.

There are difficult questions that any rational observer ought to be pondering right now.

How are we to believe that the same ideological groups who are head-chopping, women-abusing, minority-oppressing terrorists when they operate in US-occupied Iraq, are now “moderate�, “diversity-friendly rebels� when they operate next door in Syria?

How are opponents of western complicity in Israel’s “plausible� genocide in Gaza, as the World Court describes it, supposed to feel about the West helping to shatter the “axis of resistance�, which stood alone in offering material support to try to stop it?

Is HTS pursuing a nationalist agenda that is truly about liberating Syrians from western imperialism, or is western imperialism – wielding both the stick of an Israeli attack dog and the carrot of the rich Gulf lapdogs – once again in the driving seat in Syria?

How much of what we see is the reality of the situation and how much perception management?

Iran in cross-hairs

There are plenty of clues to help us answer these questions if we go looking for them.

Wesley Clark, a former US Army general, recalled a moment weeks after the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers in 2001 when he visited the Pentagon.

He was shown a classified document that set out how the US was going to “take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and finishing off with Iran�.

None of these states had any obvious connection to the events of 9/11. The one that did have such a connection – Saudi Arabia – was not on the list and has remained one of the United States’ most favoured client states.

The order of targets prioritised by Washington had to be modified – and the timeline was way off – but the realisation of that 2001 blueprint is closer than ever.

The invasion of Iraq in 2003 by the US and UK, on false pretences, led to the removal of dictator Saddam Hussein and the collapse of the Iraqi state. The country was plunged into a devastating sectarian war from which it is still struggling to recover.

Nato meddling in Libya, again on false pretences, led to the removal of dictator Muammar Gaddafi and the collapse of the Libyan state in 2011. It has been a failed state run by warlords ever since.

Sudan and Somalia – the latter subject to a US-backed Ethiopian invasion in 2007 – are both basket cases, riven by all-consuming, horrifying civil wars that the US helped to stoke rather than resolve.

The destruction of these various states created the space for new ultra-violent, intolerant Islamist groups such as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State (IS) group to flourish.

Turkey’s open backing of the rebels in Syria – plus more concealed support from the CIA and MI6 – led to the removal of Syrian dictator Assad at the weekend and the collapse of what was left of the Syrian state. It is hard to imagine a unified authority emerging there.

Meanwhile, the terms of surrender foisted on Beirut to end Israel’s savage bombing of Lebanon do not look designed to hold. The already fragile sectarian arrangements barely glueing the Lebanese state together are almost certain to come unstuck in the coming months.

Iran, the last target on the Pentagon’s list, is now fully in the cross-hairs. Deprived of allies in Syria, and now largely cut off from its Hezbollah allies in Lebanon, Tehran is as vulnerable as it has ever been.

Bigger picture

None of this is accidental.

Were western publics not so deeply influenced by years of disinformation from their politicians and media, they might by now be starting to see a bigger picture gradually coming into focus.

One in which the fates of Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Iran hang in the balance together. One in which the western powers, led from Washington, are once again meddling, in violation of international law, to destroy the territorial integrity of each of them. One in which Israel and the West’s geostrategic interests are paramount, not the freedoms or welfare of the region’s people.

Dictators are bad. Killing civilians is bad. But these truisms, selectively prioritised by our feckless media class, have been weaponised to obscure the wider picture.

When westerners see “enemy� governments fall, as Assad’s has just done, or civil wars break out in far-off lands, they are led to assume that these are the geopolitical equivalent of a natural event.

The unexamined premise is that the world is ultimately heading, in fits and starts, towards a liberal democratic order. That is why HTS is repackaging itself, ably assisted by the western media, as newly pragmatic and moderate.

Suddenly, after years of misrepresenting Hamas, western politicians and media are desperate to clarify – if only in Syria – the difference between jihadists and Islamic nationalists

Here is a very strange thing. For years, western media outlets and politicians have been recklessly indifferent to the fact that Hamas is not a jihadist movement, like al-Qaeda or Islamic State, but a specifically *Palestinian* national resistance movement – if one underpinned by an Islamist ideology that distinguishes it from secular Palestinian national movements like Fatah.

Shortly after Hamas’ attack on Israel on October 7 2023, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu stood alongside US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and claimed unchallenged: “Hamas is ISIS [Islamic State]… and Hamas should be treated exactly the way ISIS was treated.“

But Hamas, unlike al-Qaeda and Islamic State, is not seeking to recreate a caliphate embracing all Muslims wherever they live, indifferent to national borders. It wants to create a Palestinian state in Palestine. Israel is determined to stop any Palestinian state emerging, even it means committing genocide.

Hamas does not demand strict adherence to religious law, and it does not prioritise Islam over Palestinian national identity.

It is not, as Israel and its apologists in the West try to persuade us, part of some Islamic crusade, waging a global war against the values of a supposed Judeo-Christian “civilisation�.

Hamas does not oppress Christians (a Christian community existed quite peacefully in Gaza until Israel started bombing their churches), or force women to wear the veil.

The UK’s designation of Hamas as a terrorist organisation in both its military and political-welfare wings has been justified in large part on this misrepresentation of Hamas’ ideological character.

I raise this matter not to praise Hamas (see the legal disclaimer below) but to highlight the current, outrageous hypocrisy of the entire western media corps.

We now have an al-Qaeda offshoot in Syria, rebranded as HTS. And western journalists, led as ever by the BBC, are falling over themselves to explain how the group has transformed itself overnight from head-chopping jihadism into a moderate, “diversity-friendly� Syrian national resistance movement.

The media is suddenly deeply concerned to clarify the difference between militant jihadism and Islamic national resistance, and insist that the latter is respectable.

That, of course, is being presented as the rationale for the British and US governments to quickly end the designation of HTS as a terrorist organisation, even as the same governments keep Hamas in its entirety proscribed. It is the reason given for embracing this al-Qaeda retread as a good Syrian nationalist movement, and one supposedly keen to unify the country.

The point is: the western media is quite capable of understanding the difference between jihadists and Islamic nationalists when they want to. But they only want to when the British and US national security states tell them to.

That is the behaviour of what we are told is a “free press�.

LEGAL DISCLAIMER: The above observations are made for purely analytical purposes and are not intended in any way to “encourage support� for Hamas, which would be in violation of Section 12 of the UK’s Terrorism Act. Hamas is designated a terrorist organisation by the UK government.

After all, who are we to question the government’s wisdom in using counter-terror legislation to jail journalists for up to 14 years for pointing out the inconsistent application of its policies?

Who are we to question the right of the British police to raid the homes of independent journalists, investigate and arrest them, as has happened to Richard Medhurst and Asa Winstanley, for allegedly not sticking closely enough to the UK government’s position on Hamas?

Who are we to question why the British media, upholders of a glorious tradition of press freedom, are not reporting on the arrest and investigation of independent journalists by police for supposedly violating Section 12 in relation to Hamas when the police appear utterly unwilling to enforce Section 12 in relation to HTS?

None of the foregoing should be seen in any way to suggest that Britain is not fully democratic, or that it is exhibiting any signs of becoming a police state.

Either Guardian journalists don’t care about police accruing powers to jail journalists for doing journalism, or they have no real control over the material the paper publishes

Guardian journalists have probably the strongest chapel of the main journalist union in Britain. Strong enough that they were able to organise a strike this past week over the sale of the Guardian’s sister Sunday paper, the Observer, to Tortoise Media.

And yet the Guardian chapel of the National Union of Journalists has not gone on strike over the recent raid by counter-terrorism police on a fellow journalist, Asa Winstanley, with threats to lock him up for 14 years for writing against the genocide in Gaza.

Maybe in our current era that is too much to expect. But the same chapel has not even issued a statement condemning the hounding of Winstanley and other journalists under counter-terrorism laws, in what amounts to a massive assault by the British state on press freedom.

Nor has the chapel insisted that its own newspaper, the Guardian, run a single story about the persecution of Winstanley and other journalists as supposed “supporters of terror�. There has been complete silence.

Only two conclusions are possible:

Either Guardian journalists don’t actually care about the police accruing powers to jail journalists for doing journalism.

Or Guardian journalists have no real editorial control over the material they publish, and it is the paper’s management that imposes the editorial agenda from the top.

When I worked at the Guardian and Observer newspapers through most of the 1990s, I reached the conclusion that it was the latter. Most journalists were so grateful to be part of a vaguely “left� newspaper – given that the other choices were working for Murdoch or the Daily Telegraph – that they dared not upset the apple cart.

They have once again demonstrated that they can find a collective backbone only when their jobs, rather than the principles of a free press, are under threat.

It is not as though we haven’t been here before. We saw the same Guardian management playbook when Julian Assange was hounded by the British state for a decade, and locked up in a high-security prison for years while the US government sought his extradition for doing journalism that exposed the high crimes of the British and US states.

The Guardian gave this concerted, years-long attack on press freedom the most minimal, grudging coverage possible. No one broke rank.

The Guardian is not our friend. Whatever individual journalists there may feel, the paper as an institution doesn’t care about journalism or press freedom. And if it doesn’t really care about press freedom, it doesn’t really care about any other freedoms. Because all those other freedoms are contingent on a free, critical press.

There is, however, one freedom the corporation that owns the Guardian cares about: the freedom to make money, to market the paper as “on the left� to win over customers who identify with the brand of a left-liberal newspaper.

That doesn’t mean the paper always needs to be commercially profitable – though that is doubtless a nice bonus. But the Guardian does need to profit the much bigger corporation, the Guardian Media Group, it is embedded in.

It does that by exclusively occupying a space in the marketplace – appealing to a liberal-left demographic – so no real leftwing publication, run by journalists rather a media corporation, can take its place and properly inform its readers about the state of the world.

The Guardian occupies a key part of the media space – our modern town square – so that no one better qualified to occupy it can get a look in.

It is there to kill real dissident journalism, to kill truly independent journalism from the likes of Asa Winstanley. It is there to make sure “mainstream� left journalism mirrors closely the “mainstream� political left: Keir Starmer’s Labour party, with all its authoritarian, City of London-pandering, Nato-worshipping instincts.

The Guardian is not our friend. It is time we stopped sleeping with the enemy.