Gaza is Burning While the World Watches!

- The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing – Edmund Burke.

At the time of writing this piece the United States government had for the sixth time vetoed the United Nations Security Council Resolution calling for the ceasefire in Gaza, a move by the US that tacitly endorses the despicable and callous actions by its ally Israel against the besieged Gaza Strip. For those witnessing this Israel – Palestine conflict unfold for the first time, should be reminded that the conflict didn’t start on 7 October 2023, since Palestinians have been subjected to many years of suffocating occupation following the founding of the state of Israel in 1948 which has intensified through the years particularly in the aftermath of Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War in 1967.[1]

Recently, a United Nations inquiry pronounced that Israel’s war on Gaza constitutes genocide, a finding several major human rights groups have also reached including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. In December 2023 South Africa brought a case before the International Court of Justice (ICJ), arguing that Israel’s actions in the Gaza Strip amounted to genocide. South Africa filed an application instituting proceedings against the State of Israel concerning alleged violations by Israel of its obligations under the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (the “Genocide Convention”) in relation to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. In a nutshell, South Africa, as a State party to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, sought to request the ICJ to order the State of Israel to immediately suspend its military operations in and against Gaza, as well as take all reasonable measures within its power to prevent genocide. The ICJ, based in The Hague, is the principal judicial organ of the United Nations (UN) and adjudicates legal disputes between states. In terms of Article 63, states that are parties to a convention under interpretation in ICJ proceedings have the right to intervene, therefore South Africa was exercising this right as a party to the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Since then a list of countries that have sought to intervene in support of the ongoing case brought by South Africa has grown. 

The concept of ‘genocide’ can be traced to the aftermath of the Second World War when the victorious Allies sought to prosecute defeated Nazi Germany, a concept coined by a former Polish lawyer named Rafael Lemkin which he defined as entailing the destruction of a nation or an ethnic group.[2]  In January 2024 the ICJ issued an almost unanimous pronouncement against Israel – a country whose very identity is connected with the crime that Lemkin identified – in connection with an alleged risk of genocide in Gaza as it called for Israel to ‘take all measures within its power’ to prevent the incitement or commission of genocide.[3] Since then, the Court has issued a series of provisional measures ordering Israel to ensure measures to prevent acts of genocide.  Recently, Brazil has also formally filed a declaration of intervention at the ICJ in the case brought by South Africa against Israel over alleged violations of the 1948 Genocide Convention in the Gaza Strip.

The notion of ‘genocide’ sought to oblige signatories to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in accordance with their obligations to desist from the commission of any and all acts within the scope of

Article II of the Convention, in particular:

(a)    Killing members of the group;

(b)   Causing serious bodily or mental harm to the members of the group;

(c)    Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; and

(d)   Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.

Not only has Israel ignored its obligations under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, in relation to the Palestinian people as a group protected by the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, it has also embarked on a genocidal warpath against the City of Gaza’s inhabitants through the following atrocious actions:

(a)    Forced displacement and expulsion.

(b)   Deprivation of access to adequate basic necessities such as food and water;

(c)    Deprivation of access to humanitarian assistance and relief;

(d)   Deprivation of access to medical supplies and assistance.

(e)    Destruction of Palestinian life including cultural heritage in Gaza.

Sadly, the destruction of Palestinian life in the Gaza Strip by the Israelis has now reached another level of concern through the carpet bombardment of the city itself which has steadily become more and indiscriminate. This constitutes a calculated and deliberate tactic of urbicide, the murder of a city and its inhabitants in a continuing campaign of state-sanctioned terror, despite the thrust of international prohibitions. Journalists and aid workers have not been spared from the continuing wanton, murderous activities of the Israeli army. According to the Mail & Guardian more than 240 journalists have been killed by Israel in Gaza since October 2023 through deliberate  targeting in ‘a deliberate silencing of the truth’.[4]

Israel has over the years repeatedly ignored UN Resolutions on the rights of Palestinians, and through Israel’s perceived ‘exceptionalism’, some of the western powers including the US, its main benefactor and supporter, have over the years ensured that Israel is not held to account for its continued violation of international law. Thus, the conflict did not start with the attack by Hamas on 7 October 2023. For instance, in December 2008 Israel launched Operation Cast Lead, a ferocious 22-day assault on the besieged Gaza Strip which left massive destruction in its wake and a huge loss of life.[5] Ilan Pappe writes, “A more recent historical context, relevant to the present crisis, is the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine, which included the forced relocation of Palestinians to the Gaza Strip from villages  on whose ruins  some of the Israeli settlements  attacked on October 7 were built. These uprooted Palestinians were among the 750 000 who lost their homes and became refugees and who had until 1948 lived in more than 500 villages and a dozen towns.”[6] Sadly, the world knew about this ethnic cleansing, designated as a crime against humanity in international treaties, but did nothing about. For Palestinians, this has been the source of their Nakba – a catastrophe of epic proportions ever since the creation of the Zionist state of Israel in 1948 on their land.  Ethnic cleansing has remained an integral part of Israel’s policy and arsenal, utilized to ensure that it retains the land that used to be historical Palestine with as few of the native Palestinians residing there as possible. Pappe argues, “Evidence of this includes the expulsion of 300 000 Palestinians during and in the aftermath of the 1967 War and the expulsion of more than 600 000 from the West Bank, Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip in the years that followed”[7] hence the imperative to contextualize and historicize the events of 7 October, 2023.

Briefly, on the notion of ‘urbicide’, Bogdan Bogdanovic, an architect and former mayor of Belgrade, who fled Serbia during the Bosnian war in the aftermath of the disintegration of Yugoslavia, argues urbicide is the intentional attack on the human and inert fabric of the city with the intent of destroying the civic values embodied within it – the very spaces for interaction where cultures are generated and shared.[8] For Bogdanovic, the bombardment of cities such as Vukovar, Sarajevo, Mostar and Dubrovnic during the Bosnian conflict was intentionally aimed at an object of extraordinary even symbolic beauty. He equates the act to that of the attack of a madman who throws acid in a beautiful woman’s face and promises her a beautiful face in return, an act that he sees as arising from an atavistic enmity. This is exactly what the Israelis are hell bent to achieve with the continuing aerial bombardment of the City of Gaza, to bomb Gaza back to the Stone Age, a throwback to the US bombing campaign of the Vietnam War which was the longest and the heaviest aerial bombardment in history (The phrase “bomb them back to the Stone Age” is attributed to General Curtis LeMay of the US Army, who advocated for a more aggressive bombing campaign against North Vietnam during the Vietnam War). Ironically, Israel remains the strongest ally of the United States, and appears to have been a very good student in learning the evil ways of its ally, and its major military benefactor.

Article 53 of the Geneva Convention (IV) prohibits the destruction of real or personal property by an occupying power, such as private homes, buildings of the State and social organisations, unless such destruction is absolutely necessary for military operations. The Geneva Conventions and their Additional Protocols protect civilian buildings from destruction in wartime especially when they are not serving any military objectives. Thus, undefended localities and buildings specifically used by civilians is prohibited and attacking them constitutes a grave breach of the protocol. The Israeli army is alleged to have been in breach of these protocols not only during its current incursion into the Gaza Strip but repeatedly across occupied Palestine including the West bank.

History always repeats itself twice, wrote Karl Marx: first in the form of tragedy, then in the form of a farce. It is repeating itself as tragedy for the Palestinians, a Nakba – a catastrophe of epic proportions. It is also repeating itself in the form of a farce, a farce in the so-called international system that seems to be powerless if not complicit in the continuing injustices and subjugation being perpetuated against native and indigenous peoples. History also informs us that the ancient City of Carthage whose ruins are located in what is now modern-day Tunisia, was perceived as a threat by Rome to its rule and dominance. Marcus Porcius Cato (Cato the Elder), a Roman senator, called for Carthaginem esse delendam which is a Latin phrase which translates to ‘Carthage must be destroyed’, at the end of all his political speeches in an effort to persuade the Senate to wage war against Carthage[9] just like Netanyahu following the attack by the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas, quoting the more blood-curdling passages from the Hebrew Bible: ‘You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says the Bible. Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.’[10] Thus, the Israeli Premier purposely invoked biblical overtones while inciting extreme violence against Palestinians.

 Consequently, this persistent advocacy for the destruction of Carthage culminated in the Romans engaging Carthage in three destructive conflicts known as the Punic Wars, and despite the brilliance of its commanders, Carthage was eventually defeated, its people either killed or enslaved and the city destroyed. Thus, Rome’s ultimate destruction of the ancient North African city of Carthage was an act of urbicide – the murder of a city just as it is currently unfolding with the ongoing bombardment of the City of Gaza by the Israelis with no distinction between unarmed civilians and Hamas militants or leadership. Bevan writes, “The Romans systematically flattened its ruins; the site was cursed and according to legend sown with salt as a symbol of eternal sterility. Carthage, the economic powerhouse of its age, was to be erased from history. Its language, culture and religion did not survive except in the most tattered fragments.”[11] It remains to be seen whether Netanyahu’s and Trump’s call for the City of Gaza to be destroyed, its inhabitants transferred and the City turned into some sort of a Mediterranean sunny place for shady people will come to pass.

One cannot resist to draw parallels with what Nazi Germany sought to achieve during the Second World War. As in the build-up to the German invasion of the Soviet Union during the Second World War, Frankopan writes, “Hitler, while urging the implementation of horror, daydreamed about the future: the Crimea would be like the Riviera for Germans, he reflected; how wonderful it would be to link the peninsula in the Black Sea to the motherland with a motorway so that every German could visit in their People’s Car (or Volkswagen)”.[12] It would seem that the model that Hitler and those close to him, now Netanyahu and Trump, to which they looked for inspiration: the United States, is once again providing a blueprint for the extermination of a people. They all sought to do what the European settlers in the New World had done to the native Americans – the local population had to be driven back – or exterminated. This has always been the mantra if not the modus operandi adopted by settler-colonialists against native and indigenous peoples across the globe whom they considered ‘subhuman’ as they sought to usurp their lands and plunder their resources. Israel in its genocidal war against Gazans appears to emulate both the Nazi tyranny and European settler – colonialism and the objective appears to be ethnic cleansing of occupied Palestine in an effort to create an enlarged Zionist entity with the full support of the United States and some of the European countries notably Britain, France, and Germany. Ethnic cleansing is designated as a crime against humanity in terms of international treaties, such as that which created the International Criminal Court (ICC).

The End.

Prepared by Milile Kraba

*Milile is a graduate of the University of Cape Town, University of Stellenbosch and the University of South Africa, and writes in his personal capacity. He holds qualifications in Law, Political Science, Sociology, Environmental and Geographical Science, Economics, and Urban Studies.

[1] Pappe I 2024, A Very Short History of the Israel – Palestine Conflict, Oneworld Books, London.

[2] Sands P 2017, East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London.

[3] Cranshaw S, 2025, Prosecuting the Powerful: War Crimes and the Battle for Justice, The Bridge Street Press, London.

[4] Mail & Guardian, August 29 to September 4 2005 at 18 – 19.

[5] Morton S 2024 Imtiaz Soolman and the Gift of the Givers: A Mercy to All, Bookstorm (Pty) Ltd, Cape Town at 84 – 95.

[6] Pappe I 2024 Ten Myths About Israel, Verso, London & New York, at xi - xii.

[7] Pappe I at xii.

[8] Bogdanovic B ‘Murder of the City’, New York Review of Books, XL/10 (27 May 1993).

[9] Bevan R 2016 The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War, Reaktion Books Ltd, London.

[10]  Crawshaw S 2025 Prosecuting the Powerful: War Crimes and the Battle for Justice, The Bridge Street Press, Londondon at 264.

[11] Bevan R 2016 at 31.

[12] Frankopan P 2016 The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, Bloomsbury at 377-378.