Over the past two years, Israel has killed over 66,000 Palestinians in Gaza, the vast majority of whom were civilians, including 20,000 children. Tens of thousands more have been wounded, many with life-changing injuries, or are still missing, mostly buried under rubble.
This mass slaughter of Palestinians, which a UN commission of inquiry last month found to be a genocide, has been the utterly devastating Israeli response to the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023, when paramilitaries killed 1,195 people in southern Israel and took 251 people hostage.
What was scarcely mentioned in the initial reaction to Hamas’s assault is that it followed numerous Israeli Defence Force attacks on Gaza (which Hamas has had political control of since 2007) over the preceding 15 years, which killed around 5,000 Palestinians in total and injured thousands more.
